Primitive Culture

Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom

Edward Burnett Tylor

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AUTOR UND WERK

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) erwarb sein Wissen autodidaktisch, da er als Quäker keinen direkten Zugang zu einer der großen staatskirchlichen britischen Universitäten hatte. Nachdem er bereits in den 1880er Jahren zum Reader in Anthropology der Universität Oxford ernannt wurde, erhielt er 1896 auch den Oxforder Lehrstuhl für Anthropologie.

Primitive Culture (EV 1871) zeigt ihn als entschiedenen Anhänger einer religions-evolutionistischen Haltung. Nach Tylor entwickelt sich jede Religion aus dem Animismus (Idee der Allbeseelung des Universums), über den Polytheismus (Glaube an mehre Göttinnen / Götter) hin zum Monotheismus (Eingottglaube).

Primitive Culture

Volume 1.

„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.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The present volumes, uniform with the previous volume of ‘Researches into the Early History of Mankind’ (1st Ed. 1865; 2nd Ed. 1870), carry on the investigation of Culture into other branches of thought and belief, art and custom. During the past six years, I have taken occasion to bring tentatively before the public some of the principal points of new evidence and argument here advanced. The doctrine of survival in culture, the bearing of directly-expressive language and the invention of numerals on the problem of early civilization, the place of myth in the primitive history of the human mind, the development of the animistic philosophy of religion, and the origin of rites and ceremonies, have been discussed in various papers and lectures,* before being treated at large and with a fuller array of facts in this work.

The authorities for the facts stated in the text are [IV] fully specified in the foot-notes, which must also serve as my general acknowledgment of obligations to writers on ethnography and kindred sciences, as well as to historians, travellers, and missionaries. I will only mention apart two treatises of which I have made especial use: the ‘Mensch in der Geschichte,’ by Professor Bastian of Berlin, and the ‘Anthropologie der Naturvölker,’ by the late Professor Waitz of Marburg.

In discussing problems so complex as those of the development of civilization, it is not enough to put forward theories accompanied by a few illustrative examples. The statement of the facts must form the staple of the argument, and the limit of needful detail is only reached when each group so displays its general law, that fresh cases come to range themselves in their proper niches as new instances of an already established rule. Should it seem to any readers that my attempt to reach this limit sometimes leads to the heaping up of too cumbrous detail, I would point out that the theoretical novelty as well as the practical importance of many of the issues raised, make it most unadvisable to stint them of their full evidence. In the course of ten years chiefly spent in these researches, it has been my constant task to select the most instructive ethnological facts from the vast mass on record, and by lopping away unnecessary matter to reduce the data on each problem to what is indispensable for reasonable proof.

E. B. T.

March, 1871.

Fortnightly Review: ‘Origin of Language,’ April 15, 1866; ‘Religion of Savages,’ August 15, 1866. Lectures at Royal Institution; ‘Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Man,’ March 15, 1867; ‘Survival of Savage Thought in Modern Civilization,’ April 23, 1869. Lecture at University College, London: ‘Spiritualistic Philosophy of the Lower Races of Mankind,’ May 8, 1869. Paper read at British Association, Nottingham, 1866: ‘Phenomena of Civilization Traceable to a Rudimental Origin among Savage Tribes,’ Paper read at Ethnological Society of London, April 26, 1870: ‘Philosophy of Religion among the Lower Races of Mankind,’ &c. &c.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

[V] Since the publication of this work in 1871, translations have appeared in German and Russian. In the present edition, the form of page has been slightly altered, for convenience of re-issue at once in England and America. The matter, however, remains substantially the same. A few passages have been amplified or altered for greater clearness, and on some points additional or improved evidence has been put in. Among the anthropologists whose published reviews or private communications have enabled me to correct or strengthen various points, I will only mention by name Professor Felix Liebrecht, of Liége, Mr. Clements R. Markham, Professor Calderwood, Mr. Ralston, and Mr. Sebastian Evans.

It may have struck some readers as an omission, that in a work on civilization insisting so strenuously on a theory of development or evolution, mention should scarcely have been made of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose influence on the whole course of modern thought on such subjects should not be left without formal recognition. This absence of particular reference is accounted for by the present [VI] work, arranged on its own lines, coming scarcely into contact of detail with the previous works of these eminent philosophers.

An objection made by several critics as to the accumulation of evidence in these volumes leads me to remark, with sincere gratification, that this objection has in fact been balanced by solid advantage. The plan of collecting wide and minute evidence, so that readers may have actually before them the means of judging the theory put forward, has been justified by the reception of the book, even in circles to whose views many of its arguments are strongly adverse, and that in matters of the first importance. Writers of most various philosophical and theological schools now admit that the ethnological facts are real, and vital, and have to be accounted for. It is not too much to say that a perceptible movement of public opinion has here justified the belief that the English mind, not readily swayed by rhetoric, moves freely under the pressure of facts.

E. B. T.

September, 1873.

CHAPTER I.

THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.

[1] 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.

[2] 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 its 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 [3] 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.

[4] Now it appears that this view of human will and conduct, as subject to definite law, is indeed recognized 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 [5] 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 inquiry 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 [6] 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 5 the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may be set beside the mediaeval 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 [7] 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 he 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 [8] 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 [9] 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 old world received not only maize, potatoes, and turkeys, but the habit of 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 mediaeval 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 [10] 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 foot-notes 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 and 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 [11] 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 a 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 [12] 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 [13] 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 [14] 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 [15] 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 was turned by a handle against the flint 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 an obvious modification into the percussion-lock, which is just now changing its old-fashioned arrangement to be adapted from muzzle-loading to breech-loading. The mediaeval 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 savage 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 [16] and again into view series of facts which may be consis tently 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 [17] 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 [18] 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 arbitary invention, and in substituting for them a theory of development by the cooperation 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 [19] 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. To ingenious attempts at explaining by the light of reason things which want the [20] light of history to show their meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been due. Sir H. S. Maine, in his ‘Ancient Law,’ gives a perfect instance. In all the literature which enshrines the pretended philosophy of law, he remarks, there is nothing more curious than the pages of elaborate sophistry in which Blackstone attempts to explain and justify that extraordinary rule of English law, only recently repealed, which prohibited sons of the same father by different mothers from succeeding to one another’s land. To Sir H. S. Maine, knowing the facts of the case, it was easy to explain its real origin from the “Customs of Normandy,” where according to the system of agnation, or kinship on the male side, brothers by the same mother but by different fathers were of course no relations at all to one another. But when this rule “was transplanted to England, the English judges, who had no clue to its principle, interpreted it as a general prohibition against the succession of the half-blood, and extended it to consanguineous brothers, that is to sons of the same father by different wives.” Then, ages after, Blackstone sought in this blunder the perfection of reason, and found it in the argument that kinship through both parents ought to prevail over even a nearer degree of kinship through but one parent.¹ Such are the risks that philosophers run in detaching any phenomenon of civilization from its hold on past events, and treating it as an isolated fact, to be simply disposed of by a guess at 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 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 [21] 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 archaeological inference from the remains of pre-historic 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 primaeval 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 primaeval 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 xamination of the Art of Counting a far more definite consequence is shown. It may be confidently asserted that not only is this important art [22] 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 mediaeval 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, beside the catholic sympathy with v.hich 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 [23] 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 [24] 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 fifty years ago 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 toward 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 Comto 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 [25] 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 primaeval history are beginning to come within our view.

¹ Blackstone, ‘Commentaries.’ “As every man’s own blood is compounded of the bloods of his respective ancestors, he only is properly of the whole or entire blood with another, who hath (so far as the distance of degrees will permit), all the same ingredients in the composition of his blood that the other hath,” etc.

CHAPTER II.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE.

[26] 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 Archaeology 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 [27] 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 [28] 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 [29] 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 restore the past in the midst of the present. So it is with social institutions. The slavery recognized 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 Mahommedan 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 [30] 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.¹ 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 primaeval 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 paradisaical 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.² So when we read descriptions of the hospitality, the gentleness, the bravery, the deep religious feeling of the [31] North American Indians, we admit their claims to oui 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 might 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 [32] 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 mediaeval 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 [33] having or not having reporters present. If any one holds that human thought and action were worked out in primaeval 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 [34] 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 [35] emblem of Saturn, still continued annually to mow the harvests of Italy; and the human feasts of the 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.” ³

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 this century. “Nous partons toujours,” he says, “de l’hypothèse banale que l’homme s’est élevé gradu-ellement 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 du nécessairement appartenir aux premiers hommes, &c.”⁴ 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 [36] 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 cf the position it has thus occupied may be well instanced from the theories adopted by two eminent French writers of the last 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.”⁵ And Goguet, holding that the preexisting 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.⁶ 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 [37] 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 mans 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 directty 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 [38] 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.⁷ 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, ana, 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 [39] 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 [40] 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 in leaves, and ate raw flesh, till, under such and such rulers, they were taught to build huts, prepare skins for garments, and make fire.⁸ Lucretius can describe to us, in his famous lines, the large-boned, hardy, lawless, primaeval race of man, living the roving life of the wild beasts which he 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.⁹ 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 primaeval 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 [41] was inexhaustible, when there was no cold nor heat, no envy nor old age.¹⁰ 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 Ságara who, after a brief reign of 252,000 years, made the dismal discovery of the first grey hair.¹¹

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.”¹² Whately appropriated this remark, which indeed forms the kernel of his well-known Lecture on the Origin of Civilization: “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.¹³ But he omits to ask the counter-question, whether we find one recorded instance of a civilized people falling independently into a savage [42] 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; archaeology 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 recognized 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 [43] 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 of to-day are 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 ilia fodi.
Purpura ssepe tuos fulgens prætexit amictua.
Sed non Sarmatico tingitur ilia mari.
Vellera dura ferunt pecudes, et Palladis uti
Arte Tomitanæ non didicere nurus.
Femina pro lana Cerialia munera frangit,
Suppositoque gravem vertice portat aquam.
[44] Non hic pampineis amicitur vitibus ulmus,
Nulla premunt ramos pondere poma suo.
Tristia deformes pariunt absinthia campi,
Terraque de fructu quam sit amara, docet.”¹⁴

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.”¹⁵

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.¹⁶ Another [45] district remarkable for a barbaric simplicity of life is the Hebrides. In 1868 Mr. Walter Morrison there bought from an old woman at Stornoway the service of earthenware she was actually using, of which he gave me a crock. These earthen vessels, unglazed and made by hand without the potter’s wheel, might pass in a museum as indifferent specimens of savage manufacture. 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.¹⁷ 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).¹⁸ 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 rude but [46] not savage community on Pitcairn’s Island.¹⁹ The mixed Portuguese and native races of the East Indies and Africa lead a life below the European standard, but not a savage life.²⁰ 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.²¹ 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 orginazation, looks especially to the slave-trade as the deteriorating cause.²² In [47] 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, and the remarkable ruins of buildings of hewn stone fitted without mortar indicate a former civilization above that of the present native population.²³ 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.²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ There are tribes who are the very outcasts of savage life. There is reason to look upon the miserable Digger Indians [48] of North America and the Bushmen of South Africa as the persecuted remnants of tribes who have seen happier days.²⁷ 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.²⁸ 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.²⁹ 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 [49] 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, Phoenicians, Syrians, etc., and may have an older as well as a newer 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 several 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 [50] 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.³⁰ In Ceylon, however, we seem to have the remarkable phenomenon of a distinctly savage race 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 a full 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, [51] but not in use among the modern Singhalese; their language is described as a kind of Singhalese patois, peculiar in dialect and utterance. 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 præ-Aryan type.³¹

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, Birma, etc., 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 [52] 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 a very low 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.³² The Polynesians, 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 [53] Louisiana and the Apalaches of Florida. Linguistic connexion is not unknown between the more advanced peoples and the lower races around them.³³ 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 stock appears to have thrown off any direct savage offshoot recognizable by the age-enduring test of language, 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 [54] 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 or Prehistoric Archaeology, 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 are not quite sure, 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 fully 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. Baron Bunsen’s calculations of Egyptian dynasties in thousands of years are indeed both disputable and disputed, but they are based on facts which at any late 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 [55] 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 Archaeology cheerfully takes up the problem. And, indeed, far from being dismayed by the vastness of the period required on the narrowest computation, the prehistoric archaeologist 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 Archaeology is fully alive to facts which may [56] 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.³⁴ 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 do not rank high even 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. 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. The civilization of these people has been, however, sometimes overrated. Their earthworks did not require, as has been thought, standards of measurement and means of determining angles, for a cord and a bundle of stakes would be a sufficient set of instruments to lay out any of them. 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.³⁵ 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 [57] perhaps in this case be like that of 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.³⁶ 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.³⁷ On the whole it is remarkable how little of colourable evidence of degeneration has been disclosed by archaeology. 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 archaeological 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 the Polynesian Islands.”³⁸ 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 [58] 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 master-pieces 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 conception of living mathematicians.”³⁹

The master-key to the investigation of man’s primaeval condition is held by Prehistoric Archaeology. 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 [59] indeed, even beyond that of the present world.”⁴⁰ 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 archaeology. 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.⁴¹ In the gravel-beds of Europe, the laterite of India, and other more superficial localities, where relics of the Palaeolithic 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, etc., 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 [60] 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.⁴² 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 as 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.”⁴³ The progress of Archaeology 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 judgment of Lucretius, when, attaching experience of the present to memory and [61] inference from the past, he propounded what is now a tenet of archasology, 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.” ⁴⁴

Throughout the various topics of Prehistoric Archaeology, 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 theii surviving representatives among 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 Archaeology. 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 [62] 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 advanceing in civilization.” ⁴⁵

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.⁴⁶ In fact, they have gone halfway toward inventing what builders call a “strut,” but have stopped [63] 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; ⁴⁷ 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 potters 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 primaeval 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 [64] 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.⁴⁸ 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 Australia, to whom it would have been very useful, while even among the Papuan natives of the New Hebrides there is reason to think it not original, for the bow is called there fana, pena, nfanga, &c., names apparently taken from the Malay panah, and indicating a Malay origin for the instrument. It seems to me that Dr. Klemm, in his dissertation 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 primaeval 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.⁴⁹ Fox traces connexion through the various types of weapons, pointing out how a form once arrived at is repeated in various sizes, like [65] the spear-head and arrow-point; how in rude conditions of the arts the same instrument serves different purposes, as where the Fuegians used 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.⁵⁰

The manufacture of stone implements is now almost perfectly understood by archæologists. The processes used by modern savages have been observed and imitated. Mr. 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.⁵¹ On thorough knowledge we are now able to refer in great measure the remarkable similarities of the stone scrapers, flake-knives, hatchets, spear- and arrowheads, &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 [66] rudest artificially shaped stone implement is imperceptibly gradual, and onward from this rude stage much independent progress in different directions is to be traced, and 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 [67] classic amentum, apparently a thong attached to the middle of the javelin to throw it with. The highest people known to have used the spear-thrower proper are the Aztecs. Its existence among them is vouched for by representations in the Mexican mythological pictures, by its 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 at the Conquest, when it had apparently fallen into survival. In fact the history of the instrument seems in absolute opposition to the degradation-theory, representing as it does an invention belonging to savage culture, 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 an elastic switch to fillip small missiles with, and the remarkable elastic 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 [68] gradual improvement.⁵² 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 hence-forward 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 [69] 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.

¹ G. W. Earl, ‘Papuans,’ p. 79; A. R. Wallace, ‘Eastern Archipelago.

² Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 400–480.

³ Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ ch. xxxviii.

⁴ Do Maistre, ‘Soirées de St. Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 150.

⁵ De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 15; ‘Formation des Langues,’ vol. i p. 49; vol. ii. p. 32.

⁶ Goguet, ‘Origine des Lois, des Arts,’ etc., vol. i p. 88.

⁷ Whately, ‘Essay on the Origin of Civilization,’ in Miscellaneous Lectures, etc. See also W. Cooke Taylor, ‘Natural History of Society.’

⁸ Goguet, vol. iii. p. 270.

⁹ Lucret. v. 923, etc.; see Hor. Sat. i. 3.

¹⁰ ‘Avesta,’ trans. Spiegel & Bleeck, vol. ii. p. 50.

¹¹ Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 64, 128.

¹² 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.”

¹³ Whately, ‘Essay on Origin of Civilization.’

¹⁴ Ovid. Ex Ponto, iii. 8; see Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ vol. xii. p. 641.

¹⁵ W. C. Taylor, ‘Nat. Hist, of Society,’ vol. i. p. 202.

¹⁶ Fynes Moryson, ‘Itinerary;’ London, 1617, part iii. p. 162, etc.; J. Evans in ‘Arcliaeologia,’ vol. xli. See description of hide-boiling, etc , among the Wild Irish about 1550, in Andrew Boorde, ‘Introduction of Knowledge,’ ed. by F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Soc. 1870.

¹⁷ Buchanan, ‘Rerum Scoticarum Historia;’ Edinburgh, 1528, p. 7. See ‘Early History of Mankind,’ 2nd ed. p. 272.

¹⁸ Martin, ‘Description of Western Islands,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 639.

¹⁹ ‘Mutiny of the Bounty,’ etc.

²⁰ 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.

²¹ Southey, ‘History of Brazil,’ vol. iii. p. 422.

²² J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.,’ p. 189.

²³ Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 359, see 91; Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 116.

²⁴ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 51.

²⁵ Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. v.

²⁶ Milton and Cheadle, ‘North West Passage by Land,’ p. 241; Waitz, vol. iii. pp. 74–6.

²⁷ ‘Early History of Mankind,’ p 187.

²⁸ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Bes.,’ vol. i. p. 50.

²⁹ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 272.

³⁰ See G. Campbell, ‘Ethnology of India,’ in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 1866, part ii.

³¹ J. Bailey, ‘Veddahs,’ in Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. ii. p. 278; see vol. iii. p. 70. Compare Robert Knox, ‘Historical Relation of Ceylon.’ London, 1681, part iii. chap, i.; Sir J. E. Tennent, ‘Ceylon,’ etc.

³² Journ. Ind. Archip., vol. i. pp. 295-9; vol. ii. p. 237,

³³ For the connexion between the Aztec language and the Sonoran family extending N.W. toward the sources of the Missouri, see Buschmann, ‘Spuren der Aztekisohen Sprache im Nördlichen Mexico,’ etc., 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.

³⁴ J. H. Lamprey, in Trans, of Prehistoric Congress, Norwich, 1868, p. 60; J. Linton Palmer, in Journ. Eth. Soc., vol. i., 1869.

³⁵ Squier and Davis, ‘Mon. of Mississippi Valley,’ etc., in Smithsonian Contr., vol. i 1848. See 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.

³⁶ St. John, ‘Life in Forests of Far East,’ vol. ii. p. 327.

³⁷ Rafn, ‘Americas Arctiske Landes Gamle Geographie,’ pi. vii., viii.

³⁸ Lubbock, in ‘Report of British Association, Dundee, 1867,’ p. 121.

³⁹ Lyell,’ Antiquity of Man,’ chap. xix.

⁴⁰ Frere, in ‘Archæologia,’ 1800.

⁴¹ J. Evans, in ‘Archæologia,’ 1861; Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ 2nd ed., p. 335.

⁴² See ‘Early History of Mankind,’ 2nd ed. chap, viii.

⁴³ Argyll, ‘Primeval Man,’ p. 1-9.

⁴⁴ Lueret. De Rerum Natura, v. 1281.

⁴⁵ See Lyell, ‘Antiquity of Man,’ 3rd ed. 1863; Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ 2nd ed. 1870; ‘Trans, of Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology,’ (Norwich, 1868); Stevens, ‘Flint Chips, etc.,’ 1870; Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia’ (ed. by Lubbock, 1868); Falconer, ‘Palæonto-logical Memoirs, etc.’; Lartet and Christy, ‘Reliquiæ Aquitanicse’ (ed. by T. R. Jones); Keller, ‘Lake Dwellings’ (Tr. and Ed. by J. E. Lee), etc., etc.

⁴⁶ Wallace, ‘Indian Archipelago,’ vol. i p. 357.

⁴⁷ ‘Early History of Mankind,’ pp. 192, 243, etc., etc.

⁴⁸ Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ p. 104.

⁴⁹ Klemm, ‘Allg. Culturwissenschaft, part ii., Werkzeuge und Waffen.

⁵⁰ Lane Fox, ‘Lectures on Primitive Warfare,’ Journ. United Service Inst. 1867–9.

⁵¹ 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.

⁵² See details in ‘Early History of Mankind,’ chap, vii.–ix.

CHAPTER III.

SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

[70] 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.¹ 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 Virginia apta
Tempora. Quæ nupsit, non diuturna fuit.
Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt,
Mense malas Maio nubere volgus ait.” ²

The saying that marriages in May are unlucky survives [71] 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 woodcutters 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.³ 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, [72] described as a superstition; and, indeed, this name would be given to a large proportion of survivals generally. The very word “superstition,” in what is perhaps its original sense of a “standing over” from old times, itself expresses the notion of survival. 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.⁴ Miniature boomerangs and spears are among the toys of Australian children; and even as the fathers keep up the extremely primitive custom of getting themselves wives by carrying them off by violence from other tribes, so playing at such [73] Sabine marriage has been noticed as one of the regular games of the little native boys and girls.⁵ 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 wide-spread in savage culture, we trace this instrument through barbaric and classic life and onward to a high mediaeval 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 long-bow, 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 mediaeval 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.” ⁶

Perhaps as serious a use of the sling as can now be pointed out within 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.

[74] 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 Zea-landers placing 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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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 [75] 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?”⁹ 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; practically each calls the total before he sees his adversary’s hand, so that the skill lies especially in shrewd guessing. This game affords endless amusement to China, where it is called “tsoey-moey,” and to Southern Europe, where it is known in Italian as “morra,” and in French as “mourre.” So peculiar a game would hardly have been invented twice over in Europe and Asia, but it is hard to guess whether the Chinese learnt it from the West, or whether it belongs to the remarkable list of clever inventions which Europe has borrowed from China. The ancient Egyptians, as their sculptures show, used to play at some kind of finger-game, and the Komans 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.¹⁰

When Scotch lads, playing at the game of “tappie-tousie,” take one another by the forelock and say, “Will ye be my man ?”¹¹ 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 [76] found surviving in Switzerland as a toy among the children, who made fire with it in sport, much as Esquimaux would have done in earnest.¹² 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.¹³ 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 Manichseans were an especial mark for such aspersions, which were passed on to a sect considered as their successors—the Paulicians, whose name reappears in [77] 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.¹⁴

[78] 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; ¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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 [79] answer from their signs.¹⁸ As in ancient Italy oracles gave responses by graven lots,¹⁹ 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!”²⁰

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.”²¹ 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 [80] 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.”²² 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.²³

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, verj suggestive from this point of view, of the Polynesian art of divination by spinning the “niu” or cocoa-nut. In the Tongan Islands, in Mariner’s time, the principal purpose for which this was solemnly performed was to inquire 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 [81] god. On other occasions, when the cocoa-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 cocoa-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.²⁴ It is in favour of the view of serious divination being the earlier use, to notice that the New Zealanders, though they have no cocoa-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. cocoa-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.”²⁵ 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 [82] even when the Roman gambler used the tali for gambling, he would invoke a god or his mistress before he made his throw.²⁶ 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,²⁷ and Negro sorcerers still throw dice as a means of detecting thieves.²⁸ 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.²⁹ 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.³⁰ 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 [83] 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).³¹ 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.³²

Again, in relics of old magic and religion, we have [84] 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 “gypsy, 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 worldwide 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.³³ 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 homoeopathic doctrine, that what hurts will also cure: it is mentioned in the Scandinavian Edda, “Dog’s hair heals dog’s bite.”³⁴ The phrase “raising the wind” now passes as humorous slang, but it once, in all seriousness, described one of the most dreaded of the sorcerers 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 [85] 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 farfetched. 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.³⁵ 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 folklore rule, that to get out of bed left foot first will bring a bad day,³⁶ 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 mediaeval 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 [86] new-made magician goes forth free, but ever after shadowless.³⁷

It seems a fair inference to think folk-lore nearest to its source 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 [87] 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 mediaeval Christian times; for they are not yet quite forgotten in country places. An old Latin version runs: “Unus est Deus,” etc., and one of the still-surviving English forms begins, “One’s One all alone, and evermore shall be so,” and reckons 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.³⁸

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 [88] 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 archaeologists 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.”³⁹ 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.”⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹ 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,⁴² 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 [89] “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 some one 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 mens 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 [90] 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 [91] 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,” etc. 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 ha? 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,” etc.⁴³ 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’s 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 bedclothes’ peg.”⁴⁴ From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is an [92] example: Q. “My hen has laid among thorns?” A. “A pineapple.” ⁴⁵ 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).” ⁴⁶ 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.”⁴⁷ (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.” ⁴⁸

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; [93] 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 farfetched, 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 seven white and seven black horses ?” (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of the week.⁴⁹) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day and Night, who give 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.”⁵⁰

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 [94] 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’,” ⁵¹ 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.⁵² 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.⁵³

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 last century, remarks as follows on the prevalence of similar nonsensical and stupid customs in distant [95] 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.”⁵⁴

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 mans 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.”⁵⁵ Now, though it might be difficult enough to make sense of the minor details of court etiquette, Lord Chesterfield’s example from it of [96] 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.⁵⁶ 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 [97] in symposium drank to one another, and the Romans adopted the habit (προπίνειν, propinare, Graeco 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 [98] 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!”⁵⁷ Elsewhere in Africa, similar ideas [99] 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.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰ 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;⁶¹ if a Samoan sneezed, the bystanders said, “Life to you !”⁶² while in the Tongan group a sneeze on the starting of an expedition was a most evil presage.⁶³ 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 [100] 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,” etc.⁶⁴

In Asia and Europe, the sneezing superstition extends through a wide range of race, age, and country.⁶⁵ 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; ⁶⁶ 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;⁶⁷ Aristotle’s remark that people consider a sneeze as divine (τὸν ηὲν πταρμὸν θεὸν ἡγούμεθα εἶναι), but not a cough,⁶⁸ etc.; the Greek epigram on the man with the long nose, who did not say Zεῦ σῶσον when he sneezed, for the noise was too far off for him to hear;⁶⁹ Petronius Arbiter’s mention of the custom of saying “Salve !” to one who sneezed;⁷⁰ and Pliny’s question, “Cur sternutamentis salutamus ?” apropos of which he remarks that even Tiberius Cæar, that saddest of men, exacted this observance.⁷¹ [101] Similar rites of sneezing have long been observed in Eastern Asia.⁷² “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.⁷³

The Jewish sneezing formula is, “Tobim chayim! M i.e., “Good life !”⁷⁴ 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.⁷⁵ Lastly, the custom ranged through mediaeval into modern Europe. To cite old German examples, “Die Heiden nicht endorften niesen, da man doch sprichet ‘Nu helfiu Got!’” “Wir sprechen, swer niuset, Got helfe dir.”⁷⁶ For a combined English and French example, 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 uesheil ne diez aprez.” ⁷⁷

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.”⁷⁸ It is noticed that Anabaptists and [102] 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. “Gott hilf!” may still be heard in Germany, and “Felicita !” in Italy.

It is not strange that the existence of these absurd customs should have been for ages a puzzle to curious inquirers. 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.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰ The Persians ascribe yawning, sneezing, etc., 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.⁸¹ This may very likely be the meaning of [103] 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.⁸² 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,⁸³ the records of the mediaeval exorcists driving out devils through the patients’ nostrils,⁸⁴ and the custom, still kept up in the Tyrol, of crossing oneself when one yawns, lest something evil should come into one’s mouth,⁸⁵ 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 folklore, 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 !”⁸⁶ The corresponding idea as to yawning is to be found in an Iceland folklore 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.”⁸⁷ 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, [104] 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.⁸⁸ The plain statement by the modern Zulus fits with the hints to be gained from the superstition and folklore 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 folklore, 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 [105] 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 with 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 hanselled by burying a live horse first. In modern Greece an evident [106] 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 folklore says it is well, before entering a new house, to let a cat or dog run in.⁸⁹ 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 Galain, 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 Bam-barra tyrant; while in Great Bassam and Yarriba such sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village.⁹⁰ 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.⁹¹ In Borneo, [107] 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.⁹² 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.⁹³ When the gate of the new city of Tavoy, in Tenasserim, was built, perhaps twenty years ago, Mason was told by an eye-witness that 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 Birmese 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 [108] land.⁹⁴ Within our own dominion, when Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of Sialkot in the Punjaub, 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.⁹⁵ 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.⁹⁶ Of all people the rude Kamchadals have the prohibition in the most remarkable form. They hold it a great fault, says Kracheninnikoff, to save a [109] drowning man; he who delivers him will be drowned himself.⁹⁷ 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 savages, 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.⁹⁸ 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.⁹⁹ 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 in-dwelling spirit takes possession of them.¹⁰⁰ That the accidental drowning of a man is held to be such a seizure, savage and civilized folklore show by many examples. Among the Sioux Indians, [110] it is Unk-tahe the water-monster that drowns his victims in flood or rapid; ¹⁰¹ 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;¹⁰² the Siamese fears the Pnük or water-spirit that seizes bathers and drags them under to his dwelling;¹⁰³ in Slavonic lands it is Topielec (the ducker) by whom men are always drowned;¹⁰⁴ 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:”¹⁰⁵—

“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 folklore 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 [111] 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 Shakspeare’s fox,

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

¹ Will, de Ruhruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 46, 67, 132; Michie, ‘Siberian Overland Route,’p. 96.

² Ovid. Fast. v. 487. For modern Italy and France, see Edélestane du Méril, ‘Études d’ Archéol.’ p. 121.

³ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ (ed. by J. R. Logan), vol. ii. p. liv.

⁴ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Geschichte,’ vol ii. p. 209.

⁵ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 266; Dumont d’Urville, ‘Voy. de l’Astrolabe,’ vol i. p. 411.

⁶ Strutt, ‘Sports and Pastimes,’ book ii. chap, ii

⁷ Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. ii. p. 171.

⁸ Polack, ibid.; Wilkes, ‘U.S. Exp.’ vol. i. p. 194. See the account of the game of liagi in Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. s. 339; and Yate, ‘New Zealand; p. 113.

⁹ Petron. Arbitri Satirae rec. Büchler, p. 64 (other readings are buccce or bucco).

¹⁰ Compare Davis, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 317; Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, Vol. i. p. 188; Facciolati, Lexicon, s. v. ‘micare’; etc.

¹¹ Jamieson, ‘Diet, of Scottish Lang.’ s. v.

¹² ‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 244, etc.; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.,’ p. 573.

¹³ Grimm, ibid., p. 1200.

¹⁴ Halliwell, ‘Popular Rhymes,’ p. 112; Grimm, ‘D. M.’p. 812. Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 106. Johannis Philosophi Ozniensis Opera (Aucher), Venice, 1834, p. 78—89. ‘Infantium sanguini similam commiscentes illegitimam communionem deglutiunt; quo pacto porcorum suos foetus immaniter vescentium exsuperant edacitatem. Quique illorum cadavera super tecti culmen celantes, ac sursum oculis in cælum defixis respicientes, juraut alieno verbo ac sensu: Altissimus novit. Solem vero deprecari volentes, ajunt: Sulicule, Lucicule; atque aëreos, vagosque dæmones clam invocaut, juxta Manichæorum Simonisque incautatoris errores. Similiter et primum parientis fœminæ puerum de manu in manum inter eos invicem projectum, quum pessimâ morte occiderint, ilium, in cujus manu exspiraverit puer, ad primam sectæ dignitatem provectum venerantur; atque per utriusque nomen audent insane iurare; Juro, dicunt, per unigenitum filium: et iterum: Testem, habeo tibi gloriam ejus, in cujus manum unigenitus filius spiritum suum tradidit.... Contra hos [the orthodox] audacter evomere præsumunt impietatis suæ bilem, atque insanientes, ex inali spiritus blasphemiâ, Sculpti colas vocant.”

¹⁵ Polack, vol. i. p. 270.

¹⁶ Bosman, ‘Guinese Kust,’ letter x; Eng. Trans, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 399.

¹⁷ Homer. Iliad, vii. 171.

¹⁸ Tacit. Germania. 10.

¹⁹ Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.,’ arts, ‘oraeulum,’ ‘sortes.’

²⁰ Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations, p. 163.

²¹ Gataker, p. 141, 91; see Lecky, ‘History of Rationalism,’ vol. i p. 307.

²² Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, in ‘Works,’ vol. xiv. p. 337.

²³ See Wuttke, ‚Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 95, 115, 178.

²⁴ Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands,’ vol. ii. p. 239; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 214; Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 228. Compare Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 231.

²⁵ R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 206, 348, 387.

²⁶ Smith’s Dic. art. ‘talus.’

²⁷ Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. ii. p. 412.

²⁸ D. & C. Livingstone, ‘Exp. to Zambesi,’ p. 51.

²⁹ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 108, 285–7; see 384; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. pp. 76, 125.

³⁰ Smith’s Dic. art. ‘cottabos.’

³¹ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 222.

³² Plin. viii. 54.

³³ From a letter of Mr. H. J. Stokes, Negapatam, to Mr. F. M. Jennings. General details of the Couvade in ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ p. 293.

³⁴ Hâvamâl, 138.

³⁵ Jamieson, ‘Scottish Dictionary,’ s. v. ‘coals;’ R. Hunt, ‘Popular Romances,’ 1st ser. p. 83.

³⁶ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 131.

³⁷ Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube und Brauch,’ vol. i. p. 120; R. Chambers, ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland,’ Miscellaneous; Grimm, pp. 969, 976; Wuttke, p. 115.

³⁸ Mendes, ‘Service for the First Nights of Passover,’ London, 1862 (in the Jewish interpretation, the word shunra, —‘cat,’ is compared with Shinâr). Halliwell, ‘Nursery Rhymes,’ p. 288; ‘Popular Rhymes,’ p. 6.

³⁹ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 110.

⁴⁰ Shortland, ‘Traditions of N. Z.’ p. 196.

⁴¹ Casalis, ‘Études sur la langue Séchuana.’

⁴² R. F. Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa.’ See also Waitz, vol. ii. p. 245.

⁴³ Callaway, ‘Nursery Tales, etc. of Zulus,’ vol. i p. 364, etc.

⁴⁴ Casalis, ‘Études sur la langue Séchuana,’ p. 91; ‘Basutos,’ p. 337.

⁴⁵ Steere, ‘Swahili Tales,’ p. 418.

⁴⁶ Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 212.

⁴⁷ Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 216. See Polaek, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. ii. p. 171.

⁴⁸ Sahagun, ‘Historia de Nueva España,’ in Kingsborough’s ‘Antiquities of Mexico,’ vol. vii. p. 178.

⁴⁹ Grimm, p. 699.

⁵⁰ Diog. Laert. i. 91; Athenagoras, x. 451.

⁵¹ Mannhardt’s ‘Zeitschr. für Deutsche Mythologie,’ vol. iii p. 2, etc:

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

⁵² See Grote, ‘Hist, of Greece,’ vol. ii. p. 5.

⁵³ Mannhardt’s ‘Zeitschr.’ 1. c

⁵⁴ E. A. W. Zimmermann, ‘Geographische Geschiehte des Menschen,’ etc., 1778–83, vol. iii. Sea Professor Rolleston’s Inaugural Address, British Association, 1870.

⁵⁵ Earl of Chesterfield, ‘Letters to his Son,’ vol. ii No. lx viii.

⁵⁶ See Hylten-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ vol. i p. 161—70; Grimm, pp. 52 – 5, 1201; Brand, vol. ii. pp. 314, 325, etc.

⁵⁷ Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 64, 222—5, 263.

⁵⁸ Godignus, ‘Vita Patris Gonzali Sylveriæ.’ Col. Agripp. 1616; lib. ii. c x.

⁵⁹ Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xviii. in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 478.

⁶⁰ Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 373.

⁶¹ Shortland, ‘Trads. of New Zealand,’ p. 131.

⁶² Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 348; see also Williams, ‘Eiji,’ vol. i. p. 250.

⁶³ Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. i. p. 456.

⁶⁴ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Hist de la Florida,’ vol. iii. ch. xli.

⁶⁵ 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, etc.; R. G. Haliburton, ‘New Materials for the History of Man.’ Halifax, N. S. 1863; ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ art. ‘sneezing; ’ Wernsdorf, ‘De Ritu Sternutantibus bene precancii,’ Leipzig, 1741; see also Grimm, D. M. p. 1070, note.

⁶⁶ Homer. Odyss. xvii. 541.

⁶⁷ Xenophon. Anabasis, iii. 2, 9.

⁶⁸ Aristot. Problem, xxxiii. 7.

⁶⁹ Anthologia Græca, Brunck, vol. iii. p. 95.

⁷⁰ Petron. Arb. Sat. 98.

⁷¹ Plin. xxviii. 5.

⁷² Noel, ‘Dic. des Origines; ’ Migne, ‘Dic. des Superstitions,’ etc; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 129.

⁷³ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 142; Dubois, ‘Peuples de l’Inde,’ vol. i. p. 465; Sleeman, ‘Ramaseeana,’ p. 120.

⁷⁴ Buxtorf, ‘Lexicon Chaldaicum; ’ Tendlau, ‘Sprichwörter, etc. Deutsch-Jüdischer Vorzeit.’ Frankf. a. M., 1860, p. 142.

⁷⁵ Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. i. p. 282. See Grant, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90.

⁷⁶ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 1070, 1110.

⁷⁷ ‘Manuel des Pecchés,’ in Wedgwood, ‘Dic. English Etymology,’ s. v. ‘wassail.’

⁷⁸ Brand, vol. iii. p. 126.

⁷⁹ Callavvay, p. 263.

⁸⁰ Ward, I. c.

⁸¹ ‘Pend-Nameh,’ tr. de Sacy, ch. lxiii.; Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc., p. 802; Lane, I. c.

⁸² G. Brecher, ‘Das Transcendentale im Talmud,’ p. 168; Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5.

⁸³ Migne, ‘Dic. des Hérésies,’ s. v.

⁸⁴ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 115, 322.

⁸⁵ Wuttke, ‘Deutscher Volksaberglaube,’ p. 137.

⁸⁶ Haliburton, op. cit.

⁸⁷ Powell and Magnussen, ‘Legends of Iceland,’ 2nd ser. p. 448.

⁸⁸ The cases in which a sneeze is interpreted under special conditions, as with reference to right and left, early morning, etc. (see Plutarch. De Genio Socratis, etc.), are not considered here, as they belong to ordinary omen divination.

⁸⁹ W. Scott, ‘Minstrelsy of Scottish Border; ‘Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races of Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 149, 487; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Mythologie,’ p. 972. 1095; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 92, 407, vol. iii. p. 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.”

⁹⁰ Waitz, vol. ii. p. 197.

⁹¹ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Pes.’ vol. i. p. 346; Tyerman and Bennet, vol. ii. p. 39.

⁹² 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, ‘Yŭh 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.’”

⁹³ Caron, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 623.

⁹⁴ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. pp. 193, 214; vol. ii. pp. 91, 270; vol. iii. p. 16. Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations of Scriptures,’ p. 283 (Ceylon).

⁹⁵ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 107. A modern Arnaut story is given by Prof. Liebrecht in ‘Philologus,’ vol. xxiii. (1865) p. 682.

⁹⁶ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii p. 210 Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 318.

⁹⁷ Kracheninnikow, ‘Descr. du Kamchatka, Voy. en Sibérie,’ vol. iii. p. 72.

⁹⁸ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 265, 274.

⁹⁹ J. V. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen,’ p. 12.

¹⁰⁰ Chap. XVIII.

¹⁰¹ Eastman, ‘Dacotah,’ p. 118, 125.

¹⁰² R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 48.

¹⁰³ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii p. 34.

¹⁰⁴ Hanusch, ‘Wissenschaft des Slawischen Mythus,’ p. 299.

¹⁰⁵ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 462.

CHAPTER IV.

SURVIVAL IN CULTURE (continued).

[112] Occult Sciences—Magical powers attributed by higher to lower races—Magical processes based on Association of Ideas—Omens—Augury, etc.—Oneiro-mancy—Haruspication, Scapulimancy, Chiromancy, etc.—Cartomancy, etc.—Rhabdomancy, Dactyliomancy, Coscinomancy, etc.—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 mediaeval 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 [113] 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 Birma, supposed to be the broken-down remains of an ancient cultured race, and dreaded as man-tigers;¹ and with the Budas of Abyssinia, who are at once the smiths and potters, sorcerers and werewolves, of their district.² 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 [114] 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.³ 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.”⁴ 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.⁵ In Southern India, again, we hear in past times of Hinduized Dravidians, the Sudras of Canara, living in fear of the dsemoniacal powers of the slave-caste below them.⁶ 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.⁷ 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 [115] 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 present 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.”⁸ 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 conjurors, and say none can lay spirits but popish priests.⁹ 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;¹⁰ thus with unconscious irony judging the relation of Rome toward modern civilization.

The principal key to the understanding of Occult Science [116] 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.¹¹ 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 folklore, 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.¹² As the negro fetish-man, when his patient does not come in person, can [117] divine by means of his dirty cloth or cap instead,¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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 Croesus; 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹

Magical arts in which the connexion is that of mere analogy or symbolism are endlessly numerous throughout [118] 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.²⁰ 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.²¹ 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.²² 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.²³ 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.²⁴ Locks must be opened and bolts drawn in a dying man’s house, that his soul may not be held fast.²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ Sailors becalmed will sometimes [119] whistle for a wind; but in other weather they hate whistling at sea, which raises a whistling gale.²⁸ 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.²⁹ 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 Pharmacopoeia.³⁰ 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 Brazil³¹ and the Dayaks of Borneo,³² and extends upward through classic civilization. The Maoris may give a sample of the character of its rules: they [120] 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.³³ 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.³⁴ 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.³⁵ 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, mediaeval, 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 [121] 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.³⁶ 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 non-natural 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.³⁷ The Kam-chadals, 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.³⁸ The Zulus, experience having taught them the fallacy of expecting direct fulfilment of dreams, have in some cases tried to mend [122] 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 Dic.” 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.³⁹ 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 backbiter, 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, [123] and pass on through the mediaeval 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.⁴⁰

Haruspication belongs, among the lower races, especially to the Malays and Polynesians,⁴¹ and to various Asiatic tribes.⁴² It is mentioned as practised in Peru under the Incas.⁴³ Captain Burton’s account from Central Africa perhaps fairly displays its symbolic principle. He describes the mganga or sorcerer taking an ordeal by [124] 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.⁴⁴ 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.⁴⁵ Since then, haruspica-tion 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.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ The principal art of this kind is divination by a shoulder-blade, technically called scapuli-mancy or omoplatoscopy. This is especially found in vogue in Tartary, where it is ancient, and whence it may have spread into all other countries where we hear of it. 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.⁴⁸ To find this quaint art lasting on into modern times [125] ill 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.”⁴⁹

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.” ⁵⁰

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 versa. Zulu diviners still work a similar process with their magical pieces of stick, which rise to say yes and [126] 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 daemons) fell backward or forward, to the right or left.⁵¹ 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.⁵²

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.⁵³ Nearer Central Asia, in the [127] 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.⁵⁴ 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.⁵⁵ 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 conjurors,” 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, [128] 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.⁵⁶ 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 mediaeval 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.⁵⁷

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.⁵⁸ 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 [129] 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.⁵⁹ 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 mediaeval 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 pseony, with the cock which heralds day, with magnanimous animals, such as the lion and bull; and the moon with silver, and the changing chamseleon, 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.⁶⁰ 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 [130] 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.” ⁶¹

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 astrologers’ 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. [131] 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 Venus became connected with love, Mars with war, Jupiter (whose ♃ in altered shape still heads our physicians’ prescriptions) with power and ‘joviality.’ Throughout the East, astrology even now remains a science in full esteem. The condition of mediaeval 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 [132] 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 myself to 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 booksellers’ 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 [133] 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 [134] 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 “conjurors’ 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 [135] 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 folklore 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 [136] 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?’” ⁶²

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 folklore 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 [137] 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 [138] 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 inquiry, to do his subject justice. 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 primaeval 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 [139] 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.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ 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 bulls of Gregory IX. and Innocent VIII., and the records of the Holy Inquisition, are conclusive evidence to prove. To us here the main interest of mediaeval 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 [140] 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.⁶⁵ Two of the most familiar devices used against the mediaeval 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 folklore 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.⁶⁶ 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 appeares that God hath appointed [141] 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 ilium 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.⁶⁷

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 [142] 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 present 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 folklore. 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 [143] 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 [144] which have combined to bring about the spiritualistic renaissaace, 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 last 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 mans 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.⁶⁸

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 folklore.⁶⁹ From of old, such unexplained noises have been ascribed to the agency of personal spirits, who more often than not are [145] considered human souls. The modern Dayaks, Siamese, and Singhalese agree with the Esths as to such routing and rapping being caused by spirits.⁷⁰ 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.”⁷¹ 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.⁷² 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 he 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.”⁷³· 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 folklore 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 [146] 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.⁷⁴ 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.⁷⁵ 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 Eochester, 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. A rimprimerie du Gouvernement, Basse Terre (Guadeloupe), 1853.’ In the recorded communications, names, dates, etc. 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 [147] 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.⁷⁶ 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.⁷⁷ 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 [148] 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, and 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 oecumenical Nicene Synod, although translated from the body, have also signed the volume with our own hands.”⁷⁸ 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 fac-similes 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-[149] Chaise informs the world, in modern French, that Abelard and she are united and happy; St. Paul writes himself ελζιστоS αποστολου (meaning, we may suppose, ελαχιστοs 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.⁷⁹

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 priti). 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.⁸⁰ Foreign conjurors were professing to exhibit this miracle among the Greeks in the second century, as witness Lueian’s jocular account of the Hyperborean conjuror:— [150] “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 daemons, raising the dead, and bringing in Hekate herself visibly, and drawing down the moon ?” Kleodemos then goes on to relate how the conjuror 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.⁸¹ 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 [151] 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.” ⁸²

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 [152] to man.⁸³ 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.⁸⁴ 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 [153] 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.⁸⁵ 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 inquired whether he had about him such “loosening letters” (literas solutorias) as tales were told of; the man replied that he knew nought 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 [154] the redemption both of soul and body. Again, there prevailed in Scotland up to the last 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 [155] 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.”⁸⁶

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, manes-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 [156] 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 inquiries 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 [157] 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 Judaeus Apella;
Non ego.”⁸⁷

[158] 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 modem 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 [159] 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 Jife, 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.

¹ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 119.

² ‘Life of Nath. Pearce,’ ed. by J. J. Halls, vol. i. p. 286.

³ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 328; vol. ii. p. 273; see vol. iv. p. 425.

⁴ Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ part ii. p. 435.

⁵ Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 6; see p. 16.

⁶ Jas. Gardner, ‘Faiths of the World,’ s. v. ‘Exorcism.’

⁷ 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.

⁸ F. Rühs, ‘Finland,’ p. 296; Bastian, ‘Mensch.’ vol. iii. p. 202.

⁹ Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. pp. 81–3; see 313.

¹⁰ Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 128; see 239.

¹¹ For an examination of numerous magical arts, mostly coming under this category, see ‘Early History of Mankind,’ chaps, vi. and x.

¹² 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.

¹³ Burton, ‘W. and W. from West Africa,’ p. 411.

¹⁴ W. Gregory, ‘Letters on Animal Magnetism,’ p. 128.

¹⁵ Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 361; Collins, ‘New South Wales,’ vol. i. pp. 561, 594.

¹⁶ Shortt, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 278.

¹⁷ Bastian, ‘Mensch.’ vol. iii. p. 117.

¹⁸ See Grote, vol. iii. pp. 113, 351.

¹⁹ Hardy, ‘Eastern Monachism,’ p. 241.

²⁰ Oldfield, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 246.

²¹ Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 134.

²² See specimen and description in the Christy Museum.

²³ Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 130, 363.

²⁴ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 31.

²⁵ R. Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom. of W. of England,’ 2nd ser. p. 165; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 231.

²⁶ Wuttke, p. 100.

²⁷ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 560.

²⁸ Brand, vol. iii. p. 240.

²⁹ Hunt, ibid. p. 148.

³⁰ Wuttke, p. 165; Brand, vol. iii. p. 305.

³¹ Magalhanes de Gandavo, p. 125; D’Orbigny, vol. ii. p. 168.

³² St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 202; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 357.

³³ Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 90; Polack, vol. i. p. 248.

³⁴ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 202.

³⁵ Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 381.

³⁶ 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.

³⁷ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 241.

³⁸ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 279.

³⁹ Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu.’ pp 236, 241; R. Taylor, ‘N. Z.’ p. 334.

⁴⁰ Artemidorus, ‘Oneirocritica; Cockayne, ‘Leechdoms, etc., of Early England,’ vol. iii.; Seafield, ‘Literature, etc., of Dreams;’ Brand, vol. iii.; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes,’ etc., p. 217, etc., etc.

⁴¹ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 74, 115; Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. iv. p. 150; Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. i. p. 255.

⁴² 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.

⁴³ Cieza de Leon, p. 289; Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 183.

⁴⁴ Burton, ‘Central Air.’ vol. ii. p. 32; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 417, 518.

⁴⁵ Plin. xi. 73. See Cic. de Divinatione, ii. 12.

⁴⁶ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 32.

⁴⁷ Le Jeune, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. i. p. 90.

⁴⁸ 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. 109.

⁴⁹ Brand, vol. iii. p. 339; Forbes Leslie, vol. ii. p. 491.

⁵⁰ Maury, ‘Magie, etc.,’ p. 74; Brand, vol. iii. p. 348, etc. See figure in Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Occult. Philosoph.’ ii. 27.

⁵¹ R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 205; Shortland, p. 139; Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 330, etc.; Theophylact. in Brand, vol. iii. p. 332. Compare mentions of similar devices; Herodot. iv. 67 (Scythia); Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 350.

⁵² Migne’s ‘Dic. des Sciences Occultes.’

⁵³ Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 200; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 146.

⁵⁴ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 170. See Macpherson, p. 106 (Khonds).

⁵⁵ Ammian. Marcellin. xxix. 1.

⁵⁶ 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.

⁵⁷ Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Speciebus Magiae,’ xxi.; Brand, vol. iii. p. 351; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1062.

⁵⁸ De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St Petersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 212.

⁵⁹ Shortland, ‘Trads., etc. of New Zealand,’ p. 138.

⁶⁰ See Cicero, ‘De Div.’ i.; Lucian. ‘De Astrolog.’; Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Occulta Philosophia;’ Sibly, ‘Occult Sciences; ’ Brand, vol. iii.

⁶¹ Plin. xvi. 75; xviii. 75; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 676; Brand, vol. ii. p. 169; vol. iii. p. 144.

⁶² Bacon, ‘Novum Organum.’ The original story is that of Diagoras; see Cicero, ‘De Natura Deorum,’ iii. 37; Diog. Laërt. lib. vi., Diogenes, 6.

⁶³ Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ pp. 428, 435; Burton, ‘Central Afr.,’ vol i. pp. 57, 113, 121.

⁶⁴ See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xxxiv.; Lecky, ‘Hist. of Rationalism,’ vol. i. chap. i.; Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek; ’ ‘The Pope and the Council,’ by ‘Janus,’ xvii.

⁶⁵ See also Dasent, ‘Introd. to Norse Tales;’ Maury, ‘Magie, etc.,’ ch. vii.

⁶⁶ 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, ‘Archæolog. of Scotland,’ p. 439; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 15, 20, 122, 220.

⁶⁷ 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; eee Plin. vii 2.

⁶⁸ Swedenborg, ‘The True Christian Religion,’ London, 1855, Nos. 156,167, 281, 851.

⁶⁹ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ pp. 473, 481.

⁷⁰ St John, ‘Far East,’ vol. L p. 82; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 111; ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. pp. 232, 259, 288; Boeder, ‘Ehsten Aberglaube,’ p. 147.

⁷¹ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii p. 74.

⁷² Brand, vol. ii. p. 486.

⁷³ Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part ii The invisible drummer appears to have been one William Drury; see ‘Pepye’ Diary,’ vol. i. p. 227.

⁷⁴ 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).

⁷⁵ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 393.

⁷⁶ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol ii. p. 112; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii p. 252; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 159.

⁷⁷ Toehla, ‘Aurifontina Chymica,’ cited by K. R. H. Mackenzie, in ‘Spiritualist,’ Mar. 15, 1870.

⁷⁸ Nicephor. Callist. Ecclesiast. Hist. viii. 23; Stanley, ‘Eastern Church,’ p.172.

⁷⁹ ‘Pneumatologie Positive et Expérimentale; La Réalité des Esprits et le Phénomène Merveilleux de leur Écriture Directe demontrés,’ par le Baron L. de Guldenstubbé. Paris, 1857.

⁸⁰ Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 38, 126, 150; ‘Eastern Monachism, pp. 272, 285, 382: Koppen, ‘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), in Trant, in ’Missionary Register,’ July, 1820, pp. 294—6.

⁸¹ Lucian. Philopseudes, 13.

⁸² Eunapius in Iambl.

⁸³ Alban Butler, ‘Lives of the Saints,’ vol. i. p. 674; Calmet, ‘Diss. sur les Apparitions, etc.,’chap. xxi.; De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St. Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. pp. 158, 175. See also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 578; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 159.

⁸⁴ Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part ii.; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 161.

⁸⁵ ‘Spiritualist,’ Feb. 15, 1870. Orrin Abbott, ‘The Davenport Brothers,’ New York, 1864.

⁸⁶ 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.

⁸⁷ Conyers Middleton, ‘A Letter from Rome,’ 1729; Hor. Sat. I. v. 98.

CHAPTER V.

EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

[160] Element of directly expressive Sound in Language—Test by independent correspondence in distinct languages—Constituent processes of Language —Gesture—Expression of feature, etc.—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, etc.

In carrying on the inquiry 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 [161] 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 are being expanded and solidified by a school of philologers, among whom Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood is the most prominent.¹ 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 any one offered it, the advocates of the disputed theories might dispose of in the single phrase, that they would neither be pooh-poohed [162] 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 answer 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 [163] 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.²

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, etc. 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 oi most remote antiquity [164] 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.³ 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 [165] 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.⁴ 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, etc., 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, etc., 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 [166] 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.⁵

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; [167] 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.⁶ They are compound musical tones [168] 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” of the sound produced. Quality, which is independent of pitch, depends on the harmonic overtones accompanying the fundamental tone which alone musical notation takes account of: this quality 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.

[169] 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, há = to seek, hã=pestilence, 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.⁷ In West Africa, again, the same device appears: Thus in Dahoman so = stick, só=horse, sò=thunder; Yoruba, bá=with, bá= bend.⁸ 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 [170] 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; ⁹ 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 coeur,” “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 [171] 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 [172] of Tierra del Fuego express “no” by a peculiar cluck, as do also the Turks, who accompany it with the gesture ol 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 anyone language by means of an alphabet intended for any other. But while [173] 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 rater, father, rater, 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 [174] 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,¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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 tones of question and answer, as in “Will you go ? Yes.”? The rules of this imperfect musical intonation in ordinary conversation have been as yet but little studied. But as a [175] 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 I now carrying [176] the unquestioned authority of words printed in a book, and reproduced letter for letter with a most amusing accuracy. But when Home 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.¹² 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 ! made ! 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!¹³ 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 [177] thing has been noticed among Indians of Upper California, who as an expression of pain cry, aná! that is “mother.”¹⁴ 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 last century quite seriously remarking, apropos of the old Greek battle-shout, ἀλαλά! ἀλαλά! that the Turks to this day call out Allah ! Allah 1 Allah ! upon the like occasion.¹⁵

The calls to animals customary in different countries¹⁶ 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 sehû! mentioned as an old German cry to scare birds, as we should say sh sh ! or the aá f 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, [178] 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 gvsch ! gös gös ! are set down as calls to geese; and when we notice that the Bohemian peasant calls hvsy ! 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 I 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 hüt ! 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, pús 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 [179] 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 Northwest 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 oat”¹⁷

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 ‘Duo 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 [180] 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 primaeval 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 “II n’ entend ni á dia! ni á 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 jo! 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 hiip ! 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): —

[181] “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! hür ! 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 I—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.¹⁸

As quaint a mixture of words and interjectional cries as I have met with, is in an old French Cyclopædia,¹⁹ which gives a minute description of the hunters 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 ha 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 [182] 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, ha bellement lá ila, lá ila, hau valet!—hau Vami, tau tau après après, a route a route ! and so on. And sometimes words have broken down into calls whose sense is not quite gone, like the “voilà ici” and the “voilà 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 vauleceletz! 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 mantains 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, [183] 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!²⁰ 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 [184] 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 ! ovai! 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 woï! 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 Jewish! of contempt in the Chinook Jargon, the Tunguz yo yo ! of pain, the Irish ivb wb ! of distress, the native Brazilian’s teh teh ! of wonder [185] and reverence, the hi-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 he ! the Hebrew he ! ha ! for “lo ! behold !” the hoi! 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 ma, 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, etc., 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 !” Eochefort 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 [186] cent.) an English congregation would have saluted a popular preacher.²¹ 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’ 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 Green-landera, 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.²² 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 [187] and considerable gesticulation.”²³ 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. [188] The Galla iya, “to cry, scream, give the battle-cry” hai its analogues in Greek ἰá, ἰή, “a cry,” ἰήϊος “wailing, mournful,” etc. 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, ui ! 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 Quiche 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” (compare Coptic eioio, “to wear a sorrowful countenance “); while we can scarcely fail to see a derivation from expressive sound in the verb hai-hai “to run away” (compare the word aie-aie, used to mean “an omnibus” in modern French slang). 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.²⁴ 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 hayllil and with this sound are connected the verbs hayllini “to sing,” hayllicuni, “to celebrate a victory.” The Zulu [189] hálala ! of exultation, which becomes also a verb “to shout for joy,” has its analogues in the Tibetan alala ! of joy, and the Greek ἄλαλα, which is used as a noun meaning the battle-cry and even the onset itself, ἀλαλáζω, “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 bá há! “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 birefada (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.”

The capabilities of an interjection in modifying words, when language chooses to avail itself thoroughly of them, may be seen in the treatment of this same interjection o ! in the Japanese grammar.²⁵ 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 others things, but not before their own; it is polite to say o before the names of all women, and well-bred children are [190] 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. The o is also used to convey a distinct notion of eminence, and even to distinguish the male gender from the female; as o m’ma, a horse, from me m’ma, a mare. A distinction is made in written language between o, which is put to anything royal, and oo (pronounced o-o not u) 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 the slightest consideration shows that an English child of six years old would at once understand these formations; and if we do not thus incorporate in our grammar the o! of admiration and reverential embarrassment, it is merely because we have not chosen to take advantage of this rudimentary means of expression. Another closely allied exclamation, the cry of io ! has taken its 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 [191] 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 Caesar, as the title of each succeeding governor, while for the King of France was reserved the yet higher style of “the great Onontio.”²⁶

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 any tiling 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.²⁷ 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, [192] 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,²⁸ 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 delicice, delicatus, out of a highly organized language like Latin, and refer them, as the same etymologist does, to an interjectional utterance of satisfaction, dlick!²⁹ 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 [193] 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, ivira, 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 mediaeval 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 oil! 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.³⁰ 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! [194] 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 ! etc., h’ ! heh ! he-e ! hü ! hoehah ! ah-ha ! etc. 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 !—mäin !: in Miranha ha ú !—nani! The Quichua of Peru affirms by y ! hu! and expresses “no,” “not,” “not at all,” by ama! manan! etc., making from the latter the verb manamñi, “to deny.” The Quiche 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, etc. The Sanskrit particles hi ! “indeed, certainly,” na, “not,” exemplify similar forms in Indo-European languages, down to our own aye ! and no !³¹ 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.³²

[195] 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 !³³ 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 interjec-tional 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.³⁴

[196] 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 Veddahs 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.”³⁵ Among other sibilant [197] interjections, are Turkish sûsâ ! Ossetic ss ! sos ! “silence ! “Femandian sia! “listen!” “tush!” Yoruba sió! “pshaw!” Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one linguistic family, are very wide-spread 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 hûñkára (hûm-making), “the utterance of the mystic religious exclamation hum !” and çiççabda (çiç-sound), “a hiss.” Beside 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, “tolaugh,” 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 ! etc., 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, ply, “to revile, to hate.”³⁶ Further [198] 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 Quiche 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 mediaeval 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 [199] 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 cujasque ingenio prsedicatur.)

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

² 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 (Dohne, Dic). Polynesia, etc.: 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), Quiche (Brasseur, Gr. and Dic). S. America: Tupi (Diaz, Dic), Carib (Rochefort, Vocab. i, Quichua (Markham, Gr. and Dic), Chilian (Febres, Dic), Brazilian tribes (Martius, ‘Glossaria linguarum Brasiliensium’). Many details in Pott, ‘Doppelung,” etc.

³ Bonwick, ‘Daily Life of Tasmanians,’ p. 140; Capt. Wilson, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.,’ vol. iv. p. 322, etc.; 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.

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

⁴ Compare Herbert Spencer, ‘Origin and Function of Music ‘in’ Essays’ (1858).

⁵ See Helmholtz, ‘Tonempfindungen,’ 2nd ed. p. 163; Tyndall, ‘Sound,’ lecture v.; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 95, etc.

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

⁷ Burton, in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.,’ vol. i. p. 313; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Gr. and Dic.’ p. 5; see J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.,’ p. 461.

⁸ C. W in ‘London and Westminster Review,’ Oct. 1837.

⁹ ‘Accentus est etiam in dicendo cantus obscurior.’—Cic. de Orat.

¹⁰ Helmholtz, p. 364.

¹¹ Caswell, in Bastian, ‘Berlin. Akad.’ L c.

¹² Home Tooke, ‘Diversions of Purley,’ 2nd ed. London, 1798, pt. i. pp. 60 8.

¹³ 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.

¹⁴ Arroyo de la Cuesta, ‘Gr. of Mutsun lang,’ p. 39, in Smithsonian Contr., rol. iii.; Neapolitan mamma mia! exclamation of wonder, &c., Liebrecht in Götting. Gel. Anz. 1872, p. 1287.

¹⁵ Shaw, ‘Travels in Barbary,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xv. p. 669.

¹⁶ Some of the examples here cited, will be found in Grimm, ‘Deutsche Cf. vol. iii. p. 308; Pott, ‘Doppelung.’ p. 27; Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language.’

¹⁷ See Pictet, ‘Origin. Indo-Europ.’ part i. p. 382; Caldwell, ‘Gr. of Dra-vidian Langs,’ p. 465; Wedgwood, Dic. s. v. ‘puss,’ etc.; 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. mûno=cat. It. micio, Fr. mite, minon, Ger. mieze, etc.= ‘cat,’ and Sp. miz/ Ger. minz/ etc. = ‘puss !’ are from imitation· of a mew.

¹⁸ For lists of drivers’ words, see Grimm, I. c.; Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ p. 264; Halliwell, ‘Dic. of Archaic and Provincial English,’ s. v. ‘ree;’ Brand, vol. ii. p. 15; Pictet, part ii. p. 489.

¹⁹ ‘Recueil de Planches sur les Sciences, les Arts, etc.’ Paris, 1763, art. ‘Chasses’ The traditional cries are still more or loss in use. See ‘A Week in a French Country-house.’

²⁰ Aldrete, ‘Lengua Castellana,’ Madrid, 1673, 8. vv. harre, exe.

²¹ “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.’

²² Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 279.

²³ D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ p. 65.

²⁴ Compare, in the same district, Camé ii, Cotoxó hiehie, euhiähiä, multua, -a, -um.

²⁵ J H. Donker Curtius, ‘Essai de Grammaire Japonaise,’ p. 34, etc. 199.

²⁶ 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.

²⁷ The arre ! may have been introduced into Europe by the Moore, 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!

²⁸ Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language,’ p. 92.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 72.

³⁰ De Brasses, vol. i. p. 203. See Wedgwood.

³¹ Also Oraon hae—ambo; Micmao é—mw.

³² A double contradiction in Carib anhan /= “yes 1” oua/= “no !” Single contradictions in Catoquina hang! Tupi eém! Botocudo hemhem! Yoruba eñ! for “yes I” Culino aiy! Australian yo! for “no 1” &c. How much these sounds depend on peculiar intonation, we, who habitually use h’m! either for “yes !” or “no !” can well understand.

³³ (Charles de Brosses) ‘Traité de la Formation Mécanique des Langues, etc.’ Paris, An ix., vol. i. p. 238; vol. ii. p. 313. Lazarus and Steinthal, ‘Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie,’ etc., vol. i. p. 421. Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft,’ p. 73. Farrar, ‘Chapters on Language,’ p. 202.

³⁴ 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.

³⁵ Catlin, ‘Noith 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.

³⁶ Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language,’ p. 83, ‘Dictionary,’ Introd. p. xlix. ands. 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/, 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.

CHAPTER VI.

EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (continued).

Imitative Words—Human actions named from sound—Animals’ names from cries, etc.—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.

[200] 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 so on 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 [201] musical instruments, the sounds of shouting, howling, stamping, breaking, tearing, scraping, and so forth, 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 extentfail 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 Tatars, with their arrows that went ter ter; certain Buddhist heretics maintained that water is alive, because when it boils it says chichitd, 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 hiva) may be a perfect imitative verb; yet when it passes into modern [202] 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 thoughts, 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 [203] 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 exists.

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 Lobun, bwa-bun; Galla bufa, afufa; Zulu futa, punga, pupuza (fu, pu, used as expressive particles); Quiche puba; Quichua puhuni; Tupi ypeú; Finnish puhkia; Hebrew puach; Danish puste; Lithuanian púciu; and in numbers of other languages;¹ 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 [204] 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, L e., a “six-_poo.” When a European uses the word puff to denote the discharge of a gun, he is merely using the same imitative word for blowing which describes 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 “souffiant.” 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.² 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,” etc., 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.”

[205] The group of words belonging to the closed lips, of which mum, mumming, mumble are among the many forms belonging to European languages,³ 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,” rnumata “to close the lips as with a mouthful of water,” mumuta, mumuza “to eat mouthfuls of corn, etc., with the lips shut;” Tahitian mamu “to be silent,” omumu “to murmur; “Fijian, nomo, nomo-nomo “to be silent; “Chilian, ñomn “to be silent;” Quiche, 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 her dan (make thu) “to spit,” Greek πτύω, may be compared with Chinook mamook toh, tooh, (make toh, tooh); Chilian tuvcutun (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, etc. 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” re-appears 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 [206] or pet animals, expresses the verb “to lovre” as nem-no-sha (to make n’m-ri). 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 kdka crow reappears in the name of a similar bird in British Columbia, the kah-kah; a fly is called by the natives of Australia a bumberoo, like Sanskrit bambhardli “afly,” Greek βομβύιος, and our bumble-bee. Analogous to the name of the tse-tse, the terror of African travellers, is ntsintsi, the word for “a 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 the Tucanos.⁴ The cock, gallo quiquiriquí, as the Spanish nursery-language calls him, has a long list of names from various languages which in various ways [207] 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 Kahrkataq”⁵

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 πιπιvιov, French pipion (old), pigeon; its derivation is from the young bird’s peep, Latin pipire, Italian pipiare, pigiolare, modern Greek πιπινιζω, to chirp; by an easy metaphor, a pigeon comes to mean “a silly young fellow [208] 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.”⁶ The derivation of Greek βoῦs, 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.⁷ 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 but” “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 re-appears in the Darien Indian shak-shak, the shook-shook of the Arawaks, the Chinook shugh (whence shugh-opoots, rattle-tail, 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 [209] 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 judgment,— “In spêdistin thuthaúrna. thuthaúrneith auk jah daúthans ustandand” (1 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 French or mediaeval Latin sound in pipe, pipa, 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, [210] 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 realty 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 we notice 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 [211] “waterfall,” tum-wáta. 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, tumtum bufa bufti, “the workman blows the 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 imitated 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 [212] 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 word 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 ττίτττω ?

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 stick,” seemingly so called from its whir through the air; kurarriti, “to hum, buzz; ” kurrirrurriri, “round about, unintelligible,” etc.; pitata, “to knock, pelt, as rain,” pitapitata, “to knock;” [213] wiiti, “to laugh, rejoice” —just as in our own “Turnament of Tottenham”: —

“ ‘We te he !’ quoth Tyb, and high,
‘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), tsish, “a grindstone,” mamook tsish (make tsish), “to sharpen.” 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” 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; “bohoni, “a throstle “(cries bo! bo! compare [214] 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; ” bubaluza, “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 sounds 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 so forth, 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 [215] 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 to make sense of strange words by altering them into something with an appropriate meaning (like beefeater from buffetier) 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, stcepan, 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 [216] with the foot on the Dorset cottage-sill—in Barnes’s poem:—

“Where love do seek the maiden’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 [217] 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 rátchi 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 d to the root, and prolonging its sound, kajee “to speak,” Amg kajēēa “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 [218] 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,” baba, “a small thing,” contrasted in a proverb, “Baba bo, baba molle” — “A great [219] 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 it⁸ 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 [220] 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.⁹

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; urn, 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.
Tuinale | re, this; ri, that.
| ngi, I; ngo, thou; ngu, he.
Greenlandish | uv, here, there (where one points to); iv, there, up there [found in comp.].
| Sujelpa (Colville Ind.), αχα, this; iχi, that.
Sahaptin | kina, here; kuna, there.
Mutsun | ne, here; nu, there.
Tarahumara | ihe, 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; tvety, 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.¹⁰ 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 mah and ăh is intended to express.”

má di, I eat; mâh di, thou eatest;
ă di, we eat; âh di, ye eat.

[222] 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 any child 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 Mangu chacha is mas. . . . cheche, femina. Again, ama, in Mangu, is father; eme, mother; amcha, father-in-law, emche, mother-in-law.”¹¹ 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 [223] 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 1853,¹² effectually overthrew this argument, and settled the view that such coincidences 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 [224] instance, the same principle of symbolism which leads the Welshman 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.”¹³

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 organised 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 via. 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 [225] 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 pd and md 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 pd and md 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.¹⁴

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 [226] 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,” ammd “mother,” Bodo aphâ “father,” dyd “mother;” the Kocch group ηάηά and ndni “paternal grandfather and grandmother,” mâmâ “uncle,” dâdâ “cousin,” may be set beside Sanskrit tata “father,” nand “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, baba “father,” bâbú “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 bobo “something to drink,” gogo [227] “little boy,” far 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 this character of this peculiar region of language: Black-foot Indian ninnah “father;” Greek νεννος “uncle,” νεννα “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 des, pa’s and ma’s, serve almost as indiscriminately [228] 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.)”¹⁵

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 [229] 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 net 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 [230] 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 [231] 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 ot 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 introauction [232] 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 primaeval 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 [233] 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.¹⁶ 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 [234] 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 [235] 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 values, 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 κάνη, “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 generalise 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 [236] 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 [237] 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 [238] figures 2, 3, 4, which are not self-expressive, have driven into the background the Eoman 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. [289] 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 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.

¹ Mpongwe punjina; Basuto foka; Carib phoubäe; Arawac appildiln (igneni sufflare). Other cases are given by Wedgwood, ‘Or. of Lang.’ p. 83.

² See Wedgwood, ‘Dic.’ Introd. p. viii.

³ See Wedgwood, Dic, 8. v. “mum,” etc.

⁴ Bates, ‘Naturalist on the Amazons,’ 2nd ed., p. 404; Markham in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.,’ vol. iii. p. 143.

⁵ ‘Avesta,’ Farg. xviii. 34-5.

⁶ Wedgwood, Dic, 8. v. “pigeon;” Diez. ‘Etym. Wörterb.,’ s. y. “piccione.”

⁷ Bopp, ‘Gloss. Sanscr.,’ s. v. “go.” See Pott, ‘Wurzel-Wörterb. der Indo-Germ. Spr.’ s. v. “gu,” Zählmeth., p. 227.

⁸ Pott, ‘Doppelung (Reduplication, Gemination) als eines der wichtigsten Bildungsmittel der Sprache,’ 1862. Frequent use has been here made of this work.

⁹ 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.’

¹⁰ Also Old High German diz and daz.

¹¹ Max Müller, L c

¹² 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.

¹³ One family of languages, the Athapascan, contains both appd and mama as terms for “father,” in t/ie Tahkali and Tlatskanai.

¹⁴ 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.

¹⁵ Facciolati, ‘Lex.’ Varro ap. Nonn., ii. 97.

¹⁶ Plato Cratylus. 90.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ART OF COUNTING.

[240] 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.” [241] 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,¹ so that the supposed series of high numerals forms at once a little vocabulary of Tongan indecency, and a warning as to the [242] 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.”² 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.³

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.’” ⁴ In [243] 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 Jorgenson, 1. parmery; 2. calahawa; more than 2, cardia; as Backhouse puts it, they count “one, two, plenty”; but an observer who had specially good opportunities, Dr. Milligan, gives a word found among them for 5, which we shall recur to.⁵ 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.⁶ 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 [244] 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.”⁷ 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.”⁸ The Bororos of Brazil reckon: 1. couai; 2. macouai; 3. ouai; and then go on counting on their fingers, repeating this ouai⁹ Of course it no more follows among savages than among ourselves that, because a man counts on his [245] 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.¹⁰ 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,’ etc., 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 [246] fingers, keeping the other two hidden.”¹¹ Throughout the world, the general relation between finger-counting and word-counting may be stated as follows. For readiness and for ease of apprehension of numbers, a palpable arithmetic, such as is worked on finger-joints or fingers,¹² 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, [247] 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 so on 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,” and so on for 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, Abi-pone, and Carib rival the Tamanac in their systematic way of working out “hand,” “hands,” “foot,” “feet,” etc. Others show slighter traces of the same process, where, for instance, the numerals 5 or 10 are found to be connected [248] with words for “hand,” etc., 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 come to 11, 12, 13, counted quihicha ata, bosa, mica, i.e., “foot one, two, three.”¹³ 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 arkanek-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;” and thus by counting several men they reach higher [249] numbers, thus expressing, for example, 53 as inûp pingajugsâne arkanek-pingasut, “on the third man on the first foot three.” ¹⁴ 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 Mexican 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; for here, as in the two South American tribes before mentioned, puggana “man,” stands 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 15.¹⁵ As an example from the Melanesian languages the Mare will serve; it reckons 10 as ome re rue tubenine, apparently “the two [250] sides” (i. e. both hands), 20 as sa re ngome, “one man,” etc.; 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.”¹⁶ 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 etc., 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 7.¹⁷ 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 so on with 40, 60, 80, etc. “two men, three men, four men, etc., 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.¹⁸ Lastly, for bringing before our minds a picture of the man counting upon his fingers, and being struck by the idea that if he describes his gestures in words, these words may become an [251] 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.¹⁹

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 [252] own languages have nevertheless sometimes found it convenient to invent new ones. Thus the scholars of India, ages ago, selected a set of words for 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 became 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: —

“Yahni tri rtvishu gunendu kritâgnibhûta
Bânâsvinetra çara bhûku yugabdhi râmâh
Budrâbdhirâmagunavedaçatâ dviyugma
Dantà budhairabhihitâh kramaço bhatârâh.”

²⁰

[253] 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 one, two, three, and so forth, in the various languages of the world. The following passage in which, more than thirty 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.

[254] 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.²¹ 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.²² 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”).²³ Lastly, the system has [255] come into existence among a North American group of tribes, the Dacotas or Sioux. There have been found in use among them 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.²⁴

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, [256] 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, etc., 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.”²⁵

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, 4,820.²⁶

Among cultured nations, whose languages are most tightly bound to the conventional and unintelligible [257] 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 place 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 drôit, “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; droit (party), 20; thiodh (people), 30; folk (people), 40; old (people), 80; her (army), 100; Sleswig, schilk, 12 (as though we were to make a numeral out of “shilling”); Mid 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.²⁷

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 [258] 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, 8. 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 δύοo, 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 8. 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, 8, 4, 5, [259] then put in τ for 6, and so manage to let ι stand for 10, as 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 forth. 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.²⁸

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.²⁹ 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 [260] brought forward,³⁰ 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 [261] 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.
Hie numerus magno tunc 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 suinitur inde novis.”³¹

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 [262] 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, etc.³² 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,³³ which is incidentally the most extensive collection of details relating to numerals, indispensable to students occupied with such inquiries. 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.”³⁴ The suggestion has been made that the Greek use [263] of πεμπάζειυ, “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, etc., 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 tri-ugent “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-ni-gontig, 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, etc., gained a position in English which it has not yet totally lost.³⁵

[264] 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 one of our nursery number-rhymes illustrates in a curiously perfect way. It runs—

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

[265] 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 “tris-megistus,” “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.”³⁶

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 [266] superior race axe 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.³⁷ 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.³⁸ 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 Maranon, with native numerals up to 5, adopt for higher numbers those of the Quichua, the language of the Peruvian Incas.³⁹ The cases of the indigenes of India are instructive. The Khonds reckon 1 and 2 in native words, and then take to borrowed [267] 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.⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹ In Melanesia, the Annatom language can only count in its own numerals to 5, and then borrows English siks, seven, eet, nain, etc. 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.⁴² 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 [268] 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 Mediaeval 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, etc. 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 saltes | 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.
[269] Say quxrterer saltee or dacha saltee | 10d. dieci soldi.
Say chinker saltee or dacha oney saltee | 11d. undici soldi.
Oney beong | 1s.
A beong my saltee | 1s. 6d.
Dooe beong say saltee or madza caroon | 2s. 6d. (half crown, mezza corona.⁴³)

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 forth. 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 relations 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, and the Indian numerals themselves, if their originals are the initials of “eka,” “dvi,” “tri,” &c.; 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, and the arrangement of the Indian numerals in order, so that position distinguishes units, tens, hundreds, &c.; and lastly, the modern notation of decimal fractions by carrying down below the unit the proportional order which [270] 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,⁴⁴ 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 cocoa-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.⁴⁵

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, etc., 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, [271] 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 unmistakeable 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 [272] 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.

¹ Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands,’ vol. ii. p. 390.

² 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.”

³ Low in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.,’ vol. i. p. 408; Year-Books Edw. I. (xx.—I. ed. Horwood, p. 220.

⁴ Spix and Martius, ‘Reise in Brazilien,’ p. 387.

⁵ Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’p. 143; Backhouse, ‘Narr.’p. 104; Milligan in Papers, etc. Roy. Soc. Tasmania, vol. iii. part ii. 1859.

⁶ Oldfield in Tr. Eth. Soc. vol. iii. p. 291; Lang, ‘Queensland,’p. 433; Latham, ‘Comp. Phil.’ p. 352. Other terms in Bonwick, I. c.

⁷ Sicard, ‘Théorie des Signes pour l’Instruction des Sourds-Muets,’ vol. ii. p. 634.

⁸ Stanbridge in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 304.

⁹ Martius, ‘Gloss. Brasil,’p. 15.

¹⁰ Kraclieninnikow, ‘Kamtchatka,’ p. 17.

¹¹ Gumilla, ‘Historia del Orenoco,’ vol. iii. ch. xlv.; Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ p. 16.

¹² 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, etc., comes out just as in chaffering in words.

¹³ Gilij; ‘Saggio di Storia Americana,’ vol. ii. p. 332 (Tamanac, Maypure). Martins, ‘Gloss. Brasil.’ (Cayriri, Tnpi, Carib, Omagua, Jnri, Guachi, Coretu, Cherentes, Maxuruna, Caripuna, Cauixana, Carajás, Coroado, etc.); Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 168; Humboldt, ‘Monumens,’ pl. xliv. (Muysca).

¹⁴ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 286; Kleinsehmidt ‘Gr. der Grönl. Spr.;’ Rae in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 145.

¹⁵ Milligan, I. c.; G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab. W. Australia.’ Compare a series of quinary numerals to 9, from Sydney, in Pott, ‘Zählinethode,’ p. 46.

¹⁶ Gabelentz, ‘Melanesiche Sprachen,’ p. 183.

¹⁷ W. v. Humboldt, ‘Kawi Spr,’ vol. ii. p. 808; corroborated by ‘As. Res.’ vol. vi. p. 90; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 182, etc.

¹⁸ Koelle, ‘Gr. of Vei. Lang.’ p. 27.

¹⁹ Schleuder, ‘Gr. for Zulu Sproget,’ p. 30; Dohne, ‘Zulu Dic.;’ Grout, ‘Zulu Gr.’ See Hahn, ‘Gr. des Herero.’

²⁰ Sir W. Jones in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. 1790, p. 296; K. Jacquet in ‘Nouv. Journ. Asiat.’ 1835; W. v. Humboldt, ‘Kawi-Spr.’ vol. i. p. 19. This system of recording dates, etc., 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.

²¹ Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 324: Shürmann, ‘Vocab. of Parnkalla Lang.’ gives forms partially corresponding.

²² ‘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, an seem not all correct.

²³ 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 fafiive, Maori wahine, ‘woman; ’ comp. Malay batina, ‘female.’

²⁴ M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux,’ p. xxv.

²⁵ 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.)

²⁶ Bowen, ‘Gr. and Dic. of Yoruba.’ Burton in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 314.

²⁷ See Pott, ‘Zählinethode,’ pp. 78, 99, 124, 161; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer,’ ch. v.

²⁸ Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ p. 483.

²⁹ Of evidence of this class, the following deserves attention: —Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 169, gives geyeñknatè, ‘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 Americain,’ vol. ii. p. 163, remarks:—”Les Chiquitos ne savent compter que jusqu’à un (tarna), 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, een-tli, ‘grain,’ may be connected. On possible derivations of 2 from hand, &c., especially Hottentot t’koam, ‘hand, 2,’ see Pott, ‘Zählmethode, p. 29.

³⁰ 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, etc.; 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.

³¹ Ovid. Fast. iii. 121.

³² 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-sanws; 7, rim-roëeti; 8, rim-tmwroe; 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, h-thack; 10, te-bennete.

³³ A. F. Pott, ‘Die Quinäre und Vigesimale Zählmethode bei Völkern aller Welttheile,’ Halle, 1847; supplemented in ‘Festgabe zur xxv. Versammlung Deutscher Philologen, etc., in Halle’ (1867).

³⁴ ‘Account of Laura Bridgman,’ London, 1845, p. 159.

³⁵ Compare the Rajmahali tribes adopting Hindi numerals, yet reckoning by twenties. Shaw, I. 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.

³⁶ D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ p. 616.

³⁷ Grant in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90.

³⁸ Dobrizhoffer, ‘Gesch. der Abiponer,’ p. 205; Eng. Trans, vol. ii. p. 171.

³⁹ Markhum in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 166.

⁴⁰ Latham. ‘Comp. Phil.’ p. 186; Shaw in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iv. p. 96; Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. pp. 27, 204, 251.

⁴¹ St. Cricq in ‘Bulletin de la Soc. de Geog.’ 1853, p. 286; Polt. Zählmethode,’ p. 7.

⁴² Gabelentz, p. 89 Hale, 1. a

⁴³ J. C. Hotten, ‘Slang Dictionary,’ p. 218.

⁴⁴ ‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 106.

⁴⁵ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 91; Klemm, C. G. vol. iii. p. 383.

CHAPTER VIII.

MYTHOLOGY.

[273] 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 doctrines 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 [274] through the changes wrought by modem 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 Eiver 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,
Eaised 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 develope, 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 Maui, the New Zealand Sun-god, 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 [275] 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 present 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 that they were brought up to hear with such reverent delight, should describe a world so strangely [276] 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.¹ 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 [277] 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 inconstant 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 farther 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 [278] 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 develope. So far as the plan consisted in mere suppression of the marvellous, a notion of its trustworthiness may be obtained, as Mr. G. W. Cox well [279] 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.² But it has of late fallen on evil days, and mythologists in authority have treated it in so highhanded a fashion as to bring it into general contempt. So far has the feeling against the abuse of such argument gone, [280] 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 [281] 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 [282] 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.³

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 [283] 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 [284] modern rude tribes who have departed least from these primitive conditions, while 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, 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.

[285] 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 [286] 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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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.⁶ The spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law (repealed in the present reign), whereby not [287] 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 Brac-ton says, “Omnia quæ 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 Gf man.”⁷ But his argument rather serves to show the worthlessness of oif-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.⁸

Animism takes in several doctrines which so forcibly conduce to personification, that savages and barbarians, apparently without an effort, can give 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.

[288] 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 tire.⁹ 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 Jeune: —“Je leur ay demandé d’où venoit l’Eclipse de Lune et de Soleil; ils m’ont respondu que la Lune s’édip-soit 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?”¹⁰ 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 [289] 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.¹¹ As the Egyptian Osiris and Isis, identified with Sun and Moon, were at once brother and sister, and husband and wife, so it was with the Peruvian Sun and Moon, and thus the sister-marriage of the Incas had in their religion at once a meaning and a justification.¹² 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.¹³

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 any one gave offence to the moon, he would fling down stones on the offender and kill him,¹⁴ 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,¹⁵ what conceptions of personal life could be [290] 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.¹⁶ 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 cætera sidera vocans, quasi coram interrogabat, vellentne contueri inane solum?) ¹⁷

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 corroborée; 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.¹⁸ The Esquimaux did not stop short at calling the stars of Orion’s belt the Lost Ones, and [291] 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.¹⁹ 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 tallied with him when he was once out hunting, weary and luckless, and led him to a place where there was much game.²⁰ 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.²¹ 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.²² 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, [292] 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.²³

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.”²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ The Moslems still account for waterspouts as caused by gigantic demons, such as that one described in the “Arabian Nights:”—“The [293] 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.”²⁷ The difficulty in interpreting language like this is to know how 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.”²⁸ 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.²⁹

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.³⁰ It is not only in mere nature-myth like this, but in actual awe-struck belief and terror, that the idea of the [294] live Rainbow is worked out. The Karens of Birma 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, the}’ 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.”³¹ 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.”³² Lastly in Dahome, Danh the Heavenly Snake, which makes the Popo beads and confers wealth on man, is the Rainbow.³³

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, volcanos, 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 [295] 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.³⁴ 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.³⁵ 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 the savage 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 blushiog maid,
With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.”³⁶

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.³⁷ 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.³⁸ When the plague fell on Home 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. [296] 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.”³⁹

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 [297] 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.⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹ 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.⁴² To the South Sea islander it was the [298] heaven-ladder where heroes of old climbed up and down; ⁴³ 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.⁴⁴ As the Israelite called it the bow of Jehovah in the clouds, it is to the Hindu the bow of Rama,⁴⁵ and to the Finn the bow of Tiermes the Thunderer, who slays with it the sorcerers that hunt after men’s lives; ⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ 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.” ⁴⁸ 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-makers 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 [299] 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.⁴⁹ 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 [300] 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.⁵⁰ 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 [301] 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 [302] 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 mediaeval 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.⁵¹ 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 !”⁵² 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.⁵³

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.⁵⁴ 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 [303] 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.⁵⁵ If to any one 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 [304] assagai bears the peaceful name of U-simbela-banta-bami, He-digs-up-for-my-children.⁵⁶ 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 ot 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.⁵⁷ 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 Arthurs 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 primaeval 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 [305] 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 the Aryan 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 [306] disease, is a state common and held in honour among the very classes specially concerned with mythic idealism, and under its influence the harriers 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.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰ [307] 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.⁶¹ 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 [308] well instanced in the history of a widespread belief, extending through savage, barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediaeval 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 lycan-thropy. 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.⁶² The Khonds of Orissa say that some among them [309] have the art of “mleepa,” and by the aid or 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.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ 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.⁶⁵

How vividly the imagination or 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 [310] 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.”⁶⁶ 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-hyœnas. 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.⁶⁷ 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 [311] 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 hyæna’s ears to encourage a profitable superstition.⁶⁸ 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.⁶⁹ 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 [312] 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.⁷⁰

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 hæc Ponto mihi lecta venena
Ipse dedit Mœris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.
His ego sæpe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvis
Mœrin, ssepe animas imis excire sepulcris,
Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.” ⁷¹

Of the classic accounts, one of the most remarkable is Petronius Arbiter’s story of the transformation of a “versi-pellis” or “turnskin; ” this contains the episode of the [313] 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” (ham-rammr) 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 λυκάυθρωπоς, adopt the Slavonic term βρύκоλακας (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 tear 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 [314] long time tormented an honest fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to flight with his broadsword, 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 cf myth and madness.⁷²

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 [315] 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 primaeval 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.

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

² See Banier, ‘La Mythologie et les Fables expliquées par l’Histoire,’ Paria, 1738; Lempriere, ‘Classical Dictionary,’ etc.

³ Harnisch, ‘Slav. Myth.’ p. 323; Grimm, D. M. p. 363; Latham, ‘Deser. 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.

⁴ Macrae in ‘As. Res.’ vol vii. p. 189.

⁵ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 51.

⁶ Grote, vol. iii. p. 104; vol. v. p. 22; Herudot. i. 189; vii. 34; Porphyr. de Abstinentia, ii. 30; Pausan. i. 28; Pollux, ‘Onomasticon.’

⁷ Reid, ‘Essays,’ vol. iii. p. 113.

⁸ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 210.

⁹ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 102. See also De la Borde, ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

¹⁰ Le Jeune in ‘Relatious des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 26. See Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol ii. p. 170.

¹¹ 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.

¹² Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 86; Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Comm. Real.’ i. c. 4.

¹³ Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ vl. 42; Clavigero, vol. ii p. 9; Sahagun in Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico.’

¹⁴ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 59.

¹⁵ Le Jeune, in ‘Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1639, p. 88.

¹⁶ Froebel, ‘Central America,’ p. 490.

¹⁷ Tac. Ann. xiii. 55.

¹⁸ Stanbridge, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 301.

¹⁹ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 295; Hayes, ‘Arctic Boat Journey,’ p. 254.

²⁰ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 276; see also De la Borde, ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

²¹ Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 119.

²² Origen. de Principiis, i. 7, 3; Pamphil. Apolog. pro Origine, ix. 84.

²³ De Maistre, ‘Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 210, see 184.

²⁴ Kaempfer, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684.

²⁵ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 265; see Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 140 (Indra’s elephants drinking).

²⁶ Chron. Joh. Bromton, in ‘Hist. Angl. Scriptores,’ x. Ric. I. p. 1216.

²⁷ Lane, ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol. i, p. 30, 7.

²⁸ Krapf, ‘Travels,’ p. 198.

²⁹ 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.]

³⁰ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 121.

³¹ Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 217.

³² Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 294.

³³ Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 148; see 242.

³⁴ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. p. 148.

³⁵ Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 106.

³⁶ Jas. Atkinson, ‘Customs of the Women of Persia,’ p. 49.

³⁷ 2 Sam. xxiv. 16; 2 Kings xix, 35.

³⁸ G. S. Assemanni ‘Bibliotheca Orientalis,’ ii. 86.

³⁹ Hanusch, ‘Slav. Mythus,’ p. 322. Compare Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ i. c. 14 (Mexico); Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 197.

⁴⁰ Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 357.

⁴¹ Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.’ p. 9.

⁴² Welcker, ‘Grieeh. Götterl. vol. i. p. 690.

⁴³ Eflis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol i. p. 231; Polack, ‘New. Z.’ vol. i. p. 273.

⁴⁴ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 694—6.

⁴⁵ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 140.

⁴⁶ Castren, ‘Finnische Mythologie,’ pp. 48, 49.

⁴⁷ Delbrück in Lazarus and Steinthal’s Zeitschrift, vol. iii. p. 269.

⁴⁸ Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 520.

⁴⁹ Sicard, ‘Théorie des Signes, etc.’ 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.

⁵⁰ Le Jeune, in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 13.

⁵¹ Pietro della Valle, ‘Viaggi,’ letter xvi.

⁵² ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’vol. ii. p. xxvii.

⁵³ 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.

⁵⁴ Caldwell, ‘Comp. Gr. of Dravidian Langs.’ p. 172.

⁵⁵ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 366. For other cases see especially Pott in Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Allg. Encyelop.’ art. ‘Geschlecht; ’ also D. Forbes, ‘Persian Gr.’ p. 26; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 60.

⁵⁶ Callaway, ‘Relig. of Amazulu,’ p. 166.

⁵⁷ Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ pp. 132, etc., 211; Shorthand, ‘Traditions of N. Z.’ p. 15.

⁵⁸ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 391 and pl. 55.

⁵⁹ Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 124.

⁶⁰ Tac. Germania, 45.

⁶¹ Maury, ‘Magie, etc.’ p. 175.

⁶² Eliot in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p. 32.

⁶³ Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 92, 99, 108.

⁶⁴ Dalton, ‘Kols of Chota-Nagpore’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 82.

⁶⁵ J. Cameron, ‘Malayan India,’ p. 393; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 119; vol. iii. pp. 261, 273; ‘As. Res.’ vol vi. p. 173.

⁶⁶ Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 77. See J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urielig.’ p 63; Martins, ‘Ethn. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 652; Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua, p. 229; Piediahita, ‘Kuevo Keyno de Granada,’ part i. lib. i. c. 3.

⁶⁷ Koelle, ‘Afr. Lit. and Kanuri Vocab.’ p. 275.

⁶⁸ ‘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.

⁶⁹ Parkyns, ‘Life in Abyssinia’ (1853), vol. ii. p. 146.

⁷⁰ 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. Air.’ p. 57; Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ pp. 615, 642; Magyar, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 136.

⁷¹ Virg. Bucol. eel. viii. 95.

⁷² 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, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 286, 320; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 118.

CHAPTER IX.

MYTHOLOGY—continued.

[316] 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 [317] 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 earty 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 [318] simplicity of their interpretations, can they be really true ? Can so great a part of the legendary lore of classic, barbarian, and mediaeval 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 nàïvely 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 Aryans, 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 [319] 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 mythologie 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 Sifrit’s death at the hand of Hagen in the Nibelungen Lied; his falling pierced with [320] 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; ¹ even as the Aryan Indra, the Sky, is the “thousandeyed” (sahasraksha, 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,² must have been thinking of the starry sky watching [321] 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 Helios was the Sun, and Selene 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 summer and winter, does not depend alone on analogy of incident, but has the very names to prove its reality, Zeus, Helios, Demeter—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 high savage 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 [322] 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 not twenty years ago. 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 [323] 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, [324] though he put forth all his strength. What cared Tumatauenga for his brother’s wrath ? He it was who had 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 their 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 [325] 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.”³

The rending asunder of heaven and earth is a far-spread Pofynesian legend, well known in the island groups that lie away to the north-east.⁴ 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 [326] separation of heaven and earth in the primaeval 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.”⁵ 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-Ppacha or “Mother-Earth; ” the Caribs, when there was an earthquake, said 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 [327] as their mother, and the Great Spirit as their father. A story told by Gregg shows a somewhat diffeient thought of mythic parentage. General Harrison once called the Shawnee chief Tecumseh for a talk:— “Come here, Te-cumseh, 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 hosom,” 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.”⁶ In the mythology of Finns, Lapps, and Esths, Earth-Mother is a divinely honoured personage.⁷ Through the mythology of our own country the same thought may be traced, from the days when the Anglo-Saxon called upon the Earth, “Hal 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.” ⁸

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 Prthivi mátar, the [328] “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 Demeter, 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.⁹ It re-appears in ancient Scythia; ¹⁰ 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 Yn 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.¹¹

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 [329] 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 tc 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 vu,” 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 [330] 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.¹² 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.¹³ In Sumatra we have the comparatively scientific notion that an eclipse has to do with the action of Sun and Moon on one another, and, accordingly, they make a loud noise with sounding instruments to prevent the one from devouring the other.¹⁴ 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.”¹⁵

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 [331] 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 slugggishly 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 eighty years ago in the Asiatick Researches, are still full of interest. “It is evident, from what has been explained, that the Pŭndits, learned in the Jyotish shastrŭ, 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 Brahmŭns, that [332] 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 védŭs and pooranŭs, 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 shastrŭs, might have been so formerly, and may be so still; but for astronomical purposes, astronomical rules must be followed.”¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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 [333] 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.¹⁸

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, “labor-anti succurrere lunæ.” 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 cœlo 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.¹⁹ 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 charh ari is mentioned in our own country in the seventeenth century: [334] “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 Sonnenfinsternuss), 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 inquiry that the poor moon was believed to be the prey of some invisible monster seeking to devour her.²⁰ 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 heaventy 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; [335] 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-Woman-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, “0, 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 [336] 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 their thought that if Man could likewise descend into Hades and return, his race would be immortal.²¹ It is seldom that solar characteristics are more distinctly marked in the several details of a myth than they are here. Hine-nuite-po, Great-Woman-Night, who dwells on the horizon, is the New Zealand Hades, or goddess of Hades. The birds are to keep silence as the Sun enters the Night, but may sing when he comes forth from her mouth, the mouth of Hades. Lastly, I have been able to use an unexceptionable means of testing whether the legend is or is not a real sun-myth. If it is so, then the tiwakawaka (also called the piwakaivaka) ought to be a bird that sings at sunset. I have had inquiry [337] made in New Zealand to ascertain whether this is the case, and have thus obtained a perfect confirmation of my interpretation of the legend of the death of Maui, as being a nature-myth of the setting sun; the reply is that the name “describes the cry of the bird, which is only heard at sunset.”

In the list of myths of engulphing 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 befel him was this—a snake swallowed him, but they ripped the creature up, and Ta Ywa came back to life,²² 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 [338] 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.²³ 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 Litao-lane; 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.²⁴

[339] 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 Borne 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.²⁵

[340] 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 mediaeval 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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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.”²⁸

Stories belonging to the same group are not unknown to [341] European folklore. One is the story of Little Red Riding Hood, 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 Riding-hood 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 ?²⁹

It may be worth while to raise the question apropos of this nursery tale, does the peasant folklore of modern Europe really still display episodes of nature-myth, not as [342] 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 a recent lecture on Russian Folklore. 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 in all 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 answered, “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 folklore 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 savage 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 [343] 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 ware 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, [344] in the noose, and wounds him and makes him go slowly. With a fishhook pointed with the miraculous jawhone, 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 raising of dry land from beneath the ocean. It is said elsewhere that it was Maui’s grandfather, Rangi-Wenua, 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. Thus the bringing up of the land from the ocean by the blood-stained jawbone of the morning seems to be a myth of the dawn. The metaphor of the jawbone of morning, somewhat far-fetched as it may seem, re-appears in the Rig-Veda, if Professor Max Müller’s interpretation of Sârameya as the Dawn will hold good in this passage: “When thou, bright Sârameya, openest thy teeth, O red one, spears seem to glitter on thy jaws as thou swallowest. Sleep, sleep.”³⁰ 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 [345] 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.³¹

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,
[346] 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.³² Thus savage legends from Polynesia and America may well support the theory³³ 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, [347] 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.”³⁴

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 Birma, a race among whose special ideas are curiously mixed thoughts borrowed from the more cultured races 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 [348] 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, etc.”³⁵ Passing from Birma 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 Mana-bozho 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 [349] 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.³⁶ 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.”³⁷ 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 Symplegades, those two huge cliffs that opened and closed again with swift and violent collision.³⁸ 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 [350] 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 Symplê-gades 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.³⁹ 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 Phoebus, Phœboque adversa recurrens
Cynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius æther
Regius interitu’, qui cuncta movetque regitque
Consilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nee ullua
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.” ⁴⁰

Where the Aryan myth-maker takes no thought of the [351] 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.”⁴¹ In the Zend-Avesta it is “the shining sun with the swift horses, the eye of Ahura-Mazda and Mithra, the lord of the region.”⁴² 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.’⁴³ The old Germans, in calling the sun “Wuotan’s eye,”⁴⁴ 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 scalds 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 [352] the moon, which in popular myth from the time of the Veda has been found in the well.⁴⁵ 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 Anangke, 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 ?⁴⁶ 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— [353] 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 upon 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.⁴⁷

[354] Like to this in meaning, though different in fancy, is the civilization-myth of the Incas. Men, said this Qqichua 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 roysl 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.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹ 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.⁵⁰ Slavonic legend, following the [355] 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.⁵¹ 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.⁵² 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.⁵³

[356] 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 old again she remains, and her daughters with her which are the Stars.⁵⁴

From savagery up to civilization, there may be traced in the mythology of the Stars a course of thought, changed [357] 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 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.⁵⁵ 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 [358] 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.⁵⁶ 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, Bootes 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 stern [359] of the Canoe of Tamarerete, whose anchor dropped from the prow is the Southern Cross.⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹ 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,⁶² and to the Manichæans whose fancy transferred pure souls to this “column of light,” whence they could [360] come down to earth and again return.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ 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 Wœtlingas, 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.”⁶⁵

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 [361] 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.⁶⁶ Such is the fancy in classic poetry of Æolus holding the prisoned winds in his dungeon cave: —

“Hie vasto rex Æolus antro
Luctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonoras
Imperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere frænat.”⁶⁷

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 master-piece, 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, Kabibonokka, 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.⁶⁸ 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 [362] 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.⁶⁹

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 Eos, Starry Heaven and Dawn, work out, on Aryan ground, mythic conceptions that Red Indian tale-tellers could understand and rival.⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹

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 [363] 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 its 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 perhaps 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, Harvey 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.⁷²

[364] 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.⁷³ In Celebes we hear of the world-supporting Hog, who rubs himself against a tree, and then there is an earthquake.⁷⁴ 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, [365] and thus the story only expresses in mythic phrase the very fect 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.⁷⁵ 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; ⁷⁶ the Chibchas said it was their god Chibchacum moving the earth from shoulder to shoulder.⁷⁷ 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; ⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰ 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.⁸¹ 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 [366] 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.⁸²

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 [367] legends in a less easily interprétable 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.

¹ Macrob. ‘Saturn.’ i. 19, 12. See Eurip. Phœn. 1116, etc. and Schol. Welcker, vol. i. p. 336; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ vol. ii. p. 380.

² Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ p. 425.

³ Sir G. Grey, ‘Polynesian Mythology,’ p. i. etc., translated from the original Maori text published by him under the title ‘Ko nga Mahinga a nga Tupuna Maori, etc.’ London, 1854. Compare with Shortland, ‘Trads. of ‘N. Z.’ p. 55, etc.; R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 114, etc.

⁴ Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer, etc.’ p. 42; Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 116; Tverman and Bennet, p. 526; Turner, ‘Polynesia, p. 245.

⁵ Premare in Pauthier, ‘Livres Sacrés de l’Orient,’ p. 19; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 396.

⁶ 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, etc., Mexicana,’ cap. 3, in Kings-borough, ‘Ant. of Mexico,’ vol. v.

⁷ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 86.

⁸ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. xix. 229-33, 608; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes,’ p. 153; Milton, ‘Paradise Lost,’ ix. 273, i. 535; see Lucretius, i. 250.

⁹ Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 459; Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. pp. 663-7; Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 220.

¹⁰ Herod, iv. 59.

¹¹ 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.

¹² 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.

¹³ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 331.

¹⁴ Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 194.

¹⁵ Grant in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90; Koelle, ‘Kanuri Proverbs, etc’ p. 207.

¹⁶ H. H. Wilson, ‘Vishnupurana,’ pp. 78, 140; Skr. Die. 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.’

¹⁷ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 63; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii p. 344.

¹⁸ 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).

¹⁹ Plutarch, de Facie in Orbe Lunæ; Juvenal, Sat. vi. 441; Plin. ii 9; Tacit. Annal. i. 28.

²⁰ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ 668-78, 224; Hanusch, ‘Slav. 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, ‘Die. des Superstitions,’ art. ‘Eclipse;’ Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Occulta Philosophia’ ii. c. 45, gives a picture of the lunar eclipse-dragon.

²¹ Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ p. 54—58; in his editions of the Maori text, 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. 232; Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseel.’ p. 33; Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 63 (a curious version of the myth of Maui’s death); see also pp. 171, 180, and Baker in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 53.

²² Mason, Karens in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 1865, part ii. p. 178, etc.

²³ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 318; ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 135, etc., 144; John Taimer, ‘Narrative,’ p. 357; see Brin ton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 166. For legends of Sun-Catcher, see ‘Early History of Mankind,’ ch, xii.

²⁴ Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 347; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. pp. 56, 69, 84, 334 vsee 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 bsai 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).

²⁵ Tzetzes ap. Lycophron, Cassandra, 33. As to connexion with Joppa and Phoenicia, 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.

²⁶ ‘Apoc. Gosp.’ Nicodemus, ch. xx.; Mrs. Jameson, ‘History of our Lord in Art,’ vol. ii. p. 258.

²⁷ Eireks Saga, 8, 4, in ‘Flateyjarbok,’ vol. i., Christiania, 1859; Baring-Gould, ‘Myths of the Middle Ages,’ p. 238.

²⁸ Mrs. Jameson, ‘Sacred and Legendary Art,’ vol. ii. p. 138.

²⁹ 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 Mr. 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 Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 506, see379, ‘Chips, etc.,’ vol. ii. p. 103; Hanusch, p. 192; Edda, Gylfa-ginning, 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 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.

³⁰ Rig-Veda, vii. 54; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd sei p. 473.

³¹ Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ p. 16, etc., see 144. Other details in Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,’ pp. 32-7, 143-51; R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 124, etc.; compare 116, 141, etc., 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.

³² ‘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.

³³ 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.

³⁴ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 291, 767.

³⁵ 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 Gott. Gel. Anz. 1872, p. 1290, refers to a Birmese legend in Bastian, O. A. vol. ii. p. 515, and a Mongol legend, Gesser Chan, book iv.

³⁶ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Researches,’ vol. ii. p. 40, etc.; 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, I. c.

³⁷ Torquemada, ‘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.

³⁸ Apollodor. i. 9, 22; Apollon. Rhod. Argonautica, ii. 310-616; Pindar, Pythia Carm. iv. 370. See Kuhn, ‘Herabkunft des Feuers,’ p. 152 (mention of Hnitbjörg).

³⁹ Polack, ‘ Manners of N. Z.’ vol. i. p. 16; ‘ New Zealand,’ vol. i. p. 358; Yate, p. 142; Schirren, pp. 88,165.

⁴⁰ Euseb. Præp. Evang. iii. 9.

⁴¹ Rig Veda, i. 115; Böhtlingk and Roth, s. v. ‘mitra.’

⁴² Avesta, tr. Spiegel and Bleeck, Yaçna, i. 35; compare Burnouf, Yaçna.

⁴³ Macrob. Saturnal. i. 21, 13. See Max Müller, ‘Chips, vol. ii. p. 85.

⁴⁴ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 665. See also Harnisch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 213.

⁴⁵ Edda, ‘Völuspa,’ 22; ‘Gylfaginning,’ 15. See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 133; De Gubernatis, ‘Zoological Mythology,’ vol. i. p. 18, 81.

⁴⁶ As to the identification of the Noms 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 Boman Pane in ‘Life of Columbus’ in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 80; J. G. Müller, ‚Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 179). In Central America a Quiche 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.

⁴⁷ Piedrahita, ‘Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’ Antwerp, 1688, part i. lib. i. c. 3; Humboldt, ‘Monumens,’ pl. vl.; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 428–80.

⁴⁸ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentaries 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, p. 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.

⁴⁹ Stanbridge, ‘Abor. of Australia,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 301.

⁵⁰ J. D. Hooker, ‘Himalayan Journals,’ vol. ii. p. 276.

⁵¹ Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 269.

⁵² 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.

⁵³ 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 reviral: 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.

⁵⁴ Journ. Ind. Archip. vol. i. p. 284; vol. iv. p. 333; Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc.’ vol. ix. part ii. p. 797; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 422.

⁵⁵ Stanbridge in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. pp. 301-3.

⁵⁶ 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).

⁵⁷ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 363.

⁵⁸ Stanbridge, I. 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.

⁵⁹ Casalis, p. 196; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 191.

⁶⁰ 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.

⁶¹ Hanusch, pp. 272, 407, 415.

⁶² Porphyr, de Antro Nyrnpharum, 28; Macrob. de Somn. Scip. i. 12.

⁶³ Beausobre, ‘Hist. de Manichée, vol. ii. p. 513.

⁶⁴ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 341; ‘Chronique de Tabari,’ tr. Dubeux, p. 24; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 330, etc.

⁶⁵ 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, etc. 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.

⁶⁶ Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 144, see Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. ii. p.417.

⁶⁷ Virg. Æneid. i. 56; Homer. Odys. x. 1.

⁶⁸ Sehoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 200; vol. ii. pp. 122, 214; ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 324.

⁶⁹ Brinton, ‘Myths of the New World,’ ch. iii.

⁷⁰ ‘Rig-Veda,’ tr. by Max Muller, vol. i. (Hymns to Maruts); Welcker, ‘Griech. Gotterl.’ vol. iii. p. 67; Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan Nations,’ vol. ii. ch. v.

⁷¹ 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, etc., 741, 747.

⁷² 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.), p. 177, 213; Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. xxii.; La 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, I. c. p. 217; Moffat, ‘South Africa,’ p. 338; Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 266; Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 119.

⁷³ Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 120; S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ p. 135; Schirren, pp. 35-7.

⁷⁴ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 887.

⁷⁵ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 61, 122.

⁷⁶ Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 482.

⁷⁷ Pouchet, ‘Plurality of Races,’ p. 2.

⁷⁸ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 267.

⁷⁹ Mason, ‘Karens,’ I. c. p 182.

⁸⁰ 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.

⁸¹ Edda, ‘Gylfaginning,’ 50 Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 777, eta.

⁸² Kaempfer, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684; see mammoth-myths in ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ p. 315.

CHAPTER X.

MYTHOLOGY (continued.)

[368] 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 [369] 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 of some eighty years ago relates the following account of the Andaman islanders, as a historical fact of which he had been informed: “Shortly after the Portu-uese 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 [370] 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.¹ Not long since, I met with a very perfect myth of this kind. In a brick field 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 Womb-well’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 WombwelTs 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 WombwelFs caravan and dead elephant current to explain a similar find of fossil bones.² 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 near the Mount Cenis sets 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 [371] 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 or some superhuman personage, [372] 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.” ³ 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,⁴ and St. Honoratus clearing the snakes from his island (one of the Lerins opposite Cannes)⁵ 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 [373] many feet below the sea, and afterwards upheaved to become again dry land. History is remarkably silent as to the events demonstrated by this remarkable geological evidence; between the recorded adornment of the temple by Eoman 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 [374] 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.”⁶

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.⁷ 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 [375] Mandeville: “In an isle clept Crues, ben schippes withouten 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.”⁸ 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.”⁹ 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 cyclopaedia 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 [376] 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.”¹⁰

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.¹¹ 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 [377] 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.”¹² 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.¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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.”¹⁵

[378] 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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ In these traditions the development [379] 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.”¹⁹

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.²⁰ With this goes another [380] widety-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.²¹ 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.” ²² 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 [381] 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 bunma-nus, or wild men of the woods.”²³ 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.²⁴ 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.²⁵ This term “man of the woods” extends far beyond Hindu and Malay limits. The Siamese talk of the Khonpa, “men of the wood,” meaning apes;²⁶ the Brazilians of Cauiari, or “wood-men,” meaning a certain savage tribe.²⁷ 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.” ²⁸ In our own language the [382] “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).²⁹ 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.³⁰ 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.” ³¹ 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 [383] 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,³² while in South America the coata tapuya, or “monkey-men,” are as naturally described as men with tails.³³ 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.³⁴ 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; ³⁵ the half-civilized Malays describe the ruder forest tribes as tailed men; ³⁶ the Moslem nations of Africa tell the same story of the Niam-[384] Nam of the interior.³⁷ 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.³⁸ 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 truly ...... an Englyshman now cannot travayle in an other land, by way of marchan-dyse or any other honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his tethe, that al Englishmen have tailes.”³⁹ 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.⁴⁰ 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 [385] that they will be born tailless.⁴¹ There seems no evidence to connect the occasional occurrence of tail-like projections by malformation with the stories of tailed human tribes.⁴²

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.⁴³

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 this latter element [386] în 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.⁴⁴ 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 (Dhu l’Karnein) 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.⁴⁵ Who can fail to recognize in [387] 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; ⁴⁶ 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 Eio de la Plata, that they are “not so very little as described.”⁴⁷

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.⁴⁸ 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, while in India it is a usual legend of the prehistoric dolmens, that they were dwarfs’ houses—the dwellings of the ancient [388] pygmies, who here again appear as representatives of prehistoric tribes.⁴⁹ But a very different meaning is obvious in a mediaeval 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 pigmies.⁵⁰ 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 extravagent 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 “noseless” 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.”⁵¹ 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 [389] 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 Piny’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.⁵² 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, is taken so literally that heretic children are sometimes forced to open their mouths to satisfy the orthodox of their being of the usual colour within. On examining the descriptions 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 Birmese speak of the rude Karens as “dog-men;”⁵³ Marco Polo describes the Angaman (Andaman) islanders as brutish and savage cannibals, with heads like dogs.⁵⁴ 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 [390] 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.⁵⁵ This last suggestive remark well states the old prevalent notion that barbarians have no real language, but are “speechless,” “tongueless,” or even mouthless.⁵⁶ 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 mediaeval 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.⁵⁷ Again, Moslem legend tells of the [391] 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 !” This odd fancy coincides with the simple metaphor which describes a savage as only “half a man,” semihomo, as Virgil calls the ferocious Cacus.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰ 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 [392] way,” and they still retain that ancient name of Anti-podes.⁶¹

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 hesets 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 salamanders 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.⁶² 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.⁶³ 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 [393] 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.”⁶⁴ 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 Birmah and the Ba-toka 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.⁶⁵ Of the legends of tattooing, one of the oddest 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.⁶⁶

[394] 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 [395] 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.⁶⁷ 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, [396] whence they called the place Sinndr, 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.⁶⁸ Such crude fancies 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 [397] familiar term of chic. Etymologists, a race not wanting in effrontery, have hardly ever surpassed this circumstantial canard; the word chic dates at any rate from the seventeenth century.⁶⁹ 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.” ⁷⁰ 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 Machabceorum, the Dance of the Maccabees, [398] 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.⁷¹ 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,”⁷² 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;⁷³ and the Maori tribes of Ngate-Wakaue and Nga-Puhi claim [399] descent from chiefs called Wakaue and Puhi.⁷⁴ Around this nucleus of actuality, however, there gathers an enormous mass of fiction simulating its effects. The myth-maker, curious to know how any 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 anew 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 Cœsarea from Cœsar, 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 [400] 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 Mantiïiêus, Phigahs, 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, etc., etc. It is curious to watch Milton’s mind emerging, but not wholly emerging, from the state of the mediaeval 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 [401] 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.”⁷⁵

Among ruder races of the world, asserted genealogies of this class may be instanced in South American tribes called the Amoipira and Potyuara,⁷⁶ Khond clans called Baska and Jakso,⁷⁷ Turkoman hordes called Yomut, Tekke, and Chaudor,⁷⁸ 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 Katsena⁷⁹ 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, Chichi-mecatl 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.⁸⁰ The Brazilians account for the division of the Tapis and Guaranis, by the legend of two ancestral brothers, Tupi and Guarani, who [402] quarrelled and separated, each with his followers: but 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.⁸¹ And when such facts are considered as that North American clans named after animals, Beaver, Cray-fishy, and the like, account for these names by simply claiming the very creatures themselves as ancestors,⁸² 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

[403] 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.⁸³ 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.⁸⁴ 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.⁸⁵ 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 Buysbroek 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.⁸⁶ Historically absurd, this legend states what appears the unimpeachable ethnological [404] 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 Turks 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.⁸⁷

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” (apparently meaning Upper and Lower Egypt, the “two lands,” as the Egyptians themselves wrote it in their inscriptions), appears 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 [405] of Zidon (צידן), be transferred to it to represent the Phoenicians, 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 mythologie phrase serves as a medium for expressing philosophic opinion, let us quickly cross the district where fancy assumes the semblance of explanatory legend. The mediaeval 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 plaintains and bananas, the Vanquished have hung down their heads, while the victor stands proudly erect,⁸⁸ 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.⁸⁹ 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 [406] who sprang again from his grave as the Indian corn, Mondamin, the “Spirit’s grain.”⁹⁰ 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 Cormshman 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 towerroofs. 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.⁹¹ 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 such variously imaginative fashion describes the appearance of a blood-red stain.

[407] 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 heara 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.⁹² 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 mediaeval writers, records the story without a symptom of suspicion;⁹³ 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; [408] 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.⁹⁴ 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; [409] 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.⁹⁵ 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,⁹⁶ 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 [410] of moral human nature; to men in whose eyes any wolf or hyæna 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 Eat, the Owl, and the fat Blackfellow, or of Pussy-brother who singed his friends’ noses while they were asleep.⁹⁷ 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.⁹⁸ 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 Flat-head Indians, the Little Wolf found in cloudland his grand-sires 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.⁹⁹ 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 [411] 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.¹⁰⁰ 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 myths 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.¹⁰¹ 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.¹⁰² 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, [412] 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.”¹⁰³

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 Jacob Grimm’s view to an original Frankish composition of the 12th century, itself containing materials of far earlier date.¹⁰⁴ 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 mediaeval Europe delighted in, but which we have allowed to drop out of all but scholars’ knowledge, lies in great measure in [413] the 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 aesthetic 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.”¹⁰⁵ It is a surprising instance of this tendency to concretism, that among people so civilized [414] 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.¹⁰⁶ 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.”¹⁰⁷ Nor, it may be added, has such misconception 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 [416] 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.

¹ 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.

² F. Buckland, ‘Curiosities of Nat. Hist.’ 3rd series, vol. ii. p. 39.

³ Andrew Boorde, Introduction of Knowledge,’ ed. by F. J. Fnrnivall, Early Eng. Text Soc. 1870, p. 133.

⁴ Ælian, De Nat. Animal, v. 2, see 8.

⁵ Acta Sanctorum Bolland. Jan. xvi

⁶ ‘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.

⁷ 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, etc.’ ed. Rixner, Amberg, 1830, p. 65; see Ludlow, ‘Popular Epics of Middle Ages,’ p. 221.

⁸ Sir John Maundevile, ‘Voiage and Travaile.’

⁹ Sir Thomas Browne, ‘Vulgar Errours,’ ii. 3.

¹⁰ ‘Mémoires cone. l’Hist., etc., 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 horseman on the top with brazen horse.)

¹¹ Brasseur, ‘Popol Vuh,’ pp. 23-31. Compare this Central American myth of the ancient senseless mannikins who became monkeys, with a Pottowatom legend in Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes, ‘part i. p. 320.

¹² 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.).

¹³ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 102.

¹⁴ Weil, ‘Bibl. Leg. der Muselmänner,’ p. 267; Lane, ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol. iii. p. 350; Burton, ‘El Medinah, etc.’vol. ii. p. 343.

¹⁵ Ovid, ‘Metamm.’ xiv. 89-100; Welcker, ‘Griechische Götterlehre, vol. iii. p. 108.

¹⁶ Campbell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p. 132; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 456; Tod, ‘Ànnals of Bajasthan,’ vol. i. p. 114.

¹⁷ Bourien in ‘Tr. Eth, Soc.’ vol. iii p. 78; see ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 271.

¹⁸ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 485; ‘Mensch, vol. iii pp. 347, 349, 387; Koeppen, vol. ii. p. 44; J. J. Schmidt, ‘Völker Mittel-Asiens,’ p. 210.

¹⁹ 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.

²⁰ 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.

²¹ 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.

²² 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.

²³ Ayeen Akbaree, trans, by Gladwin; ‘Report of Ethnological Committee Jubbulpore Exhibition, 1866-7,’ parti, p. 3. See the mention of the ban-manush in Kumaon and Nepal, Campbell; ‘Ethnology of India,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part il p. 46.

²⁴ Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 41.

²⁵ 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.

²⁶ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 123; vol. iii. p. 435.

²⁷ Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 425, 471.

²⁸ Its analogue is bosjesbok, “bush-goat,” the African antelope. The derl vation of the Bosjesman’s name from his nest-like shelter in a bosh, given by Kolben and others since, is newer and far-fetched.

²⁹ Martius, vol. i. 50.

³⁰ Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81; Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p. xxx.; Bates, ‘Amazons,’ vol. i. p. 73; vol. ii. p. 204.

³¹ Castelnau, ‘Exp. dans l’Amer, du Sud,’ vol. iii. p. 118. See Martins, vol. i. pp. 248, 414, 563, 633.

³² Petherick, ‘Egypt, etc.’ p. 367.

³³ Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p. 685; Martius, vol. i. pp. 425, 633.

³⁴ Krapf, p. 142; Baker, ‘Albert Nyanza,’ vol. i. p. 83; St. John, vol. i. pp. 51, 405; and others.

³⁵ Lockhart, ‘Abor. of China,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 181.

³⁶ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 358; vol. iv. p. 374; Cameron, ‘Malayan India,’ p. 120; Marsden, p. 7; Antonio Galvano, pp. 120, 218.

³⁷ Davis, ‘Carthage,’ p. 230; Bostock and Riley’s Pliny (Bonn’s ed.), vol. ii. p. 134, note.

³⁸ Francisque-Michel, ‘Races Maudites,’ vol. i. p. 17; ‘Argot,’ p. 349; Fernan Caballero, ‘La Gaviota,’ vol. i. p. 59.

³⁹ Horue Tooke, ‘Diversions of Purley,’ vol. i. p. 397.

⁴⁰ Baring-Gould, ‘Myths,’ p. 137.

⁴¹ “Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 252; Backhouse, ‘Austr.’ p. 557; Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1290; De Laet, ‘Novus Orbis,’ p. 543.

⁴² 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, etc. (Nicobar Islands); Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. ii. pp. 246, 316 (Sarytschew Is.); ‘Letters of Columbus,’ Hakluyt Soc. p. 11 (Cuba), etc., etc.

⁴³ Details of monstrous tribes have been in past centuries specially collected in the following works: ‘Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transformed, or the Artificiall Changeling, etc.,’ 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, etc.,’ Hamburg, 1721. Only a few principal references are here given.

⁴⁴ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xvii. xviii.; Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ ch. vi.; Hannsch, ‘Slav. Myth.’ pp. 230, 325-7; Wuttke, ‘Volksa-bergl.’ p. 231.

⁴⁵ ‘Chronique de Tabari,’ tr. Dubeux, part i. ch. viii. See Koran, xviii 92.

⁴⁶ Pigafetta in Pinkerton, vol. xi. p. 314. See Blumenbach, ‘De Generis Humanœ Varietate; ’ Fitzroy, ‘Voy. of Adventure and Beagle,’ vol. i.; Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 488.

⁴⁷ Knivet in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1231; compare Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 564, with Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’p. 424; see also Kraf, ‘East Africa,’ p. 51; Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 319.

⁴⁸ ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ ch. xi.; Hunt, ‘Pop. Bom.’ 1st series, pp. 18, 304.

⁴⁹ Squier, ‘Abor. Monuments of N. Y.’ p. 68; Long’s ‘Exp.’ vol. i. pp. 62, 275; Meadows Taylor in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 157.

⁵⁰ 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.

⁵¹ Benjamin of Tudela, ‘Itinerary,’ ed. and tr. by Asher, 83; Plin. vii 2. See Max Müller in Bunsen, vol. i. pp. 346, 358.

⁵² Plin. iv. 27; Mela, iii. 6; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 120; vol. it p. 93; St. John, vol. ii. p. 117; Marsden, p. 53; Lane, ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol. iii. pp. 92, 305; Petherick, ‘Egypt, etc.’ p. 367; Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. i. p. 235; Pedro Simon, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ p. 7. A name similar to Oregones is Patagones, or ‘Big-feet,’ which remains in Patagonia; compare with this the stories of men with feet so large as to serve for parasols, the Skiapodes or ‘Shadowfeet,’ Plin. vii. 2; see Rawlinson’s Herodotus vol. i. p. 50.

⁵³ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. i. p. 138.

⁵⁴ Marco Polo, book iii. ch. xviii.

⁵⁵ Ælian, iv. 46; Plin. vi 85; 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. 86, 94, 97, 805; Davis, ‘Carthage,’ p. 230; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ Vol. ii. p. 83.

⁵⁶ 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.

⁵⁷ Plin. v. 8; Lane, vol. i. p. 83; vol. ii p. 377; vol. iii. p. 81; Eisen-menger, 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; voi v. p. 901; Isidor. Hispal. a. v. ‘Acephali; ’ Vanibéry, p. 310, see p. 436.

⁵⁸ 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 Nim chas, 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.

⁵⁹ Hay ton in Purchas, vol. iii. p. 108; see Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. vol. 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, etc.,’ 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, I. c.; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Gr.’p. xx.; Schirren, p. 196.

⁶⁰ Koelle, ‘Vei Gr.’ p. 229; Strabo, i. 2, 35.

⁶¹ Plin. vii. 2; Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81.

⁶² Krapf, p. 359.

⁶³ Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. iii. p. 390.

⁶⁴ D. Wilson, ‘Archaeology, etc. of Scotland,’ p. 123.

⁶⁵ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 128; Livingstone, p. 532.

⁶⁶ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ p. 160; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 113; Turner, ‘Polynesia,” p. 182) a similar legend told by the Samoans). Another ta † tooing legend in Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 152; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 112.

⁶⁷ 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.

⁶⁸ 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 aril quepay = ‘yes ! remain,’ said to have been addressed to the colonists by the Inca: Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Die.; ’ 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

⁶⁹ Charnock, ‘Verba Nominalia,’ s. v. ‘chic; ’ see Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ s. v.

⁷⁰ ‘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 cantore 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.

⁷¹ See also Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ s. v. ‘maccabe, macchabée’ = noyé.

⁷² Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ p. 69, 184.

⁷³ Döhne, ‘Zulu Die.’ p. 417; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 269; Waitz, vol. ii-pp. 349, 352.

⁷⁴ Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 224.

⁷⁵ 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 Ursprünge der Völker und Sprachen.’

⁷⁶ Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 54; see 283.

⁷⁷ Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 78.

⁷⁸ Vambéry, ‘Central Asia,’ p. 325; see also Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 456 (Ostyaks); Georgi, ‘Reise im Rusa. Reich,’ vol. i. 242 (Tunguz).

⁷⁹ Barth, ‘N. & Centr. Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 71.

⁸⁰ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 574.

⁸¹ Martius, vol. i. pp. 180—4; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 416.

⁸² Schoolcrat’t, ‘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.

⁸³ Grote, ‘Hist, of Greece; ’ Pausan. iii 20; Diod. Sic. v.; Apollodor. Bibl. i. 7, 3, vi. 1, 4; Herodot. i. 171.

⁸⁴ Max Müller in Bunsen, vol. i. p. 338; Tabari, part i. ch. xlv. lxix.

⁸⁵ 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.

⁸⁶ Gul de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 23; Gabelentz in ‘Zeitschrfür die Kunde des Morgenlandes,’ vol. ii. p. 73; Schmidt, ‘Volker Mittel. Asien,’ p. 6.

⁸⁷ 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.

⁸⁸ Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 311; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 252.

⁸⁹ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 69.

⁹⁰ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 122; ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 320, part ii. p. 230.

⁹¹ 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, etc.’ in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 714.

⁹² Sprenger, ‘Leben des Mohammad,’ vol. i. pp. 78, 119, 162, 310.

⁹³ Marco Polo, book i. ch. viii.

⁹⁴ Grote, vol. i. p. 347.

⁹⁵ Welcker, vol. i. p. 756.

⁹⁶ Xenoph. Memorabilia, ii 1.

⁹⁷ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 259.

⁹⁸ Steller, Kamtschatka,’ p. 255.

⁹⁹ Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 306.

¹⁰⁰ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 882.

¹⁰¹ 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.

¹⁰² Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 355.

¹⁰³ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 160; see 43, 51.

¹⁰⁴ Jacob Grimm, ‘Reinhart Fuchs,’ Introd.

¹⁰⁵ Account of Laura Bridgman, p. 120.

¹⁰⁶ 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.

¹⁰⁷ Jameson, ‘History of Our Lord in Art,’ vol. i. p. 375.

CHAPTER XI.

ANIMISM.

[417] 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 or 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 savage 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 [418] 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 [419] 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, Turramullun 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, etc.”¹ 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.”² 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 oontrary of his thesis by the very facts he alleges in its support.”³

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 [420] 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.⁴ 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. It. 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 [421] 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 religions 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.”⁵ 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; ⁶ or when Dampier inquired after the religion of the natives of Timor, and was told [422] that they had none; ⁷ 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.”⁸ Among the numerous accounts collected by Sir John Lub-bock as evidence bearing on the absence or low development of religion among low races,⁹ 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 Eev. G. Turner of the Samoan religion itself; and the assertion that the Tupinambas of Brazil had no religion is one not to be received without some more positive proof, 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.”¹⁰ 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 [423] 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. Assertions of this sort are made very carelessly. Thus it is said of the Andaman Islanders that they have not the rudest elements of a religious faith; Dr. Mouat states this explicitly,¹¹ 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. 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 Near the deity of the Nuehr, and the Shilluks’ creator, who is described as visiting, like other spirits, a sacred wood or tree. Kaufmann, Brun [424] 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.¹²

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 possessed 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 [425] 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 stage 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 purpose 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.¹³ From its special relation to the doctrine [426] 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 [427] 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 religious of the savage and the civilized world. While dwelling at some length on doctrines and ceremonies of the lower [428] 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 present 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 [429] 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 appari-tional-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 mediaeval 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 [430] 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, 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; ¹⁴ the Algonquin Indians describe a man’s soul as otahchuk, “his shadow; ” ¹⁵ the Quiché language uses natub for “shadow, soul; “¹⁶ the Arawac ueja means “shadow, soul, image; ” ¹⁷ the Abipones made the one word lodkal serve for “shadow, soul, echo, image.” ¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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; ”²⁰ 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.²¹ 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 [431] 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.²² 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.”²³ 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.”²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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.²⁸

[432] 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.”²⁹ It is thus that West Australians used one word waug for “breath, spirit, soul; ” ³⁰ that in the Netela language of California, pints means “life, breath, soul;”³¹ that certain Greenlanders reckoned two souls to man, namely his shadow and his breath; ³² 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.”³³ 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 interro- [433] gatory, “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.”³⁴ 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.³⁵ 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.³⁶

[434] 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 among savage races such classification appears in full vigour. Thus the Fijians distinguish 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.³⁷ 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.³⁸ 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.³⁹ The Karens distinguish between the ‘là’ or ‘kelah,’ which may be defined as the personal life-phantom, and the ‘thah’ which is the responsible moral soul.⁴⁰ The fourfold division among the Khonds of Orissa is 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 [435] after generation, so that at the birth of each child the priest asks which member of the tribe has returned; the third goes out to hold spiritual intercourse, leaving the body in a languid state, and it is this soul which can migrate for a time into a tiger; the fourth dies on the dissolution of the body.⁴¹ Such classifications resemble those of higher races, as for instance the three-fold division of shade, manes, and spirit:

“Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra
Quatuor hæc loci bis duo suscipiunt.
Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra,
Manes Orcus habet, 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 Mr. Birch as his “soul,” “mind,” “existence,” “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 mediaeval theories of the vegetal, sensitive, and rational souls. Suffice it to point out here that such speculation dates back to the savage 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 [436] 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.”⁴² 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 Eiver of Death, but have been driven back and return to re-animate their bodies.⁴³ 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.” ⁴⁴ To the negroes of North Guinea, derangement [437] or dotage is caused by the patient being prematurely deserted by his soul, sleep being a more temporary withdrawal.⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ The Karens of Birma will run about pretending to catch a sick man’s wandering soul, or as they say with the ancient Greeks, 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 [438] 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.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹

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 [439] 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.⁵⁰ 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; ⁵¹ 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; ⁵² the Greenland angekok’s soul goes forth from his body to fetch his familiar demon;⁵³ the Turanian shaman lies in lethargy while his soul departs to bring hidden wisdom from the land of spirits.⁵⁴ 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.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶ A group of the legendary visits to the spirit-world, which will be described in the next chapter, [440] 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.⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸ 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 Green-landers, 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.⁵⁹ Among the Indians of North America, we hear of the dreamers 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.⁶⁰ [441] The New Zealanders considered the dreaming soul to leave the body and return, even travelling to the region of the lead to hold converse with its friends.⁶¹ The Tagals of Luzon object to waking a sleeper, on account of the absence of his soul.⁶² The Karens, whose theory of the wandering boul 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.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ 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 dream.⁶⁵ 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 [442] 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 mountain full of gold.⁶⁶ 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 [443] soul remains in the body.⁶⁷ 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.”⁶⁸ 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; ⁶⁹ 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.⁷⁰ A modern observer’s description of the state of mind of the negroes of South Guinea 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 [444] they consequently utter falsehood without intending, and profess to see things which never existed.”⁷¹

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.⁷² 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 ?” ⁷³ 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. [445] 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.⁷⁴ As we survey the immense series of dream-stories of similar types in patristic, mediaeval, 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,⁷⁵ 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 [446] 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.⁷⁶ 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; ⁷⁷ thus among the Finns the ghosts of the dead were to be seen by the shamans, but not by men generally unless in dreams.⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹ 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 in- [447] visibility 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 maybe 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.”⁸⁰ 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.⁸¹

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 [448] he was confessing penitents at home.⁸² The reception and explanation of these various classes of stories fits 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.⁸³ 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.⁸⁴ 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.⁸⁵ [449] Folk-lore 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 Kircudbrightshire, “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.⁸⁶ 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.⁸⁷ Narratives of this class, which I can here only specify without arguing on them, are [450] 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.⁸⁸ But a quaint and special group of beliefs will serve to display the thoroughness [451] 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.⁸⁹ 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.⁹⁰ 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 India 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.⁹¹ 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.⁹² The series ends as usual in the folk-lore of the civilized world. The phantom skeleton in chains that haunted the house at [452] 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.⁹³

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.⁹⁴ 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.⁹⁵ The Zulu diviner’s familiar spirits [453] are ancestral manes, who talk in a low whistling tone short of a full whistle, whence they have their name of “imilozi” or whistlers.⁹⁶ These ideas correspond with classic descriptions of the ghostly voice, as a “twitter” or “thin murmur: ”

Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,
Ψχετο τετριγυία.’⁹⁷

“Umbra cruenta Eemi visa est assistere lecto,
Atque hæc exiguo murmure verba loqui.”⁹⁸

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.⁹⁹

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 many a people to treat 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 [454] to visit its body, and some of them still bore holes in the coffin for the same purpose.¹⁰⁰ The Malagasy sorcerer, for the cure of a sick man who had lost his soul, would make a hole in the burial-house to let out a spirit, which he would catch in his cap and so convey to the patient’s head.¹⁰¹ The Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at death.¹⁰² 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.¹⁰³ 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.¹⁰⁴ 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.¹⁰⁵ 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;¹⁰⁶ the Tonquinese avoided house-cleaning during the festival when the souls of the dead came back to their [455] houses for the New Years visit;¹⁰⁷ 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.¹⁰⁸ 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.¹⁰⁹ 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.¹¹⁰

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.¹¹¹ 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 [456] nor sinew.¹¹² The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified body.¹¹³ 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.¹¹⁴ 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.”¹¹⁵ Among the Fathers, Irenæus describes souls as incorporeal in comparison with mortal bodies,¹¹⁶ 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.¹¹⁷ For an example of mediaeval 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.” ¹¹⁸

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.¹¹⁹ Nor was the ancient [457] 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.”¹²⁰

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 had no need of additional hypotheses to account for these manifestations, theological theories such as we may find 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.¹²¹ 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 [458] 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 wide-spread, 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 higher savagery, it developes itself in the barbaric stage, 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 savage 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 cf 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 [459] 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.”¹²² 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 [460] 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 their 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 billed a young man at a distance from him, and thus provided a companion for the spirit of the slain chjef.¹²³

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 [461] 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.¹²⁴ 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.¹²⁵ 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 ¹²⁶ and Mexico,¹²⁷ in Bogota¹²⁸ and Peru.¹²⁹ 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.¹³⁰

Of such funeral rites, carried out to the death, graphic [462] and horrid descriptions are recorded in the countries across Africa—East, Central, and West. A headman of the Wa-doe 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 chiefs 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 ot humours.”¹³¹ 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 [463] thing of the past among the Barotse, as among the Zulus, who yet have not forgotten the days when the chiefs 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.¹³²

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.¹³³ In the seventeenth century the practice is described as 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. The Japanese form of modern survival of such funeral sacrifices is to substitute for real men and animals images of stone, or clay, or wood, placed by the corpse.¹³⁴ 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 [464] horse thus devoted.¹³⁵ 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.¹³⁶

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.¹³⁷ 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.¹³⁸ In Scandinavian myth, Baldr is burnt with his [465] 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.¹³⁹ 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.¹⁴⁰ 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 with her own hand, that she may be burnt on one pyre with her lord.”¹⁴¹ 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 satí or “good woman,” which word has passed into English as suttee. Mentioned in classic and mediaeval times, the practice was in full vigour at the beginning of the present century.¹⁴² 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 [466] traditional standards of Hindu faith. The ancient Brah-manic 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, “Bise, 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 with Prof. Müller that the more modern ordinance of Suttee-burning is a corrupt departure from the early Brahmanic ritual, we may nevertheless find some 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 still more ancient form of the rite, the widow had been actually sent with the dead, for which real sacrifice a more humane 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.”¹⁴³ 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 [467] 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 re-action against a yet more ancient savage 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 [468] 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 take revenge.¹⁴⁴ 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.¹⁴⁵ Such customs are common among the lower Asiatic tribes. The Stiens of Kambodia ask pardon of the beast they have killed;¹⁴⁶ the Ainos of Yesso kill the bear, offer obeisance and salutation to him, and cut up his carcase.¹⁴⁷ 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.¹⁴⁸ 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.¹⁴⁹ 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.¹⁵⁰ In Borneo, [469] the Dayaks, when they have caught an alligator with a baited hook and rope, address him with respect and sooth -ing till they have his legs fast, and then mocking call him “rajah” and “grandfather.”¹⁵¹ 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.¹⁵² 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 [470] child.¹⁵³ 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 Amhondrombe, come out occasionally to walk among the tombs or execution-places of criminals.¹⁵⁴ The Kamchadals held that every creature, even the smallest fly, would live again in the under world.¹⁵⁵ 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.¹⁵⁶ The Zulus say the cattle they kill come to life again, and become the property of the dwellers in the world beneath.¹⁵⁷ 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.¹⁵⁸ 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 induisit communis conditor illis
Tantum animas; nobis animum quoque....”¹⁵⁹

Through the middle ages, controversy as to the psychology of brutes has lasted on into our own times, ranging between [471] 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 inimals will be raised even above their bodily and mental state at the creation, “the horridness of their appearance will be exchanged for their primaeval 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.¹⁶⁰ 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 [472] 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.¹⁶¹ 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.¹⁶² 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 ever finds his home, may 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.¹⁶³ The dead Buraet’s favourite horse, led saddled to the grave, killed, and flung in, may serve for a Tatar [473] example.¹⁶⁴ 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.¹⁶⁵ 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.¹⁶⁶ 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.¹⁶⁷ 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.¹⁶⁸ 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.¹⁶⁹ 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 [474] 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.¹⁷⁰ 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 recals the horses and servants killed and buried with prae-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 1829, 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.¹⁷¹ Germany retained the actual sacrifice within the memory of living men. A cavalry general named Frederick Kasimir 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.¹⁷² 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 [475] soul, common to plants and to the higher organisms possessing an animal soul in addition, was familiar to mediaeval 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.¹⁷³ 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.¹⁷⁴ 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.”¹⁷⁵ 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 nor sentient principle, [476] 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. Generally speaking, 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.¹⁷⁶ 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. 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 [477] 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 continally 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, constantiy [478] 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.”¹⁷⁷ 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 light-headed 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 recognised 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,

[479] “Such was the very armour he had on,
When he the ambitions 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 Birmah. Among the Indians of North America, Father Charlevoix wrote, souls are, as it were, the shadows and 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.¹⁷⁸ In interesting correspondence with [480] 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.”¹⁷⁹ The theory among the Karens is stated by the Bev. 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.” ¹⁸⁰

[481] 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, 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 mans 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 [482] 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.¹⁸¹

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 companions 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 [483] strangled wives.¹⁸² 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 persons 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.¹⁸³ 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.¹⁸⁴ Yet, having made full [484] allowance for all this, we shall jet find 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 every thing 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”¹⁸⁵ It will be desirable briefly to examine further the subject of funeral offerings, as bearing on this interesting question of early pyschology.

A wide survey of funeral sacrifices over the world will plainly show one of their most usual motives to be a more [485] 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 mementos 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 [486] 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.¹⁸⁶ 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.¹⁸⁷ 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,¹⁸⁸ 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.¹⁸⁹ So in old Europe, the warrior with his sword and spear, the horse with the 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 Archaeology.

[487] 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.¹⁹⁰ A Tasmanian, asked the reason of a spear being deposited in a native’s grave, replied “To fight with when he is asleep.”¹⁹¹ 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.¹⁹² 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.¹⁹³ 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.¹⁹⁴ 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 [488] 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 had long been dead walking, adorned with the things that were buried with them, and accompanied by their wives who had been buried alive.”¹⁹⁵

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.¹⁹⁶ 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.¹⁹⁷ 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.¹⁹⁸ 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 [489] 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.¹⁹⁹ 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 [490] 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.”²⁰⁰

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.”²⁰¹ 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 theVeda recited at the ceremony: “Yadâ gachchâtyasunîtimetâmathâ devânâm vasanîrbhavâti,”— “When he cometh unto that life, faithfully will he do the service of the gods.”²⁰² 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 [491] 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, burned them in a great trench with prayer, and now obtained his answer.²⁰³ 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.²⁰⁴ 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” (helskô) 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.²⁰⁵ 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 [492] 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.²⁰⁶ 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 Birmah. 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 Betting 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 [493] things not worth plundering.²⁰⁷ 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.²⁰⁸ 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.²⁰⁹ 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 realised 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.²¹⁰ [494] Again, when the modern Hindu offers to his dead parent funeral cakes with flowers and betel, he presents a woollen yarn which he lays across the cake, and naming the deceased says, “May this apparel, made of woollen yarn, be acceptable to thee.”²¹¹ 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.²¹²

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,²¹³ so the rite of interring objects with the dead survived in Christian Europe. As the Greeks gave the dead man the obolus for Charon’s toll, and the old Prussians furnished him 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, while the placing of the coin in the dead man’s hand is a regular ceremony of an Irish wake, and similar little funeral offerings of coin are recorded in the folklore-books elsewhere in Europe.²¹⁴ 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 [495] over the dead still holds its place in Europe.²¹⁵ 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.²¹⁶ 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;
Eire 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.
[496] From Whinny-moore when thou may passe,
Every night and alle;
To Brig o’ Dread thou comes at laste,
And Ohriste 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.”²¹⁷

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 [497] 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 [498] 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 [499] 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 out 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. Beid 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.²¹⁸ 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 [500] 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 [501] 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 h s 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 groundwork 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 [502] 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.

¹ J. D. Lang, ‘Queensland,’ pp. 340, 374, 380, 388, 444 (Buddai appears, p, 879, as causing a deluge; he is probably identical with Budyah).

² Moffat, ‘South Africa,’ p. 261.

³ Azara, ‘Voy. dans l’Amérique Méridionale,’ vol. ii. pp. 3, 14, 25, 51, 60, 91, 119, etc.; D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 318.

⁴ 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. s. y. ‘Superstition.’

⁵ J. de Verrazano in Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 300.

⁶ See Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 429; Flacourt, ‘Hist, de Madagascar, p. 59.

⁷ Dampier, ‘Voyages,’ vol. ii. part ii. p. 76.

⁸ Roe in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 2.

⁹ Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ p. 564: see also ‘Origin of Civilization,’ p. 138.

¹⁰ Sproat, ‘Scenes and Studies of Savage Life,’ p. 205.

¹¹ Mouat, ‘Andaman Islanders,’ pp. 2, 279, 303.

¹² 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 (Arn Islanders, etc.); Farrar in ‘Anthrop. Rev.’Aug. 1864, p. ccxvii. (Kafirs, etc.); Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 583 (Manaos); J. G. Palfrey, ‘Hist, of New England,’ vol. i. p. 46 (New Eng tribes).

¹³ The term has been especially used to denote the doctrine of Stahl, the promulgate’ 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.

¹⁴ Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 182.

¹⁵ Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ ed. by James, p. 291. Also Sproat, p. 300 (Ahts).

¹⁶ Brasseur, ‘Langue Quichée,’ s. v.

¹⁷ Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 795; vol. ii p. 310.

¹⁸ Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 194.

¹⁹ Döhne, ‘Zulu Die.’ s. v. ‘tunzi; ‘Callaway,’ Rel. of Amazulu,’ pp. 91, 126; ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 342.

²⁰ Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 245; Arbousset and Daumas, ‘Voyage,’ p. 12.

²¹ Burton, ‘W. and W. fr. W. Afr.’ p. 389; see Koelle, ‘Afr. Native Lit.’ p. 324 (Kanuri). Also ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. v. p. 713 (Australian).

²² Dante, ‘Div. Comm. Purgatorio,’ canto iii. Compare Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ p. 221. See ante, p. 85.

²³ Rochefort, pp. 429, 516; J. G. Müller, p. 207.

²⁴ Mariner, ‘Tonga Is,’ vol. ii. p. 135; S. S. Fanner, ‘Tonga,’ etc. p. 131.

²⁵ Casalis, l. c. See also Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ etc. p. 135.

²⁶ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 15—23.

²⁷ J. H. Bernau, ‘Brit. Guiana,’ p. 134.

²⁸ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 1028, 1133. Anglo-Saxon man-líca.

²⁹ Lieber, ‘Laura Bridgman,’ in Smithsonian Contrib. vol. ii. p. 8.

³⁰ G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab. of W. Australia,’ p. 103.

³¹ Brinton, p. 50, see 235; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 15.

³² Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

³³ Crawfurd, ‘Malay Gr. and Die. s. v.; Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 386.

³⁴ Oviedo, ‘Hist. du Nicaragua,’ pp. 21-51.

³⁵ Pott, ‘Zigeuner,’ vol. ii. p. 306; ‘Jndo-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. ir.

³⁶ Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 253; Coram. in Virg. Æn. iv. 684; Cic. Verr. v. 45; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 210; Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube,’ etc. vol. i. p. 111.

³⁷ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 241.

³⁸ Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 393.

³⁹ Charlevoix, vol. vi. pp. 75-8; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. pp. 33, 83, part iii. p. 229, part iv. p. 70; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 194; J. G. Müller, pp. 66, 207, 8.

⁴⁰ Cross in ‘Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 810.

⁴¹ Macpherson, pp. 91, 2. See also Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iii. p. 71 (Lapp) St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 189 (Dayaks).

⁴² Shürmann, ‘Vocab. of Parnkalla Lang.’ s. v.

⁴³ Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 291; Keating, ‘Narr, of Long’s Exp.’ vol. ii. p. 154.

⁴⁴ 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.

⁴⁵ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 220.

⁴⁶ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. il p. 319; also Sproat, p. 218 (Vancouver’s I.).

⁴⁷ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 34. Gmelin, ‘Reisen durch Sibirien,’ vol. ii p. 359 (Yakuts); Ravenstein, ‘Amur,’ p. 351 (Tunguz).

⁴⁸ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 143; vol. ii. pp. 388, 418; vol. iii. p. 236. Mason, ‘Karens,’ I. c. p. 196, etc.; Cross, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.’ vol. iv. 1854, p. 307. See also St. John, ‘Far East,’ La (Dayaks).

⁴⁹ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 150.

⁵⁰ Cardan, ‘De Varietate Rerum,’ Basel, 1556, cap. xliii.

⁵¹ Stanbridge, ‘Abor. of Victoria,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 300.

⁵² Macplierson, ‘India,’ p. 103.

⁵³ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 269. See also Sproat, I. c.

⁵⁴ Ruhs, ‘Finland,’ p. 303; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ p. 134; Bastian, Mensch,’ vol. ii p. 319.

⁵⁵ Vatnsdæla Saga; Baring-Gould, ‘Werewolves,’ p. 29.

⁵⁶ Plin. vii. 53; Lucian. Hermotimus, Muse. Rncom. 7.

⁵⁷ R. D. Owen, ‘Footfalls on the Boundary of another World,’ p. 259. See A. R. Wallace, Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural,’ p. 43.

⁵⁸ Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 331, vol. iii. p. 236. See Calmet, ‘Diss. sur les Esprits; ’ Maury, ‘Magie,’ part ii. ch. iv.

⁵⁹ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

⁶⁰ Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195.

⁶¹ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 104, 184, 333; Baker in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 57.

⁶² Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 319; Jagor in Journ. Eth. Soc. vol. ii p. 175.

⁶³ Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 199; Cross, l. c.; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 144, vol. ii. p. 889, vol. iii. p. 266.

⁶⁴ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 16-20; Eisenmenger, vol. i. p. 458, vol. ii pp. 13, 20, 453; Franck, ‘Kabbale,’ p. 235.

⁶⁵ Augustin. De Civ. Dei, xviii. 18.

⁶⁶ Grimm. ‘D. M.’ p. 103d.

⁶⁷ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 78; Loskiel, part i. p. 76; Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 172.

⁶⁸ 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).

⁶⁹ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 242.

⁷⁰ Mayne, ‘Brit. Columbia,’ p. 261; see Sproat l. c.

⁷¹ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Africa,’ p. 395, see 210. See also Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 396; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 287; Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkcrton, vol. viii. p. 677; ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ p. 8.

⁷² Homer. II. xxiii. 59. See also Odyss. xi. 207, 222; Porphyr. De Antre Nympharum; Virgil. Æn. ii. 794; Ovid. Fast v. 475.

⁷³ Cicero De Divinatione, i. 27.

⁷⁴ Augustin. De Cura pro Mortuis, x.-xii. Epist. clviii.

⁷⁵ Compare Voltaire’s remarks, ‘Diet. Phil.’ art. “ame,” etc.

⁷⁶ Steinhäuser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Magazin der Evang. Missionen,’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 135.

⁷⁷ ‘Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo,’ tr. Alfonso Ulloa, Venice, 1571, p. 127; Eng. Tr. in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 80.

⁷⁸ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 120.

⁷⁹ I. Sam. xxviii. 12.

⁸⁰ Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 269.

⁸¹ Pennant, ‘2nd Tour in Scotland,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 315; Johnson, ‘Journey to the Hebrides.’

⁸² J. Gardner, ‘Faiths of the World,’ s. v. ‘bilocation.’

⁸³ Meson, ‘Karens,’ I. c. p. 198.

⁸⁴ 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.

⁸⁵ Calmet, ‘Diss. sur les Esprits,’ vol. i. ch. xl.

⁸⁶ 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.

⁸⁷ See R. D. Owen, ‘Footfalls on the Boundary of another World’; Mrs. Crowe, ‘Night-Side of Nature; ’ Howitt’s Tr. of Ennemoser’s ‘Magic,’ etc.

⁸⁸ 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 folk-lore; compare the representations of tiny souls in mediaeval pictures.

⁸⁹ Magalhanes de Gandavo, p. 110; Maffei, ‘Indie Orientali,’ p. 107.

⁹⁰ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 287.

⁹¹ Waitz, vol. ii. p. 194; Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 42.

⁹² Meiners. vol. ii. p. 756, 763; Purchas, vol. iii. p. 495; J. Jones in ‘Tr Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 138.

⁹³ Calmet, vol. i. ch. xxxvi.; Plin. Ep. 7 27; Hunt, ‘Pop. Romances,’ vol ii p. 156.

⁹⁴ Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jésuites,’ 1639, p. 43; see 1634, p. 13.

⁹⁵ Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 92; Yate, p. 140; R. Taylor, p. 104. 153; Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 406.

⁹⁶ Callaway, ‘Rel. of Aniazulu,’ pp. 265, 348, 370.

⁹⁷ Homer. Il. xxiii. 100.

⁹⁸ Ovid. Fast. v. 457.

⁹⁹ 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 ‘Dæmonolatreia’ is one of the ghastliest volumes in the ghastly literature of witchcraft, cites Hermolaus Barbarus as having heard the voice sub-sibilantis dœmonis, 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, ib. i. c. 8, “pleræque aliæ 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”).

¹⁰⁰ Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 176.

¹⁰¹ Flacourt, ‘Madagascar,’ p. 101.

¹⁰² Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 15.

¹⁰³ Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 142; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 209; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 801; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 761.

¹⁰⁴ Lang, ‘Queensland,’ p. 441; Bonwiek, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 187.

¹⁰⁵ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. pp. 76, 122; Le Jeune in ‘Rel. de la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 23; 1639, p. 44; Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 292 Peter Jones, ‘Hist. of Ojebway Indians,’ p. 99.

¹⁰⁶ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323.

¹⁰⁷ Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.

¹⁰⁸ Festus, s. v. ‘everriatores; ’ see Bastian, l. c., and compare Hartknoch, cited below, vol. ii. p. 40.

¹⁰⁹ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 132, 216.

¹¹⁰ Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 285; Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part ii. p. 161; Wuttke, p. 216; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 192.

¹¹¹ Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 135.

¹¹² Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

¹¹³ Rochefort, ‚Iles Antilles,’ p. 429.

¹¹⁴ Loubere, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 458; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 259; see 278.

¹¹⁵ Diog. Laert. x. 67—8; see Serv. ad Æn. iv. 654.

¹¹⁶ Irenæus contra Hæres, v. 7, 1; see Origen. De Princip. ii. 3, 2.

¹¹⁷ Tertull. De Anima, 9.

¹¹⁸ Hampole, ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt.’

¹¹⁹ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 216, 226.

¹²⁰ A. J. Davis, ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse,’ New York, 1851, p. 49.

¹²¹ Calmet, vol. i. ch. xli., etc.

¹²² ‘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. Kes.’ vol. iii. p. 28, Dalton, ‘Descr. Ethnol. of Bengal,’ p. 67; see also p. 46—7 (Kukis).

¹²³ 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.

¹²⁴ J. M‘Coy, ‘Hist, of Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 360; “Waitz, vol. iii. p. 200. See also Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 133 (Comanches).

¹²⁵ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 429, 612; see also J. G. Müller, pp. 174, 222.

¹²⁶ Oviedo, ‘Relation de Cueba,’ p. 140; Charlevoix, ‘Nouv. Fr.’ vol. vi. p. 178 (Natchez); Waitz, vol. iii. p. 219. See Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 239.

¹²⁷ Brasseur, ‘Mexique, ‘vol. iii. p. 573.

¹²⁸ Piedrahita, ‘Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’ part. i. lib. i. c. 3.

¹²⁹ 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.

¹³⁰ Simpson, ‘Journey,’ vol. i. p. 190; similar practice among Takulli or Carrier Ind., Waitz, vol. iii. p. 200.

¹³¹ Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. i. p. 124; vol. ii. p. 25; ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 18, etc.; ‘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.

¹³² Cavazzi, ‘Ist. Descr. de’ tre Regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola,’ Bologna, 1687, lib. i. 264; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 419—21; Callaway, ‘Religion of Ama-zulu,’ p. 212.

¹³³ Renaudot, ‘Ace. 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.

¹³⁴ Caron, ‘Japan,’ ibid., p. 622; Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ v. p. 22.

¹³⁵ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ new series, vol. ii. p. 374.

¹³⁶ 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).

¹³⁷ Jacob Grimm, ‘Verbrennen der Leichen,’ contains an instructive collection of references and citations.

¹³⁸ Homer. II. xxiii. 175; Eurip. Suppl.; Pausanias, iv. 2.

¹³⁹ Edda, ‚Gylfagmning,’49; ‘Brynhildarqvitha,’ etc.

¹⁴⁰ Cæsar. ‘Bell. Gall.’ vi. 19.

¹⁴¹ Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 145.

¹⁴² Strabo, xv. 1, 62; Cic. Tusc. Disp. v. 27, 78; Diod. Sic. xvii. 01; xix. 33, etc.; 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.

¹⁴³ Max Müller, ‘Todtenbestattimg bei den Brahmanen, in Zeitschr. der Deutsch. Morgenl. Ges.’vol. ix.; ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p 34; Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 526.

¹⁴⁴ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 543; part iii, pp. 229, 520; Waitz, vol. iii. pp. 191—3.

¹⁴⁵ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. pp. 355, 364; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 178.

¹⁴⁶ Mouhot, ‘Indo-China,’ vol. i. p. 252.

¹⁴⁷ Wood in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 36.

¹⁴⁸ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 26.

¹⁴⁹ De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 61.

¹⁵⁰ Ravenstein, ‘Amur,’ p. 382; T. W. Atkinson, p. 483.

¹⁵¹ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. ii. p. 253 (Dayaks).

¹⁵² Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 78; Sagard, ‘Hist du Canada,’ p. 497; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 229.

¹⁵³ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

¹⁵⁴ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 271; Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 429.

¹⁵⁵ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 269.

¹⁵⁶ Stewart, ‘Kukis; Dalton, l. c.;’ Cross, ‘Karens,’ l. c.; Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c.

¹⁵⁷ Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 317.

¹⁵⁸ Low in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 426. See Meiners, vol. i. p. 220 vol. ii. p. 791.

¹⁵⁹ Juvenal. Sat. xv. 148.

¹⁶⁰ 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.

¹⁶¹ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. pp. 237, 262; part ii. p. 68.

¹⁶² D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. i. p. 196; vol. ii. pp. 23, 78; Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 118; Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ p. 178.

¹⁶³ Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 152; Cranz, p. 301; see Nilsson, p. 140. Torque-mada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ xiii. ch. 47; Clavigero, ‘Mcssico,’ vol. ii pp. 94-6.

¹⁶⁴ Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. R.’ vol. i. p. 312.

¹⁶⁵ Baron, ‘Tonquin,’ in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 704.

¹⁶⁶ W. G. Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 10; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 334; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 619 (Gallas).

¹⁶⁷ 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 (Castren, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 120), old Russians (Grimm, ‘Verbrennen,’ p. 254).

¹⁶⁸ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 335.

¹⁶⁹ Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 177; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 62, 284, 331.

¹⁷⁰ Mannhardt, ‘Götterwelt der Deutschen, etc.’ vol. i. p. 319.

¹⁷¹ Saint-Foix, ‘Essais historiques sur Paris,’ in ‘Œuvres Comp.’ Maestricht, 1778, vol. iv. p. 150.

¹⁷² J. M. Kemble, ‘Horæ Ferales,’ p. 66.

¹⁷³ Moerenhout. ‘Voy. aux Iles du Grand Océan,’ vol. i. p. 430.

¹⁷⁴ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 187.

¹⁷⁵ 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. Iud. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 340.

¹⁷⁶ 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.

¹⁷⁷ Hume, ‘Nat. Hist, of Rel.’sec. ii.; Comte, ‘Philosophie Positive,’ vol. r. p. 30.

¹⁷⁸ 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.’

¹⁷⁹ 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.

¹⁸⁰ Cross, I. c. p. 309, 313; Mason, I. c. p. 202. Compare Meiners, vol. i. p. 144; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 161 3.

¹⁸¹ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 68; ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. p. 128; Lallemant in ‘Rel. des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1626, p. 8.

¹⁸² Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. pp. 188, 243, 246; Alger, p. 82; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 229.

¹⁸³ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ new series, vol. ii. p. 421.

¹⁸⁴ 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, etc.; 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. Soa’ 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 (Appa-lachicola); 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).

¹⁸⁵ 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 (CJavigero, 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).

¹⁸⁶ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 222, see 420.

¹⁸⁷ Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 430.

¹⁸⁸ Polack, ‘M. of New Zealauders,’ vol. ii pp. 66, 78, 116, 127.

¹⁸⁹ Georgi, ‘Rusa. R.’ vol. i. p. 266; Herodot. iv. 71, see note in Rawlinson’s Tr. etc., etc.

¹⁹⁰ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. pp. 228, 245.

¹⁹¹ Bon wick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 97.

¹⁹² Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ pp. 263, 301.

¹⁹³ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. pp. 55, 65; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. ürrel.’ pp. 88, 287.

¹⁹⁴ Sahagnm, book iii. App. in Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico,’ vol. vii.; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 94; Brasseur, vol. iii. pp. 497, 569.

¹⁹⁵ Cieza de Leon, p. 161; Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruvian Antiquities, ‘pp. 186, 200.

¹⁹⁶ Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 254, 429; see Flacourt, p. 60.

¹⁹⁷ Caatrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 118; J. Billings, ‘Exp. to N. Russia,’ p. 129; see ‘Samoiedia’ in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 632, and Leems, ‘Lapland,’ ibid., p. 484.

¹⁹⁸ Boeder, ‘Ehsten Gebrauche,’ p. 69.

¹⁹⁹ ‘Joum. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 691; see vol. i. pp. 297, 349.

²⁰⁰ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 89; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 337. For other instances, see Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 332, etc.; Alger, ‘Future Life,’ part ii.

²⁰¹ Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iv. p. 159; Ezek. xxxii. 27.

²⁰² Max Müller, ‘Todtenbestattung der Brahmanen,’ in D. M. Z. vol. ix, p. vii-xiv.

²⁰³ Lucian. De Luctu, 9, etc.; Philopseudes, 27; Strabo, viii. 6, 12; Herodot. v. 92; Smith’s ‘Die. Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ art. ‘fuiras.’

²⁰⁴ Valer. Max. ii; Mela, iii 2. Froius (1565) in Maffei, Histor. Indicarum, lib. iv.

²⁰⁵ Grimm, Verbrennen der Leichen,’ pp. 232, etc., 247, etc.; ‘Deutsche Myth.’ pp. 795-800.

²⁰⁶ Dusburg, ‘Chronicon Prussiæ,’ iii c. v.; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’pp. 898, 414 (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.

²⁰⁷ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 54, 68. Compare Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 430.

²⁰⁸ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. p. 54.

²⁰⁹ Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210.

²¹⁰ 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.

²¹¹ Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. pp. 161, 169.

²¹² Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ p. 142; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. p. 319.

²¹³ Beeckmann, ‘Voy. to Borneo,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xi. p. 110.

²¹⁴ Hartknoch, ‘Alt. und Neues Preussen,’ part i. p. 181’; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 791-5; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 212; Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube,’ etc. vol. i. p. 187, etc.; Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. p. 158 (France) j Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 285 (Ireland).

²¹⁵ Maitland, ‘Church in the Catacombs,’ p. 137; Forbes Leslie, vol. ii. 502; Meinen, vol. ii. p. 750; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ Vol. ii p. 407

²¹⁶ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 284.

²¹⁷ From the collated and annotated text in J. C. Atkinson, ‘Glossary of Cleveland Dialect,’ p. 595 (a = one, neean = none, bcean = bone). Other versions in Scott, ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,’ vol. ii. p. 367; Kelly, ‘Indo-European Folklore,’ 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 Volker,’ p. 319), a sop to Cerberus.

²¹⁸ 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.

End of Volume 1.

Primitive Culture

Volume 2.

CHAPTER XII.

ANIMISM—continued.

[1] 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 though 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 mankind, 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 [2] 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 ioctrines 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 [3] 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. North American Indians of the Algonquin districts, 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 [4] 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 [5] 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 Tatar 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 White-fellow, 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 [6] 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 another district of North-West [7] America, we find Indians 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 Pow-hatans 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 Buenos [8] Ayres 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 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 ot 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 ot 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 Wolta, where the ghosts build themselves houses and dwell. But they can and do come back from [9] 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 [10] 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, misshaped, 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 bloodthirsty 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 the district of the world which has been more or less 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 ;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 whether these and the Hindu ideas are originally independent of each other, and if not, did the Hindus adopt the [11] ideas of the indigenes, or vice versâ ? 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 in 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 :—

[12] “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 recal 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 prêta 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

[13] Within the classic world, the ancient Egyptians are described as maintaining a doctrine of migration, whether by successive embodiments in a “cycle of necessity” 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. The pictures and hieroglyphic sentences of the Book of the Dead are still preserved, and though the ambiguity of its formulas and the difficulty of distinguishing material from mystical meaning in its doctrine make it of little use as a check upon the classic accounts, yet it shows at least that notions of metamorphosis of the soul did hold a large place in the Egyptian religion.³⁷ In Greek philosophy, great teachers stood forth to proclaim it. 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 Menelaus 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

[14] 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 Manichseans 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 ijot 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 [15] the question is, how much of them did the Manichæans really and soberly believe ? Allowing for exaggeration and constructive imputation, there is reason to consider the account at least founded on fact. It seems clear that the Manichæan sect, when they fused together Zarathustrism, Buddhism, and Christianity, into a transcendental ascetic faith, adopted the Hindu theory of penance and purification of souls by migration into animals and plants, probably elaborating it meanwhile into fresh and fanciful details.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 mediaeval 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 [16] 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 mediaeval 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 ancient theory of metempsychosis in stage after stage of the world’s civilization, scattered among the native races of America and Africa, established in old Egypt, elaborated by the Hindu mind into its great system of ethical philosophy, reviving and failing through classic and mediaeval 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 [17] 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 mens 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, etc., 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, etc. 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 [18] 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, etc., 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 [19] 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. But how far the preservation of these remains may be connected with an idea of bodily resurrection, whether among the native races of America, or in ancient Egypt, or elsewhere, is a problem for which also the evidence available does not seem sufficient.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 [20] the next world with his entire body (sarvatanû). In Brah-minism and Buddhism, the re-births of souls in bodies to inhabit heavens and hells are simply included as particular cases of transmigration. The question of an old Persian doctrine of resurrection, thought by some to be related to the late Jewish doctrine, is obscure.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 [21] 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 The case is, like various others of the same kind, incomplete.

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 [22] 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. Even among races who distinctly accept the doctrine of the surviving soul, this 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, or perhaps at most without closer scrutiny to prize its hope as a good influence in human life. Far from a life after death being held by all men as the destiny of all men, whole classes are formally excluded from it. In the Tonga islands, the future life was a privilege of caste, for while the chiefs and higher orders were to pass in divine ethereality to the happy land of Bolotu, the lower ranks were believed to be endowed only with souls that died with their bodies ; and although some of these had the vanity to claim a place in paradise among their betters, the populace in general acquiesced in the extinction of their own plebeian spirits.⁵² The Nicaraguans believed 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.⁵³ 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 [23] 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.⁵⁴ 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.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶ Even common water can drown a negro ghost, if we may believe the story of the Matamba widows having themselves ducked in the river or pond to drown off the souls of their [24] departed husbands, who might still be hanging about them, clinging closest to the best loved wives. After this ceremony, they went and married again.⁵⁷ 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 folklore 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 [25] 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 haunting-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 ;⁵⁸ 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, recognises 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 mostly be connected with other causes, such as horror or abnegation of all things belonging to the dead, there are cases where it [26] appears that the place is simply abandoned to the ghost. In Old Calabar it was customary for the son to leave his father’s house to decay, but after two years he might rebuild it, the ghost being thought by that time to have departed;⁵⁹ the Hottentots abandoned the dead man’s house, and were said to avoid entering it lest the ghost should be within;⁶⁰ the Yakuts let the hut fall in ruins where any one had expired, thinking it the habitation of demons ;⁶¹ the Karens were said to destroy their villages to escape the dangerous neighbourhood of departed souls.⁶² Such proceedings, however, scarcely extend beyond the limits of savagery, 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 Green-landers 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 !” ⁶³ ; the Hottentots removed the dead from the hut by an opening broken out on purpose, to prevent him from finding the way back ;⁶⁴ 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;⁶⁵ the Siberian Chuwashes fling a red-hot stone [27] after the corpse is carried out, for an obstacle to bar the soul from coming back ;⁶⁶ 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.⁶⁷ In the ancient and mediaeval 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 [28] but to harm the living.⁶⁸ In New Zealand, the ideas were to be found that the souls of the dead were apt to linger near their 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.⁶⁹ 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.”⁷⁰ Among Brazilian tribes, the wandering shadows of the dead are said to be considered unresting till burial.⁷¹ 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.⁷² 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 ;⁷³ 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.⁷⁴ 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 [29] of Acheron.⁷⁵ 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 folklore: “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.”⁷⁶ In mediaeval 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.⁷⁷ 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 Antars 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 [30] place where men’s flesh creeps with terror. Not to discuss here the general subject of the 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.⁷⁸ 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 [31] at funeral feasts—though some indeed would eat all.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰ The Wanika of East Africa set a cocoa-nut shell full of rice and tembo near the grave for the “koma” or shade, which cannot exist without food and drink.⁸¹ 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.⁸² 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.⁸³

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 [32] proceed to the river and bathe, and having thus lustrated themselves, they repair to the banquet and €iat, drink, and make merry as though they never were to die.”⁸⁴ 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.⁸⁵ 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. Beside 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 !
[83] 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.⁸⁶ Among Turanian races of North Asia, 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 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.⁸⁷

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 [34] 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.⁸⁸ 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.⁸⁹ 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.⁹⁰ In the classic world such rites were represented by funeral feasts and oblations of food.⁹¹

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 silicer-nium 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 [35] 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,”⁹² 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 Pro-fundis.⁹³ Spaniards still offer bread and wine on the tombs of those they love, on the anniversary of their decease.⁹⁴ The conservative Eastern Church still holds to ancient rite. The funeral feast is served in Russia, with its table 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 Greek Christians now explain away into symbolism this remnant of primitive offering to the dead : the honey is heavenly sweetness, the [36] shrivelled raisins will be full beauteous grapes, the grain typifies the resurrection, “that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.”⁹⁵

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.⁹⁶ The Karens make their annual offerings to the dead in the “month of shades,” that is, December ;⁹⁷ the Kocch of North Bengal every year at harvest-home offer fruits and a fowl to deceased parents ;⁹⁸ the Barea of East Africa celebrate in November the feast of Thiyot, at once a feast of general peace and merry-making, of thanks-giving 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 ;⁹⁹ in West Africa we hear of the feast of the dead at the time of yam-harvest ;¹⁰⁰ at the end of the year the Haitian negroes take food to the graves for the shades to eat, “manger zombi,” as they say.¹⁰¹ The Roman Feralia and Lemuralia were held in February [87] and May.¹⁰² [37] 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.¹⁰³ 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 !”¹⁰⁴ When Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, at the end of the tenth century, instituted the celebration of All Souls’,¹⁰⁵ he set on foot one of [38] 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, on the second of November, 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. All Souls’ Day keeps up, 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.¹⁰⁶

If we ask how the spirits of the dead are in general supposed [39] 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.¹⁰⁷ 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.¹⁰⁸ 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.¹⁰⁹ A less gross conception is that the soul consumes [40] 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.¹¹⁰ The idea is well displayed among the natives in Mexican districts, where the souls who come to the annual feast are described as hovering over and smelling the food set out for them, or sucking out its nutritive quality.¹¹¹ 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.¹¹² 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 !”¹¹³ 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, where fore 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.¹¹⁴ The Jesuit Father Christoforo Borri suggestively translates the native idea into his own scholastic phraseology. In Cochin China, [41] 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.¹¹⁵ 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.¹¹⁶ So, in more civilized Japan, when the survivors have placed [42] 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.¹¹⁷

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 ayidos Styx habet ima deos.
Tegula porrectis satis est velata coronis,
Et sparsæ fruges, parcaque mica salis,
Inque mero mollita ceres, violæque solutæ :
Hæc habeat media testa relicta via.
Nec majora veto. Sed et his placabilis umbra est.”¹¹⁸

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 [43] 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.¹¹⁹ 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.” ¹²⁰

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.

¹ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1635, p. 130 ; Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 75. See Brin ton, p. 253.

² Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195, see pp. 198, 213.

³ Mayne, ‘British Columbia,’ p. 181.

⁴ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ pp. 248, 258, seep. 212. See also Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 353 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 793.

⁵ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 28.

⁶ Bastian, ‘Zur vergl. Psychologie,’ in Lazarus and Steinthal’s ‘Zeitschrift,’ vol. v. p. 160, etc., also Papuas and other races.

⁷ Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ p. 376.

⁸ Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 201.

⁹ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 210 ; see also R. Clarke, ‘Sierra Leone,’ p. 159 ; Burton, Dahome, vol. ii. p. 158.

¹⁰ Bastian, l. c.

¹¹ Macpherson, p. 72 ; also Tickell in ‘Joura. As. Soc, Bengal,’ vol. ix. pp. 793, etc. ; Dalton in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 22 (similar rite of Mundas and Oraons).

¹² Klemm, ‘Culturgeschichte,’ vol. iii. p. 77.

¹³ A. S. Thomson, ‘New Zealand,’ i. 118 ; see Shortland, ‘Traditions,’ p. 145; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 353 ; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 279 ; see also p. 276 (Samoieds). Compare Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. v. p. 426 ; Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 353 ; Kracheninnikow, p. 117. See Plath, ‘Rel der alten Chinesen,’ ii. p. 98.

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,” etc. 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. ; Turne:, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 424.

¹⁵ Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 85 ; Brun-Rollet, ‘Nil Blane,’ etc. p. 234.

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.

¹⁷ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 113.

¹⁸ Hayes, ‘Arctic Boat Journey,’ p. 198.

¹⁹ Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 102.

²⁰ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 104.

²¹ Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 174.

²² Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 5.

²³ Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 602 ; Markham in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 195.

²⁴ Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. pp. 74, 270.

²⁵ Coreal in Brinton, l. c. See also J. G. Müller, p. 139 (Natchez), 223 (Caribs), 402 (Peru).

²⁶ Brinton, p. 254 ; see also Martius, vol. i. p. 446.

²⁷ Waitz, vol. ii. p. 419 (Maravi).

²⁸ Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 196, etc. ; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 137.

²⁹ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 210, 218. See also Brun-Rollet, pp. 200, 234 ; Meiners, vol. i. p. 211.

³⁰ Steinhauser in ‘Mag. der Evang. Miss.’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 135.

³¹ Manu, xi. xii. Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 164, vol. ii. pp. 215, 347 -52.

³² St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 181.

³³ Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210. See also Shaw in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iv. p. 46 (Rajmahal tribes).

³⁴ Abraham Roger, ‘La Porte Ouverte,’ Amst. 1670, p. 107.

³⁵ Mann, 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.”

³⁶ Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. i. pp. 35, 289, etc., 318 ; Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, ‘Le Bouddha et sa Religion,’ p. 122; Hardy, ‘Manual of Buddhism,’ pp. 98, etc., 180, 318, 445, etc.

³⁷ Herod, ii. 123, see Rawlinson’s Tr. ; Plutarch. De Iside 31, 72 ; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. ch. xvi. ; Bunsen, ‘Egypt’s Place in Univ. Hist.’ vols. iv. and v.

³⁸ Plat. Phædo, Timæus, Phædrus, Repub. Pindar. Olymp. ii. antistr. 4 ; Ovid. Metam. xv. 160 ; Lucian. Somn. 17, etc. Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyran. See also Meyer’s Conversations-Lexicon, art. ‘Seelenwanderung.’ For rebirth in old Scandinavia, see Helgaqvidha, iii., in ‘Edda.’

³⁹ Eisenmenger, part ii. p. 23, etc.

⁴⁰ Beausobre, ‘Hist, de Manichée,’ etc., vol. i. pp. 245—6, vol. ii. pp. 496—9. See Augustin. Contra Faust. ; De Hæres. ; De Quantitate Animæ.

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,’ etc. vol. ii. pp. 438—443 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 796.

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, etc.

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 arlives 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 cut germ? and life to start the course of planetary existence. (Note to 2nd edition.)

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).

⁴⁵ See J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 208 (Caribs) ; but compare Rochefort, p. 429. Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 269 ; Castrén, ‘Finnische Mythologie, p. 119.

⁴⁶ See for American evidence Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 254, etc. For Egyptian evidence Birch’s tr. of ‘Book of Dead’ in Bunsen’s ‘Egypt.’ vol. vi. ; Wilkinson, etc.

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 ; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 332, 347, 357; Haug, ‘Parsees,’ p. 266; see Alger, ‘Future Life.’

⁴⁸ Origen, De. Princip. ii. 3, 2 : “materiae corporalis, cujus materiæ anima usum semper habet, in qualibet qualitate positæ, nunc quidem carnali, post-modum vero subtiliori et puriori, quae spiritalis appellatur.”

⁴⁹ Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii p. 345.

⁵⁰ Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 84.

⁵¹ Kaufmann, ‘Schilderungenaus Centralafrika,’ p. 124; G. Lejean in ‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’ Apr. 1, 1860, p. 760 ; see Brun-Rollet, ‘Nil Blanc,’ pp. 100, 234.

⁵² Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 136.

⁵³ Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 50. For similar statements, see Martins, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 247 ; Smith’s ‘Virginia’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 41 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 760.

⁵⁴ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 259.

⁵⁵ 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.

⁵⁶ Bosman, ‘Guinea’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. See also Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 191 (W. Afr.) ; Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 355.

⁵⁷ Cavazzi, Congo, Matamba, et Angola,’ lib. i. 270. See also Liebrecht in ‘Zeitschr. für Ethnologie,’ vol. v., p. 96, (Tartary, Scandinavia, Greece).

⁵⁸ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 310; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp, 111, 193; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 235.

⁵⁹ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323.

⁶⁰ Kolben, p. 579.

⁶¹ Billings, p. 125.

⁶² 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 ; Steller, ‘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.

⁶³ Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 152; Cranz, p. 300.

⁶⁴ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323 ; see pp. 329, 363.

⁶⁵ Bowring, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 122 ; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. iii. p. 258.

⁶⁶ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 120.

⁶⁷ 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 not clear.

⁶⁸ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. pp. 228, 236, 245.

⁶⁹ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 221 ; Schirren, p. 91 ; see Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 233.

⁷⁰ Morgan, ‘League of Iroquois,’ p. 174.

⁷¹ J. G. Müller, p. 286.

⁷² Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 126.

⁷³ 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).

⁷⁴ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 51, 99—101.

⁷⁵ Lucian. De Luctu. See Pauly, ‘Real. Encyclop.’ and Smith, ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ s. v. ‘inferi.’

⁷⁶ Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 277.

⁷⁷ Calmet, vol. ii. ch. xxxvi. ; Brand, vol. iii. p. 67.

⁷⁸ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 75; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. pp. 39, 83 ; part iv. p. 65 ; Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 293.

⁷⁹ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 1636, p. 104.

⁸⁰ Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 253, 364. See Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 220.

⁸¹ Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 150.

⁸² T. J. Hutchinson, p. 206.

⁸³ Cavazzi, ‘Congo, etc.’ book i. p. 264. So in ancient Greece, Lncian. Charon, 22.

⁸⁴ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 180.

⁸⁵ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 235.

⁸⁶ Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. ix. p. 795 ; Dalton, ibid. 1866, part ii. p. 153, etc. ; and in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 1, etc. ; Latham ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 415, etc.

⁸⁷ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 62 ; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 121.

⁸⁸ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 173, etc. ; vol. ii. p. 91, etc. ; Meiners, vol. i. p. 306.

⁸⁹ Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. p. 362; Lucian. De Luctu, 21.

⁹⁰ Manu, iii. ; Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 161, etc. ; Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 600 ; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 332.

⁹¹ Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s. v. “funus ;” Smith’s ‘Dic.’ s. v. “funus.” See Meiners, vol. i. pp. 305—19.

⁹² Augustin, contra Faustum, xx. 4 ; De Civ. Dei, viii. 27. See Beausobre, vol. ii. pp. 633, 685.

⁹³ Saint-Foix, ‘Essais Historiques sur Paris,’ in ‘Œuvres,’ vol. iv. p. 147, etc.

⁹⁴ Lady Herbert, ‘Impressions of Spain,’ p. 8.

⁹⁵ H. C. Romanoff, ‘Rites and Customs of Greco-Russian Church,’ p. 249 ; Ralston, ‘Songs of the Russian People,’ p. 135, 320 ; St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 77 ; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 115.

⁹⁶ 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.).

⁹⁷ Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 238.

⁹⁸ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 147.

⁹⁹ Munzinger, ‘Ost. Afrika,’ p. 473.

¹⁰⁰ Waitz, vol. ii. p. 194.

¹⁰¹ G. D’Alaux in ‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’ May 15, 1852, p. 768.

¹⁰² Ovid. Fast. ii. 533 ; v. 420.

¹⁰³ Bleek, ‘Avesta,’ vol. ii. p. 31 ; vol. iii. p. 86 ; Alger, p. 137.

¹⁰⁴ Harnisch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 374, 408 ; St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 77 ; Romanoff, ‘Greco-Roman Church,’ p. 255.

¹⁰⁵ 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 Nov. 2, the day after All Saints’, should be set apart for services for the departed.

¹⁰⁶ 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.

¹⁰⁷ Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1634, p. 16 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195.

¹⁰⁸ Cavazzi, ‘Congo,’ etc. book i. 265.

¹⁰⁹ 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 unlocked 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.)

¹¹⁰ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 220, see 104.

¹¹¹ Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 24.

¹¹² Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 163, etc. ; Manu. iii.

¹¹³ Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth,’ p. 408 ; Hartknoch, ‘Preussen,’ part i. p. 187.

¹¹⁴ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. pp. 33, 48 ; Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.

¹¹⁵ Borri, ‘Relatione della Nuova Missione della Comp. di Giesu,’ Rome, 1631, p. 208 ; and in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 822, etc.

¹¹⁶ Grout, ‘Zulu Land,’ p. 140 ; see Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 11.

¹¹⁷ Caron, ‘Japan,’ vol. vii. p. 629 ; see Turpin, ‘Siam,’ ibid. vol. ix. p. 590.

¹¹⁸ Ovid. Fast. ii. 533.

¹¹⁹ Legge, ‘Confucius” pp. 101-2, 130 ; Bunsen, ‘God in History,’ p, 871.

¹²⁰ Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i p. 392, vol. ii. p. 289.

CHAPTER XIII.

ANIMISM—(continued).

[44] 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 that 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?

[45] 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 judgment-seat of Ndengei, and thither the living come in pilgrimage, thinking to see there ghosts and gods.¹ 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.² In Mexico the cavern of Chalcha-tongo 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.³ In the kingdom of Prester John, Maundevile tells of an entrance to the infernal regions : “Sum men clepen it the vale enchanted, some clepen it the vale of develes, and some clepen it the vale perilous. In that vale heren men often tyme grete tempestes and thonders, and grete murmures and noyses, alle dayes and nyghtes, and gret noyse, as it were soun of taboures and of nakeres and trompes, as though it were of a gret feste. This valle is alle fulle of develes, and hathe ben alleways ; and men seyn there that it is on of the entrees of helle.”⁴ North German peasants still remember on the banks of the swampy Drömling the place of access to the land of departed souls.⁵ 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 [46] 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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 :—

[47] “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.
[48] Many they who travel thither,
Few who thence have found the home-way,
From the houses of Tuoni
From the dwellings of Manala.’”⁸

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 Eury-dike, 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.⁹

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 [49] 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.¹⁰ 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. [50] 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 turned 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.¹¹ The Zulus of our own day tell of men who have gone down by holes in the ground into the under-world, 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.”¹² 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 life-like 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 [51] man died in a solitary hut near the hanks 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 [52] 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.¹³ Races of North Asia¹⁴ and West Africa¹⁵ have in like manner their explorers of the world beyond the grave.

Classic literature continues the series. Lucian’s graphic [53] 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, everyone 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 judgment, 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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ Such stories, old and new, are current among the Hindus at this day. A certain man’s soul, for instance, is carried to the [54] 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹

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 ?” ²⁰ 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.”²¹ 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, [55] named Charinus and Leucius, rose from their tombs at the Resurrection, and went about silently and prayerfully among men, till Annas and Caiaphus 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 asunder ; 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.²²

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 ir mediaeval 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,²³ 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 [56] 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 the 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.”

[57] 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 processyour
Of alle manere menne of relygyoun,
Payre 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 ne we 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 :
Myehe 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 dvvers colowres ;
Hyt was grene on every syde,
As medewus are yn someres tyde
Ther were trees growyng fulle grene
Fulle of fruy te 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.”

[58] 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 1497, 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 [59] 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 empyrsean 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 [60] 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 people 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 [61] few days later, and the disaster was of course ascribed to Mr. Rigg’s profanation.²⁴ The Chilians said that the sou] 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ A survival of such thought may be traced into mediaeval 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.²⁷ When Columbus sailed westward across the Atlantic to seek the “new heaven and a 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.²⁸

Secondly, there are Australians who think that the spirit of the dead hovers a while on earth, and goes at last toward [62] 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.²⁹ 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.³⁰ 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.³¹

[63] 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.’³²

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.’

This group of legends has especial interest to us Englishmen, who ourselves dwell, it seems, on such an island of the [64] dead. It is not that we or our country are of a more ghostlj 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 [65] 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 Baz, 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 folklore 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,” etc.

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.³³

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, [66] 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.³⁴ 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.³⁵ 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.³⁶ 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 underworld. 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.³⁷ 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.”³⁸ From among rude Asiatic tribes, let us take example from the Karens. [67] 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.³⁹

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, 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.⁴¹ 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.”⁴² In the ancient Egyptian doctrine of the future life, modelled as it was on solar myth, Amenti, the western region of the departed, is an under-world or Hades ; the dead passes the gate of the setting sun to traverse the roads of darkness, and behold his father Osiris ; and with a [68] like 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.⁴³ 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.⁴⁴ 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 [69] 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.”⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ 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) tc look down upon the molten lava.⁴⁸

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 [70] 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.⁴⁹ 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 that ancient theory mentioned by Plutarch, that hell is in the air and elysium in the moon,⁵⁰ and again with the mediaeval conception of the moon as the seat of hell, a thought 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 [71] 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 ⁵¹ and the South Sea Islanders ⁵² 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.⁵³ 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.⁵⁴ 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 [72] 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.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶ 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.⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸ What thoughts of heaven were in the minds of the old Aryan poets, this hymn from the Rig-Veda may show :—

[73] “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 !”⁵⁹

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 [74] 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 oi Night, and its entrance in 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 mediaeval. 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 [75] 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 [76] 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.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹ 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.⁶² 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 [77] 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.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ When we compare 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.⁶⁵ 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 bananas 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 [78] 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 ?” etc.⁶⁶

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.⁶⁷ 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 [79] becomes intellectual, till at a higher grade even bodily form is gone, and after the last heaven of “Neither-eonsciousness-nor-unconsciousness” there follows Nirwâna, as ecstasy passes into swoon.⁶⁸

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.⁶⁹ 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.⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹ The Hades of the West African seems no [80] 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 punishments : 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 umbrae, 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.”⁷² 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.⁷³ 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 piu). The Roman Orcus holds the pallid souls, rapacious Orcus, sparing neither good nor bad. [81] 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.”⁷⁴

Where and what was Sheol, the dwelling of the ancient Jewish dead ? Though its description is so suggested by the dark, quiet, inevitable cavern-tomb, that the two conceptions melt together in Hebrew poetic phrase, nevertheless Sheol is not a mere general term for burial-places. Nations to whom the idea of a subterranean region of departed spirits was a familiar thought, with familiar words to express it, quite naturally use these words in Biblical translation as the equivalents of Sheol. 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 [82] 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., “èpesēt èàmenti” in the Coptic, “in infernum” in the Vulgate). Sheol (שְׁאוֹל‎ from שַאל) 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 ?” “Though they dig into Sheol, thence shall mine hand take them ; though they climb up to Heaven, thence will I bring them down.” Thither Jew and Gentile go down : “Whatman liveth, and shall not see death ? shall he deliver his soul from the hand of Sheol ?” 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, become weak as we ? Art thou made like unto us ?”

The rephaim, the “shades” of the dead, who dwell in Sheol, love not to be disturbed from their rest by the [83] 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.” ⁷⁵ 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.⁷⁶ Even among the higher savages, however, a connexion [84] 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 future reward and punishment 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 soul after death seems comparatively seldom to turn on a judicial system of reward and punishment. Such difference as they make 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 [85] 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.⁷⁷ 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.⁷⁸ 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 [86] 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.⁷⁹ 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 another 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 come 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.⁸⁰ 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.⁸¹ So Jean de Lery said of the rude Tupinambas of Brazil, that they think the souls of such as had 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 [87] have not striven to defend their country, will go to Aygnan, the Evil Spirit, to incessant torments.⁸² More characteristic, and probably more genuinely native than this, is the fancy 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.⁸³

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 spoilt 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.⁸⁴ 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 [88] slain in battle.⁸⁵ 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.⁸⁶ 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 the 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 childbirth, 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.⁸⁷ 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 [89] modem writer, the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.⁸⁸ 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 seem rather to 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.⁸⁹ 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 in this sense they call good and bad men, may be fairly looked on 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 [90] 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.⁹⁰ 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 some-what 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.⁹¹ 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.⁹²

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.⁹³ 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 [91] 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.⁹⁴ 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.⁹⁵ 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 [92] 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.”⁹⁶ 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.⁹⁷ 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 underworld 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.⁹⁸ 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 a richer, wiser, [93] 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.⁹⁹ Nor did Christianity scorn to borrow details from the religions it abolished. The narrative of a mediaeval 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.¹⁰⁰

The foregoing considerations having been duly weighed, it remains to call attention to the final problem, at what stage 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 [94] 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.”¹⁰¹ 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 where 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 to the dark hungry wretched [95] land where they are henceforth to dwell.¹⁰² 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 1622, 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.¹⁰³ 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.¹⁰⁴ If, now, looking at these records, it be granted that the idea of moral retribution involved in them is of genuine native origin, and that the goodness and wickedness for which men are to be 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. This by no means invalidates the view here put forward as to the historical development of this doctrine, but only shows at how early a stage it may have begun to take place. The general mass of evidence 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.¹⁰⁵

[96] 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 transmigration into animals, the connexion kept up between corpse and soul, the good and evil life beyond the tomb, the soul’s passage into the dark western Hades or to the bright sun in heaven—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 ! . . . Bub 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 the 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 [97] sacred birds. . . . I am pure ! I am pure ! I am pure!”¹⁰⁶

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. 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.¹⁰⁷ 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-[98] 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.¹⁰⁸ 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 [99] nis 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 him from the north, and with it the ugly hateful maiden who is his own wicked deeds, and the soul takes the fourth step into [100] 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 Mazada-yaçnian 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.”¹⁰⁹

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 [101] 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 [102] 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 the 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 [103] 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 [104] 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, [105] 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 modern African’s state of mind, 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. The Osiris-mummy carried round at Egyptian feasts symbolized not dissolution, but entrance into glory, to the nation who looked for their real life not on the banks of the Nile, but in the sunset regions of the mystic Amenti. 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 [106] Getae, 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 [107] 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.

¹ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 239 ; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 398.

² Arbousset and Daumas, p. 347 ; Casali’s, p. 247.

³ Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 20, etc.

⁴ Sir John Maundevile, ‘Voiage.’

⁵ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 215. Other cases in Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 58, 369, etc.

⁶ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic. Res.’ vol. ii. pp. 32, 64, and see ante, vol. i. p. 312.

⁷ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 271 ; Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. ii. p. 312.

⁸ Kalewala, Rune xvi. ; see Schiefner’s German Translation, and Castrén ‘Finn. Myth,’ pp. 128, 134. A Slavonic myth in Hanusch, p 412.

⁹ 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, etc.

¹⁰ See for example, various details in Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 369–75, etc.

¹¹ 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.

¹² Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. pp. 316–20.

¹³ Shortland, ‘Traditions of New Zealand,’ p. 150. The idea in this Maori story, that the living who tastes the food of the dead may not return, 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 n 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. The analogy of this with the Homeric episode of the lotus-eaters may be deep.

¹⁴ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ p. 139, etc.

¹⁵ 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.

¹⁶ Lucian. Philopseudes, pp. 21–5.

¹⁷ Plutarch. De Sera Numinis Vindicta, xxii. ; and in Euseb. Præp. Evang. xi. 36.

¹⁸ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 63.

¹⁹ Gregor. Dial. iv. 36. See Calmet, vol. ii. ch. 49.

²⁰ Augustin. Epist. clxiv. 2.

²¹ See Pearson, ‘Exposition of the Creed ;’ Bingham, ‘Ant. Chr. Ch.’ book x. ch. iii. Art. iii. of the Church of England was reduced to its present state by Archbp. Parker’s revision.

²² Codex Apocr. N. T. Evang. Nicod. ed. Giles. ‘Apocryphal Gospels,’ etc. tr. by A. Walker ; ‘Gospel of Nicodemus.’ The Greek and Latin texts differ much.

²³ The following details mostly from T. Wright, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory’ (an elaborate critical dissertation on the mediaeval legends of visits to the other world).

²⁴ 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.

²⁵ Molina, ‘Chili,’ vol. ii. p. 89.

²⁶ Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 496 ; Sahagun, iii. App. c. 2, x. c. 29 ; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 5.

²⁷ See Wright, l. c. etc. ; Alger, p. 391 ; Maundevile, etc.

²⁸ ‘History of Colon,’ ch. 61 ; Pet. Martyr. Dec. i. lib. ix. ; Irving, ‘Life of Columbus,’ vol. ii. p. 121.

²⁹ Stanbridge in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 299; G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab. W. Austr.’ p. 83 ; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 181.

³⁰ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 321 ; see part iii. p. 229.

³¹ Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 107. See also Burton, ‘W. and W. fr. W. Africa,’ p. 154 (Gold Coast).

³² Hesiod. Opera et Dies, 165. Pindar, Olymp, ii. antistr. 4. Callistrat. Hymn. in Ilgen, Scolia Græca, 10. Strabo, iii. 2, 13 ; Plin. iv. 36.

³³ 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,’ 2d. ed. London, 1772, p. 180 ; Wright, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory,’ pp. 64, 129.

³⁴ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 269.

³⁵ Harmon, ‘Journal,’ p. 299 ; see Lewis and Clarke, p. 139 (Mandans).

³⁶ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 140, 287 ; see Humboldt and Bonpland, ‘Voy.’ vol. iii. p. 132; Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 114.

³⁷ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 232 ; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 235.

³⁸ Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 317, etc.; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 474. See also Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 157.

³⁹ Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 195 ; Cross, l. c. p. 313. Turanian examples in Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 119.

⁴⁰ See below, pp. 79, 85.

⁴¹ Festus, s. v. “manalis,” etc.

⁴² Sophocl. Œdip. Tyrann. 178 ; Lucian. De Luctu, 2. See classic details in Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ art. ‘inferi.’

⁴³ Birch in Bunsen’s ‘Egypt,’ vol. v.; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. p. 368 ; Alger, p. 101.

⁴⁴ Smith, Virginia, in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. pp. 14, 41 ; vol. xii. p. 604 ; see below, p. 95.

⁴⁵ Thorpe, ‘Analecta Anglo-Saxonica,’ p. 115.

⁴⁶ Schirren, p. 151. See Taylor, ‘N. Z.’ p. 525.

⁴⁷ Meiners, vol. ii. p. 781 ; Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. p. 170.

⁴⁸ Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 160; Brinton, p. 288.

⁴⁹ 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.

⁵⁰ 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 ; Alger, l. c. ; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 80, 89 (souls in stars.)

⁵¹ 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.

⁵² Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 134 ; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 103; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 101, 114, 256.

⁵³ Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 393 ; Burton, ‘W. and W. fr. W. Afr.’ p. 454 ; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 295.

⁵⁴ Herodot. iv. 158, see 185, and Rawlinson’s note. See Smith’s ‘Dic. of the Bible,’ s. v. “firmament.” Eisenmenger, part i. p. 408.

⁵⁵ Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 367.

⁵⁶ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. p. 240 (but compare part v. p. 403); Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 176 ; Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 209.

⁵⁷ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. pp. 319, 328; see Martius, vol. i. p. 485 (Jumanas).

⁵⁸ J. G. Müller, p. 403 ; Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 496 ; Kingsborough, ‘Mexico,’ Cod. Letellier, fol. 20.

⁵⁹ Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 46; Roth in ‘Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Ges.’ vol. iv. p. 427.

⁶⁰ Cross, ‘Karens,’ l. c. pp. 309, 313 ; Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 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.

⁶¹ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 224; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 135.

⁶² D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. i. p. 364 ; Spix and Martius, ‘Brasilien,’ vol. i. p. 383 ; De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.

⁶³ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 258.

⁶⁴ Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 336.

⁶⁵ Edda: ‘Gylfaginning.’

⁶⁶ ‘Koran,’ ch. lv. lvi.

⁶⁷ Eisenmenger, ‘Entdecktes Judenthum,’ part i. p. 7.

⁶⁸ Hardy, ‘Manual of Buddhism,’ pp. 5, 24; Köppen, ‘Rel. des Buddha,’ vol. i. p. 235, etc.

⁶⁹ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 1636, p. 105.

⁷⁰ Sahagun, ‘Hist, de Nueva España,’ book iii. appendix ch. i., in Kings borough, vol. vii. ; Brasseur, vol. iii. p. 571.

⁷¹ Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ pp. 247, 254.

⁷² 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.

⁷³ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 126, etc.; Kalewala, Rune xv. xvi. xlv. etc.; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 780.

⁷⁴ Homer. II. ix. 405 ; Odyss. xi. 218, 475 ; Virg. Æu. vi. 243, etc. etc.

⁷⁵ 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. This argument is mainly from Alger, ‘Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life.’ ch. viii.; see F. W. Farrar in Smith’s ‘Dic. of the Bible,’ art. “hell.”

⁷⁶ The doctrine of reversal, as in Kamschatka, 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.)

⁷⁷ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 245, 397 ; see also Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 237 (Samoans); Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 105.

⁷⁸ Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 209.

⁷⁹ ‘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, etc.

⁸⁰ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 259.

⁸¹ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 77; Lescarbot, ‘Hist, de la Nouvelle France,’ Paris, 1619, p. 679.

⁸² Lery, ‘Hist. d’un Voy. en Brésil,’ p. 234 ; Coreal, ‘Voi. aux Indes Occ.’ vol. i. p. 224.

⁸³ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 430.

⁸⁴ ‘Journ. Ind. Arehip.’ vol. i. p. 325.

⁸⁵ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 1636, p. 104; see also Meiners, vol. ii. p. 769. J. G. Müller, pp. 89, 139.

⁸⁶ Chateaubriand, ‘Voy. en Amérique’ (Religion).

⁸⁷ 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 childbirth to heaven, bad men and those killed by the sword to hell.)

⁸⁸ Alger, ‘Future Life,’ p. 93.

⁸⁹ Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 300.

⁹⁰ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 397 ; see also Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i p. 243.

⁹¹ Brinton, p. 242, etc.

⁹² 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.

⁹³ Ellis, l. c. ; Moerenhout, ‘Voyage,’ vol. i. p. 433.

⁹⁴ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 378.

⁹⁵ Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter x. ; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401.

⁹⁶ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 181 ; see Mundy, ‘Narrative,’ vol. i. p. 832.

⁹⁷ Macpherson, p. 92. Compare Moerenhout, l. c. (Tahiti).

⁹⁸ Mason, l. c. p. 195. See also De Brosses, ‘Nav. aux Terres Australes,” vol. ii. p. 482 (Caroline Is.).

⁹⁹ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ pp. 136, 144. See Georgi, ‘Reise in 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.

¹⁰⁰ See T. Wright, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory.’

¹⁰¹ Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 171, 191 ; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Lang.’ p. xvi. See J. L. Wilson, p. 210.

¹⁰² Brebeuf in ‘Rel des Jes.’ 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.

¹⁰³ Smith, ‘New England,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 244.

¹⁰⁴ Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 303.

¹⁰⁵ The remarks on this subject in the 1st edition have been in some respects modified, with particular reference to the argument of Prof. Calderwood, on ‘Moral Philosophy and Savage Life’ in ‘Contemporary Review,’ Jan. 1872. (Note to 2nd Ed.).

¹⁰⁶ Bunsen, ‘Egypt’s Place in Univ. Hist.’ vol. iv. p. 618, etc. ; Birch’s Introduction to and translation of the ‘Book of the Dead,’ ibid. vol. v. ; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. v.

¹⁰⁷ For details see Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 47 ; Pauly, “Real Encyclop.’ and Smith’s ‘Dic. of Biog. and Myth.’

¹⁰⁸ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ new ser. vol. ii. p. 210. See Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’

¹⁰⁹ Spiegel, ‘A vesta,’ ed. Bleek, vol. iii. pp. 136, 163; see vol. i. pp. xviii. 90, 141; vol. ii. p. 68.

CHAPTER XIV.

ANIMISM (continued).

[108] 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, [109] 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 mediaeval 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 ideas 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, [110] 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,¹ and so onward to the declaration of Philo Judaeus, that souls demons, and angels differ indeed in name, but are in reality one,² and to the state of mind of the modern Roman Catholic priest, who is [111] 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).³ 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.⁴ 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 ;⁵ the Caribs said that, of man’s various souls, some go to the seashore and capsize boats, others to the forests to be evil spirits :⁶ among the Sioux Indians the fear of the ghost’s vengeance has been found to act as a check on murder ;⁷ 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.⁸ The Patagonians lived in terror of the souls of their wizards, which become evil demons after death;⁹ 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 [112] purpose to make them bring offerings.¹⁰ 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.”¹¹ 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.¹² 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.¹³ India even carries 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.¹⁴ 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 [113] 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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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 [114] 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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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.²⁰ 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.²¹ 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, [115] 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.²²

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 [116] 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.’”²³ We shall see 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 primaeval 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 [117] forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones upon the spirits of their ancestors.”²⁴

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.”²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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.²⁸ In Siam the lower orders scruple to [118] 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.²⁹ 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 honours 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 [119] 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.³⁰

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 “pitris” (patres, fathers) as they are called, preceded and followed by offerings to the greater deities, give to the worshipper merit [120] and happiness.³¹ 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.”³² 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 [121] 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. Theodoras, 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.³³ 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 iEsculapius, 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, [122] and at any rate they are patron-saints of the profession of medicine to this day.³⁴ Second, as to the actual state of hagiolatry in modern Europe, it is ohvious 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 !” ³⁵ To sum up the whole [123] 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 [124] 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 fore-tell—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 dsemoniacal 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 [125] 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 [126] 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.³⁶ The theory of disease-spirits is well stated in its extreme form among the Min tira, 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 so on, 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.”³⁷ 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.³⁸ Among the Dayaks of Borneo, “to have been [127] 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 acknowleged 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.³⁹ 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, etc.—being apportioned each to a deity who inflicts aches and pains and ailments there.⁴⁰ 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 [128] 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.⁴¹ 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.⁴² 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, etc.,” 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 [129] firing guns at it as it is supposed to be escaping.⁴³ 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.⁴⁴ 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.” ⁴⁵ 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 [130] Barolongs give a kind of worship to deranged persons, as under the direct influence of a deity ; while in East Africa the explanation of madness and idiocy is simple and typical—“he has fiends.”⁴⁶ 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, etc. ; 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.⁴⁷ 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 Eev. 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.”⁴⁸ 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 [131] 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.⁴⁹ 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.⁵⁰ 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 actount 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.⁵¹ 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 [132] 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.”⁵² 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.⁵³ 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.⁵⁴ 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 [133] 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.⁵⁵ Among the wild Veddas of Ceylon, the “devil-dancers” have to work themselves into paroxysms, to gain the inspiration whereby they profess to cure their patients.⁵⁶ 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.⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸ Among the Singpho of South-East Asia, when the “natzo” or conjuror 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.⁵⁹ 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 [134] 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.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹ 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 [135] 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 hury his friend’s disease with them.⁶²

The details of demoniacal possession among barbaric and civilized nations need no elaborate description, so simply do they continue the savage cases.⁶³ 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 possession 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 [136] 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.⁶⁴ In Birma, 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 Birmese 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 ?” ⁶⁵ Within our own domain of British India, [137] 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.⁶⁶

Opinions similar to these 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.” Thus Homer’s sick men racked with pain are tormented by a hateful demon (στυγερὸς δέ οἱ ἔχραε δαίμων). So to Pythagoras the causes of disease in men and beasts are demons pervading the air. “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 demoniac or spiritual [138] 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 (κακοδαιμονία). 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.⁶⁷

The Jewish doctrine of possession⁶⁸ 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.⁶⁹ Modern missionary works, such as have been cited [139] here, give the most striking evidence of the correspondence of these demoniac symptoms with such as may still be ohserved 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 with 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 recognized 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 in sweeping and the like out of times of worship, 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.⁷⁰

[140] 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 1788.⁷¹ A strong [141] sense of the permanence of the ancient doctrine may he 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.⁷² 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.⁷³ 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 ?’ Iui 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.”⁷⁴ To conclude the series with a modern spiritualistic instance, [142] 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.⁷⁵ 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 [143] 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 the 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, we find demoniacal influences brought forward to account for affections which scientific physicians now explain on a different principle, we must be careful 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.”

[144] The President de Brosses, a most original thinker of the last century, struck by the descriptions of the African worship of material and terrestrial objects, introduced the word Fétichisme as a general descriptive term,⁷⁶ 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 [145] 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 [146] 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 notions 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, we hear 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 conjurors from the affected part in the shape of a sharp stone.⁷⁷ 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.⁷⁸ 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 [147] that may injure the patient, and charged the faditra to take them away for ever, it is thrown away, and the malady with it.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰ 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 replanting 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 [148] man.⁸¹ 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.⁸² 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.⁸³ 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.⁸⁴ Thus, on the one hand, the spirit-theory of disease is brought into connexion with that sorcerer’s practice so extraordinarily 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 some account elsewhere, under the name of the “sucking-cure.”⁸⁵ On the other hand, we see 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 [149] 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 ;⁸⁶ 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 ;⁸⁷ 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.⁸⁸ 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.⁸⁹ One case of this [150] 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 the relics 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 ;⁹⁰ 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.⁹¹ And thus, from the savage who keeps and carries with his household property the cleaned bones of his forefathers,⁹² to [151] 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 re-animate their bodies;⁹³ 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 ;⁹⁴ 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;⁹⁵ 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.⁹⁶ 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, would 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 [152] 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.⁹⁷ Among the Salish Indians of Oregon, the conjurors 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.⁹⁸ 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.⁹⁹ 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.¹⁰⁰ Tatar folk-lore 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 [153] 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.¹⁰¹ 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 last century of the art of “laying” ghosts,¹⁰² 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 [154] 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.¹⁰³ 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.¹⁰⁴ Among the North American Indians, the fetish-theory seems involved in that [155] 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 buried 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 conjurors, and since stretched to take in all that concerns their art), use multitudes of other fetishes as means of spiritual influence.¹⁰⁵ 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.¹⁰⁶ 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 [156] 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.¹⁰⁷

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 [157] 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 chiefs 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.¹⁰⁸

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 have 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,” etc.), 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 [158] 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 [159] 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 onesided 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.¹⁰⁹

European life, lastly, shows well-marked traces of the ancient doctrine of spirits or mysterious influences inhabiting objects. Thus a mediaeval 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.¹¹⁰ Amulets are still carried in the most civilized countries of the world, by the [160] 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 we have seen 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.¹¹¹ 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 [161] 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 :¹¹² 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 ;¹¹³ and we hear of Brazilian tribes setting up stakes in the ground, and making offerings before them to appease their deities or demons.¹¹⁴ 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.¹¹⁵

[162] 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 ;¹¹⁶ 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 ;¹¹⁷ 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.¹¹⁸ 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.¹¹⁹ 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.¹²⁰ So in the New Hebrides worship was given to water-worn pebbles,¹²¹ while Fijian gods and goddesses had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.¹²² 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 [163] 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.¹²³ 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 ;¹²⁴ the stone under the great cotton-tree of every Khond village, shrine of Nadzu Pennu the village deity ;¹²⁵ 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 ; ¹²⁶ the stone kept in every house by the Baka-dâra and Betadâra, which represents their god Bûta, whom they induce by sacrifice to restrain the demon-souls of the dead from troubling them ;¹²⁷ 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.¹²⁸ The remarkable groups of standing-stones in India [164] 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.¹²⁹ 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.¹³⁰

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 [165] worship of the same rude objects, whose veneration no doubt dated from remote barbaric antiquity. As Mr. Grote says, speaking of Greek worship, “The priiritive 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 ἀργὸς) at Hyettos which “after the ancient manner” represented Herakles, the thirty such stones which the Pharseans in like archaic fashion worshipped for the gods, and that one which received such honour in Boeotian 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.¹³¹ 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.”¹³²

[166] 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 aerolite, was undoubtedly a local rite which the Prophet transplanted into his new religion, where it flourishes to this day.¹³³ The curious passage in Sanchonia-thon 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 Phoenician 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-cones, but how far these objects were of the character of altars, symbols, or fetishes, is a riddle.¹³⁴ 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 earfy middle ages,¹³⁵ 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 plausible solution is suggested for an interesting problem of Prehistoric Archaeology in Europe. Are the menhirs, cromlechs, etc.,idols, and circles [167] and lines of idols, worshipped by remotely ancient dwellers in the land as representatives or embodiments of their gods ? It may well be so : yet 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.¹³⁶ 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.¹³⁷ No savage ever showed more clearfy 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 habitualty 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 [168] 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 Phoenician 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, [169] I have given some account elsewhere.¹³⁸ 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 connection 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 actually animate has prevailed in the mind of the idolator.

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 divine personage, 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 [170] into the active image-fetish, that we are particularly concerned to understand it. Here it is reasonable to judge the idolator 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 wont listen to our prayers !” So they drag him in the dirt, and then, if they get what they [171] 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 of 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, with its 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.¹³⁹

[172] 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 pigmy heaven-descended figures of wax or wood ;¹⁴⁰ 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 “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.¹⁴¹ 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 [173] mind.¹⁴² 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.¹⁴³ 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.¹⁴⁴ 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 [174] 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, and 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.¹⁴⁵ 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 steaks and stones, or carved wooden images, from six to 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, [175] 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.¹⁴⁶ 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.¹⁴⁷

West Africa naturally applies its familiar fetish-doctrine [176] 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.¹⁴⁸ 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.”¹⁴⁹ 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.¹⁵⁰ 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 [177] 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.”¹⁵¹

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 wealth. 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 [178] in baskets, is a recognized manner of expelling disease-spirits.¹⁵² 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.¹⁵³

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.¹⁵⁴ Augustine cites as follows the opinions attributed to Hermes Trisme-gistus. 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 [179] 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.”¹⁵⁵ 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 [180] 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 patient’s 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.”¹⁵⁶

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, [181] 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 primaeval 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.”¹⁵⁷ 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; [182] 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.”)¹⁵⁸ 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 for our own selves and our feelings, we still talk of “animal spirits,” of being in “good and bad spirits,” only recalling with an effort the long past metaphysics which such words 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.¹⁵⁹ Nor is that [183] 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.

¹ See Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 134 ; J. G. Müller ‘Amerikanische Urreligionen,’ p. 171.

² Philo Jud. de Gigantibus, iv.

³ Rituale Romanum : De Exorcizandis Obsessis a Dæmonio.

⁴ Oldfield, ‘Abor. of Australia’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 236. See Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 181.

⁵ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 104.

⁶ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 429.

⁷ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 195; M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ p, 72.

⁸ Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 344 ; Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xxv.

⁹ Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 116 ; but cf. Musters, p. 180.

¹⁰ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 122.

¹¹ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 206.

¹² 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, etc.’ in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 677.

¹³ Shortt, ‘Tribes of India,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 192 ; Tinling, ‘Tour round India,’ p. 19.

¹⁴ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 101.

¹⁵ Sir J. Shore in ‘Asiatic Res.’ vol. iv. p. 331.

¹⁶ 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.

¹⁷ 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.

¹⁸ Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 105; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 182.

¹⁹ Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 88.

²⁰ Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 104 ; S. S. Farmer, p. 126; Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 81 ; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 108.

²¹ J. R. Forster, ‘Observations,’ p. 604 ; Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 258 ; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 234.

²² Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 123, 423. As to the connexion of the Vaximbas with the Mazimba of East Africa, see Waitz, vol. ii. p. 360, 426.

²³ 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.

²⁴ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 388–93. See Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 181, 194.

²⁵ Bailey in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. ii. p. 301. Compare Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 153.

²⁶ Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkerton, vol. viii. pp. 674–7. See Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 95 (Khonds) ; Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 183 (Santals).

²⁷ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 122 ; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 90. See Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 373.

²⁸ Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ vol. i. p. 3, vol. ii. p. 51; Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 672, 680, 723, 755.

²⁹ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. iii. p. 250.

³⁰ 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.

³¹ Manu, book iii.

³² Details in Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s. v. ‘inferi;’ Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Biog. and Myth. ;’ Meiners, Hartung, etc.

³³ Middleton, ‘Letter from Rome ; ‘Murray’s ‘Handbook of Rome.’

³⁴ L. F. Alfred Maury, ‘Magie, etc.’ p. 249 ; ‘Acta Sanctorum,’ 27 Sep.; Gregor. Turon. De Gloria Martyr, i. 98.

³⁵ 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 etc. etc.’ London (Washbourne), 1870.

³⁶ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 235 ; see Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 337. Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ pp. 183, 195.

³⁷ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 307.

³⁸ 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.

³⁹ ‘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.

⁴⁰ Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ pp. 97, 114, 125; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 48, 137.

⁴¹ Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 236.

⁴² Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 363, 395, etc., 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.

⁴³ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 250, part ii. pp. 179, 199, part iii. p. 498 ; M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ p. 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.

⁴⁴ Roman Pane, xix. in ‘Life of Colon’ ; in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87.

⁴⁵ 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 Martins, ‘Brasilien,’ vol. i. p. 70 ; Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 646 (Macusis).

⁴⁶ Casalis, ‘Basutos.’ p. 247; Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 147, etc. ; Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 21, etc. ; Burton, ‘Central Aft.’ vol. ii pp. 320, 354 ; Steere in ‘Journ. Anthrop. Inst.’ vol. i. 1871, p. cxlvii.

⁴⁷ Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Magaz. der Evang. Missions und Bibel-Gesellschaften,’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 139.

⁴⁸ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 388.

⁴⁹ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 163, 170.

⁵⁰ Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 103.

⁵¹ Mason in Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 414. Cross, l. c. p. 305.

⁵² Callaway, Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 183, etc., 259, etc.

⁵³ Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 116. See also Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 418 (Caribs).

⁵⁴ Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. p. 280 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 488.

⁵⁵ Falkner, l. c.

⁵⁶ Tennent, ‘Ceylon,’ vol. ii. p. 441. See Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 469.

⁵⁷ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 172.

⁵⁸ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 278.

⁵⁹ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 328, see vol. iii. p. 201, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 139. See also Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 59.

⁶⁰ 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.

⁶¹ Dos Santos, ‘Ethiopia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 686.

⁶² Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 57. See also Steinhauser, l. c. pp. 132, 139 ; J. B. Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xvi.

⁶³ Details from Tatar races in Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 164, 173, etc. Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 90 ; from Abyssinia in Parkyns, ‘Life in A.,’ ch xxxiii.

⁶⁴ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 143, vol. ii. pp. 110, 320.

⁶⁵ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii pp. 103, 152, 381, 418, vol. iii. p. 247, etc. 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. vil. pp. 701, 730, etc.

⁶⁶ 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. ; Spiegel, ‘Avesta.’

⁶⁷ Homer. Odyss. v. 396, x. 64 ; Diog. Laert. viii. 1 ; Plat. Phædr. Tim. etc. ; Pausan. iv. 27, 2 ; Xen. Mem. I. i. 9 ; Plutarch. Vit. Alex. De Orac. Def. ; Lucian. Philopseudes ; Petron. Arbiter, Sat. ; etc. etc.

⁶⁸ Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. Eisenmenger, ‘Entdecktes Judenthum,’ part ii. p. 454. See Maury, p. 290.

⁶⁹ 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 ; etc.

⁷⁰ For general evidence see Bingham, ‘Antiquities of Christian Church, book iii. ch. iv. ; Calmet, ‘Dissertation sur les Esprits ;’ Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. ; Lecky, ‘Hist, of Rationalism.’ Among particular passages are Tertull. Apolog. 23 ; De Spectaculis, 26 ; Chrysostora. Homil. xxviii in Matth. iv. ; Cyril. Hierosol. Catech. xvi. 16 ; Minuc. Fel. Octavius. xxi. ; Concil. Carthag. iv. ; etc., etc.

⁷¹ 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, etc ; Voltaire, ‘Questions sur l’Encyclopédie,’ art. ‘Superstition’; ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ art. ‘Possession.’

⁷² See Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. part ii. ch. ii.

⁷³ 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.

⁷⁴ Gaume, ‘L’Eau Bénite au Dix-Neuvième Siècle,’ 3rd ed. Paris, 1866, p. 353.

⁷⁵ West in ‘Spiritual Telegraph,’ cited by Bastian.

⁷⁶ (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.]

⁷⁷ Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii p. 337 ; Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 362 ; Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 235, etc. ; G. F. Moore, ‘Voeab. of S. W. Austr.’ pp. 18, 98, 103. See Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 195.

⁷⁸ Rocbefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 419, 508 ; J. G. Müller, pp. 173, 207, 217.

⁷⁹ Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 221, 232, 422.

⁸⁰ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 211, see 72.

⁸¹ Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 314.

⁸² Steinhauser, l. c. p. 141. See also Steere, ‘East Afr. Tribes,’ in ‘Jonrn. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. cxlviii.

⁸³ Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 352. See ‘Sindh,’ p. 177.

⁸⁴ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 275.

⁸⁵ ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ ch. x. See Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 116, etc.

⁸⁶ Plin. xxx. 14, 20. Cardan, ‘De Var. Rerum,’ cap. xliii.

⁸⁷ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 134, vol. ii. p. 247.

⁸⁸ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 122.

⁸⁹ 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.

⁹⁰ Catlin, ‘N. A. Indians,’ vol. i. p. 90.

⁹¹ J. L. Wilson, ‘W Africa,’ p. 394.

⁹² Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Rel. ‘vol. i. p. 305 ; J. G. Müller, p. 209.

⁹³ Mason, Karens, l. c. p. 231.

⁹⁴ Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 721–3.

⁹⁵ 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.)

⁹⁶ Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210. See Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 73 ; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 209, 262, 289, 401, 419.

⁹⁷ Darwin, ‘Journal,’ p. 458.

⁹⁸ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 320.

⁹⁹ Report of Jubbulpore Ethnological Committee, Nagpore, 1868, part i. p. 5.

¹⁰⁰ 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.

¹⁰¹ 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.

¹⁰² Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. p. 72.

¹⁰³ Herrera, ‘Hist. de las Indias Occidentales,’ Dec. i. ix. 3.

¹⁰⁴ Lery, Brésil, p. 249 ; J. G. Müller, pp. 210, 262.

¹⁰⁵ 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, etc. See Cranz, Grönland, p. 274.

¹⁰⁶ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 162, 221, 230 ; Meiners, vol. i p. 170.

¹⁰⁷ Bell in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 357.

¹⁰⁸ H. Rowley, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa,’ p. 217.

¹⁰⁹ Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 174 ; Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 56, etc., 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.

¹¹⁰ Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. iii. p. 255, etc. Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 171. Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 75–95, 225, etc. St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 46.

¹¹¹ Berkeley, ‘Concerning Motion,’ in ‘Works,’ vol. ii. p. 86.

¹¹² Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 196, part iii. p. 229

¹¹³ Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ dec. i. iii. 3.

¹¹⁴ De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.

¹¹⁵ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentaries Reales,’ i. 9 ; J. G. Müller, pp. 263, 311, 371, 387 ; Waitz, vol. iv p. 454 ; see below, p. 175.

¹¹⁶ Hahn, ‘Gramm, des Hereró,’ s. v. ‘omu-makisina.’

¹¹⁷ Kaufmann, ‘Central-Afrika,’ (White Nile), p. 131.

¹¹⁸ Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 518, 523.

¹¹⁹ Zollinger in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 692.

¹²⁰ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 337. See also Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 899.

¹²¹ Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ pp. 347, 526.

¹²² Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 220; Seemann, Viti, pp. 66, 89.

¹²³ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 193, etc., 204, etc. ; ‘Voyages au Nord,’ vol. viii. pp. 103, 410; Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iii. p. 120. See also Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 265, 276.

¹²⁴ 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.

¹²⁵ Macpherson, India, pp. 103, 358.

¹²⁶ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 177. See also Shortt, ‘Tribes of Neilgherries’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 281.

¹²⁷ Elliot in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. 1869, p. 115.

¹²⁸ Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 739.

¹²⁹ 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, etc. Prof. Liebrecht, in ‘Ztschr. für Ethnologie, vοl. v., p. 100, compares the field-protecting Priapos-hermes of ancient Italy, daubed with minium.

¹³⁰ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 142, 182, etc., see 221. See also Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 239. (Siah-push, stone offered to the representative of deity)

¹³¹ Grote, ‘Hist, of Greece,’ vol. iv. p. 132 ; Welcker, ‘Griechische Götterlehre,’ vol. i. p. 220. Meiners, vol. i. p. 150, etc. Details esp. in Pausanias; Theophrast. Charact. xvi. ; Tacit. Hist. ii. 3 ; Amohius, Adv. Gent. ; Tertullianus ; Clemens Alexandr.

¹³² 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.

¹³³ Sprenger, ‘Mohammad,’ vol. ii. p. 7, etc. Burton, El Medinah, etc. vol. ii. p. 157.

¹³⁴ Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10. Movers, Phönizier, vol. i. pp. 105, 569, and see index, ‘Säule,’ etc. See De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 135 (considers bætyl = beth-el, etc.).

¹³⁵ Lubbock, ‘Origin of Civ.’ p. 225. Leslie, ‘Early Races of Scotland, vol. i. p. 256.

¹³⁶ Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ p. 241. See also Meiners, vol. ii. p. 671 (speaking stones in Norway, etc.).

¹³⁷ Earl of Roden, ‘Progress of Reformation in Ireland,’ London, 1851, p. 61. Sir J. E. Tennent in ‘Notes and Queries,’ Feb. 7, 1852. See Borlase, ‘Antiquities of Cornwall,’ Oxford, 1754, book iii. ch. 2.

¹³⁸ ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ chap. vi.

¹³⁹ For general collections of evidence, see especially Meiners, ‘Geschichte der Religionem,’ vol. i. books i. and v. ; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. ; Waitz, ‘Anthropologie;’ De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ etc. Particular details in J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 393 ; Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 395 ; Castrén, ‘Finnische Mythologie,’ p. 193, etc.; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. ; Köppen, ‘Rel. des Buddha,’ vol i. p. 493, etc. ; Grote, ‘Hist, of Greece.’

¹⁴⁰ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 263; Meiners, vol. i. p. 163.

¹⁴¹ 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.

¹⁴² Fernando Colombo, ‘Vita del Amm. Cristoforo Colombo,’ Venice, 1571, p. 127, etc. ; 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.

¹⁴³ Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. pp. 71, 89 ; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 458 ; J. G. Müller, pp. 322, 371.

¹⁴⁴ Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 486 ; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 148 ; J. G. Müller, p. 642.

¹⁴⁵ Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ etc. p. 83 ; Taylor, pp. 171, 183, 212.

¹⁴⁶ J. R. Forster, ‘Obs. during Voyage,’ London, 1778, p. 534, etc. Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 281, etc., 323, etc. See also Earl, ‘Papuans,’ p. 84 ; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 78 (Nias).

¹⁴⁷ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 198.

¹⁴⁸ Hutchinson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 336 ; see Bastian, ‘Psychologie, p. 172.

¹⁴⁹ Steinhauser, in ‘Magaz. der Evang. Missionen,’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 131.

¹⁵⁰ Schlegel, Ewe-Sprache, p. xvi.

¹⁵¹ 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.)

¹⁵² Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 193, etc. ; Bastian, ‘Psych.’ p. 34, 208, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 293, 486. See ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 350 (Chinese.)

¹⁵³ Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. xvii. ; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 198, vol. ii. p. xxxv. 164, 284, 292, 485.

¹⁵⁴ Arnobius Adversus Gentes, vi. 17–19.

¹⁵⁵ Augustinus ‘De Civ. Dei,’ viii. 23: “at ille visibilia et contrectabilia simulacra, velut corpora deorum esse asserit ; inesse autem his quosdam spiritus invitatos, etc..... Hos ergo spiritus invisibiles per artem quandam visibilibus rebus corporalis materiæ copulare, ut sint quasi animata corpora, illis spiritibus dicata et subdita simulacra, etc.” See also Tertullianus De Spectaculis xii. : “In mortuorum autem idolis dæmonia consistant, etc.”

¹⁵⁶ 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, etc.”

¹⁵⁷ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 455. See Spiegel, ‘A vesta,’ vol. ii. p. 54.

¹⁵⁸ Porphyr. de Vita Pythagorse. Oken, ‘Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie,’ 2753.

¹⁵⁹ Suidas, s. v. ἐγγαστρίμυθος ; Isidor. Gloss s. v. ‘præcantatores ;’ Bastian, ‘Mensch.’ vol. ii. p. 578. Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. p. 269. Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 115.

CHAPTER XV.

ANIMISM (continued).

[184] 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 Spirilj—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 ; 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 [185] 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 irhabiting 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 natives of Tasmania: “They [186] 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 the majority were much of the nature and attributes of the goblins and elves of our native land.”¹ 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.”² 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 find its main attribute to be spite against themselves. Among the Algonquin Indians of North America, School-craft 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.”³ 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 [187] 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.” ⁴ 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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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 Pythagoras⁷ and Iamblichus,⁸ 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.⁹ 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 ; [188] 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 mediaeval 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 noonday, 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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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 [189] 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.”¹²

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 ;¹³ the evil “na” crouches on the stomach of the Karen ;¹⁴ the North American Indian, gorged with feasting, is visited by nocturnal spirits ;¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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 [190] 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;¹⁸ in New Zealand, where ancestral deities “form attachments with females and pay them repeated visits,” while in the Samoan Islands such intercourse of mischievous inferior gods caused “many supernatural conceptions ;”¹⁹ and in Lapland, where details of this last extreme class have also been placed on record.²⁰ From these lower grades of culture we may follow the idea 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.²¹ 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.²² Later theologians were less cautious, and grave argumentation on nocturnal intercourse with incubi and succubi was carried on till, at the height of mediaeval civilization, we find it accepted in full belief by ecclesiastics and lawyers. Nor are we to count it as an ugly but harmless superstition, when for example we find it set forth in the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII. in 1484, as an [191] 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.²³ 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. 1600.²⁴

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 [192] 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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, Eussian 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 [193] 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 re-animated 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 folk-lore. 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 [194] 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.²⁸

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.²⁹ Thus the visionary temptations of the Hindu ascetic and the mediaeval 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.³⁰ So South American Indians would carry brands or torches for fear of evil demons when they ventured into the dark.³¹ [195] Tribes of the Malay Peninsula light fires near a mother at childbirth, to scare away the evil spirits.³² 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 firebrand to keep off the spectral foes. Even in broad daylight, the Hindu lights lamps to keep off the demons,³³ a ceremony which is to be noticed again at a Chinese wedding.³⁴ 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.³⁵ Into modern times, the people of the Hebrides continued to protect the mother and child from evil spirits, by carrying fire round them.³⁶ 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 [196] the domestic animals.³⁷ 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 accensse, sive positpe fuerint, discedant principes tenebra-rum, et contremiscant, et fugiant pavidi cum omnibus ministris suis ab habitationibus illis, etc.” 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.” ³⁸

Animals stare and startle when we see no cause ; is it that they see spirits invisible to man ? Thus the Green-lander says that the seals and wildfowl are scared by spectres, which no human eye but the sorcerer’s can behold ;³⁹ and thus the Khonds hold that their flitting ethereal gods, invisible to man, are seen by beasts.⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹ So in old Scandinavia, the dogs could see Hela the death-goddess move unseen by men ;⁴² so Jew and Moslem, hearing the dogs howl, know that they have seen the Angel of Death come on his awful errand ;⁴³ while the [197] 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.⁴⁴ 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.⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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 [198] high-priest watched till he beheld the divine footprints, and then shouted to announce. “Our great god is come.”⁴⁷ 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.⁴⁸ 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 ; ⁴⁹ 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 footprint 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.⁵⁰ 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 spirits appear, act, speak, walk, eat, and so forth, they must produce tangible bodies by either condensing the air, or substituting [199] other terrestrial solid bodies capable of performing these functions.⁵¹

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.⁵² 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.⁵³ 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.⁵⁴

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 [200] 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.⁵⁵ In Tasmania, a native has been heard to ascribe his deliverance to the preserving care of his deceased father’s spirit, now become his guardian angel.⁵⁶ 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.⁵⁷ In Chili, as to guardian spirits, it has been remarked [201] 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.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰ In Asia, the Mongols, each with his patron genius,⁶¹ and the Laos sorcerers who can send their familiar spirits into others’ bodies to cause disease,⁶² are examples equally to the purpose.

Among the Aryan nations of Northern Europe,⁶³ 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.

[202] Ingrained in the Platonic system, the doctrine has its salient example in the warning spirit which Sokrates felt within him dissuading from wrong.⁶⁴ 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.⁶⁵ 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 kakodaemon of Brutus [203] which appeared to him by night in his tent: “I am thy evil genius,’’ it said, “we meet again at Philippi.”⁶⁶

As we study the shapes which the attendant spirits of the individual man assumed in early and mediaeval 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. Frances 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.⁶⁷ 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.⁶⁸ 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 [204] will not insist on the belief, provided that the general ministry of angels be accepted.⁶⁹ 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.”⁷⁰ 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).⁷¹ 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 mediaeval 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 distinct 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 [205] 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 filled their places and did 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.⁷² 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, termitehills, trees, crocodiles, apes, snakes, birds, and so on.⁷³ 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, we find at once traces of such primitive thought, and of its change under [206] new intellectual conditions. Knowing the thoughts of rude Turanian tribes of Siberia as to pervading spirits of nature, we are prepared to look for re-modelled 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.⁷⁴

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 [207] 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.⁷⁵ 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.⁷⁶ 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 we read 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.⁷⁷ Thus animism provided a theory of volcanos, 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 [208] a drink of rum. 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 Western 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.⁷⁹ 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 [209] and cramp, and holds with inexorable grasp its drowning victim:⁸⁰

“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 primaeval mythology are as souls which cause the waters 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.⁸¹ It would seem that creatures with such attributes come naturally into the category of spiritual beings, but already among the rude natives of Australia and Van Diemen’s [210] Land, in such stories as that of the bunyip which carries off the 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.⁸² 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.⁸³ “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.⁸⁴ 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.⁸⁵ Africa displays well the [211] 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.⁸⁶ 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 rein-deer’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 Wöh-handa, 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.⁸⁷ As for the water-worship prevailing among non-Aryan indigenes of British India, it [212] seems to reach its climax among the Bodo and Dhimal of the North-East, tribes to whom the local rivers are the local deities,⁸⁸ 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.⁸⁹ Turn to the classic world, and we but find the beliefs and 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.’

[213] 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.⁹⁰ 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,⁹¹ and in England Ecgbert’s Poenitentiale proscribes the like rites, “if any man vow or bring his offerings to any well” “if one hold his vigils at any well.”⁹² 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 [214] 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.” ⁹³

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.⁹⁴ 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.⁹⁵

The spirits of the tree and grove no less deserve our [215] 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.⁹⁶ 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.⁹⁷ 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.⁹⁸ 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.⁹⁹ So in America, the Ojibwa medicine-man has heard the tree utter its complaint [216] when wantonly cut down.¹⁰⁰ 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.¹⁰¹ 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.¹⁰² 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.”¹⁰³ 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 ;”¹⁰⁴ 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.¹⁰⁵

[217] 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 Birmah, before they cut down a tree, offer prayers to its “kaluk” (i.q., “ketah”), 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.¹⁰⁶ 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 [218] addressing himself to a senseless thing, which hears and knows nothing.¹⁰⁷ 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.¹⁰⁸ 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 [219] regions. Thus the sacred palm of Negra in Yemen, whose demon was propitiated by prayer and sacrifice to give oracular response,¹⁰⁹ or the tall oaks inhabited by the gods, where old Slavonic people used to ask questions and hear the answers,¹¹⁰ have their analogue in the prophetic oak of Dodona, wherein dwelt the deity, ‘ναῖεν δ’ ἐνὶ πυθμένι φηγοῦ.’¹¹¹ 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.’¹¹²

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.”¹¹³

How personal a creature the tree-nympth was to the classic mind, is shown in legends like that of Paraibios, [220] whose father, regardless of the hamadryad’s entreaties, cut down her ancient trunk, and in himself and in his offspring suffered her dire vengeance.¹¹⁴ 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.¹¹⁵ Such episodes mediaeval 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’ 1 tronco suo gridò : Perché mi schiante ?” ¹¹⁶

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.” ¹¹⁷

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 [221] 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 Kugaard 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.¹¹⁸ 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.¹¹⁹

In the remarkable document of mythic cosmogony, preserved by Eusebius under the alleged authorship of the Phoenician 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.”¹²⁰ 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 [222] 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.¹²¹ 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 funs 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 [223] forest; the baleful shapes of terror that glide at night through our own woodland are familiar still to peasant and poet.¹²² 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.¹²³ 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.¹²⁴ 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.¹²⁵ The Dayaks fasten rags of their clothes on trees at cross roads, fearing for their health if they neglect the custom ;¹²⁶ 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.¹²⁷ The divinities of African tribes [224] may dwell in trees remarkable for size and age, or inhabit sacred groves where the priest alone may enter.¹²⁸ Trees treated as idols by the Congo people, who put calabashes of palm wine at their feet in case they should be thirsty ; ¹²⁹ and among West African negro tribes father 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,¹³⁰ 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.¹³¹ 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, within the present [225] 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.¹³² 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.¹³³ 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.¹³⁴ 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 [226] spirits, and in this hallowed place offerings to the gods are made.¹³⁵

Here, then, among the lower races, is surely evidence enough to put on their true historic footing the rites of tree and grove which we find 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.¹³⁶ 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.¹³⁷ 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 Birbhum district of Bengal a great annual pilgrimage is made to a shrine in the jungle, to make offerings of rice and money and sacrifice animals to a certain ghost who dwells in a bela-tree.¹³⁸ In thoroughly Hindu districts we may see the pippala (Ficus religiosa) planted as the village tree, the “chaityataru” of Sanskrit [227] literature, while the Hindu in private life plants the banyan and other trees and worships them with divine honours.¹³⁹ 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 shamed 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.” ¹⁴⁰

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, etc., etc.”¹⁴¹ 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.¹⁴² The Keltic Heaven-god, whose image was a mighty oak, the white-robed Druids [228] climbing the sacred tree to cut the mistletoe, and sacrificing the two white bulls beneath, are types from another national group.¹⁴³ 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.¹⁴⁴ With Christianity comes a crusade against the holy trees and groves. Boniface hews down in the presence of the priests 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 idololatrise 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.¹⁴⁵ 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 [229] the patient carries to the wood some bread and salt in a clean rag, and leaving it with a prayer, comes home cured.¹⁴⁶ 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 Linnceus. Lastly, Jacob 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.¹⁴⁷

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 [230] 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.¹⁴⁸ 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.¹⁴⁹ How, indeed, can we 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.¹⁵⁰ 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.”¹⁵¹ 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.¹⁵² It is instructive to observe how naturally such personal intercourse between man and animal may pass into full worship, when the creature is powerful [231] 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.¹⁵³ 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.¹⁵⁴ 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.¹⁵⁵ 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.¹⁵⁶

Whether an animal be worshipped as the receptacle or [232] 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.¹⁵⁷ The Tongans never killed certain birds, or the shark, whale, etc., 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.¹⁵⁸ 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.¹⁵⁹ Every Samoan islander had his tutelary deity or “aitu,” appearing in some animal, an eel, shark, dog, turtle, etc., 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.¹⁶⁰ 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.¹⁶¹ If we pass to Sumatra, we shall find that the veneration paid by the [233] Malays to the tiger, and their hahit of apologizing to it when a trap is laid, is connected with the idea of tigers being animated by the souls of departed men.¹⁶² 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.¹⁶³ 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.¹⁶⁴ 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, etc., 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.¹⁶⁵ 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 [234] 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 he rid of them, we need only speak ill of the snake, at which they immediately stop their ears and run out of doors.”¹⁶⁶ 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.”¹⁶⁷

The cases of a divine ancestral soul worshipped as incarnate in an animal body, form a link between manes-worship and beast-worship, and this connexion is made otherwise in another department of the religion of the lower races, the veneration of a particular species of animal by a particular family, clan, or tribe. It is well known that numerous tribes of mankind connect themselves with, call themselves by the name of, and even derive their mythic pedigree from, some animal, plant, or thing, but most often an animal. Among the Algonquin Indians of North America, the name of such a tribe-animal, as Bear, Wolf, Tortoise, Deer, Rabbit, etc., serves to designate each of a number of clans into which the race is divided, a man belonging to each such clan being himself actually spoken of as a bear, wolf, etc., and the figures of these creatures indicating his clan in the native picture-writing. Such creatures must be, so far as possible, distinguished from the mere patron-animal of an individual, the “medicine” just mentioned among the American Indians. The name [235] or symbol of an Algonquin clan-animal is called “dodaim,” and this word, in its usual form of “totem,” has become an accepted term among ethnologists to describe similar customary surnames over the world, the system of dividing tribes in this way being called Totemism. The origin of totemism of course comes within the domain of mythology, while the social divisions, marriage arrangements, and so forth, connected with it, form a highly important part of the law and custom of mankind at certain stages of culture. It only comes within the province of religion so far as the clan-animals, etc., are the subjects of religious observance, or are actually treated as patron-deities. To some extent this seems to happen among the Algonquins themselves, some accounts describing the totem-animal as being actually regarded as the sacred object or “medicine” or protector of the family bearing its name and symbol.¹⁶⁸ This is the case among certain Australian tribes ; a family has some animal (or vegetable) as its “kobong,” its friend or protector, and a mysterious connexion subsists between a man and his tribe-animal, of which species he is reluctant to kill one, for it might be his own protector, while if his kobong be a vegetable, there are restrictions on his gathering it.¹⁶⁹ So in South Africa the Bechuana people are divided into clans : Bakuena, men of the crocodile ; Batlapi, of the fish ; Bataung, 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.¹⁷⁰ So in Asia, among the Kols of Chota-Nagpur, we find many of the Oraon and Munda clans named after animals, as Eel, Hawk, Crow, Heron, and they must not kill or eat what they are named after ; it is to be noticed, however, that this only forms one part of a system of tribal food-prohibitions.¹⁷¹ [236] Among the Yakuts of Siberia, again, each tribe looks on some particular animal as sacred, and abstains from eating it.¹⁷² These facts seem to indicate not mere accidental peculiarities, but a wide-spread common principle acting among mankind in the lower culture. Mr. M’Lennan, in a remarkable investigation, has endeavoured to account for much of the wide-spread animal-worship of the world by considering it as inherited from an early “totem-stage of society.”¹⁷³ If this view be more or less admitted as just, the question then arises, what is the origin of to-temism ? Sir John Lubbock, in his work on the Origin of Civilization,¹⁷⁴ and Mr. Herbert Spencer,¹⁷⁵ have favoured the idea of its springing from the really very general practice of naming individual men after animals, Bear, Deer, Eagle, etc., these becoming in certain cases hereditary tribe-names. It must be admitted as possible that such personal epithets might become family surnames, and eventually give rise to myths of the families being actually descended from the animals in question as ancestors, whence might arise many other legends of strange adventures and heroic deeds of ancestors, to be attributed to the quasi-human animals whose names they bore; at the same time, popular mystification between the great ancestor and the creature whose name he held and handed down to his race, might lead to veneration for the creature itself, and thence to full animal-worship. All this might indeed possibly happen, and when it did happen it might set an example which other families could imitate, and thus bring on the systematic division of a whole people into a number of totem-clans, each referred to a mythic animal ancestor. Yet, while granting that such a theory affords a rational interpretation of the obscure facts of totemism, we must treat it as a theory not vouched [237] for by sufficient evidence, and within our knowledge liable to mislead, if pushed to extremes. It offers plausible yet quite unsound explanations of points of mythology and theology which seem to have direct and reasonable explanations of their own. We may well shrink from using too confidently a method of myth-interpretation which can account for solar and lunar nature-myths, by referring them to traditions of human heroes and heroines who chanced to bear the names of Sun and Moon. As to animal-worship, when we find men paying distinct and direct reverence to the lion, the bear, or the crocodile as mighty superhuman beings, or adoring other beasts, birds, or reptiles as incarnations of spiritual deities, we can hardly supersede such well-defined developments of animistic religion, by seeking their origin in personal names of deceased ancestors, who chanced to be called Lion, Bear, or Crocodile.

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 reasonby being setup as sacred mysteries. Ancient Egypt was [238] 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 bull-dynasty of Apis, Horus wearing the head of his sacred hawk, Bubastis and her cat, Thoth and his cynocephalus and ibis, the cow-headed Hathor and the hippopotamus Typhon. 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. M’Lennan’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.¹⁷⁶ 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; [239] 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.¹⁷⁷ 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 Indians reverence to the rattlesnake, as grandfather and king of snakes, as a divine protector able to give fair winds or cause tempests ;¹⁷⁸ 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.”¹⁷⁹ 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 ; ¹⁸⁰ the Roman genius loci appearing in the form of the snake (Nullus enim locus sine [240] genio est, qui per anguem plerumque ostenditur) ;¹⁸¹ the old Prussian serpent-worship and offering of food to the household snakes ; ¹⁸² the golden viper adored by the Lombards, till Barbatus got it in his hands and the goldsmiths made it into paten and chalice.¹⁸³ 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.¹⁸⁴ 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.¹⁸⁵ In different ways, these Nâga tribes of South Asia are on the one hand analogues of the [241] Snake Indians of America, and on the other of the Ophio-genes 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.¹⁸⁶

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 ;¹⁸⁷ the snake as worshipped still by the Slave Coast negro, not for itself but for its indwelling deity ;¹⁸⁸ the snake kept and fed with milk in the temple of the old Slavonic god Potrimpos ;¹⁸⁹ the serpent-symbol of the healing deity Asklepios, who abode in or manifested himself through the huge tame snakes kept in his temples¹⁹⁰ (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 Phoenician serpent with its tail in its mouth, symbol of the world and of the Heaven-god Taaut, in its original meaning probably a mythic world-snake like the Scandinavian Midgard-worm, but in the changed fancy of later ages adapted into an emblem of eternity.¹⁹¹ 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.¹⁹² 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 [242] Hades ; - and it unequivocally belongs to the Wicked Serpent of the Zarathustrians, Aji Dahaka,¹⁹⁴ 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.¹⁹⁵ 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.¹⁹⁶

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, [243] 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.¹⁹⁷ 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 we learn 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.¹⁹⁸ According to Father Geronimo Boscana, the Acagchemen tribe of Upper California furnish a curious parallel to this notion. They [244] 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.¹⁹⁹ 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, etc. : “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.”²⁰⁰ 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.²⁰¹ Here, again, occurs a noteworthy correspondence with the ideas of a distant race. In Buyân, the island paradise of Russian myth, there [245] are to be found the Snake older than all snakes, and the prophetic Eaven, 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.²⁰² 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.²⁰³ 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.²⁰⁴ It seems as though some similar view ran through the doctrine of more civilized races, as in the well-known [246] 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.²⁰⁵ 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.²⁰⁶ 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).

¹ Bonwick, ‘Tasmaniens,’ p. 182.

² Oldfield in ‘Tr Eth. Soc.’ vol iii. p. 228.

³ 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.

⁴ Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 90. See also Cross, Karens, in ‘Journ. Amer. Or. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 315 ; Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 239.

⁵ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ p. 114, 182, etc.

⁶ J. L. Wilson, W. Afr.’ p. 218, 388 ; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 171.

⁷ Diog. Laert. Vita Pythagor. 32.

⁸ Iamblichus, ii.

⁹ Collected passages in Calmet, ‘Diss. sur les Esprits ;’ Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek,’ vol. ii. p. 263, etc. ; vol. vi. p. 49, etc. ; see Migne’s Dictionaries.

¹⁰ Calmet, ‘Dissertation sur les Esprits,’ vol. i. ch. xlviii.

¹¹ Gaume, ‘L’Eau Bénite au XIXme Siècle,’ p. 295, 341.

¹² Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i p. 331.

¹³ Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 555 ; Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 337.

¹⁴ Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 211.

¹⁵ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 226.

¹⁶ Rochefort, ‘Antilles,’ p. 419.

¹⁷ Grimm ‘D. M.’ p. 1193 ; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 832 ; St. Clair & 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. wudumœre (wood-mare) =echo.

¹⁸ ‘Vita del Amm. Christoforo Colombo,’ ch. xiii. ; and Life of Colon in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 84.

¹⁹ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 149, 389. Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 119.

²⁰ Högström, ‘Lapmark,’ ch. xi.

²¹ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 151. See also Borri, ‘Cochin-China,’ in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 823.

²² 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, Siivanos et Faunos, quos vulgo incubos vocant, improbos sæpe extitisse mulieribus, et earum appetisseac peregisse concubitum; et quosdam dæmones, quos Dusios Galli nuncupant, hanc assidue immunditiam et tentare et efficere ; plures talesque asseverant, ut hoc negare impudentiaa videatur ; non hinc aliquid audeo definire, utrum aliqui spiritus . . . possint etiam hanc pati libidinem; ut …. sentientibus feminibus misceantur.” See also Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 449, 479; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 332; Cockayne, ‘Leechdoms of Early England, ‘vol. i. p. xxxviii. vol. ii. p. 345.

²³ The ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ was published about 1489. See on the general subject, Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek,’ vol. vi. ; Ennemoser, ‘Magic,’ vol. ii. : Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. p. 256 ; Lecky, ‘Hist, of Rationalism,’ vol. i.

²⁴ 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.”

²⁵ J. R. Forster, ‘Observations during Voyage round World,’ p. 548.

²⁶ Cross, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 312.

²⁷ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 307.

²⁸ J. V. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ etc. p. 24; Calmet, ‘Diss. sur les Esprits,’ vol. ii. ; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1048, etc.; St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 49 ; see Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p. 409.

²⁹ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 268. Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 246, etc.

³⁰ Grey, ‘Australia, ‘vol. ii. 302. See also Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 180.

³¹ 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.

³² ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. pp. 270, 298 ; vol. ii. ‘N. S.’ p. 117.

³³ Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations,’ p. 531; Colebrooke in ‘As. Res.’ vol. vii. p. 274.

³⁴ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 77.

³⁵ 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 a 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.).]

³⁶ Martin, ‘Western Islands,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 612.

³⁷ St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 44.

³⁸ Rituale Romanum ; Benedictio Candelarum. Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. i. p. 46.

³⁹ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 267, see 296.

⁴⁰ Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 100.

⁴¹ Homer. Odyss. xvi. 160.

⁴² Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 632.

⁴³ Eisenmonger, ‘Judenthum,’ part i. p. 872. Lane, Thousand and One Nights,’ vol. ii. p. 56.

⁴⁴ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 162. Other localities in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 333.

⁴⁵ Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. ix. p. 795. The dirge is given above, p. 32.

⁴⁶ De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 46.

⁴⁷ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 79.

⁴⁸ Tractat Berachoth.

⁴⁹ 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.

⁵⁰ Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. i. p. 193. See Boeder, ‘Ehsten Abergl.’ p. 73.

⁵¹ Tertullian. De Came Christi, vi. ; Adv. Marcion. ii. ; Origen. De Princip. i. 7. See Horst, l. c. Calmet, ‘Dissertation,’ vol. i. ch. xlvi.

⁵² J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 217. See Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 402.

⁵³ Pallas, ‘Reisen,’ vol. i. p. 360.

⁵⁴ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1212; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 119; see Hyltén-Cavallius, part i. p. 178 (Sweden).

⁵⁵ Oldfield, ‘Abor. of Australia,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 240.

⁵⁶ Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 182.

⁵⁷ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 268 ; Egede, p. 187.

⁵⁸ Molina, ‘Chili,’ vol. ii. p. 86.

⁵⁹ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 418 ; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel,’ p. 171, 217.

⁶⁰ Waitz, vol. ii. p. 182 ; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 387; Steinhauser, l. c. p. 134. Compare Callaway, p. 327, etc.

⁶¹ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 75.

⁶² Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 275.

⁶³ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 829; Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube,’ part i. p. 92; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Mythus,’ p. 247.

⁶⁴ Menander, 205, ap. Clement. Stromat. v. Xenophon, Memorab. See Plotin. Ennead. iii. 4 ; Porphyr. Plotin.

⁶⁵ Paulus Diaconus : “Genium appellant Deum, qui vim obtineret rerum omnium generandarum.” Censorin. de Die Natali, 3 : “Enndem esse genium et larem, multi veteres memorise 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.

⁶⁶ 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.’

⁶⁷ Acta Sanctorum Bolland : S. Francisca Romana ix. Mart. Calmet, ‘Dissertation,’ ch. iv. xxx. ; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 140, 347, vol. ii. p. 10; Wright, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory,’ p. 33.

⁶⁸ Rochholz, p. 93.

⁶⁹ Bull, ‘Sermons,’ 2nd Ed. London, 1714, vol. ii. p. 506.

⁷⁰ Swedenborg, ‘True Christian Religion,’ 380. See also A. J. Davis, ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse,’ p. 38.

⁷¹ D. Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 7.

⁷² L. H. Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 64. Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 1636, p. 107. See Schoolcraft, ‘Tribes,’ vol. iii. p. 337.

⁷³ Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Magazin der Evang. Missionen,’ Basel, 1856; No. 2, p. 127, etc.

⁷⁴ Plath, ‘Religion der Alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 44.

⁷⁵ Oldfield, ‘Abor. of Austr.’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 232.

⁷⁶ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 47, 265.

⁷⁷ Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ in Ternaux-Compans, part xiv. pp. 132, 160. Compare Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. ii. p. 169.

⁷⁸ Creswick, ‘Veys,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi p. 359. See Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 106.

⁷⁹ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 1636, p. 108. Long’s Exp. vol. i. p. 46. See Loskiel, ‘Indians of N. A.’ part i. p. 45.

⁸⁰ For details of the belief in water-spirits as the cause of drowning, see ante, vol. i. p. 109.

⁸¹ 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 ‘Zeitschrifür Ethnologie,’ vol. i. (contains a general collection of details as to water-worship).

⁸² Compare Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 203, and Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 48, with Forbes Leslie, Brand, &c.

⁸³ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 267.

⁸⁴ 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.

⁸⁵ 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.

⁸⁶ Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 198 ; Steinhauser, l. c. p. 131 ; Villault in Astley, vol. i p. 668 ; Backhouse, ‘Air.’ p. 230 ; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales, vol. i. p. 90 ; Bastian, l. c.

⁸⁷ Castrén, ‘Vorlesungen über die Altaischen Völker,’ p. 114. ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 70. Atkinson, ‘Siberia,’ p. 444. Boeder, ‘Ehsten Abergläub. Gebräuche,’ ed. Kreutzwald, p. 6.

⁸⁸ 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.

⁸⁹ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 206, etc.

⁹⁰ Homer. Il. xx. xxi See Gladstone, ‘Juventus Mundi,’ pp. 190, 345, etc. etc.

⁹¹ 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.”

⁹² Poenitentiale Ecgberti, ii. 22, “gif hwilc man his ælmessan gehâte oththe bringe to hwilcon wylle ;” iv. 19, “gif hwâ his wæccan set ænigum wylle hsebbe.” Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 549, etc. See Hyltén-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ part i. pp. 131, 171 (Sweden).

⁹³ Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen and Mähren,’ p. 43, etc. Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 291, etc. Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p. 139, etc.

⁹⁴ St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 46. Similar ideas in Grohmann, p. 44. Eisenmenger, ‘Entd. Judenthum,’ part i. p. 426.

⁹⁵ Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. p. 158. Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 366, etc. Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom. 2nd Series,’ p. 40, etc. Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races of Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 156, etc.

⁹⁶ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 307.

⁹⁷ Beeker, Dyaks, in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 111.

⁹⁸ Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 301.

⁹⁹ S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ p. 127.

¹⁰⁰ Bastian, ‘Der Baum in vergleichender Ethnologie,’ in Lazarus and Steinthal’s ‘Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie,’ etc. vol. v. 1868.

¹⁰¹ Chr. Colombo, ch. xix. ; and in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87.

¹⁰² Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ pp. 205, 243.

¹⁰³ Waitz, vol. ii. p. 188.

¹⁰⁴ Bosman, letter 19, and in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 500.

¹⁰⁵ 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.

¹⁰⁶ 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.

¹⁰⁷ Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 100, 443.

¹⁰⁸ Fergusson, ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ pl. xxiv. xxvi. etc.

¹⁰⁹ Tabary in Bastian, l. c. p. 295.

¹¹⁰ Hartknoch, ‘Alt-und Neues Preussen,’ part i. ch. v.

¹¹¹ See Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclopedie.’ Homer. Odyss. xiv. 327, xix. 296.

¹¹² Hymn. Homer. Aphrod. 257.

¹¹³ Ausonii Idyll. De Histor. 7.

¹¹⁴ Apollon. Rhod. Argonantica, ii. 476. See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl. vol. iii. p. 57.

¹¹⁵ Ovid. Metamm. i. 452, ii. 345, xi. 67.

¹¹⁶ Dante, ‘Divina Commedia,’ ‘Inferno,’ canto xiii.

¹¹⁷ Ariosto, ‘Orlando Furioso,’ canto vi.

¹¹⁸ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 615, etc. Bastian, ‘Der Baum,’ l. c. p. 297; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 313.

¹¹⁹ Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 57, see 183.

¹²⁰ Euseb. ‘Prsep. Evang.’ i. 10.

¹²¹ Further details as to tree-worship in Bastian, ‘Der Baum,’ etc. here cited ; Lubbock, ‘Origin of Civilization,’ p. 206, etc. ; Fergusson, ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ etc.

¹²² Bastian, ‘Der Baum,’ l. c. etc.

¹²³ Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. viii.

¹²⁴ Darwin, ‘Journal,’ p. 68.

¹²⁵ Polack, ‘New Z.’ vol. ii. p. 6 ; Taylor, p. 171, see 99.

¹²⁶ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 89.

¹²⁷ Wallace, ‘Eastern Archipelago,’ vol. i. p. 338.

¹²⁸ Prichard, ‘Nat. Hist, of Man,’ p. 531.

¹²⁹ Merolla in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 236.

¹³⁰ Lubbock, p. 193; Bastian, l. c. ; Park, ‘Travels,’ vol. i. pp. 64, 106.

¹³¹ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 86, etc. 191, etc. ; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 363 ; Simpson, ‘Journey,’ vol. ii. p. 261.

¹³² Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergläubische Gebräuche,’ etc. ed. Kreutzwald, pp. 2, 112, 146.

¹³³ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 165, 173.

¹³⁴ Macpherson, p. 61.

¹³⁵ Dalton, ‘Kola,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 34. Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. i. p. 134, vol. iii. p. 252.

¹³⁶ 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, etc. etc.

¹³⁷ 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, etc.

¹³⁸ Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ pp. 131, 194.

¹³⁹ Boehtlingk & Roth, s. v. ‘chaityataru.’ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 204.

¹⁴⁰ Ovid. Metamm. viii. 741.

¹⁴¹ Cato de Re Rustica, 139 ; Plin. xvii. 47.

¹⁴² Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 98, 229. Hartknoch, part i. ch. v. vii. ; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 67.

¹⁴³ Maxim. Tyr. viii. ; Plin. xvi. 95.

¹⁴⁴ Tacit. Germania, 9, 39, etc. ; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 66.

¹⁴⁵ Hyltén-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ part i. p. 142.

¹⁴⁶ Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p. 153, see 238.

¹⁴⁷ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 62, etc.

¹⁴⁸ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 276.

¹⁴⁹ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Comentarios Reales,’ i. ch. ix. etc.

¹⁵⁰ Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 303.

¹⁵¹ Petron. Arb. Fragm. ; Statius, iii. Theb. 661.

¹⁵² See ante, ch. xi.

¹⁵³ Mouhot, ‘Indo-China,’ vol. i. p. 252.

¹⁵⁴ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France, ‘vol. v. p. 443.

¹⁵⁵ W. M. Wood in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 36.

¹⁵⁶ 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.

¹⁵⁷ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i p. 336.

¹⁵⁸ Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ p. 126 ; Mariner, vol. ii. p. 106.

¹⁵⁹ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 217, etc.

¹⁶⁰ Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 238.

¹⁶¹ Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ ch. iv.

¹⁶² Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 292.

¹⁶³ 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.

¹⁶⁴ See anté, p. 8 ; Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 196.

¹⁶⁵ Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ l. c. p. 133. J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr. pp. 210, 218. Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xv.

¹⁶⁶ 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.

¹⁶⁷ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 196, see 228.

¹⁶⁸ James, ‘Long’s Exp.’ vol. i. ch. xv. ; John Long, ‘Voyages and Travels, p. 86. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 190. See ‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 286.

¹⁶⁹ Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 228.

¹⁷⁰ Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 211 ; Livingstone, p. 13.

¹⁷¹ Dalton in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 86.

¹⁷² Latham, ‘Descr. Eth. ‘vol. i. p. 364.

¹⁷³ J. F. M’Lennan in ‘Fortnightly Review,’ 1869–70.

¹⁷⁴ Lubbock, ‘Origin of Civilization,’ p. 183.

¹⁷⁵ Spencer in ‘Fortnightly Review,’ 1870.

¹⁷⁶ Herod, ii. ; Plutarch, De Iside & Osiride ; Strabo, xvii. 1 ; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. i. ch. iv. etc. Bunsen, ‘Egypt’s Place in Univ. Hist,’ 2nd Edition, with notes by Birch, vol. i.

¹⁷⁷ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 195, etc.

¹⁷⁸ Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 231 ; Brinton, p. 108, etc.

¹⁷⁹ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Comentarios Reales,’ i. 9.

¹⁸⁰ Herodot. viii. 41.

¹⁸¹ Servius ad Æn. v. 95.

¹⁸² Hartknoch, ‘Preussen,’ part i. pp. 143, 162.

¹⁸³ Grirnm, ‘D. M.’ p. 648.

¹⁸⁴ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 650. Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube,’ etc. vol. i. p. 146. Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 644. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ etc., p. 78. Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p. 175.

¹⁸⁵ Fergusson, ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ p. 55, etc. pl. xxiv. M. Lennan, l. c. p. 563, etc.

¹⁸⁶ Strabo, xiii. 1, 14.

¹⁸⁷ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 62, 585.

¹⁸⁸ J. B. Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xiv.

¹⁸⁹ Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 217.

¹⁹⁰ Pausan. ii. 28 ; Ælian. xvi. 39. See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. ii. p. 734.

¹⁹¹ Macrob. Saturnal. i. 9. Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 500.

¹⁹² Details such as in Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part i. pp. 38, 414, may be ascribed to Christian intercourse. See Brinton, p. 121.

¹⁹³ Lepsius, ‘Todtenbuch’ and Birch’s transl. in Bunsen’s ‘Egypt,’ vol. v.

¹⁹⁴ Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Bleek, vol. ii. p. 51, vol. iii. p. 35.

¹⁹⁵ Epiphan. Adv. Hæres. xxxvii Tertullian. De Præscript, contra Hæreticos, 47.

¹⁹⁶ 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.

¹⁹⁷ Comte, ‘Philosophie Positive,’ vol. v. p. 101.

¹⁹⁸ Turner ‘Polynesia,’ p. 242.

¹⁹⁹ Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 105.

²⁰⁰ Acosta, ‘Historia de las Indias,’ book v. c. iv. ; Rivero & Tschudi, pp. 161, 179 ; J. G. Müller, p. 365.

²⁰¹ Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jes. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p .18. Lafitau, ‘Mœurs des Sauvages,’ vol. i. p. 370. See also Waitz, vol. iii. p. 194; Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 327.

²⁰² Ralston, ‘Songs of the Russian People,’ p. 375. The Slavonic myth of Buyán, with its dripping oak and the snake Garafena lying beneath, ia obviously connected with the Scandinavian myth of the dripping ash. Yggdrasill, the snake Nidhögg below, and the two Swans of the Urdhar-fount, parents of all swans.

²⁰³ Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 162.

²⁰⁴ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ pp. 106, 160, 189, etc.

²⁰⁵ Eisenmenger, ‘Judenthum,’ part ii. p. 376; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 194.

²⁰⁶ De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 58.

CHAPTER XVI.

ANIMISM—continued.

[247] 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-god—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 [248] 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 goverment 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 commonalty, 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, whose dominion thus stretches far and wide over the world, are not, any more than the lower spirits, creations of a civilized theology. In the rudest 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, reigning deities make their appearance in the spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe. These tieings need by no [249] means correspond in nature and function between tribe and tribe, yet for the most part each is a definite theological figure with a definite meaning and origin, and as such recurs in many districts, while its definition finds its proper pigeon-hole in the ethnographers generalization. This state of things comes into view at a glance. Even 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.¹ 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.² In North America the description of a solemn Algonquin sacrifice introduces us to 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.³ 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.⁴ 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 [250] 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.⁵ In West Africa, let us take an example 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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, [251] grove and temple, and from these the worshipper could pass to gods of flowers or of pulque, of hunters and gold-smiths, 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ In modern India, Brahma-Vishnu-Siva reign prominent 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 Surya 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.¹¹

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 [252] 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 [253] Indian Miehabu 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 eighty years ago, in the tirst 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 [254] 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.¹² If we would have examples nearer home, we may trace the evil demon Aeshma Daeva of the ancient Persian religion becoming the Asmo-deus 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 Vizli-puzli 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. [255] 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 describes 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 [256] 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 “Master of Heaven,” the Heaven-god, but it may expand into a yet more general thought of divinity in the Great Spirit in Heaven.¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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 [257] 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.”¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷

With such evidence perfectly accords the history of the [258] Heaven-god among our Indo-European race. The being adored by the primitive Aryan 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 Aryan 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 Zεὺς 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 tnat 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 [259] 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.¹⁸ 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. The Dinkas of the White Nile, with a thought which travellers in their land can well understand, seem to identify their heaven-dwelling Creator with the all-producing Great Rain, under the name of Dendid ; among the Da-maras 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.¹⁹ Pachacamac, the Peruvian world-creator, has set the Rain-goddess to pour waters over the land, and send down hail and snow.²⁰ 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.²¹ 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 [260] 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 forests 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.²² 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 Burus 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.²³ It was to Ukko the [261] 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.”²⁴

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 !” ²⁵ 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. Aforetime 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.²⁶ In later ages, when drought parched the fields of the mediaeval 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.

[262] 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.²⁷ 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.²⁸ 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., [263] Mahoya (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.²⁹ 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.³⁰ 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.”³¹

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 [264] who have forgotten their Stone Age) flings down from heaven the stone hatchets which are found in the ground, and preserved as sacred objects.³² 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.³³ Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus the Thunderer is Ilya, in whose name mytholo-gists 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.³⁴ 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, we hear 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 [265] 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 “uk-konen,” that is, “a little ukko,” and when it lightens they say, “There is Ukko striking fire !”³⁵

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 ; Tvash-tar 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 Aryan 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.”³⁶ 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 Olym-pos. In like manner the Jupiter Capitolinus of Rome is himself Jupiter Tonans :

[266] “Ad penetrale Numæ, Capitolinumque Tonantem.”³⁷

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 !” ³⁸ 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 forsaeho 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.³⁹

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 Shawondasee the South Wind, the wild and cruel North [267] 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.⁴⁰ 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 [268] which he cannot catch or prison, so that it almost always blows.⁴¹ 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.⁴² 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 ;⁴³ 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.” ⁴⁴ Such instances from Allophylian mythology⁴⁵ show types which are found developed in full vigour by the Aryan races. In the Vedic hymns, the Storm-gods, the Maruts, toss the clouds across the surging sea ; Indra the Heaven-god, with the swift Maruts who break through the stronghold, finds in their hiding places the bright cows, the days.⁴⁶ 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 lising all, besought her each
To sit beside him ; she with their requests
Refused compliance, and addressed them thus,” &c.

[269] 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.⁴⁷ 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.”

Jacob Grimm has defined Odin or Woden as “the all-penetrating creative and formative power.” But we can hardly ascribe such abstract conceptions to his barbaric worshippers. As little may we seek his real nature 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 must 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.⁴⁸ 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, “DaWind, hast du Mehl für dein Kind, aber aufhören musst du !”⁴⁹

[270] 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 mans 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.⁵⁰ In the list of fetishdeities 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.⁵¹ 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 !”⁵²

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.⁵³ 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 [271] 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.⁵⁴ 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 [272] Heaven to the Heaven-god. In the designation of Maaemä, Earth-mother, given to the earth itself, we seem to trace 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 whem 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.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶

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 :—

[273] “Tanno Vâto mayobhu vâtu bheshajam tanmâtâ Prithivî tatpitâ Dyauh.” ⁵⁷

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.⁵⁸ The Romans acknowledged her plain identity as Terra Mater, Ops Mater.⁵⁹ 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.” ⁶⁰ 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,⁶¹ 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, [274] 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.⁶²

Water-worship, as we have 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 Thunder-bird.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ 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.

[275] 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.”⁶⁵ 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.⁶⁶ 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 Bosnian’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 Burtons 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 ‘Ag-bwe,’ 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 [276] 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.’’⁶⁷ “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.⁶⁸ In South America the idea of the divine Sea is clearly marked in the Peruvian worship of Mama-cocha, Mother Sea, giver of food to men.⁶⁹ 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.⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹

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.⁷² 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, [277] 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.”⁷³ Here is direct nature-worship in its extremest sense of fetish-worship. But in the anthropomorphic stage appear that dim prse-Olympian figure of Nēreus the Old Man of the Sea, father of the Nereids in their ocean caves, and the Homeric Poseidon the Earth-shaker, who stables his coursers in his cave in the -ZEgean 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.⁷⁴

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 [278] 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 our present purpose to carry a line of some of the best-defined facts which seem 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.⁷⁵ 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 aerial 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.⁷⁶ In the elaborately [279] 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.⁷⁷ 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.⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹

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 [280] 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.⁸⁰ The Ainos of Yesso have many gods, but Fire is the principal deity, to whom, not to Sun, Moon, and Stars, they pray for all they need.⁸¹ 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 from a Mongol wedding-song to the personified Fire, seems curiously to acknowledge the precedence of the ancient friction-fire made by the wooden drill, over that made by the more modern flint and steel. “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 !”⁸² 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.⁸³

[281] The fire-worship of Assyria, Chaldaea, Phoenicia, is famous in history, the fire-pillars, the temple of the Tyrian Baal where stood no image but the eternal fire burning on the hearth, the Canaanitish Moloch to whom (whether in actual or symbolic sacrifice) children passed through the fire. “And they built the high places of Baal, in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through to Moloch.” ⁸⁴ But the records which have reached us of these ancient deities are obscure and complex in their definition, and their study is perhaps more valuable in compiling the history than in elucidating the principles of religion. 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 its 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 ritualistic Hinduism of our own day, where Agni still, as among the ruder Mongol hordes north of the Himalaya, is new-born of the twirling fire-sticks, and receives the melted butter of the sacrifice.⁸⁵ Among the [282] records of fire-worship in Asia, is the account in Jonas Hanway’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, etc. 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.⁸⁶

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).⁸⁷ 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, [283] 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.⁸⁸ 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.” ⁸⁹ 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. But the development of the more philosophic Zarathustrian doctrines has led to a result common in the history of religion, that the ancient distinctly [284] meant rite has dwindled to a symbol, to be pieserved 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.⁹⁰ 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 JEtna 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.’⁹¹

In Greek civil life, Hestia sat in house and assembly as [285] 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 Vestae simulacra putavi:
Mox didici curvo nulla subesse tholo.
Ignis inextinctus templo celatur in illo.
Effigiem nullam Vesta nec ignis habet.”⁹²

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.⁹³ 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.⁹⁴

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 [286] 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.⁹⁵ 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 [287] 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.⁹⁶

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 represented 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.⁹⁷ Among the [288] 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.⁹⁸

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 [289] 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.⁹⁹ Another nation of sun-worship -pers 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 tonat-zuli, were let fly up sunward as messengers, and the ceremony was over.¹⁰⁰ 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 [290] of its divine mythology, and attributes especially to the Sun the title of Teotl, God.¹⁰¹ 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 that 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.¹⁰² It is thus, lastly, in the far more celebrated native theocracy to the south. In the great 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 em 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.¹⁰³ [291] 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,¹⁰⁴ 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.¹⁰⁵ 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.¹⁰⁶ 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.¹⁰⁷ 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 [292] 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.¹⁰⁸

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 Surya, knower of beings, the all-revealer before whom the stars depart with the nights like thieves. We approach Surya (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 rite and appointed festival, 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 [293] 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 !”¹⁰⁹ 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 dawning 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 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 Bacchus 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.”¹¹⁰ [294] 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.¹¹¹ 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.¹¹² It is true that Caesar’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 !”¹¹³ 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 the Slavonic Perun and 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 [295] 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 Har-p-chroti (Harpokrates) the new-born Sun of the winter solstice.¹¹⁴ 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,¹¹⁵ agree perfectly with the recognition in Palmyra of the Lord Sun, Baal-Shemesh, and with the identification of the Assyrian Bel and the Tyrian Baal with the 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.¹¹⁶ 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 Phoenicians and Egyptians as holding Sun, Moon, and Stars to be gods, sole causes of the generation and destruction of all things.¹¹⁷

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 [296] 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 ;¹¹⁸ 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.”¹¹⁹ 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).¹²⁰ 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.¹²¹ 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, etc.”¹²²

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 sunfestivals, [297] 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.¹²³ 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 by Aurelian about 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. [298] 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 Nyssa 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.¹²⁴ 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.”¹²⁵ 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.¹²⁶ 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.”

[299] 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 hold 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.¹²⁷ 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 !” ¹²⁸ 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. Begarding 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.” ¹²⁹ With a somewhat different turn of mythic fancy, the Hurons seem to have considered Aataentsic the Moon as maker of the earth and man, and grandmother of Iouskeha the Sun, with whom she governs the world.¹³⁰ 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 [300] first glimpse 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 !” etc.¹³¹ These people keep holiday at new-moon, as indeed in many countries her worship is connected with the settlement of periodic festivals. 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.¹³² The Congo people fell on their knees, or stood and clapped their hands, crying, “So may I renew my life as thou art renewed !”¹³³ 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.¹³⁴

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 [301] North-America,¹³⁵ the Ainos of Yesso,¹³⁶ the Bodos of North-East India,¹³⁷ the Tunguz of Siberia.¹³⁸ 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 ;¹³⁹ 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; ¹⁴⁰ 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.¹⁴¹ 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.¹⁴² 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 there is to be seen the Carthaginian goddess, whom there is good reason to look on as herself wholly or partly of lunar nature. This is the list of deities invoked : “Before Zeus and Hera and [302] 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.”¹⁴³ 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.¹⁴⁴ In Egyptian theology, not to discuss other divine beings to whom a lunar nature has been ascribed, it is at least certain that Aah is the Moon in absolute personal divinity.¹⁴⁵ In Aryan theology, the personal Moon stands as Selene beside the more anthropomorphic forms of Hekatē and Artemis,¹⁴⁶ as Luna beside the less understood Lucina, and Diana with her borrowed attributes,¹⁴⁷ while our Teutonic forefathers were content with his plain name of Moon.¹⁴⁸ 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.¹⁴⁹ 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 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 [303] is performed, while practical peasant wit dwells on the ill-luck of having no piece of silver when the new moon is first seen.¹⁵⁰

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.

¹ Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 362 ; Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 228 ; Lang, ‘Queensland,’ p. 444.

² Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 583.

³ Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. America,’ part i. p. 43.

⁴ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 322.

⁵ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i p. 180.

⁶ J. B Schlegel, ‘Schüssel zur Ewe Sprache,’ p. xii. ; compaer Bowen, ‘Yoruba Lang.’ in ‘Smithsonian Contrib.’ vol. i. p. xvi.

⁷ Samoiedia, in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 531.

⁸ Macpherson, p. 84, etc.

⁹ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. ch. i.

¹⁰ Gladstone, ‘Juventus Mundi,’ ch. vii. etc.

¹¹ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii.

¹² ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. pp. 33, 255, 275, 338, vol. ii. p. 692.

¹³ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des. Jes.’, 1636, p. 107 ; Lafitau, ‘Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains,’ vol. i. p. 132. Schoolcraft, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 36, etc. 237. Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ pp. 48, 172. J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 119.

¹⁴ Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 203.

¹⁵ Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 168, etc. ; Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ p.76.

¹⁶ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 7, etc.

¹⁷ Plath, ‘Religion und Cultus der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 18, etc. ; part ii. p. 32; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 396. See Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2d. 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.

¹⁸ 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.

¹⁹ Lejean, ‘Le Haut-Nil,’ etc., in Rev. D. M. Apr. 1, 1862. Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 169 (W. Afr.) p. 416 (Damaras).

²⁰ Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.’ p. 9 ; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 318, 368.

²¹ Ibid, pp. 496–9 ; Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ pp. 40, 72.

²² Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 89, 355.

²³ Dalton, Kols, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 34. Compare 1 Kings xviii.

²⁴ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 36 ; Kalewala, Rune ii. 317.

²⁵ Marc. Antonin. v. 7. ‘Ἐὐχὴ Ἀθηναίων, ὖσον, ὖσον, ὦ φίλε Ζεῦ, κατὰ τῆς ἀρούρας τῶν Ἀθηναίων καὶ τῶν πεδίων.’

²⁶ Petron. Arbiter. Sat xliv. “Antea stolatæ ibant nudis pedibus in clivum, passis capillis, mentibus puris, et Jovem aquam exorabant. Itaque statim urceatim plovebat : aut tune aut nunquam ; et omnes redibant udi tanquam mures.” See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 160.

²⁷ Pr. Max v. Wied, ‘N. Amer.’ vol. ii. pp. 152, 223 ; J. G. Müller, p. 120 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 179.

²⁸ Keating, ‘Narr.’ vol. i. p. 407; Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ p. 71; Brinton, p. 150, etc. ; see M ‘Coy, ‘Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 363.

²⁹ De la Borde, ‘Caraïbes,’ p. 530 ; Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 431.

³⁰ 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, etc.).

³¹ Brinton, p. 153 ; Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ Dec. v. 4. J. G. Müller, p. 327. ‘Rites and Laws of the Yneas,’ tr. & ed. by C. R. Markham, p. 16, see 81 ; Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 86.

³² Bowen, ‘Yoruba Lang.’ p. xvi. in ‘Smithsonian Contr.’ vol. i. See Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 142. Details as to thunder-axes, etc. in ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ ch. viii.

³³ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 266.

³⁴ Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iv. p. 85. (Ossetes, etc.) See Welcker, vol. i. p. 170 ; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 158. Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 423 (Ali-sect.).

³⁵ Castren, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 39, etc.

³⁶ ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 32. 1, 55. 5, 130. 8, 165 ; iii. 34. 9 ; vi. 20 ; x. 43. 9, 89, 9. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd S. p. 427 ; ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 42, vol. ii. p. 323. See Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts.’

³⁷ Homer, II. viii. 170, xvii. 595. Ovid. Fast. ii. 69. See Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ l. c. ; Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. ii. p. 194.

³⁸ Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 257.

³⁹ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ ch. viii. Edda ; Gylfaginning, 21, 44.

⁴⁰ 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,’ 267 (Sillagiksartok, Weather-spirit) ; De la Borde, ‘Caraïbes,’ p. 530 (Carib-Star Curumon, makes the billows and upsets canoes).

⁴¹ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 329, (compare with the Maori Tempest-god Tawhirimatea, Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ p. 5) ; Schirren, ‘Wandersage der Neuseeländer,’ etc. p. 85 ; Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 144. See also Mariner, ‘Tonga. Is.’ vol. ii. p. 115.

⁴² Steller, ‘Kamschatka,’ p. 266.

⁴³ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 37, 68.

⁴⁴ Boecler, pp. 106, 147.

⁴⁵ See also Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iv. p. 85 (Circassian Water-god and Wind-god).

⁴⁶ ‘Rig-Veda,’ tr. by Max Müller, i. 6. 5, 19. 7.

⁴⁷ Homer, II. xxiii. 192 (Lord Derby’s trans.) Odys. xx. 66, 77 ; Apollon. Rhod. Argonautica ; Apollodor. i. 9. 21 ; Virg. Æn. i. 66 ; Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 707, vol. iii. p. 67.

⁴⁸ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ pp. 121, 871.

⁴⁹ Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksabergl.’ p. 86.

⁵⁰ Tanner’s ‘Narrative,’ p. 193 ; Loskiel, l. c. See also Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 414; J. G. Müller, p. 178 (Antilles).

⁵¹ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 10 ; Rivero & Tschudi, p. 161 ; J. G. Müller, p. 369.

⁵² Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 170.

⁵³ ‘Report of Ethnological Committee, Jubbulpore Exhibition,’ 1866–7. Nagpore, 1868, part ii. p. 54.

⁵⁴ Macpherson, ‘India,’ chap, vi.

⁵⁵ Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich.’ vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 86, etc.

⁵⁶ 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.

⁵⁷ ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 89. 4, etc. etc.

⁵⁸ Weleker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 385, etc.

⁵⁹ Varro de Ling. Lat. iv.

⁶⁰ Tacit. Germania, 40. Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 229, etc.

⁶¹ Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksabergl.’ p. 87.

⁶² Liebich, ‘Die Zigeuner,’ pp. 30, 84.

⁶³ Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 485 ; Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ p. i. 118, 161.

⁶⁴ Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 14.

⁶⁵ Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 301 ; see also 303 (Tagals).

⁶⁶ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 328.

⁶⁷ Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xix. ; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 494. Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 141. See also below, chap, xviii. (sacrifice).

⁶⁸ Schlegel, ‘Ewe Sprache,’ p. xiv.

⁶⁹ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 10, vi. 17 ; Rivero & Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 161.

⁷⁰ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 265.

⁷¹ Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9.

⁷² Herod, vi. 76.

⁷³ Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 20.

⁷⁴ Homer, Il. i. 538, xiii. 18, xx. 13. Gladstone, ‘Juventus Mundi.’ Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 616, etc. Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan Nations,’ vol. ii. ch, vi.

⁷⁵ Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. pp. 41, 45. See also J. G. Müller, p. 55.

⁷⁶ Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. xxii.

⁷⁷ Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ vi. c. 28, x. c. 22, 30 ; Brasseur ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. pp. 492, 522, 536.

⁷⁸ Schirren, ‘Wandersage der Neuseeländer,’ etc. p. 32; Turner, ‘Polynesia, pp. 252, 527.

⁷⁹ Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 148 ; Schlegel, ‘Ewe Sprache,’ p. x v.

⁸⁰ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 276.

⁸¹ Bickmore, Ainos, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 20.

⁸² 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).

⁸³ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. vi. p. 85 (Circassia). Welcker, vol. i p. 663.

⁸⁴ 2 Kings, xxiii. 10 ; Jerem. xxxii. 35 ; etc. Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 327 etc., 337 etc., 401.

⁸⁵ ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. l. 1, 19 2, iii 1. 18, etc. ; Max Müller, vol. i. p. 39 Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 53.

⁸⁶ Hanway, ‘Journal of Travels,’ London, 1753. vol. i. ch. lvii.

⁸⁷ Diog. Laert. Proœm. ii 6. Sextus Empiricus adv. Physicos, ix. ; Strabo, xv. 3, 13.

⁸⁸ John Wilson, ‘The Parsi Religion,’ ch. iv ; ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Spiegel & Bleek, Yaçna, i. lxi.

⁸⁹ Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 169.

⁹⁰ Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 88, 98.

⁹¹ Homer. Hymn. Aphrod. 29, Hestia l. Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. ii. pp. 686, 691.

⁹² Ovid. Fast. vi. 295.

⁹³ Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergl. Gebr.’ p. 29, etc.

⁹⁴ Wuttke, ‘Volksabergl.’ p. 86. Gröhmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ p. 41.

⁹⁵ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. i. p. 242.

⁹⁶ Herod. i. 216, iv. 184. Baker, ‘Albert Nyanza,’ vol. i. p. 144.

⁹⁷ Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 181 (Hudson’s B., Pottawatomies), 205 (Virginians). J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 117 (Delawares, Sioux, Mingos, etc.). 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), etc. 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, etc.); Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 164 ; Gregg, vol. ii. p. 238 (Shawnees) ; but compare the remarks of Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 141.

⁹⁸ 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).

⁹⁹ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 172; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 217.

¹⁰⁰ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles, ‘book ii. ch. viii.

¹⁰¹ 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, etc. ; Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 487 ; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ p. 141.

¹⁰² 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. 852, etc. ; J. G. Müller, p. 432, etc.

¹⁰³ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ lib. i. c. 4, 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, etc. ; J. G. Müller, p. 362, etc.

¹⁰⁴ Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Rel.’ vol. i. p. 383. Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 346 ; ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 147.

¹⁰⁵ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 167, 175 (Bodos, etc.).

¹⁰⁶ Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 33 (Oraons, etc.); Hunter, ‘Annals of Rural Bengal,’ p. 184 (Santals).

¹⁰⁷ Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 84, etc. (Khonds).

¹⁰⁸ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 16, 51, etc. 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.

¹⁰⁹ ‘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.

¹¹⁰ ‘Khordah-Avesta,’ xxvi. in Avesta tr. by Spiegel, vol. iii. See Cox. ‘Mythology of Aryan Nations,’ vol. i. p. 334, vol. ii. p. 354. Strabo, xv. 3, 13. Nonnus, xl. 400. Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 180 : ‘Ἡλίῳ Μίθρᾳ ἀνικήτῳ’; ‘Διὸς ἀνικήτον Ἡλίου.’

¹¹¹ Plat. Sympos. xxxvi. See Welcker, ‘Griech. Gotterlehre,’ vol. i. pp. 400, 412.

¹¹² 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.”

¹¹³ Cicero de Natura Deorum, iii. 21.

¹¹⁴ See Bunsen, ‘Egypt’s Place in Univ. Hist. ;’ Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians,’ etc.

¹¹⁵ Deut. iv. 19, xvii. 3 ; II Kings xxiii. 11.

¹¹⁶ Mövers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. pp. 162, 180, etc. Lamprid. Heliogabal. i.

¹¹⁷ Euseb. Præparat. Evang. i. 6.

¹¹⁸ Neander, ‘Church History,’ vol. vi. p. 341. Carsten Niebuhr, ‘Reisebeschr.’ vol. ii. p. 896.

¹¹⁹ Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 9 ; vol. ii. p. 258. See Koran, xli. 37.

¹²⁰ Tertullian. Apolog. adv. Gentes, xvi. See Lucian de Saltat. xvii. ; compare Job xxxi. 26.

¹²¹ Leo. I. Serm. viii. in Natal. Dom.

¹²² Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 150.

¹²³ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 581, etc. Wuttke, pp. 17, 93. Brand, ;Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 157, etc. ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 260. Murray’s ‘Handbook for Syria and Palestine,’ 1868, p. 162.

¹²⁴ See Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s. v. ‘Sol;’ 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, etc.

¹²⁵ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 693, 1223. Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. i. p. 467. Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 188.

¹²⁶ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 583 ; Brand, vol. i. p. 298 ; Wuttke, pp. 14, 140. Beausobre, I. c.

¹²⁷ Spix and Martius, ‘Reise in Brasilien,’ vol. i. pp. 377, 381 ; Martins, ‘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.

¹²⁸ De la Borde, ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

¹²⁹ Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 206 ; ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. v. p. 253.

¹³⁰ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 1635, p. 34.

¹³¹ Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 235 ; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 175, 342.

¹³² Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 84 ; Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 428 ; see Purchas, vol. v. p. 766. Müller, ‘Fetu,’ p. 47.

¹³³ Merolla, ‘Congo,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 273.

¹³⁴ Kolbe, ‘Beschryving van de Kaap ie Goede Hoop,’ part i. xxix. See ante, vol. i. p. 355.

¹³⁵ Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 43.

¹³⁶ Bickmore, ‘Ainos,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 20.

¹³⁷ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 167.

¹³⁸ Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. R.’ vol. i. p. 275.

¹³⁹ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. pp. 9, 35 ; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ I. c.

¹⁴⁰ Waitz, vol. iv. p. 362.

¹⁴¹ Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 90. But compare Garcilaso de la Vega, iii. 21.

¹⁴² Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9.

¹⁴³ Deuteron. xvii. 3 ; Polyb. vii. 9 ; see Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ pp. 159, 536, 605.

¹⁴⁴ Lucian de Syria Dea, iv. 34.

¹⁴⁵ Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians,’ vol. iv. p. 239, vol. v. p. 5. Bunsen, ‘Egypt,’ vol. iv. See Plutarch. Is. et Osir.

¹⁴⁶ Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 550, etc.

¹⁴⁷ Cic. de Nat. Deor. ii. 27.

¹⁴⁸ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xxii.

¹⁴⁹ Akerblad, ‘Lettre à Italinsky.’ Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 346. Mungo Park, ‘Travels,’ in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xvi. p. 875.

¹⁵⁰ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 29, 667; Brand, vol. iii. p. 146; Forbes Leslie, Early Races of Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 186.

CHAPTER XVII.

ANIMISM— (continued).

[304] 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 Supreme Deity evolved in various forms among the lower races ; 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 recognised 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 [305] Childbirth. In the West Indies, a special divinity occupied with this function took rank as one of the great indigenous fetish-gods ;¹ in the Samoan group, the household god of the father’s or mother’s family was appealed to ;² in Peru the Moon takes to this office,³ and the same natural idea recurs in Mexico ;⁴ in Esthonian religion the productive Earth-mother appropriately becomes patroness of human birth ;⁵ classic theology carries on both these ideas, in so far as the Greek Hēra represents the Earth⁶ and the Roman Lucina the Moon ;⁷ and to conclude the list, the Chinese work out the problem from the manes-worshipper’s point of view, for the goddess whom they call “Mother” and propitiate with many a ceremony and sacrifice to save and prosper their children, is held to have been in human life a skilful midwife.⁸

The deity of Agriculture may be a cosmic being affecting the weather and the soil, or a mythic giver of plants and teacher of their cultivation and use. Thus among the Iroquois, Heno the Thunder, who rides through the heavens on the clouds, who splits the forest-trees with the thunderbolt-stones he hurls at his enemies, who gathers the clouds and pours out the warm rains, was fitly chosen as patron of husbandry, invoked at seed-time and harvest, and called Grandfather by his children the Indians.⁹ It is interesting to notice again on the southern continent the working out of this idea in the Tupan of Brazilian tribes ; Thunder and Lightning, it is recorded, they call Tupan, considering themselves to owe to him their hoes and the profitable [306] art of tillage, and therefore acknowledging him as a deity.¹⁰ Among the Guarani race, Tamoi the Ancient of Heaven had no less rightful claim, in his character of heaven-god, to be venerated as the divine teacher of agriculture to his people.¹¹ In Mexico, Centeotl the Grain-goddess received homage and offerings at her two great festivals, and took care of the growth and keeping of the corn.¹² In Polynesia, we hear in the Society Islands of Ofanu the god of husbandry, in the Tonga Islands of Alo Alo the fanner, god of wind and weather, bearing office as god of harvest, and receiving his offering of yams when he had ripened them.¹³ A picturesque figure from barbaric Asia is Pheebee Yau, the Ceres of the Karens, who sits on a stump and watches the growing and ripening corn, to fill the granaries of the frugal and industrious.¹⁴ The Khonds worship at the same shrine, a stone or tree near the village, both Bürbi Pennu the goddess of new vegetation, and Pidzu Pennu the rain-god.¹⁵ Among Finns and Esths it is the Earth-mother who appropriately undertakes the task of bringing forth the fruits.¹⁶ And so among the Greeks it is the same being, Dēmētēr the Earth-mother, who performs this function, while the Roman Ceres who is confused with her is rather, as in Mexico, a goddess of grain and fruit.¹⁷

The War-god is another being wanted among the lower races, and formed or adapted accordingly. Areskove the Iroquois War-god seems to be himself the great celestial deity ; for his pleasant food they slaughtered human victims, that he might give them victory over their enemies ; as a pleasant sight for him they tortured the war-captives ; on [307] 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, and their leader prayed to the Great Spirit; Floridan Indians prayed to the Sun before their wars.¹⁸ Araucanians of Chili entreated Pillan the Thunder-god that he would scatter their enemies, and thanked him amidst their cups after a victory.¹⁹ The very name of Mexico seems derived from Mexitli, the national War-god, identical or identified with the hideous gory Huitzilopochtli. Not to attempt a general solution of the enigmatic nature of this inextricable compound parthenogenetic deity, we may notice the association of his principal festival with the winter-solstice, when his paste idol was shot through with an arrow, and being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten, wherefore the ceremony was called the teoqualo or “god-eating.” This and other details tend to show Huitzilopochtli as originally a nature-deity, whose life and death were connected with the year’s, while his functions of War-god may be of later addition.²⁰ Polynesia is a region where quite an assortment of war-gods may be collected. Such, to take but one example, was Tairi, war-god of King Kamehameha of the Sandwich Islands, whose hideous image, covered with red feathers, shark-toothed, mother-of-pearleyed, with helmet-crest of human hair, was carried into battle by his special priest, distorting his own face into hideous grins, and uttering terrific yells which were considered to proceed from the god.²¹ Two examples from Asia may show what different original conceptions may serve to shape such deities as these upon. The Khond War-god, who entered into all weapons, so that from instruments of peace they became weapons of war, who gave edge to the [308] axe and point to the arrow, is the very personified spirit of tribal war, his token is the relic of iron and the iron weapons buried in his sacred grove which stands near each group of hamlets, and his name is Loha Pennu or Iron-god.²² The Chinese War-god, Kuang Tä, on the other hand, is an ancient military ghost ; he was a distinguished officer, as well as a “faithful and honest courtier,” who flourished during the wars of the Han dynasty, and emperors since then have delighted to honour him by adding to his usual title more and more honorary distinctions.²³ Looking at these selections from the army of War-gods of the different regions of the world, we may well leave their classic analogues, Ares and Mars, as beings whose warlike function we recognize, but not so easily their original nature.²⁴

It would be easy, going through the religious systems of Polynesia and Mexico, Greece and Rome, India and China, to give the names and offices of a long list of divinities, patrons of hunting and fishing, carpentering and weaving, and so forth. But studying here rather the continuity of polytheistic ideas than the analysis of polytheistic divinities, it is needless to proceed farther in the comparison of these deities of special function, as recognized to some extent in the lower civilization, before their elaborate development became one of the great features of the higher.

The great polytheistic deities we have been examining, concerned as they are with the earthly course of nature and human life, are gods of the living. But even in savage levels man began to feel an intellectual need of a God of the Dead, to reign over the souls of men in the next life, and this necessity has been supplied in various ways. Of the deities set up as lords of Deadman’s Land, some are beings whose original meaning is obscure. Some are distinctly nature-deities appointed to this office, often for local reasons, [309] 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, or the Great Spirit who receives good warriors in his happy hunting-grounds, or his grandmother, the bloodthirsty Death-goddess Atahentsic.²⁵ In Brazil, the Underworld-god, who places good warriors and sorcerers in Paradise, contrasts with Aygnan the evil deity who takes base and cowardly Tupi souls,²⁶ much as the Mexican Tlaloc, Water-god and lord of the earthly paradise, contrasts with Mictlanteuctli, ruler of the dismal dead-land in the shades below.²⁷ In Peru there seems to have existed a belief that the spirits of the departed 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 underworld of shades, the land of the demon Supay.²⁸ Accounts of this class must often be suspected of giving ideas mis-stated under European influence, or actually adopted from Europeans, but there is in some a look of untouched genuineness. Thus in Polynesia, the idea of a Devil borrowed from colonists or missionaries may be suspected in such a figure as the evil deity Wiro, chief of Beigna, 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 [310] 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 stretched far away into the sea, in the shape of an eel or serpent. Different in name and nature, yet not so different as to be in either beyond recognition, this being reappears in the kindred myths of the neighbouring group, the Tonga Islands. The Tongan Hikuleo has his home in the spirit-land of Bulotü, 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 Barotongan Tiki (no doubt a solar deity, a Maui), to whose long house, a place of unceasing joys, the dead are to find their way.²⁹ Among Turanian tribes, there are Samoyeds who believe in a deity called A’, dwelling in impenetrable darkness, sending disease and death to men and reindeer, and ruling over a crowd of spirits which are manes of the dead. Tatars tell of the nine Irle-Chans, who in their gloomy subterranean kingdom not only rule over souls of the dead, but have at their command a multitude of ministering spirits, visible and invisible. In the gloomy under-world of the Finns reigns Mana or Tuoni, a being whose nature is worked out by personification from the dismal dead-land or death itself.³⁰ Much the [311] same may be said of the Greek Aides, Hades, and the Scandinavian Hel, whose names, perhaps not so much by confusion as with a sense of their latent significance, have become identified in language with the doleful abodes over which a personifying fancy set them to preside.³¹ As appropriately, though working out a different idea, the ancient Egyptians conceived their great solar deity to rule in the regions of his western under-world—Osiris is Lord of the Dead in Amenti.³²

In the world’s assembly of great gods, an important place must be filled up by the manes-worshipper in logical development of his special system. The theory of family manes, carried back to tribal gods, leads to the recognition of superior deities of the nature of Divine Ancestor or First Man, and it is of course reasonable that such a being, if recognized, should sometimes fill the place of lord of the dead, whose ancestral chief he is. There is an anecdote among the Mandans told by Prince Maximilian von Wied, which brings into view conceptions lying in the deepest recesses of savage religion, the idea of the divine first ancestor, the mythic connexion of the sun’s death and descent into the under-world with the like fate of man, and the nature of the spiritual intercourse between man’s own soul and his deity. The First Man, it is said, promised the Mandans to be their helper in time of need, and then departed into the West. It came to pass that the Mandans were attacked by foes. One Mandan would send a bird to the great ancestor to ask for help, but no bird could fly so far. Another thought a look would reach him, but the hills walled him in. Then said a third, thought must be the safest way to reach the First Man. He wrapped himself in his buffalo-robe, fell down, and spoke, “I think—I have thought—I come back.” Throwing off the fur, he was bathed in sweat. The divine helper he had called on in his [312] distress appeared.³³ There is instructive variety in the ways in which the lower American races work out the. conception of the divine forefather. The Mingo tribes revere and make offerings to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a powerful deity under the Master of Life, or even as identified with him ; some Mississippi Indians said that the first Man ascended into heaven, and thunders there; among the Dog-ribs, he was creator of sun and moon ;³⁴ Tamci, the grandfather and ancient of heaven of the Guaranis, was their first ancestor, who dwelt among them and taught them to till the soil, and rose to heaven in the east, promising to succour them on earth, and at death to carry them from the sacred tree into a new life where they should all meet again, and have much hunting.³⁵

Polynesia, again, has thoroughly worked the theory of divine ancestors into the native system of multiform and blending nature-deities. Men are sprung from the divine Maui, whom Europeans have therefore called the “Adam of New Zealand,” or from the Rarotongan Tiki, who seems his equivalent (Mauitiki), and who again is the Tii of the Society Islands ; it is, however, the son of Tii, who precisely represents a Polynesian Adam, for his name is Taata, i.e., Man, and he is the ancestor of the human race. There is perhaps also reason to identity Maui and the First Man with Akea, first King of Hawaii, who at his earthly death descended to rule over his dark subterranean kingdom, where his subjects are the dead who recline under the spreading kou-trees, and drink of the infernal rivers, and feed on lizards and butterflies.³⁶ In the mythology of Kamchatka, the relation between the Creator and the First Man is one not of identity but of parentage. Among the sons of [313] Kutka the Creator is Haetsh the First Man, who dwelt on earth, and died, and descended into Hades to be chief of the under-world ; there he receives the dead and new-risen Kamchadals, to continue a life like that of earth in his pleasant subterranean land where mildness and plenty prevail, as they did in the regions above in the old days when the Creator was still on earth.³⁷ Among all the lower races who have reasoned out this divine ancestor, none excel those consistent manes-worshippers, the Zulus. Their worship of the manes of the dead has not only made the clan-ancestors of a few generations back into tribal deities (Unkulunkulu), but beyond these, too far off and too little known for actual worship, yet recognized as the original race-deity and identified with the Creator, stands the First Man, he who “broke off in the beginning,” the Old-Old-One, the great Unkulunkulu. While the Zulu’s most intense religious emotions are turned to the ghosts of the departed, while he sacrifices his beloved oxen and prays with agonising entreaty to his grandfather, and carries his tribal worship back to those ancestral deities whose praise-giving names are still remembered, the First Man is beyond the reach of such rites. “At first we saw that we were made by Unkulunkulu. But when we were ill we did not worship him, nor ask anything of him. We worshipped those whom we had seen with our eyes, their death and their life among us..... Unkulunkulu had no longer a son who could worship him ; there was no going back to the beginning, for people increased, and were scattered abroad, and each house had its own connections; there was no one who said, ‘For my part I am of the house of Unkulunkulu.’” Nay more, the Zulus who would not dare to affront an “idhlozi,” a common ghost, that might be angry and kill them, have come to make open mock of the name of the great first ancestor. When the grown-up people wish to talk privately or eat something by themselves, it is the regular thing to send the children out to [314] 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, which has no power to do even a little thing for herself, but sits continually where she sat in the morning till the sun sets. And the children make sport of her, for she cannot catch them and flog them, but only talk with her mouth. Just so is the name of Unkulunkulu when all the children are told to go and call him. He is now a means of making sport of children.”³⁸

In Aryan religion, the savage divinities just described give us analogues for the Hindu Yama, throughout his threefold nature as Sun, as First Man, as Judge of the Dead. Professor Max Muller thus depicts his solar origin, which may indeed be inferred from his being called the child of Vivasvat, himself the very 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 [315] 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 Vivasvat 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 primaeval days reigned over his happy deathless kingdom of good Zarathu-strian men, are but two figures developed in the course of ages out of one and the same Aryan sun-myth.³⁹ Within the limits of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theology, the First Man scarcely occupies more than a place of precedence among the human race in Hades or in Heaven, not the high office of Lord of the Dead. Yet that tendency to deify an ideal ancestor, which we observe to act so strongly on lower races, has taken effect also here. The Rabbinical Adam is a gigantic being reaching from earth to heaven, for the definition of whose stature Rabbi Eliezer cites Deuteronomy iv. 32, “God made man (Adam) upon the earth, and from one end of heaven to the other.”⁴⁰ It is one of the familiar episodes of the Koran, how the angels were bidden to bow down before Adam, the regent of Allah upon earth, and how Eblis (Diabolus) swelling with pride, refused the act of adoration.⁴¹ Among the Gnostic sect of the Valentinians, Adam the primal man in whom the Deity had revealed himself, stood as earthly representative of the Demiurge, and was even counted among the Æons.⁴²

The figures of the great deities of Polytheism, thus traced in outline according to the determining idea on which each is shaped, seem to show that conceptions originating under rude and primitive conditions of human thought and passing thence into the range of higher culture, [316] 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 befal mankind, and whom the natives represent with horns and tail, although no horned beast is indigenous in the land.⁴³ There may be more or less native substratum in all this, but the hints borrowed from popular Christian ideas are unmistakeable. [317] 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) seem to have had no idea of the Devil, as the Prince of Darkness, before the Europeans came into the country. They consider him now as a very powerful spirit, but unable to do good, and therefore call him The Evil One. Thus they now believe in two Beings, the one supremely good, and the other altogether evil. To the former they ascribe all good, and to the latter all evil. About thirty years ago, a great 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 exploits on the journey, but all agreed in this, that no one could enter into heaven without great danger ; for the road, say they, 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 through him to God himself, from whom they pretend to have received a commandment, to instruct the Indians in the way to heaven. By these preachers the Indians were informed that heaven was the dwelling of God, and hell that of the Devil. Some of their preachers confessed that they had not reached the dwelling of God, but had however approached near enough to hear the cocks crow, and to see the smoke of the chimneys in heaven, &c., &c.”⁴⁴

Such unequivocal proofs that savage tribes can adopt and work into the midst of their native beliefs the European doctrine of the Good and Evil Spirit, must induce us to criticize keenly all recorded accounts of the religion of un-cultured [318] 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, 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 [319] into the midst of the assembly of the people watching in silence, just as the spirits now fling real flowers at a table-rapping séance.⁴⁵ For spirits less closely belonging to the definition of ghosts, we may take Rochefort’s remark in the 17th century as to the two sorts of spirits, good and bad, recognized by the Caribs of the West Indies. This writer declares that their good spirits or divinities are in fact so many demons who seduce them and keep them enchained in their damnable servitude ; but nevertheless, he says, the people themselves do distinguish them from their evil spirits.⁴⁶ Nor can we pronounce this distinction of theirs unreasonable, learning from other authorities that it was the office of some of these spirits to attend men as familiar genii, and of others to inflict diseases. After the numerous details which have incidentally been cited in the present volumes, it will be needless to offer farther proof that spiritual beings are really conceived by savages and barbarians as ranged in antagonistic ranks as good and evil, i.e., friendly and hostile to themselves. The interesting inquiry on which it is here desirable to collect evidence, is this : how far are the docrines 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 primitive conceptions which, developed in systematic form and attached to ethical meaning, have 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 many cases easier to explain these beings as native at least in origin, than to suppose that foreign intercourse should have exerted the [320] 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 Tus-caroras, 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 [321] (or Brinton’s translations, Ugly Spirit and Beautiful Spirit, may be more accurate). 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 [322] flags would destroy his own life, but he himself used the deer-horns, the instrument of death. After a two days’ fight, the Good Mind slew his brother and crushed him in the earth ; and the last words of the Bad Mind were that he would have equal power over men’s souls after death ; then he sank down to eternal doom and became the Evil Spirit. The Good Mind visited the people, and then retired from the earth.⁴⁷

This is a graphic tale. Its version 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 profitably criticized this, referring to early American writers to show how much dualistic fancy has sprung up since the times of first intercourse between natives and white men, and pointing out the habit of European narrators to make distinctions between good and evil spirits in ways foreign to Indian thought. When we compare this legend, he says, with the version of the same legend 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.

Brinton’s tracing of the myth to its earlier stage is quite just, and in great measure also his view as to the development of its dualism. Yet if we go back to the earliest sources and examine this myth of the White One and the Dark One, we shall find it to be itself one of the most perfect examples the world can show of the rise of primitive dualism in the savage mind. Father Brebeuf s story is as [323] 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. Iouskeha and Taouiskaron, the Sun and Moon, dwell together in their cabin at the end of the earth, and thither it was that the four 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. Anothei [324] 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 Eata-hentsic is wicked and spoils.”⁴⁸ Thus in early Iroquois legend, the Sun and Moon, as god and goddess of Day and Night, had already acquired the characters of the great friend and enemy of man, the Good and Evil Deity. And as to the related cosmic legend of Day and Night, contrasted in the persons of the two brothers, the White One and the Dark One, though this was originally pure unethic nature-myth, yet it naturally took the same direction among the half-Europeanized Indians of later times, becoming a moral myth of Good and Evil. 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 as this, 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, we may fairly account for many systems of this class found in the native religions of America. While the character and age of 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 referred to a modern and Christian origin, yet we shall be cautious in claiming anything that may be borrowed civilized theology, as being genuine evidence of primitive development. The Algonquin’s belief recognizes the antagonistic Kitchi Manitu and Matchi Manitu, the Great Spirit and Evil Spirit, who preside over the [325] spiritual contending hosts which fill the world and struggle for the mastery over it. They are especially associated, the one with light and warmth, the other with damp and darkness, while some tribes identify them with Sun and Moon. Here the nature-religion of the savage may have been developed, but was not set on foot, by the foreigner. 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, we may find more originality among the Floridan Indians two or three centuries ago, for they are said to have paid solemn worship to the Bad Spirit Toia who plagued them with visions, but to have had small regard for the Good Spirit, who troubles himself little about mankind.⁴⁹ On the southern continent, Martius makes this characteristic remark as to the rude tribes of Brazil : “All Indians have a lively conviction of the power of an evil principle over them ; in many there dawns also a glimpse of the good ; but they revere the one less than they fear the other. It might be thought that they hold the Good Being weaker in relation to the fate of man than the Evil.” This generalization is to some extent supported by statements as to particular tribes. The Macusis are said to recognize the good creator Macunaima, “he who works by night,” and his evil adversary Epel or Horiuch : of these people 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 Lo-cozy, the good and evil deity of the Yumanas, live above the earth and toward the sun : the Evil Deity is feared by these [326] savages, but the Good Deity will come to eat fruit with the departed and take their souls to his dwelling, wherefore they bury the dead each doubled up in his great earthen pot, with fruit in his lap, and looking toward the sunrise. Even the rude Botocudos are thought to recognize antagonistic principles of good and evil in the persons of the Sun and Moon.⁵⁰ This idea has especial interest from its correspondence on the one hand with that of the Iroquois tribes, and on the other with that of the comparatively civilized Muyscas of Bogota, whose good deity is unequivocally a mythic Sun, thwarted in his kindly labours for man by his wicked wife Huythaca the Moon.⁵¹ The native religion of Chili is said to have placed among the subaltern deities Meulen, the friend of man, and Huecuvu the bad spirit and author of evil. These people can hardly have learnt from Christianity to conceive their evil spirit as simply and fully the general cause of misfortune : if the earth quakes, Huecuvu has given it a shock; if a horse tires, Huecuvu has ridden him ; if a man falls sick, Huecuvu has sent the disease into his body, and no man dies but that Huecuvu suffocates him.⁵²

In Africa, again, rudimentary 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 [327] abstain some from one kind of food and some from another.⁵³ Among accounts of the two rival deities in West Africa, one describes the Guinea negroes as recognizing below the Supreme Deity two spirits (or classes of spirits), Ombwiri and Onyambe, the one kind and gentle, doing good to men and rescuing them from harm, the other hateful and wicked, whose seldom mentioned name is heard with uneasiness and displeasure.⁵⁴ It would be scarcely profitable, in an inquiry where accurate knowledge of the doctrine of any insignificant tribe is more to the purpose than vague speculation on the theology of the mightiest nation, to dwell on the enigmatic traces of ancient Egyptian dualism. Suffice it to say that the two brother-deities Osiris and Seti, Osiris the beneficent solar divinity whose nature the blessed dead took on them, Seti perhaps a rival national god degraded to a Typhon, seem to have become the representative figures of a contrasted scheme of light and darkness, good and evil ; the sculptured granite still commemorates the contests of their long-departed sects, where the hieroglyphic square-eared beast of Seti has been defaced to substitute for it the figure of Osiris.⁵⁵

The conception of the light-god as the good deity in contrast to a rival god of evil, is one plainly suggested by nature, and naturally recurring in the religions of the world. The Khonds of Orissa may be counted its most perfect modern exponents in barbaric culture. To their supreme creative deity, Būra Pennu or Bella Pennu, Light-god or Sun-god, there stands opposed his evil consort Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess, and the history of good and evil in the world is the history of his work and her counterwork. He created a world paradisaic, happy, harmless ; she rebelled against him, and to blast the lot of his new creature, man, [328] she brought in disease, and poison, and all disorder, “sowing the seeds of sin in mankind as in a ploughed field.” Death became the divine punishment of wickedness, the spontaneously fertile earth went to jungle and rock and mud, plants and animals grew poisonous and fierce, throughout nature good and evil were commingled, and still the fight goes on between the two great powers. So far all Khonds agree, and it is on the practical relation of good and evil that they split into their two hostile sects of Būra and Tari. Būra’s sect hold that he triumphed over Tari, in sign of her discomfiture imposed the cares of childbirth on her sex, and makes her still his subject instrument wherewith to punish ; Tari’s sect hold that she still maintains the struggle, and even practically disposes of the happiness of man, doing evil or good on her own account, and allowing or not allowing the Creator’s blessings to reach mankind.⁵⁶

Now that the sacred books of the Zend-Avesta are open to us, it is possible to compare the doctrines of savage tribes with those of the great faith through which of all others Dualism seems to have impressed itself on the higher nations. The religion of Zarathustra was a schism from that ancient Aryan nature-worship which is represented in a pure and early form in the Veda, and in depravity and decay in modern Hinduism. The leading thought of the Zarathustrian faith was the contest of Good and Evil in the world, a contrast typified and involved in that of Day and Night, Light and Darkness, and brought to personal shape in the warfare of Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu, the Good and Evil Deity, Ormuzd and Ahriman. The prophet Zarathustra said : “In the beginning there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity. These are the good and the base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one of these two spirits. Be good, not base !” The sacred Vendidad begins with the record of the primaeval contest of the two principles. Ahura-mazda created the best of regions [329] 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 kinds of sins which the evil Ahriman produced amongst the creatures of Ormazd in opposition. “That which was the wish of Ormazd the Creator, and I ought to have thought and have not thought, what I ought to have spoken and have not spoken, what I ought to have done and have not done ; of these sins repent I with thoughts, words, and works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as heavenly, with the three words : Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin. That which was the wish of Ahriman, and I ought not to have thought and yet have thought, what I ought not to have spoken and yet have spoken, what I ought not to have done and yet have done ; of these sins repent I with thoughts, words, and works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as heavenly, with the three words : Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin.” . . . “May Ahriman be broken, may Ormazd increase.”⁵⁷ The Izedis or Yezidis, the so-called Devil-worshippers, still remain a numerous though oppressed people in Mesopotamia and adjacent countries. Their adoration of the sun and horror of defiling fire accord with the idea of a Persian origin of their religion (Persian ized = god), an origin underlying more superficial admixture of Christian and Moslem elements. This remarkable sect is distinguished by a special form of dualism. While recognizing the existence of a Supreme Being, their peculiar reverence is given to Satan, chief of the angelic host, who now has the means of doing evil to mankind, and in his restoration will have the power of rewarding them. “Will not Satan then reward the poor Izedis, who alone have never spoken ill of him, and have suffered so much for him ?” Martyrdom for the rights [330] of Satan ! exclaims the German traveller to whom an old white-bearded devil-worshipper thus set forth the hopes of his religion.⁵⁸

Direct worship of the Evil Principle, familiar as it is to low barbaric races, is scarcely to be found among people higher in civilization than these persecuted and stubborn sectaries of Western Asia. So far as such ideas extend in the development of religion, they seem fair evidence how far worship among low tribes turns rather on fear than love. That the adoration of a Good Deity should have more and more superseded the propitiation of an Evil Deity, is the sign of one of the great movements in the education of mankind, a result of happier experience of life, and of larger and more gladsome views of the system of the universe. It is not, however, through the inactive systems of modern Parsism and Izedism that the mighty Zoroastrian dualism has exerted its main influence on mankind. We must look back to long past ages for traces of its contact with Judaism and Christianity. It is often and reasonably thought that intercourse between Jews and ancient Persians was an effective agent in producing that theologic change which differences the later Jew of the Rabbinical books from the earlier Jew of the Pentateuch, a change in which one important part is the greater prominence of the dualistic scheme. So in later times (about the fourth century), the contact of Zoroastrism and Christianity appears to have been influential in producing Manichseism. We know Manichseism 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 [331] powers becomes a key to the physical and moral nature and course of the universe.⁵⁹ Among Christian or semi-Christian sects, the Manichaeans 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 Turkish 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 [332] this, should fail to point out that this deity is no other than Azrael the angel of death, adopted under Moslem influence.⁶⁰ Again, in the mixed Pagan and Christian religion of the Circassians, which at least in its recently prevalent form would be reckoned polytheistic, there stand beneath the Supreme Being a number of mighty subordinate deities, of whom the principal are Iele the Thunder-god, Tleps the Fire-god, Seoseres the god of Wind and Water, Misitcha the Forest-god, and Mariam the Virgin Mary.⁶¹ If the monotheistic criterion be simply made to consist in the Supreme Deity being held as creator of the universe and chief of the spiritual hierarchy, then its application to savage and barbaric theology will lead to perplexing conse quences. 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 the lower races, 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 savage 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 [333] 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 caught and trained into their own theology the native Canadian thought of a 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 Dr. Brinton considers this divinity as derived from Christian instruction, and his very name but a corruption of Dieu, le bon Dieu.⁶² Among the list of supreme deities of the lower races who are also held to be first ancestors of man, we hear of Louquo, the uncreate first Carib, who descended from the eternal heaven, made the flat earth, and produced man from his own body. He lived long on earth among men, died and came to life again after three days, and returned to heaven.⁶³ It would be hardly reasonable to enumerate, amo ng genuine deities of native [334] 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 some 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 primaeval ancestor. More frequently, it is the nature-worshippers 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 [335] in close connection 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 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, savage or cultured, 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 realised as the Supreme Deity. In such ways, the result of carrying to their utmost limits the animistic conceptions which pervade the philosophy of religion, alike among low races and high, is to reach an idea of as it were a soul of the world, a shaper, animator, ruler of the universe, a Great Spirit. In no small measure, such definition answers to that of the highest deity adored by the lower races of mankind. As we enter these regions of transcendental theology, however, 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 vast idea, two especial ways are open, and both are trodden even by uncultured men. The first way is to fuse the attributes of the great polytheistic powers into more or less of common personality, [336] 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 or formlessness in which savage and barbaric tribes have not seldom pictured the Supreme.

Thus, then, it appears that the theology of the lower races already reaches its climax in conceptions of Supreme Deity, 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, many savage or barbaric people 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, [337] “Till this hour, we never knew nor acknowledged anything greater or better than the Sun.”⁶⁴ So when a later missionary argued with the chief of the Tobas, “My god is good and punishes wicked people,” the chief replied, “My God (the Sun) is good likewise ; but he punishes nobody, satisfied to do good to all.”⁶⁵ In various manifestations, moreover, there reigns in native faiths a supreme being whose characteristics are those of the Heaven-god. It is thus with the Tamoi of the Guaranis, that beneficent deity worshipped in his blended character of ancestor of mankind and ancient of heaven, lord of the celestial paradise.”⁶⁶ It is so with the highest deity of the Arauca-nians, Pillan the Thunder or the Thunderer, called also Huenu-Pillan or Heaven-Thunder, and Vuta-gen or Great Being. “The universal government of Pillan,” says Molina, “is a prototype of the Araucanian polity. He is the great Toqui (Governor) of the invisible world, and as such has his Apo-Ulmenes, and his Ulmenes, to whom he entrusts the administration of affairs of less importance. These ideas are certainly very rude, but it must be acknowledged that the Araucanians are not the only people who have regulated the things of heaven by those of the earth.” ⁶⁷ A different but not less characteristic type of the Supreme Deity is placed on record among the Caribs, a beneficent power dwelling in the skies, reposing in his own happiness, careless of mankind, and by them not honoured nor adored.⁶⁸

The theological history of Peru, in ages before the Spanish conquest, has lately had new light thrown on it by the researches of Mr. Markham. Here the student comes into view of a rivalry full of interest in the history of barbaric religion, the rivalry between the Creator and [338] the divine Sun. The Supreme Deity in the religion of the Incas was Uiracocha, whose titles were Pachayachachic, ‘Teacher of the World,’ and Paehacamac, ‘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. Baise 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, the house of the Teacher of the World,” 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 [339] 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 whitber 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 Castillan soldier, who lost it in one night at play.⁶⁹

Among rude tribes of the North American continent, evidence of the primacy of the divine Sun is not unknown. We may perhaps distrust Father Sagard’s early identification of Atahocan the Creator with Iouskeha the Sun. Yet Father Hennepin’s account of the Sioux worshipping the Sun as the Creator is explicit enough, and agrees with the argument of the modern Shawnees, that the Sun animates everything, and therefore must be the Master of Life or Great Spirit.⁷⁰ It is the widespread belief in this Great Spirit, whatever his precise nature and origin, that has long and deservedly drawn the attention of European thinkers to the native religions of the North American tribes. True, this is a district in which the native doctrine has been at times described by Europeans in exaggerated and mistaken terms, converting it into a rude analogue of theism, while also the ideas of the Indians themselves came to be remodelled under Christian influence. It has even [340] been thought that the whole doctrine of the Great Spirit was borrowed by the savages from missionaries and colonists. But this view will not bear examination. After due allowance made for mis-rendering of savage answers and importation of white men’s thoughts, it can hardly be judged that a divine being whose characteristics are often so unlike what European intercourse would have suggested, and who is heard of by such early explorers among such distant tribes, could be a deity of foreign origin. The Green-landers’ Torngarsuk or Great Spirit (his name is an augmentative of “torngak”—“spirit”) seems no figure derived from the religion of Scandinavian colonists, ancient or modern. He is the oracular deity whom the angekoks go in spirit to consult about sickness and weather and sport, and to whose summer-land beneath the sea Greenland souls hope to descend at death. Imperfectly defined by native theologians, thought to be beneficent and therefore scarcely worshipped, he so clearly held his place as supreme deity in the native mind, that, as Cranz the missionary relates, many Greenlanders hearing of God and his almighty power were apt to fall on the idea that it was their Torngarsuk who was meant.⁷¹ 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.”⁷²

The Great Spirit of the North American Indians is especially known to us in name and nature as the Kitchi [341] Manitu of the Ojibwas and other Algonquin tribes. In late times, Schoolcraft represents this deity as a pantheistic Sou] 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.⁷³ 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.⁷⁴ 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 [342] 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.” Brinton’s etymology is plausible, that this Kiehtan is simply the Great Spirit (Kittanitowit, Great Living Spirit, an Algonquin word compounded of “Kitta”—great ; “manito”—spirit ; “wit”— termination indicating life). 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 Beligion, 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.”⁷⁵ 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 [343] that Oki, a word apparently meaning that which is “above,” 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.⁷⁶ 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 schemes their religions have settled into. Yet the Creeks towards the end of the last 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.⁷⁷ 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.⁷⁸

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 [344] doctrines seem to have been spoken of moie 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 Ixtlilxochitr’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.⁷⁹

In the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity is especially manifested in that great mythologic divinity of [345] the Polynesian race, whom the New Zealanders call Tan-garoa, 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 Eangi the Heaven in the New Zealand myth of Heaven and Earth, [346] the great first parents. If this inference be just, then it seems that Taaroa the Creator is no personification of a primaeval theistic idea, but simply the divine personal Heaven transformed 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.⁸⁰ 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 [347] 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 ?”⁸¹

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-worshippers scheme to extend in this direction may be judged from the religious speculations of the Zulus, where we may trace the merging of the First Man, the Old-Old-One, Unkulunkulu, into the ideal of the Creator, Thunderer, and Heaven-god.⁸² 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, influenced as these may have been by foreign intercourse, to be nevertheless for the most part based on native ideas of the personal Heaven.⁸³ Whether they think of their [348] 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 Ny-ongmo’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 negros may have modelled their thoughts of a Highest Deity who has abandoned the control of his world to lesser and evil spirits.⁸⁴ 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 [349] 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.⁸⁵ 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.”⁸⁶

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 [350] Pennu the Earth-goddess, yet even they agree theoretically with the sect who worship Būra 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.⁸⁷ 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.⁸⁸ 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 remotely ancient 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. In this ancient faith the Sun-god is supreme. He is “Amaterasu oho Kami,” the “heaven-enlightening great Spirit.” Below him stand all lesser kamis or spirits, through whom, as mediators, guardians, and protectors, worship is paid by men. The Sun-god’s race, as in Peru, is the royal family, and his spirit animates the reigning ruler, the Son of Heaven. Kempfer, in his ‘History of Japan,’ written early in the 18th century, showed how absolutely the divine Tensio Dai Sin was looked upon as ruler of the minor powers, by his mention of 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 [351] homage to their celestial Dairi. He describes, as it was in his time, the great Japanese place of pilgrimage, Ysse, the home of Tensio Dai Sin. There may be seen the small cavern in a hill near the sea, where he once hid himself, depriving the world, sun, and stars of their light, and thus showing himself to be lord of light and supreme above all gods. Within his small ancient temple hard by, there are to be seen round the walls pieces of cut white paper, symbols of purity, and in the midst nothing but a polished metal mirror, emblem of the all-seeing eye of this great god.⁸⁹

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 Mongol 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.⁹⁰ Here, again, we may have [352] the advantage of studying among a cultured racet he 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 Muller 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 [353] 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.”⁹¹

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 Otympian 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 [354] 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 soul⁹²—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.⁹³ 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 Muller, 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, Yaruna, Agni ; then he is the beautiful-winged heavenly Garutmat : That which is One the wise call it in divers manners; they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtariçvan.”⁹⁴

[355] The figure of the supreme deity, be he Heaven-god, Sun-god, Great Spirit, beginning already in savage 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 develope 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.”⁹⁵ 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.⁹⁶ 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.⁹⁷ 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.⁹⁸ 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 [356] 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 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.”⁹⁹ 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 [357] 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 it is 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 seems 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 seems 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 [358] archseology. 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 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 [359] 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 pourtray 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 [360] 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 brings into view, by the side of 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 beliefs 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 [361] 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 has 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 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.

¹ Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ Dec. i. 3, 3 ; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel. pp. 175, 221.

² Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 174.

³ Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 160.

⁴ Kingsborough, ‘Mexico,’ vol. v. p. 179.

⁵ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 89.

⁶ Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 371.

⁷ Ovid. Fast. ii. 449.

⁸ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 264.

⁹ Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 158.

¹⁰ De Laet, ‘Novus Orbis,’ xv. 2 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 417 ; Brinton, pp. 152, 185 ; J. G. Müller, p. 271, etc.

¹¹ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 319.

¹² Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. pp. 16, 68, 75.

¹³ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 333. Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 115.

¹⁴ Cross, in ‘Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 316 ; Mason, p. 215.

¹⁵ Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 91, 355.

¹⁶ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 89.

¹⁷ Weloker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. ii. p. 467. Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan Nations. vol. ii. p. 308.

¹⁸ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 141, 271, 274, 591, etc.

¹⁹ Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 90.

²⁰ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. pp. 17, 81.

²¹ 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.

²² Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 90, 360.

²³ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 267.

²⁴ Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 413. Cox, ‘Myth, of Aryan N.’, vol. ii. pp. 254, 311.

²⁵ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 137, etc. 272, 286, etc. 500, etc. 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.

²⁶ Lery, ‘Bresil,’ p. 234.

²⁷ Clavigero, vol. ii. pp. 14, 17 ; Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 495.

²⁸ ‘Rites and Laws of Yncas,’ tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, pp. 32, 48 (prayer from M.S. communication by C. R. M.) ; Garcilaso de la Vega, lib. ii. c. 2, 7 ; Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 251.

²⁹ 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.

³⁰ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 128, 147, 155; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 171 (Africa).

³¹ Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl,’ vol. i. p. 395. Grimm, ‘Deutsch. Myth.’ p. 288.

³² ‘Book of Dead,’ tr. by Birch, in Bunsen, ‘Egypt,’ vol. v.

³³ Pr. Max v. Wied, ‘N. Amerika,’ vol. ii. p. 157.

³⁴ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 133, etc. 228, 255. Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i. pp. 159, 177 ; Pr. Max v. Wied, vol. ii. pp. 149, etc. Compare Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 179 (Quawteaht the Great Spirit is also First Man).

³⁵ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 319.

³⁶ Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseelünder,’ p. 64, etc., 88, etc.; Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 111, vol. iv. pp. 145, 366.

³⁷ Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 271.

³⁸ Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 1–104.

³⁹ ‘Rig-Veda,’ x. ‘Atharva-Veda,’ xviii. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd Ser. p. 514. Muir, ‘Yama,’ etc. 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.

⁴⁰ Eisenmenger, part i. p. 365.

⁴¹ Koran, ii. 28, vii. 10, etc.

⁴² Neander, ‘Hist. of Chr.’ vol. ii. pp. 81, 109, 174.

⁴³ Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p, 228. See also Eyr vol. ii. p. 356 ; Lang, ‘Queensland.’ p. 444.

⁴⁴ Loskiel, ‘Indians in North America,’ part i. p. 34.

⁴⁵ Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 348.

⁴⁶ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 416. See J. G. Müller, p. 207.

⁴⁷ 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.

⁴⁸ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jesuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1635, p. 34, 1636, p. 100. Sagard, ‘Histoire du Canada,’ Paris, 1636, p. 490. L. H. Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 156.

⁴⁹ Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. pp. 182, 330, 335, 345; La Potherie, ‘Hist. de l’Amér. Septentrionale,’ Paris, 1722, vol. i. p. 121 ; J. G. Müller, p. 149, etc. Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 35, etc., 320, 412 ; Catlin, vol. i. p. 156 ; Gregg, ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. ii. pp. 238, 305 ; Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 263.

⁵⁰ Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 327, 485,583, 645, see 247, 393, 427, 696. See also J. G. Millier, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 259, etc., 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.

⁵¹ Piedrahita, ‘Hist, de Nuev. Granada,’ parti, book i. ch. 3.

⁵² Molina, ‘Hist. of Chili,’ vol. ii. 84; Febres, ‘Diccionario Chileno,’ s. v.

⁵³ 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).

⁵⁴ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 387. Waitz, vol. ii. p. 173.

⁵⁵ Birch, in Bunsen, vol. v. p. 136. Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ etc.

⁵⁶ Macplierson, ‘India,’ p. 84.

⁵⁷ Avesta (Spiegel and Bleeck) : Vendidad, i. ; ‘Khordah-A.’ xlv. xlvi. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 1st Ser. p. 208.

⁵⁸ Layard, ‘Nineveh,’ vol. i. p. 297 ; Ainsworth, ‘Izedis,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 11.

⁵⁹ Beausobre, ‘Hist. de Manichée,’ etc. Neander, ‘Hist. of Christian Religion,’ vol. ii. p. 157, etc.

⁶⁰ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 155.

⁶¹ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. vi. p. 85.

⁶² Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 53. Schoolcraft, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 33.

⁶³ De la Borde, ‘Caraibes,’ p. 524. J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 228.

⁶⁴ Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 89.

⁶⁵ Hutchinson, ‘Chaco Ind.’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 327.

⁶⁶ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 319.

⁶⁷ Molina, ‘Hist. of Chili,’ vol. ii. p. 84, etc. Compare Febres, ‘Diccionario Chileno.’

⁶⁸ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 415. Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ p. 179.

⁶⁹ ‘Narratives of the Kites 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, etc. 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.). Garcilasode 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, etc.

⁷⁰ Sagard, ‘Hist. du Canada,’ p. 490. Hennepin, ‘Voy dans l’Amérique,” p. 302. Gregg, ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. ii. p. 237.

⁷¹ Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 263.

⁷² Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1633, p. 16 ; 1634, p. 13.

⁷³ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 15.

⁷⁴ 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, etc., occur.

⁷⁵ Smith, ‘Hist. of Virginia,’ London, 1632 ; in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. pp. 13, 39 ; New England, ibid. p. 244. Brinton, p. 58 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 177, etc. ; J. G. Müller, pp. 99, etc. ; Loskiel, part i. pp. 33, 43.

⁷⁶ Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés. 1636, p. 107 ; see above, p. 255. Brinton, p. 47 ; Sagard, p. 494 ; J. G. Müller, p. 103. For other mention of a Supreme Deity among North American tribes see Joutel, ‘Journal du Voyage, etc. Paris, 1713, p. 224 (Louisiana) ; Sproat in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. v. p. 253 (Vancouver’s I.).

⁷⁷ Bartram in ‘Tr. Amer. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. pp. 20, 26.

⁷⁸ Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part ii. p. 127.

⁷⁹ 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, etc.

⁸⁰ Moerenhout, ‘Voy. aux lles du Grand Océan,’ vol. i. pp. 419, 437. Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 321, etc. 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. 290. Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 244. Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. pp. 116, 121. Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,’ pp. 68, 89.

⁸¹ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 217.

⁸² Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ part i. See ante, pp. 116, 313.

⁸³ See especially Waitz, vol. ii. p. 167, etc. ; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 209, 387 ; Bosman, Mungo Park, etc. Comp. Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 390.

⁸⁴ Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Mag. der Miss.’ Basel, 1856. No. 2, p. 128. J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Air.’ pp. 92, 209 ; Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 42. See also Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 171, 419.

⁸⁵ Magyar, ‘Reisen in Süd-Afrika,’ pp. 125, 335.

⁸⁶ Bowen, ‘Gr. and Dic. of Yoruba,’ p. xvi. in ‘Smithsonian Contr.’ vol. i.

⁸⁷ Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 84, etc.

⁸⁸ Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 32. Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 184.

⁸⁹ Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9. Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ ch. xi. in Pinkerton, vol. vii. Wuttke, ‘Gesch. d. Heidenthums,’ part ii. p. 220.

⁹⁰ Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 1, etc. Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gosch.’ vol. iii. p. 101. Samoiedia in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. i. p. 531. Georgi, Reise im Russ. Reich.’ vol. i. p. 275.

⁹¹ Plath, ‘Rel. der Alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 18, etc. See Max Müller, ‘Lectures on Science of Religion, No. III. in ‘Fraser’s Mag.’ 1870. Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 100.

⁹² See Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. ii. Wuttke, ‘Heidenthum,’ part i. p. 254. Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. xxi. vol. ii. p. 1.

⁹³ Comte, ‘Philosophie Positive.’ Cf. Bp. Berkeley’s ‘Siris’; and for a modern dissertation on the universal aether as the divine soul of the world, see Phil. Spiller, ‘Gott im Lichte der Naturwissenschaften,’ Berlin, 1873 (note to 2nd ed.).

⁹⁴ ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 164, 46. Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. pp. 27, 241.

⁹⁵ See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterlehre,’ pp. 143, 175.

⁹⁶ Avesta ; trans, by Spiegel, ‘Ormazd-Yasht.’ 12.

⁹⁷ Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. iv. ch. xii. ; Bunsen, ‘Egypt,’ vol. iv. p. 325.

⁹⁸ Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 169, etc. See Max Müller, ‘Lecture,’ iii. I. c.

⁹⁹ Cited in Johnson’s Dictionary. The term “natural religion” is nsed 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 primaeval 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.

CHAPTEE XVIII.

RITES AND CEREMONIES.

[362] 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, etc. —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, etc.—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 [363] strong and weak sides. On the one hand, it is generally easier to obtain accurate accounts of ceremonies by eyewitnesses, 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 inquirer 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, [364] 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 is not indeed to be claimed as an immediate or 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 certainly known to pray to them even in thought. Beyond this lower level, however, animism and prayer become more and more nearly conterminous ; and a view of their relation in their earlier stages may be easiest and 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 [365] all shout together.¹ 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.” ²

Among the Indians of North America, 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.³ 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.⁴ 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, [366] “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.⁵ 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.”⁶ 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.”⁷

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 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. [367] 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!”⁸

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.⁹ 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 [368] 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 !”¹⁰ 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 !”¹¹

Typical forms of prayer may be selected in Asia near the junction-line of savage and barbaric culture. Among the Karens of Birma, 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 !”¹² 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, [369] 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 !”¹³

[370] 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 conservative 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.¹⁴ 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 !”¹⁵ 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 !”¹⁶ 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 [371] 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.”¹⁷ 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!”¹⁸ 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 [372] 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 Koppen 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 hum!” 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.¹⁹ 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 [373] 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,²⁰ 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 seems to have at least 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, etc.”²¹ Moral prayer, sometimes appearing in rudiment, sometimes shrunk into [374] 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 !”²² 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 !”²³ 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, Mahommedanism, 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.

[375] 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 the rite 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 sacrifice 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 [376] 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 rite 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 ?²⁴ The sacrifice to Water [377] 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.²⁵ 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 seaside, 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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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, tearing 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 [378] looking round, and each householder carrying off a particle to bury in like manner in his favourite field.²⁸ 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.²⁹ 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.”³⁰

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.³¹ 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.³²

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 [379] crushed maize and seed;³³ 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 ;³⁴ 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 ;³⁵ in modern India the cows reverently fed with fresh grass, Durga’s meatofferings laid out on stones for the jackals, the famous alligators in their temple-tanks.³⁶ 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.³⁷ Such in modern India is the woman who as representative of Radha eats and drinks the offerings at the shameless orgies of the Saktas.³⁸ 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,³⁹ and the West African priest who carries the allowances of food sent to the local spirits of mountain, or [380] river, or grove, which food he eats himself as the spirit’s proxy,⁴⁰ 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.”⁴¹ 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,⁴² or when the Aztecs would pour the blood and put the heart of the slaughtered human victim into the monstrous idol’s mouth,⁴³ 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.⁴⁴ 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 [381] at the door of his straw-roofed temple;⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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 ;⁴⁷ 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.⁴⁸ Thus in Virginia the Indians (in pretence or reality) sacrificed children, whose [382] blood the oki or spirit was said to suck from their left breast.⁴⁹ 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.⁵⁰ 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.⁵¹ 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;⁵² 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.⁵³ 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.”⁵⁴

Spirit being considered in the lower animism as somewhat of the ethereal nature of smoke or mist, there is an [383] 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 acceptable sacrifice ascending into the air to the abode of gods and spirits.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶ 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 [384] savour.⁵⁷ 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 hitumen were burnt.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹ The ordinance held as prominent a place among the Semitic nations. At the yearly festival of Bel in Babylon, the Chaldseans are declared by Herodotus to have burned a thousand talents of incense on the large altar in the temple where sat his golden image.⁶² 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 [385] were burned morn and even, a perpetual incense before the Lord.⁶³

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.⁶⁴ 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.”⁶⁵ 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.⁶⁶ 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.⁶⁷ 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.⁶⁸ 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 [386] 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 !”⁶⁹ 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.’⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹

The view of commentators that sacrifice, as a religious rite 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, [387] Dean Stanley has vividly pourtrayed the aspect of the Temple, with the flocks of sheep and droves of cattle crowding its courts, the vast apparatus of slaughter, the huge 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.⁷² In these 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 naively 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.”⁷³ Such imagination [388] 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.⁷⁴ 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.⁷⁵ 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.⁷⁶ 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.⁷⁷ 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 [389] chanting his song, and then themselves fall to.⁷⁸ And thus, in the folklore of mediaeval 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.⁷⁹

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,⁸⁰ 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.⁸¹ 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.⁸² 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.⁸³ 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 [390] 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.⁸⁴ 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 [391] 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.⁸⁵ 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 !” ⁸⁶ 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 [392] banquet of the flesh and blood of the men who are to die in this war,” &c.⁸⁷ 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.”⁸⁸ 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.” ⁸⁹ 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.” ⁹⁰ 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, [393] let us now follow the question of the sacrificed 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 mans 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 [394] 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,⁹¹ the other among the negroes of Sierra Leone, who sacrifice an ox “to make God glad very much, and do Kroomen good.”⁹²

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.⁹³ 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 ;⁹⁴ the Talein of Birma holding up the dish at his meal to offer it to the nat, before the company fall to;⁹⁵ the Hindu holding up a little of his rice in his [395] fingers to the height of his forehead, and offering it in thought to Siva or Vishnu before he eats it.⁹⁶ 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.⁹⁷ 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.⁹⁸ The Serwatty Islanders sacrifice buffalos, 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 [396] devoured by the devotees, this ensures a respectable attendance when the offerings are numerous.⁹⁹ 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.¹⁰⁰ 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;¹⁰¹ while in ancient Peru whole flocks of sacrificed llamas were eaten by the people.¹⁰² 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.¹⁰³

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;¹⁰⁴ or of the Ava Buddhists bringing to the temples offerings of boiled rice and sweetmeats and cocoa-nut fried [397] in oil, and never attempting to disturb the crows and wild dogs who devoured it before their eyes;¹⁰⁵ 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.¹⁰⁶ 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, we find men 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 forth-coming [398] 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 those 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.¹⁰⁷ 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 Phoenicians 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.¹⁰⁸ In such ways, slightly within the range of the lower culture, but strongly in the religion of the higher [399] 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 ;¹⁰⁹ 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 entrails¹¹⁰; 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.¹¹¹ Thus the most ancient whole [400] 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.¹¹² With a different motive, not that of parsimony, but of keeping up in survival an ancient rite, 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.¹¹³

The offering of a part of the worshipper’s own body is a most usual rite, 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.¹¹⁴ 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 [401] children of five years old quarrelling for the honour of having it done to them.¹¹⁵ 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 a 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 forefinger afterwards, upon the skull.¹¹⁶ 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 we hear of a golden finger being allowed instead, the substitute of a substitute.¹¹⁷ The New Zealanders hang locks of hair on branches of trees in the burying-ground, a recognized place for offerings.¹¹⁸ 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.¹¹⁹ Thus there is some ground for interpreting the consecration of the boy’s cut hair in Europe as a representative sacrifice.¹²⁰ As for the formal shedding of blood, it may represent fatal bloodshed, as when [402] the Jagas or priests in Quilombo only marked with spears the children brought in, instead of running them through ;¹²¹ or when in Greece a few drops of human blood had come to stand instead of the earlier and more barbaric human sacrifice;¹²² 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.¹²³ 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 parent’s 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!”¹²⁴ These various rites of finger-cutting, hair-cutting, and blood-letting, have required mention here from the special point of view of their [403] connexion with sacrifice. They helong 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.¹²⁵ The Greeks found it sufficient to offer to the gods criminals or captives ;¹²⁶ 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.¹²⁷ Among such accounts, the typical story belongs to Punic history. The Carthaginians had been overcome and hard pressed in the war with Agathokles, and they set down the defeat to divine wrath. Kronos (Moloch) 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 of Moloch. “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.”¹²⁸ 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 [404] the other.¹²⁹ 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!”¹³⁰ It looks as though 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.¹³¹ 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 iEolians of Tenedos sacrificing to Melikertes (Melkarth) instead of a new-born child a newborn calf, shoeing it with buskins and tending the mother-cow as if a human mother.¹³²

One step more in the course of substitution leads the [405] 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.¹³³ 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.¹³⁴ 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.¹³⁵ The modern Chinese, whose satisfaction in this kind of make-believe is so well shown by their dispatching 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 [406] laid out for the year-deity.¹³⁶ 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 aruseh 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.¹³⁷ 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,¹³⁸ as seems to have been the case with metal models of faces, breasts, hands, &c. in Boeotian temples.¹³⁹ 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,¹⁴⁰ 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.¹⁴¹

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. [407] 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.¹⁴² 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.¹⁴³ In many another district of Europe, the tenacious memory of the tiller of the soil has kept up in wondrous perfection heirlooms from prse-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 last century this most direct elemental sacrifice might be seen in Germany at the midsummer festival in the most perfect form; some of the porridge [408] 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.¹⁴⁴ 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.¹⁴⁵ 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.¹⁴⁶ The custom of burning alive the finest calf, to save a murrain-struck herd, had its last examples in Cornwall in the present 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.¹⁴⁷ 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 deiero, Reddens laudes Domino.”¹⁴⁸ With a lingering recollection of the old [409] libations, the German toper’s saying still runs that heeltaps are a devil’s offering.¹⁴⁹

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.”¹⁵⁰ 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. [410] 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 inter. course thus learnt, he has thenceforth but to reproduce the cause in order to renew the effects.

[411] 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 [412] “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 [413] 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.¹⁵¹

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.¹⁵² The “keebèt” or conjurors 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, etc. 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 [414] 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.”¹⁵³ 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.¹⁵⁴ 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.¹⁵⁵

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.¹⁵⁶ 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.¹⁵⁷ Through after ages, both cause [415] 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.”¹⁵⁸

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 saw 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.¹⁵⁹ It is needless to multiply such mediaeval 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.

[416] 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 “co-hoba” 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.¹⁶⁰ 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 [417] of North Brazil, desiring to discover murderers, would administer such drinks to seers, in whose dreams the criminals appeared.¹⁶¹ 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.¹⁶² The Mexican priests also appear to have used an ointment or drink made with seeds of “ ololiuhqui,” which produced delirium and visions.¹⁶³ In both Americas tobacco was used for such purposes. It must be noticed that smoking is more or less used 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.” ¹⁶⁴ So North American Indians held intoxication by tobacco to be supernatural ecstasy, and the dreams of men in this state to be inspired.¹⁶⁵ 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 [418] the heat and suffocating smoke, they were taken out, generally falling in a swoon.¹⁶⁶ 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 woollen 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.¹⁶⁷

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 thalasssegle which Pliny speaks of as drunk to produce delirium and visions; the drugs mentioned by Hesychius, whereby Hekate was evoked; the mediaeval 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.¹⁶⁸ 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 [419] 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.¹⁶⁹

Many details of the production of ecstasy and swoon by bodily exercises, chanting and screaming, etc., 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.¹⁷⁰ 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- [420] 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.¹⁷¹ 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.¹⁷² Thus, in the religion of uncultured races, the phenomenon of being “ struck” holds so recognized 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 gc even a gene- [421] ration 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.”¹⁷³ 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 minds 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 [422] 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.¹⁷⁴ 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;¹⁷⁵ 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.”¹⁷⁶ 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 ;¹⁷⁷ 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.¹⁷⁸ [423] 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.¹⁷⁹ 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 mediaeval 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.¹⁸⁰ 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.¹⁸¹ 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 mediaeval 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.”¹⁸²

[424] Where among the lower races sun-worship begins to con« solidate itself in systematic ritual, the orientation of the worshipper and the temple becomes usual and distinct. The sun-worshipping Comanches, preparing for the warpath, 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.¹⁸³ 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.¹⁸⁴ 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.¹⁸⁵ 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.¹⁸⁶ 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.¹⁸⁷

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 Brah- [425] man 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.¹⁸⁸ 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 cocoa-nut divided at a single cut, it is placed on the ground, and the bystanders worship it, turning to the west.¹⁸⁹

These two contrasted rites of east and west established [426] 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.”¹⁹⁰ 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.¹⁹¹ 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 [427] 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.¹⁹²

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 [428] 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 (πρòς τàς δυσμàς) 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.”¹⁹³ This perfect double rite of east and west, retained in the baptismal ceremony of the Greek Church, may be seen in Eussia 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 Eeformation, till at the beginning of the present century they seemed falling out of use ; since then, however, they have been restored to a certain prominence by the revived medievalism of our own day. To the student of history, it is a striking example of the connexion of thought and rite through the religions of the lower and higher culture, to see surviving in our midst, with meaning dwindled into [429] 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 or 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 [430] 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.¹⁹⁴ 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.¹⁹⁵ 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.¹⁹⁶ 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 [431] ancestral names till the child chose one for itself by sneezing at it. The ceremony is 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 newborn child is in the highest degree tapu, and may only be touched by a few special persons till the restriction is removed.¹⁹⁷ 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.¹⁹⁸ 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.¹⁹⁹ 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.²⁰⁰ 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.²⁰¹ In these various examples [432] of lustration of infants, the purifications by fire have the most 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 have been imitated from Christian baptism. Thus, while there is nothing to prevent our supposing some rites of savage baptism to be of native origin, it seems unsafe to assert this in any individual case.

The purification of women at childbirth, etc., 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,²⁰² and the Basutos in South Africa. These latter have a well-marked rite of lustration by sprinkling, performed on girls at womanhood.²⁰³ The Hottentots considered mother and child unclean till they had been washed and smeared after the uncleanly native fashion.²⁰⁴ Lustrations with water were usual in West Africa.²⁰⁵ Tatar tribes in Mongolia used bathing, while in Siberia the custom of leaping over a fire answered the purpose of purification.²⁰⁶ The Mantras of the Malay Peninsula have made the bathing of the mother after [433] childbirth into a ceremonial ordinance.²⁰⁷ 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.²⁰⁸ 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.²⁰⁹ 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.²¹⁰ 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.²¹¹ 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 [434] 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.²¹² 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. Kafirs 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.²¹³ Mediaeval 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.²¹⁴

In the organized 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 [435] 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 had 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.”²¹⁵ 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 [486] 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.²¹⁶

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;²¹⁷ 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 ;²¹⁸ in Birma the purification of the mother by fire, and the annual sprinkling-festival.²¹⁹ Within the range of Buddhism in its Lamaist form, we find such instances as the Tibetan and [437] 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.²²⁰ 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 private form of baptism, in which a new name was given with a three-fold sprinkling and washing with warm water where mystic alder-twigs were put; this ceremony they called by the name of “laugo” or bathing, a word not of Lapp but Scandinavian origin ; it might be repeatedly performed, and was considered a thoroughly native Lapp proceeding, utterly distinct from the Christian baptism to which the Lapps also conformed.²²¹ It is, however, the easiest ethnographic explanation of these two baptismal ceremonies in Central Asia and Northern Europe, to suppose imitation of Christianity either entirely bringing in a new rite, or adapting 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 [438] 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 !”²²² 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 wafer. 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.²²³

[439] 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 praenomen 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 lava turn, 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 ; iEneas 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 csedis
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 [440] funeral, aspersed with water and stepping over fire, were this double process made pure.²²⁴

The ordinances of purification in the Levitical law relat 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 ages 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.²²⁵ 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.²²⁶ 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 [441] among some little-known Christian sects, and in the European folk-lore custom of passing children through or over fire, if indeed we can be sure that this rite is lustral and not sacrificial.²²⁷ 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.²²⁸ 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, “Ephphetha,” 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.²²⁹ 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 [442] 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.

¹ Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 88 ; see p. 427.

² Ibid. p. 200; see 174. See also Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 343. Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 235.

³ Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part iii. p. 237.

⁴ M‘Coy, ‘Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 359.

⁵ Tanner, ‘Narrative,’ p. 46.

⁶ Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 297.

⁷ Hecke welder, ‘Ind. Völkerschaften,’ p. 354.

⁸ ‘Narratives of Rites and Laws of Yncas,’ tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, p. 31, 33. See also Brinton, p. 298.

⁹ Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 124, 141, 174, 182. ‘Remarks on Zulu lang.’ Pietermaritzburg, 1870, p. 22.

¹⁰ Waitz, vol. ii. p. 169. Steinhauser, I. c. p. 129.

¹¹ Rowley, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa,’ p. 226.

¹² Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 215.

¹³ Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 110, 128. See also Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 182 (Santals).

¹⁴ Plath, ‘Religion der Chinesen,’ part ii. p. 2 ; Doolittle, vol. ii. p. 116.

¹⁵ ‘Sama-Veda,’ i. 4, 2. Wuttke, ‘Gesch. des Heidenthums,’ part ii. p. 842.

¹⁶ Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. i. p. 128.

¹⁷ ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 51, 8, x. 105, 8. Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ part ii. ch. iii.

¹⁸ Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. ii. p. 383.

¹⁹ See Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. i. pp. 345, 556 ; vol. ii. pp. 303, 819. Compare Fergusson, ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ pl. xlii.

²⁰ Xenoph. Memorabilia Socrat. i. 3, 2.

²¹ Sahagun, ‘Retorica, etc., de la Gente Mexicana,’ lib. vi. c. 4, in Kingsborough ; ‘Antiquities of Mexico,’ vol. v.

²² ‘Rig-Veda,’ vii. 89. 3. Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 39.

²³ ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Spiegel ; ‘Khordah-Avesta,’ Patet Qod.

²⁴ Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentaries Reales,’ v. 19. Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 421.

²⁵ Charlevoix, ‘Nouv. Fr.’ vol. i. p. 394. See also Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xiii. p. 41.

²⁶ 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.

²⁷ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. p. 75. See also Tanner, ‘Narr.’ p. 193, and above, p. 270.

²⁸ Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 129.

²⁹ Billings, ‘Exp. to Northern Russia,’ p. 125. Chinese sacrifices buried for earth spirits, see ante, vol. i. p. 107 ; Plath, part ii. p. 50.

³⁰ Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 182.

³¹ Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 67.

³² Herod. vii. 35, 54. Liv. Vii. 6. Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece,’ vol. x. p. 589, see 715.

³³ Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 367.

³⁴ Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 336, 358. Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 220.

³⁵ Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 494; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 218 ; Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ p. 331.

³⁶ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 195, etc.

³⁷ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 69. J. G. Müller, p. 631.

³⁸ Ward, vol. ii. p. 194 ; ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 332.

³⁹ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 226.

⁴⁰ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Air.’ p. 218.

⁴¹ Manu, iii. 212. See also ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Spiegel and Bleek, vol. ii. p. 2.

⁴² Ysbrants Ides, ‘Reize naar China,’ p. 38. Meiners, vol. i. p. 162.

⁴³ Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 46. J. G. Müller, p. 631.

⁴⁴ Bel and the Dragon.

⁴⁵ Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 47.

⁴⁶ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ part ii. p. 210.

⁴⁷ Homer, Odyss. xi. xii.

⁴⁸ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 270.

⁴⁹ 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.

⁵⁰ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 145. See also St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 160.

⁵¹ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 147; Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 181; Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Paces of Scotland,’ vol. ii. p. 458.

⁵² Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xxi. ; in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xvi. p. 631. See also Waitz, vol. ii. p. 192.

⁵³ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 96.

⁵⁴ Levit. i., etc. ; Deuteron, xii. 23 ; Psalm xvi. 4.

⁵⁵ 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. Catliu, vol i. pp. 181, 229. Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 164. J. G. Müller, p. 58.

⁵⁶ Rochefort, ‘lies Antilles,’ pp. 418, 507. Lery, ‘Voy. en Brésil,’ p. 268. See also Musters in ‘Journ. Anthrop. Inst.’ vol. i. p. 202 (Patagonians).

⁵⁷ Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 11, 141, 177. See also Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 258.

⁵⁸ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 39. See also Piedrahita, part i. lib. i. o. 3 (Muyscas).

⁵⁹ Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part ii. p. 31. Doolittle, ‘Chinese.’

⁶⁰ Porphyr, de Abstinentia, ii. 5. Arnob. contra Gentes. vii. 26. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 14.

⁶¹ Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians,’ vol. v. pp. 315, 338. Plutarch de la. et Osir.

⁶² Herodot. i. 183.

⁶³ Exod. xxx., xxxvii. Lev. x. 1, xvi. 12, etc.

⁶⁴ Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xiii. p. 41. Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jes.’ 1634, p. 16. Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i. p. 189.

⁶⁵ ‘Rites and Laws of Incas,’ p. 16, etc., 79 ; see ‘Ollanta, an ancient Ynca Drama,’ tr. by C. R. Markham, p. 81. Garcilaso de la Vega, lib. i. ii. vi.

⁶⁶ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. pp. 106, 114.

⁶⁷ Plath, part ii. p. 65.

⁶⁸ Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 191.

⁶⁹ ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 1, 4.

⁷⁰ Homer, Il. i. 317.

⁷¹ Porphyr. De Abstinentia, ii. 42 ; see 58.

⁷² Stanley, ‘Jewish Church,’ 2d Ser. pp. 410, 424. See Kalisch on Leviticus ; Barry in Smith’s ‘Dictionary of the Bible,’ art. ‘sacrifice.’

⁷³ Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazalu,’ p. 11 (amadhlozi or amatongo=ancestral spirits).

⁷⁴ 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.

⁷⁵ ‘Jonrn. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 194.

⁷⁶ Eliot in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p. 30.

⁷⁷ Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 88, 100.

⁷⁸ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 114.

⁷⁹ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 264.

⁸⁰ ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 27.

⁸¹ Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 208.

⁸² Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 407. Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res,’ vol. i. p. 358. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 104, 220.

⁸³ Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 231.

⁸⁴ Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Researches,’ vol. ii. p. 140 ; see 190.

⁸⁵ Tanner’s ‘Narrative,’ pp. 286, 318. See also Waitz, vol. iii. p. 207.

⁸⁶ J. G. Müller, p. 142 ; see 282.

⁸⁷ Sahagun, lib. vi. in Kingsborough, vol. v.

⁸⁸ ‘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).

⁸⁹ Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 188, 196. Steinhauser, I. c. p. 136. See also Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xv. ; Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 273.

⁹⁰ A. Campbell in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 153.

⁹¹ O’Riley, in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 592. Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 12.

⁹² R. Clarke, ‘Sierra Leone,’ p. 43.

⁹³ 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, etc.

⁹⁴ J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 218 ; Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xvi. p. 400.

⁹⁵ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 387.

⁹⁶ Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations,’ p. 545.

⁹⁷ M‘Coy, ‘Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 305.

⁹⁸ Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 59. See Casalis, p. 252.

⁹⁹ Earl in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 174.

¹⁰⁰ Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 170, see 146; Hooker, ‘Himalayan Journals,’ vol. ii. p. 276.

¹⁰¹ Prescott, ‘Mexico,’ book i. ch. iii.

¹⁰² ‘Rites and Laws of Yncas,’ p. 33, etc.

¹⁰³ Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterlehre,’ vol. ii. p. 60 ; Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclopedie,’ s. v. ‘Sacrificia.’

¹⁰⁴ Tanner’s ‘Nar.’ p. 154 ; see also Waitz, vol. iii. p. 167.

¹⁰⁵ Symes, ‘Ava,’ in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. ix. p. 440.

¹⁰⁶ Burton, ‘Medinah,’ etc. vol. iii. p. 302 ; Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. i. p. 132.

¹⁰⁷ Hardy, ‘Manual of Buddhism,’ p. 59.

¹⁰⁸ II. Kings, iii. 27. Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10, iv. 156. Laud. Constant. xiii. Porphyr. De Abstin. ii. 56, etc. Lamprid. Heliogabal. vii. Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 300, etc.

¹⁰⁹ Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 419.

¹¹⁰ Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 59. Bosman in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 399.

¹¹¹ Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 106; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 232.

¹¹² Hesiod. Theog. 537. Welcker, vol. i. p. 764 ; vol. ii. p. 51.

¹¹³ Haug, ‘Parsis,’ Bombay, 1862, p. 238.

¹¹⁴ Hamilton in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 342.

¹¹⁵ 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.

¹¹⁶ Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i. p. 172 ; Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. ii. p. 170. See also Venegas, ‘Noticiade la California,’ vol. i. p. 117; Garcilaso de la Vega, lib. ii. c. 8 (Peru).

¹¹⁷ Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ etc., in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. viii. p. 661 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 472 ; Bastian, I. c. See also Dubois, ‘India,’ vol. i. p. 5.

¹¹⁸ Polack, ‘New Zealand,’ vol. i. p. 264.

¹¹⁹ Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 184.

¹²⁰ Theodoret. in Levit. xix. ; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ Details in Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 229, etc.

¹²¹ Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 113 (see other details).

¹²² Pausan. viii. 23 ; ix. 8.

¹²³ ‘Encyc. Brit.’ art ‘Brahma.’ See ‘Asiat. Res.’ vol. ix. p. 387.

¹²⁴ Boeder, ‘Ehsten Aberglaüubische Gebraüche,’ etc., p. 4.

¹²⁵ Rivero and Tscaudi, p. 196. See ‘Rites of Yncas,’ p. 79.

¹²⁶ Bastian, p. 112, etc. ; Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ art. ‘Sacrificium.’

¹²⁷ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 40.

¹²⁸ Diodor. Sic. xx. 14.

¹²⁹ Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 88; Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 256.

¹³⁰ Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 108, 187.

¹³¹ De Silva in Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 181.

¹³² Details in Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s. v. ‘Sacrificia’ ; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 114 ; Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 300.

¹³³ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. 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.

¹³⁴ Grote, vol. v. p. 366. Schmidt in Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ art. ‘Sacrificium.’ Bastian, I. c.

¹³⁵ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 501.

¹³⁶ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 152.

¹³⁷ Lane, ‘Modern Eg.’ vol. ii. p. 262. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 85.

¹³⁸ Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. iii. p. 395 ; and in Rawlinson’s Herodotus, vol. ii. p. 137. See 1. Sam. vi. 4.

¹³⁹ Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 1131.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid.

¹⁴¹ Bastian, vol. iii. p. 116.

¹⁴² St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 43. Compare modern Circassian sacrifice of animal before cross, as substitute for child, in Bell, ‘Circassia,’ vol. ii.

¹⁴³ Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ pp. 123, 153, etc.

¹⁴⁴ Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 86. See also Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ pp. 417, 602.

¹⁴⁵ Hyltén-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ part i. pp. 131, 146, 157, etc.

¹⁴⁶ Moimier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ pp. 187, 666.

¹⁴⁷ 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.

¹⁴⁸ Brand, vol. i. p. 484. Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 45, 194, 1188, see 250; ‘Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer,’ p. 900 ; Hyltén-Cavallius, part i. p. 175.

¹⁴⁹ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 962.

¹⁵⁰ Beausobre, vol. ii. p. 667. Polydorus Vergilius, De Inventoribus Reru (Basel, 1521), lib. v. 1.

¹⁵¹ Tanner’s ‘Narrative,’ p. 288. Loskiel, ‘N. A. Ind.’ part i. p. 76. Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part i pp. 34, 113, 360, 391 ; partiii. 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.

¹⁵² Colombo, ‘Vita,’ ch. xxv. Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 501. See also Meiners, vol. ii p. 143 (Guyana).

¹⁵³ Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 68.

¹⁵⁴ St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 144.

¹⁵⁵ Döhne, ‘Zulu Die.’ s. v. ‘nyanga;’ Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 158; Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 387.

¹⁵⁶ Somadeva Bhatta, tr. Brockhaus, vol. ii. p. 81. Meiners, vol. ii p. 147.

¹⁵⁷ Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc., p. 237 ; Pausan. i. 34 ; Philostrat. Apollon. Tyan. i ; Galen. Comment. in Hippocrat. i.

¹⁵⁸ Baptist. Mantuan. Fast ix. 350.

¹⁵⁹ ‘Acta Sanctorum Bolland,’ S. Theresa.

¹⁶⁰ Colombo, ‘Vita,’ ch. lxii. ; Roman Pane, ibid. ch. xv. ; and in Pinkerton, vol. xii. Condamine, ‘Travels,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiv. p. 226 ; Martius, ‘Etlmog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 441, 631 (details of snuff-powders among Omaguas, Otomacs, etc. ; native names curupa, paricà, niopo, nupa ; made from seeds of Mimosa acacioides, Acacia niopo).

¹⁶¹ Maury, Magie,’ etc. p. 425.

¹⁶² Seemann, ‘Voy. of Herald,’ vol. i. p. 256. Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruvian Antiquities,’ p. 184. J. G. Müller, p. 397.

¹⁶³ Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 558 ; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 40 ; J. G. Müller, p. 656.

¹⁶⁴ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 277 ; Hernandez, ‘Historia Mexicans,’ lib. v. c, 51 ; Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1292.

¹⁶⁵ D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ vol. i. p. 487.

¹⁶⁶ Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 42.

¹⁶⁷ Herodot. iv. 73-5.

¹⁶⁸ Maury, ‘Magie,’ etc. I. c. ; Plin. xxiv. 102 ; Hesyeh. s. v. ‘ὠπήτειρα.’ See also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 162, etc. ; Baring-Gould, ‘Were wolves,’ p. 149.

¹⁶⁹ Polak, ‘Persien,’ vol. ii. p. 245 ; Vambéry in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. ii. p. 20 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 216.

¹⁷⁰ Meiners, vol. ii. p. 162.

¹⁷¹ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 286.

¹⁷² Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 145. Compare ‘OestL Asien,’ vol ii. p. 247 (Aracan).

¹⁷³ D. H. Tuke in ‘Journal of Mental Science,’ Oct. 1870, p. 368.

¹⁷⁴ Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 327.

¹⁷⁵ Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 230. Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 151.

¹⁷⁶ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. p. 54.

¹⁷⁷ Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 485.

¹⁷⁸ D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. pp. 319, 330.

¹⁷⁹ Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruvian Antiquities,’ p. 202. See also Arbousset and Daumas, ‘Voyage,’ p. 277 (Kafirs).

¹⁸⁰ Bickmore, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 20. Georgi, ‘Reise,’ vol. i. p. 266. Gul. de Rubmquis in Hakluyt, vol. i. p. 78. Bastian, ‘OestL Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 228.

¹⁸¹ Lilian. Var. Hist. v. 14, vii. 19 ; Plutarch. Solon, x. ; Diog. Laert. Solon ; “Welcker, vol. i. p. 404.

¹⁸² Beda in Die S. Paschae. Durand, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, lib. vii. c. 35-9. Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. ii. pp. 295, 318.

¹⁸³ Gregg, ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. i pp. 270, 273 ; vol. ii. p. 818.

¹⁸⁴ Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 178.

¹⁸⁵ Bochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 365.

¹⁸⁶ Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 24 ; J. G. Müller, p. 641. See Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 29.

¹⁸⁷ J. G. Müller, p. 363 ; Prescott, ‘Peru,’ book i. ch. 3. Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentaries Reales,’ lib. iii. c. 20, says it was at the east end ; c£ lib. vi. c. 21 (llama sacrificed with head to east).

¹⁸⁸ Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i, iv. and v.

¹⁸⁹ ‘Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs,’ London, 1837, p. 46.

¹⁹⁰ Ezek. viii. 16. Mishna, ‘Sukkoth,’ v. See Fergusson in Smith’s ‘Dictionary of the Bible,’ s. v. ‘Temple.’

¹⁹¹ Hyde, ‘Veterum Persarum Religionis Historia,’ ch. iv. Niebuhr, ‘Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien,’ vol. i. p. 396. Layard, ‘Nineveh,’ vol. i. ch. ix.

¹⁹² Lucian. De Domo, vi. Vitruv. de Architecture, iv. 5. See Welcker, vol. i p. 403.

¹⁹³ Augustin, de Senn. Dom. in Monte, ii. 5. Tertullian. Contra Valentin. iii. ; Apolog. xvi. Constitutiones Apostolicæ, ii. 57, Cyril. Catech. Myst. i 2. Hieronym. in Amos, vi. 14; Biugham, ‘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.

¹⁹⁴ Billings, ‘N. Russia,’ p. 175.

¹⁹⁵ Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 485.

¹⁹⁶ ‘Journ, Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 264.

¹⁹⁷ 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.

¹⁹⁸ Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 152.

¹⁹⁹ Munzinger, ‘Ost-Afrika,’ p. 387.

²⁰⁰ Park, ‘Travels,’ ch. vi.

²⁰¹ 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).

²⁰² Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 261 ; part iii. p. 243, etc. Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. v. p. 425. Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 294.

²⁰³ Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 267.

²⁰⁴ Kolben, vol. i. pp. 273, 283.

²⁰⁵ Bosman, in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xvi. pp. 423, 527; Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 107, 463.

²⁰⁶ Pallas, ‘Mongolische Völkerschaften,’ vol. i. p. 166, etc.; Strahlenbeig, ‘Siberia,’ p. 97.

²⁰⁷ Bourien in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 81.

²⁰⁸ Dalton in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 22 ; Shortt, ibid. vol. iii. p. 875.

²⁰⁹ Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 255.

²¹⁰ Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 127.

²¹¹ Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 241 ; see 407, 419.

²¹² Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 258.

²¹³ Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 147; Backhouse, ‘Mauritius and S. Africa,’ pp. 213, 225.

²¹⁴ Bastian, ‘Mensch, ‘vol. iii. p. 75; Rubruquis, in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 62 ; Plano Carpini in Hakluyt, vol. i. p. 37.

²¹⁵ 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.

²¹⁶ Sahagun, ‘Nueva España,’ lib. vi. ; Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ lib. xii. ; Clavigero, vol. ii. pp. 39, 86, etc. ; Humboldt, ‘Vues des Cordillères,’ Mendoza Cod. ; J. G. Müller, p. 652.

²¹⁷ Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ v. p. 22; Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ ch. xiii. in Pinkerton, vol. vii.

²¹⁸ Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 120, vol. ii. p. 273. Davis, vol. i. p. 269.

²¹⁹ Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 247 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 106 ; Symea in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 435.

²²⁰ Koppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. ii. p. 320 ; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 151, 211, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 499.

²²¹ Leems, ‘Lapland,’ in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 483 ; Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 77.

²²² Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 96, 246, 337; Colebrooke, ‘Essaye,’ vol. ii. Wuttke, ‘Gesch. des Heidenthums,’ vol. ii. p. 378. ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 22, 23.

²²³ Avesta, Vendidad, v.-xii. ; Lord, in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 570 ; Naoroji, ‘Parsee Religion ; ‘Polak, ‘Persien, ‘vol. i. p. 355, etc., vol. ii p. 271. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 125.

²²⁴ Details in Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ and Pauly, ‘Real Encyclopedie,’ s. v. ‘amphidromia,’ ‘lustratio,’ ‘sacrificium,’ ‘fanus;’ Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Religionen,’ book vii. ; Lomeyer, ‘De Veterum Gen-tilium Lustrationibus ; ‘Montfaucon, ‘L’Antiquité Expliquée,’ etc. Special passages : Homer. II. vi. 266 ; Eurip. Ion. 96 ; Theocrit. xxiv. 95 ; Virg. Æn. ii. 719 ; Plaut. Anlular. iii. 6 ; Pers. Sat. ii. 31 ; Ovid. Fast. i. 669, ii. 45, iv. 727 ; Festus, s. v. ‘aqua et ignis,’ etc. The obscure subject of lustration in the mysteries is here left untouched.

²²⁵ Ex. xxix. 4, xxx. 18, xl. 12 ; Lev. viii. 6, xiv. 8, xv. 5, xxii. 6 ; Numb. xix., etc. ; Lightfoot in ‘Works,’ vol. xi. ; Browne in Smith’s ‘Die. of the Bible,’ s. v. ‘baptism ;’ Calmet, ‘Die.’ etc.

²²⁶ Reland, ‘De Religione Mohammedanica ; ‘Lane, ‘Modern Eg.’ vol. i. p. 98, etc.

²²⁷ 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.

²²⁸ Rituale Romanum ; Gaume, ‘L’Eau Bénite ;’ Middleton, ‘Letter from Rome,’ etc.

²²⁹ Rituale Romanum. Bingham, book x. ch. 2, book xv. ch. 8. See Mark vii. 34, viii.23 ; John ix. 6.

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUSION.

[443] 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 archaeology, 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 pre-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 [444] 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 [445] 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 we consider 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 ? [446] 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 of 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 demonstrated this. 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 pseudohistoric legend. Poetry is full of myth, and he who will [447] 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 tests 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, [448] 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 inquirers 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 circumstance 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 [449] 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 theologians 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 [450] 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 ethrologist 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 [451] 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. [452] 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 connexion 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 suffer 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 [453] 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.

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Edward Burnett Tylor: Primitive Culture. Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom Volume I. John Murray, London 1920.
Edward Burnett Tylor: Primitive Culture. Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom Volume II. John Murray, London 1920.
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Grundlagentexte der Religionswissenschaft bei edition enso

Bisher erschienen:

Band 1: Rudolf Otto: Das Heilige

Band 2: Friedrich Schleiermacher: Über die Religion

Band 3: Sigmund Freud: Totem und Tabu, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion

Band 4: Friedrich Max Müller: Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft

Band 5: Max Weber: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus

Band 6: Ludwig Feuerbach: Das Wesen des Christentums

Band 7: James G. Frazer: The Golden Bough

Band 8: Edward Burnett Tylor: Primitive Culture

Der Herausgeber

Martin von Arndt ist Religionswissenschaftler, Dozent in der Erwachsenenbildung und Schriftsteller. Er promovierte über Tiefenpsychologische Bibelexegese, hat zahlreiche Sachbücher und Romane veröffentlicht.