(1) Relations, 1636, pp. 106, 107.
A spiritual being, whose home is heaven, who rides on the winds, whose wrath is dreaded, who sanctions the oath, is only called "a demon" by the prejudice of the worthy father who, at the same time, admits that the savages have a conception of God—and that God, so conceived, is this demon!
The debatable question is, was the "demon," or the actual expanse of sky, first in evolution? That cannot precisely be settled, but in the analogous Chinese case of China we find heaven (Tien) and "Shang-ti, the personal ruling Deity," corresponding to the Huron "demon". Shang-ti, the personal deity, occurs most in the oldest, pre-Confucian sacred documents, and, so far, appears to be the earlier conception. The "demon" in Huron faith may also be earlier than the religious regard paid to his home, the sky.(1) The unborrowed antiquity of a belief in a divine being, creative and sometimes moral, in North America, is thus demonstrated. So far I had written when I accidentally fell in with Mr. Tylor's essay on "The Limits of Savage Religion".(2) In that essay, rather to my surprise, Mr. Tylor argues for the borrowing of "The Great Spirit," "The Great Manitou," from the Jesuits. Now, as to the phrase, "Great Spirit," the Jesuits doubtless caused its promulgation, and, where their teaching penetrated, shreds of their doctrine may have adhered to the Indian conception of that divine being. But Mr. Tylor in his essay does not allude to the early evidence, his own, for Oki, Atahocan, Kiehtan, and Torngursak, all undeniably prior to Jesuit influence, and found where Jesuits, later, did not go. As Mr. Tylor offers no reason for disregarding evidence in 1892 which he had republished in a new edition of Primitive Culture in 1891, it is impossible to argue against him in this place. He went on, in the essay cited (1892) to contend that the Australian god of the Kamilaroi of Victoria, Baiame, is, in name and attributes, of missionary introduction. Happily this hypothesis can be refuted, as we show in the following chapter on Australian gods.
(1) See Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. 362, and Making of Religion, p. 318; also Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 108,109, and Dr. Legge's Chinese Classics, in Sacred Books of the East, vols. iii., xxvii., xxviii.
(2) Journ. of Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxi., 1892.
It would be easy enough to meet the hypothesis of borrowing in the case of the many African tribes who possess something approaching to a rude monotheistic conception. Among these are the Dinkas of the Upper Nile, with their neighbours, whose creed Russegger compares to that of modern Deists in Europe. The Dinka god, Dendid, is omnipotent, but so benevolent that he is not addressed in prayer, nor propitiated by sacrifice. Compare the supreme being of the Caribs, beneficent, otiose, unadored.(1) A similar deity, veiled in the instruction of the as yet unpenetrated Mysteries, exists among the Yao of Central Africa.(2) Of the negro race, Waitz says, "even if we do not call them monotheists, we may still think of them as standing on the boundary of monotheism despite their innumerable rude superstitions".(3) The Tshi speaking people of the Gold Coast have their unworshipped Nyankupon, a now otiose unadored being, with a magisterial deputy, worshipped with many sacrifices. The case is almost an exact parallel to that of Ahone and Oki in America. THESE were not borrowed, and the author has argued at length against Major Ellis's theory of the borrowing from Christians of Nyankupon.(4)
(1) Rochefort, Les Isles Antilles, p. 415. Tylor, ii. 337.
(2) Macdonald, Africana, 1, 71, 72, 130, 279-301. Scott, Dictionary of the Manganja Language, Making of Religion, pp. 230-238. A contradictory view in Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 681.
(3) Anthropologie, ii. 167.
(4) Making of Religion, pp. 243-250.