The Desert World

by Arthur Mangin

The savage has no “industries” in the sense which we attach to that comprehensive word; the terms “trade,” “business,” “profession,” possess no equivalents in his language. He builds himself a hut, a cabin, or a wigwam; and he fabricates for his use a few indispensable implements, weapons, and utensils. The only profession recognized among savage peoples is that of the priesthood. Priests, indeed, are everywhere found as the teachers and ministers of a religion—if we are willing to bestow that sacred word on an incongruous mass of superstitious practices and beliefs, founded upon some dim idea of the existence of a Supreme Being. And this idea exists, though very faintly and rudely, and mingled with many atrocious or absurd aberrations, among most of the red-skins of North America and the islanders of Polynesia. These races believe in the power of a superior God, whom the former denominate the “Great Spirit,” Kitchi Manitou, and the latter Taoroa or Tangara; as well as in another life, a coarse and sensual immortality, wherein they hope to enjoy the full measure of those animal delights which constitute their ideal of perfect happiness. The conception which the savage forms of his God is, nevertheless, a very poor and imperfect one. He never connects him with his thoughts, his emotions, his moral or intellectual nature; but only with the material world—with the thunder and the lightning, the sunshine and the cloud. “Who is it,” says the Indian, “that causes the rain to rise in the high mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean? Who is it that causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in the summer? Who is it that rears up the shade of those lofty forests, and blasts them with the quick lightning at his pleasure?” And so the Polynesian employs his priest to propitiate his God with sacrifices when the storm rages; and the African, after a prolonged drought, engages the intercession of his “rain-maker” to obtain the desired showers. It is not a moral and a spiritual, but a material God, of whom the savage conceives, and before whose anger he trembles.

In some regions of South America, and principally in Peru, man worships the sun as his supreme divinity, and it is easy to understand the awe and wonder with which the uncultivated mind would necessarily look upon the orb of day, the master and ruler of the year. With Southey, I find myself ready to exclaim:—

“I marvel not, O Sun, that unto thee
In adoration man should bow the knee,
And pour the prayer of mingled awe and love;
For like a god thou art, and on thy way
Of glory sheddest, with benignant ray,
Beauty, and life, and joyaunce from above.”

We know, too, that sun-worship has prevailed among the most highly civilized races, and that it was the basis of Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, and Oriental mythologies. “Our northern natures,” says Mr. Helps,[179] referring to the influence of this religion of the outer world, “can hardly comprehend how the sun and the moon and the stars were imaged in the heart of a Peruvian, and dwelt there; how the changes in these luminaries were combined with all his feelings and his fortunes; how the dawn was hope to him; how the fierce mid-day brightness was power to him; how the declining sun was death to him; and how the new morning was a resurrection to him: nay, more, how the sun and the moon and the stars were his personal friends, as well as his deities; how he held communion with them, and thought that they regarded every act and word; how, in his solitude, he fondly imagined that they sympathized with him; and how, with outstretched arms, he appealed to them against their own unkindness, or against the injustice of his fellow-man.” But such a creed as this is indicative of some degree of advancement, of some modicum of civilization, and may not be compared with the monstrous fetichism prevailing in Melanesia, Australia, Africa, and the Polar Deserts. In these regions the savage takes for the objects of his veneration beasts and inanimate objects; or is without any definite belief, and shows himself refractory to all religious teaching. Such is the case, according to Sir John Ross, among the Eskimos; while the Australians, according to Latham, have not even succeeded in formulating the rudest elements of a mythology; and the negroes of Equatorial Africa indulge in horrible superstitions which are a hundredfold worse than the absence of all belief.

The individuals, therefore, who act as priests among these ignorant and stupid savages are, in reality, only miserable sorcerers, to whom they attribute the power of predicting the future, of controlling wind and rain, the sun and the moon, of curing disease, either by magic potions, incantations, or amulets; but they fear without respecting them, and never hesitate to put them to death when the effect of their juggleries or their prophecies does not respond to the hopes cherished by the worshippers.

Among these credulous and cruel peoples we find the realization of all those terrible dreams embodied by the poet in his picture of the influences and consequences of superstition. For a vivid commentary on the following lines of Pope, the reader should turn to the pages of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Du Chaillu, William Ellis, John Williams, or Admiral Wilkes. Of superstition, the poet says:[180]—

“She taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray
To powers unseen, and mightier far than they:
She, from the rending earth and bursting skies,
Saw gods descend, and fiends infernal rise;
Here fixed the dreadful, there the blessed abodes:
Fear made her devils, and weak hope her gods:
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust;
Such as the souls of cowards might conceive,
And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.
Zeal, then, not charity, became the guide;
And hell was built on spite, and heaven on pride.
Then sacred seemed the ethereal vault no more;
Altars grew marble then, and reeked with gore;
Then first the flamen tasted living food;
Next his grim idol smeared with human blood;
With heaven’s own thunders shook the world below,
And played the god an engine on his foe.”

The savage has only rudimentary notions of the justice, the respect, and the good-will which man owes to his fellows. Nevertheless, if in some parts of the world he appears an intractable, cruel, and perfidious being, in others his manners are gentle, inoffensive, and hospitable. And nearly everywhere he seems capable of gratitude, devotion, and even of veritable heroism. But, in general, the law of the strongest is the only law which he recognizes; the fear of an immediate and corporeal chastisement is the sole restraint upon his passions; and the material instincts are the most powerful impulses of his actions. The want or narrowness of the moral sense induces as its natural consequences among the unfortunate savages every form of debauchery—the absolute and brutal tyranny of the chief over his tribe, of man over woman, of the father over his children, of the conqueror over the conquered; murder on the slightest occasion, and with incredible refinements of cruelty; and, finally, anthropophagy—that hideous custom which lowers man below the most ferocious beasts, and which, nevertheless is not always, as might be supposed, the sign of the lowest abasement.

Anthropophagy springs from different causes, and clothes itself in various forms. Sometimes it is but the expression of a sanguinary instinct, of an atrocious sentiment of vengeance; sometimes it is the consequence of a state of misery and of famine almost permanent; often, also, it is closely connected with the usage of human sacrifices, and those who practise it consider it as a sacred duty, as an act of piety, agreeable to their divinities or to the manes of the victims whose very flesh they devour.