That amid night’s black deeds, when evil prowls
Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners well,
Glarest o’er all, the wakeful eye of—Hell!’
Skin for skin, the brown savage is not ill matched in such speculative lore with the white philosopher.
Fifthly, as Paradise on the face of the earth, and Hades beneath it where the sun goes down, are regions whose existence is asserted or not denied by savage and barbaric science, so it is with Heaven. Among the examples which display for us the real course of knowledge among mankind, and the real relation which primitive bears to later culture, the belief in the existence of a firmament is one of the most instructive. It arises naturally in the minds of children still, and in accordance with the simplest childlike thought, the cosmologies of the North American Indians[[171]] and the South Sea Islanders[[172]] describe their flat earth arched over by the solid vault of heaven. Like thoughts are to be traced on through such details as the Zulu idea that the blue heaven is a rock encircling the earth, inside which are the sun, moon, and stars, and outside which dwell the people of heaven; the modern negro’s belief that there is a firmament stretched above like a cloth or web; the Finnish poem which tells how Ilmarinen forged the firmament of finest steel, and set in it the moon and stars.[[173]] The New Zealander, with his notion of a solid firmament, through which the waters can be let down on earth through a crack or hole from the reservoir of rain above, could well explain the passage in Herodotus concerning that place in North Africa where, as the Libyans said, the sky is pierced, as well as the ancient Jewish conception of a firmament of heaven, ‘strong as a molten mirror,’ with its windows through which the rain pours down in deluge from the reservoirs above, windows which late Rabbinical literature tells us were made by taking out two stars.[[174]] In nations where the theory of the firmament prevails, accounts of bodily journeys or spiritual ascents to heaven are in general meant not as figure, but as fact. Among the lower races, the tendency to localize the region of departed souls above the sky seems less strong than that which leads them to place their world of the dead on or below the earth’s surface. Yet some well-marked descriptions of a savage Heaven are on record, the following, and others to be cited presently. Even some Australians seem to think of going up to the clouds at death, to eat and drink, and hunt and fish as here.[[175]] In North America, the Winnebagos placed their paradise in the sky, where souls travel along that ‘Path of the Dead’ which we call the Milky Way; and working out the ever-recurring solar idea, the modern Iroquois speak of the soul going upward and westward, till it comes out on the beauteous plains of heaven, with people and trees and things as on earth.[[176]] In South America the Guarayos, representatives in some sort of the past condition of the Guarani race, worship Tamoi the Grandfather, the Ancient of Heaven; he was their first ancestor, who lived among them in old days and taught them to till the ground; then rising to heaven in the East he disappeared, having promised to be the helper of his people on earth, and to transport them, when they died, from the top of a sacred tree into another life, where they shall find their kindred and have hunting in plenty, and possess all that they possessed on earth; therefore it is that the Guarayos adorn their dead, and burn their weapons for them, and bury them with their faces to the East, whither they are to go.[[177]] Among American peoples whose culture rose to a higher level than that of these savage tribes, we hear of the Peruvian Heaven, the glorious ‘Upper World,’ and of the temporary abode of Aztec warriors on heavenly wooded plains, where the sun shines when it is night on earth, wherefore it was a Mexican saying that the sun goes at evening to lighten the dead.[[178]] What thoughts of heaven were in the minds of the old Aryan poets, this hymn from the Rig-Veda may show:—
‘Where there is eternal light, in the world where the sun is placed, in that immortal imperishable world place me, O Soma!
Where king Vaivasvata reigns, where the secret place of heaven is, where these mighty waters are, there make me immortal!
Where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, where the worlds are radiant, there make me immortal!
Where wishes and desires are, where the place of the bright sun is, where there is freedom and delight, there make me immortal!
Where there is happiness and delight, where joy and pleasure reside, where the desires of our desire are attained, there make me immortal!’[[179]]