The general scheme of Animism, of which the doctrine of souls hitherto discussed forms part, thence expands to complete the full general philosophy of Natural Religion among mankind. Conformably with that early childlike philosophy in which human life seems the direct key to the understanding of nature at large, the savage theory of the universe refers its phenomena in general to the wilful action of pervading personal spirits. It was no spontaneous fancy, but the reasonable inference that effects are due to causes, which led the rude men of old days to people with such ethereal phantoms their own homes and haunts, and the vast earth and sky beyond. Spirits are simply personified causes. As men’s ordinary life and actions were held to be caused by souls, so the happy or disastrous events which affect mankind, as well as the manifold physical operations of the outer-world, were accounted for as caused by soul-like beings, spirits whose essential similarity of origin is evident through all their wondrous variety of power and function. Much that the primitive animistic view thus explains, has been indeed given over by more advanced education to the ‘metaphysical’ and ‘positive’ stages of thought. Yet animism is still plainly to be traced onward from the intellectual state of the lower races, along the course of the higher culture, whether its doctrines have been continued and modified into the accepted philosophy of religion, or whether they have dwindled into mere survivals in popular superstition. Though all I here undertake is to sketch in outline such features of this spiritualistic philosophy as I can see plainly enough to draw at all, scarcely attempting to clear away the haze that covers great parts of the subject, yet even so much as I venture on is a hard task, made yet harder by the responsibility attaching to it. For it appears that to follow the course of animism on from its more primitive stages, is to account for much of mediæval and modern opinion whose meaning and reason could hardly be comprehended without the aid of a development-theory of culture, taking in the various processes of new formation, abolition, survival, and revival. Thus even the despised ideas of savage races become a practically important topic to the modern world, for here, as usual, whatever bears on the origin of philosophic opinion, bears also on its validity.
At this point of the investigation, we come fully into sight of the principle which has been all along implied in the use of the word Animism, in a sense beyond its narrower meaning of the doctrine of souls. By using it to express the doctrine of spirits generally, it is practically asserted that the idea of souls, demons, deities, and any other classes of spiritual beings, are conceptions of similar nature throughout, the conceptions of souls being the original ones of the series. It was best, from this point of view, to begin with a careful study of souls, which are the spirits proper to men, animals, and things, before extending the survey of the spirit-world to its fullest range. If it be admitted that souls and other spiritual beings are conceived of as essentially similar in their nature, it may be reasonably argued that the class of conceptions based on evidence most direct and accessible to ancient men, is the earlier and fundamental class. To grant this, is in effect to agree that the doctrine of souls, founded on the natural perceptions of primitive man, gave rise to the doctrine of spirits, which extends and modifies its general theory for new purposes, but in developments less authenticated and consistent, more fanciful and far-fetched. It seems as though the conception of a human soul, when once attained to by man, served as a type or model on which he framed not only his ideas of other souls of lower grade, but also his ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports in the long grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the Great Spirit.
The doctrines of the lower races fully justify us in classing their spiritual beings in general as similar in nature to the souls of men. It will be incidentally shown here, again and again, that souls have the same qualities attributed to them as other spirits, are treated in like fashion, and pass without distinct breaks into every part of the general spiritual definition. The similar nature of soul and other spirit is, in fact, one of the commonplaces of animism, from its rudest to its most cultured stages. It ranges from the native New Zealanders’ and West Indians’ conceptions of the ‘atua’ and the ‘cemi,’ beings which require special definition to show whether they are human souls or demons or deities of some other class,[[229]] and so onward to the declaration of Philo Judæus, that souls, demons, and angels differ indeed in name, but are in reality one,[[230]] and to the state of mind of the modern Roman Catholic priest, who is cautioned in the rubric concerning the examination of a possessed patient, not to believe the demon if he pretends to be the soul of some saint or deceased person, or a good angel (neque ei credatur, si dæmon simularet se esse animam alicujus Sancti, vel defuncti, vel Angelum bonum).[[231]] Nothing can bring more broadly into view the similar nature of souls and other spiritual beings than the existence of a full transitional series of ideas. Souls of dead men are in fact considered as actually forming one of the most important classes of demons and deities.
It is quite usual for savage tribes to live in terror of the souls of the dead as harmful spirits. Thus Australians have been known to consider the ghosts of the unburied dead as becoming malignant demons.[[232]] New Zealanders have supposed the souls of their dead to become so changed in nature as to be malignant to their nearest and dearest friends in life;[[233]] the Caribs said that, of man’s various souls, some go to the seashore and capsize boats, others to the forest to be evil spirits;[[234]] among the Sioux Indians the fear of a ghost’s vengeance has been found to act as a check on murder;[[235]] of some tribes in Central Africa it may be said that their main religious doctrine is the belief in ghosts, and that the main characteristic of these ghosts is to do harm to the living.[[236]] The Patagonians lived in terror of the souls of their wizards, which become evil demons after death;[[237]] Turanian tribes of North Asia fear their shamans even more when dead than when alive, for they become a special class of spirits who are the hurtfullest in all nature, and who among the Mongols plague the living on purpose to make them bring offerings.[[238]] In China it is held that the multitudes of wretched destitute spirits in the world below, such as souls of lepers and beggars, can sorely annoy the living; therefore at certain times they are to be appeased with offerings of food, scant and beggarly; and a man who feels unwell, or fears a mishap in business, will prudently have some mock-clothing and mock-money burnt for these ‘gentlemen of the lower regions.’[[239]] Notions of this sort are widely prevalent in Indo-China and India; whole orders of demons there were formerly human souls, especially of people left unburied or slain by plague or violence, of bachelors or of women who died in childbirth, and who henceforth wreak their vengeance on the living. They may, however, be propitiated by temples and offerings, and thus have become in fact a regular class of local deities.[[240]] Among them may be counted the diabolic soul of a certain wicked British officer, whom native worshippers in the Tinnevelly district still propitiate by offering at his grave the brandy and cheroots he loved in life.[[241]] India even carried theory into practice by an actual manufacture of demons, as witness the two following accounts. A certain brahman, on whose lands a kshatriya raja had built a house, ripped himself up in revenge, and became a demon of the kind called brahmadasyu, who has been ever since the terror of the whole country, and is the most common village deity in Kharakpur.[[242]] Toward the close of the last century there were two brahmans, out of whose house a man had wrongfully, as they thought, taken forty rupees; whereupon one of the brahmans proceeded to cut off his own mother’s head, with the professed view, entertained by both mother and son, that her spirit, excited by the beating of a large drum during forty days, might haunt, torment, and pursue to death the taker of their money and those concerned with him. Declaring with her last words that she would blast the thief, the spiteful hag deliberately gave up her life to take ghostly vengeance for those forty rupees.[[243]] By instances like these it appears that we may trace up from the psychology of the lower races the familiar ancient and modern European tales of baleful ghost-demons. The old fear even now continues to vouch for the old belief.
Happily for man’s anticipation of death, and for the treatment of the sick and aged, thoughts of horror and hatred do not preponderate in ideas of deified ancestors, who are regarded on the whole as kindly patron spirits, at least to their own kinsfolk and worshippers. Manes-worship is one of the great branches of the religion of mankind. Its principles are not difficult to understand, for they plainly keep up the social relations of the living world. The dead ancestor, now passed into a deity, simply goes on protecting his own family and receiving suit and service from them as of old; the dead chief still watches over his own tribe, still holds his authority by helping friends and harming enemies, still rewards the right and sharply punishes the wrong. It will be enough to show by a few characteristic examples the general position of manes-worship among mankind, from the lower culture upward.[[244]] In the two Americas it appears not unfrequently, from the low savage level of the Brazilian Camacans, to the somewhat higher stage of northern Indian tribes whom we hear of as praying to the spirits of their forefathers for good weather or luck in hunting, and fancying when an Indian falls into the fire that the ancestral spirits pushed him in to punish neglect of the customary gifts, while the Natchez of Louisiana are said to have even gone so far as to build temples for dead men.[[245]] Turning to the dark races of the Pacific, we find the Tasmanians laying their sick round a corpse on the funeral pile, that the dead might come in the night and take out the devils that caused the diseases; it is asserted in a general way of the natives, that they believed most implicitly in the return of the spirits of their departed friends or relations to bless or injure them as the case might be.[[246]] In Tanna, the gods are spirits of departed ancestors, aged chiefs becoming deities after death, presiding over the growth of yams and fruit trees, and receiving from the islanders prayer and offerings of first fruits.[[247]] Nor are the fairer Polynesians behind in this respect. Below the great mythological gods of Tonga and New Zealand, the souls of chiefs and warriors form a lower but active and powerful order of deities, who in the Tongan paradise intercede for man’s benefit with the higher deities, who direct the Maori war parties on the march, hover over them and give them courage in the fight, and, watching jealously their own tribes and families, punish any violation of the sacred laws of tapu.[[248]] Thence we trace the doctrine into the Malay islands, where the souls of deceased ancestors are looked to for prosperity in life and help in distress.[[249]] In Madagascar, the worship of the spirits of the dead is remarkably associated with the Vazimbas, the aborigines of the island, who are said still to survive as a distinct race in the interior, and whose peculiar graves testify to their former occupancy of other districts. These graves, small in size, and distinguished by a cairn and an upright stone slab or altar, are places which the Malagasy regard with equal fear and veneration, and their faces become sad and serious when they even pass near. To take a stone or pluck a twig from one of these graves, to stumble against one in the dark, would be resented by the angry Vazimba inflicting disease, or coming in the night to carry off the offender to the region of ghosts. The Malagasy is thus enabled to account for every otherwise unaccountable ailment by his having knowingly or unknowingly given offence to some Vazimba. They are not indeed always malevolent, they may be placable or implacable, or partake of both characters. Thus it comes to pass, that at the altar-slab which long ago some rude native family set up for commemoration or dutiful offering of food to a dead kinsman, a barbaric supplanting race now comes to smear the burnt fat of sacrifice, and set up the heads of poultry and sheep and the horns of bullocks, that the mysterious tenant may be kind, not cruel, with his superhuman powers.[[250]]
On the continent of Africa, manes-worship appears with extremest definiteness and strength. Thus Zulu warriors, aided by the ‘amatongo,’ the spirits of their ancestors, conquer in the battle; but if the dead turn their backs on the living, the living fall in the fight, to become ancestral spirits in their turn. In anger the ‘itongo’ seizes a living man’s body and inflicts disease and death; in beneficence he gives health, and cattle, and corn, and all men wish. Even the little children and old women, of small account in life, become at death spirits having much power, the infants for kindness, the crones for malice. But it is especially the head of each family who receives the worship of his kin. Why it is naturally and reasonably so, a Zulu thus explains. ‘Although they worship the many Amatongo of their tribe, making a great fence around them for their protection; yet their father is far before all others when they worship the Amatongo. Their father is a great treasure to them even when he is dead. And those of his children who are already grown up know him thoroughly, his gentleness, and his bravery.’ ‘Black people do not worship all Amatongo indifferently, that is, all the dead of their tribe. Speaking generally, the head of each house is worshipped by the children of that house; for they do not know the ancients who are dead, nor their laud-giving names, nor their names. But their father whom they knew is the head by whom they begin and end in their prayer, for they know him best, and his love for his children; they remember his kindness to them whilst he was living; they compare his treatment of them whilst he was living, support themselves by it, and say, “He will still treat us in the same way now he is dead. We do not know why he should regard others besides us; he will regard us only.”’[[251]] It will be seen in another place how the Zulu follows up the doctrine of divine ancestors till he reaches a first ancestor of man and creator of the world, the primæval Unkulunkulu. In West Africa, manes-worship displays in contrast its two special types. On the one hand, we see the North Guinea negroes transferring the souls of the dead, according to their lives, to the rank of good and evil spirits, and if evil worshipping them the more zealously, as fear is to their minds a stronger impulse than love. On the other hand, in Southern Guinea, we see the deep respect paid to the aged during life, passing into worship when death has raised them to yet higher influence. There the living bring to the images of the dead food and drink, and even a small portion of their profits gained in trade; they look especially to dead relatives for help in the trials of life, and ‘it is no uncommon thing to see large groups of men and women, in times of peril or distress, assembled along the brow of some commanding eminence, or along the skirts of some dense forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones upon the spirits of their ancestors.’[[252]]
In Asia, manes-worship comes to the surface in all directions. The rude Veddas of Ceylon believe in the guardianship of the spirits of the dead; these, they say, are ‘ever watchful, coming to them in sickness, visiting them in dreams, giving them flesh when hunting;’ and in every calamity and want they call for aid on the ‘kindred spirits,’ and especially the shades of departed children, the ‘infant spirits.’[[253]] Among non-Hindu tribes of India, whose religions more or less represent præ-Brahmanic and præ-Buddhistic conditions, wide and deep traces appear of an ancient and surviving cultus of ancestors.[[254]] Among Turanian tribes spread over the northern regions of the Old World, a similar state of things may be instanced from the Mongols, worshipping as good deities the princely souls of Genghis Khan’s family, at whose head stands the divine Genghis himself.[[255]] Nor have nations of the higher Asiatic culture generally rejected the time-honoured rite. In Japan the ‘Way of the Kami,’ better known to foreigners as the Sin-tu religion, is one of the officially recognized faiths, and in it there is still kept up in hut and palace the religion of the rude old mountain-tribes of the land, who worshipped their divine ancestors, the Kami, and prayed to them for help and blessing. To the time of these ancient Kami, say the modern Japanese, the rude stone implements belong which are found in the ground in Japan as elsewhere: to modern ethnologists, however, these bear witness not of divine but savage parentage.[[256]] In Siam the lower orders scruple to worship the great gods, lest through ignorance they should blunder in the complex ritual; they prefer to pray to the ‘theparak,’ a lower class of deities among whom the souls of great men take their places at death.[[257]] In China, as every one knows, ancestor-worship is the dominant religion of the land, and interesting problems are opened out to the Western mind by the spectacle of a great people who for thousands of years have been thus seeking the living among the dead. Nowhere is the connexion between parental authority and conservatism more graphically shown. The worship of ancestors, begun during their life, is not interrupted but intensified when death makes them deities. The Chinese, prostrate bodily and mentally before the memorial tablets that contain the souls of his ancestors, little thinks that he is all the while proving to mankind how vast a power unlimited filial obedience, prohibiting change from ancestral institutions, may exert in stopping the advance of civilization. The thought of the souls of the dead as sharing the happiness and glory of their descendants is one which widely pervades the world, but most such ideas would seem vague and weak to the Chinese, who will try hard for honour in his competitive examination with the special motive of glorifying his dead ancestors, and whose titles of rank will raise his deceased father and grandfather a grade above himself, as though, with us, Zachary Macaulay and Copley the painter should now have viscounts’ coronets officially placed on their tombstones. As so often happens, what is jest to one people is sober sense to another. There are 300 millions of Chinese who would hardly see a joke in Charles Lamb reviling the stupid age that would not read him, and declaring that he would write for antiquity. Had he been a Chinese himself, he might have written his book in all seriousness for the benefit of his great-great-grandfather. Among the Chinese, manes-worship is no rite of mere affection. The living want the help of the ancestral spirits, who reward virtue and punish vice: ‘The exalted ancestor will bring thee, O Prince, much good!’—‘Ancestors and fathers will abandon you and give you up, and come not to help, and ye will die.’ If no help comes in time of need, the Chinese will reproach his ancestor, or even come to doubt his existence. Thus in a Chinese ode the sufferers in a dreadful drought cry, ‘Heu-tsi cannot or will not help.... Our ancestors have surely perished.... Father, mother, ancestors, how could you calmly bear this?’ Nor does manes-worship stop short with direct family ties; it is naturally developed to produce, by deification of the heroic dead, a series of superior gods to whom worship is given by the public at large. Thus, according to legend, the War-god or Military Sage was once in human life a distinguished soldier, the Mechanics’ god was a skilful workman and inventor of tools, the Swine-god was a hog-breeder who lost his pigs and died of sorrow, and the Gamblers’ god, a desperate gamester who lost his all and died of want, is represented by a hideous image called a ‘devil gambling for cash,’ and in this shape receives the prayers and offerings of confirmed gamblers, his votaries. The spirits of San-kea Ta-te, and Chang-yuen-sze go to partake of the offerings set out in their temples, returning flushed and florid from their meal; and the spirit of Confucius is present in the temple, where twice a year the Emperor does sacrifice to him.[[258]]
The Hindu unites in some degree with the Chinese as to ancestor-worship, and especially as to the necessity of having a son by blood or adoption, who shall offer the proper sacrifices to him after death. ‘May there be born in our lineage,’ the manes are supposed to say, ‘a man to offer to us, on the thirteenth day of the moon, rice boiled in milk, honey and ghee.’ Offerings made to the divine manes, the ‘pitaras’ (patres, fathers) as they are called, preceded and followed by offerings to the greater deities, give to the worshipper merit and happiness.[[259]] In classic Europe, apotheosis lies part within the limits of myth, where it was applied to fabled ancestors, and part within the limits of actual history, as where Julius and Augustus shared its honours with the vile Domitian and Commodus. The most special representatives of ancestor-worship in Europe were perhaps the ancient Romans, whose word ‘manes’ has become the recognized name for ancestral deities in modern civilized language; they embodied them as images, set them up as household patrons, gratified them with offerings and solemn homage, and counting them as or among the infernal gods, inscribed on tombs D. M., ‘Diis Manibus.’[[260]] The occurrence of this D. M. in Christian epitaphs is an often-noticed case of religious survival.
Although full ancestor-worship is not practised in modern Christendom, there remains even now within its limits a well-marked worship of the dead. A crowd of saints, who were once men and women, now form an order of inferior deities, active in the affairs of men and receiving from them reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under the definition of manes. This Christian cultus of the dead, belonging in principle to the older manes-worship, was adapted to answer another purpose in the course of religious transition in Europe. The local gods, the patron gods of particular ranks and crafts, the gods from whom men sought special help in special needs, were too near and dear to the inmost heart of præ-Christian Europe to be done away with without substitutes. It proved easier to replace them by saints who could undertake their particular professions, and even succeed them in their sacred dwellings. The system of spiritual division of labour was in time worked out with wonderful minuteness in the vast array of professional saints, among whom the most familiar to modern English ears are St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians; St. Luke, patron of painters; St. Peter, of fishmongers; St. Valentine, of lovers; St. Sebastian, of archers; St. Crispin, of cobblers; St. Hubert, who cures the bite of mad dogs; St. Vitus, who delivers madmen and sufferers from the disease which bears his name; St. Fiacre, whose name is now less known by his shrine than by the hackney-coaches called after him in the seventeenth century. Not to dwell here minutely on an often-treated topic, it will be enough to touch on two particular points. First, as to the direct historical succession of the Christian saint to the heathen deity, the following are two very perfect illustrations. It is well known that Romulus, mindful of his own adventurous infancy, became after death a Roman deity propitious to the health and safety of young children, so that nurses and mothers would carry sickly infants to present them in his little round temple at the foot of the Palatine. In after ages the temple was replaced by the church of St. Theodorus, and there Dr. Conyers Middleton, who drew public attention to its curious history, used to look in and see ten or a dozen women, each with a sick child in her lap, sitting in silent reverence before the altar of the saint. The ceremony of blessing children, especially after vaccination, may still be seen there on Thursday mornings.[[261]] Again, Sts. Cosmas and Damianus, according to Maury, owe their recognized office to a similar curious train of events. They were martyrs who suffered under Diocletian, at Ægææ in Cilicia. Now this place was celebrated for the worship of Æsculapius, in whose temple incubation, i.e. sleeping for oracular dreams, was practised. It seems as though the idea was transferred on the spot to the two local saints, for we next hear of them as appearing in a dream to the Emperor Justinian, when he was ill at Byzantium. They cured him, he built them a temple, their cultus spread far and wide, and they frequently appeared to the sick to show them what they should do. Legend settled that Cosmas and Damianus were physicians while they lived on earth, and at any rate they are patron-saints of the profession of medicine to this day.[[262]] Second, as to the actual state of hagiolatry in modern Europe, it is obvious on a broad view that it is declining among the educated classes. Yet modern examples may be brought forward to show ideas as extreme as those which prevailed more widely a thousand years ago. In the Church of the Jesuit College at Rome lies buried St. Aloysius Gonzaga, on whose festival it is customary especially for the college students to write letters to him, which are placed on his gaily decorated and illuminated altar, and afterwards burnt unopened. The miraculous answering of these letters is vouched for in an English book of 1870. To the same year belongs an English tract commemorating a late miraculous cure. An Italian lady afflicted with a tumour and incipient cancer of the breast was exhorted by a Jesuit priest to recommend herself to the Blessed John Berchmans, a pious Jesuit novice from Belgium, who died in 1621, and was beatified in 1865. Her adviser procured for her ‘three small packets of dust gathered from the coffin of this saintly innocent, a little cross made of the boards of the room the blessed youth occupied, as well as some portion of the wadding in which his venerable head was wrapped.’ During nine days’ devotion the patient accordingly invoked the Blessed John, swallowed small portions of his dust in water, and at last pressed the cross to her breast so vehemently that she was seized with sickness, went to sleep, and awoke without a symptom of the complaint. And when Dr. Panegrossi the physician beheld the incredible cure, and heard that the patient had addressed herself to the Blessed Berchmans, he bowed his head, saying, ‘When such physicians interfere, we have nothing more to say!’[[263]] To sum up the whole history of manes-worship, it is plain that in our time the dead still receive worship from far the larger half of mankind, and it may have been much the same ever since the remote periods of primitive culture in which the religion of the manes probably took its rise.
It has now been seen that the theory of souls recognizes them as capable either of independent existence, or of inhabiting human, animal, or other bodies. On the principle here maintained, that the general theory of spirits is modelled on the theory of souls, we shall be able to account for several important branches of the lower philosophy of religion, which without such explanation may appear in great measure obscure or absurd. Like souls, other spirits are supposed able either to exist and act flitting free about the world, or to become incorporate for more or less time in solid bodies. It will be well at once to get a secure grasp of this theory of Embodiment, for without it we shall be stopped every moment by a difficulty in understanding the nature of spirits, as defined in the lower animism. The theory of embodiment serves several highly important purposes in savage and barbarian philosophy. On the one hand it provides an explanation of the phenomena of morbid exaltation and derangement, especially as connected with abnormal utterance, and this view is so far extended as to produce an almost general doctrine of disease. On the other hand, it enables the savage either to ‘lay’ a hurtful spirit in some foreign body, and so get rid of it, or to carry about a useful spirit for his service in a material object, to set it up as a deity for worship in the body of an animal, or in a block or stone or image or other thing, which contains the spirit as a vessel contains a fluid: this is the key to strict fetishism, and in no small measure to idolatry. In briefly considering these various branches of the Embodiment-theory, there may be conveniently included certain groups of cases often impossible to distinguish apart. These cases belong theoretically rather to obsession than possession, the spirits not actually inhabiting the bodies, but hanging or hovering about them and affecting them from the outside.