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.[[462]] 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.[[463]] 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 one reads 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.[[464]] Thus animism provided a theory of volcanoes, 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 a drink of rum.[[465]] 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 North 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.[[466]] 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 and cramp, and holds with inexorable grasp its drowning victim:[[467]]
“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 primæval mythology are as souls which cause the water’s 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.