The Earth-deity takes an important place in polytheistic religion. The Algonquins would sing medicine-songs to Mesukkummik Okwi, the Earth, the Great-Grandmother of all. In her charge (and she must be ever at home in her lodge) are left the animals whose flesh and skins are man’s food and clothing, and the roots and medicines of sovereign power to heal sickness and kill game in time of hunger; therefore good Indians never dig up the roots of which their medicines are made, without depositing an offering in the earth for Mesukkummik Okwi.[[642]] In the list of fetish-deities of Peruvian tribes, the Earth, adored as Mamapacha, Mother Earth, took high subordinate rank below Sun and Moon in the pantheon of the Incas, and at harvest-time ground corn and libations of chicha were offered to her that she might grant a good harvest.[[643]] Her rank is similar in the Aquapim theology of West Africa; first the Highest God in the firmament, then the Earth as universal mother, then the fetish. The negro, offering his libation before some great undertaking, thus calls upon the triad: ‘Creator, come drink! Earth, come drink! Bosumbra, come drink!’[[644]]
Among the indigenes of India, the Bygah tribes of Seonee show a well-marked worship of the Earth. They call her ‘Mother Earth’ or Dhurteemah, and before praying or eating their food, which is looked on always as a daily sacrifice, they invariably offer some of it to the earth, before using the name of any other god.[[645]] Of all religions of the world, perhaps that of the Khonds of Orissa gives the Earth-goddess her most remarkable place and function. Boora Pennu or Bella Pennu, the Light-god or Sun-god, created Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess for his consort, and from them were born the other great gods. But strife arose between the mighty parents, and it became the wife’s work to thwart the good creation of her husband, and to cause all physical and moral ill. Thus to the Sun-worshipping sect she stands abhorred on the bad eminence of the Evil Deity. But her own sect, the Earth-worshipping sect, seem to hold ideas of her nature which are more primitive and genuine. The functions which they ascribe to her, and the rites with which they propitiate her, display her as the Earth-mother, raised by an intensely agricultural race to an extreme height of divinity. It was she who with drops of her blood made the soft muddy ground harden into firm earth; thus men learnt to offer human victims, and the whole earth became firm; the pastures and ploughed fields came into use, and there were cattle and sheep and poultry for man’s service; hunting began, and there were iron and ploughshares and harrows and axes, and the juice of the palm-tree; and love arose between the sons and daughters of the people, making new households, and society with its relations of father and mother, and wife and child, and the bonds between ruler and subject. It was the Khond Earth-goddess who was propitiated with those hideous sacrifices, the suppression of which is matter of recent Indian history. With dances and drunken orgies, and a mystery play to explain in dramatic dialogue the purpose of the rite, the priest offered Tari Pennu her sacrifice, and prayed for children and cattle and poultry and brazen pots and all wealth; every man and woman wished a wish, and they tore the slave-victim piecemeal, and spread the morsels over the fields they were to fertilize.[[646]] In Northern Asia, also, among the Tatar races, the office of the Earth-deity is strongly and widely marked. Thus in the nature-worship of the Tunguz and Buraets, Earth stands among the greater divinities. It is especially interesting to notice among the Finns a transition like that just observed from the god Heaven to the Heaven-god. In the designation of Maaemä, Earth-mother, given to the earth itself, there may be traced survival from the stage of direct nature-worship, while the passage to the conception of a divine being inhabiting and ruling the material substance, is marked by the use of the name Maan emo, Earth’s mother, for the ancient subterranean goddess whom men would ask to make the grass shoot thick and the thousandfold ears mount high, or might even entreat to rise in person out of the earth to give them strength. The analogy of other mythologies agrees with the definition of the divine pair who reign in Finn theology: as Ukko the Grandfather is the Heaven-god, so his spouse Akka the Grandmother is the Earth-goddess.[[647]] Thus in the ancient nature-worship of China, the personal Earth holds a place below the Heaven. Tien and Tu are closely associated in the national rites, and the idea of the pair as universal parents, if not an original conception in Chinese theology, is at any rate developed in Chinese classic symbolism. Heaven and Earth receive their solemn sacrifices not at the hands of common mortals but of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, and his great vassals and mandarins. Yet their adoration is national; they are worshipped by the people who offer incense to them on the hill-tops at their autumn festival, they are adored by successful candidates in competitive examination; and, especially and appropriately, the prostration of bride and bridegroom before the father and mother of all things, the ‘worshipping of Heaven and Earth,’ is the all-important ceremony of a Chinese marriage.[[648]]
The Vedic hymns commemorate the goddess Prithivî, the broad Earth, and in their ancient strophes the modern Brahmans still pray for benefits to mother Earth and father Heaven, side by side:—
‘Tanno Vâto mayobhu vâtu bheshajam tanmâtâ Prithivî tatpitâ Dyauh.’[[649]]
Greek religion shows a transition to have taken place like that among the Turanian tribes, for the older simpler nature-deity Gaia, Γῆ πάντων μήτηρ, Earth the All-Mother, seems to have faded into the more anthropomorphic Dēmētēr, Earth-Mother, whose eternal fire burned in Mantinēa, and whose temples stood far and wide over the land which she made kindly to the Greek husbandman.[[650]] The Romans acknowledged her plain identity as Terra Mater, Ops Mater.[[651]] Tacitus could rightly recognize this deity of his own land among German tribes, worshippers of ‘Nerthum (or, Hertham), id est Terram matrem,’ Mother Earth, whose holy grove stood in an ocean isle, whose chariot drawn by cows passed through the land making a season of peace and joy, till the goddess, satiated with mortal conversation, was taken back by her priest to her temple, and the chariot and garments and even the goddess herself were washed in a secret lake, which forthwith swallowed up the ministering slaves—‘hence a mysterious terror and sacred ignorance, what that should be which only the doomed to perish might behold.’[[652]] If in these modern days we seek in Europe traces of Earth-worship, we may find them in curiously distinct survival in Germany, if no longer in the Christmas food-offerings buried in and for the earth up to early in this century,[[653]] at any rate among Gypsy hordes. Dewel, the great god in heaven (dewa, deus), is rather feared than loved by these weatherbeaten outcasts, for he harms them on their wanderings with his thunder and lightning, his snow and rain, and his stars interfere with their dark doings. Therefore they curse him foully when misfortune falls on them, and when a child dies, they say that Dewel has eaten it. But Earth, Mother of all good, self-existing from the beginning, is to them holy, so holy that they take heed never to let the drinking-cup touch the ground, for it would become too sacred to be used by men.[[654]]
Water-worship, as has been seen, may be classified as a special department of religion. It by no means follows, however, that savage water-worshippers should necessarily have generalized their ideas, and passed beyond their particular water-deities to arrive at the conception of a general deity presiding over water as an element. Divine springs, streams, and lakes, water-spirits, deities concerned with the clouds and rain, are frequent, and many details of them are cited here, but I have not succeeded in finding among the lower races any divinity whose attributes, fairly criticized, will show him or her to be an original and absolute elemental Water-god. Among the deities of the Dakotas, Unktahe the fish-god of the waters is a master-spirit of sorcery and religion, the rival even of the mighty Thunderbird.[[655]] In the Mexican pantheon, Tlaloc god of rain and waters, fertilizer of earth and lord of paradise, whose wife is Chalchihuitlicue, Emerald-Skirt, dwells among the mountain-tops where the clouds gather and pour down the streams.[[656]] Yet neither of these mythic beings approaches the generality of conception that belongs to full elemental deity, and even the Greek Nēreus, though by his name he should be the very personification of water (νηρός), seems too exclusively marine in his home and family to be cited as the Water-god. Nor is the reason of this hard to find. It is an extreme stretch of the power of theological generalization to bring water in its myriad forms under one divinity, though each individual body of water, even the smallest stream or lake, can have its personal individuality or indwelling spirit.
Islanders and coast-dwellers indeed live face to face with mighty water-deities, the divine Sea and the great Sea-gods. What the sea may seem to an uncultured man who first beholds it, we may learn among the Lampongs of Sumatra: ‘The inland people of that country are said to pay a kind of adoration to the sea, and to make to it an offering of cakes and sweetmeats on their beholding it for the first time, deprecating its power of doing them mischief.’[[657]] The higher stage of such doctrine is where the sea, no longer itself personal, is considered as ruled by indwelling spirits. Thus Tuaraatai and Ruahatu, principal among marine deities of Polynesia, send the sharks to execute their vengeance. Hiro descends to the depths of the ocean and dwells among the monsters, they lull him to sleep in a cavern, the Wind-god profits by his absence to raise a violent storm to destroy the boats in which Hiro’s friends are sailing, but, roused by a friendly spirit-messenger, the Sea-god rises to the surface and quells the tempest.[[658]] This South Sea Island myth might well have been in the Odyssey. We may point to the Guinea Coast as a barbaric region where Sea-worship survives in its extremest form. It appears from Bosman’s account, about 1700, that in the religion of Whydah, the Sea ranked only as younger brother in the three divine orders, below the Serpents and Trees. But at present, as appears from Captain Burton’s evidence, the religion of Whydah extends through Dahome, and the divine Sea has risen in rank. ‘The youngest brother of the triad is Hu, the ocean or sea. Formerly it was subject to chastisement, like the Hellespont, if idle or useless. The Huno, or ocean priest, is now considered the highest of all, a fetish king, at Whydah, where he has 500 wives. At stated times he repairs to the beach, begs ‘Agbwe,’ the ... ocean god, not to be boisterous, and throws in rice and corn, oil and beans, cloth, cowries, and other valuables.... At times the king sends as an ocean sacrifice from Agbome a man carried in a hammock, with the dress, the stool, and the umbrella of a caboceer; a canoe takes him out to sea, where he is thrown to the sharks.’[[659]] While in these descriptions the individual divine personality of the sea is so well marked, an account of the closely related Slave Coast religion states that a great god dwells in the sea, and it is to him, not to the sea itself, that offerings are cast in.[[660]] In South America the idea of the divine Sea is clearly marked in the Peruvian worship of Mamacocha, Mother Sea, giver of food to men.[[661]] Eastern Asia, both in its stages of lower and higher civilization, contributes members to the divine group. In Kamchatka, Mitgk the Great Spirit of the Sea, fish-like himself, sends the fish up the rivers.[[662]] Japan deifies separately on land and at sea the lords of the waters; Midsuno Kami, the Water-god, is worshipped during the rainy season; Jebisu, the Sea-god, is younger brother of the Sun.[[663]]
Among barbaric races we thus find two conceptions current, the personal divine Sea and the anthropomorphic Sea-god. These represent two stages of development of one idea—the view of the natural object as itself an animated being, and the separation of its animating fetish-soul as a distinct spiritual deity. To follow the enquiry into classic times shows the same distinction as strongly marked. When Kleomenes marched down to Thyrea, having slaughtered a bull to the sea (σφαγιασάμενος δέ τῇ θαλάσσῃ ταῦρον) he embarked his army in ships for the Tirynthian land and Nauplia.[[664]] Cicero makes Cotta remark to Balbus that ‘our generals, embarking on the sea, have been accustomed to immolate a victim to the waves,’ and he goes on to argue, not unfairly, that if the Earth herself is a goddess, what is she other than Tellus, and ‘if the Earth, the Sea too, whom thou saidst to be Neptune.’[[665]] Here is direct nature-worship in its extremest sense of fetish-worship. But in the anthropomorphic stage appear that dim præ-Olympian figure of Nēreus the Old Man of the Sea, father of the Nereids in their ocean caves, and the Homeric Poseidōn the Earth-shaker, who stables his coursers in his cave in the Ægean deeps, who harnesses the gold-maned steeds to his chariot and drives through the dividing waves, while the subject sea-beasts come up at the passing of their lord, a king so little bound to the element he governs, that he can come from the brine to sit in the midst of the gods in the assembly on Olympos, and ask the will of Zeus.[[666]]
Fire-worship brings into view again, though under different aspects and with different results, the problems presented by water-worship. The real and absolute worship of fire falls into two great divisions, the first belonging rather to fetishism, the second to polytheism proper, and the two apparently representing an earlier and later stage of theological ideas. The first is the rude barbarian’s adoration of the actual flame which he watches writhing, roaring, devouring like a live animal; the second belongs to an advanced generalization, that any individual fire is a manifestation of one general elemental being—the Fire-god. Unfortunately, evidence of the exact meaning of fire-worship among the lower races is scanty, while the transition from fetishism to polytheism seems a gradual process of which the stages elude close definition. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that rites performed with fire are, though often, yet by no means necessarily, due to worship of the fire itself. Authors who have indiscriminately mixed up such rites as the new fire, the perpetual fire, the passing through the fire, classing them as acts of fire-worship, without proper evidence as to their meaning in any particular case, have added to the perplexity of a subject not too easy to deal with, even under strict precautions. Two sources of error are especially to be noted. On the one hand, fire happens to be a usual means whereby sacrifices are transmitted to departed souls and deities in general; and on the other hand, the ceremonies of earthly fire-worship are habitually and naturally transferred to celestial fire-worship in the religion of the Sun.
It may best serve the present purpose to carry a line of some of the best-defined facts which seems to bear on fire-worship proper, from savagery on into the higher culture. In the last century, Loskiel, a missionary among the North American Indians, remarks that ‘In great danger, an Indian has been observed to lie prostrate on his face, and throwing a handful of tobacco into the fire, to call aloud, as in an agony of distress, “There, take and smoke, be pacified, and don’t hurt me.”’ Of course this may have been a mere sacrifice transmitted to some other spiritual being through fire, but we have in this region explicit statements as to a distinct fire-deity. The Delawares, it appears from the same author, acknowledged the Fire-manitu, first parent of all Indian nations, and celebrated a yearly festival in his honour, when twelve manitus, animal and vegetable, attended him as subordinate deities.[[667]] In North-West America, in Washington Irving’s account of the Chinooks and other Columbia River Tribes, mention is made of the spirit which inhabits fire. Powerful both for evil and good, and seemingly rather evil than good in nature, this being must be kept in good humour by frequent offerings. The Fire-spirit has great influence with the winged aërial supreme deity, wherefore the Indians implore him to be their interpreter, to procure them success in hunting and fishing, fleet horses, obedient wives, and male children.[[668]] In the elaborately systematic religion of Mexico, there appears in his proper place a Fire-god, closely related to the Sun-god in character, but keeping well marked his proper identity. His name was Xiuhteuctli, Fire-lord, and they called him likewise Huehueteotl, the old god. Great honour was paid to this god Fire, who gives them heat, and bakes their cakes, and roasts their meat. Therefore at every meal the first morsel and libation were cast into the fire, and every day the deity had incense burnt to him. Twice in the year were held his solemn festivals. At the first, a felled tree was set up in his honour, and the sacrificers danced round his fire with the human victims, whom afterwards they cast into a great fire, only to drag them out half roasted for the priests to complete the sacrifice. The second was distinguished by the rite of the new fire, so well known in connexion with solar worship; the friction-fire was solemnly made before the image of Xiuhteuctli in his sanctuary in the court of the great teocalli, and the game brought in at the great hunt which began the festival was cooked at the sacred fire for the banquets that ended it.[[669]] Polynesia well knows from the mythological point of view Mahuika the Fire-god, who keeps the volcano-fire on his subterranean hearth, whither Maui goes down (as the Sun into the Underworld) to bring up fire for man; but in the South Sea islands there is scarcely a trace of actual rites of fire-worship.[[670]] In West Africa, among the gods of Dahome is Zo the fire-fetish; a pot of fire is placed in a room, and sacrifice is offered to it, that fire may ‘live’ there, and not go forth to destroy the house.[[671]]