Turning from the simple faiths of savage tribes of North America to the complex religion of the half-civilized Mexican nation, we find what we might naturally expect, a cumbrous polytheism complicated by mixture of several national pantheons, and beside and beyond this, certain appearances of a doctrine of divine supremacy. But these doctrines seem to have been spoken of more definitely than the evidence warrants. A remarkable native development of Mexican theism must be admitted, in so far as we may receive the native historian Ixtlilxochitl’s account of the worship paid by Nezahualcoyotl, the poet king of Tezcuco, to the invisible supreme Tloque Nahuaque, he who has all in him, the cause of causes, in whose star-roofed pyramid stood no idol, and who there received no bloody sacrifice, but only flowers and incense. Yet it would have been more satisfactory were the stories told by this Aztec panegyrist of his royal ancestor confirmed by other records. Traces of divine supremacy in Mexican religion are especially associated with Tezcatlipoca, ‘Shining Mirror,’ a deity who seems in his original nature the Sun-God, and thence by expansion to have become the soul of the world, creator of heaven and earth, lord of all things, Supreme Deity. Such conceptions may in more or less measure have arisen in native thought, but it should be pointed out that the remarkable Aztec religious formulas collected by Sahagun, in which the deity Tezcatlipoca is so prominent a figure, show traces of Christian admixture in their material, as well as of Christian influence in their style. For instance, all students of Mexican antiquities know the belief in Mictlan, the Hades of the dead. But when one of these Aztec prayer-formulas (concerning auricular confession, the washing away of sins, and a new birth) makes mention of sinners being plunged into a lake of intolerable misery and torment, the introduction of an idea so obviously European condemns the composition as not purely native. The question of the actual developments of ideas verging on pantheism or theism, among the priests and philosophers of native Mexico, is one to be left for further criticism.[[823]]
In the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity is especially manifested in that great mythologic divinity of the Polynesian race, whom the New Zealanders call Tangaroa, the Hawaiians Kanaroa, the Tongans and Samoans Tangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa. Students of the science of religion who hold polytheism to be but the mis-development of a primal idea of divine unity, which in spite of corruption continues to pervade it, might well choose this South Sea Island divinity as their aptest illustration from the savage world. Taaroa, says Moerenhout, is their supreme or rather only god; for all the others, as in other known polytheisms, seem scarcely more than sensible figures and images of the infinite attributes united in his divine person. The following is given as a native poetic definition of the Creator. ‘He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named.’ According to Ellis, Taaroa is described in the Leeward Islands as the eternal parentless uncreate Creator, dwelling alone in the highest heaven, whose bodily form mortals cannot see, who after intervals of innumerable seasons casts off his body or shell and becomes renewed. It was he who created Hina his daughter, and with her aid formed the sky and earth and sea. He founded the world on a solid rock, which with all the creation he sustains by his invisible power. Then he created the ranks of lesser deities such as reign over sea and land and air, and govern peace and war, and preside over physic and husbandry, and canoe-building, and roofing, and theft. The version from the Windward Islands is that Taaroa’s wife was the rock, the foundation of all things, and she gave birth to earth and sea. Now, fortunately for our understanding of this myth, the name of Taaroa’s wife, with whom he begat the lesser deities, was taken down in Tahiti in Captain Cook’s time. She was a rock called Papa, and her name plainly suggests her identity with Papa the Earth, the wife of Rangi the Heaven in the New Zealand myth of Heaven and Earth, the great first parents. If this inference be just, then it seems that Taaroa the Creator is no personification of a primæval theistic idea, but simply the divine personal Heaven transformed under European influence into the supreme Heaven-god. Thus, when Turner gives the Samoan myths of Tangaloa in heaven presiding over the production of the earth from beneath the waters, or throwing down from the sky rocks which are now islands, the classic name by which he calls him is that which rightly describes his nature and mythic origin—Tangaloa, the Polynesian Jupiter. Yet in island district after district, we find the name of the mighty heavenly creator given to other and lesser mythic beings. In Tahiti, the manes-worshipper’s idea is applied not only to lesser deities, but to Taaroa the Creator himself, whom some maintained to be but a man deified after death. In the New Zealand mythology, Tangaroa figures on the one hand as Sea-god and father of fish and reptiles, on the other as the mischievous eaves-dropping god who reveals secrets. In Tonga, Tangaloa was god of artificers and arts, and his priests were carpenters; it was he who went forth to fish, and dragged up the Tonga islands from the bottom of the sea. Here, then, he corresponds with Maui, and indeed Tangaroa and Maui are found blending in Polynesia even to full identification. It is neither easy nor safe to fix to definite origin the Protean shapes of South Sea mythology, but on the whole the native myths are apt to embody cosmic ideas, and as the idea of the Sun preponderates in Maui, so the idea of the Heaven in Taaroa.[[824]] In the Fiji Islands, whose native mythology is on the whole distinct from that of Polynesia proper, a strange weird figure takes the supreme place among the gods. His name is Ndengei, the serpent is his shrine, some traditions represent him with a serpent’s head and body and the rest of him stone. He passes a monotonous existence in his gloomy cavern, feeling no emotion nor sensation, nor any appetite but hunger; he takes no interest in any one but Uto, his attendant, and gives no sign of life beyond eating, answering his priest, and changing his position from one side to the other. No wonder Ndengei is less worshipped than most of the inferior gods. The natives have even made a comic song about him, where he talks with his attendant, Uto, who has been to attend the feast at Rakiraki, where Ndengei has especially his temple and worship.
Ndengei. ‘Have you been to the sharing of food to-day?’
Uto. ‘Yes: and turtles formed a part; but only the under-shell was shared to us two.’
Ndengei. ‘Indeed, Uto! This is very bad. How is it? We made them men, placed them on the earth, gave them food, and yet they share to us only the under-shell. Uto, how is this?’[[825]]
The native religion of Africa, a land pervaded by the doctrines of divine hierarchy and divine supremacy, affords apt evidence for the problem before us. The capacity of the manes-worshipper’s scheme to extend in this direction may be judged from the religious speculations of the Zulus, where may be traced the merging of the First Man, the Old-Old-One, Unkulunkulu, into the ideal of the Creator, Thunderer, and Heaven-god.[[826]] If we examine a collection of documents illustrating the doctrines of the West African races lying between the Hottentots on the south and the Berbers on the north, we may fairly judge their conceptions, evidently influenced as these have been by Christian intercourse, to be nevertheless based on native ideas of the personal Heaven.[[827]] Whether they think of their supreme deity as actively pervading and governing his universe, or as acting through his divine subordinates, or as retiring from his creation and leaving the lesser spirits to work their will, he is always to their minds the celestial ruler, the Heaven-god. Examples may be cited, each in its way full of instruction. In the mind of the Gold-coast negro, tendencies towards theistic religion seem to have been mainly developed through the idea of Nyongmo, the personal Heaven, or its animating personal deity. Heaven, wide-arching, rain-giving, light-giving, who has been and is and shall be, is to him the Supreme Deity. The sky is Nyongmo’s creature, the clouds are his veil, the stars his face-ornaments. Creator of all things, and of their animating powers whose chief and elder he is, he sits in majestic rest surrounded by his children, the wongs, the spirits of the air who serve him and represent him on earth. Though men’s worship is for the most part paid to these, reverence is also given to Nyongmo, the Eldest, the Highest. Every day, said a fetish-man, we see how the grass and corn and trees spring forth by the rain and sunshine that Nyongmo sends, how should he not be the Creator? Again, the mighty Heaven-god, far removed from man and seldom roused to interfere in earthly interests, is the type on which the Guinea negroes may have modelled their thoughts of a Highest Deity who has abandoned the control of his world to lesser and evil spirits.[[828]] The religion of another district seems to show clearly the train of thought by which such ideas may be worked out. Among the Kimbunda race of Congo, Suku-Vakange is the highest being. He takes little interest in mankind, leaving the real government of the world to the good and evil kilulu or spirits, into whose ranks the souls of men pass at death. Now in that there are more bad spirits who torment, than good who favour living men, human misery would be unbearable, were it not that from time to time Suku-Vakange, enraged at the wickedness of the evil spirits, terrifies them with thunder, and punishes the more obstinate with his thunderbolts. Then he returns to rest, and lets the kilulu rule again.[[829]] Who, we may ask, is this divinity, calm and indifferent save when his wrath bursts forth in storm, but the Heaven himself? The relation of the Supreme Deity to the lesser gods of polytheism is graphically put in the following passage, where an American missionary among the Yorubas describes the relation of Olorung, the Lord of Heaven, to his lesser deities (orisa), among whom the chief are the androgynous Obatala, representing the reproductive power of nature, and Shango the Thunder-god. ‘The doctrine of idolatry prevalent in Yoruba appears to be derived by analogy from the form and customs of the civil government. There is but one king in the nation, and one God over the universe. Petitioners to the king approach him through the intervention of his servants, courtiers, and nobles: and the petitioner conciliates the courtier whom he employs by good words and presents. In like manner no man can directly approach God; but the Almighty himself, they say, has appointed various kinds of orisas, who are mediators and intercessors between himself and mankind. No sacrifices are made to God, because he needs nothing; but the orisas, being much like men, are pleased with offerings of sheep, pigeons, and other things. They conciliate the orisa or mediator that he may bless them, not in his own power, but in the power of God.’[[830]]
Rooted as they are in the depths of nature-worship, the doctrines of the supreme Sun and Heaven both come to the surface again in the native religions of Asia. The divine Sun holds his primacy distinctly enough among the rude indigenous tribes of India. Although one sect of the Khonds of Orissa especially direct their worship to Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess, yet even they agree theoretically with the sect who worship Bura Pennu or Bella Pennu, Light-god or Sun-god, in giving to him supremacy above the manes-gods and nature-gods, and all spiritual powers.[[831]] Among the Kol tribes of Bengal, the acknowledged primate of all classes of divinities is the beneficent supreme deity, Sing-bonga, Sun-god. Among some Munda tribes his authority is so real that they will appeal to him for help where recourse to minor deities has failed; while among the Santals his cultus has so dwindled away that he receives less practical worship than his malevolent inferiors, and is scarce honoured with more than nominal dignity and an occasional feast.[[832]] These are rude tribes who, so far as we know, have never been other than rude tribes. The Japanese are a comparatively civilized nation, one of those so instructive to the student of culture from the stubborn conservatism with which they have consecrated by traditional reverence, and kept up by state authority, the religion of their former barbarism. This is the Kami-religion, Spirit-religion, the ancient but mixed faith of divine spirits of ancestors, nature-spirits, and polytheistic gods, which still holds official place by the side of the imported Buddhism and Confucianism. The Sun-goddess, Amaterasu, ‘Heaven-shiner,’ though but sprung from the left eye of the parent Izanagi, came to be honoured above all lesser kamis or gods, while by a fiction of ancestor-worship the solar race, as in Peru, became the royal family, her spirit descending to animate the Mikado. Kaempfer, in his ‘History of Japan,’ written early in the 18th century, showed how absolutely the divine Tensio Dai Sin, represented below on the imperial throne, was looked upon as ruler of the minor powers; he mentions the Japanese tenth month, called the ‘godless month,’ because then the lesser gods are considered to be away from their temples, gone to pay their annual homage to the Dairi. He describes, as it was in his time, the great Japanese place of pilgrimage, Yse. There was to be seen the small cavern in a hill near the sea, where the divine Sun once hid herself, depriving the world of light, and thus showing herself to be supreme above all gods. Within the small ancient temple hard by, of which an account and a picture are given from a Japanese book, there were to be seen round the walls the usual pieces of cut white paper, and in the midst nothing but a polished metal mirror.[[833]]
Over the vast range of the Tatar races, it is the type of the supreme Heaven that comes prominently into view. Nature-worshippers in the extreme sense, these rude tribes conceived their ghosts and elves and demons and great powers of the earth and air to be, like men themselves, within the domain of the divine Heaven, almighty and all-encompassing. To trace the Samoyed’s thought of Num the personal Sky passing into vague conceptions of pervading deity; to see with the Tunguz how Boa the Heaven-god, unseen but all-knowing, kindly but indifferent, has divided the business of his world among such lesser powers as sun and moon, earth and fire; to discern the meaning of the Mongrel Tengri, shading from Heaven into Heaven-god, and thence into god or spirit in general; to follow the records of Heaven-worship among the ancient Turks and Hiong-nu; to compare the supremacy among the Lapps of Tiermes, the Thunderer, with the supremacy among the Finns of Jumala and Ukko, the Heaven-god and heavenly Grandfather—such evidence seems good ground for Castrén’s argument, that the doctrine of the divine Sky underlay the first Turanian conceptions, not merely of a Heaven-god, but of a highest deity who in after ages of Christian conversion blended into the Christian God.[[834]] Here, again, we may have the advantage of studying among a cultured race the survival of religion from ruder ancient times, kept up by official ordinance. The state religion of China is in its dominant doctrine the worship of Tien, Heaven, identified with Shang-ti, the Emperor-above, next to whom stands Tu, Earth; while below them are worshipped great nature-spirits and ancestors. It is possible that this faith, as Professor Max Müller argues, may be ethnologically and even linguistically part and parcel of the general Heaven-worship of the Turanian tribes of Siberia. At any rate, it is identical with it in its primary idea, the adoration of the supreme Heaven. Dr. Legge charges Confucius with an inclination to substitute in his religious teaching the name of Tien, Heaven, for that known to more ancient religion and used in more ancient books, Shang-ti, the personal ruling Deity. But it seems rather that the sage was in fact upholding the traditions of the ancient faith, thus acting according to the character on which he prided himself, that of a transmitter and not a maker, a preserver of old knowledge, not a new revealer. It is in accordance with the usual course of theologic development, for the divine Heaven to reign in rude mythologic religion over the lesser spirits of the world before the childlike poetic thought passes into the statesman’s conception of a Celestial Emperor. As Plath well remarks, ‘It belongs to the Chinese system that all nature is animated by spirits, and that all these follow one order. As the Chinese cannot think of a Chinese Empire with an Emperor only, and without the host of vassal-princes and officials, so he cannot think of the Upper Emperor without the host of spirits.’ Developed in a different line, the idea of a supreme Heaven comes to pervade Chinese philosophy and ethics as a general expression of fate, ordinance, duty. ‘Heaven’s order is nature’—‘The wise man readily awaits Heaven’s command’—‘Man must first do his own part; when he has done all, then he can wait for Heaven to complete it’—‘All state officers are Heaven’s workmen, and represent him’—‘How does Heaven speak? The four seasons have their course, the hundred things arise, what speaks he?’—‘No, Heaven speaks not; by the course of events he makes himself understood, no more.’[[835]]
These stray scraps from old Chinese literature are intelligible to European ears, for our Aryan race has indeed worked out religious ideas from the like source and almost in the like directions. The Samoyed or Tunguz Heaven-god had his analogue in Dyu, Heaven, of the Vedic hymns. Once meaning the sky, and the sky personified, this Zeus came to mean far more than mere heaven in the minds of Greek poets and philosophers, when it rose toward ‘that conception which in sublimity, brightness, and infinity transcended all others as much as the bright blue sky transcended all other things visible upon earth.’ At the lower level of mythic religion, the ideal process of shaping the divine world into a monarchic constitution was worked out by the ancient Greeks, on the same simple plan as among such barbarians as the Kols of Chota-Nagpur or the Gallas of Abyssinia; Zeus is King over Olympian gods, and below these again are marshalled the crowded ranks of demigods, heroes, demons, nymphs, ghosts. At the higher level of theologic speculation, exalted thoughts of universal cause and being, of physical and moral law, took personality under the name of Zeus. It is in direct derivation along this historic line, that the classical heaven-cultus still asserts itself in song and pageant among us, in that quaintest of quaint survivals, the factitious religion of the Italian Opera, where such worship as artistic ends require is still addressed to the divine Cielo. Even in our daily talk, colloquial expressions call up before the mind of the ethnographer outlines of remotest religious history. Heaven grants, forbids, blesses still in phrase, as heretofore in fact.
Vast and difficult as is the research into the full scope and history of the doctrine of supremacy among the higher nations, it may be at least seen that helpful clues exist to lead the explorer. The doctrine of mighty nature-spirits, inhabiting and controlling sky and earth and sea, seems to expand in Asia into such ideas as that of Mahâtman the Great Spirit, Paramâtman the Highest Spirit, taking personality as Brahma the all-pervading universal soul[[836]]—in Europe into philosophic conceptions of which a grand type stands out in Kepler’s words, that the universe is a harmonious whole, whose soul is God. There is a saying of Comte’s that throws strong light upon this track of speculative theology: he declares that the conception among the ancients of the Soul of the Universe, the notion that the earth is a vast living animal, and in our own time, the obscure pantheism which is so rife among German metaphysicians, are only fetishism generalized and made systematic.[[837]] Polytheism, in its inextricable confusion of the persons and functions of the great divinities, and in its assignment of the sovereignty of the world to a supreme being who combines in himself the attributes of several such minor deities, tends toward the doctrine of fundamental unity. Max Müller, in a lecture on the Veda, has given the name of kathenotheism to the doctrine of divine unity in diversity which comes into view in these instructive lines:—