GODS AS GUARDIANS OF MORALITY
AS men are concerned about the conduct of their fellow men towards their gods, so gods are in many cases concerned about men’s conduct towards one another—disapproving of vice and punishing the wicked, approving of virtue and rewarding the good. But this is by no means a universal characteristic of gods. It is a quality attributed to certain deities only and, as it seems, in most instances slowly acquired.
We are told by competent observers that the supernatural beings of savage belief frequently display the utmost indifference to all questions of worldly morality. According to Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, the Central Australian natives, though they assume the existence of both friendly and mischievous spirits, “have not the vaguest idea of a personal individual other than an actual living member of the tribe who approves or disapproves of their conduct, so far as anything like what we call morality is concerned.”[1] The Society Islanders maintained that “the only crimes that were visited by the displeasure of their deities were the neglect of some rite or ceremony.”[2] The religious belief of the Gonds of Central India is said to be wholly unconnected with any idea of morality; a moral deity demanding righteous conduct from his creatures, our informant adds, is a religious conception far beyond the present capacity either of the Indian savage or the ordinary Hindu.[3] Of the Ew̔e-, Yoruba-, and Tshi-speaking peoples of the West African Slave and Gold Coasts Major Ellis writes:—“Religion, at the stage of growth in which we find it among these three groups of tribes, has no connection with morals, or the relations of men to one another. It consists solely of ceremonial worship, and the gods are only offended when some rite or ceremony has been neglected or omitted…. Murder, theft, and all offences against the person or against property, are matters in which the gods have no immediate concern, and in which they take no interest, except in the case when, bribed by a valuable offering, they take up the quarrel in the interests of some faithful worshipper.”[4] So also among the Bambala, a Bantu tribe in the Kasai, south of the River Congo, “there is no belief that the gods or spirits punish wrong-doing by afflicting the criminal or his family, nor are the acts of a man supposed to affect his condition after death.”[5] The Indians of Guiana, says Sir E. F. Im Thurn, observe an admirable code of morality, which exists side by side with a simple animistic form of religion, but the two have absolutely no connection with one another.[6] With reference to the Tarahumares of Mexico Dr. Lumholtz states that the only wrong towards the gods of which an Indian may consider himself guilty is that he does not dance enough. “For this offence he asks pardon. Whatever bad thoughts or actions toward man he may have on his conscience are settled between himself and the person offended.”[7] In the primitive Indian’s conception of a god,” Mr. Parkman observes, “the idea of moral good has no part. His deity does not dispense justice for this world or the next.”[8]
[1] Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 491.
[2] Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i. 397.
[3] Forsyth, Highlands of Central India, p. 145. See also Hodgson, Miscellaneous Essays, i. 124 (Bódo and Dhimáls); Caldwell, Tinnevelly Shanars, p. 36; Lyall, Asiatic Studies, p. 45; Radloff, Das Schamanenthum, p. 13 (Turkish tribes of the Altai).
[4] Ellis, Yoruba-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, p. 293. Idem, Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, p. 10. The Ew̔e god Mawu is represented as an exception to this rule (infra, [p. 686]).
[5] Torday and Joyce, ‘Ethnography of the Ba-Mbala,’ in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xxxv. 415.
[6] Im Thurn, Indians of Guiana, p. 342.
[7] Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, i. 332.