CHAPTER III
THE BUSH-SOUL
The animal which savage races take as a symbol of the family becomes their totem. Many believe that their ancestors were originally animals, fishes, or reptiles, and are so accustomed to this idea that transformation appears simple and natural to them. They hold that the souls of the dead pass into one or another animal form.
"Wise people," says the Bhagavad Gita, "see the same soul (Atman) in the Brahman, in worms and in insects, in the dog and the elephant, in beasts, cows, gadflies, and gnats."
"Nothing is more strikingly characteristic of primitive thinking than the close community of nature which it assumes between man and brute," writes Fiske. "The doctrine of metempsychosis, which is found in some shape or other all over the world, implies a fundamental identity between the two; the Hindu is taught to respect the flocks browsing in the meadow, and will on no account lift his hand against a cow, for who knows but it may be his own grandmother?"[7]
The primeval worship of ancestors and the savage customs of totemism are connected with this belief in transformation.
Primitive man cannot grasp the idea of death as final. He believes that the man who has passed away is still capable of communicating with the living, and the idea of the persistence of the dead is to him the reality. Even though a dead man has thrown off the body like a mask, his appearance remains the same and he is still possessed of human powers, perhaps intensified by the experience he has undergone. He can show himself to his friends, and may do so preferably after nightfall. He is then wrapped to some extent in mystery, and connected with strange sights, movements, and sounds.
Gifted with new powers he may appear as an animal, perhaps in order to harm his enemies or warn people of evil. His howling may be heard above the sound of the tempest. Perhaps he rides on the night-wind, perhaps he comes in the form of a hound, as a messenger of death, and bays under the window of the sick a warning that death is at hand. Again, he may come as a ravening wolf to devour some victim of his greed. Thus the savage mind fails to distinguish between the real and the imaginative and, basing his beliefs on the stories about his own tribal totem, is convinced that his ancestors may career about his home in the form of lion, leopard, serpent or other tutelary genius. This curious mental process expands with what it feeds on until the shade of distinction between wolf-like ghosts and corporeal human wolves is obliterated and the metempsychosis is complete.
In "Life Amongst the Modocs,"[8] Joaquin Miller tells a poetic story of the descent of the Indians from the grizzly bear.
One severe spring-time many thousands of years ago there was a storm on the summit of Mount Shasta and the Great Spirit sent his fair daughter to speak to the storm and bid it stop, but he told her not to look forth from the hole in the top of the mountain lest she should be caught in the wind and come to disaster.