“The gods of the natives then are nearly as numerous as their dead. It is impossible to worship all; a selection must be made, and, as we have indicated, each worshipper turns most naturally to the spirits of his own departed relatives; but his gods are too many still, and in farther selecting he turns to those that have lived nearest his own time. Thus the chief of a village will not trouble himself about his great-great-grandfather: he will present his offering to his own immediate predecessor, and say, ‘O father, I do not know all your relatives, you know them all, invite them to feast with you.’ The offering is not simply for himself, but for himself and all his relatives.”
Ordinary ghosts are soon forgotten with the generation that knew them. Not so a few select spirits, the Cæsars and Napoleons, the Charlemagnes and Timurs of savage empires.
“A great chief that has been successful in his wars does not pass out of memory so soon. He may become the god of a mountain or a lake, and may receive homage as a local deity long after his own descendants have been driven from the spot. When there is a supplication for rain the inhabitants of the country pray not so much to their own forefathers as to the god of yonder mountain on whose shoulders the great rain-clouds repose. (Smaller hills are seldom honoured with a deity.)”
Well, in all this we get, it seems to me, the very essentials and universals of religion generally,—the things without which no religion could exist—the vital part, without the ever-varying and changeable additions of mere gossiping mythology. In the presents brought to the dead man’s grave to appease the ghost, we have the central element of all worship, the practical key of all cults, past or present.
On the other hand, mythologists tell us nothing about the origin of prayer and sacrifice: they put us off with stories of particular gods, without explaining to us how those gods ever came to be worshipped. Now, mythology is a very interesting study in its own way: but to treat as religion a mass of stories and legends about gods or saints, with hardly a single living element of practice or sacrifice, seems to me simply to confuse two totally distinct branches of human enquiry. The Origin of Tales has nothing at all to do with the Origin of Worship.
When we come to read Mr. Macdonald’s account of a native funeral, on the other hand, we are at once on a totally different tack; we can understand, as by an electric flash, the genesis of the primitive acts of sacrifice and religion.
“Along with the deceased is buried a considerable part of his property. We have already seen that his bed is buried with him; so also are all his clothes. If he possesses several tusks of ivory, one tusk or more is ground to a powder between two stones and put beside him. Beads are also ground down in the same way. These precautions are taken to prevent the witch (who is supposed to be answerable for his death) from making any use of the ivory or beads.
“If the deceased owned several slaves, an enormous hole is dug for a grave. The slaves are now brought forward. They may be either cast into the pit alive, or the undertakers may cut all their throats. The body of their master or their mistress is then laid down to rest above theirs, and the grave is covered in.
“After this the women come forward with the offerings of food, and place them at the head of the grave. The dishes in which the food was brought are left behind. The pot that held the drinking-water of the deceased and his drinking-cup are also left with him. These, too, might be coveted by the witch, but a hole is pierced in the pot, and the drinking calabash is broken.
“The man has now gone from the society of the living, and he is expected to share the meal thus left at his grave with those that have gone before him. The funeral party breaks up; they do not want to visit the grave of their friend again without a very good reason. Anyone found among the graves may be taken for a cannibal. Their friend has become a citizen of a different village. He is with all his relatives of the past. He is entitled to offerings or presents which may come to him individually or through his chief. These offerings in most cases he will share with others, just as he used to do when alive,” Sometimes the man may be buried in his own hut.