"It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the trees … all of which are only channels of poison wherewith the demons would smite them."
To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horror of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it certain death. So strong is this superstition that explorers have often experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serve as porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeks and Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized (parks and gardens) and habitable. "Their souls," says Rohde (511),
"could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of sunlit mountain summits."
And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24):
"Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us from them; yet there was a constant procession over these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and generals with literary men in their train. All these travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise 'De Analogia.'"
A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, that it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and Romans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent, could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take another sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which no one will deny.
NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION
To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful, infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To accuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now, without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what conception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their gods. The moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names—"The Rioter," "The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank or beauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "The Murderer." Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous, revengeful, and the subject of every basest passion. They are demoralized heathen—monster expressions of moral corruption" (Williams, 184). These gods make war, and kill and eat each other just as mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that "the spirits of the dead are eaten by the gods or demons" (Ellis, P.R., I., 275). It might be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adultery, revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to his gods cannot, from his point of view, be considered blasphemous. Quite true; but my point is that men who have made so little progress in sympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge, murder and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their gods, are altogether too coarse and callous to be able to experience the higher religious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most careful observer (Ellis, P.R., I., 291) says:
"Instead of exercising those affections of gratitude, complacency, and love toward the objects of their worship which the living God supremely requires, they regarded their deities with horrific dread, and worshipped only with enslaving fear."
This "enslaving fear" is the principal ingredient of primitive religious emotion everywhere. To the savage and barbarian, religion is not a consolation and a blessing, but a terror. Du Chaillu says of the equatorial Africans (103) that "their whole lives are saddened by the fears of evil spirits, witchcraft, and other kindred superstitions under which they labor." Benevolent deities, even if believed in, receive little or no attention, because, being good, they are supposed to do no harm anyway, whereas the malevolent gods must be propitiated by sacrifices. The African Dahomans, for instance, ignore their Mahu because his intentions are naturally friendly, whereas their Satan, the wicked Legba, has hundreds of statues before which offerings are made. "Early religions," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely puts it, "are selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so much as eager to gain something to his advantage." If the gods fail to respond to the offerings made to them, the sacrificers naturally feel aggrieved, and show their displeasure in a way which to a person who knows refined religion seems shocking and sacrilegious. In Japan, China, and Corea, if the gods fail to do what is expected of them, their images are unceremoniously walloped. In India, if the rains fail, thousands of priests send up their prayers. If the drought still continues, they punish their idols by holding them under water. During a thunderstorm in Africa, Chapman (I., 45) witnessed the following extraordinary scene: