Comparative Religion

by J. Estlin Carpenter

The poets of the ancient Vedic hymns beheld everything around them full of energy. The names by which they designated what they saw all denoted action or agency. The swift flow of the stream gained it the title of the "runner"; as it cut away the banks or furrowed its course deep between the rocks, it was the "plougher"; when it nourished the fields it was the "mother"; when it marked off one territory from another it was the "defender" or "protector." So the seers addressed their invocations to the dawn or the sun, to the winds and the fire, to the river or the mountain, to the earth-mother or the sky-father, as living powers, capable of responding to the prayers of their worshippers. Similar energy dwelt in the horse or the cow, the bird of omen and the guardian dog. It was even shared by ritual implements such as the stones by which the sacred soma-juice was squeezed out, or by the products of human handiwork, the war-car, the weapon, the drum, and the peaceful plough.

At the present day the Batak in the north-west of Sumatra interpret the world about them in terms of a soul-stuff or life-power called tondi. A vast reservoir of this exists in the world above, and flows down upon men and animals and plants. The biggest animal, like the tiger, the most important of plants, like rice (chief source of food), have most tondi, but it is not confined to living things; the smith attributes it to his iron, the fisherman to his boat, the tiller of the ground to his hoe, the householder to his hearth and home. But a further analysis is beginning. What is the relation of a man's tondi to himself? When he dies, it passes into some fresh organism. But the rest of him, his shadow, his double, or his self, becomes a begu. In life, it is the body that thinks and feels, that fears and hopes and wills, though the presence of the tondi supplies the needful energy. But the tondi also has the functions of consciousness, for it can go away in dreams and meet the begus of parents and ancestors. And the apprehension that it may depart begets reverence and even offerings to the tondi, rather than to distant gods for whom man can feel neither fear nor love.

We touch here another root of religious belief, which produces growths so wide-spreading that some interpreters bring the whole range of objects of worship within their shade. How, after all, does man explain himself to himself? At first he does not think about thinking. Such words as he uses are vague and elastic, like the Polynesian mana, which covers a multitude of facts without and within. Only through long dim processes does any idea corresponding to our conception of personality come into his consciousness. He is as confused about the objects round him as he is about himself. Yet he has some sort of initiative. Whence comes it? Little by little a variety of experiences force on him the belief that beside the body and its limbs he possesses something which he cannot ordinarily see, but which is essential to his activity. He falls asleep, and lies still upon the ground; he wakes, full of remembrance of adventure, the localities which he has visited, the animals that he has hunted, the dead kinsmen whom he has met. The Australians explain their dreams by the supposition that the yambo, the mūrup, or the boolabong, can quit the body and return. "I asked one of the Kurnai" (of Gippsland), relates Mr. Howitt, "whether he really thought his yambo could go out during sleep." "It must be so," was the answer, "for when I sleep, I go to distant places, I see distant people, I even see and speak with those that are dead." The great apostle of the East in the sixteenth century, the devoted Francis Xavier, wrote home from India to the Society of Jesus in Europe—

"I find that the arguments which are to convince these ignorant people must be by no means subtle, such as those which are found in the books of learned schoolmen, but such as their minds can understand. They asked me again and again how the soul of a dying person goes out of the body, how it was, whether it was as happens to us in dreams, when we seem to be conversing with our friends and acquaintances. Ah, how often this happens to me, dearest brethren, when I dream of you! Was this because the soul then leaves the body?"

This explanation is found all round the globe.

Many other experiences confirm the impression of some kind of dual existence. The shadow or shade which follows a man repeats his movements, and appears as a sort of double. It is even widely believed in the face of the simplest evidence that a dead body casts no shadow (of course, as it lies upon the ground the shadow may almost disappear). Your reflection in river, pool, or lake, actually reproduces your colour as well as your form: beware lest a crocodile seizes it and drags you in. From ancient times down to Shelley and Walt Whitman, poetry has designated Sleep and Death as "brothers"; in death that which was temporarily absent in sleep has gone away for good. It may have rushed out with the blood from a gaping wound; it may have quietly departed with the last faint breath. So it may be summoned back, as in Chinese custom, on the housetop, in the garden or the field. Ghostly sounds may be heard in the forest, among the rocks, borne along the wind; the clairvoyant may discern dimly strange faces, vanished forms; the dead can sometimes make themselves seen in their old haunts; the world is full of unexpected indications of presences beyond our sense.

Such presences are grouped, for the modern student, under the general title "spirits." But the explanations which lead to these beliefs are not concerned with human beings only. Animals share in the incidents of life and death; plants, even, grow and blossom and decay; and animals, plants, and inanimate objects of all sorts may be seen in dreams. Hence the analysis which is applied to man can be readily extended; and another world is called into existence, strangely blended with this, a realm of immaterial counterparts and impalpable forces. A Fiji native, placed before a mirror, recognising himself and object after object, whispered softly, "Now I can see into the world of spirits."

With the help of this elementary philosophy a vast machinery of causation is always at hand for explaining untoward events. The Tshi-speaking negro on the West Coast of Africa has inside him a kind of life-power named kra. It existed long before his birth, for it served in the same capacity a whole series of predecessors; and it will continue its career after his death, when the man himself becomes a srahman or ghost. The adjoining Ga-speaking tribes modify the kra into two kla, one male and one female, the first of a bad disposition, the second good, who give advice and prompt to actions according to their respective characters. Yet a third inmate dwells in the neighbouring Yoruba-speaking folk, one in the head, one in the stomach, and one in the great toe. Offerings are made to the first by rubbing fowl's blood and palm oil on the forehead. The second needs none, for it shares whatever the stomach receives. The third is propitiated as an agent of locomotion before starting on a journey. But the curious theme of the plurality of souls must not beguile us.

Meantime the original kra is set behind all the activities of nature, and extended to the whole sphere of material objects. Each town or village or district has its own local spirits, rulers of river and valley, rock and forest and hill. Sometimes they take human shape, and colour, white or black, for transformations of all kinds are always possible. They are not all of equal rank; the broad lake, the mountain, the sea where the surf breaks heavily and the frail craft are upset—the lightning, the storm, and the earthquake—the leopard, the crocodile, the shark, and the devastating smallpox—such are among the dreaded manifestations of these dangerous and mysterious powers. But the actual dead must not be forgotten; they must be provided with ghostly counterparts of food and weapons and utensils, with cloth and gold-dust, just as a departed chief must be accompanied into the next life by the wives and slaves who adorned his household state in this.