A notable example of the prolongation of error on this subject through orthodox assumptions is seen in Dr. A. W. Howitt’s otherwise valuable work on The Native Tribes of South Australia (1904). Dr. Howitt produces (pp. 488–508) abundant evidence to show that a number of tribes believe in a “supernatural anthropomorphic being,” variously named Nurrundere, Nurelli, Bunjil, Mungan-ngaua, Daramalun, and Baiame (“the same being under different names,” writes Dr. Howitt, p. 499). This being he describes as “the tribal All-Father,” “a venerable kindly Headman of a tribe, full of knowledge and tribal wisdom, and all-powerful in magic, of which he is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions such as the aborigines regard them” (pp. 500–1). But he insists (p. 506) that “in this being, though supernatural, there is no trace of a divine nature,” and, again, that “the Australian aborigines do not recognize any divinity, good or evil” (p. 756), though (p. 501) “it is most difficult for one of us to divest himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural being [as the All-Father] with a nature quasi-divine, if not altogether so.” Dr. Howitt does not name any European deity who satisfies him on the point of divinity! Obviously the Australian deities have evolved in exactly the same way as those of other peoples, Yahweh included. Dr. Howitt, indeed, admits (p. 507) that the Australian notions “may have been at the root of monotheistic beliefs.” They certainly were; and when he adds that, “although it cannot be alleged that these aborigines have consciously any form of religion, it may be said that their beliefs are such that, under favourable conditions, they might have developed into an actual religion,” he indicates afresh the confusion possible from unscientific definitions. The sole content of his thesis is, finally, that a “supernatural” being is not “divine” till the priests have somewhat trimmed him, and that a religion is not “actual” till it has been sacerdotally formulated. Dr. Howitt’s negations are as untenable as Mr. Andrew Lang’s magnification of the Australian All-Father into a perfect Supreme Being.
The really important part of Dr. Howitt’s survey of the problem is his conclusion that the kind of belief he has described exists only in a specified area of Australia, and that this area is “the habitat of tribes ... where there has been the advance from group marriage to individual marriage, from descent in the female line to that in the male line” (p. 500). Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s denial of the existence of any belief in a personal deity among the tribes of Central Australia (Northern Tribes, 1904, p. 491) appears to stand for actual fact.
As to the “divinity” of the ancestor-gods of the primitives, see Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 41 sq.]
The problem has been unduly narrowed to the question whether there are any whole tribes so developed. It is obviously pertinent to ask whether there may not be diversity of opinion within a given tribe. Such testimonies as those collected by Sir John Lubbock [Lord Avebury] and others, as to the existence of religionless savages, are held to be disposed of by further proof that tribes of savages who had been set down as religionless on the evidence of some of themselves had in reality a number of religious beliefs. Travellers’ questions had been falsely answered, either on the principle that non-initiates must not be told the mysteries, or from that sudden perception of the oddity of their beliefs which comes even to some civilized people when they try to state them to an unbelieving outsider. Questions, again, could easily be misunderstood, and answers likewise. We find, for instance, that savages who scout the idea that the dead can “rise again” do believe in the continued disembodied existence of all their dead, and even at times conceive of them as marrying and procreating! On the whole, they conceive of a continuity of spirit-life on earth in human shape. To speak of such people as having no idea of “a life beyond the grave” would obviously be misleading, though they have no notion of a judgment day or of future rewards or punishments.[24]
Undoubtedly, then, the negative view of savage religion had in a number of cases been hastily taken; but there remains the question, as a rule surprisingly ignored, whether some of the savages who disavowed all belief in things supernatural may not have been telling the simple truth about themselves, or even about their families and their comrades. As one sympathetic traveller notes of the Samoyedes: “There can be no such thing as strict accuracy of grammar or expression among an illiterate people; nor can there be among these simple creatures any consistent or fixed appreciation even of their own forms of ... belief.... Having no object in arriving at a common view of such matters, each Samoyede, if questioned separately, will give more or less his own disconnected impression of his faith.”[25] And this holds of unfaith. A savage asked by a traveller, “Do you believe” so-and-so, might very well give a true negative answer for himself;[26] and the traveller’s resulting misconception would be due to his own arbitrary assumption that all members of any tribe must think alike.
A good witness expressly testifies: “In the tribe [of Australians] with which I was best acquainted, while the blacks had a term for ghost and believed that there were departed spirits who were sometimes to be seen among the foliage, individual men would tell you upon inquiry that they believed that death was the last of them” (Eaglehawk and Crow: A Study of the Australian Aborigines, by John Mathew, M.A., B.D., 1899, p. 146). As to the risk of wrong negative inferences, on the other hand, see pp. 145, 147.
One of the best of our missionary witnesses, H. A. Junod, in his valuable study of the South African Thonga, testifies both to the commonness of individual variation in the way of religious fancy and the occurrence of sporadic unbelief, usually ended by fear. Individuals freely indulge in concrete speculations—e.g., as to the existence of animal souls—which do not win vogue (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 342 sq.), though the reporter seems to overlook the possibility that such ideas may be adopted by a tribe. Freethinking ideas have, of course, by far the least chance of currency. “The young folks of Libombo used to blaspheme in their hearts, saying, ‘There are no Gods.’ But,” added the witness, “we very soon saw that there were some, when they killed one of us,” who trod on a snake (work cited, pp. 354–55). That testimony illustrates well the difficulties of rational progress in a primitive community. But at times the process may be encouraged by the environment. The early missionary Ellis gives an instance of a community in Hawaii that had abandoned all religious practices: “We asked them who was their God. They said they had no God; formerly they had many: but now they had cast them all away. We asked them if they had done well in abolishing them. They said ‘Yes,’ for tabu had occasioned much labour and inconvenience, and drained off the best of their property. We asked them if it was a good thing to have no God.... They said perhaps it was; for they had nothing to provide for the great sacrifices, and were under no fear of punishment for breaking tabu; that now one fire cooked their food, and men and women ate together the same kind of provisions.” (W. Ellis, Tour Through Hawaii or Owhyhee, 1827, p. 100.) The community in question had in their own way reached the Lucretian verdict, Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.
Unless, again, such witnesses as Moffat be unfaithful reporters as well as mistaken in their inferences, some of the natives with whom they dealt were all but devoid of the ordinary religious notions[27] which in the case of other natives have enabled the missionaries to plant their doctrines. Nor is there anything hard of belief in the idea that, just as special religious movements spread credence in certain periods, a lack of active teachers in certain tribes may for a time have let previously common beliefs pass almost out of knowledge. If it be true that the Black Death wrought a great decline in the ecclesiastical life of England in the fourteenth century,[28] a long period of life-destroying conditions might eliminate from the life of a savage tribe all lore save that of primary self-preservation. Moffat incidentally notes the significant fact that rain-makers in his time were usually foreigners to the tribes in which they operated.[29]
The explanation is partly that given by him later, that “a rain-maker seldom dies a natural death,”[30] most being executed as impostors for their failures. To this effect there are many testimonies.[31] Among the Bushmen, says Lichtenstein, when a magician “happens to have predicted falsely several times in succession, he is thrust out of the kraal, and very likely burned or put to death in some other way.”[32] “A celebrated magician,” says Burton again, “rarely if ever dies a natural death.”[33] And it is told of the people of Niuē, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, that “of old they had kings; but as they were the high priests as well, and were supposed to cause the food to grow, the people got angry with them in times of scarcity, and killed them; and as one after the other was killed, the end of it was that no one wished to be king.”[34] So, in Uganda, if a chief and his medicine-men cannot make rain, “his whole existence is at stake in times of distress.” One chief was actually driven out; and the rain-doctors always live on sufferance.[35] In such a state of things religion might well lose vogue.
Among some peoples of the Slave Coast, it appears, the regular priests, despite their power and prestige, are always under suspicion by reason of their frequent miscarriages; and they are—or were—not unfrequently put to death.[36] Here there is disbelief in the priest without disbelief in the God. But a disbelief in the priest which tended to exterminate him might well diminish religion.