Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

Less obviously connected with prayer than sacrifice is dancing, a custom which the civilized world has long since ceased to regard as in any sense connected with religion, but which among savages, besides being a natural expression of joy in life, of thankfulness for sun or shower, is not unfrequently a mode of prayer, a means employed for the attainment of desire. This at least seems the case with those imitative dances or pantomimes in which with marvellous exactitude the savage all the world over acts the part of the animals he pursues in the chase. The national dance of the Kamschadals consists in the imitation of the manners and motions of seals and bears, varying from the gentlest movement of their bodies to the most violent agitation of their thighs and knees, accompanied with singing and stamping in time;[88] and it is remarkable that in Vancouver’s Island also there is a seal dance, for which the natives, stripping themselves naked, enter the water, regardless of the cold of the night, and emerge ‘dragging their bodies along the sand like seals,’ then enter the houses and crawl about the fires, and finally jump up and dance about.[89]

But although it is intelligible that such facility and perfection of beast-acting as, for instance, enabled the Dog-rib Indians to approach and kill the reindeer, acquired originally by the necessities of the chase, should be perpetuated as a religious ceremony to keep up a habit of actual importance to existence, there are cases to which this explanation would hardly apply, as, for example, to the African gorilla dance, which has been so vividly described by a recent eye-witness, and which, he says, ‘was a religious festival held on the eve of an enterprise,’ the eve, namely, of a gorilla hunt. An African dancing to a drum and harp imitated closely all the attitudes and movements of the gorilla, being joined in the chorus by all the rest present. ‘Now he would be seated on the ground, his legs apart, his hands resting on his knees, his head drooping, and in his face the vacant expression of the brute. Sometimes he folded his arms on his forehead. Suddenly he would raise his head with prone ears and flaming eyes,’ till in the last act he represented the gorilla attacked and killed.[90] But, unless gorillas are ever killed by so clever an imitation of themselves that they really mistake their African neighbours for their own brothers, the gorilla dance must, by a phenomenon of thought not without analogy, be a mode of prayer for obtaining a desired result; the same fetishistic law of thought prevailing that is traceable in the idea that by pouring water on a stone you can bring rain on the earth, or that you can injure your enemy by an injury to his effigy.

It may be, however, that pantomimic dances were employed originally as a clearer expression than mere words of the suppliant’s wishes, the acting of a hunt or battle being equivalent to a petition for favour and success in the same, and the unseen deities addressed being not unnaturally conceived as more likely to see the bodily movements than to hear the feeble voice of the petitioner. The analogy of the various tongues, prevalent among birds, beasts, and men, might well suggest to a savage the possibility of the spiritual world being unavoidably deaf to his utterances from mere inability to comprehend them; whilst dealings with the nearest tribe might make it natural for him to resort to the use of signs and symbols as the least mistakable vehicle for his meaning. The Ahts, retiring to the solitude of the woods, and there standing naked with outstretched arms before the moon, employ set words and gestures according to the nature of the object they desire. Thus in praying for salmon the suppliant rubs the back of his hands, and, looking upwards, says, ‘Many salmon, many salmon;’ in asking for deer he carefully rubs both his eyes, for geese the back of his shoulders, for bears his sides and legs, uttering in a sing-song way the usual formula. The meaning of all these rubbings is obscure; but it has been suggested that the rubbing of the hands indicates a wish that the hand may have the requisite steadiness for throwing the salmon spear; the rubbing of the eyes, a prayer, that they may be opened to discern deer in the forest.[91] Among a Californian tribe it was usual, preparatory to the chase, to resort to a certain stake-inclosure and there to pray to the god’s image for success, by mimicry of the actions of the hunt, as by leaping and twanging of the bow.[92] In the Society Islands, if the land had been in any way defiled by an enemy, a mode of religious purification consisted in offering pieces of coral, collected expressly, on the altar to the gods, to induce them ‘to cleanse the land from pollution, that it might be pure as the coral fresh from the sea.’[93]

The Voguls, whose most frequent prayers are for success in hunting, are said to promote their fulfilment by ‘images in the shape of the beast more especially sought for, rudely shaped out of wood or stone.’[94] But to dance like the animal would naturally serve the purpose as well; and so the interpretation of some dances as symbolised prayers explains several American customs which are strikingly analogous to the African gorilla dance already described. Every Mandan Indian was compelled by social law to keep his buffalo’s mask, consisting of the skin and horns of a buffalo’s head, in his lodge, ready to put on and wear in the buffalo dance, whenever the protracted absence of that animal from the prairie rendered it expedient to resort to this means for the purpose of inducing the herds to change the direction of their wanderings and bend their course towards the Mandan villages. And a principal part in the annual celebration of the subsidence of the great waters consisted in the buffalo dance, wherein eight men dressed in entire buffalo skins, so as to imitate closely the appearance and motions of buffaloes, were the chief actors, and four old men chanted prayers to the Great Spirit for the continuation of his favours in sending them good supplies of buffaloes for the coming year.[95] In this instance the close relation between dance and prayer, the dance being either supplementary or explicative, clearly appears; as it also does in a very similar buffalo dance performed by a neighbouring tribe of the Mandans, the Minnatarees. In their ceremony six elderly men acted the animals, imitating with great perfection even the peculiar sound of their voice.[96] Behind them came a man, who represented the driving of the beasts forward, and who, at a certain point, placing his hands before his face, sang, and made a long speech in the nature of a prayer, containing good wishes for the buffalo hunt and for war, as also an appeal to the heavenly powers to be propitious to the huntsmen and their arms. So again the Sioux Indians for several days before starting on a bear hunt would hold a bear dance, which was regarded as ‘a most important and indispensable form,’ and in which the whole tribe joined in a song to the Bear Spirit, to conciliate as well as to consult him. ‘All with the motions of their hands closely imitated the movements of that animal; some representing its motion in running, and others the peculiar attitude and hanging of the paws when it is sitting up on its hind feet and looking out for the approach of an enemy.’[97] And the same tribe, whenever they had bad luck in hunting, would institute a dance to invoke the aid of one of their gods.[98]

To the African gorilla dance, the Mandan buffalo dance, the Sioux bear dance, may be added the custom of the Koossa Kafirs, who, before they start on a hunt, perform a wonderful game, which is considered absolutely necessary to the success of the undertaking.[99] One of them, representing some kind of game, takes a handful of grass in his mouth and runs about on all fours; whilst the rest make-believe to transfix him with their spears, till at last he throws himself on the ground as if he were killed.[100] On the occasion of a Sioux Indian dreaming of the fish-eating cormorant, a fish dance was instituted, to ward off any danger portended, in which the most elaborate imitation of the cormorant was observed. The medicine-men, dancing up to a fish, affixed to a pole, began quacking, flapping their arms like wings, biting at the fish, and pretending to hide a piece in their nests away from the wolves.[101] The Ahts, again, Sproat observed, spent the eve of a deer hunt ‘in dancing and singing and in various ceremonies intended to secure good luck on the morrow.’[102] And in South Australia it is remarkable that, when boys of a certain age undergo the ceremony of losing their front teeth, power is conferred on them of killing the kangaroo by a kind of kangaroo dance. First of all, a kangaroo of grass is deposited at their feet; and then the actors, the adults of the tribe, having fitted themselves with long tails of grass, set off ‘as a herd of kangaroos, now jumping along, then lying down and scratching themselves, as those animals do when basking in the sun,’ two armed men following them meanwhile, as it were to steal on them unmolested and spear them.[103]

The same thought occurs in prayers for rain. Modern Servian peasants, pouring water over a girl covered with grass and flowers, employ a mode of petition for rain very similar to that in vogue near Lake Nyanza. There, after a wild dance, a jar of water is placed before the village chief: the woman who acts as priestess of the ceremonies washes her hands, arms, and face with the water; then a large quantity of it is poured over her, and finally all the women present rush to dip their calabashes in the jar and to toss the water in the air with loud cries and wild gesticulations.[104]

Again, the common savage war dance may be taken to have a religious significance in addition to its secular motive of sustaining martial feelings and habits. In the war dance of the Navajoes of New Mexico the most important part of the war dance was the arrow dance, when a young virgin, beautifully dressed, represented in gesture ‘the war path.’ An eye-witness has described it as a really beautiful performance. Slowly and steadily she would pursue her imaginary foe; suddenly her step would quicken as she came in sight of the enemy; she would dance faster and faster, and, seizing an arrow, demonstrate by the rapidity of her movements that the fight had begun; she would point with the arrow, show how it wings its course, how the scalp is taken, how the victory is won.[105] Among the Winnebagoe Indians also it was part of the war dance for a warrior to go through the pantomime of the discovery of the enemy, of the ambuscade, the attack, the slaughter, and the scalping.[106] And in this reference may be noted the curious proceeding of the women of Accra, on the Guinea Coast, who, whilst the male population were engaged in war with a neighbouring people, endeavoured every day to bring it to a happy issue by dancing fetish; that is, by fighting sham battles with wooden swords, flying to the boats on the beach and pretending to row, throwing some one into the sea, taking a trowel and making believe to build a wall—all actions literally symbolical of corresponding ones to be performed by the men in the course of defeating their enemy.[107] In Madagascar, too, when the men are absent in war, the custom of the women to dance, in order to inspire their husbands with courage, has been thought not to be destitute of a religious meaning.

That a dance may be in reality a form of prayer, a petition acted instead of spoken, as more likely so to be understood, makes it possible that prayers may be hidden under customs which are generally only cited to illustrate the absurdity of primitive metaphysics. May it not be that the Indian, when he thinks to ensure a successful chase by drawing a figure of his game with a line leading to its heart from its mouth, and by so subjecting its movements to himself, or when he thinks to cure a man of sickness by shooting the bark-effigy of the animal supposed to possess him—may it not be that he thereby hopes to influence known or unknown natural forces in his favour by a clear representation of his wants? The control of natural phenomena by witchcraft may thus have been in its origin a direction to natural phenomena, or rather to the spirits ruling them; an address perhaps to those spirits of the dead which to a savage are his earliest and for long his only gods; and thus the absurdities of fetishism might become intelligible as lifeless prayers, with more or less of their primal meaning, descended from such a philosophy of nature. The Kamschadal child sent out naked to make the rain stop, clear as the meaning of the custom is with the prayer joined to it, would without it appear in the light of ordinary fetishism. So the Khond, carrying a branch cut from hostile soil to his god of war, and there, after he has dressed it like one of the enemy, throwing it down, with certain incantations, on the shrine of the divinity, urges his petition in a way which even the god of war can scarcely fail to understand. And the Basuto woman, who in her wish for children, prays to her tutelary divinity for the accomplishment of her desires by making dolls of clay and treating them as infants, affords yet another illustration of the operation of the same law of thought.[108]

It remains to show how, in primitive theology, prayer attaches itself as well to the material as the spiritual world, for it is here especially that it finds its counterpart in the folk-lore of our own day. As, however, there is scarcely an object in nature which in a state of ignorance may not with reason be worshipped, a few illustrations must be taken for thousands on a subject it were less easy to exhaust than the patience of the reader.

‘As for animals having reasoning powers,’ says an exceptionally credible witness, ‘I have heard Indians talk and reason with a horse the same as with a person.’[109] Our fairy tales of talking animals would be commonplace facts to a savage. Hence it can be no matter of surprise to find that it is a common Indian custom to converse with rattlesnakes, and to endeavour to propitiate them with presents of tobacco. On one occasion, the Iowas having begun to build a village, the presence of a rattlesnake on a neighbouring hill was suddenly announced, when forthwith started the great snake doctor with tobacco and other presents: when he had offered these, and had had a long talk with the snake, he returned to his village, with the satisfactory news that his tribesmen might now travel in safety, as peace had been made between them and the snakes.[110]