I.
SOME SAVAGE MYTHS AND BELIEFS.
The question of the universality of religion, of its presence in some form or another in every part of the world, seems to be one of those which lie beyond the bounds of a dogmatic answer. For the accounts of missionaries and travellers, which furnish the only data for its solution, have been so largely vitiated, if not by a consciousness of the interests supposed to be at stake, at least by so strong an intolerance for the tenets of native savage religions, that it seems impossible to make sufficient allowance either for the bias of individual writers or for the extent to which they may have misunderstood, or been purposely misled by, their informants.
Although, however, on the subject of native religions we can never hope for more than approximate truth, the reports of missionaries and others, written at different periods of time about the same place or contemporaneously about widely remote places, as they must be free from all possible suspicion of collusion, so they supply a kind of measure of probability by which the credibility of any given belief may be tested. Thus an idea, too inconceivable to be credited, if only reported of one tribe of the human race, may be safely accepted as seriously held, if reported of several tribes in different parts of the world. An Englishman, for instance, however much winds and storms may mentally vex him, would scarcely think of testifying his repugnance to them by the physical remonstrance of his fists and lungs, nor would he easily believe that any people of the earth should seriously treat the wind in this way as a material agent. If he were told that the Namaquas shot poisoned arrows at storms to drive them away, he would show no unreasonable scepticism in disbelieving the fact; but if he learnt on independent authority that the Payaguan Indians of North America rush with firebrands and clenched fists against the wind that threatens to blow down their huts; that in Russia the Esthonians throw stones and knives against a whirlwind of dust, pursuing it with cries; that the Kalmucks fire their guns to drive the storm-demons away; that Zulu rain-doctors or heaven-herds whistle to lightning to leave the skies just as they whistle to cattle to leave their pens; and that also in the Aleutian Islands a whole village will unite to shriek and strike against the raging wind, he would have to acknowledge that the statement about the Namaquas contained in itself nothing intrinsically improbable. And besides this test of genuine savage thought, a test which obviously admits of almost infinite application, there is another one no less serviceable in ethnological criticism, namely, where the reality of a belief is supported by customs, widely spread and otherwise unintelligible. No better illustration can be given of this than the belief, which, asserted by itself, would be universally disbelieved, in a second life not only for men but for material things; but which, supported as it is by the practice, common alike in the old world and the new, of burying objects with their owner to live again with him in another state, is certified beyond all possibility of doubt. If to us there seems a no more self-evident truth than that a man can take nothing with him out of the world, a vast mass of evidence proves, that the discovery of this truth is one of comparatively modern date and of still quite partial distribution over the globe.
So much, then, being premised as to the nature of the evidence on which our knowledge of the lower races depends, and as to the limits within which such evidence may be received and its veracity tested, let us proceed to examine some of the higher beliefs of savages, which, as they bear some analogy to the beliefs on similar subjects of more advanced societies, are in a sense religious, and, so far at least as the collected information justifies us in judging, seem of indigenous and independent growth.
Few results of ethnology are more interesting than the wide-spread belief among savages, arrived at purely by their own reasoning faculties, in a creator of things. The recorded instances of such a belief are, indeed, so numerous as to make it doubtful whether instances to the contrary may not have been based on too scant information. The difficulty of obtaining sound evidence on such subjects is well illustrated by the experience of Dobritzhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, who spent seven years among the Abipones of South America. For when he asked them whether the wonderful course of the stars and heavenly bodies had never raised in their minds the thought of an invisible being who had made and who guided them, he got for answer that of what happened in heaven, or of the maker or ruler of the stars, the ancestors of the Abipones had never cared to think, finding ample occupation for their thoughts in the providing of grass and water for their horses. Yet the Abipones really believed that they had been created by an Indian like themselves, whose name they mentioned with great reverence and whom they spoke of as their ‘grandfather,’ because he had lived so long ago. He was still, they fancied, to be seen in the Pleiades; and when that constellation disappeared for some months from the sky they would bewail the illness of their grandfather, and congratulate him on his recovery when he returned in May. Still, the creator of savage reasoning is not necessarily a creator of all things, but only of some, like Caliban’s Setebos, who made the moon and the sun, and the isle and all things on it—
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise.
So that it is possible the creator of the Abipones was merely their deified First Ancestor. For on nothing is savage thought more confused than on the connection between the first man who lived on the world and the actual Creator of the world, as if in the logical need of a first cause they had been unable to divest it of human personality, or as if the natural idea of a first man had led to the idea of his having created the world. Thus Greenlanders are divided as to whether Kaliak was really the creator of all things or only the first man who sprang from the earth. The Minnetarrees of North America believed that at first everything was water and there was no earth at all, till the First Man, the never-dying one, the Lord of Life, sent down the great red-eyed bird to bring up the earth. The Mingo tribes also ‘revere and make offerings to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a powerful deity under the Master of Life, or even as identified with him;’ whilst among the Dog-ribs the First Man, Chapewee, was also creator of the sun and moon. The Zulus of Africa likewise merge the ideas of the First Man and the Creator, the great Unkulunkulu; as also do the Caribs, who believe that Louquo, the uncreate first Carib, descended from heaven to make the earth and also to become the father of men.[3] So again in the Aht belief Quawteaht is not only ‘the first Indian who ever lived,’ their forefather, but the maker of most things visible, of the earth and all animals, yet not of the sun and moon.[4] It seems, therefore, not improbable that savage speculation, being more naturally impelled to assume a cause for men than a cause for other things, postulated a First Man as primeval ancestor, and then applying an hypothesis, which served so well to account for their own existence, to account for that of the world in general, made the Father of Men the creator of all things; in other words, that the idea of a First Man preceded and prepared the way for the idea of a first cause.
However this may be, and admitting the possible existence of tribes absolutely devoid of any idea of creation at all, the following savage fancies about it are not without their interest as typical examples of primitive cosmogony.