Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

It would be tedious to allude to more than a few illustrations of the belief as it exists in the world, or to try to distinguish the elements in them of purely native growth from the influences of Christian teaching. The Kamchadals believe that the earth was once flooded and many persons drowned, though they tried to save themselves in boats, those only succeeding who made great rafts of trees and let down stones for anchors, to prevent themselves from drifting out to sea; when the waters subsided their rafts rested on the mountain-tops. The Esquimaux appealed to the bones of whales found on their mountains in support of their assertion that the world had once been tilted over and all men drowned but one. The Mandan Indians, according to Catlin, celebrated every year in pantomime the subsidence of the great waters.[20]

It is noticeable that in most savage legends of a flood (and it may, perhaps, be taken as some test of their authenticity) there is an entire absence of the idea, so familiar to ourselves, of the flood having resulted from any fault committed by the then inhabitants of the earth. At most such an idea appears in germ, as in the tradition of the Society Islanders, that a fisherman, catching his hook in the hair of the great sea-god as he lay asleep in his coral grove, so angered that divinity that he caused the waters to arise till they flooded the very tops of the mountains and drowned the inhabitants, the fisherman and his family alone being suffered to escape, and thereby serving to attest the genuineness of the tradition. So in Fiji the deluge was caused by two grandsons of a god killing his favourite bird, and instead of being apologetic acting with insolence and fortifying the town they lived in for the purpose of defying their grandfather. The connection of the catastrophe with human wickedness belongs apparently to a more advanced state of thought, of which the recently deciphered Chaldæan version may be taken as a sample. In it Hasisadra, the sage, who with his wife escaped the general destruction, tells Izdubar, the giant, how he built a vessel according to the directions of Hea, to save himself and his family from the universal deluge which the gods sent upon the earth to punish the wickedness of men; how the deluge lasted six days, and on the seventh, when the storm ceased, the vessel was stranded for seven days on the mountains of Nizir; and how on the seventh day, he Hasisadra, sent out first a dove and then a swallow, both of whom, finding no resting-place, returned to the vessel, till a raven was sent forth and did not return; and Hasisadra sent out the animals to the four winds, and poured out a libation in thanksgiving, and built an altar on the summit of the mountain.

The belief in a future life—a belief perhaps first suggested in that rude state of culture where the dreaming and waking life are not clearly distinct but are both equally real—appears to prevail so generally among the lower races, that it is more difficult to find instances where it is not found than instances where it is. The dead who visit the living in their sleep are not thought of as dead, but as simply invisible; and for this reason all over the globe it is so common to bury material things in the graves of the departed, to serve them in that other world which is so vividly conceived as but a continuation of this one. The Red Indian takes his horses, the Greenlander his reindeer, and both the common requisites of earthly economy; just as many tribes still take their slaves and their wives to accompany them on that journey which, as it is imagined so distinctly, is undertaken without mystery to a fresh existence. Till lately, in parts of Sweden, a man’s pipe and tobacco-pouch, some money and lights, were interred with him; and at Reichenbach, in Germany, a man’s umbrella and goloshes are still placed in his grave.[21] In Russia formerly a new pair of shoes was put on the feet of the dead for the long journey before him, a custom also found among the natives of California, and the Christian priest used to place on a man’s breast, as he lay in his coffin, a pass, which, besides being inscribed with his Christian name and the dates of his birth and death, was also a certificate of his baptism, of the piety of his life, and of his having partaken of the communion before his death.[22] These are but survivals of savage ideas, which picture the continuation of consciousness far more vividly than more advanced religions. The Ahts bury blankets with their dead, that they may not shiver in the cold ones provided in the land of Chayher. The Delawar Indian used to make an opening at the head-end of the coffin, that the soul of the deceased might go in and out till it had thoroughly settled on its future place of residence. When the Chippewyas killed their aged relatives who could hunt no more, the medicine-song used proves the simple faith which made the cruel deed an act of mercy: ‘The Lord of life gives courage. It is true all Indians know that he loves us, and we give over to him our father, that he may feel himself young in another land and able to hunt.’

It is possible, indeed, that in many cases the attention shown by savages to their dead, by the burial of property which would have been of use to the survivors, or by the placing of food on their graves at periodical feasts, arose rather from fear than from any kinder motive, dictated by the dread always felt by the living of the dead and the wish to satisfy them, if possible, by some peace-offering. The Samoyed sorcerer, after a funeral, goes through the ceremony of soothing the departed, that he may not trouble the survivors nor take their best game; a feeling still further illustrated by their habit of not taking the dead out to be buried by the regular hut door, but by a side-opening, that if possible they may not find their way back—a habit found also in Greenland and in many other parts of the world. For the fear of the dead is a universal sentiment, common no less to the Abipones, who thought that sorcerers could bring the dead from their graves to visit the living, or to the Kaffirs, who think that bad men alone live a second time and try to kill the living by night, than it is to the ignorant who still believe in the blood-sucking vampire, a belief which little more than a century ago amounted to a kind of epidemic in Hungary, resulting in a general disinterment and the burning or staking of the suspected bodies. In the sepulture, therefore, of men with their possessions, it was probably the original thought that the dead would be less likely to haunt the dwellings of the living, if they were not compelled to re-seek upon earth those articles of daily use which they knew were to be found there.

But the savage belief in a future is very variable; nor could we expect to find it much affected by ideas of earthly morality, when such ideas themselves hardly appear to exist. At most it is men of rank and courage who live again, while cowards and the commonalty perish utterly; generally there is no qualification of any kind. The Bedouins have no fixed belief at all, some thinking that after death they are changed into screech-owls, and others that if a camel is slain on their graves they will return to life riding on it, but otherwise on foot. All North American Indians are said to believe in the continual life of the soul, and, because they think themselves the highest beings on earth, postulate a hereafter where all their earthly longings will be satisfied.[23] But they trouble themselves little about it, thinking that the god they recognise as supreme is too good to punish them. Thus the Indians of Arauco look forward to an eternal life in a beautiful land which lies to the west, far over the sea, whither souls are taken by the sailor Tempulazy and where no punishment is expected: for Pillican, their god, the Lord of the world, would not inflict pain.[24] The Tunguz Lapps look on the next life as simply a continuation of this one; in it there will be no punishment, for here everyone is as good as he can be, and the gods kill men reluctantly, but are thereby satisfied. In the Polynesian future there is a similar absence of any idea of retribution. There is, for instance, no moral qualification, but only one of rank, for Bolotu, that happy land of the dead which lies far away to the north-west of Tonga, beyond the reach of Tongan boats and greater than all the Tongan islands put together, wherein abound beautiful and useful trees, whose plucked fruit instantly grows again; where a delicious fragrance fills the air, and birds of the loveliest colours sit upon the trees; where the woods swarm with pigs, which are immortal so long as they are not eaten by the gods. Nothing, indeed, shows better how independent is imagination of race than the great similarity of those idealised earths which constitute the heavens of the most distant savage tribes. The American Indian, who visits in a dream the unseen world, reports of it, in language recalling that of Homer, that it is a land where there is neither day nor night, where the sun never rises nor sets; where rain and tomahawks and arrows are never seen; where pipes abound everywhere, lying ready to be smoked; where the earth is ever green, the trees ever in leaf; where there is no need of bearskin nor of hut; where, if you would travel, the rivers will take your boat whithersoever you will, without the need of rudder or of paddle. And just as in the Tongan Bolotu the plucked fruit is replaced, so there the goat voluntarily offers its shoulder to the hungry man, in full confidence that it will grow again, and the beaver for the same reason makes a ready sacrifice of its beautiful tail.[25]

So far there is no idea of a future life as in any way affected by this one. But such ideas do exist among savages, and are extremely interesting as indications of the growth of their moral ideas. The quality most necessary for a savage is pre-eminently courage, and courage, therefore, appearing as the first recognised virtue, lays first claim, as such, to consideration hereafter. The Brazilians believed that the souls of the dead became beautiful birds, whilst cowards were turned into reptiles. The Minnetarrees held that there were two villages which received the dead; but that the cowardly and bad went to the small one, whilst the brave and good occupied the larger. Among the Caribs, who entertain the strange fancy that they have as many souls as they feel nerves in their body, but that the chief of these resides in the heart and goes to heaven at death, whilst the others go to the sea or the woods, we meet again with the reservation of happiness to the souls of the brave. They alone will live merrily, dancing, feasting, and talking; they alone will swim in the great streams, feeling no fatigue; the Arawaks will either serve them as slaves or wander about in desert mountains. Somewhat similar was the faith of the old Mexicans, who divided the future world into three parts: the first, the House of the Sun, where the days were spent in joyful attendance on that luminary, with songs and games and dances, by such brave soldiers as had died in battle or as prisoners had been sacrificed to the gods, and by women who had died in giving children to the community; the second, the kingdom of Tlalocan, hidden among the Mexican mountains, not so bright as the former, but cool and pleasant, and filled with unfailing pumpkins and tomatoes, reserved for priests and for children sacrificed to Tlaloc and for all persons killed by lightning, by drowning, or by sickness; the third, the kingdom of Mictlauteuctli, reserved for all other persons, but with nothing said of any punishment there awaiting them. One of the beliefs in Greenland is, that heaven is situate in the sky or the moon, and that the journey thither is so easy that a soul may reach it the same evening that it quits the body, and play at ball and dance with those other departed souls who are encamped round the great lake and shine in heaven as the northern lights. But others say that it is only witches and bad people who join the heavenly lights, where they not only enjoy no rest, owing to the rapid revolutions of the sky, but are so plagued with ravens that they cannot keep them from settling in their hair. They believe that heaven lies under the earth or sea, where dwells Torngarsuk, the Creator, with his mother, in perpetual summer and beautiful sunshine. There the water is good and there is no night, and there are plenty of birds, and fish, and seals, and reindeer, all to be caught at pleasure, or ready cooking in a great kettle; but these delights are reserved for persons who have done great deeds and worked steadfastly, who have caught many whales or seals, who have been drowned at sea, or have died in childbirth. These persons alone may hope to join the great company and feast on inconsumable seals. Even then they must slide for five days down the blood-stained precipice; and unhappy they to whom the journey falls in stormy weather or in winter, for then they may suffer that other death of total extinction, especially if their survivors disturb them by their noise or affect them injuriously by the food they eat. The Kamchadal belief is very curious, as showing how the idea of compensation in the next world for the evils of this—an idea already apparent in the Mexican and Greenland beliefs—may have served to bridge over the conception of a mere continuance of life for the soul, and the conception of an actual retribution awaiting it. They imagine that the dead come to a place under the earth, where Haetsch dwells, son of Kutka the Creator, and the first man who died on earth, now Lord of the under-world and general receiver of souls. To those who come dressed in fine furs and drive fat dogs before their sledges, he gives instead old ragged furs and lean dogs; but to those who have known poverty on earth he gives new furs and beautiful dogs and also a better place to live in than the others. The dead live again as on earth; their wives are restored to them, they build ostrogs again, and catch fish, and dance and sing; there is less storm and snow than above ground, and more people; indeed, abundance of everything.

It is easy to conceive how, when once the idea had been reached that the brave deserved compensation in the next world for their earthly courage, the poor for their earthly wretchedness, or the sick for their earthly sufferings, and all men for the misfortune of premature death, it should also be inferred, as soon as any criterion between goodness and badness more refined than the mere difference between courage and cowardice had been attained, that the good should have some advantage over the bad, and from such an inference to a complete theory of retribution and punishment of the bad the logical steps seem fairly obvious. Few things, indeed, are more remarkable among the lower races than the general absence of the ideas we associate with hell.[26] At most the idea of future punishment is negative, the lives of slaves and cowards terminating in a total cessation of consciousness, as opposed to its continuance for warriors and chiefs. Still, the idea of difficulty in attaining the blessed abodes, such as that above noticed as prevalent in Greenland—an idea, as Mr. Tylor suggests, probably connected with the sun’s passage across the sky to the west, where the happy land is so generally figured to lie—is very common, and from such an idea it is natural to connect the difficulty of the journey to Paradise with the destruction of those whose presence in it would mar its blessedness.

The trial of merit, varying with experiences of physical geography, generally lies either in the passage of a river or gulf by a narrow bridge, or in the climbing of a steep mountain. The Choctaws, for instance, believe that the dead have to pass a long and slippery pine-log, across a deep and rapid river, on the other side of which stand six persons, who pelt new-comers with stones and cause the bad ones to fall in.[27] In Khond theology the judge of the dead resides beyond the sea, on the smooth and slippery Leaping Rock, below which flows a black unfathomable river; and the souls of men take bold leaps to reach the rock, those that fail contracting a deformity which is transferred to the next soul animated on earth. The Blackfoot Indians, on the other hand, believe that departed souls have to climb a steep mountain, from the summit of which is seen a great plain, with new tents and swarms of game; that the dwellers in that happy plain advance to them and welcome those who have led a good life, but reject the bad—those who have soiled their hands in the blood of their countrymen—and throw them headlong from the mountain; whilst women who have been guilty of infanticide never reach the mountain at all, but hover round the seat of their crimes with branches of trees tied to their legs. The Fijians think that even the brave have some difficulty in reaching the judgment-seat of Ndengei, and they provide the dead with war-clubs to resist Sama and his host, who will dispute their passage. But celibacy is in their eyes apparently the only offence which calls for peremptory and hopeless punishment. Unmarried Fijians are dashed to pieces by Nangananga as in vain attempts to steal round to a certain reef they are driven ashore by the rising tide.[28] The Norwegian Lapps consider that abstinence from stealing, lying, and quarrelling entitles a man to compensation hereafter. Such receive after death a new body, and live with the higher gods in Saiwo, and indulge in hunting and magic, brandy-drinking and smoking, to a far higher degree than was possible on earth. Wicked men, perjurers, and thieves go to the place of the bad spirits, to Gerre-Mubben-Aimo.[29] The idea of compensation of the good leads naturally to the idea of retribution for the bad; and even among the Guinea Coast negroes we find future inducements to the practice of such moral duties as they recognise. For they are wont to make for themselves idols, called Sumanes whose favour they endeavour to secure by abstinence from certain kinds of foods, believing that after death those who have been constant in their vows of abstinence and in offerings to the Sumanes will come to a large inland river, where a god inquires of everyone how he has lived his days on earth, and those who have not kept their vows are drowned and destroyed for ever. The inland-dwelling negroes declare that at this river dwells a powerful god in a beautiful house, which, though always exposed, is never touched by rain. He knows all past and present things; he can send any kind of weather, he can heal sicknesses and work miracles. Before him must all the dead appear; the good to receive a happy and peaceful life, the bad to be killed for ever by the large wooden club which hangs before his door. Lastly, it may be noticed that negro tribes believe that death will take them to the land of the European and give them the white man’s skin; but, as they generally paint their devil white, we cannot be sure that such a change is not rather dreaded as a punishment for the bad than regarded as a change for the better.

So far it appears that savages have developed from the promptings and imaginings of their own minds some idea of a Creator and of a soul, as well as of a future to some extent dependent on earthly antecedents. It is of course difficult to judge how far the missionaries or travellers, who have mainly supplied the only evidence we have, may have clearly understood, or how much they may have unintentionally imported into, beliefs they represent as purely indigenous. In many cases a remarkable similarity may lead us to suspect that the belief is not native, but implanted at some time by Christian or other influence, though traces of such influence may be absolutely wanting or at least not proved. There can, for instance, be little doubt whence Sissa, the devil of the Guinea Coast negroes, derived the pair of horns and long tail with which he is usually depicted. But, on the other hand, we cannot lay down any rigid canon for the imaginations of men, nor say that if one belief is identical with another a thousand miles off it must therefore have been borrowed and cannot be of independent growth. Indeed, when we reflect on the limited nature of the mental faculties of savages, on the limited range of objects for their minds to work upon, on their childlike fear of the dark and the unseen, and their still more childlike delight in the indulgence of their fancy, so far from there being anything strange in the analogies of thought between distant tribes, the strangeness would rather be if such analogies did not exist. It is probable that children tell one another much the same stories in London as they do at the Antipodes, and there is no more reason to be surprised at finding much the same theologies current in Africa as in Australia or Ceylon. The same sun, which shines on men’s bodies alike, shines on their minds alike too; and myths, like dreams, with all the apparent field for variety in their formation, are really subject to the closest laws of uniformity and sameness.

We have, however, to be careful, in applying terms of our own religious phraseology to savage thoughts and fancies, to discriminate between the higher and lower meaning they bear, and always to employ them in the lower. The belief, already noticed, of the Kamchadals in Kutka well illustrates how different is the meaning involved in the Kamchadal theory of creation from that involved in Genesis or the Zend-Avesta. The same is true of the belief in a soul and its future life; for the savage, intensely vivid as is his future beyond the grave, seldom doubts for an instant but that he will share it with all the rest, not only of the animate, but of the inanimate world. For that reason he buries axes, and clothes, and food with the dead, to be of service in the next world. The Fijians used to show ‘the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the utensils of this frail world, swimming, or rather tumbling one over the other,’ as they were borne by a swift stream at the bottom of a deep hole to the regions of immortality.[30] So of the animate world. The Kamchadal believes that the smallest fly that breathes will rise after death to live again in the under-world.[31] If the Laplander expects that all honest people will re-meet in Aimo, he as fully expects that bears and wolves will meet there too. The Greenlander believes that all the heavenly bodies were once Greenlanders, or animals, and that they shine with a pale or red light according to the food they ate on earth. He also believes that when all things now living on the earth are dead, and the earth cleansed from their blood by a great water-flood; when the purified dust is consolidated again by a great wind, and a fairer earth, all plain and no cliffs, is substituted for the present one; when Priksoma, he who is above, breathes on men that they may live again—then animals will also rise again and be in great abundance. The old inhabitants of Anahuac and Egypt believed equally that animals would share the next world with them; and, if the universality of an opinion were any reason for its credibility, few opinions could claim a better title to acceptance than this one. So confident were the Swedish Lapps of the future life of animals, that whenever they killed one in sacrifice they buried the bones in a box, that the gods might more easily restore it to life.[32] There is really nothing very unnatural in this idea, when we remember that in the lower stages of culture man not only admits the equality of brutes with himself, but even acknowledges their superiority by actual worship of them. It is not difficult to understand how it is that savages who see deities in everything, in the motionless mountain or stone no less than in the rushing river or wind, should see in animals deities of extraordinary power, whose capacities infinitely transcend their own. Recognising as they do in the tiger a strength, in the deer a speed, in the monkey a cunning, all superior to their own, they naturally conceive of them as deities whom above all others it is expedient to humour by adoration and sacrifice. Some negro tribes, holding that all animals enshrine a spirit, which may injure or benefit themselves, will refrain from eating certain animals, otherwise perfectly edible, and endeavour to propitiate them by lifelong attention. Thus some regularly offer food at the earth-houses of termites, or fatten sheep and goats, for a purely temporary and perfectly spiritual advantage. It is on account of their divine and immortal nature that the well-known custom of apologising to animals killed in the chase is so general among savages. It is generally a deprecation of any post-mortem vindictiveness on the part of the animal’s ghost. The natives of Greenland refrain from breaking seals’ heads or throwing them into the sea; but they pile them in a heap before their hut door, that the souls of the seals may not be angry and in their spite frighten living seals away. The Yuracares of Bolivia were careful to put small fish-bones carefully aside, lest fish should disappear; and other Indian tribes would keep the bones of beavers and sables from their dogs for a year and then bury them, lest the spirits of those animals should take offence and no more of them be killed or trapped.[33] The Lapps are so afraid that the soul of the animal whose flesh they have killed may take its revenge as a disembodied spirit, that before eating it they not only entreat pardon for its death, but perform the ceremony of treating it first with nuts or other delicacies, that it may be led to believe it is present as a guest—not to be eaten, but to eat. Another Kamchadal fancy indicates how savages, whose theory of cause and effect appears to be that it is quite sufficient for two things to be connected contemporaneously for one to be cause and the other effect, are led more especially to see deities in birds, from the observation that changes in weather are associated with their arrival and departure. Since to be associated with a thing is to be caused by it, migratory birds take away or bring the summer with them. For the reason that the spring and the wagtails return together the Kamchadal thanks the wagtail for bringing back the spring, and it is probably from a similar confusion of thought that he thanks the ravens and crows for fine weather.