Whether, in conclusion, it be true or not that the more civilised nations of the earth have gone through stages of growth in which their religious conceptions resembled those of contemporary savage tribes, one result at least is clear, that the actual standpoint of the savage with regard to the great mysteries of existence is removed toto cœlo from that of Christian, or Mahometan, or Parsee. The Creator he believes in is not so much the cause of all things as the maker of some things, because seemingly the first father of men needed the wherewithal to exercise his energies. The savage’s soul is simply his breath or ghost, which indeed will survive his body, but which may lose its identity in the body of an animal or thing, destined like himself to live again. He conceives of himself generally as not mortal, but not therefore as immortal. His future is but a repetition of his present, with the same base wants and pursuits, only with a greater possibility of indulgence, and not necessarily indefinite in duration. It is, perhaps, some compensation for this, that, if it does not hold out great hopes, its prospect serves to deprive death of its terror, and brightens the sufferings of the passing day. To the native American death is said to be rather an event of gladness than of terror, bringing him rest or enjoyment after his period of toil; nor does he fear to go to a land ‘which all his life long he has heard abounds in rewards without punishments.’[34] No thought of possibly flying from present evils to find immeasurably greater ones awaiting him after death would ever occur to a savage, and he will even kill himself or cheerfully submit to be killed by his friends, in order to realise the sooner the difference imagined between earth and heaven. The powers of evil which vex him here will be absent hereafter, and the Spirit he recognises as supreme in his hierarchy of invisible powers is either conceived as too beneficent to punish, or, if he punishes at all, as likely to punish at once and for ever.
II.
SAVAGE MODES OF PRAYER.
In the same way as a child is insensibly educated by the very efforts of an adult to place himself on its level, so any tribe of savages is to some extent modified by the time that a stranger has fitted himself, by long residence among them and the acquisition of their language, to tell us anything about them. This primary difficulty, amounting theoretically to insuperability, might alone suffice to invalidate most of the received evidence which asserts or denies concerning savages anything whatsoever in broad general terms. But when the evidence concerns religious ideas another difficulty is superadded, and one which appertains to the subject of religion alone—the reserve, that is, (attested by too many travellers to need specific references,) with which savages guard their stock of fundamental beliefs. The delicacy manifested by the most skilled of the Iowa Indian tribe as to communicating fully or freely on religious subjects, lest they should bring on themselves or their nation some great calamity,[35] indicates the feeling that probably underlies such religious reticence. If a savage dare not pronounce his own name, much less the names of his dead, it is a fair matter of wonder that he should ever have become so free with the names and attributes of his divinities as to have rendered it possible for such systematic representations of his theology as are current to appear before the world.
The evidence afforded by ethnology as to the nature of prayer among savages is slighter than on most subjects relating to them, partly from the natural disregard paid to such matters by most Christian missionaries, partly from the secret and hidden character of prayer, which alone would make its study impossible; but there is abundant evidence to show that religious supplication of a certain kind enters more deeply than might be supposed into the daily lives of the lower races of mankind. Says Ellis of the Society Islanders: ‘Religious rites were connected with almost every act of their lives. An ubu or prayer was offered before they ate their food, planted their gardens, built their houses, launched their canoes, cast their nets, and commenced or concluded a journey.’[36] In the Fijian Islands business transactions were commonly terminated by a short wish or prayer; and in the Sandwich Islands the priest would pray before a battle that the gods he addressed would prove themselves stronger than the gods of his foes, promising them hecatombs of victims in the event of victory. But the mere fact of such prayers is of less interest than the actual formulas used; these, however, have more rarely been thought worth recording.
According to a recent African traveller it is a daily prayer in some parts of Guinea: ‘O God, I know thee not, but thou knowest me: thy aid is necessary to me.’ Or again: ‘O God, help us; we do not know whether we shall live to-morrow: we are in thy hand.’[37] A Bushman, being asked how he prayed to Cagn (recognised by his tribe as the first being and creator of all things), answered, in a low, imploring tone: ‘O Cagn, O Cagn, are we not your children? do you not see our hunger? Give us food;’ ‘and,’ he added, ‘he gives us both hands full.’[38] It further appears that the Bushmen address petitions to the sun, to the moon, and to the stars;[39] and the Kamchadals, who have been made to dispute with them the lowest rank of humanity, had a rude form of prayer to the Storm-god, which was uttered by a small child, sent naked round the ostrog with a shell in its uplifted hand: ‘Gsanlga, sit down and cease to storm; the mussel is accustomed to salt, not to sweet water; you make me too wet, and from the wet I must freeze. I have no clothes; see how I freeze.’[40] In a certain African tribe it is said to be usual for the men to go every morning to a river, and there, after splashing water in their faces, or throwing sand over their heads, after clasping and loosing their hands and whispering softly the words Eksuvais, to pray: ‘Give me to-day rice and yams, gold and aggry-beads, slaves, riches, and health; make me active and strong.’[41]
The Zulus of Africa and the Khonds of India supply good illustrations of savage prayer. The head man of a Zulu village, at the sacrifice of a bullock to the spirits of the dead, thus addresses them in prayer: ‘I pray for cattle that they may fill this pen. I pray for corn that many people may come to this village of yours and make a noise and glorify you. I also ask for children, that this village may have a large population and that your name may never come to an end.’[42] The Khonds, also, at the sacrifice of a bullock express their wishes with rather more emphasis: ‘Let our herds be so numerous that they cannot be housed; let children so abound that care of them shall overcome their parents, as shall be seen by their burnt hands.’ Or, again, they will ask that their swine may so abound that their fields shall require no other ploughs than their ‘rooting snouts;’ that their poultry may be so numerous as to hide the thatch of their houses; that neither fish, frog, nor worm shall be able to live in their drinking ponds beneath the trampling feet of their multitude of cattle.[43]
These may be taken as fair samples of primitive prayer; but it is only just, as against the inference that a savage’s prayers have reference solely to the good and evil things of this world, to notice indications of higher sentiments. The Yebus of Africa, with faces bowed to the earth, are said commonly to pray, not only for preservation from sickness and death, but for the gifts of happiness and wisdom.[44] The Tahitian priest, praying to the god by whom it was supposed that a dead man’s spirit had been required, that the sins of the latter, especially that one for which he had lost his life, might be buried in a hole then dug in the ground and not attach to the survivors, points to the occasional presence of a moral motive in prayer; though even here the deprecation of further anger on the part of the gods appears the principal object of concern.[45] So little indeed do thoughts of morality or of a future state enter as factors into savage prayer, and so little does any ethical distinction appear in the savage conception of supernatural powers, that not unfrequently supplication is directed to the attainment of ends morally the reverse of desirable. Like the Roman tradesman praying to Mercury to aid him in cheating, the Nootka warrior would entreat his god that he might find his foes asleep, and so kill a great many of them.[46] But perhaps the best illustration of the perverted use of prayer is one employed by a clan of the Hervey Islanders when engaged on a thieving and murdering expedition, and uttered as near as possible to the dwelling of the person about to be robbed. It is apparently addressed to Rongo, or Oro, the great Polynesian god of war, and is thus translated in Mr. Gill’s ‘Myths and Songs of the South Pacific’:—[47]
We are on a thieving expedition;