Still more stringent are the precautions taken when the fish are the first of the season. On salmon rivers, when the fish begin to run up the stream in spring, they are received with much deference by tribes who, like the Indians of the Pacific Coast of North America, subsist largely upon a fish diet. To some of these tribes the salmon is what corn is to the European, rice to the Chinese, and seals to the Esquimaux. Plenty of salmon means abundance in the camp and joy at the domestic hearth; failure of the salmon for a single season means famine and desolation, silence in the village, and sad hearts about the fire.[731] Accordingly in British Columbia the Indians used to go out to meet the first fish as they came up the river: “They paid court to them, and would address them thus: ‘You fish, you fish; you are all chiefs, you are; you are all chiefs.’ ”[732] Amongst the Thlinkeet or Tlingit of Alaska the first halibut of the season is carefully handled and addressed as a chief, and a festival is given in his honour, after which the fishing goes on.[733] Among the tribes of the Lower Fraser River when the first sockeye-salmon of the season has been caught, the fisherman carries it to the chief of his tribe, who delivers it to his wife. She prays, saying to the salmon, “Who has brought you here to make us happy? We are thankful to your chief for sending you.” When she has cut and roasted the salmon according to certain prescribed rules, the whole tribe is invited and partakes of the fish, after they have purified themselves by drinking a decoction of certain plants which is regarded as a medicine for cleansing the people. But widowers, widows, menstruous women, and youths may not eat of this particular salmon. Even later, when the fish have become plentiful and these ceremonies are dispensed with, the same classes of [pg 254] persons are not allowed to eat fresh salmon, though they may partake of the dried fish. The sockeye-salmon must always be looked after carefully. Its bones have to be thrown into the river, after which the fish will revive and return to its chief in the west. Whereas if the fish are not treated with consideration, they will take their revenge, and the careless fisherman will be unlucky.[734] Among the Songish or Lkungen tribe of Vancouver Island it is a rule that on the day when the first salmon have been caught, the children must stand on the beach waiting for the boats to return. They stretch out their little arms and the salmon are heaped on them, the heads of the fish being always kept in the direction in which the salmon are swimming, else they would cease to run up the river. So the children carry them and lay them on a grassy place, carefully keeping the heads of the salmon turned in the same direction. Round the fish are placed four flat stones, on which the plant hog's wort (Peucedanum leiocarpum, Nutt.), red paint, and bulrushes are burnt as an offering to the salmon. When the salmon have been roasted each of the children receives one, which he or she is obliged to eat, leaving nothing over. But grown people are not allowed to eat the fish for several days. The bones of the salmon that the children have eaten may not touch the ground. They are kept in dishes, and on the fourth day an old woman, who pretends to be lame, gathers them in a huge basket and throws them into the sea.[735] The Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia observe certain ceremonies when the first olachen fish of the season are caught. The fish are roasted on an instrument of elder-berry wood, and the man who roasts them must wear his travelling dress, mittens, cape, and so forth. While this is being done the Indians pray that plenty of olachen may come to their fishing-ground. The fire may not be blown up, and in eating the fish they [pg 255] may not cool it by blowing nor break a single bone. Everything must be neat and clean, and the rakes used for catching the fish must be kept hidden in the house.[736] In spring, when the winds blow soft from the south and the salmon begin to run up the Klamath river, the Karoks of California dance for salmon, to ensure a good catch. One of the Indians, called the Kareya or God-man, retires to the mountains and fasts for ten days. On his return the people flee, while he goes to the river, takes the first salmon of the catch, eats some of it, and with the rest kindles the sacred fire in the sweating-house. “No Indian may take a salmon before this dance is held, nor for ten days after it, even if his family are starving.” The Karoks also believe that a fisherman will take no salmon if the poles of which his spearing-booth is made were gathered on the river-side, where the salmon might have seen them. The poles must be brought from the top of the highest mountain. The fisherman will also labour in vain if he uses the same poles a second year in booths or weirs, “because the old salmon will have told the young ones about them.”[737] Among the Indians of the Columbia River, “when the salmon make their first appearance in the river, they are never allowed to be cut crosswise, nor boiled, but roasted; nor are they allowed to be sold without the heart being first taken out, nor to be kept over night, but must be all consumed or eaten the day they are taken out of the water. All these rules are observed for about ten days.”[738] They think that if the heart of a fish were eaten by a stranger at the beginning of the season, they would catch no more fish. Hence, they roast and eat the hearts themselves.[739] There is a favourite fish of the Aino which appears in their rivers about May and June. They prepare for the fishing by observing rules of ceremonial purity, and when they have gone out to fish, the women at [pg 256] home must keep strict silence or the fish would hear them and disappear. When the first fish is caught he is brought home and passed through a small opening at the end of the hut, but not through the door; for if he were passed through the door, “the other fish would certainly see him and disappear.”[740] This may partly explain the custom observed by other savages of bringing game in certain cases into their huts, not by the door, but by the window, the smoke-hole, or by a special opening at the back of the hut.[741]
Some savages preserve the bones of the animals they kill in order that the animals may come to life again.
With some savages a special reason for respecting the bones of game, and generally of the animals which they eat, is a belief that, if the bones are preserved, they will in course of time be reclothed with flesh, and thus the animal will come to life again. It is, therefore, clearly for the interest of the hunter to leave the bones intact, since to destroy them would be to diminish the future supply of game. Many of the Minnetaree Indians “believe that the bones of those bisons which they have slain and divested of flesh rise again clothed with renewed flesh, and quickened with life, and become fat, and fit for slaughter the succeeding June.”[742] Hence on the western prairies of America, the skulls of buffaloes may be seen arranged in circles and symmetrical piles, awaiting the resurrection.[743] After feasting on a dog, the Dacotas carefully collect the bones, scrape, wash, and bury them, “partly, as it is said, to testify to the dog-species, that in feasting upon one of their number no disrespect was meant to the species itself, and partly also from [pg 257] a belief that the bones of the animal will rise and reproduce another.”[744] Among the Esquimaux of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay, when a boy has killed his first seal, his mother gathers all the bones and throws them into a seal-hole. They think that these bones will become seals which the boy will catch in later life.[745] The Yuracares Indians of Bolivia are at great pains to collect all the bones of the beasts, birds, and fishes which they eat, and to throw them into a stream, bury them in the depths of the forest, or burn them in the fire, “in order that the animals of the sort killed may not be angry and may allow themselves to be killed again.”[746] In sacrificing an animal the Lapps regularly put aside the bones, eyes, ears, heart, lungs, sexual parts (if the animal was a male), and a morsel of flesh from each limb. Then, after eating the remainder of the flesh, they laid the bones and the rest in anatomical order in a coffin and buried them with the usual rites, believing that the god to whom the animal was sacrificed would reclothe the bones with flesh and restore the animal to life in Jabme-Aimo, the subterranean world of the dead. Sometimes, as after feasting on a bear, they seem to have contented themselves with thus burying the bones.[747] Thus the Lapps expected the resurrection of the slain animal to take place in another world, resembling in this respect the Kamtchatkans, who believed that every creature, down to the smallest fly, would rise from the dead and live underground.[748] On the other hand, the North American Indians looked for the resurrection of the animals in the present world. The habit, observed especially by Mongolian peoples, of stuffing the skin of a sacrificed [pg 258] animal, or stretching it on a framework,[749] points rather to a belief in a resurrection of the latter sort. The objection commonly entertained by primitive peoples to break the bones of the animals which they have eaten or sacrificed[750] [pg 259] may be based either on a belief in the resurrection of the animals, or on a fear of intimidating other creatures of the same species and offending the ghosts of the slain animals. The reluctance of North American Indians and Esquimaux to let dogs gnaw the bones of animals[751] is perhaps only a precaution to prevent the bones from being broken.
Some savages preserve or destroy the bones of men in order to assist or prevent their resurrection.
We have already seen that some rude races believe in a resurrection of men[752] as well as of beasts, and it is quite natural that people who entertain such a belief should take care of the bones of their dead in order that the original owners of the bones may have them to hand at the critical moment. Hence in the Mexican territories of Guazacualco and Yluta, where the Indians thought that the dead would rise again, the bones of the departed were deposited in baskets and hung up on trees, that their spirits might not be obliged to grub in the earth for them at the resurrection.[753] [pg 260] On the other hand, the Luritcha tribe of Central Australia, who eat their enemies, take steps to prevent their coming to life again, which might prove very inconvenient, by destroying the bones and especially the skulls of the bodies on which they have banqueted.[754]
Unquestioning faith of savages in the immortality of animals. The savage faith in human immortality is commonly supposed to be deduced from a primitive theory of dreams.
The preceding review of customs observed by savages for the conciliation and multiplication of animals which they hunt and kill, is fitted to impress us with a lively sense of the unquestioning faith which primitive man reposes in the immortality of the lower creatures. He appears to assume as an axiom too obvious to be disputed that beasts, birds, and fishes have souls like his own, which survive the death of their bodies and can be reborn in other bodies to be again killed and eaten by the hunter. The whole series of customs described in the foregoing pages—customs which are apt to strike the civilised reader as quaint and absurd—rests on this fundamental assumption. A consideration of them suggests a doubt whether the current explanation of the savage belief in human immortality is adequate to account for all the facts. That belief is commonly deduced from a primitive theory of dreams. The savage, it is said, fails to distinguish the visions of sleep from the realities of waking life, and accordingly when he has dreamed of his dead friends he necessarily concludes that they have not wholly perished, but that their spirits continue to exist in some place and some form, though in the ordinary course of events they elude the perceptions of his senses. On this theory the conceptions, whether gross or refined, whether repulsive or beautiful, which savages and perhaps civilised men have formed of the state of the departed, would seem to be no more than elaborate hypotheses constructed to account for appearances in dreams; these towering structures, for all their radiant or gloomy grandeur, for all the massy strength and solidity with which they present themselves to the imagination of many, may turn out on inspection to be mere visionary castles built of clouds and vapour, which a breath of reason suffices to melt into air.
But can a theory of dreams account for the savage belief in the immortality of animals?
But even if we grant for the sake of argument that this theory offers a ready explanation of the widespread belief in human immortality, it is less easy to see how the theory accounts for the corresponding belief of so many races in the immortality of the lower animals. In his dreams the savage recognises the images of his departed friends by those familiar traits of feature, voice, and gesture which characterised them in life. But can we suppose that he recognises dead beasts, birds, and fishes in like manner? That their images come before him in sleep with all the particular features, the minute individual differences, which distinguished them in life from their fellows, so that when he sees them he can say to himself, for example, “This is the very tiger that I speared yesterday; his carcase is dead, but his spirit must be still alive”; or, “That is the very salmon I caught and ate this morning; I certainly killed his body but clearly I have not succeeded in destroying his soul”? No doubt it is possible that the savage has arrived at his theory of animal immortality by some such process of reasoning, but the supposition seems at least more far-fetched and improbable than in the case of human immortality. And if we admit the insufficiency of the explanation in the one case, we seem bound to admit it, though perhaps in a less degree, in the other case also. In short, we conclude that the theory of dreams appears to be hardly enough by itself to account for the widespread belief in the immortality of men and animals; dreams have probably done much to confirm that belief, but would they suffice to originate it? We may reasonably doubt it.