To return to the personal characteristics of the two regnant powers, the Good and the Bad Spirit, the former, though vague, is yet an omnipotent tempestipresent deity, and, although passive, something more than sympathetic and benevolent. He made the world, or it might be more correct to put it that he permitted it to be created, for his amusement and pleasure. When not otherwise engaged in his mysterious happy hunting-grounds he keeps a watch over earth and over mankind. But so great is he that no prayer or invocation is offered to him, nor, were it offered, could he be thereby influenced.[346] It is because he is so big a Chief that his attitude is entirely passive. Once Neva had forgotten the puny human factor, so he took the guise of a man and came to earth. The open spaces—the natural savannahs or geological outcrops—are where he spoke to the Indians, and it is a sign of his speaking and of his erstwhile presence that these are now open to the sun and the sky. But one Indian vexed Neva, the Good Spirit, and he was wrath with all men, so he went again to sit on the roof of the world. But before he departed he whispered into the ears of all the tigers that they were to kill the Indians and their children, and that is why the tigers to-day are wicked and sometimes are the habitations of the most evil spirits. Before this time the tigers were good to men, and they hunted together like brothers; they lived together in the houses; they ate and drank and licked tobacco in amity round the fire.[347]
Such, so far as I could gather, is the Indian’s belief. The tale was told me by a Boro, but the belief is approximately the same with all these tribes. On the occasion of hearing this story of the visit of the Good Spirit to earth I related, to the best of my ability, the Christian story. The result may be of value in determining the possession of logic by the Indian. After they had listened to my story the tribesmen held a tobacco palavar, which lasted some six hours. Then the chief—the medicine-man was surly and remote—appeared, and this was the burden of his wisdom. His own people were greater than the people from the clouds—the white people—for the Good Spirit, Neva himself, came to the Indians, whereas only the Young Chief visited the clouds. And the Indians were better than the white people, for the white people killed the Young Chief, but the Indians listened to Neva, and only one among them vexed him.
I had heard the story of the Good Spirit’s manifestation before, but doubted its genuineness, until one day when I inquired of a Boro what a savannah was he answered me that it was where Neva spoke to the Indians. When I questioned him further he told me the above. It is impossible to say how far this story may be a genuine folk-tale, how far it is a perverted version of the Biblical account. Tales travel far. They are adopted from one people to another, with resultant variations. We know that the Jesuits penetrated to the Rio Negro as early as 1668-69. There have been missionaries of that Society on the Napo. But I met with no traces of them on the upper waters, nor have any of these peoples anything in the least resembling the Christian symbol in their designs. One might expect to find so simple a figure as a cross reproduced in native art if once known, but it certainly is not. On the face of it we may here be dealing with a variant that has passed from tribe to tribe, that has trickled through centuries, to reappear now as a tribal tradition among peoples who have never been in any direct contact with Christian influences.[348]
As regards the rule of these supreme spirits over the lesser spirits of good and evil they stand in the relation of great chief. The good spirits are the spirits of trees that bear edible fruits, of the trees from which arrows are made, of the Coca erythroxylon, of the astringent properties of various herbs, of the medicine-man’s magic stones that may be used as a prophylactic. These are not only the subjects of the Good Spirit, they were made by him. He made all the good things of the forest; and he also made the rivers and the skies. The Bad Spirit placed the rocks in the rivers, the poison in the mandiocca and in all noxious growths of the bush. He made the liana to trip the unwary walker, in short all things hurtful. These malevolent elements are the bad spirits which, as the name in Witoto appears to imply—the Taifeno,—are all subject to the Taife. As the Good Spirit lives above the world so the Bad Spirit inhabits the nether regions. The lesser spirits of evil go to him by way of the earth holes,[349] for these are the passages to his kingdom. The visit of the Good Spirit to earth as a corporate being was a unique event never repeated, but the Bad Spirit wanders with his myrmidons in the forest every night. Sometimes he takes the form of a tiger, or other fierce animal; sometimes, as alternative to the tiger-lifting theory, he resembles a man who can disappear at will. He imitates the call of the hunter who has found game, or the call of an animal to be hunted. He entices his victim by these and similar contrivances to venture deeper and deeper into the bush, until the wretched wanderer is utterly lost. According to tribal belief he is then destroyed, or spirited bodily away. As has been said, the Bad Spirit never appears to more than one at a time, and that one is usually spirited away, so can give no account of the appearance, but as confirmation of his real presence an Indian will sometimes whisper the evil name as he points out the track of an abnormal-sized tapir, which is curiously reminiscent to the European of the cloven hoof of his own Devil.
The child-lifting story is a favourite one, and some amount of corroborative evidence is forthcoming, for in the awful loneliness of the bush a child naturally would become half demented with fear and apprehension, and if ever found again would be only too honestly willing to believe he had been in the very real clutches of a very real devil. The juvenile adventurer, answering in this way to leading questions, gives to these simple people all the proof they look for, and adds an immediate and local authenticity to the accepted myth.
As there is no prayer to the Good Spirit, so there is no supplication to the Bad. The medicine-man, as I have said, invokes neither; he appeals to neither; but he attempts by magic to force the Bad Spirit into quiescence, to discover some more potent influence that shall make him powerless to hurt, for unless coerced he is all-powerful.
Indefinite as these beliefs in a deity, good or evil, may be, faith as to the after-life of the soul is possibly still vaguer. Yet faith there certainly is, for the existence of the spirits of the dead is an accepted fact, acknowledged in the Indian ritual of burial.
Of spirits there are four kinds:
Permanent disembodied spirits, or the souls of the dead, their ghosts.