On the coast of Guinea the people "have a faint idea of the true God, and ascribe to him the attributes Almighty and Omnipresent; they believe he created the universe, and therefore vastly prefer him before their idol-gods; but yet they do not pray to him, or offer any sacrifices to him; for which they give the following reasons. God, they say, is too highly exalted above us and too great to condescend so much as to trouble himself, or think of mankind: wherefore he commits the government of the world to their idols" (C. G., p. 348). The manner in which Utikxo, the highest God, is thrown into the shade by the more intelligible and human Unkulunkulu (as shown in a previous extract) is another example of the operation of this law. And it is especially noteworthy that the Amazulu have also a "lord of heaven," with attributes corresponding to those of Utikxo, for whom they have no name. Anonymity, or if not absolute anonymity, the absence of any name commonly employed in the popular language is, as we shall see, one of the most usual features of this most exalted Being. Other travelers give similar accounts of other regions of Africa. Winterbottom, who was especially acquainted with Sierra Leone and its neighborhood, says that "the Africans all acknowledge a supreme Being, the creator of the universe; but they suppose him to be endowed with too much benevolence to do harm to mankind, and therefore think it unnecessary to offer him any homage" (S. L., vol. i. p. 222). Of Dahomey we learn from Winwood Reade (a writer not likely to be partial to theism, or to discover it where it does not exist), that the natives erect temples to snakes, but "have also the unknown, unseen God, whose name they seldom dare to mention" (S. A., p. 49). In another country in Africa the same writer found that the natives worshiped numerous spirits, and believed also in an evil Genius and a good Spirit. The former they were in the habit of propitiating by religious service; but the latter "they do not deem it necessary to pray to in a regular way, because he will not harm them. The word by which they express this supreme Being answers exactly to our word God. Like the Jehovah of the Hebrews, like that word in masonry which is only known to masters and never pronounced but in a whisper and in full lodge, this word they seldom dare to speak; and they display uneasiness if it is uttered before them." The writer states that he only heard it on two occasions; once when his men cried it out in a dangerous storm, and once when having asked a slave the name for God, the man "raised his eyes, and pointing to heaven, said in a soft voice Njambi" (Ib., p. 250). Again, in a lecture on the Ashantees, Mr. Reade informed his hearers that "the Oji people," although believing in a supreme Being, do not worship him: while they do worship "a number of inferior gods or demons," to whom they believe the superior God, offended with mankind, has left the management of terrestrial affairs.
Strange to say, the peculiarity thus observed in the old world is precisely repeated in the new. Of the Mexicans it is stated that "they never offered sacrifices to" Tonacatecotle who was "God, Lord, Creator, Governor of the Universe," and whom "they painted alone with a crown, as lord of all." As their explanation of this conduct "they said that he did not regard them. All the others to whom they sacrificed were men once on a time, or demons" (A. M., vol. vi. p. 107, plate 1). Concerning the Peruvians, Acosta tells us that they give their deity a name of great excellence, Pachacamac, or Pachayachacic (creator of heaven and earth), and Usapu (admirable). He remarks, however, with much surprise, that they had no proper (or perhaps general) name in their language for God. There was nothing in the language of Cuzco or Mexico answering to "Deus," and the Spaniards used their own word "Dios." Whence he concludes, somewhat hastily, that they had but a slight and superficial knowledge of God (H. I., b. 5, ch. iii).
In reference to Peru, however, we have still more trustworthy evidence from a member of the governing family, or Incas. From his statements it appears that the name applied to the Highest was pronounced only on rare occasions, and then with extremest reverence. This name was Pachacamac, a word signifying "he who animates the whole world," or the Universal Soul, as it would be termed in Indian philosophy. Like other creeds that of Peru had its secondary deity, the Sun, in whose honor sacrifices were offered and festivals held, while no temples were erected, and no sacrifices offered to Pachacamac, although the Peruvians adored him in their hearts and looked upon him as the unknown God (C. R., b. 2, ch. iii).
Ancient religion presents similar facts. In his exhaustive work on Sabaeism, Chwolsohn observes that the fundamental idea of that form of faith was not, as is often supposed, astrolatry. To Shahrastani (the Arabian scholar), and many others who followed him, Sabaeism expressed the idea "that God is too sublime and too great to occupy himself with the immediate management of this world; that he has therefore transferred the government thereof to the gods, and retained only the most important affairs for himself; that further, man is too weak to be able to apply immediately to the Highest; that he must therefore address his prayers and sacrifices to the intermediate divinities, to whom the management of the world has been intrusted by the Highest." Further on, the author asks himself whether this conception was peculiar to the Harranian Sabaeans, and replies, "Certainly not. This fundamental idea is tolerably old, and in later times found admission to some extent even among the strictly monotheistic Jews.... In the heathen world this view was universally shared by the cultivated classes, at least in the first centuries of the Christian era" (Ssabismus, vol. i. p. 725).
Indian theology teems with the conception of a sublime but unknowable deity far superior to the deities of popular adoration, who has no name and whose greatness cannot be adequately expressed in human language. Indian philosophy loses itself in a sea of mystic terms when it endeavors to speak of this all-pervading and preëminent Being. Take, for example, the following from the Chândogya Upanishad, one of the treatises appended to the Sâma Veda. A father is instructing his son:—
"'Dissolve this salt in water, and appear before me to-morrow morning.' He did so. Unto him said (the father), 'My child, find out the salt that you put in that water last night.' The salt, having been dissolved, could not be made out. (Unto Swetaketu said his father), 'Child, do you taste a little from the top of that water.' (The child did so. After a while the father inquired), 'How tastes it?' 'It is saltish' (said Swetaketu)." The same result followed with water taken from the middle and the bottom. "'If so (throwing it away), wash your mouth and grieve not.' Verily he did so (and said to his father), 'The salt that I put in the water exists for ever; (though I perceive it not by my eyes it is felt by my tongue).' (Unto him) said (his father), 'Verily, such is the case with the Truth, my child. Though you perceive it not, it nevertheless pervades this (body). That particle which is the soul of all this is Truth; it is the Universal Soul. O Swetaketu, Thou art that'" (Ch. Up., ch. vi. sec. 13, p. 113).
Similar notions of an all-pervading and infinite Being are found in the Bhagavat-Gíta, a theological episode inserted in the great epical poem known as the Mahâbhârata. There Vishnu is not merely the ordinary god Vishnu of Indian theology; but the universe itself is expressed as an incarnation of that deity who is seen in everything and himself is everything. "I am the soul, O Arjuna," thus he addresses his mortal pupil, "which exists in the heart of all beings, and I am the beginning and the middle and also the end of existing things" (Bh. G., ch. x. p. 71).
Again, Vishnu thus describes himself in language which translated into ordinary prose, would serve to convey the idea embodied in Mr. Herbert Spencer's Unknowable:—
"Know that that brilliance which enters the sun and illumines the whole earth, and which is in the moon, and in fire, is of me. And I enter the ground and support all living things by my vigor; and I nourish all herbs, becoming that moisture of which the peculiar property is taste. And becoming fire, I enter the body of the living, and being associated with their inspiration and expiration, cause food of the four kinds to digest. And I enter the heart of each one, and from me come memory, knowledge, and reason" (Ib., ch. xv. p. 100).
Nor did the writers of the Veda and the commentaries thereupon omit to look above the concrete forms of the mythological gods who people their Pantheon to a more comprehensive and less comprehensible primordial Source. The gods were unfitted to serve as explanations of the origin of the universe by reason of the theory that they were not eternal, and that they came into existence subsequently to the creation of the world. The writer of a hymn in the tenth book of the Rig-Veda asserted that "the One, which in the beginning breathed calmly, self-sustained, is developed by ... its own inherent heat, or by rigorous and intense abstraction." But this Rishi avowed himself unable to say anything of creation, or even to know whether there was a creator. "Even its ruler in the highest heaven may not be in possession of the great secret." Explaining this passage, a commentator, writing at a much later date, observes that "the last verse of the hymn declares that the ruler of the universe knows, or that even he does not know, from what material cause this visible world arose, and whether that material cause exists in any definite form or not. That is to say, the declaration that 'he knows,' is made from the stand-point of that popular conception which distinguishes between the ruler of the universe and the creatures over whom he rules; while the proposition that 'he does not know' is asserted on the ground of that highest principle which, transcending all popular conceptions, affirms the identity of all things with the supreme Soul, which cannot see any other existence as distinct from itself" (O. S. T., vol. v. pp. 363, 364).