MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION
Volume II.
By Andrew Lang
Longmans, Green, And Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York And Bombay
1901
First printed, August, 1887
MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION
CONTENTS
[ CHAPTER XII. GODS OF THE LOWEST RACES. ]
[ CHAPTER XIII. GODS OF THE LOWEST RACES. ]
[ CHAPTER XIV. AMERICAN DIVINE MYTHS ]
[ CHAPTER XV. MEXICAN DIVINE MYTHS ]
[ CHAPTER XVI. THE MYTHOLOGY OF EGYPT ]
[ CHAPTER XVII. GODS OF THE ARYANS OF INDIA. ]
[ CHAPTER XVIII. GREEK DIVINE MYTHS ]
[ CHAPTER XIX. HEROIC AND ROMANTIC MYTHS. ]
CHAPTER XII. GODS OF THE LOWEST RACES.
Savage religion mysterious—Why this is so—Australians in
1688—Sir John Lubbock—Roskoff—Evidence of religion—Mr.
Manning—Mr. Howitt—Supreme beings—Mr. Tylor's theory of
borrowing—Reply—Morality sanctioned—Its nature—Satirical
rite—"Our Father"—Mr. Ridley on a creator—Mr. Langloh
Parker—Dr. Roth—Conclusion—Australians' religious.
The Science of Anthropology can speak, with some confidence, on many questions of Mythology. Materials are abundant and practically undisputed, because, as to their myths, savage races have spoken out with freedom. Myth represents, now the early scientific, now the early imaginative and humorous faculty, playing freely round all objects of thought: even round the Superhuman beings of belief. But, as to his Religion, the savage by no means speaks out so freely. Religion represents his serious mood of trust, dependence or apprehension.
In certain cases the ideas about superhuman Makers and judges are veiled in mysteries, rude sketches of the mysteries of Greece, to which the white man is but seldom admitted. In other cases the highest religious conceptions of the people are in a state of obsolescence, are subordinated to the cult of accessible minor deities, and are rarely mentioned. While sacrifice or service again is done to the lower objects of faith (ghosts or gods developed out of ghosts) the Supreme Being, in a surprising number of instances, is wholly unpropitiated. Having all things, he needs nothing (at all events gets nothing) at men's hands except obedience to his laws; being good, he is not feared; or being obsolescent (superseded, as it seems, by deities who can be bribed) he has shrunk to the shadow of a name. Of the gods too good and great to need anything, the Ahone of the Red Men in Virginia, or the Dendid of the African Dinkas, is an example. Of the obsolescent god, now but a name, the Atahocan of the Hurons was, while the "Lord in heaven" of the Zulus is, an instance. Among the relatively supreme beings revealed only in the mysteries, the gods of many Australian tribes are deserving of observation.
For all these reasons, mystery, absence of sacrifice or idol, and obsolescence, the Religion of savages is a subject much more obscure than their mythology. The truth is that anthropological inquiry is not yet in a position to be dogmatic; has not yet knowledge sufficient for a theory of the Origins of Religion, and the evolution of belief from its lowest stages and earliest germs. Nevertheless such a theory has been framed, and has been already stated.
We formulated the objections to this current hypothesis, and observed that its defenders must take refuge in denying the evidence as to low savage religions, or, if the facts be accepted, must account for them by a theory of degradation, or by a theory of borrowing from Christian sources. That the Australians are not degenerate we demonstrated, and we must now give reasons for holding that their religious conceptions are not borrowed from Europeans.
The Australians, when observed by Dampier on the North-west Coast in 1688, seemed "the miserablest people in the world," without houses, agriculture, metals, or domesticated animals.* In this condition they still remain, when not under European influence. Dampier, we saw, noted peculiarities: "Be it little or much they get, every one has his part, as well the young and tender as the old and feeble, who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty". This kind of justice or generosity, or unselfishness, is still inculcated in the religious mysteries of some of the race. Generosity is certainly one of the native's leading features. He is always accustomed to give a share of his food, or of what he may possess, to his fellows. It may be, of course, objected to this that in doing so he is only following an old-established custom, the breaking of which would expose him to harsh treatment and to being looked on as a churlish fellow. It will, however, be hardly denied that, as this custom expresses the idea that, in this particular matter, every one is supposed to act in a kindly way towards certain individuals: the very existence of such a custom, even if it be only carried out in the hope of securing at some time a quid pro quo, shows that the native is alive to the fact that an action which benefits some one else is worthy to be performed....
* Early Voyages to Australia, pp. 102-111. Hakluyt
Society.
It is with the native a fixed habit to give away part of what he has."* The authors of this statement do not say that the duty is inculcated, in Central Australia, under religious sanction, in the tribal mysteries. This, however, is the case among the Kurnai, and some tribes of Victoria and New South Wales.** Since Dampier found the duty practised as early as 1688, it will scarcely be argued that the natives adopted this course of what should be Christian conduct from their observations of Christian colonists.
The second point which impressed Dampier was that men and women, old and young, all lacked the two front upper teeth. Among many tribes of the natives of New South Wales and Victoria, the boys still have their front teeth knocked out, when initiated, but the custom does not prevail (in ritual) where circumcision and another very painful rite are practised, as in Central Australia and Central Queensland.
Dampier's evidence shows how little the natives have changed in two hundred years. Yet evidence of progress may be detected, perhaps, as we have already shown. But one fact, perhaps of an opposite bearing, must be noted. A singular painting, in a cave, of a person clothed in a robe of red, reaching to the feet, with sleeves, and with a kind of halo (or set of bandages) round the head, remains a mystery, like similar figures with blue halos or bandages, clothed and girdled. None of the figures had mouths; otherwise, in Sir George Grey's sketches, they have a remote air of Cimabue's work.*** These designs were by men familiar with clothing, whether their own, or that of strangers observed by them, though in one case an unclothed figure carries a kangaroo. At present the natives draw with much spirit, when provided with European materials, as may be seen in Mrs. Langloh Parker's two volumes of Australian Legendary Tales. Their decorative patterns vary in character in different parts of the continent, but nowhere do they now execute works like those in the caves discovered by Sir George Grey. The reader must decide for himself how far these monuments alone warrant an inference of great degeneration in Australia, or are connected with religion.
* Spencer and Gillen, Natives of Central Australia, p. 48.
** Howitt, Journal Anthrop. Inst., 1885, p. 310.
*** Grey's Journals of Expeditions of Discovery in North-
West and Western Australia, in the years 1837-39, vol i.,
pp. 200-263. Sir George regarded the pictures as perhaps
very ancient. The natives "chaffed" him when he asked for
traditions on the subject.
Such are the Australians, men without kings or chiefs, and what do we know of their beliefs?
The most contradictory statements about their religion may be found in works of science Mr. Huxley declared that "their theology is a mere belief in the existence, powers and dispositions (usually malignant) of ghost-like entities who may be propitiated or scared away; but no cult can be properly said to exist. And in this stage theology is wholly independent of ethics." This, he adds, is "theology in its simplest condition".
In a similar sense, Sir John Lubbock writes: "The Australians have no idea of creation, nor do they use prayers; they have no religious forms, ceremonies or worship. They do not believe in the existence of a Deity, nor is morality in any way connected with their religion, if it can be so called."*
* Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, p. 158,1870. In 1889, for
"a deity" "a true Deity".
This remark must be compared with another in the same work (1882, p. 210). "Mr. Ridley, indeed,... states that they have a traditional belief in one supreme Creator, called Baiamai, but he admits that most of the witnesses who were examined before the Select Committee appointed by the Legislative Council of Victoria in 1858 to report on the Aborigines, gave it as their opinion that the natives had no religious ideas. It appears, moreover, from a subsequent remark, that Baiamai only possessed 'traces' of the three attributes of the God of the Bible, Eternity, Omnipotence and Goodness".*
* Cf. J. A. I., 1872, 257-271.
Mr. Ridley, an accomplished linguist who had lived with wild blacks in 1854-58, in fact, said long ago, that the Australian Bora, or Mystery, "involves the idea of dedication to God ". He asked old Billy Murri Bundur whether men worshipped Baiame at the Bora? "Of course they do," said Billy. Mr. Ridley, to whose evidence we shall return, was not the only affirmative witness. Archdeacon Gunther had no doubt that Baiame was equivalent to the Supreme Being, "a remnant of original traditions," and it was Mr. Günther, not Mr. Ridley, who spoke of "traces" of Baiame's eternity, omnipotence and goodness. Mr. Ridley gave similar reports from evidence collected by the committee of 1858. He found the higher creeds most prominent in the interior, hundreds of miles from the coast.
Apparently the reply of Gustav Roskoff to Sir John Lubbock (1880) did not alter that writer's opinion. Roskoff pointed out that Waitz-Gerland, while denying that Australian beliefs were derived from any higher culture, denounced the theory that they have no religion as "entirely false". "Belief in a Good Being is found in South Australia, New South Wales, and the centre of the south-eastern continent."* The opinion of Waitz is highly esteemed, and that not merely because, as Mr. Max Müller has pointed out, he has edited Greek classical works. Avec du Grec on nepeut gâter rien. Mr. Oldfield, in addition to bogles and a water-spirit, found Biam (Baiame) and Namba-jundi, who admits souls into his Paradise, while Warnyura torments the bad under earth.** Mr. Eyre, publishing in 1845, gives Baiame (on the Morrum-bidgee, Biam; on the Murray, Biam-Vaitch-y) as a source of songs sung at dances, and a cause of disease. He is deformed, sits cross-legged, or paddles a canoe. On the Murray he found a creator, Noorele, "all powerful, and of benevolent character," with three unborn sons, dwelling "up among the clouds". Souls of dead natives join them in the skies. Nevertheless "the natives, as far as yet can be ascertained, have no religious belief or ceremonies"; and, though Noorele is credited with "the origin of creation," "he made the earth, trees, water, etc.," a deity, or Great First Cause, "can hardly be said to be acknowledged".***
* Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologic, vi. 794 et seq.
** Oldfield, Translations of Ethnol. Soc., iii. 208. On
this evidence I lay no stress.
*** Eyre, Journals, ii. pp. 355-358.
Such are the consistent statements of Mr. Eyre! Roskoff also cites Mr. Ridley, Braim, Cunningham, Dawson, and other witnesses, as opposed to Sir John Lubbock, and he includes Mr. Tylor.* Mr. Tylor, later, found Baiame, or Pei-a-mei, no earlier in literature than about 1840, in Mr. Hale's United States Exploring Expedition? Previous to that date, Baiame, it seems, was unknown to Mr. Threlkeld, whose early works are of 1831-1857. He only speaks of Koin, a kind of goblin, and for lack of a native name for God, Mr. Threlkeld tried to introduce Jehova-ka-biruê, and Eloi, but failed. Mr. Tylor, therefore, appears to suppose that the name, Baiame, and, at all events, his divine qualities, were introduced by missionaries, apparently between 1831 and 1840.*** To this it must be replied that Mr. Hale, about 1840, writes that "when the missionaries first came to Wellington" (Mr. Threlkeld's own district) "Baiame was worshipped there with songs". "These songs or hymns, according to Mr. Threlkeld, were passed on from a considerable distance. It is notorious that songs and dances are thus passed on, till they reach tribes who do not even know the meaning of the words."****
* Roskoff, Das Religionstoesen der Rohesten Naturvolher, pp.
37-41.
** Ethnology and Philology, p. 110. 1846.
*** Tylor, The Limits of Savage Religion, J. A. I., vol.
xxi. 1892.
**** Roth, Natives of N.-W. Central Queensland, p. 117.
In this way Baiame songs had reached Wellington before the arrival of the missionaries, and for this fact Mr. Threlkeld (who is supposed not to have known Baiame) is Mr. Hale's authority. In Mr. Tylor's opinion (as I understand it) the word Baiame was the missionary translation of our word "Creator," and derived from Baia "to make". Now, Mr. Ridley says that Mr. Greenway "discovered" this baia to be the root of Baiame. But what missionary introduced the word before 1840? Not Mr. Threlkeld, for he (according to Mr. Tylor), did not know the word, and he tried Eloi, and Jehova-ka-biru£, while Immanueli was also tried and also failed* Baiame, known in 1840, does not occur in a missionary primer before Mr. Ridley's Gurre Kamilaroi (1856), so the missionary primer did not launch Baiame before the missionaries came to Wellington. According to Mr. Hale, the Baiame songs were brought by blacks from a distance (we know how Greek mysteries were also colportés to new centres), and the yearly rite had, in 1840, been for three years in abeyance. Moreover, the etymology, Baia "to make" has a competitor in "Byamee = Big Man".** Thus Baiame, as a divine being, preceded the missionaries, and is not a word of missionary manufacture, while sacred words really of missionary manufacture do not find their way into native tradition. Mr. Hale admits that the ideas about Baiame may "possibly" be of European origin, though the great reluctance of the blacks to adopt any opinion from Europeans makes against that theory.***
* Ridley, speaking of 1855. Lang's Queensland, p. 435.
** Mrs. Langloh Parker, More Australian Legendary Tales.
1898. Glossary.
*** Op. cit., p. 110.
It may be said that, if Baiame was premissionary, his higher attributes date after Mr. Ridley's labours, abandoned for lack of encouragement in 1858. In 1840, Mr. Hale found Baiame located in an isle of the seas, like Circe, living on fish which came to his call. Some native theologians attributed Creation to his Son, Burambin, the Demiurge, a common savage form of Gnosticism.
On the nature of Baiame, we have, however, some curious early evidence of 1844-45. Mr. James Manning, in these years, and earlier, lived "near the outside boundaries of settlers to the south". A conversation with Goethe, when the poet was eighty-five, induced him to study the native beliefs. "No missionaries," he writes, "ever came to the southern district at any time, and it was not till many years later that they landed in Sydney on their way to Moreton Bay, to attempt, in vain, to Christianise the blacks of that locality, before the Queensland separation from this colony took place." Mr. Manning lost his notes of 1845, but recovered a copy from a set lent to Lord Audley, and read them, in November, 1882, to the Royal Society of New South Wales. The notes are of an extraordinary character, and Mr. Manning, perhaps unconsciously, exaggerated their Christian analogies, by adopting Christian terminology. Dean Cowper, however, corroborated Mr. Manning's general opinion, by referring to evidence of Archdeacon Gunther, who sent a grammar, with remarks on "Bhaime, or Bhaiame," from Wellington to Mr. Max Müller. "He received his information, he told me, from some of the oldest blacks, who, he was satisfied, could not have derived their ideas from white men, as they had not then had intercourse with them." Old savages are not apt to be in a hurry to borrow European notions. Mr. Manning also averred that he obtained his information with the greatest difficulty. "They required such secrecy on my part, and seemed so afraid of being heard even in the most secret places, that, in one or two cases, I have seen them almost tremble in speaking." One native, after carefully examining doors and windows, "stood in a wooden fireplace, and spoke in a tone little above a whisper, and confirmed what I had before heard". Another stipulated that silence must be observed, otherwise the European hands might question his wife, in which case he would be obliged to kill her. Mr. Howitt also found that the name of Darumulun (in religion) is too sacred to be spoken except almost in whispers, while the total exclusion of women from mysteries and religious knowledge, on pain of death, is admitted to be universal among the tribes.* Such secrecy, so widely diffused, is hardly compatible with humorous imposture by the natives.
There is an element of humour in all things. Mr. Manning, in 1882, appealed to his friend, Mr. Mann, to give testimony to the excellency of Black Andy, the native from whom he derived most of his notes, which were corroborated by other black witnesses. Mr. Mann arose and replied that "he had never met one aborigine who had any true belief in a Supreme Being". On cross-examination, they always said that they had got their information from a missionary or other resident. Black Andy was not alluded to by Mr. Mann, who regarded all these native religious ideas as filtrations from European sources. Mr. Palmer, on the other hand, corroborated Mr. Manning, who repeated the expression of his convictions.** Such, then, is the perplexed condition of the evidence.
* Howitt,.7. A. I., xiii. 193.
** Mr. Mann told a story of native magic, viewed by himself,
which might rouse scepticism among persons not familiar with
what these conjurers can do.
It may be urged that the secrecy and timidity of Mr. Manning's informants, corresponding with Mr. Howitt's experience, makes for the affirmative side; that, in 1845, when Mr. Manning made his notes, missionaries were scarce, and that a native "cross-examined" by the sceptical and jovial Mr. Mann, would probably not contradict. (Lubbock, O. of C. p. 4.) Confidence is only won by sympathy, and one inquirer will get authentic legends and folklore from a Celt, while another of the ordinary English type will totally fail On this point Mr. Manning says: "Sceptics should consider how easy it might be for intelligent men to pass almost a lifetime among the blacks in any quarter of this continent without securing the confidence even of the best of the natives around them, through whom they might possibly become acquainted with their religious secrets, secrets which they dare not reveal to their own women at all, nor to their adult youths until the latter have been sworn to reticence under that terrifying ceremony which my notes describe". In the same way Mrs. Langloh Parker found that an European neighbour would ask, "but have the blacks any legends?" and we have cited Mr. Hartt on the difficulty of securing legends on the Amazon, while Mr. Sproat had to live long among, and become very intimate with, the tribes of British Columbia, before he could get any information about their beliefs. Thus, the present writer is disinclined to believe that the intelligence offered to Mr. Manning with shy secrecy in 1845 was wholly a native copy of recently acquired hints on religion derived from Europeans, especially as Mr. Howitt, who had lived long among the Kurnai, and had written copiously on them, knew nothing of their religion, before, about 1882, he was initiated and admitted to the knowledge like that of Mr. Manning in 1845 The theory of borrowing is also checked by the closely analogous savage beliefs reported from North America before a single missionary had arrived, and from Africa. For the Australian, African and American ideas have a common point of contact, not easily to be explained as deduced from Christianity. According, then, to Mr. Manning, the natives believed in a being called Boyma, who dwells in heaven, "immovably fixed in a crystal rock, with only the upper half of a supernatural body visible". Now, about 1880, a native described Baiame to Mr. Howitt as "a very great old man with a beard," and with crystal pillars growing out of his shoulders which prop up a supernal sky. This vision of Baiame was seen by the native, apparently as a result of the world-wide practice of crystal-gazing.* Mr. Tylor suspects "the old man with the beard" as derived from Christian artistic representations, but old men are notoriously the most venerated objects among the aborigines. Turning now to Mrs. Langloh Parker's More Australian Legendary Tales (p. 90), we find Byamee "fixed to the crystal rock on which he sat in Bullimah" (Paradise). Are we to suppose that some savage caught at Christian teaching, added this feature of the crystal rock from "the glassy sea" of the Apocalpyse, or from the great white throne, and succeeded in securing wide acceptance and long persistence for a notion borrowed from Europeans? Is it likely that the chief opponents of Christianity everywhere, the Wirreenuns or sorcerers, would catch at the idea, introduce it into the conservative ritual of the Mysteries, and conceal it from women and children who are as open as adults to missionary influence? Yet from native women and children the belief is certainly concealed.
* J. A. I., xvi. p. 49, 60.
Mr. Manning, who prejudices his own case by speaking of Boyma as "the Almighty," next introduces us to a "Son of God" equal to the father as touching his omniscience, and otherwise but slightly inferior. Mr. Eyre had already reported on the unborn sons of Noorele, "there is no mother". The son of Boyma's name is Grogoragally. He watches over conduct, and takes the good to Ballima (Bullimah in Mrs. Langloh Parker), the bad to Oorooma, the place of fire (gumby). Mr. Eyre had attested similar ideas of future life of the souls with Noorele. (Eyre, ii. 357.) In Mrs. Langloh Parker's book a Messenger is called "the All-seeing Spirit," apparently identical with her Wallahgooroonbooan, whose voice is heard in the noise of the tundun, or bull-roarer, used in the Mysteries.*
* More Legendary Tales, p. 86.
Grogoragally is unborn of any mother. He is represented by Mr. Manning as a mediator between Boyma and the race of men. Here our belief is apt to break down, and most people will think that Black Andy was a well-instructed Christian catechumen. This occurred to Mr. Manning, who put it plainly to Andy. He replied that the existence of names in the native language for the sacred persons and places proved that they were not of European origin. "White fellow no call budgery place (paradise) 'Ballima,' or other place 'Oorooma,' nor God 'Boyma,' nor Son 'Grogoragally,' only we black fellow think and call them that way in our own language, before white fellow came into the country." A son or deputy of the chief divine being is, in fact, found among the Kurnai and in other tribes. He directs the mysteries. Here, then, Andy is backed by Mr. Howitt's aboriginal friends. Their deity sanctioned morality "before the white men came to Melbourne" (1835) and was called "Our Father" at the same date.* Several old men insisted on this, as a matter of their own knowledge. They were initiated before the arrival of Europeans. Archdeacon Gunther received the same statements from old aborigines, and Mr. Palmer, speaking of other notions of tribes of the North, is perfectly satisfied that none of their ideas were derived from the whites.** In any case, Black Andy's intelligence and logic are far beyond what most persons attribute to his race. If we disbelieve him, it must be on the score, I think, that he consciously added European ideas to names of native origin. On the other hand, analogous ideas, not made so startling as in Mr. Manning's Christian terminology, are found in many parts of Australia.
* J. A., xiii. p. 192, 193,
** Op. cit., p. 290.
Mr. Manning next cites Moodgeegally, the first man, immortal, a Culture Hero, and a messenger of Boyma's. There are a kind of rather mediaeval fiends, Waramolong, who punish the wicked (murderers, liars and breakers of marriage laws) in Gumby. Women do not go to Ballima, Boyma being celibate, and women know nothing of all these mysteries; certainly this secrecy is not an idea of Christian origin. If women get at the secret, the whole race must be exterminated, men going mad and slaying each other. This notion we shall see is corroborated. But if missionaries taught the ideas, women must know all about them already. Mr. Manning's information was confirmed by a black from 300 miles away, who called Grogoragally by the name of Boymagela. There are no prayers, except for the dead at burial: corroborated by Mrs. Langloh Parker's beautiful Legend of Eerin. "Byamee," the mourners cry, "let in the spirit of Eerin to Bullimah. Save him from Eleanbah wundah, abode of the wicked. For Eerin was faithful on earth, faithful to the laws you left us!"* The creed is taught to boys when initiated, with a hymn which Mr. Manning's informant dared not to reveal. He said angrily that Mr. Manning already knew more than any other white man. Now, to invent a hymn could not have been beyond the powers of this remarkable savage, Black Andy. The "Sons" of Baiame answer, we have seen, to those ascribed to Noorele, in Mr. Eyre's book. They also correspond to Daramulun where he is regarded as the son of Baiame, while the Culture Hero, Moodgeegally, founder of the Mysteries, answers to Tundun, among the Kurnai.** We have, too, in Australia, Dawed, a subordinate where Mangarrah is the Maker in the Larrakeah tribe.***
* More Australian Tales, p. 96.
** Howitt, J. A. /., 1885, p. 313.
*** J. A. I., Nov., 1894, p. 191.
In some cases, responsibility for evil, pain, and punishment, are shifted from the good Maker on to the shoulders of his subordinate. This is the case, in early Virginia, with Okeus, the subordinate of the Creator, the good Ahone.* We have also, in West Africa, the unpropitiated Nyankupon, with his active subordinate, who has human sacrifices, Bobowissi;** and Mulungu, in Central Africa, "possesses many powerful servants, but is himself kept a good deal behind the scenes of earthly affairs, like the gods of Epicurus".*** The analogy, as to the Son, interpreter of the divine will, in Apollo and Zeus (certainly not of Christian origin!) is worth observing. In the Andaman Islands, Mr. Mann, after long and minute inquiry from the previously un-contaminated natives, reports on an only son of Puluga, "a sort of archangel," who alone is permitted to live with his father, whose orders it is his duty to make known to the moro-win, his sisters, ministers of Puluga, the angels, that is, inferior ministers of Puluga's will.****
* William Strachey, Hakluyt Society, chapter vii., date,
1612.
** Ellis, Religion of the Tshi-speaking Races.
*** Macdonald, Africana, vol. i. p. 67.
****J. A. I., xii. p. 158.
It is for science to determine how far this startling idea of the Son is a natural result of a desire to preserve the remote and somewhat inaccessible and otiose dignity of the Supreme Being from the exertion of activity; and how far it is a savage refraction of missionary teaching, even where it seems to be anterior to missionary influences, which, with these races, have been almost a complete failure. The subject abounds in difficulty, but the sceptic must account for the marvellously rapid acceptance of the European ideas by the most conservative savage class, the doctors or sorcerers; for the admission of the ideas into the most conservative of savage institutions, the Mysteries; for the extreme reticence about the ideas in presence of the very Europeans from whom they are said to have been derived; and in some cases for the concealment of the ideas from the women, who, one presumes, are as open as the men to missionary teaching. It is very easy to talk of "borrowing," not so easy to explain these points on the borrowing theory, above all, when evidence is frequent that the ideas preceded the arrival of Christian teachers.
On this crucial point, the question of borrowing, I may cite Mr. Mann as to the Andamanese beliefs. Mr. Mann was for eleven years in the islands, and for four years superintended our efforts to "reclaim" some natives. He is well acquainted with the South Andaman dialect, and has made studies of the other forms of the language. This excellent witness writes: "It is extremely improbable that their legends were the result of the teaching of missionaries or others". They have no tradition of any foreign arrivals, and their reputation (undeserved) as cannibals, with their ferocity to invaders, "precludes the belief" that any one ever settled there to convert or instruct them. "Moreover, to regard with suspicion, as some have done, the genuineness of such legends argues ignorance of the fact that numerous other tribes, in equally remote or isolated localities, have, when first discovered, been found to possess similar traditions on the subject under consideration," Further, "I have taken special care not only to obtain my information on each point from those who are considered by their fellow tribesmen as authorities, but [also from those] who, from having had little or no intercourse with other races, were in entire ignorance regarding any save their own legends," which, "they all agree in stating, were handed down to them by their first parent, To-mo, and his immediate descendants".* What Mr. Mann says concerning the unborrowed character of Andaman beliefs applies, of course, to the yet more remote and inaccessible natives of Australia.
In what has been, and in what remains to be said, it must be remembered that the higher religious ideas attributed to the Australians are not their only ideas in this matter. Examples of their wild myths have already been offered, they are totemists, too, and fear, though they do not propitiate, ghosts. Vague spirits unattached are also held in dread, and inspire sorcerers and poets,** as also does the god Bunjil.***
* J. A. I., xii. pp. 156, 157.
** Ibid.y xvi., pp. 330, 331. On Bunjil.
*** In Folk-Lore, December, 1898, will be found an essay,
Mr. Hartland, on my account of Australian gods. Instancing
many wild or comic myths (some of them unknown to me when I
wrote 'The Making of Religion'), Mr. Hartland seems to argue
that these destroy the sacredness of other coexisting native
beliefs of a higher kind. But, on this theory, what religion
is sacred? All have contradictory myths. See
Introduction.
Turning from early accounts of Australian religion, say from 1835 to 1845, we look at the more recent reports. The best evidence is that of Mr. Howitt, who, with Mr. Fison, laid the foundations of serious Australian anthropology in Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1881). In 1881, Mr. Howitt, though long and intimately familiar with the tribes of Gippsland, the Yarra, the Upper Murray, the Murumbidgee, and other districts, had found no trace of belief in a moral Supreme Being. He was afterwards, however, initiated, or less formally let into the secret, by two members of Brajerak (wild) black fellows, not of the same tribe as the Kurnai. The rites of these former aborigines are called Kuringal. Their supreme being is Daramulun "believed in from the sea-coast across to the northern boundary claimed by the Wolgal, about Yass and Gundagai, and from Omeo to at least as far as the Shoalhaven River.... He was not, as it seems to me, everywhere thought to be a malevolent being, but he was dreaded as one who could severely punish the trespasses committed against these tribal ordinances and customs, whose first institution is ascribed to him.... It was taught also that Daramulun himself watched the youths from the sky, prompt to punish by sickness or death the breach of his ordinances." These are often mere taboos; an old man said: "I could not eat Emu's eggs. He would be very angry, and perhaps I should die." It will hardly be argued that the savages have recently borrowed from missionaries this conception of Daramulun, as the originator and guardian of tribal taboos. Opponents must admit him as of native evolution in that character at least. The creed of Daramulun is not communicated to women and children. "It is said that the women among the Ngarego and Wolgal knew only that a great being lived beyond the sky, and that he was spoken of by them as Papang (Father). This seemed to me when I first heard it to bear so suspicious a resemblance to a belief derived from the white men, that I thought it necessary to make careful and repeated inquiries. My Ngarego and Wolgal informants, two of them old men, strenuously maintained that it was so before the white men came." They themselves only learned the doctrine when initiated, as boys, by the old men of that distant day. The name Daramulun, was almost whispered to Mr. Howitt, and phrases were used such as "He," "the man," "the name I told you of". The same secrecy was preserved by a Woi-worung man about Bunjil, or Pund-jel, "though he did not show so much reluctance when repeating to me the 'folk-lore' in which the 'Great Spirit' of the Kulin plays a part". "He" was used, or gesture signs were employed by this witness, who told how his grandfather had warned him that Bunjil watched his conduct from a star, "he can see you and all you do down here,"—"before the white men came to Melbourne." (1835).*
* J. A. I.f xiii, 1884, pp. 192, 193.
Are we to believe that this mystic secrecy is kept up, as regards white men, about a Being first heard of from white men? And is it credible that the "old men," the holders of tribal traditions, and the most conservative of mortals, would borrow a new divinity from "the white devils," conceal the doctrine from the women (as accessible to missionary teaching as themselves), adopt the new Being as the founder of the antique mysteries, and introduce him into the central rite? And can the natives have done so steadily, ever since about 1840 at least? To believe all this is to illustrate the credulity of scepticism.
Mr. Howitt adds facts about tribes "from Twofold Bay to Sydney, and as far west, at least, as Hay". Here, too, Daramulun instituted the rites; his voice is heard in the noise of the whirling mudji (bull-roarer). "The muttering of thunder is said to be his voice 'calling to the rain to fall, and make the grass grow up green'." Such are "the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the tribe".*
At the rites, respect for age, for truth, for unprotected women and married women, and other details of sexual morality, is inculcated partly in obscene dances. A magic ceremony, resembling mesmeric passes, and accompanied by the word "Good" (nga) is meant to make the boys acceptable to Daramulun. A temporary image of him is made on raised earth (to be destroyed after the rites), his attributes are then explained. "This is the Master (Biamban) who can go anywhere and do anything."** An old man is buried, and rises again. "This ceremony is most impressive." "The opportunity is taken of impressing on the mind of youth, in an indelible manner, those rules of conduct which form the moral law of the tribe." "There is clearly a belief in a Great Spirit, or rather an anthropomorphic Supernatural Being, the Master of All, whose abode is above, the sky, and to whom are attributed powers of omnipotence and omnipresence, or, at any rate, the power to do anything and go anywhere.... To his direct ordinance are attributed the social and moral laws of the community." Mr. Howitt ends, "I venture to assert that it can no longer be maintained that [the Australians] have no belief which can be called religious—that is, in the sense of beliefs which govern tribal and individual morality under a supernatural sanction".***
* J. A. I., 1884, p. 446.
** Op. cit., p. 453.
*** J. A. I., 1884, p. 459.
Among the rites is one which "is said to be intended to teach the boys to speak the straightforward truth, and the kabos (mystagogues) thus explain it to them ".*
It is, perhaps, unfortunate that Mr. Howitt does not give a full account of what the morality thus sanctioned includes. Respect for age, for truth, for unprotected women, and for nature (as regards avoiding certain unnatural vices) are alone spoken of, in addition to taboos which have no relation to developed morality. Mr. Palmer, in speaking of the morality inculcated in the mysteries of the Northern Australians, adds to the elements of ethics mentioned by Mr. Howitt in the south, the lesson "not to be quarrelsome". To each lad is given, "by one of the elders, advice so kindly, fatherly and impressive, as often to soften the heart, and draw tears from the youth".**
* J. A. 1., xiii. 444.
** Ibid., xlii 296.
So far, the morality religiously sanctioned is such as men are likely to evolve, and probably no one will maintain that it must have been borrowed from Europeans. It is argued that the morality is only such as the tribes would naturally develop, mainly in the interests of the old (the ruling class) and of social order (Hart-land, op. cit. pp. 316-329). What else did any one ever suppose the mores of a people to be, plus whatever may be allowed for the effects of kindliness, or love, which certainly exists? I never hinted at morals divinely and supernormally revealed. All morality had been denied to the Australians. Yet in the religious rites they are "taught to speak the straightforward truth"! As regards women, there are parts of Australia where disgusting laxity prevails, except in cases prohibited by the extremely complex rules of forbidden degrees. Such parts are Central Australia and North-west Central Queensland.*
Another point in Mr. Howitt's evidence deserves notice. He at first wrote "The Supreme Being who is believed in by all the tribes I refer to here, either as a benevolent or more frequently as a malevolent being, it seems to me represents the defunct headman ". We have seen that Mr. Howitt came to regard "malevolence" as merely the punitive aspect of the "Supreme Being ". As to the theory that such a being represents a dead headman, no proof is anywhere given that ghosts of headmen are in any way propitiated. Even "corpse-feeding" was represented to Mr. Dawson by intelligent old blacks, as "white fellows' gammon".** Mrs. Langloh Parker writes to me that she, when she began to study the blacks, "had, I must allow, a prejudice in favour of Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory—it seemed so rational, but, accepting my savages' evidence, I must discard it". As to "offerings of food to the dead," Mrs. Langloh Parker found that nothing was offered except food "which happened to be in the possession of the corpse," at his decease.
For these reasons it is almost inconceivable that the "Supreme Being" should "represent a dead headman," as to dead men of any sort no tribute is paid. Mr. Howitt himself appears to have abandoned the hypothesis that Daramulun represents a dead headman, for he speaks of him as the "Great Spirit," or rather an "anthropomorphic Supernatural Being",***
* Spencer and Gillen, and Roth.
** Dawson, Aborigines of Australia.
*** J. A. I., 1884, p. 458.
A Great Spirit might, conceivably, be developed out of a little spirit, even out of the ghost of a tribesman. But to the conception of a "supernatural anthropomorphic being," the idea of "spirit" is not necessary. Men might imagine such an entity before they had ever dreamed of a ghost.
Having been initiated into the secrets of one set of tribes, Mr. Howitt was enabled to procure admission to those of another group of "clans," the Kurnai. For twenty-five years the Jeraeil, or mystery, had been in abeyance, for they are much in contact with Europeans. The old men, however, declared that they exactly reproduced (with one confessed addition) the ancestral ceremonies. They were glad to do it, for their lads "now paid no attention either to the words of the old men, or to those of the missionaries".*
*J. A. I.,1885, p. 304.
This is just what usually occurs. When we meet a savage tribe we destroy the old bases of its morality and substitute nothing new of our own. "They pay no attention to the words of the missionaries," but loaf, drink and gamble like station hands "knocking down a cheque ".
Consequently a rite unknown before the arrival of Europeans is now introduced at the Jeraeil. Swift would have been delighted by this ceremony. "It was thought that the boys, having lived so much among the whites, had become selfish and no longer willing to share that which they obtained by their own exertions, or had given to them, with their friends." The boys were, therefore, placed in a row, and the initiator or mystagogue stooped over the first boy, and, muttering some words which I could not catch, he kneaded the lad's stomach with his hands. This he did to each one successively, and by it the Kurnai supposed the "greediness" (———) "of the youth would be expelled".*
* Op. cit., pp. 310, 311.
So far from unselfishness being a doctrine borrowed by the Kurnai from Christians, and introduced into their rites, it is (as we saw in the case of the Arunta of Central Australia) part of the traditional morality—"the good old ancestral virtues," says Mr. Howitt—of the tribes. A special ceremony is needed before unselfishness can be inspired among blacks who have lived much among adherents of the Gospel.
Thus "one satiric touch" seems to demonstrate that the native ethics are not of missionary origin.
After overcoming the scruples of the old men by proving that he really was initiated in the Kuringal, Mr. Howitt was admitted to the central rite of the Kurnai "showing the Grandfather". The essence of it is that the mystae have their heads shrouded in blankets. These are snatched off, the initiator points solemnly to the sky with his throwing stick (which propels the spears) and then points to the Tundun, or bull-roarer. This object (———) was also used in the Mysteries of ancient Greece, and is still familiar in the rites of savages in all quarters of the world.
"The ancestral beliefs" are then solemnly revealed. It seems desirable to quote freely the "condensed" version of Mr. Howitt. "Long ago there was a great Being called Mungan-ngaur." Here a note adds that Mungan means "Father," and "ngaur" means "Our".
"He has no other name among the Kurnai. In other tribes the Great Supreme Being, besides being called 'father,' has a name, for example Bunjil, Baiame, Daramulun." "This Being lived on the earth, and taught the Kurnai... all the arts they know. He also gave them the names they bear. Mungan-gnaur had a son" (the Sonship doctrine already noticed by Mr. Manning) "named Tundun (the bull-roarer), who was married, and who is the direct ancestor—the Weintwin or father's father—of the Kurnai. Mungan-ngaur instituted the Jeraeil (mysteries) which was conducted by Tundun, who made the instruments" (a large and a small bull-roarer, as also in Queensland) "which bear the name of himself and his wife.
"Some tribal traitor impiously revealed the secrets of the Jeraeil to women, and thereby brought down the anger of Mungan upon the Kurnai. He sent fire which filled the wide space between earth and sky. Men went mad, and speared one another, fathers killing their children, husbands their wives, and brethren each other." This corroborates Black Andy. "Then the sea rushed over the land, and nearly all mankind were drowned. Those who survived became the ancestors of the Kurnai.... Tundun and his wife became porpoises" (as Apollo in the Homeric hymn became a dolphin), "Mungan left the earth, and ascended to the sky, where he still remains."*
* Op. cit., pp. 313, 314.
Here the Son is credited with none of the mediatorial attributes in Mr. Manning's version, but universal massacre, as a consequence of revealing the esoteric doctrine, is common to both accounts.
Morals are later inculcated.
1. "To listen to and obey the old men.
2. "To share everything they have with their friends.
3. "To live peaceably with their friends.
4. "Not to interfere with girls or married women.
5. "To obey the food restrictions until they are released from them by the old men." [As at Eleusis.]
These doctrines, and the whole belief in Mungan-ngaur, "the Kurnai carefully concealed from me," says Mr. Howitt, "until I learned them at the Jeraeil".* Mr. Howitt now admits, in so many words, that Mungan-ngaur "is rather the beneficent father, and the kindly though severe headman of the whole tribe.... than the malevolent wizard".... He considers it "perhaps indicative of great antiquity, that this identical belief forms part of the central mysteries of a tribe so isolated as the Kurnai, as well as of those of the tribes which had free communication one with another".
As the morals sanctioned by Mungan-ngaur are simply the extant tribal morals (of which unselfishness is a part, as in Central Australia), there seems no reason to attribute them to missionaries—who are quite unheeded. This part of the evidence may close with a statement of Mr. Howitt's: "Beyond the vaulted sky lies the mysterious home of that great and powerful Being who is Bunjil, Baiame, or Dara-mulun in different tribal languages, but who in all is known by a name, the equivalent of the only one used by the Kurnai, which is Mungan-ngaur, Our Father".**
* Op. cit. 321, note 3
** J. A. I., xvi. 64.
Other affirmative evidence might be adduced. Mr. Ridley, who wrote primers in the Kamilaroi language as early as in 1856 (using Baiame for God), says: "In every part of Australia where I have conversed with the aborigines, they have a traditional belief in one Supreme Creator," and he wonders, as he well may, at the statement to the contrary in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which rests solely on the authority, of Dr. Lang, in Queensland. Of names for the Supreme Being, Mr. Ridley gives Baiame, Anamba; in Queensland, Mumbal (Thunder) and, at Twofold Bay, "Dhu-rumbulum, which signifies, in the Namoi, a sacred staff, originally given by Baiame, and is used as the title of Deity".*
By "staff" Mr. Ridley appears to indicate the Tundun, or bull-roarer. This I venture to infer from Mr. Matthews' account of the Wiradthuri (New South Wales) with whom Dhuramoolan is an extinct bugbear, not answering to Tundun among the Kurnai, who is subordinate, as son, to Mungan-ngaur, and is associated with the mystic bull-roarer, as is Gayandi, the voice of the Messenger of Baiame, among Mrs. Langloh Parker's informants.** In one tribe, Dara-mulun used to carry off and eat the initiated boys, till he was stopped and destroyed by Baiame. This myth can hardly exist, one may suppose, among such tribes as consider Daramulun to preside over the mysteries.
* J. A. I., ii. (1872), 268, 270.
** Ibid., xxv. 298.
Living in contact with the Baiame-worshipping Kamilaroi, the Wiradthuri appear to make a jest of the power of Daramulun, who (we have learned) is said to have died, while his "spirit" dwells on high.* Mr. Green way also finds Turramulan to be subordinate to Baiame, who "sees all, and knows all, if not directly, through Turramulan, who presides at the Bora.... Turramulan is mediator in all the operations of Baiame upon man, and in all man's transactions with Baiame. Turramulan means "leg on one side only," "one-legged". Here the mediatorial aspect corroborates Mr. Manning's information.** I would suggest, periculo meo, that there may have been some syncretism, a Baiame-worshipping tribe adopting Daramulun as a subordinate and mediator; or Baiame may have ousted Daramulun, as Zeus did Cronos.
Mr. Ridley goes on to observe that about eighteen years ago (that is, in 1854) he asked intelligent blacks "if they knew Baiame". The answer was: "Kamil zaia zummi Baiame, zaia winuzgulda," "I have not seen Baiame, I have heard or perceived him". The same identical answer was given in 1872 "by a man to whom I had never before spoken". "If asked who made the sky, the earth, the animals and man, they always answer 'Baiame'." Varieties of opinion as to a future life exist. All go to Baiame, or only the good (the bad dying eternally), or they change into birds!***
* J. A. I., xii. 194.
** Ibid., vii. 242.
*** Ibid., ii. 269.
Turning to North-west Central Queensland we find Dr. Roth (who knows the language and is partly initiated) giving Mul-ka-ri as "a benevolent, omnipresent, supernatural being. Anything incomprehensible." He offers a sentence: "Mulkari tikkara ena" = "Lord (who dwellest) among the sky". Again: "Mulkari is the supernatural power who makes everything which the blacks cannot otherwise account for; he is a good, beneficent person, and never kills any one". He initiates medicine men. His home is in the skies. He once lived on earth, and there was a culture-hero, inventing magic and spells. That Mulkari is an ancestral ghost as well as a beneficent Maker I deem unlikely, as no honours are paid to the dead. "Not in any way to refer to the dead appears to be an universal rule among all these tribes."* Mulkari has a malignant opposite or counterpart.
Nothing is said by Dr. Roth as to inculcation of these doctrines at the Mysteries, nor do Messrs. Spencer and Gillen allude to any such being in their accounts of Central Australian rites, if we except the "self-existing" "out of nothing" Ungambikula, sky-dwellers.
One rite "is supposed to make the men who pass through it more kindly," we are not told why.** We have also an allusion to "the great spirit Twangirika," whose voice (the women are told) is heard in the noise of the bull-roarer.***
* Roth, pp. 14, 36, 116, 153,158, 165.
** Spencer and Gillen, p. 369.
*** Ibid., p. 246.
"The belief is fundamentally the same as that found in all Australian tribes," write the authors, in a note citing Tundun and Daramulun. But they do not tell us whether the Arunta belief includes the sanction, by Twangirika, of morality. If it does not, have the Central Australians never developed the idea, or have they lost it? They have had quite as much experience of white men (or rather much more) than the believers in Baiame or Bunjil, "before the white men came to Melbourne," and, if one set of tribes borrowed ideas from whites, why did not the other?
The evidence here collected is not exhaustive. We might refer to Pirnmeheal, a good being, whom the blacks loved before they were taught by missionaries to fear him.*
* Dawson, The Australian Aborigines.
Mr. Dawson took all conceivable pains to get authentic information, and to ascertain whether the belief in Pirnmeheal was pre-European. He thinks it was original. The idea of "god-borrowing" is repudiated by Manning, Gunther, Ridley, Green-way, Palmer, Mrs. Langloh Parker and others, speaking for trained observers and (in several cases) for linguists, studying the natives on the spot, since 1845. It is thought highly improbable by Mr. Hale (1840). It is rejected by Waitz-Gerland, speaking for studious science in Europe. Mr. Howitt, beginning with distrust, seems now to regard the beliefs described as of native origin. On the other hand we have Mr. Mann, who has been cited, and the great authority of Mr. E. B. Tylor, who, however, has still to reply to the arguments in favour of the native origin of the beliefs which I have ventured to offer. Such arguments are the occurrence of Baiame before the arrival of missionaries; the secrecy, as regards Europeans, about ideas derived (Mr. Tylor thinks) from Europeans; the ignorance of the women on these heads; the notorious conservatism of the "doctors" who promulgate the creed as to ritual and dogma, and the other considerations which have been fully stated. In the meanwhile I venture to think, subject to correction, that, while Black Andy may have exaggerated, or Mr. Manning may have coloured his evidence by Christian terminology, and while mythical accretions on a religious belief are numerous, yet the lowest known human race has attained a religious conception very far above what savages are usually credited with, and has not done so by way of the "ghost-theory" of the anthropologists. In this creed sacrifice and ghost-worship are absent.*
It has seemed worth while to devote space and attention to the Australian beliefs, because the vast continent contains the most archaic and backward of existing races. We may not yet have a sufficient collection of facts microscopically criticised, but the evidence here presented seems deserving of attention. About the still more archaic but extinct Tasmanians and their religion, evidence is too scanty, too casual, and too conflicting for our purpose.**
* These Australian gods are confusing.
1. Daramulun is supreme among the Coast Murring. J. A. I.,
ziv. 432-459.
2. Baiame is supreme, Daramulun is an extinct bugbear,
among the Wiradthuri. J. A. I., xxv. 298.
3. Baiame is supreme, Daramulun is "mediator," among the
Kamilaroi. J. A. I., vii. 242.
** See Ling Roth's Tasmanians.
CHAPTER XIII. GODS OF THE LOWEST RACES.
Bushmen gods—Cagn, the grasshopper?—Hottentot gods—"Wounded
knee," a dead sorcerer—Melanesian gods—Qat and the spider
—Aht and Maori beasts-gods and men-gods—Samoan form of
animal-gods—One god incarnate in many animal shapes—One
for each clan—They punish the eating of certain animals.
Passing from Australia to Africa, we find few races less advanced than the Bushmen (Sa-n, "settlers," in Nama). Whatever view may be taken of the past history of the Bushmen of South Africa, it is certain that at present they are a race on a very low level of development. "Even the Hottentots," according to Dr. Bleek, "exceed the Bushmen in civilisation and political organisation".*
* See Waitz, Anthrop. Nat. Volk, ii. 323-329.
Before investigating the religious myths of the Bushmen, it must be repeated that, as usual, their religion is on a far higher level than their mythology. The conception of invisible or extra-natural powers, which they entertain and express in moments of earnest need, is all unlike the tales which they tell about their own.
Our main authorities at present for Bushman myths are contained in A Brief Account of Bushman Folk-lore, Bleek, London, 1875; and in A Glimpse into the Mythology of the Maluti Bushmen, by Mr. Orpen, Chief Magistrate, St. John's Territory, Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874. Some information may also be gleaned from the South African Folk-lore Journal, 1879-80, gods, if gods such mythical beings may be called. Thus Livingstone says: "On questioning intelligent men among the Bakwains as to their former knowledge of good and evil, of God and the future state, they have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without a tolerably clear conception on all these subjects".* Their ideas of sin were the same as Livingstone's, except about polygamy, and apparently murder. Probably there were other trifling discrepancies. But "they spoke in the same way of the direct influence exercised by God in giving rain in answer to the prayers of the rain-makers, and in granting deliverance in times of danger, as they do now, before they ever heard of white men ". This was to be expected. In short, the religion of savages, in its childlike and hopeful dependence on an invisible friend or friends, in its hope of moving him (or them) by prayer, in its belief that he (or they) "make for righteousness," is absolutely human. On the other side, as in the myths of Greece or India, stand the absurd and profane anecdotes of the gods.
* Missionary Travels, p. 158.
We now turn to a Bushman's account of the religious myths of his tribe. Shortly after the affair of Langa-libalele, Mr. Orpen had occasion to examine an unknown part of the Maluti range, the highest mountains in South Africa. He engaged a scout named Qing, son of a chief of an almost exterminated clan of hill Bushmen. He was now huntsman to King Nqusha, Morosi's son, on the Orange River, and had never seen a white man, except fighting. Thus Qing's evidence could not be much affected by European communications. Mr. Orpen secured the services of Qing, who was a young man and a mighty hunter. By inviting him to explain the wall-pictures in caves, Mr. Orpen led him on to give an account of Cagn, the chief mythical being in Bushman religion. "Cagn made all things, and we pray to him," said Qing. "At first he was very good and nice, but he got spoilt through fighting so many things." "The prayer uttered by Qing, 'in a low imploring voice,' ran thus: 'O Cagn, O Cagn, are we not your children? Do you not see our hunger? Give us food.'" Where Cagn is Qing did not know, "but the elands know. Have you not hunted and heard his cry when the elands suddenly run to his call?"* Now comes in myth. Cagn has a wife called Coti. "How came he into the world? Perhaps with those who brought the sun;... only the initiated men of that dance know these things."**
* Another Bushman prayer, a touching appeal, is given in
Alexander's Expedition, ii. 125, and a Khoi-Khoi hymn of
prayer is in Hahn, pp. 56, 57.
** Cf. Custom and Myth, pp. 41, 42. It appears that the
Bushmen, like the Egyptians and Greeks, hand down myths
through esoteric societies, with dramatic mysteries.
Cagn had two sons, Cogaz and Gcwi. He and they were "great chiefs," but used stone-pointed digging sticks to grub up edible roots! Cagn's wife brought forth a fawn, and, like Cronus when Rhea presented him with a foal, Cagn was put to it to know the nature and future fortunes of this child of his. To penetrate the future he employed the ordinary native charms and sorcery. The remainder of the myth accounts for the origin of elands and for their inconvenient wildness. A daughter of Cagn's married "snakes who were also men," the eternal confusion of savage thought. These snakes became the people of Cagn. Cagn had a tooth which was "great medicine"; his force resided in it, and he lent it to people whom he favoured. The birds (as in Odin's case) were his messengers, and brought him news of all that happened at a distance.*
* Compare with the separable vigour of Cagn, residing in his
tooth, the European and Egyptian examples of a similar
myth—the lock of hair of Minos, the hair of Samson—in
introduction to Mrs. Hunt's Grimm's Household Stories,
p. lxxv.
He could turn his sandals and clubs into dogs, and set them at his enemies. The baboons were once men, but they offended Cagn, and sang a song with the burden, "Cagn thinks he is clever"; so he drove them into desolate places, and they are accursed till this day. His strong point was his collection of charms, which, like other Bushmen and Hottentots, he kept "in his belt". He could, and did, assume animal shapes; for example, that of a bull-eland. The thorns were once people, and killed Cagn, and the ants ate him, but his bones were collected and he was revived. It was formerly said that when men died they went to Cagn, but it has been denied by later Bushmen sceptics.
Such is Qing's account of Cagn, and Cagn in myth is plainly but a successful and idealised medicine-man whose charms actually work. Dr. Bleek identifies his name with that of the mantis insect. This insect is the chief mythological personage of the Bushmen of the western province. Kággen his name is written. Dr. Bleek knew of no prayer to the mantis, but was acquainted with addresses to the sun, moon and stars. If Dr. Bleek's identification is correct, the Cagn of Qing is at once human and a sort of grasshopper, just as Pund-jel was half human, half eagle-hawk.
"The most prominent of the mythological figures," says Dr. Bleek, speaking of the Bushmen, "is the mantis." His proper name is Kaggen, but if we call him Cagn, the interests of science will not seriously suffer. His wife is the "Dasse Hyrax". Their adopted daughter is the porcupine, daughter of Khwdi hemm, the All-devourer. Like Cronus, and many other mythological persons, the All-devourer has the knack of swallowing all and sundry, and disgorging them alive. Dr. Bleek offers us but a wandering and disjointed account of the mantis or Cagn, who is frequently defeated by other animals, such as the suricat. Cagn has one point at least in common with Zeus. As Zeus was swallowed and disgorged by Cronus, so was Cagn by Khwái hemm. As Indra once entered into the body of a cow, so did Cagn enter into the body of an elephant. Dr. Bleek did not find that the mantis was prayed to, as Cagn was by Qing. The moon (like sun and stars) is, however, prayed to, and "the moon belongs to the mantis," who, indeed, made it out of his old shoe! The chameleon is prayed to for rain on occasion, and successfully.
The peculiarity of Bushman mythology is the almost absolute predominance of animals. Except "an old woman," who appears now and then in these incoherent legends, their myths have scarcely one human figure to show. Now, whether the Bushmen be deeply degenerate from a past civilisation or not, it is certain that their myths are based on their actual condition of thought, unless we prefer to say that their intellectual condition is derived from their myths. We have already derived the constant presence and personal action of animals in myth from that savage condition of the mind in which "all things, animate or inanimate, human, animal, vegetable or inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and reason" (chap. iii.). Now, there can be no doubt that, whether the Bushman mind has descended to this stage or not, in this stage it actually dwells at present. As examples we may select the following from Dr. Bleek's Bushman Folk-lore. Díalkwáin told how the death of his own wife was "foretold by the springbok and the gems-bok". Again, for examples of living belief in community of nature with animals, Dialkwain mentioned an old woman, a relation, and friend of his own, who had the power "of turning herself into a lioness". Another Bushman, Kabbo, retaining, doubtless, his wide-awake mental condition in his sleep, "dreamed of lions which talked". Another informant explained that lions talk like men "by putting their tails in their mouth".
This would have pleased Sydney Smith, who thought that "if lions would meet and growl out their observations to each other," they might sensibly improve in culture. Again, "all things that belong to the mantis can talk," and most things do belong to that famous being. In "News from Zululand,"* in a myth of the battle of Isandlwana, a blue-buck turns into a young man and attacks the British.
* Folk-lore Journal of South Africa, i. iv. 83.
These and other examples demonstrate that the belief in the personal and human character and attributes of animals still prevails in South Africa. From that living belief we derive the personal and human character and attributes of animals, which, remarkable in all mythologies, is perhaps specially prominent in the myths of the Bushmen.
Though Bushman myth is only known to us in its outlines, and is apparently gifted with even more than the due quantity of incoherence, it is perhaps plain that animals are the chief figures in this African lore, and that these Bushmen gods, if ever further developed, will retain many traces of their animal ancestry.
From the Bushmen we may turn to their near neighbours, the Hottentots or Khoi-Khoi. Their religious myths have been closely examined in Dr. Hahn's Tsuni Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi. Though Dr. Hahn's conclusions as to the origin of Hottentot myth differ entirely from our own, his collection and critical study of materials, of oral traditions, and of the records left by old travellers are invaluable. The early European settlers at the Cape found the Khoi-Khoi, that is, "The Men," a yellowish race of people, who possessed large herds of cattle, sheep and goats.* The Khoi-Khoi, as nomad cattle and sheep farmers, are on a much higher level of culture than the Bushmen, who are hunters.**
* Op. cit. i. pp. 1, 32.
** Ibid., p. 5.
The languages of the two peoples leave "no more doubt as to their primitive relationship" (p. 7). The wealth of the Khoi-Khoi was considerable and unequally distributed, a respectable proof of nascent civilisation. The rich man was called gou, aob, that is "fat". In the same way the early Greeks called the wealthy "(——————)".* As the rich man could afford many wives (which gives him a kind of "commendation" over men to whom he allots his daughters), he "gradually rose to the station of a chief".** In domestic relations, Khoi-Khoi society is "matriarchal" (pp. 19-21 ).***
* Herodotus, v. 30.
** Op. cit., p. 16.
*** But speaking of the wife, Kolb calls "the poor wretch" a
"drudge, exposed to the insults of her children",—English
transl., p. 162.
All the sons are called after the mother, the daughters after the father. Among the arts, pottery and mat-making, metallurgy and tool-making are of ancient date. A past stone age is indicated by the use of quartz knives in sacrifice and circumcision. In Khoi-Khoi society seers and prophets were "the greatest and most respected old men of the clan" (p. 24). The Khoi-Khoi of to-day have adopted a number of Indo-European beliefs and customs, and "the Christian ideas introduced by missionaries have amalgamated... with the national religious ideas and mythologies," for which reasons Dr, Hahn omits many legends which, though possibly genuine, might seem imported (pp. 30, 31).
A brief historical abstract of what was known to old travellers of Khoi-Khoi religion must now be compiled from the work of Dr. Hahn.
In 1655 Corporal Müller found adoration paid to great stones on the side of the paths. The worshippers pointed upwards and said Hette hie, probably "Heitsi Eibib," the name of a Khoi-Khoi extra-natural being. It appears (p. 37) that Heitsi Eibib "has changed names" in parts of South Africa, and what was his worship is now offered "to |Garubeb, or Tsui |Goab". In 1671 Dapper found that the Khoi-Khoi "believe there is one who sends rain on earth;... they also believe that they themselves can make rain and prevent the wind from blowing". Worship of the moon and of "erected stones" is also noticed. In 1691 Nicolas Witsen heard that the Khoi-Khoi adored a god which Dr. Hahn (p. 91) supposes to have been "a peculiar-shaped stone-fetish," such as the Basutos worship and spit at. Witsen found that the "god" was daubed with red earth, like the Dionysi in Greece. About 1705 Valentyn gathered that the people believed in "a great chief who dwells on high," and a devil; "but in carefully examining this, it is nothing else but their somsomas and spectres" (p. 38). We need not accept that opinion. The worship of a "great chief" is mentioned again in 1868. In 1719 Peter Kolb, the German Magister, published his account of the Hottentots, which has been done into English.* Kolb gives Gounja Gounja, or Gounja Ticqvoa, as the divine name; "they say he is a good man, who does nobody any hurt,... and that he dwells far above the moon ".** This corresponds to the Australian Pirnmeheal. Kolb also noted propitiation of an evil power. He observed that the Khoi-Khoi worship the mantis insect, which, as we have seen, is the chief mythical character among the Bushmen.***
* Second edition, London, 1788.
** Engl. transl., 95.
*** Engl, transl., i. 97, gives a picture of Khoi-Khoi
adoring the mantis.
Dr. Hahn remarks, "Strangely enough the Namaquas also call it |Gaunab, as they call the enemy of Tsui |Goab".* In Kolb's time, as now, the rites of the Khoi (except, apparently, their worship at dawn) were performed beside cairns of stones. If we may credit Kolb, the Khoi-Khoi are not only most fanatical adorers of the mantis, but "pay a religious veneration to their saints and men of renown departed". Thunberg (1792) noticed cairn-worship and heard of mantis-worship. In 1803 Lichtenstein saw cairn-worship. With the beginning of the present century we find in Apple-yard, Ebner and others Khoi-Khoi names for a god, which are translated "Sore-Knee" or "Wounded-Knee ".
This title is explained as originally the name of a "doctor or sorcerer" of repute, "invoked even after death," and finally converted into a deity. His enemy is Gaunab, an evil being, and he is worshipped at the cairns, below which he is believed to be buried.** About 1842 Knudsen considered that the Khoi-Khoi believed in a dead medicine-man, Heitsi Eibib, who could make rivers roll back their waves, and then walk over safely, as in the märchen of most peoples. He was also, like Odin, a "shape-shifter," and he died several times and came to life again.***
* Page 42; compare pp. 92, 125.
** Alexander, Expedition, i 166; Hahn, op. cit., pp. 69,
50, where Moffat is quoted.
*** Hahn, p. 66.
Thus the numerous graves of Heitsi Eibib are explained by his numerous deaths. In Egypt the numerous graves of Osiris were explained by the story that he was mutilated, and each limb buried in a different place. Probably both the Hottentot and the Egyptian legend were invented to account for the many worshipped cairns attributed to the same corpse.
We now reach the myths of Heitsi Eibib and Tsui |Goab collected by Dr. Hahn himself. According to the evidence of Dr. Hahn's own eyes, the working religion of the Khoi-Khoi is "a firm belief in sorcery and the arts of living medicine-men on the one hand, and, on the other, belief in and adoration of the powers of the dead" (pp. 81, 82, 112, 113). Our author tells us that he met in the wilds a woman of the "fat" or wealthy class going to pray at the grave and to the manes of her own father. "We Khoi-Khoi always, if we are in trouble, go and pray at the graves of our grandparents and ancestors." They also sing rude epic verses, accompanied by the dance in honour of men distinguished in the late Namaqua and Damara war. Now it is alleged by Dr. Hahn that prayers are offered at the graves of Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab, as at those of ancestors lately dead, and Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab within living memory were honoured by song and dance, exactly like the braves of the Damara war.
The obvious and natural inference is that Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab were and are regarded by their worshippers as departed but still helpful ancestral warriors or medicine-men. We need not hold that they ever were actual living men; they may be merely idealised figures of Khoi-Khoi wisdom and valour. Here, as elsewhere, Animism, ghost-worship, is potent, and, in proportion, theism declines.
Here Dr. Hahn offers a different explanation, founded on etymological conjecture and a philosophy of religion. According to him, the name of Tsui Goab originally meant, not wounded knee, but red dawn. The dawn was worshipped as a symbol or suggestion of the infinite, and only by forgetfulness and false interpretation of the original word did the Khoi-Khoi fall from a kind of pure theosophy to adoration of a presumed dead medicine-man. As Dr. Hahn's ingenious hypothesis has been already examined by us,* it is unnecessary again to discuss the philological basis of his argument.
Dr. Hahn not only heard simple and affecting prayers addressed to Tsui Goab, but learned from native informants that the god had been a chief, a warrior, wounded in his knee in battle with Gaunab, another chief, and that he had prophetic powers. He still watches the ways of men (p. 62) and punishes guilt. Universal testimony was given to the effect that Heitsi Eibib also had been a chief from the East, a prophet and a warrior. He apportioned, by blessings and curses, their present habits to many of the animals. Like Odin, he was a "shape-shifter," possessing the medicine-man's invariable power of taking all manner of forms. He was on one occasion born of a cow, which reminds us of a myth of Indra. By another account he was born of a virgin who tasted a certain kind of grass. This legend is of wonderfully wide diffusion among savage and semi-civilised races.**
* Custom and Myth, pp. 197-211.
** Le Fits de la Vierge, H. de Charency, Havre, 1879. A tale
of incest by Heitsi Eibib, may be compared with another in
Muir's Sanskrit Texts, iv. 39.
The tales about Tsui Goab and Heitsi Eibib are chiefly narratives of combats with animals and with the evil power in a nascent dualism, Gaunab, "at first a ghost," according to Hahn (p. 85), or "certainly nobody else but the Night" (pp. 125, 126). Here there is some inconsistency. If we regard the good power, Tsui Goab, as the Red Dawn, we are bound to think the evil power, Gaunab, a name for the Night. But Dr. Hahn's other hypothesis, that the evil power was originally a malevolent ghost, seems no less plausible. In either case, we have here an example of the constant mythical dualism which gives the comparatively good being his perpetual antagonist—the Loki to his Odin, the crow to his eagle-hawk. In brief, Hottentot myth is pretty plainly a reflection of Hottentot general ideas about ancestor worship, ghosts, sorcerers and magicians, while, in their religious aspect, Heitsi Eibib or Tsui Goab are guardians of life and of morality, fathers and friends.
A description of barbarous beliefs not less scholarly and careful than that compiled by Dr. Hahn has been published by the Rev. R. H. Codrington.* Mr. Codrington has studied the myths of the Papuans and other natives of the Melanesian group, especially in the Solomon Islands and Banks Island. These peoples are by no means in the lowest grade of culture; they are traders in their way, builders of canoes and houses, and their society is interpenetrated by a kind of mystic hierarchy, a religious Camorra. The Banks Islanders** recognise two sorts of intelligent extra-natural beings—the spirits of the dead and powers which have never been human.
* Journal Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.
** Op. cit., p. 267.
The former are Tamate, the latter Vui—ghosts and genii, we might call them. Vuis are classed by Mr. Codrington as "corporeal" and "incorporeal," but he thinks the corporeal Vuis have not human bodies. Among corporeal Vuis the chief are the beings nearest to gods in Melanesian myths—the half god, half "culture-hero," I Qat, his eleven brothers, and his familiar and assistant, Marawa. These were members of a race anterior to that of the men of to-day, and they dwelt in Vanua Levu. Though now passed away from the eyes of mortals, they are still invoked in prayer. The following appeal by a voyaging Banks Islander resembles the cry of the shipwrecked Odysseus to the friendly river:—
"Qat! Marawa! look down upon us; smooth the sea for us two, that I may go safely on the sea. Beat down for me the crests of the tide-rip; let the tide-rip settle down away from me; beat it down level that it may sink and roll away, and I may come to a quiet landing-place."
Compare the prayer of Odysseus:—
"'Hear me, O king, whosoever thou art; unto thee am I come as to one to whom prayer is made, while I flee the rebukes of Poseidon from the deep....' So spake he, and the god straightway stayed his stream and withheld his waves, and made the water smooth before him, and brought him safely to the mouth of the river."
But for Qat's supernatural power and creative exploits,* "there would be little indeed to show him other than a man". He answers almost precisely to Maui, the "the culture-hero" of New Zealand. Qat's mother either was, or, like Niobe, became a stone.
* See "Savage Myths of the Origin of Things".
He was the eldest (unlike Maui) of twelve brothers, among whom were Tongaro the Wise and Tongaro the Fool. The brothers were killed by an evil gluttonous power like Kwai Hemm and put in a food chest. Qat killed the foe and revived his brothers, as the sons of Cronus came forth alive from their father's maw. His great foe—for of course he had a foe—was Qasavara, whom he destroyed by dashing him against the solid firmament of sky. Qasavara is now a stone (like the serpent displayed by Zeus at Aulis*), on which sacrifices are made. Qat's chief friend is Marawa, a spider, or a Vui in the shape of a spider. The divine mythology of the Melanesians, as far as it has been recovered, is meagre. We only see members of a previous race, "magnified non-natural men," with a friendly insect working miracles and achieving rather incoherent adventures.
* Iliad, ii. 315-318.
Much on the same footing of civilisation as the Melanesians were the natives of Tonga in the first decade of this century. The Tongan religious beliefs were nearly akin to the ideas of the Samoans and of the Solomon Islanders. In place of Vuis they spoke of Hotooas (Atuas), and like the Vuis, those spiritual beings have either been purely spiritual from the beginning or have been incarnate in humanity and are now ghosts, but ghosts enjoying many of the privileges of gods. All men, however, have not souls capable of a separate existence, only the Egi or nobles, possess a spiritual part, which goes to Bolotoo, the land of gods and ghosts, after death, and enjoys "power similar to that of the original gods, but less".
It is open to philosophers of Mr. Herbert Spencer's school to argue that the "original gods" were once ghosts like the others, but this was not the opinion of the Tongans. They have a supreme Creator, who alone receives no sacrifice.* Both sorts of gods appear occasionally to mankind—the primitive deities particularly affect the forms of "lizards, porpoises and a species of water-snake, hence those animals are much respected".**
* Mariner, ii. 205.
** Mariner's Tonga Islands, Edin., 1827, ii 99-101.
Whether each stock of Tongans had its own animal incarnation of its special god does not appear from Mariner's narrative. The gods took human morality under their special protection, punishing the evil and rewarding the good, in this life only, not in the land of the dead. When the comfortable doctrine of eternal punishment was expounded to the Tongans by Mariner, the poor heathen merely remarked that it "was very bad indeed for the Papalangies" or foreigners. Their untutored minds, in their pagan darkness, had dreamed of no such thing. The Tongans themselves are descended from some gods who set forth on a voyage of discovery out of Bolotoo. Landing on Tonga, these adventurers were much pleased with the island, and determined to stay there; but in a few days certain of them died. They had left the deathless coasts for a world where death is native, and, as they had eaten of the food of the new realm, they would never escape the condition of mortality. This has been remarked as a widespread belief. Persephone became enthralled to Hades after tasting the mystic pomegranate of the underworld.
In Samoa Siati may not eat of the god's meat, nor Wainamoinen in Pohjola, nor Thomas the Rhymer in Fairyland. The exploring gods from Bolotoo were in the same way condemned to become mortal and people the world with mortal beings, and all about them should be méa máma, subject to decay and death.* It is remarkable, if correctly reported, that the secondary gods, or ghosts of nobles, cannot reappear as lizards, porpoises and water-snakes; this is the privilege of the original gods only, and may be an assumption by them of a conceivably totemistic aspect. The nearest approach to the idea of a permanent supreme deity is contained in the name of Táli y Toobo—"wait there, Toobo"—a name which conveys the notion perhaps of permanence or eternity. "He is a great chief from the top of the sky to the bottom of the earth."**
* Mariner, ii. 115.
** Ibid., ii. 205.
He is invoked both in war and peace, not locally, but "for the general good of the natives". He is the patron, not of any special stock or family, but of the house in which the royal power is lodged for the time. Alone of gods he is unpropitiated by food or libation, indicating that he is not evolved out of a hungry ghost. Another god, Toobo Toty or Toobo the Mariner, may be a kind of Poseidon. He preserves canoes from perils at sea. On the death of the daughter of Finow, the king in Mariner's time, that monarch was so indignant that he threatened to kill the priest of Toobo Toty. As the god is believed to inspire the priest, this was certainly a feasible way of getting at the god. But Toobo Toty was beforehand with Finow, who died himself before he could carry the war into Bolotoo.* This Finow was a sceptic; he allowed that there were gods, because he himself had occasionally been inspired by them; "but what the priests tell us about their power over mankind I believe to be all false". Thus early did the conflict of Church and State declare itself in Tonga. Human sacrifices were a result of priestcraft in Tonga, as in Greece. Even the man set to kill a child of Toobo Toa's was moved by pity, and exclaimed O iaooe chi vale! ("poor little innocent!") The priest demanded this sacrifice to allay the wrath of the gods for the slaying of a man in consecrated ground.** Such are the religious ideas of Tonga; of their mythology but little has reached us, and that is under suspicion of being coloured by acquaintance with the stories of missionaries.
* Mariner, i. 307, it 107.
** Compare the ayos of the Alcmænidæ.
The Maoris, when first discovered by Europeans, were in a comparatively advanced stage of barbarism. Their society had definite ranks, from that of the Rangatira, the chief with a long pedigree, to the slave. Their religious hymns, of great antiquity, have been collected and translated by Grey, Taylor, Bastian and others. The mere possession of such hymns, accurately preserved for an unknown number of years by oral tradition, proves that the mythical notions of the Maoris have passed through the minds of professed bards and early physical speculators. The verses, as Bastian has observed (Die Heilige Sage der Polynesier), display a close parallel to the roughest part of the early Greek cosmogonies, as expounded by Hesiod. Yet in the Maori hymns there are metaphysical ideas and processes which remind one more of Heraclitus than of Hesiod, and perhaps more of Hegel than of either. Whether we are to regard the abstract conceptions or the rude personal myths of gods such as A, the Beyond All, as representing the earlier development of Maori thought, whether one or the other element is borrowed, not original, are questions which theorists of different schools will settle in their own way to their own satisfaction. Some hymns represent the beginning of things from a condition of thought, and Socrates might have said of the Maori poets as he did of Anaxagoras, that compared with other early thinkers, they are "like sober men among drunkards". Thus one hymn of the origins runs thus:—
From the conception the increase,
From the increase the swelling,
From the swelling the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the desire.
The word became fruitful,
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering,
It brought forth Night.
From the nothing the begetting,
It produced the atmosphere which is above us.
The atmosphere above dwelt with the glowing sky,
Forthwith was produced the sun.
Then the moon sprang forth.
They were thrown up above as the chief eyes of heaven,
Then the heavens became light.
The sky which floats above dwelt with Hawaiki,*
And produced (certain islands).
* The islands of Hawaiki, being then the only land known, is
put for Papa, the earth.
Then follow genealogies of gods, down to the chief in whose family this hymn was traditional.*
* Taylor, New Zealand, pp. 110-112.
Other hymns of the same character, full of such metaphysical and abstract conceptions as "the proceeding from the nothing," are quoted at great length.
These extracts are obviously speculative rather than in any sense mythological The element of myth just shows itself when we are told that the sky dwelt with the earth and produced certain islands. But myth of a familiar character is very fully represented among the Maoris. Their mythical gods, though "mixed up with the spirits of ancestors," are great natural powers, first Heaven and Earth, Rangi and Papa, the parents of all. These are conceived as having originally been united in such a close embrace, the Heaven lying on the Earth, that between their frames all was darkness, and in darkness the younger gods, Atua, O-te-po, their children, were obliged to dwell. These children or younger gods (answering to the Cronidæ) were the god of war (Tumatauenga), the forest-god (Tane Mahuta), in shape a tree, the wind-god (Tawhiri Matea), the gods of cultivated and natural fruits, the god of ocean (Tangaroa). These gods were unable to endure the dungeon and the darkness of their condition, so they consulted together and said: "Let us seek means whereby to destroy Heaven and Earth, or to separate them from each other". The counsel of Tane Mahuta prevailed: "Let one go upwards and become a stranger to us; let the other remain below and be a parent to us". Finally, Tane Mahuta rent asunder Heaven and Earth, pushing Heaven up where he has ever since remained. The wind-god followed his father, abode with him in the open spaces of the sky, and thence makes war on the trees of the forest-god, his enemy. Tangaroa went, like Poseidon, to the great deep, and his children, the reptiles and fishes, clove part to the waters, part to the dry land. The war-god, Tu, was more of a human being than the other gods, though his "brethren" are plants, fish and reptiles. Still, Tu is not precisely the first man of New Zealand.
Though all these mythical beings are in a sense departmental gods, they yield in renown to a later child of their race, Maui, the great culture-hero, who is an advanced form of the culture-heroes, mainly theriomorphic, of the lower races.*
Maui, like many heroes of myth, was a youngest son. He was prematurely born (a similar story comes in the Brahmanic legend of the Adityas); his mother wrapped him up in her long hair and threw him out to sea. A kinsman rescued him, and he grew up to be much the most important member of his family, like Qat in his larger circle of brethren. Maui it was who snared the sun, beat him,** and taught him to run his appointed course, instead of careering at will and at any pace he chose about the heavens.
* Te-Heu-Heu, a powerful chief, described to Mr. Taylor the
departmental character of his gods. "Is there one maker of
things among Europeans? Is not one a carpenter, another a
blacksmith, another a shipbuilder? So it was in the
beginning. One made this, another that. Tane made trees, Ru
mountains, Tangaroa fish, and so forth." Taylor, New
Zealand, p. 108, note.
** The sun, when beaten, cried out and revealed his great
name, exactly as Indra did in his terror and flight after
slaying the serpent. Taylor, op. cit., p. 131.
He was the culture-hero who invented barbs for spears and hooks; he turned his brother into the first dog, whence dogs are sacred, he fished New Zealand out of the sea; he stole fire for men. How Maui performed this feat, and how he "brought death into the world and all our woe," are topics that belong to the myths of Death and of the Fire-Stealer.* Maui could not only change men into animals, but could himself assume animal shapes at will.
Such is a brief account of the ancient traditions of mythical Maori gods and of the culture-hero. In practice, the conception of Atua (or a kind of extra-natural power or powers) possesses much influence in New Zealand. All manner of spirits in all manner of forms are Atuas. "A great chief was regarded as a malignant god in life, and a still worse one after death."** Again, "after Maui came a host of gods, each with his history and wonderful deeds.... These were ancestors who became deified by their respective tribes,"***—a statement which must be regarded as theoretical.
* See La Mythologie, A. L., Paris, 1886.
** Taylor, op. cit., pp. 134, 136.
***Op. cit., p. 136.
It is odd enough, if true, that Maru should be the war-god of the southern island, and that the planet Mars is called after him Maru. "There were also gods in human forms, and others with those of reptiles.... At one period there seems to have been a mixed offspring from the same parents. Thus while Tawaki was of the human form, his brethren were taniwa and sharks; there were likewise mixed marriages among them." These legends are the natural result of that lack of distinction between man and the other things in the world which, as we demonstrated, prevails in early thought. It appears that the great mythical gods of the Maoris have not much concern with their morality. The myths are "but a magnified history of their chiefs, their wars, murders and lusts, with the addition of some supernatural powers"—such as the chiefs are very apt to claim.* In the opinion of a competent observer, the gods, or Atua, who are feared in daily life, are "spirits of the dead," and their attention is chiefly confined to the conduct of their living descendants and clansmen. They inspire courage, the leading virtue. When converted, the natives are said not to expel, but merely to subordinate their Atua, "believing Christ to be a more powerful Atua".**
* Op. cit., p. 137.
** Shortland, Trad, and Superst. of New Zealanders, 1856,
pp. 83-85.
The Maoris are perhaps the least elevated race in which a well-developed polytheism has obscured almost wholly that belief in a moral Maker which we find among the lowest savages who have but a rudimentary polytheism. When we advance to ancient civilised peoples, like the Greeks, we shall find the archaic Theism obscured, or obliterated, in a similar way.
In the beliefs of Samoa (formerly called the Navigators' Islands, and discovered by a Dutch expedition in 1722) may be observed a most interesting moment in the development of religion and myth. In many regions it has been shown that animals are worshipped as totems, and that the gods are invested with the shape of animals. In the temples of higher civilisations will be found divine images still retaining in human form certain animal attributes, and a minor worship of various beasts will be shown to have grouped itself in Greece round the altars of Zeus, or Apollo, or Demeter. Now in Samoa we may perhaps trace the actual process of the "transition," as Mr. Tylor says, "from the spirit inhabiting an individual body to the deity presiding over all individuals of a kind". In other words, whereas in Australia or America each totem-kindred reveres each animal supposed to be of its own lineage—the "Cranes" revering all cranes, the "Kangaroos" all kangaroos—in Samoa the various clans exhibit the same faith, but combine it with the belief that one spiritual deity reveals itself in each separate animal, as in a kind of avatar. For example, the several Australian totem-kindreds do not conceive that Pund-jel incarnates himself in the emu for one stock, in the crow for another, in the cockatoo for a third, and they do not by these, but by other means, attain a religious unity, transcending the diversity caused by the totemic institutions. In Samoa this kind of spiritual unity is actually reached by various stocks.
The Samoans were originally spoken of by travellers as the "godless Samoans," an example of a common error. Probably there is no people whose practices and opinions, if duly investigated, do not attest their faith in something of the nature of gods. Certainly the Samoans, far from being "godless," rather deserve the reproach of being "in all things too superstitious". "The gods were supposed to appear in some visible incarnation, and the particular thing in which his god was in the habit of appearing was to the Samoanan object of veneration."*
* Turner's Samoa, p. 17.
Here we find that the religious sentiment has already become more or less self-conscious, and has begun to reason on its own practices. In pure totemism it is their kindred animal that men revere. The Samoans explain their worship of animals, not on the ground of kinship and common blood or "one flesh" (as in Australia), but by the comparatively advanced hypothesis that a spiritual power is in the animal. "One, for instance, saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the turtle, another in the dog, another in the owl, another in the lizard," and so on, even to shell-fish. The creed so far is exactly what Garcilasso de la Vega found among the remote and ruder neighbours of the Incas, and attributed to the pre-Inca populations. "A man," as in Egypt, and in totemic countries generally, "would eat freely of what was regarded as the incarnation of the god of another man", but the incarnation of his own god he would consider it death to injure or eat. The god was supposed to avenge the insult by taking up his abode in that person's body, and causing to generate there the very thing which he had eaten until it produced death. The god used to be heard within the man, saying, "I am killing this man; he ate my incarnation". This class of tutelary deities they called aitu fale, or "gods of the house," gods of the stock or kindred. In totemistic countries the totem is respected per se, in Samoa the animal is worshipful because a god abides within him. This appears to be a theory by which the reflective Samoans have explained to themselves what was once pure totemism.
Not only the household, but the village has its animal gods or god incarnate in an animal As some Arab tribes piously bury dead gazelles, as Athenians piously buried wolves, and Egyptians cats, so in Samoa "if a man found a dead owl by the roadside, and if that happened to be the incarnation of his village god, he would sit down and weep over it, and beat his forehead with a stone till the blood came. This was supposed to be pleasing to the deity. Then the bird would be wrapped up and buried with care and ceremony, as if it were a human body. This, however, was not the death of the god." Like the solemnly sacrificed buzzard in California, like the bull in the Attic Dupolia, "he was supposed to be yet alive and incarnate in all the owls in existence".*
In addition to these minor and local divinities, the Samoans have gods of sky, earth, disease and other natural departments.** Of their origin we only know that they fell from heaven, and all were incarnated or embodied in birds, beasts, plants, stones and fishes. But they can change shapes, and appear in the moon when she is not visible, or in any other guise they choose. If in Samoa the sky-god was once on the usual level of sky-gods elsewhere, he seems now to be degenerate.
* (—————————) Porph., De Abst.t ii. 29; Samoa, p.
21.
** I am careful not to call Samoan sacred animals "Totems."
to which Mr. Tylor justly objects, but I think the Samoan
belief has Totemistic origins.
CHAPTER XIV. AMERICAN DIVINE MYTHS
Novelty of the "New World "—Different stages of culture
represented there—Question of American Monotheism—
Authorities and evidence cited—Myths examined: Eskimo,
Ahts, Thlinkeets, Iroquois, the Great Hare—Dr. Brinton's
theory of the hare—Zuni myths—Transition to Mexican
mythology.
The divine myths of the vast American continent are a topic which a lifetime entirely devoted to the study could not exhaust. At best it is only a sketch in outline that can be offered in a work on the development of mythology in general. The subject is the more interesting as anything like systematic borrowing of myths from the Old World is all but impossible, as has already been argued in chapter xi. America, it is true, may have been partially "discovered" many times; there probably have been several points and moments of contact between the New and the Old World. Yet at the time when the Spaniards landed there, and while the first conquests and discoveries were being pursued, the land and the people were to Europeans practically as novel as the races and territories of a strange planet.* But the New World only revealed the old stock of humanity in many of its familiar stages of culture, and, consequently, with the old sort of gods, and myths, and creeds.
* Reville, Hibbert Lectures, 1884, p. 8
In the evolution of politics, society, ritual, and in all the outward and visible parts of religion, the American races ranged between a culture rather below the ancient Egyptian and a rudeness on a level with Australian or Bushman institutions. The more civilised peoples, Aztecs and Peruvians, had many peculiarities in common with the races of ancient Egypt, China and India; where they fell short was in the lack of alphabet or syllabary. The Mexican MSS. are but an advanced picture-writing, more organised than that of the Ojibbeways; the Peruvian Quipus was scarcely better than the Red Indian wampum records. Mexicans and Peruvians were settled in what deserved to be called cities; they had developed a monumental and elaborately decorated architecture; they were industrious in the arts known to them, though ignorant of iron. Among the Aztecs, at least, weapons and tools of bronze, if rare, were not unknown. They were sedulous in agriculture, disciplined in war, capable of absorbing and amalgamating with conquered tribes.
In Peru the ruling family, the Incas, enjoyed all the sway of a hierarchy, and the chief Inca occupied nearly as secure a position, religious, social and political, as any Rameses or Thothmes. In Mexico, doubtless, the monarch's power was at least nominally limited, in much the same way as that of the Persian king. The royal rule devolved on the elected member of an ancient family, but once he became prince he was surrounded by imposing ceremony. In both these two civilised peoples the priesthood enjoyed great power, and in Mexico, though not so extensively, if at all, in Peru, practised an appalling ritual of cannibalism and human sacrifice. It is extremely probable, or rather certain, that both of these civilisations were younger than the culture of other American peoples long passed away, whose cities stand in colossal ruin among the forests, whose hieroglyphs seem undecipherable, and whose copper-mines were worked at an unknown date on the shore of Lake Superior. Over the origin and date of those "crowned races" it were vain to linger here. They have sometimes left the shadows of names—Toltecs and Chichimecs—and relics more marvellous than the fainter traces of miners and builders in Southern and Central Africa. The rest is silence. We shall never know why the dwellers in Palenque deserted their majestic city while "the staircases were new, the steps whole, the edges sharp, and nowhere did traces of wear and tear give certain proof of long habitation".* On a much lower level than the great urban peoples, but tending, as it were, in the same direction, and presenting the same features of state communism in their social arrangements, were, and are, the cave and cliff dwellers, the agricultural village Indians (Pueblo Indians) of New Mexico and Arizona. In the sides of the cañons towns have been burrowed, and men have dwelt in them like sand-martins in a sand-bank. The traveller views "perpendicular cliffs everywhere riddled with human habitations, which resemble the cells of a honeycomb more than anything else". In lowland villages the dwellings are built of clay and stone.
* Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 328.
"The San Juan valley is strewn with ruins for hundreds of miles; some buildings, three storeys high, of masonry, are still standing."* The Moquis, Zunis and Navahos of to-day, whose habits and religious rites are known from the works of Mr. Cushing, Mr. Matthews, and Captain John G. Bourke, are apparently descendants of "a sedentary, agricultural and comparatively cultivated race," whose decadence perhaps began "before the arrival of the Spaniards."**
Rather lower in the scale of culture than the settled Pueblo Indians were the hunter tribes of North America generally. They dwelt, indeed, in collections of wigwams which were partially settled, and the "long house" of the Iroquois looks like an approach to the communal system of the Pueblos.*** But while such races as Iroquois, Mandans and Ojibbeways cultivated the maize plant, they depended for food more than did the Pueblo peoples on success in the chase. Deer, elk, buffalo, the wild turkey, the bear, with ducks and other birds, supplied the big kettle with its contents. Their society was totemistic, as has already been described; kinship, as a rule, was traced through the female line; the Sachems or chiefs and counsellors were elected, generally out of certain totem-kindreds; the war-chiefs were also elected when a military expedition started on the war-path; and Jossakeeds or medicine-men (the title varied in different dialects) had no small share of secular power.
*Nadaillac, p. 222.
** Ibid., p. 257. See Bourke's Snake-Dance of the Natives of
Arizona, and the fifth report of the Archaeological
Institute of America, with an account of the development of
Pueblo buildings. It seems scarcely necessary to discuss Mr.
Lewis Morgan's attempt to show that the Aztecs of Cortes's
time were only on the level of the modern Pueblo Indians.
*** Mr. Lewis Morgan's valuable League of the Iroquois and
the Iroquois Book of Rites (Brinton, Philadelphia, 1883) may
be consulted.
In war these tribes displayed that deliberate cruelty which survived under the Aztec rulers as the enormous cannibal ritual of human sacrifice. A curious point in Red Indian custom was the familiar institution of scalping the slain in war. Other races are head-hunters, but scalping is probably peculiar to the Red Men and the Scythians.*
* Herodotus, iv. 64.
On a level, yet lower than that of the Algonkin and other hunter tribes, are the American races whom circumstances have driven into desolate infertile regions; who live, like the Ahts, mainly on fish; like the Eskimos, in a world of frost and winter; or like the Fuegians, on crustaceans and seaweed. The minute gradations of culture cannot be closely examined here, but the process is upwards, from people like the Fuegians and Diggers, to the builders of the kitchen-middens—probably quite equals of the Eskimos***—and so through the condition of Ahts.
*** Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 66.
The resemblance between Scythian and Red Indian manners exercised the learned in the time of Grotius. It has been acutely remarked by J. G. Müller, that in America one stage of society, as developed in the Old World, is absent. There is no pastoral stage. The natives had neither domesticated kine, goats nor sheep. From this lack of interest in the well-being of the domesticated lower animals he is inclined to deduce the peculiarly savage cruelty of American war and American religion. Sympathy was undeveloped. Possibly the lack of tame animals may have encouraged the prevalence of human sacrifice. The Brahmana shows how, in Hindostan, the lower animals became vicarious substitutes for man in sacrifice, as the fawn of Artemis or the ram of Jehovah took the place of Iphigenia or of Isaac. Cf. J. G. Müller, Oeschichte der Amerikanisehen Urreligionen, pp. 22, 23.
Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and other rude tribes of the North-west Pacific Coast, to that of Sioux, Blackfeet, Mandans, Iroquois, and then to the settled state of the Pueblo folk, the southern comforts of the Natchez, and finally to the organisation of the Mayas, and the summit occupied by the Aztecs and Incas.
Through the creeds of all these races, whether originally of the same stock or not, run many strands of religious and mythical beliefs—the very threads that are woven into the varied faiths of the Old World. The dread of ghosts; the religious adoration paid to animals; the belief in kindred and protecting beasts; the worship of inanimate objects, roughly styled fetishes; a certain reverence for the great heavenly bodies, sun, moon and Pleiades; a tendency to regard the stars, with all other things and phenomena, as animated and personal—with a belief in a Supreme Creator, these are the warp, as it were, of the fabric of American religion.*
* The arguments against the borrowing of the Creator from
missionaries have already been stated.
In one stage of culture one set of those ideas may be more predominant than in another stage, but they are present in all. The zoo-morphic or theriomorphic mythologies and creeds are nowhere more vivacious than in America. Not content with the tribal zoomorphic guardian and friend, the totem, each Indian was in the habit of seeking for a special animal protector of his own. This being, which he called his Manitou, revealed itself to him in the long fasts of that savage sacrament which consecrates the entrance on full manhood. Even in the elaborate religions of the civilised races, Peruvians and Aztecs, the animal deities survive, and sacred beasts gather in the shrine of Pachacamac, or a rudimentary remnant of ancestral beak or feather clings to the statue of Huitzilopochtli. But among the civilised peoples, in which the division of labour found its place and human ranks were minutely discriminated, the gods too had their divisions and departments. An organised polytheism prevailed, and in the temples of Centeotl and Tlazolteotl, Herodotus or Pausanias would have readily recognised the Demeter and the Aphrodite of Mexico.
There were departmental gods, and there was even an obvious tendency towards the worship of one spiritual deity, the Bretwalda of all the divine kings, a god on his way to becoming single and supreme. The religions and myths of America thus display, like the myths and religions of the Old World, the long evolution of human thought in its seeking after God. The rude first draughts of Deity are there, and they are by no means effaced in the fantastic priestly designs of departmental divinities.
The question of a primitive American monotheism has been more debated than even that of the "Heno-theism" of the Aryans in India. On this point it must be said that, in a certain sense, probably any race of men may be called monotheistic, just as, in another sense, Christians who revere saints may be called polytheistic.*
* Gaidoz, Revue Critique, March, 1887.
It has been constantly set forth in this work that, in moments of truly religious thought, even the lowest tribes turn their minds towards a guardian, a higher power, something which watches and helps the race of men. This mental approach towards the powerful friend is an aspiration, and sometimes a dogma; it is religious, not mythological; it is monotheistic, not polytheistic. The Being appealed to by the savage in moments of need or despair may go by a name which denotes a hawk, or a spider, or a grasshopper, but we may be pretty sure that little thought of such creatures is in the mind of the worshipper in his hour of need.*
* There are exceptions, as when the Ojibbeway, being in
danger, appeals to his own private protecting Manitou,
perhaps a wild duck; or when the Zuni cries to "Ye animal
gods, my fathers!" (Bureau of Ethnol., 1880-81, p. 42.) Thus
we can scarcely agree entirely with M. Maurice Vernes when
he says, "All men are monotheistic in the fervour of
adoration or in moments of deep thought". (L'Histoire des
Religions, Paris, 1887, p. 61.) The tendency of adoration
and of speculation is, however, monotheistic.
Again, the most ludicrous or infamous tales may be current about the adventures and misadventures of the grasshopper or the hawk. He may be, as mythically conceived, only one out of a crowd of similar magnified non-natural men or lower animals. But neither his companions nor his legend are likely to distract the thoughts of the Bushman who cries to Cagn for food, or of the Murri who tells his boy that Pund-jel watches him from the heavens, or of the Solomon Islander who appeals to Qat as he crosses the line of reefs and foam. Thus it may be maintained that whenever man turns to a guardian not of this world, not present to the senses, man is for the moment a theist, and often a monotheist. But when we look from aspiration to doctrine, from the solitary ejaculation to ritual, from religion to myth, it would probably be vain to suppose that an uncontaminated belief in one God only, the maker and creator of all things, has generally prevailed, either in America or elsewhere. Such a belief, rejecting all minor deities, consciously stated in terms and declared in ritual, is the result of long ages and efforts of the highest thought, or, if once and again the intuition of Deity has flashed on some lonely shepherd or sage like an inspiration, his creed has usually been at war with the popular opinions of men, and has, except in Islam, won its disciples from the learned and refined. America seems no exception to so general a rule.
An opposite opinion is very commonly entertained, because the narratives of missionaries, and even the novels of Cooper and others, have made readers familiar with such terms as "the Great Spirit" in the mouths of Pawnees or Mohicans. On the one hand, taking the view of borrowing, Mrs. E. A. Smith says: "'The Great Spirit,' so popularly and poetically know as the God of the Red Man,' and 'the happy hunting-ground,' generally reported to be the Indian's idea of a future state, are both of them but their ready conception of the white man's God and heaven".* Dr. Brinton, too,** avers that "the Great Spirit is a post-Christian conception." In most cases these terms are entirely of modern origin, coined at the suggestion of missionaries, applied to the white man's God....
* Bureau of Ethnology's Second Report, p. 52.
** Myths of the New World, New York, 1876, p. 58.
The Jesuits' Relations state positively that there was "no one immaterial God recognised by the Algonkin tribes, and that the title 'The Great Manito' was introduced first by themselves in its personal sense." The statement of one missionary cannot be taken, of course, to bind all the others. The Pere Paul le Jeune remarks: "The savages give the name of Manitou to whatsoever in nature, good or evil, is superior to man. Therefore when we speak of God, they sometimes call him 'The Good Manitou,' that is, 'The Good Spirit'."* The same Pere Paul le Jeune** says that by Manitou his flock meant un ange ou quelque nature puissante. Il y'en a de bons et de mauvais. The evidence of Pere Hierosme Lallemant*** has already been alluded to, but it may be as well to repeat that, while he attributes to the Indians a kind of unconscious religious theism, he entirely denies them any monotheistic dogmas. With Tertullian, he writes, Exclamant vocem naturaliter Christianam. "To speak truth, these peoples have derived from their fathers no knowledge of a god, and before we set foot in their country they had nothing but vain fables about the origin of the world. Nevertheless, savages as they were, there did abide in their hearts a secret sentiment of divinity, and of a first principle, author of all things, whom, not knowing, they yet invoked. In the forest, in the chase, on the water, in peril by sea, they call him to their aid."
* Relations de la Novelle France, 1637, p. 49.
** Relations, 1633, p. 17.
*** 1648, p. 77.
This guardian, it seems, receives different names in different circumstances. Myth comes in; the sky is a God; a Manitou dwelling in the north sends ice and snow; another dwells in the waters, and many in the winds.* The Pere Allouez** says, "They recognise no sovereign of heaven or earth". Here the good father and all who advocate a theory of borrowing are at variance with Master Thomas Heriot, "that learned Mathematician" (1588). In Virginia "there is one chiefe god, that has beene from all eternitie," who "made other gods of a principal order".*** Near New Plymouth, Kiehtan was the chief god, and the souls of the just abode in his mansions.**** We have already cited Alione, and shown that he and the other gods found by the first explorers, are certainly not of Christian origin.
* The Confessions of Kah-ge-ga-gah Bowh, a converted Crane
of the Ojibbeways, may be rather a suspicious document. Kah,
to shorten his noble name, became a preacher and platform-
speaker of somewhat windy eloquence, according to Mr.
Longfellow, who had heard him. His report is that in youth
he sought the favour of the Manitous (Mon-e-doos he calls
them), but also revered Ke-sha-mon-e-doo, the benevolent
spirit, "who made the earth with all its variety and smiling
beauty". But his narrative is very unlike the Indian account
of the manufacture of the world by this or that animal,
already given in "Myths of the Origin of Things". The
benevolent spirit, according to Kah's father, a medicine-
man, dwelt in the sun (Copway, Recollections of a Forest
Life, London, s. a. pp. 4, 5). Practical and good-natured
actions of the Great Spirit are recorded on p. 35. He
directs starving travellers by means of dreams.
** Relations, 1667, p. 1.
*** Arber, Captain John Smith, p. 321.
**** Op. cit., p. 768.
A curious account of Red Indian religion may be extracted from a work styled A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner during a Thirty Years' Residence among the Indians (New York, 1830). Tanner was caught when a boy, and lived as an Indian, even in religion. The Great Spirit constantly appears in his story as a moral and protecting deity, whose favour and help may be won by "prayers, which are aided by magical ceremonies and dances. Tanner accepted and acted on this part of the Indian belief, while generally rejecting the medicine men, who gave themselves out for messengers or avaters of the Great Spirit. Tanner had frequent visions of the Great Spirit in the form of a handsome young man, who gave him information about the future. "Do I not know," said the appearance, "when you are hungry and in distress? I look down upon you at all times, and it is not necessary you should call me with such loud cries". (p. 189).
Almost all idea of a tendency towards monotheism vanishes when we turn from the religions to the myths of the American peoples. Doubtless it may be maintained that the religious impulse or sentiment never wholly dies, but, after being submerged in a flood of fables, reappears in the philosophic conception of a pure deity entertained by a few of the cultivated classes of Mexico and Peru. But our business just now is with the flood of fables. From north to south the more general beliefs are marked with an early dualism, and everywhere are met the two opposed figures of a good and a bad extra-natural being in the shape of a man or beast. The Eskimos, for example, call the better being Torngarsuk. "They don't all agree about his form or aspect. Some say he has no form at all; others describe him as a great bear, or as a great man with one arm, or as small as a finger. He is immortal, but might be killed by the intervention of the god Crepitus."*
* The circumstances in which this is possible may be sought
for in Crantz, History of Greenland, London, 1767, vol. i.
p. 200
"The other great but malignant spirit is a nameless female," the wife or mother of Torngarsuk. She dwells under the sea in a habitation guarded by a Cerberus of her own, a huge dog, which may be surprised, for he sleeps for one moment at a time. Torngarsuk is not the maker of all things, but still is so much of a deity that many, "when they hear of God and his omnipotence, are readily led to the supposition that probably we mean their Torngarsuk ". All spirits are called Torngak, and soak = great; hence the good spirit of the Eskimos in his limited power is "the Great Spirit".* In addition to a host of other spirits, some of whom reveal themselves affably to all, while others are only accessible to Angakut or medicine-men, the Eskimos have a Pluto, or Hades, or Charos of their own. He is meagre, dark, sullen, and devours the bowels of the ghosts. There are spirits of fire, water, mountains, winds; there are dog-faced demons, and the souls of abortions become hideous spectres, while the common ghost of civilised life is familiar. The spirit of a boy's dead mother appeared to him in open day, and addressed him in touching language: "Be not afraid; I am thy mother, and love thee!" for here, too, in this frozen and haunted world, love is more strong than death.**
Eskimo myth is practical, and, where speculative, is concerned with the fortunes of men, alive or dead, as far as these depend on propitiating the gods or extra-natural beings. The Eskimo myth of the origin of death would find its place among the other legends of this sort.***
* Crantz, op. cit., i. 207. note.
** Op. cit., i. 209
*** Cf. Modern Mythology, "The Origin of Death".
As a rule, Eskimo myth, as far as it has been investigated, rather resembles that of the Zulus. Märchen or romantic stories are very common; tales about the making of things and the actions of the pre-human beings are singularly scarce. Except for some moon and star myths, and the tale of the origin of death, hardly any myths, properly so called, are reported. "Only very scanty traces," says Rink, "have been found of any kind of ideas having been formed as to the origin and early history of the world and the ruling powers or deities."*
* He adds that this "seems sufficiently to show that such
mythological speculations have been, in respect to other
nations, also the product of a later stage of culture". That
this position is erroneous is plain from the many myths here
collected from peoples lower in culture than the Eskimos.
Cf. Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimos.
Turning from the Eskimos to the Ahts of Vancouver's Island, we find them in possession of rather a copious mythology. Without believing exactly in a supreme, they have the conception of a superior being, Quawteaht, no mere local nor tribal deity, but known in every village, like Osiris in Egypt. He is also, like Osiris and Baiame, the chief of a beautiful, far-off, spiritual country, but he had his adventures and misadventures while he dwelt on earth. The malevolent aspect of things—storms, disease and the rest—is either Quawteaht enraged, or the manifestation of his opponent in the primitive dualism, Tootooch or Chay-her, the Hades or Pluto of the Ahts. Like Hades, Chay-her is both a person and a place—the place of the dead discomforted, and the ruler of that land, a boneless form with a long grey beard. The exploits of Quawteaht in the beginning of things were something between those of Zeus and of Prometheus.
"He is the general framer—I do not say creator of all things, though some special things are excepted."* Quawteaht, in the legend of the loon (who was once an injured Indian, and still wails his wrongs), is represented as conscious of the conduct of men, and as prone to avenge misdeeds.** In person Quawteaht was of short stature, with very strong hairy arms and legs.*** There is a touch of unconscious Darwinism in this description of "the first Indian". In Quawteaht mingle the rough draughts of a god and of an Adam, a creator and a first man. This mixture is familiar in the Zulu Unkulunkulu. Unlike Prometheus, Quawteaht did not steal the seed of fire. It was stolen by the cuttlefish, and in some legends Quawteaht was the original proprietor. Like most gods, he could assume the form of the beasts, and it was in the shape of a great whale that he discomfited his opponent Tootooch.*** It does not appear that Tootooch receives any worship or adoration, such as is offered to the sun and moon.
* Sproat, Savage Life, London, 1868, p. 210.
** Op. cit., p. 182.
***Ibid. i. p. 179.
Leaving the Ahts for the Thlinkeets, we find Yehl, the god or hero of the introduction of the arts, who, like the Christ of the Finnish epic or Maui in New Zealand, was born by a miraculous birth. His mother was a Thlinkeet woman, whose boys had all been slain. As she wandered disconsolate by the sea-shore, a dolphin or whale, taking pity upon her. bade her drink a little salt water and swallow a pebble. She did so, and in due time bore a child, Yehl, the hero of the Thlinkeets. Once, in his youth, Yehl shot a supernatural crane, skinned it, and whenever he wished to fly, clothed himself in the bird's skin. Yet he is always known as a raven. Hence there is much the same confusion between Yehl and the bird as between Amun in Egypt and the ram in whose skin he was once pleased to reveal himself to a mortal. In Yehl's youth occurred the deluge, produced by the curse of an unfriendly uncle of his own; but the deluge was nothing to Yehl, who flew up to heaven, and anchored himself to a cloud by his beak till the waters abated. Like most heroes of his kind, Yehl brought light to men. The heavenly bodies in his time were kept in boxes by an old chief. Yehl, by an ingenious stratagem, got possession of the boxes. To fly up to the firmament with the treasure, to open the boxes, and to stick stars, sun and moon in their proper places in the sky, was to the active Yehl the work of a moment.
Fire he stole, like Prometheus, carrying a brand in his beak till he reached the Thlinkeet shore. There the fire dropped on stones and sticks, from which it is still obtained by striking the flints or rubbing together the bits of wood. Water, like fire, was a monopoly in those days, and one Khanukh kept all of it in his own well. Khanukh was the ancestor of the Wolf family among the Thlinkeets, as Yehl is the first father of the stock called Ravens. The wolf and raven thus answer to the mythic creative crow and cockatoo in Australian mythology, and take sides in the primitive dualism. When Yehl went to steal water from Khanukh, the pair had a discussion, exactly like that between Joukahainen and Waina-moinen in the epic of the Finns, as to which of them had been longer in the world. "Before the world stood in its place, I was there," says Yehl; and Wainamoinen says, "When earth was made, I was there; when space was unrolled, I launched the sun on his way". Similar boasts occur in the poems of Empedocles and of Taliesin. Khanukh, however, proved to be both older and more skilled in magic than Yehl. Yet the accomplishment of flying once more stood Yehl in good stead, and he carried off the water, as Odin, in the form of a bird, stole Suttung's mead, by flying off with it in his beak. Yehl then went to his own place.*
In the myths of the other races on the North-west Pacific Coast nothing is more remarkable than the theriomorphic character of the heroes, who are also to a certain extent gods and makers of things.
The Koniagas have their ancestral bird and dog, demiurges, makers of sea, rivers, hills, yet subject to "a great deity called Schljam Schoa," of whom they are the messengers and agents.** The Aleuts have their primeval dog-hero, and also a great old man, who made people, like Deucalion, and as in the Macusi myth, by throwing stones over his shoulder.***
* Bancroft, iii. 100-102 [Holmberg, Eth. Skiz., p. 61].
** Ibid., 104, quoting Dall's Alaska, p. 405, and
Lisiansky's Voyage, pp. 197, 198.
*** Brett's Indians of Guiana, p. 384.
Concerning the primal mythical beings of the great hunter and warrior tribes of America, Algonkins, Hurons and Iroquois, something has already been said in the chapter on "Myths of the Origin of Things".
It is the peculiarity of such heroes or gods of myth as the opposing Red Indian good and evil deities that they take little part in the affairs of the world when once these have been started.* Ioskeha and Tawiscara, the good and bad primeval brothers, have had their wars, and are now, in the opinion of some, the sun and the moon.** The benefits of Ioskeha to mankind are mainly in the past; as, for example, when, like another Indra, he slew the great frog that had swallowed the waters, and gave them free course over earth.***
* Erminie Smith, in Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1880-
81, publishes a full, but not very systematic, account of
Iroquois gods of to-day. Thunder, the wind, and echo are the
chief divine figures. The Titans or Jotuns, the opposed
supernatural powers, are giants of stone. "Among the most
ancient of the deities were their most remote ancestors,
certain animals who later were transformed into human
shapes, the name of the animals being preserved by their
descendants, who have used them to designate their gentes or
clans." The Iroquois have a strange and very touching
version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (op. cit., p.
104). It appears to be native and unborrowed; all the
details are pure Iroquois.
** Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, p. 102.
*** Ibid. i. p. 108.
Ioskeha is still so far serviceable that he "makes the pot boil," though this may only be a way of recalling the benefits conferred on man by him when he learned from the turtle how to make fire. Ioskeha, moreover is thanked for success in the chase, because he let loose the animals from the cave in which they lived at the beginning. As they fled he spoiled their speed by wounding them with arrows; only one escaped, the wind-swift wolf. Some devotees regarded Ioskeha as the teacher of agriculture and the giver of great harvests of maize. In 1635 Ioskeha was seen, all meagre and skeleton-like, tearing a man's leg with his teeth, a prophecy of famine. A more agreeable apparition of loskeha is reported by the Pere Barthelemy Vimont.* When an Iroquois was fishing, "a demon appeared to him in the shape of a tall and beautiful young man. 'Be not afraid,' said this spirit; 'I am the master of earth, whom you Hurons worship under the name of Ioskeha; the French give me the erroneous name of Jesus, but they know me not.'" Ioskeha then gave some directions for curing the small-pox. The Indian's story is, of course, coloured by what he knew of missionary teaching, but the incident should be compared with the "medicine dream" of John Tanner.
The sky, conceived as a person, held a place rather in the religion than in the mythology of the Indians. He was approached with prayer and sacrifice, and "they implored the sky in all their necessities".** "The sky hears us," they would say in taking an oath, and they appeased the wrath of the sky with a very peculiar semi-cannibal sacrifice.***
* Relations, 1640, p. 92.
** Op. cit. i. 1636, p. 107.
*** For Pawnees and Blackfeet see Grinnell, Pawnee and
Blackfoot Legends (2 vols.).
What Ioskeha was to the Iroquois, Michabo or Manibozho was to the Algonkin tribes. There has been a good deal of mystification about Michabo or Manibozho, or Messou, who was probably, in myth, a hare sans phrase, but who has been converted by philological processes into a personification of light or dawn. It has already been seen that the wild North Pacific peoples recognise in their hero and demiurge animals of various species; dogs, ravens, muskrats and coyotes have been found in this lofty estimation, and the Utes believe in "Cin-au-av, the ancient of wolves".* It would require some labour to derive all the ancient heroes and gods from misconceptions about the names of vast natural phenomena like light and dawn, and it is probable that Michabo or Mani-bozho, the Great Hare of the Algonkins, is only a successful apotheosised totem like the rest. His legend and his dominion are very widely spread. Dr. Brinton himself (p. 153) allows that the great hare is a totem. Perhaps our earliest authority about the mythical great hare in America is William Strachey's Travaile into Virginia.**
* Powell, in Bureau of Ethnology, 1879-80, p. 43.
** Circa 1612; reprinted by the Hakjuyt Society.
Among other information as to the gods of the natives, Strachey quotes the remarks of a certain Indian: "We have five gods in all; our chief god appears often unto us in the likeness of a mighty great hare; the other four have no visible shape, but are indeed the four wynds". An Indian, after hearing from the English the Biblical account of the creation, explained that "our god, who takes upon him the shape of a hare,... at length devised and made divers men and women". He also drove away the cannibal Manitous. "That godlike hare made the water and the fish and a great deare." The other four gods, in envy, killed the hare's deer. This is curiously like the Bushman myth of Cagn, the mantis insect, and his favourite eland. "The godly hare's house" is at the place of sun-rising; there the souls of good Indians "feed on delicious fruits with that great hare," who is clearly, so far, the Virginian Osiris.* Dr. Brinton has written at some length on "this chimerical beast," whose myth prevails, he says, "from the remotest wilds of the North-west to the coast of the Atlantic, from the southern boundary of Carolina to the cheerless swamps of Hudson's Bay.... The totem" (totem-kindred probably is meant) "clan which bore his name was looked up to with peculiar respect." From this it would appear that the hare was a totem like another, and had the same origin, whatever that may have been. According to the Pere Allouez, the Indians "ont en veneration toute particuliere, une certaine beste chimerique, qu'ils n'ont jamais veue sinon en songe, ils Tappelient Missibizi," which appears to be a form of Michabo and Mani-bozho.**
* History of Travaile, pp. 98, 99. This hare we have
alluded to in vol. i. p. 184, but it seems worth while again
to examine Dr. Brinton's theory more closely.
** Relations, 1637, p. 13
In 1670 the same Pere Allouez gives some myths about Michabo. "C'est-a-dire le grand lievre," who made the world, and also invented fishing-nets. He is the master of life, and can leap eight leagues at one bound, and is beheld by his servants in dreams. In 1634 Pere Paul le Jeune gives a longer account of Messou, "a variation of the same name," according to Dr. Brinton, as Michabo. This Messou reconstructed the drowned world out of a piece of clay brought him by an otter, which succeeded after the failure of a raven sent out by Messou. He afterwards married a muskrat, by whom he became the father of a flourishing family. "Le brave reparateur de l'univers est le frere aisné de toutes les bestes," says the mocking missionary.* Messou has the usual powers of shape-shifting, which are the common accomplishments of the medicine-man or conjuror, se transformant en mille sortes d'animaux.** He is not so much a creator as a demiurge, inferior to a mysterious being called Atahocan. But Atahocan is obsolescent, and his name is nearly equivalent to an old wife's fable, a story of events au temps jadis.*** "Le mot Nitatoho-can signifie, 'Je dis un vieux conte fait à plaisir'."
* Relations, 1634, p. 13.
** Op. cit., 1633, p. 16.
*** Op. cit., 1634, p. 13.
These are examples of the legends of Michabo or Manibozho, the great hare. He appears in no way to differ from the other animals of magical renown, who, in so many scores of savage myths, start the world on its way and instruct men in the arts. His fame may be more widely spread, but his deeds are those of eagle, crow, wolf, coyote, spider, grasshopper, and so forth, in remote parts of the world. His legend is the kind of legend whose origin we ascribe to the credulous fancy of early peoples, taking no distinction between themselves and the beasts. If the hare was indeed the totem of a successful and honoured kindred, his elevation is perfectly natural and intelligible.
Dr. Brinton, in his Myths of the New World (New York, 1876), adopts a different line of explanation. Michabo, he says, "was originally the highest divinity recognised by them, powerful and beneficent beyond all others, maker of the heavens and the world". We gladly welcome him in that capacity in religion. But it has already been shown that Michabo is only, in myth, the reparateur de l'univers, and that he has a sleeping partner—a deity retired from business. Moreover, Dr. Brinton's account of Michabo, "powerful and beneficent beyond all others, maker of the heavens and the world," clashes with his own statement, that "of monotheism as displayed in the one personal definite God of the Semitic races" (to whom Dr. Brinton's description of Michabo applies) "there is not a single instance on the American continent."* The residences and birthplaces of Michabo are as many as those of the gods of Greece. It is true that in some accounts, as in Strachey's, "his bright home is in the rising sun". It does not follow that the hare had any original connection with the dawn. But this connection Dr. Brinton seeks to establish by philological arguments. According to this writer, the names (Manibozho, Nanibozhu, Missibizi, Michabo, Messou) "all seem compounded, according to well-ascertained laws of Algonkin euphony, from the words corresponding to great and hare or rabbit, or the first two perhaps from spirit and hare".** But this seeming must not be trusted. We must attentively examine the Algonkin root wab, when it will appear "that in fact there are two roots having this sound. One is the initial syllable of the word translated hare or rabbit, but the other means white, and from it is derived the words for the east, the dawn, the light, the day, and the morning. Beyond a doubt (sic) this is the compound in the names Michabo and Manibozho, which therefore mean the great light, the spirit of light, of the dawn, or the east."
* Relations, pp. 63, 176.
** Op. cit., p. 178.
Then the war of Manibozho became the struggle of light and darkness. Finally, Michabo is recognised by Dr. Brinton as "the not unworthy personification of the purest conceptions they possessed concerning the Father of All,"* though, according to Dr. Brinton in an earlier passage, they can hardly be said to have possessed such conceptions.** We are not responsible for these inconsistencies. The degeneracy to the belief in a "mighty great hare," a "chimerical beast," was the result of a misunderstanding of the root wab in their own language by the Algonkins, a misunderstanding that not only affected the dialects in which the root wab occurred in the hare's name, but those in which it did not!
On the whole, the mythology of the great hunting and warrior tribes of North America is peopled by the figures of ideal culture-heroes, partly regarded as first men, partly as demiurges and creators. They waver in outward aspect between the beautiful youths of the "medicine-dreams" and the bestial guise of totems and protecting animals. They have a tendency to become identified with the sun, like Osiris in Egypt, or with the moon. They are adepts in all the arts of the medicine-man, and they are especially addicted to animal metamorphosis. In the long winter evenings, round the camp-fire, the Indians tell such grotesque tales of their pranks and adventures as the Greeks told of their gods, and the Middle Ages of the saints.***
* Relations, p. 183.
** Op. cit., p. 53.
*** A full collection of these, as they survive in oral
tradition, with an obvious European intermixture, will be
found in Mr. Leland's Algonquin Legends, London, 1884, and
in Schoolcraft's Hiawatha Legends, London, 1856. See
especially the Manibozho legend.
The stage in civilisation above that of the hunter tribes is represented in the present day by the settled Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona. Concerning the faith of the Zunis we fortunately possess an elaborate account by Mr. Frank Cushing.* Mr. Cushing was for long a dweller in the clay pueblos of the Zuñis, and is an initiated member of their sacred societies. He found that they dealt at least as freely in metaphysics as the Maoris, and that, like the Australians, "they suppose sun, moon and stars, the sky, earth and sea, in all their phenomena and elements, and all inanimate objects, as well as plants, animals and men, to belong to one great system of all conscious and interrelated life, in which the degrees of relationship seem to be determined largely, if not wholly, by the degrees of resemblance". This, of course, is stated in terms of modern self-conscious speculation. When much the same opinions are found among the Kamilaroi and Kurnai of Australia, they are stated thus: "Some of the totems divide not mankind only, but the whole universe into what may almost be called gentile divisions".**
* Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1880-81.
** Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 167.(p. 170). Mrs. Langloh
Parker, in a letter to me, remarks that Baiame alone is
outside of this conception, and is common to all classes,
and totems, and class divisions.
"Everything in nature is divided between the classes. The wind belongs to one and the rain to another. The sun is Wutaroo and the moon is Yungaroo.... The South Australian savage looks upon the universe as the great tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs, and all things, animate or inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate, whereof he himself is part. They are almost parts of himself".
Manifestly this is the very condition of mind out of which mythology, with all existing things acting as dramatis personæ, must inevitably arise.
The Zuni philosophy, then, endows all the elements and phenomena of nature with personality, and that personality is blended with the personality of the beast "whose operations most resemble its manifestation". Thus lightning is figured as a serpent, and the serpent holds a kind of mean position between lightning and man. Strangely enough, flint arrow-heads, as in Europe, are regarded as the gift of thunder, though the Zunis have not yet lost the art of making, nor entirely abandoned, perhaps, the habit of using them. Once more, the supernatural beings of Zuni religion are almost invariably in the shape of animals, or in monstrous semi-theriomorphic form. There is no general name for the gods, but the appropriate native terms mean "creators and masters," "makers," and "finishers," and "immortals". All the classes of these, including the class that specially protects the animals necessary to men, "are believed to be related by blood ". But among these essences, the animals are nearest to man, most accessible, and therefore most worshipped, sometimes as mediators. But the Zuni has mediators even between him and his animal mediators, and these are fetishes, usually of stone, which accidentally resemble this or that beast-god in shape. Sometimes, as in the Egyptian sphinx, the natural resemblance of a stone to a living form has been accentuated and increased by art. The stones with a natural resemblance to animals are most valued when they are old and long in use, and the orthodox or priestly theory is that they are petrifactions of this or that beast. Flint arrow-heads and feathers are bound about them with string.
All these beliefs and practices inspire the Zuñi epic, which is repeated, at stated intervals, by the initiated to the neophytes. Mr. Cushing heard a good deal of this archaic poem in his sacred capacity. The epic contains a Zuñi cosmogony. Men, as in so many other myths, originally lived in the dark places of earth in four caverns. Like the children of Uranus and Gæa, they murmured at the darkness. The "holder of the paths of life," the sun, now made two beings out of his own substance; they fell to the earth, armed with rainbow and lightning, a shield and a magical flint knife. The new-comers cut the earth with a flint-knife, as Qat cut the palpable dark with a blade of red obsidian in Melanesia. Men were then lifted through the hole on the shield, and began their existence in the sunlight, passing gradually through the four caverns. Men emerged on a globe still very wet; for, as in the Iroquois and other myths, there had been a time when "water was the world ". The two benefactors dried the earth and changed the monstrous beasts into stones. It is clear that this myth accounts at once for the fossil creatures found in the rocks and for the merely accidental resemblance to animals of stones now employed as fetishes.* In the stones is believed to survive the "medicine" or magic, the spiritual force of the animals of old.
* Report, etc, p. 15.
The Zuñis have a culture-hero as usual, Po'shai-an-k'ia, who founded the mysteries, as Demeter did in Greece, and established the sacred orders. He appeared in human form, taught men agriculture, ritual, and then departed. He is still attentive to prayer. He divided the world into regions, and gave the animals their homes and functions, much as Heitsi Eibib did in Namaqualand. These animals carry out the designs of the culture-hero, and punish initiated Zuñis who are careless of their religious duties and ritual. The myths of the sacred beasts are long and dismal, chiefly aetiological, or attempts to account by a fictitious narrative for the distribution and habits of the various creatures. Zuñi prayers are mainly for success in the chase; they are directed to the divine beasts, and are reinforced by magical ceremonies. Yet a prayer for sport may end with such a truly religious petition as this: "Grant me thy light; give me and my children a good trail across life ". Again we read: "This day, my fathers, ye animal gods, although this country be filled with enemies, render me precious.... Oh, give ye shelter of my heart from them!" Yet in religious hymns the Zuñis celebrate Ahonawilona, "the Maker and Container of All, the All Father," the uncreated, the unbegotten, who "thought himself out into space". Here is monotheism among fetishists.*
* Cushing, Report, Ethnol. Bureau, 1891-92, p. 379.
The faith of the Zuñis, with its metaphysics, its devoutness and its magic ritual, may seem a kind of introduction to the magic, the ritual and the piety of the ancient Aztecs. The latter may have grown, in a long course of forgotten ages, out of elements like those of the Zuñi practice, combined with the atrocious cruelty of the warrior tribes of the north. Perhaps in no race is the extreme contrast between low myth, and the highest speculation, that of "the Eternal thinking himself out into space," so marked as among the Zuñis. The highly abstract conception of Ahonawilona was unknown to Europeans when this work first appeared.
CHAPTER XV. MEXICAN DIVINE MYTHS
European eye-witnesses of Mexican ritual—Diaz, his account
of temples and Gods__Sahagun, his method—Theories of the
god Huitzilopochtli—Totemistic and other elements in his
image and legend—Illustrations from Latin religion—
"God-eating"—The calendar—Other gods—Their feasts and cruel
ritual—Their composite character—Parallels from ancient
classical peoples—Moral aspects of Aztec gods.
The religion of the Mexicans was a compound of morality and cruelty so astonishing that its two aspects have been explained as the contributions of two separate races. The wild Aztecs from the north are credited with having brought to a high pitch of organised ritual the ferocious customs of the Red Indians. The tortures which the tribes inflicted on captives taken in war were transmuted into the cannibal sacrifices and orgies of bloodshed with which the Aztec temples reeked. The milder elements, again, the sense of sin which found relief in confession and prayer, are assigned to the influence of Mayas, and especially of Toltecs, a shadowy and perhaps an imaginary people. Our ignorance of Mexican history before the Spanish conquest is too deep to make any such theory of the influence of race on religion in Mexico more than merely plausible. The facts of ritual and of myth are better known, thanks to the observations of such an honest soldier as Bernal Diaz and such a learned missionary as Sahagun. The author of the Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España was a Spanish Franciscan, and one of the earliest missionaries (1529) in Mexico. He himself describes the method by which he collected his information about the native religion. He summoned together the chief men of one of the provinces, who, in turn, chose twelve old men well seen in knowledge of the Mexican practices and antiquities. Several of them were also scholars in the European sense, and had been taught Latin. The majority of the commission collected and presented "pictures which were the writings formerly in use among them," and the "grammarians" or Latin-learned Aztecs wrote in European characters and in Aztec the explanations of these designs. When Sahagun changed his place of residence, these documents were again compared, re-edited and enlarged by the assistance of the native gentlemen in his new district, and finally the whole was passed through yet a third "sieve," as Sahagun says, in the city of Mexico. The completed manuscript had many ups and downs of fortune, but Sahagun's book remains a source of almost undisputed authenticity.
Probably no dead religion whose life was among a people ignorant of syllabaries or of the alphabet is presented to us in a more trustworthy form than the religion of Mexico. It is necessary, however, to discount the theories of Sahagun and his converts, who though they never heard of Euhemerus, habitually applied the euhemeristic doctrine to their facts. They decided that the gods of the Aztecs had once been living men and conjurors, worshipped after their decease. It is possible, too, that a strain of Catholic piety has found its way into the long prayers of the heathen penitents, as reported by Sahagun.* Sahagun gives us a full account of the Mexican mythology. What the gods, as represented by idols and adored in ritual, were like, we learn from a gallant Catholic soldier, Bernal Diaz.** "Above the altars," he writes, "were two shapes like giants, wondrous for height and hugeness. The first on the right was Huichilobos (Huitzilopochtli), their god of war. He had a big head and trunk, his eyes great and terrible, and so inlaid with precious stones that all his head and body shone with stars thereof. Great snakes of gold and fine stones were girdled about his flanks; in one hand he held a bow, and arrows in the other, and a little idol called his page stood by his side.... Thereby also were braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and the savour of incense were the sacrifice. The walls of this oratory were black and dripping with gouts of blood, and likewise the floor that stank horribly." Such was the aspect of a Mexican shrine before the Spaniards introduced their faith.
* For a brief account of Sahagun and the fortunes of his
book, see Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States,
iii. 231, note 61. The references here to Sahagun's own work
are to the translation by MM. Jourdanet and Simeon,
published by Masson, Paris, 1880. Bernal Diaz is referred to
in the French edition published by M. Lemerre in 1879.
** Veridique Histoire, chap, xcii.
As to the mythical habits of the Aztec Olympians in general, Sahagun observes that "they were friends of disguise, and changed themselves often into birds or savage beasts". Hence he, or his informants, infer that the gods have originally been necromancers or medicine-men, now worshipped after death; a natural inference, as magical feats of shape-shifting are commonly ascribed "everywhere to witches and warlocks". As a matter of fact, the Aztec gods, though bedizened with the attributes of mortal conjurors, and with the fur and feathers of totems, are, for the most part, the departmental deities of polytheism, each ruling over some province of nature or of human activity. Combined with these are deities who, in their origin, were probably ideal culture-heroes, like Yehl, or Qat, or Prometheus. The long and tedious myths of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca appear to contain memories of a struggle between the gods or culture-heroes of rival races. Such struggles were natural, and necessary, perhaps, before a kind of syncretism and a general tolerance could unite in peace the deities of a realm composed of many tribes originally hostile. In a cultivated people, made up out of various conquered and amalgamated tribes, we must expect polytheism, because their Olympus is a kind of divine representative assembly. Anything like monotheism, in such a state, must be the result of philosophic reflection. "A laughable matter it is," says Bernal Diaz, "that in each province the Indians have their gods, and the gods of one province or town are of no profit to the people of another. Thus have they an infinite number of idols, to each of which they sacrifice."*
* Bernal Diaz, chap. xcii.
He might have described, in the same words, the local gods of the Egyptian nomes, for a similar state of things preceded, and to some extent survived, the syncretic efforts of Egyptian priesthood. Meanwhile, the Teocallis, or temples of Mexico, gave hospitable shelter to this mixed multitude of divinities. Hard by Huitzilopochtli was Tezcatlipoca (Tezcatepuca, Bernal calls him), whose chapel "stank worse than all the shambles of Castile". He had the face of a bear and shining eyes, made of mirrors called Tezcut. He was understood by Bernal to be the Mexican Hades, or warden of the dead. Not far off was an idol, half-human and half-lizard, "the god of fruits and harvest, I remember not his name," and all his chapel walls dripped blood.
In the medley of such a pantheon, it is difficult to arrange the deities on any principle of order. Beginning with Huitzilopochtli, as perhaps the most famous, it is to be observed that he indubitably became and was recognised as a god of battles, and that he was also the guide and protector who (according to the Aztec painted scriptures) led the wandering fathers through war and wilderness to the promised land of Mexico. His birth was one of those miraculous conceptions which we have seen so frequently in the myths and märchen of the lower and the higher races. It was not by swallowing a berry, as in Finland, but by cherishing in her bosom a flying ball of feathers that the devout woman, Coatlicue, became the mother of Huitzilopochtli. All armed he sprang to the light, like Athene from the head of Zeus, and slew his brothers that had been born by natural generation. From that day he received names of dread, answering to Deimos and Phobos.*
* Clavigero, Staria Ant. del Mexico, ii. 17, 19; Bancroft,
iii. 290.
By another myth, euhemeristic in character, Huitziton (the name is connected with huitzilin, the humming-bird) was the leader of the Aztecs in their wanderings. On his death or translation, his skull gave oracles, like the head of Bran in the Welsh legend. Sahagun, in the first page of his work, also euhemerises Huitzilopochtli, and makes him out to have been a kind of Hercules doublé with a medicine-man; but all this is mere conjecture. The position of Huitzilopochtli as a war-god, guardian and guide through the wilderness is perfectly established, and it is nearly as universally agreed that his name connects him with the humming-bird, which his statue wore on its left foot. He also carried a green bunch of plumage upon his head, shaped like the bill of a small bird Now, as J. G. Müller has pointed out, the legend and characteristics of Huitzilopochtli are reproduced, by a coincidence startling even in mythology, in the legend and characteristics of Picus in Latium. Just as Huitzilopochtli wore the humming-bird indicated by his name on his foot, so Picus was represented with the woodpecker of his name on his head.*
* J. G. Muller, Uramerik. Rel., p. 595.
On the subject of Picus one may consult Ovid, Metamorph, xiv. 314. Here the story runs that Circe loved Picus, whom she met in the woods. He disdained her caresses, and she turned him into the woodpecker, "with his garnet head". "Et fulvo cervix pnecingitur auro."
According to Virgil (J. Sn., vii. 187), the statue of this Picus was settled in an old Laurentian temple or palace of unusual sanctity, surrounded by images of the earlier gods. The woodpeckers, pici, are known Martio cognomine, says Pliny (10, 18, 20, § 40), and so connected with the Roman war-god, Picas Martius.
In his Romische Mythologie, i. 336, 337, Preller makes no use of these materials for comparison, though the conduct and character of the other beast of war, the wolf, as guide and protector of the Hirpi (wolves), and worshipped by them with wolf-dances, is an obvious survival of totemism. The Picini have their animal leader, Picus, the woodpecker, the Hirpi have their animal leader, the wolf, just as the humming-bird was the leader of the Aztecs.
In these Latin legends, as in the legends of Huit-zilopochtli, the basis, as J. G. Müller sees, is the bird—the humming-bird in one case, the woodpecker in the other. The bird is then euhemerised or brought into anthropomorphic form. It is fabled that he was originally a man (like Picus before Circe enchanted him to a bird's shape), or, in Mexico, a man named Huitziton, who during the Aztec migrations heard and pursued a little bird that cried "Tinni," that is, "Follow, follow".* Now we are all familiar with classical legends of races that were guided by a bird or beast to their ultimate seats. Müller mentions Battus and the raven, the Chalcidians and the dove, the Cretans and the dolphin, which was Apollo, Cadmus and the cow; the Hirpi, or wolves, who followed the wolf. In the same way the Picini followed the woodpecker, Picus, from whom they derived their name, and carried a woodpecker on their banners. Thus we may connect both the Sabine war-gods and the bird of the Mexican war-gods with the many guiding and protecting animals which occur in fable. Now a guiding and protecting animal is almost a synonym for a totem. That the Sabine woodpecker had been a totem may be pretty certainly established on the evidence of Plutarch. The people called by his name (Picini) declined, like totemists everywhere, to eat their holy bird, in this case the woodpecker.**
* Bancroft, iii. 69, note, quoting Torquemada.
** Quoest. Rom., xxi.
The inference is that the humming-bird whose name enters into that of Huitzilopochtli, and whose feathers were worn on his heel, had been the totem of an Aztec kindred before Huitzilopochtli, like Picus, was anthropomorphised. On the other hand, if Huitzilopochtli was once the Baiame of the Aztecs, their Guide in their wanderings, he might, in myth, be mixed up with a totem or other worshipful animal. "Before this god was represented in human form, he was merely a little humming-bird, Huitziton; but as the anthropomorphic processes advanced, the bird became an attribute, emblem, or symbol of the deity."* If Huitzilopochtli is said to have given the Aztecs fire, that boon is usually regarded by many races, from Normandy to Australia, as the present given to men by a bird; for example, the fire-crested wren.** Thus understood, the ornithological element in Huitzilopochtli is purely totemic. While accepting the reduction of him to a hummingbird, M. Reville ingeniously concludes that he was "a derivative form of the sun, and especially of the sun of the fair season". If the bird was worshipped, it was not as a totem, but as "the divine messenger of the spring," like "the plover among the Latins".*** Attempts have been made, with no great success, to discover the cosmical character of the god from the nature of his feasts.
* J. G. Muller, op. cit. i. p. 596.
** Bosquet, La Normandie Merveilleuse, Paris, 1845; Brough
Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i.; Kuhn, Herabkunft,
p. 109; Journal Anthrop. Inst., November, 1884; Sproat,
Savage Life (the cuttlefish), p. 178; Bancroft, iii. 100.
*** Hibbert Lectures, 1884, English trans., pp. 54, 55. The
woodpecker seems a better Latin example than the plover.
The Mexican calendar, "the Aztec year," as described at considerable length by Sahagun, was a succession of feasts, marked by minute and elaborate rites of a magical character. The gods of rain were frequently propitiated, so was the goddess of maize, the mountain god, the mother of the gods, and many other divinities. The general theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by innumerable human sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a man for male gods, of a woman for each goddess. The latter victims were regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in each case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the god with the sacrifice, and of both with the officiating priest. The connection was emphasised by the priest's wearing the newly-flayed skins of the victims, just as in Greece, Egypt and Assyria the fawn-skin, or bull-hide, or goat-skin, or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. Finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who communicated.*
* Copious details as to the sacraments, human sacrifices,
paste figures of gods, and identity of god and victim, will
be found in Sahagun's second and third books. The magical character of the ritual deserves particular attention. See
many examples of gods made of flour and eaten in Liebrecht's
Zur Volkskunde, "Der aufgegessene Gott," p. 436. It will
be noted that the feasts of the corn goddess, like the rites
of Demeter, were celebrated with torch-dances. The ritual of
the month Quecholli (iii. 33, 144) is a mere medicine hunt,
as Tanner and the Red Indians call it, a procuring of
magical virtue for the arrows, as in the Zuni mysteries to-
day. Compare Report of Bureau of Ethnology, vol. ii.,
"Zuni Prey Gods".
From the special ritual of Huitzilopochtli Mr. Tylor conjectures that this "inextricable compound parthenogenetic god may have been originally" a nature deity whose life and death were connected with the year".* This theory is based on the practice at the feast called Panquetzaliztli.** "His paste idol was shot through with an arrow," says Mr. Tylor, "and being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten; wherefore the ceremony was called Teoqualo, or 'god-eating,' and this was associated with the winter solstice." M. Reville says that this feast coincided with our month of December, the beginning of the cold and dry season, Huitzilopochtli would die with the verdure, the flowers and all the beauteous adornments of spring and summer; but like Adonis, like Osiris, and so many other solar deities, he only died to live and to return again. Before identifying him with the sun, it may be remarked that the Aztec feast of the return of the gods was celebrated in the twelfth month and the paste sacrifice of Huitzilopochtli was in the fifteenth.
There were eighteen months in the Aztec year, and the year began on the 2nd of February. The return of the gods was, therefore, in September, and the paste sacrifice of Huitzilopochtli in December. Clearly the god who dies in the winter solstice cannot be thought to "return" late in September. Huitzilopochtli had another feast on the first day of the ninth month, that is, between June and July, when much use was made of floral decorations, and "they offered him the first flowers of the year," although flowers were used two months earlier, in the seventh month and in the fourth month.***
* Primitive Culture, ii. 307; Clavigero, Messico, ii.
17, 81.
** Sahagun, ii. 15, and Appendix, iii. 2, 3.
*** Ibid. i. ii 9.
But the Mexican calendar is hard to deal with. Müller places the feasts of Huitzilopochtli in the middle of May, the middle of August, and the middle of December.* He combines his facts with a legend which made Huitzilopochtli to be the son of the goddess of vegetation. J. G. Müller's whole argument is learned and acute, but errs probably in attempting to extract a consecutive symbolical sense out of the chaos of myth. Thus he writes: "When the myth makes the god the son of the mother of plants, it divides his essence from that of his mother, and thus Huitzilopochtli, however closely akin to the plant world, is not the plant world itself ". This is to consider more curiously than the myth-makers. The name of the patron goddess of the flower-wearers in feasts was Coatlicue or Coatlan, which is also the name of the mother of Huitzilopochtli; its meaning is "serpent petticoated".**
* Uramerik. Rel. v. p. 602.
** Sahagun, ii. 8
When Müller goes on to identify Huitzilopochtli with the bunch of feathers that fell into his mother's breast before his birth, and that again with the humming-bird, and that again with the honey-sucking bird as the "means of fructifying the plants," and, finally, with the männliche befrwchtende Naturkraft, we have left myth far behind, and are in a region of symbolism and abstract thought, where one conjecture is as good as another. The hypothesis is that men, feeling a sense of religious reverence for the germinal force in Nature, took the humming-bird for its emblem, and so evolved the myth of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, who at once fructifies and is born from the bosom of vernal Nature. It would be rash and wrong to deny that such ideas are mixed in the medley of myth. But, as a rule, the sacred animal (as the humming-bird) is sacred first in itself, probably as a totem or as a guide and protector, and the symbolical sense is a forced interpretation put later on the facts.* We can hardly go farther, with safety, than the recognition of mingled aspects and elements in Huitzilopochtli as the totem, the tribal god, the departmental war-god, and possibly he is the god of the year's progress and renewal. His legend and ritual are a conglomerate of all these things, a mass of ideas from many stages of culture.
An abstract comparatively brief must suffice for the other Aztec deities.
Tezcatlipoca is a god with considerable pretensions to an abstract and lofty divinity. His appearance was not prepossessing; his image, as Bernal has described it, wore the head of a bear, and was covered with tiny mirrors.** Various attributes, especially the mirror and a golden ear, showed him forth as the beholder of the conduct of men and the hearer of prayer. He was said, while he lived on earth, to have been a kind of Ares in the least amiable aspect of the god, a maker of wars and discord.*** Wealth and power were in his gift. He was credited with ability to destroy the world when he chose. Seats were consecrated to him in the streets and the public places; on these might no man sit down.
* Compare Maspero on "Egyptian Beast-Gods," Rev. de l'Hist.
des Rel., vol. i. and chapter postea, on "Egyptian Divine
Myths".
**The name means "shining mirror". Acosta makes him the god
of famine and pestilence (p. 353).
*** Sahagun, i. 3.
He was one of the two gods whose extraordinary birth, and death by "happy despatch," that their vitality might animate the motionless sun, have already been described.* Tezcatlipoca, like most of the other gods, revived, and came back from the sky to earth. At a place called Tulla he encountered another god or medicine-man, Quetzalcoatl, and their legends become inextricably entangled in tales of trickery, animal metamorphosis, and perhaps in vague memories of tribal migrations. Throughout Tezcatlipoca brought grief on the people called Toltecs, of whom Quetzalcoatl was the divine culture-hero.** His statues, if we may believe Acosta, did him little credit. "In Cholula, which is a commonwealth of Mexico, they worship a famous idol, which was the god of merchandise.... It had the forme of a man, but the visage of a little bird with a red bill and above a combe full of wartes."***
* Antea, "Myths of the Origins of Things ".
** Sahagnn, iii. 5, 6.
*** Acosta, Nalurall and Morall Historic of the East and
West Indies, London, 1604.
A ready way of getting a view of the Mexican Pantheon is to study Sahagun's two books on the feasts of the gods, with their ritual. It will become manifest that the worship was a worship, on the whole, of departmental gods of the elements, of harvest, of various human activities, such as love and commerce, and war and agriculture. The nature of the worship, again, was highly practical. The ceremonies, when not mere offerings of human flesh, were commonly representations on earth of desirable things which the gods were expected to produce in the heavenly sphere. The common type of all such magical ceremonies, whereby like is expected to produce like, has been discussed in the remarks on magic (chapter iv.). The black smoke of sacrifice generates clouds; the pouring forth of water from a pitcher (as in the Attic Thesmophoria) induces the gods to pour forth rain. Thus in Mexico the rain-god (Tlaloc, god of waters) was propitiated with sacrifices of children. "If the children wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that rain would also be abundant."* The god of the maize, again (Cinteotl, son of the maize-goddess), had rites resembling those of the Greek Pyanepsion and Eiresione. The Aztecs used to make an image of the god, and offer it all manner of maize and beans.** Curiously enough, the Greeks also regarded their Pyanepsion as a bean-feast. A more remarkable analogy is that of the Peruvian Mama Cora, the figure of a goddess made of maize, which was asked "if it hath strength sufficient to continue until the next year," and of which the purpose was, "that the seed of the maize may not perish".*** This corn image of the corn goddess, preserved through all the year and replaced in the next year by a fresh image, is the Attic (————), a branch of olive hung with a loaf and with all the fruits of the season, and set up to stand for all the year in front of each house. "And it remains for a year, and when it is dry and withered next year they make a fresh one."****
* Sahagun. ii. 2, 3.
** Ibid., ii. 4, 24.
*** Acosta, Hist Nat., 1604, p. 413.
**** See Schol. in Aristoph. Plut., 1054, and other
texts, quoted by Mannhardt, Arntike Waldund Feld Cultus,
ii. 221, note 3.
Children were sacrificed in Mexico to this deity. In the rites of a goddess of harvest, as has been said, torches were borne by the dancers, as in the Eleusinia; and in European and Oriental folk-lore.1 Demeter was the Greek harvest goddess, in whose rites torches had a place. One of her names is Demeter Erinnys. Mr. Max Müller recognises Erinnys as the dawn. Schwartz connects Demeter Erinnys with the thunderstorm. The torch in the hand of Demeter is the lightning, according to Schwartz. It is interesting, whether the torch be the torch of dawn, or of storm, or neither, to see the prevalence of these torch festivals in rural rites in Mexico, Greece and modern Europe. The idea of the peasants is that the lights scare away evil spirits.** In the Mexican rite, a woman, representing the goddess and dressed in her ornaments, was sacrificed. The same horrid ceremony accompanied the feast of the mother of the gods, Teteo Innan.*** In this rite the man who represented the son of the goddess wore a mask of the skin from the thigh of the female victim who had personated the goddess herself. The wearing of the skin established a kinship between the man and the woman, as in the many classical, ancient and savage rituals where the celebrants wear the hides of the sacrificed beasts. There was a god of storm called "cloudy serpent," Mixcoatl, whose rites were not more humane. The Mexican Aphrodite was named Tlaçolteotl,**** "the impure".
* Mannhardt, op. cit., ii. 263, i. 501, 502; Schwartz,
Prähistorisch Anthropologische Studien, p. 79.
** Compare the French jour des brandons.
***See Sahagun, ii. 30.
**** Ibid., i. 12.