Produced by David Widger

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

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obsolescent (superseded, as it seems, by deities who can be bribed) he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 qf 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.