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=MORGAN’S ANCIENT SOCIETY=; or, Researches on the Lines of Human Progress
through Savagery and Barbarism to Civilization. By LEWIS H. MORGAN, LL.D.
8vo. $4.

=SIR HENRY SUMNER MAINE’S WORKS=:

    =Ancient Law=: Its Connection with the Early History of
    Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas. By HENRY SUMNER
    MAINE, Member of the Supreme Council of India, and Regius
    Professor of the Civil Law in the University of Cambridge. With
    an Introduction by Theodore W. Dwight, LL.D. 8vo. $3.50.

    =Lectures on the Early History of Institutions.= A Sequel to
    “Ancient Law.” 8vo. $3.50.

    =Village Communities in the East and West.= Six Lectures
    delivered at Oxford: to which are added other Lectures,
    Addresses, and Essays. 8vo. $3.50.

=E. B. TYLOR’S WORKS=:

    =Primitive Culture=: Researches into the Development of
    Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. 2 vols. 8vo.
    $7.00.

    =Researches into the Early History of Mankind=, and the
    Development of Civilization. 8vo. $3.50.




                            PRIMITIVE MANNERS
                               AND CUSTOMS

                                   BY
                             JAMES A. FARRER

                             [Illustration]

                                NEW YORK
                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
                                  1879




_INTRODUCTION._


From the myths characteristic of savage tribes, from their beliefs,
their proverbs, their political and social regulations, it is here
sought to gain some general estimate of their powers of intelligence and
imagination, their moral ideas, and their religion; subjects naturally
of much interest and inevitably of some dispute. For the reason that in
savagery as in civilisation there are heights and depths, with more of
light here, more of darkness there, it is quite impossible to bring the
whole of savage life into focus at once, so that every general conclusion
can only be taken as true within limits. The field to be studied is also
so large and diversified, that no two minds can expect to derive from
it the same impressions, nor to attain to more than partial truth about
it. But since the savage can never hope to be heard in court himself,
it is only fair to start with certain considerations which he would
be entitled to urge, and which deserve to weigh in any judgment made
regarding him.

Statements of very low powers of numeration have been perhaps too hastily
taken as indicative of a low state of intelligence; for not only have
similar assertions concerning American and Tasmanian tribes by the
earliest voyagers proved on subsequent investigation to be erroneous,
but many savages have substitutes for our arithmetic which serve them
perfectly well, the Loangese, for instance, expressing numbers in
narration not by words but by gestures; and the Koossa Kaffirs—very few
of whom are said to be able to count above ten—possessing the peculiar
faculty of detecting almost at a glance any loss in a herd of cattle
which may amount to half a thousand. In the same way the want of a
written language is often supplied by symbolism. Puzzle as it might a
person of education to read a letter, expressed by a bundle containing a
stone, a piece of charcoal, a rag, a pepper-pod, and a grain of parched
corn, this would be the way of saying in Yoruba, that, though the
sender was as strong and firm as a stone, his prospects were as dark as
charcoal; that his clothes were in rags; that he was so feverish with
anxiety that his skin burned like pepper, even enough to cause corn to
wither. The Niam-Niam, again, who declare war by hanging on a tree an
ear of maize, a fowl’s feather, and an arrow, thereby giving contingent
enemies to understand that arrows will avenge any injury done to a single
fowl or a single ear of maize, convey their meaning quite as clearly as
the most politely framed ultimata of any Foreign Office in Europe.

Many of the beliefs attributed to savages are no fair test of their
general reasoning capabilities; for there are degrees of credulity in
savage as in civilised life, and reason everywhere struggles to exist.
When Pelopidas, on the eve of the battle of Leuctra, received commands
in a dream to sacrifice to certain shades a virgin with chestnut hair,
there were not wanting soldiers, even in that army of Bœotians, who had
the shrewdness to think and the courage to say, that it was absurd to
suppose any divine powers could delight in the slaughter and sacrifice of
human beings, and that, if there were such, they deserved no reverence.
All stages of culture thus have their dissenters, their wicked reasoners.
Among the Ahts only the most superstitious now burn the house of a dead
man, with all its contents, for fear of offending his ghost. The Zulus,
whose sole religion consists in ancestor-worship, exhibited often in
the most ridiculous ceremonies, begin to doubt the power and even the
existence of their Amatongo, or dead ancestors, if, when they are sick,
their prayers and sacrifices fail to effect a cure.

The Tongan king, Finow, often stated to Mariner his doubts about the
existence of the gods, and expressed the opinion, that men were fools for
believing all they were told by the priests; whilst his saying, that the
gods always favoured that side in war on which there were the greatest
chiefs and warriors, recalls the opinion of a far more famous potentate
than Finow. The disrespect, indeed, that Finow showed to the Tongan
religion was such, that his subjects explained violent thunderstorms as
the dissensions of the gods in Bolotu about his punishment. On the other
hand, savages are also subject to relapses of superstition, such as with
us are dignified by the name of ‘movements;’ an American tribe who traced
their origin to a dog were so firmly impressed by a fanatic with the sin
of attaching their canine relatives to their sledges, that they resolved
to use dogs no more, but women instead, for dragging their possessions.

Savage ideas of morality and of government seem to agree fundamentally
with those of more advanced populations, the ideas of the latter
differing, indeed, from the barbaric much as a finished photograph
differs from its earlier stage; that is to say, not as essentially
different, but as having become ‘fixed’ after a process of development.
The idea of the wrongfulness of certain acts starts with the fear of
their consequences, that of murder, for instance, from the fear of
revenge; nor are such ideas ever separable from the lowest levels of
savage life. The sense of the sanctity of property begins with what an
individual can make or catch for himself apart from tribal claims; nor
is any state of tribal communism so strong as to recognise no private
rights in the people or things a man takes in war, the game he kills, or
the weapons he fashions. Respect for the aged is one of the best traits
of savage life, for the tribes of whom it is asserted seem to outnumber
those of whom it is denied. In Equatorial Africa young men never appear
before old ones without curtseying nor pass them by without stooping;
should they sit in their presence, it is ‘at a humble distance.’ Nor are
cases of the abandonment of the aged and infirm conclusive proof of a
deficiency of natural affection; one tribe who were accused of so acting
are also known to have carried about with them for years a palsied man
with great tenderness and attention. Truthfulness, again, is recognised
as a virtue outside the pale of the higher religions, for Mungo Park
found it one of the first lessons taught by Mandingo women to their
children, and he mentions the case of one mother, whose only consolation
on the murder of her son ‘was the reflection that the poor boy in the
course of his life had never told an untruth.’

Strange contradictions abound in savage life, extremes of barbarity
sometimes co-existing with habits of some refinement. The Ahts, who
occasionally sacrifice one of their number to the gods, and till lately
deserted their sick and aged, without the excuse of scarcity of food,
keep small mats of bark strips for strangers to wipe their feet with, and
after meals offer them water and cedar-bark for washing their hands and
mouths. They have also a strict etiquette regulating their reception of
guests; they observe public ceremonies with extreme formality; their men
of rank vie with one another in politeness. The Niam-Niam are generally
cannibals, but when several of them drink together ‘they may each be
observed to wipe the rim of the drinking-vessel before passing it on.’
The Bachapins, among whom it is said that a murderer incurs no disgrace,
yet measure a man’s merit by his industry, and despise a man who does
not work, that is, hunt, for his living. The Aztecs, with their constant
and frightful human sacrifices, were so afraid of incurring divine wrath
for the blood they spilled in the chase, that they would always preface
a hunt by burning incense to their idols, and conclude it by smearing
the faces of their divinities with the blood of their game. To turn back
from the procession which accompanied the sacrifice of young children
to the gods of rain and water rendered a man infamous and incapable of
public office; yet death was the penalty for drunkenness in either sex,
and ‘it was considered degrading for a person of quality to touch wine at
all, even in seasons of festival.’ Similar inconsistencies are common in
social regulations, especially in those relating to marriage, stringent
laws of prohibited degrees and the strictest etiquette often affording
no further evidence of purity of manners. The most barbarous marriage
ceremonies are frequently attended with absurd forms of prudery, which
it is perhaps impossible to trace to their origin. The instance of the
Aleutian islanders, who with the grossest vices connect such notions
of propriety as that either a husband or a wife would blush to address
the other in the presence of a stranger, is one among many similar
illustrations of a side of savage life which but for parallels in our
own social usages might present itself as an inexplicable anomaly.

Better experience has in so many cases dissipated original assertions of
an absolute want of religious ideas among savages, that the strongest
doubts must be felt of all similar negative propositions. Theology in one
of three grades seems rather to be the universal property of mankind,
appearing either harmless, as at the beginning or end of its historical
career, or in its second and middle stage as identical with all that is
abominable and cruel. The classification of mankind on such a basis of
division, though it could never aspire to scientific exactness, would
afford at least a standard of practical discrimination, by which the
relations between Christian and non-Christian communities might to some
extent be adjusted; for, by considering any people under one of these
three aspects, it would be possible to form some estimate of their
aptitude for, or need of, our theology, and of the advisability of our
seeking to force it upon them.[1] Should the principle ever meet with
the acceptance it deserves, that missions, like charities, ought to be
discriminate, it is not difficult to perceive the direction in which such
a truth will be likely some day to receive practical recognition.

For wherever native theology takes the form of cannibalism, sutteeism,
human sacrifices, or other rites directly destructive of earthly
happiness, there the teaching of missionaries affords the only hope of
a speedy reform, the only acquaintance possible for savage tribes with
a culture higher than their own, save that which is likely to come to
them through the medium of the brandy-bottle or the bayonet. But to send
missions to countries like Russia or China, where there exist established
systems of religion undefiled by cruelty, violates the first principle
of the faith so conveyed, disturbing the peace of families and nations
with the curse of religious animosity. When the Jesuits entreated the
Chinese Emperor, Young-tching, to reconsider his resolution to proscribe
Christianity, there was some reason in the imperial answer: ‘What should
you say if I sent a troop of lamas and bonzes to your country, to preach
their law there?’ The Taeping rebellion, or civil war, which devastated
China for about fifteen years, desolating hundreds of miles of fair
towns and fertile fields, and fought out among massacres, sieges, and
famines, of quite indescribable cruelty and horror, owed its impulse
distinctly to the working of Christian tracts among the more ignorant
classes, followed by a fanatical endeavour to substitute a travesty of
Christianity for the older religions; yet the seeds of all this misery
are still sown in China, in the name and by the ministers of a religion
of Peace, a religion that has for its first and final rule of life the
duty of so dealing with others as we should wish them to deal with
ourselves.

Cases of the third class, where the state of religious belief is so
rudimentary as to be innocuous, are unhappily few; but where such belief
has not advanced to the detriment of the general welfare, it would seem
the kindest policy not to inspire men, whose lives are spent in the
constant perils of the woods or waves, with fears of more malignant
spirits than those their own fancy has created for them, nor to teach
them the doctrine that, hard and black as this world often proves to
them, there is a yet harder and blacker one beyond. There is also
some charm in that variety of belief and custom against which we wage
unremitting war; and only a tasteless fanaticism can think with pure joy
of the time, when sectarian chapels shall stand on every island of the
seas, and Tartarus be taught wherever the sun shines. Rites and beliefs
lose the interest which cling to them in their native home as soon as
it is sought to transplant them elsewhere, just as flowers lose their
fragrance and beauty when once they have been separated from the plant on
which they grew. For this reason Puritanism has but little charm out of
England; and though it should please our love of uniformity to read (as
we may) of a Tahitian chief carrying his Sabbatarian scruples so far as
to ask whether, if he saw ripe plantains by his garden-path on Sunday, he
might pick and eat them; or of another abstaining from turning a pig out
of his garden on Sunday, preferring to let his sugar-canes be devoured;
such facts are yet no proof that we make Christians of savages; they only
prove that, with some trouble, we may make them imbeciles.

It would be difficult, indeed, to pay too high a tribute to the unselfish
efforts of missionaries, now and in past times, directly for the benefit
of mankind and indirectly for that of science; yet the question, besides
its speculative interest, derives some justification from the general
results of missions over the world, and from the melancholy disproportion
between their actual and their merited successes: Whether the welfare
and improvement of savage tribes would not be best left to themselves
and to time? That they are not incapable of independent improvement
there is abundant evidence to show. Sometimes it arises in a tribe from
imitation of some neighbouring tribe, more powerful but less barbarous
than itself; sometimes from the initiative of some reforming chief of its
own. Thus the Comanche Indians of Texas, among whom ‘Christianity had
never been introduced,’ abolished, in consequence of their intercourse
with tribes less savage than themselves, the inhuman custom of killing a
favourite wife at her husband’s funeral. Mariner was himself a witness of
the abolition on the Tongan Islands of the custom of strangling the wife
of the great Tooitonga chief at his death. It is said, again, to be an
indisputable fact, that the Monbuttoos of Africa, whose ‘cannibalism is
the most pronounced of all the known nations of Africa,’ have, ‘without
any influence from the Mahometan or Christian world, attained to no
contemptible degree of external culture.’ Finow, the Tongan king, was
a genuine reformer; and there have even been kings of Dahome who have
wished the abolition of human sacrifices. Bianswah, the great Chippewya
chief, put a stop, by a treaty of peace with the Sioux, to the horrible
practice of burning prisoners alive; and, though the peace between
the tribes was often broken, their compact in this respect was never
violated. In other instances the modification of older usages points
to the operation of reformative tendencies. Thus the Nootka Indians,
who used to conclude their hunting festivals with a human sacrifice,
subsequently changed the custom into the more lenient one of sticking a
boy with knives in various parts of his body. The Zulus abolished the
custom of killing slaves with a chief, to prepare food and other things
for him in the next world; so that now it is only a tradition with them
that formerly when a chief died he did not die alone: ‘when the fire was
kindled the chief was put in, and then his servants were chosen and put
in after the chief; the great men followed—they were taken one by one.’

It is moreover certain that in some instances savages have arrived
spontaneously at no contemptible notions of morality, and that they have
often lost their native virtues by their very contact with a higher form
of faith. The African Bakwains declared that nothing described by the
missionaries as sin had ever appeared to them otherwise, except polygamy;
and the Tongan chiefs (if Mariner may be trusted), when asked what
motives they had, beyond their fear of misfortunes in this life, for
virtuous conduct, replied, ‘_as if they wondered such a question should
be asked_:’ ‘The agreeable and happy feelings which a man experiences
within himself when he does any good action and conducts himself nobly
and generously, as a man ought to do.’ The natural virtues attributed
to the same people include honour, justice, patriotism, friendship,
meekness, modesty, conjugal fidelity, parental and filial love, patience
in suffering, forbearance of temper, respect for rank and for age.
The Khonds of India, much more savage than the Tongans (their chief
virtues consisting in killing an enemy, dying as a warrior, or living
as a priest), yet account as sinful acts the refusal of hospitality,
the breach of an oath or promise, a lie, or the violation of a pledge
of friendship. The virtues the Maoris now possess they are said to have
possessed before we came among them, namely honesty, self-respect,
truthfulness; and the belief that these virtues are even ‘fading under
their assumed Christianity’ recalls the tradition of certain American
tribes, that their lives and manners were originally less barbarous,
the Odjibwas, for instance, actually tracing the increase of murders,
thefts, falsehood, and disobedience to parents, to the advent of the
Christian whites.

It is also remarkable that in several instances savages have of
themselves hit upon those very helps to the maintenance of virtue which
all Christian Churches have found so efficacious. For we find existing
among them as religious and moral observances not only Fasting and
Confession, but occasionally even Sermons. In the Tongan Islands _fonos_,
or public assemblies, were held, at which the king would address his
subjects, not only on agriculture but on morals and politics; and the
lower chiefs had _fonos_ also for the similar benefit of their feudal
subordinates. In America, also, some tribes observed feasts at which
the young were addressed on their moral duties, being admonished to be
attentive and respectful to the old, to obey their parents, never to
scoff at the decrepit or deformed, to be charitable and hospitable. Not
only were such precepts dwelt on at great length, but enforced by the
examples of good and bad individuals, just as they might be in London or
Rome. Such considerations, indeed, prove nothing against the additional
good that missionaries may do; but they add some force to the thought
that had a tithe of the energy, the devotion, the suffering, the money,
that has been lavished on coaxing savages to be baptized, been spent on
promoting international peace in Europe, wars might by this time be as
extinct, belong as purely to a past state of things, as judicial combats,
the thumbscrew, or the knout.

The vexed question, whether savage life represents a primitive or a
decadent condition, whether it represents what man at first everywhere
was, or only what he may become, has throughout the following chapters
been avoided, that controversy being regarded as ‘laid’ by the exhaustive
researches of Mr. Tylor and other writers. But whilst the state of the
lowest modern savages is taken as the nearest approximation we have of
the primitive state from which mankind has risen, it is not pretended
that the state of any particular tribe may not be one to which it has
fallen. As the low position of many Bushmen tribes is quite explicable by
their long border-warfare with the Dutch, and the consequent cruelties
they were exposed to, or as the state of many Brazilian savages may be
traced to similar contact with the Portuguese, so any case of extreme
savagery may be the result of causes, whose operation has no historical
or written proof to attest them. The gigantic stone images on Easter
Island, or the great earthworks in America, are among the proofs, that
but for such material traces of its existence it is possible for a whole
civilisation to vanish, and to leave only the veriest savages on the
soil where it flourished.[2] As we know that Europe was once as purely
savage as parts of Africa are still, and can conceive the cycle of
events restoring it to barbarism, so in the depths of time it may have
happened in places where no suspicion of such a history is possible. As
the surface of the earth seems subjected to processes of elevation and
subsidence, land and sea constantly alternating their dominion, so it may
be with civilisation, destined to no permanent home on the earth, but
subsiding here to reappear there, and varying its level as it varies its
latitude.

As the practical infinity of past time makes it impossible to calculate
the influence exercised in different parts of the world by migrations,
by conquests, or by commerce, except within a very limited period, so it
precludes any definite belief in ethnological divisions, and relegates
the question of the unity of the human race, like that of its origin, to
the limbo of profitless discussion. No characteristic has yet been found
by which mankind can be classified distinctly into races; and with all
the differences of colour, hair, skull, or language, which now suffice
for purposes of nomenclature, it remains true that there is nothing to
choose between the hypothesis that we constitute only one species and the
hypothesis that we constitute several. The world is so old as to admit of
divergences from a single original type quite as wide as any that exist;
whilst, on the other hand, similarity of customs (such, for instance, as
that Tartars in Asia, Sioux Indians in America, and Kamschadals should
all regard it as a sin to touch a fire with a knife), fail us as a
proof of a unity of origin, in the face of our ignorance of prehistoric
antiquity.

That the works which have treated before, and better, of the subjects
included in the following chapters should have exercised no deterrent
effect in treating of them again, must find its excuse in the general
interest which those works have produced for the studies in question,
and of which the present work is but a sign and consequence. The reader
has only himself to blame, if, having read the works on the same or
similar subjects by Mr. Tylor, Mr. Spencer, and Sir John Lubbock, or
those in German by Peschel, Wuttke, or Waitz, he troubles himself with
yet another book which seeks rather to illustrate than to exhaust the
many interesting problems connected with savage life; but the present
writer, whilst under the deepest obligations to the labours of his
predecessors—without which his own would have been impossible—has not
studied simply to recapitulate their conclusions, but has sought rather
to arrive at such results as the evidence forced upon him, independently
as far as possible of existing theories or of the authority upon which
they rest. Should he have succeeded in making anyone think better than
before, with more interest and sympathy, of those outcasts of the world
whom we designate as savage, something at least will have been done
to claim for them a kindlier treatment and respect than in popular
estimation they either deserve or obtain.




_CONTENTS._


                               CHAPTER I.

                     SOME SAVAGE MYTHS AND BELIEFS.

    The universality of religion—Nature and tests of the evidence
    relating to the subject—Savage ideas of creation: ideas of a
    first man confused with ideas of a first cause—Illustrative
    examples of primitive cosmogony—Origin of the myth of the
    Two Contending Brothers—Prevalence of the belief in a Golden
    Age—Deluge-myths—Their possible origin in recollections of
    local floods, in the changes of the land-level, or in fancies
    about the skies—Absence in most of them of any connection
    with human crime—Vivid belief in futurity among the lower
    races—Gradual growth of the idea of the future life as affected
    by the present one—Difficulties in the attainment of future
    happiness—The great difference between savage and civilised
    beliefs regarding the Unknown illustrated by the savage
    belief in a future life for animals or things as well as for
    men—Compensations in the savage’s creed: no terror of death nor
    of the future                                               pages 1-40

                               CHAPTER II.

                         SAVAGE MODES OF PRAYER.

    Difficulties in the study of natural religions—Importance of
    prayer in savage life—Examples of savage prayers—Are they
    limited to temporal interests?—Baptismal rites equivalent to
    prayers—Prayers in the form of toasts—The worship of evil
    spirits—Doubtful distinction between good and bad divinities
    among savages—Treatment of obdurate gods—Relation of sacrifice
    to prayer—Tendency of sacrifices to become more numerous and
    severe—Pantomimic dances possibly acted petitions—The African
    gorilla-dance, the Mandan buffalo-dance, the Sioux bear-dance,
    the Australian kangaroo-dance—A similar idea in prayers for
    rain—War-dances—Fetichistic practices perhaps extinct forms of
    prayer—Prayers to animals, to the moon, to trees, and their
    survival in modern folk-lore                                     41-77

                              CHAPTER III.

                          SOME SAVAGE PROVERBS.

    Differences of national character reflected in
    proverbs—Illustrated by Italian and German sayings on the
    custom of the Vendetta, by Italian and Persian proverbs
    about truth, by Catholic and Protestant sentiments about
    priests—Comparison between the proverbs of savage and
    civilised communities—Similarities of their feeling as
    regards poverty, blame, experience, perseverance, habit,
    cause, mendacity—Intelligence displayed in many savage
    proverbs—European proverbs of savage coinage, exemplified by a
    comparison between African and European proverbs relating to
    women—Inferences deducible from known proverbs                  78-100

                               CHAPTER IV.

                        SAVAGE MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

    Are there any authentic cases of a total absence of moral
    distinctions among savages?—Unsatisfactory evidence regarding
    their moral notions—The Bushman’s notion of a good and bad
    action—The fear of fellow-tribesmen, of spirits and ghosts,
    the primary source of distinction in the moral quality of
    actions—Moral restraints in secular punishments—Compensation
    necessary for homicide—Collective responsibility for crimes—Is
    murder ever regarded as indifferent?—Different institutions
    for the prevention of wrongs—Greenland singing-combats,
    _tabu_, _muru_, confession. Sins or fanciful wrong acts,
    illustrated by feelings of proper behaviour with regard to
    storms, to ancestors, to names, and to animals—Little evidence
    among savages of any idea of moral qualities apart from the
    consequences of actions—Their ideas of a future state throw
    little light on their moral sentiments—Doubtful evidence
    of a belief in a future life as affected by good or bad
    conduct—Fundamental agreement between savage and civilised
    morality                                                       101-129

                               CHAPTER V.

                         SAVAGE POLITICAL LIFE.

    Theory of social evolution—The hunting state not necessarily
    one of political inferiority—Do any tribes exist without any
    form of social government?—Examples of the loosest social
    connections—Connection of agriculture and slavery with more
    complex social systems—Freedom and equality little known
    in savage life—Natural foundations for distinction between
    aristocracy and commonalty—Ordeals previous to admission to
    higher ranks—Devices for marking differences of position:
    scars, dress, titles, artificial language, funeral ceremonies,
    crests—Savage monarchy—Confusion between gods and kings—Old
    Japanese and Samoan feelings about monarchy—Limitations on
    savage despotism—Orders of society, approaching to a system
    of caste—The relation of tabu to monarchy—Primogeniture in
    Tahiti—Absurd rights of nephews in Fiji—Taxation a festival
    in savage life—The subordination of the priesthood to the
    State                                                          130-161

                               CHAPTER VI.

                           SAVAGE PENAL LAWS.

    The interest of savage laws—Stage in which the redress of
    wrongs is a merely personal matter—Tendency of offences to be
    regarded as matters of family or tribal interest—Growth of the
    conception of crime as an offence against the tribe, promoted
    by the custom of submitting disputes to the judgment of chiefs,
    and marked by customs, which, while making such chiefs judges,
    leave the punishment of the criminal to the injured party—Such
    customs found in America, Africa, Samoa, Afghanistan—Tendency
    of penal laws to become more cruel—Primitive punishments
    not gratuitously cruel—Savage laws not always arbitrary nor
    uncertain—Force of precedents in Caffre law—Regularity in
    legal procedure—Curious notions of equity—The ordeal in savage
    law, not an appeal to the judgment of God, but an invention
    of priestcraft for the detection of guilt—Comparison of some
    ordeals—Their utility for the discovery of guilt—Death a
    frequent result of concealing real or fancied guilt—Oaths a
    later development of the ordeal—The English judicial oath
    compared with that in vogue in Samoa—Origin of the supposed
    virtue in touching or kissing the thing sworn by—Invisible
    connection between the thing touched and the calamity invoked
    in touching it                                                 162-187

                              CHAPTER VII.

                         EARLY WEDDING CUSTOMS.

    Curious wedding custom of the Garos, in India—Natural
    affection among savages, tested by some of the evidence of
    eye-witnesses—Love-stories—Treatment of women not uniformly bad
    among savages—Married life—Duty of bashfulness, displayed in
    curious manners and notions of the Esquimaux, the Hottentots,
    the Hos, the Thlinkeets, the Kirghiz, Kamschadals, the
    Bushmen, the Zulus, and the Bedouins—Conventional reserve
    between husband and wife—Restrictions on intercourse
    between near relations—Kicking and screaming the _proper_
    behaviour at weddings—Real disinclination also often a cause
    for the employment of real force—The ceremony of capture
    affords a bride a real chance of escape from a bridegroom
    she dislikes—Mercantile aspect of marriage—Marriages by
    capture often voluntary elopements in defeat of parental
    contracts, illustrated by customs in India, Afghanistan,
    Bokhara—Such marriages legalised by successful elopement and
    subsequent settlement with parents—Exogamy and endogamy, how
    related—Doubtful origin of exogamy—Its effect in preserving
    peace between tribes—Woman-stealing the result of artificial
    social customs—Origin of the difference of language between
    the sexes among the Caribs—The same phenomenon among the
    Zulus—Doubtful evidence of a total absence of marriage
    ceremonies                                                     188-238

                              CHAPTER VIII.

                       THE FAIRY-LORE OF SAVAGES.

    Primitive philosophy of nature—Astro-mythology of Australian
    tribes, of the Tasmanians, the Bushmen, the Esquimaux, Hervey
    Islanders, Thlinkeet Indians—Such myths invented to account
    for natural phenomena—Not always the result of forgotten
    etymologies—The Aht story of the origin of the moon—American
    story of the robin—Hervey Islanders’ story of the sole—Stories
    also invented to account for curious customs or beliefs—Reason
    given by the Irish for their annual persecution of the wren—The
    story of the wren and the eagle, very similar in Ireland and
    North America—Facility of the dispersion of stories often
    accounts for their resemblance—Wide range of the story of
    Faithful John—Polynesian stories of Maui stopping the sun’s
    motion—the same idea in Wallachia and North America—Many
    similar stories arose independently of each other, as the
    versions of the idea contained in Jack and the Beanstalk—Some
    Aryan myths, explained as fancies about the clouds, found also
    in the New World—Hindu myth of Urvasi compared with myths from
    Borneo and America—Story-roots to be looked for on earth, not
    in the clouds—Celestial and terrestrial phenomena confused—The
    influence of dreams in the production of myths—The influence
    of flattery—Tendency of chiefs and sorcerers to become gods
    and heroes after death—Zeus compared with the culture-heroes
    of savage mythology—The Hottentot Utixo, Mannan MacLear,
    Manabozho, Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Heitsi Eibip, all probably
    of human origin—Nicknames a factor in mythology—Tendency to
    personify abstractions—Vivid imagination of savages            239-275

                               CHAPTER IX.

                         COMPARATIVE FOLK-LORE.

    Interest of folk-lore due to the wide range of similar
    superstitions—Three ways of accounting for such
    resemblances—Great extent of superstition in civilised
    life—Savage incomplete distinction of things—Motion and life
    identified—Analogy of bee superstitions with superstitions
    about inanimate things—Fear of offending animals by a
    light use of their names—Spiritualistic character of
    witchcraft—Illustrations—Relics of object-worship—Sacred trees,
    animals, birds—Reverence for red things—Chinese analogues
    to Aryan folk-lore—Mythology probably founded on folk-lore,
    not folk-lore on mythology—Traces of fire-worship—Beltane
    fires, formerly perhaps connected with human sacrifices—Scotch
    needfires for cattle—Similar customs among the Mayas of America
    and the Hottentots—Ideas about the purity of new fire—Recent
    examples of the sacrifice of living things to appease
    spirits—Moon superstitions like those about the tides—Remnants
    of water-worship—Folk-lore a link between civilisation and
    barbarism—Influence of Christianity on folk-lore—The history
    of mankind that of a rise, not of a fall                       276-315





I.

_SOME SAVAGE MYTHS AND BELIEFS._


The question of the universality of religion, of its presence in some
form or another in every part of the world, seems to be one of those
which lie beyond the bounds of a dogmatic answer. For the accounts
of missionaries and travellers, which furnish the only data for its
solution, have been so largely vitiated, if not by a consciousness of the
interests supposed to be at stake, at least by so strong an intolerance
for the tenets of native savage religions, that it seems impossible to
make sufficient allowance either for the bias of individual writers or
for the extent to which they may have misunderstood, or been purposely
misled by, their informants.

Although, however, on the subject of native religions we can never
hope for more than approximate truth, the reports of missionaries and
others, written at different periods of time about the same place or
contemporaneously about widely remote places, as they must be free from
all possible suspicion of collusion, so they supply a kind of measure
of probability by which the credibility of any given belief may be
tested. Thus an idea, too inconceivable to be credited, if only reported
of one tribe of the human race, may be safely accepted as seriously
held, if reported of several tribes in different parts of the world. An
Englishman, for instance, however much winds and storms may mentally vex
him, would scarcely think of testifying his repugnance to them by the
physical remonstrance of his fists and lungs, nor would he easily believe
that any people of the earth should seriously treat the wind in this way
as a material agent. If he were told that the Namaquas shot poisoned
arrows at storms to drive them away, he would show no unreasonable
scepticism in disbelieving the fact; but if he learnt on independent
authority that the Payaguan Indians of North America rush with firebrands
and clenched fists against the wind that threatens to blow down their
huts; that in Russia the Esthonians throw stones and knives against
a whirlwind of dust, pursuing it with cries; that the Kalmucks fire
their guns to drive the storm-demons away; that Zulu rain-doctors or
heaven-herds whistle to lightning to leave the skies just as they whistle
to cattle to leave their pens; and that also in the Aleutian Islands a
whole village will unite to shriek and strike against the raging wind,
he would have to acknowledge that the statement about the Namaquas
contained in itself nothing intrinsically improbable. And besides
this test of genuine savage thought, a test which obviously admits of
almost infinite application, there is another one no less serviceable
in ethnological criticism, namely, where the reality of a belief is
supported by customs, widely spread and otherwise unintelligible.
No better illustration can be given of this than the belief, which,
asserted by itself, would be universally disbelieved, in a second life
not only for men but for material things; but which, supported as it is
by the practice, common alike in the old world and the new, of burying
objects with their owner to live again with him in another state, is
certified beyond all possibility of doubt. If to us there seems a no
more self-evident truth than that a man can take nothing with him out of
the world, a vast mass of evidence proves, that the discovery of this
truth is one of comparatively modern date and of still quite partial
distribution over the globe.

So much, then, being premised as to the nature of the evidence on which
our knowledge of the lower races depends, and as to the limits within
which such evidence may be received and its veracity tested, let us
proceed to examine some of the higher beliefs of savages, which, as they
bear some analogy to the beliefs on similar subjects of more advanced
societies, are in a sense religious, and, so far at least as the
collected information justifies us in judging, seem of indigenous and
independent growth.

Few results of ethnology are more interesting than the wide-spread belief
among savages, arrived at purely by their own reasoning faculties, in a
creator of things. The recorded instances of such a belief are, indeed,
so numerous as to make it doubtful whether instances to the contrary may
not have been based on too scant information. The difficulty of obtaining
sound evidence on such subjects is well illustrated by the experience of
Dobritzhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, who spent seven years among the
Abipones of South America. For when he asked them whether the wonderful
course of the stars and heavenly bodies had never raised in their minds
the thought of an invisible being who had made and who guided them, he
got for answer that of what happened in heaven, or of the maker or ruler
of the stars, the ancestors of the Abipones had never cared to think,
finding ample occupation for their thoughts in the providing of grass
and water for their horses. Yet the Abipones really believed that they
had been created by an Indian like themselves, whose name they mentioned
with great reverence and whom they spoke of as their ‘grandfather,’
because he had lived so long ago. He was still, they fancied, to be seen
in the Pleiades; and when that constellation disappeared for some months
from the sky they would bewail the illness of their grandfather, and
congratulate him on his recovery when he returned in May. Still, the
creator of savage reasoning is not necessarily a creator of all things,
but only of some, like Caliban’s Setebos, who made the moon and the sun,
and the isle and all things on it—

  But not the stars; the stars came otherwise.

So that it is possible the creator of the Abipones was merely their
deified First Ancestor. For on nothing is savage thought more confused
than on the connection between the first man who lived on the world and
the actual Creator of the world, as if in the logical need of a first
cause they had been unable to divest it of human personality, or as
if the natural idea of a first man had led to the idea of his having
created the world. Thus Greenlanders are divided as to whether Kaliak
was really the creator of all things or only the first man who sprang
from the earth. The Minnetarrees of North America believed that at first
everything was water and there was no earth at all, till the First Man,
the never-dying one, the Lord of Life, sent down the great red-eyed bird
to bring up the earth. The Mingo tribes also ‘revere and make offerings
to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a powerful
deity under the Master of Life, or _even as identified with him_;’ whilst
among the Dog-ribs the First Man, Chapewee, was also creator of the
sun and moon. The Zulus of Africa likewise merge the ideas of the First
Man and the Creator, the great Unkulunkulu; as also do the Caribs, who
believe that Louquo, the uncreate first Carib, descended from heaven
to make the earth and also to become the father of men.[3] So again in
the Aht belief Quawteaht is not only ‘the first Indian who ever lived,’
their forefather, but the maker of most things visible, of the earth and
all animals, yet not of the sun and moon.[4] It seems, therefore, not
improbable that savage speculation, being more naturally impelled to
assume a cause for men than a cause for other things, postulated a First
Man as primeval ancestor, and then applying an hypothesis, which served
so well to account for their own existence, to account for that of the
world in general, made the Father of Men the creator of all things; in
other words, that the idea of a First Man preceded and prepared the way
for the idea of a first cause.

However this may be, and admitting the possible existence of tribes
absolutely devoid of any idea of creation at all, the following savage
fancies about it are not without their interest as typical examples of
primitive cosmogony.

In one of the Dog-rib Indian sagas an important part in the creation
is played by a great bird, as among several other tribes who loved to
trace their origin to a bird, as some would trace theirs to a toad or a
rattlesnake. Originally, the saga runs, the world was nothing but a wide,
waste sea, without any living thing upon it save a gigantic bird, who
with the glance of its fiery eyes produced the lightning, and with the
flapping of its wings the thunder. This bird, by diving into the sea,
caused the earth to appear above it, and proceeded to call all animals to
its surface (except, indeed, the Chippewya Indians, who were descended
from a dog). When its work was complete it made a great arrow, which it
bade the Indians keep with great care; and when this was lost, owing to
the stupidity of the Chippewyas, it was so angry that it left the earth,
never afterwards to revisit it; and men now live no longer, as they did
in those days, till their throats are worn through with eating and their
feet with walking the earth.[5]

Many thousands of miles separate the Tongan Islands from North America,
yet there too we find the idea of the earth having come from the waters.
In the beginning nothing was to be seen above the waste of waters but the
Island of Bolotu, which is as everlasting as the gods who dwell there or
as the stars and the sea. One day the god Tangaloa went to fish in the
sea, when, feeling something heavy at the end of his line, he drew it in,
and there perceived the tops of rocks, which continued to increase in
size and number till they formed a large continent, and his line broke,
and only the Tongan Islands remained above the surface. These Tangaloa,
with the help of the other gods, filled with trees and herbs and animals
from Bolotu, only of a smaller size and not immortal. Then he bade his
two sons take their wives and go to dwell in Tonga, dividing the land
and dwelling apart. The younger brother was steady and industrious, and
made many discoveries; but the elder was idle and slept away his time,
and envied the works of his brother, till at last his envy grew so strong
that one day he murdered him. Then came Tangaloa in wrath from Bolotu, to
ask him why he had slain his brother, and he bade him bring his brother’s
family to him. They were told to take their boats and sail eastward till
they came to a great land to dwell in. ‘Your skin’ (to this effect ran
Tangaloa’s blessing) ‘shall be white as your souls, for your souls are
pure; you shall be wise, make axes, have all other riches, and great
boats. I myself will command the wind to blow from your land to Tonga,
but the people of Tonga will not be able with their bad boats to reach
you.’ To the others he said: ‘You shall be black, because your souls are
black, and you shall remain poor. You shall not be able to prepare useful
things, nor to go to the land of your brothers. But your brothers shall
come to Tonga and trade with you as they please.’[6]

This Tongan creation-myth is especially striking, not only from its
resemblance to the well-known stories of Cain and Abel or of Romulus
and Remus, but from the wonderful extension of a similar story over the
world. It has been found among the Esquimaux, among the Hervey Islanders,
among the Hindoos, among the Iroquois of America. Its origin perhaps lies
in early and rude attempts to account for the more obvious dualisms in
nature, as those, for instance, between the sun and the moon, or between
warm and cold winds. In the Iroquois version the elder brother who
killed the younger is said to have been identical with the sun, though
his mother, not the brother he killed, was the moon.[7] A curious Indian
drawing has been preserved in which the god of the north wind, or of cold
weather, contends with the god of the south, or of warmth. The former
is figured in a snowstorm, the latter in rain; wolves fight on the side
of the one, the crow and plover on that of the other. The conflict is
terrible; the southern god is worsted, cold weather prevails, and the
earth is frozen up. But in spring he sends forth his crow and plover,
who defeat the wolves, and the northern god is drowned in a flood of
spray which arises from the melting of the snow and ice. And in this
contention for cold and warm weather it is believed they will battle as
long as the world shall endure.[8]

The Kamchadal belief is instructive, as showing that by the creation of
the world the savage only means that small portion of it which he knows,
and that, so far from it being any proof of his intelligence to suppose a
cause for the hills or island which limit his energies, it is rather his
want of logical thought which impels him to the belief. For seeing, as
he does, a spirit in everything, whether it be moving animal, or rushing
wind, or standing stone, and accounting, as he does, for everything by
a spirit which is at once its cause and controlling principle, it is
only natural that he should draw from his unlimited spirit-world one
who made and governs all things. Thus the Kamchadals believe that after
their supreme deity, of whom they predicate nothing but existence, the
greatest god is Kutka. Kutka created the heavens and the earth, making
both eternal, like the men and creatures he placed on the earth. But the
Kamchadals openly avow that they think themselves much cleverer than
Kutka, who in their eyes is so stupid as to be quite undeserving of
prayers or gratitude. Had he been cleverer, they say, he would have made
the world much better, without so many mountains and inaccessible cliffs,
without streams of such rapidity, or such tempests of wind and rain. In
winter, if they are climbing a mountain, or in summer, if their canoes
come to rapids, they will vent loud curses on Kutka for having made the
streams too strong for their canoes, or the mountains so wearisome for
their feet.

The Tamanaks of the Orinoco manifested a not much higher conception of a
creator than the Kamchadals. For they ascribed the creation of the world
to Amalivacca, who in the course of his work discussed long with his
brother about the Orinoco, having the kind wish so to make it that ships
might as easily go up its stream as down, but being compelled to abandon
a task which so far transcended his powers. The Tamanaks recently showed
a cave where Amalivacca dwelt when he lived among them, before he took a
boat and sailed to the other side of the sea.[9]

Not only, however, is the idea of a creation of things quite common
among untutored savages, but there is often a belief closely connected
therewith that in the beginning death and sickness were unknown in the
world, but came into it in consequence of some fault committed by its
hitherto immortal occupants. Such a belief, reported as it is from places
so widely sundered as Ceylon, North America, and the Tongan Islands,
seems effectually to discountenance the suspicion which might otherwise
attach to it of collusion or mistake on the part of our informants.
It is the fancy of the Cingalese cosmogony that, in the fifth period
of creative energy, the immortal beings who then inhabited the earth
ate of certain plants, and thereby involved themselves in darkness and
mortality. ‘It was then that they were formed male and female, and lost
the power of returning to the heavenly mansions.’ Liable as they had
theretofore been to mental passions, such as envy, covetousness, and
ambition, they were thenceforward subjected to corporeal passions as
well, and the race now inhabiting the earth became subject to all the
evils that afflict them.[10] According to the saga of the Dog-rib Indians
the first man who lived upon the earth, when food and other good things
abounded, was Chapewee, who afterwards, giving his children two kinds of
food, black and white, forbade them to eat of the former. When he went
away for a long journey to bring the sun into the world, his children
were obedient and ate only of the white fruit, but ate it all. But when
he went away a second time to bring the moon into the world, in their
hunger his children forgot his prohibition and ate of the black fruit. So
when Chapewee returned he was very wroth, and declared that thenceforth
the earth should only produce bad fruit and that men should be subject
to sickness and death. Afterwards, indeed, when his family lamented that
men should have been made mortal for eating the black fruit, Chapewee
granted that those who dreamt certain dreams should have the power of
curing sickness and so of prolonging human life; but that was the extent
to which Chapewee relented.[11] The Caribs, Waraues, and Arawaks are
said to believe in two distinct creators of men and women; the creator
of the former being superior and doing neither good nor harm. After he
had created men he came on the earth to see what they were doing; but
finding them so bad that they even attempted his own life, he took from
them their immortality and gave it to skin-casting creatures instead.
The Aleutian Islanders believe that the god who made their islands
completed his work by making men to inhabit them; but these men were
immortal beings, for when age came over them they had but to climb a
lofty mountain and plunge from thence into a lake, in order to come forth
young again and vigorous. Then it happened that a mortal woman, who had
the misfortune to draw upon herself celestial love, remonstrated one day
with her lover for having, in his creation of the Aleutian Islands, made
so many mountains and forgotten to supply the land with forests. This
imprudent criticism caused her brother to be slain by the angry god, and
all men after him to be subject to death. A similar idea is contained in
one of the Tongan traditions of creation; for when the islands were made,
but before they were inhabited by reasonable beings, some two hundred of
the lower gods, male and female alike, took a great boat to go to see
the new land fished up by Tangaloa. So delighted were they with it that
they immediately broke up their big boat, intending to make some smaller
ones out of it. But after a few days some of them died; and one of
them, inspired by God, told them that since they had come to Tonga, and
breathed its air and eaten its fruits, they should be mortal and fill the
world with mortals. Then were they sorry that they had broken their big
boat, and they set to work to make another, and went to sea, hoping again
to reach Bolotu, the heaven they had left; but being unable to find it,
they returned regretfully to Tonga.

Thus it would seem that wherever men have so far advanced in power of
thought as to realise the conception of antiquity, the troubles of their
actual lot have always tempted them to idealise the past, and the glories
of the age of gold have been sung by the poets of no particular land
nor literature. The Shawnee Indians believed there was a time when they
could walk on the ocean or restore life to the dead, till they lost
these privileges when the nation by its carelessness became divided into
two.[12] The Ashantees trace all their calamities to the folly of their
ancestors, for when the first created black men were given their choice
between a large box and a piece of sealed-up paper they elected to take
the box, but found therein only some gold, iron, and other metals, whilst
the white men on opening the paper found all that was needful to make
them wise, and have ever since treated the blacks as their slaves.[13]
It is remarkable that a similar fancy is ascribed to the Navajoes of
New Mexico. For their ancestors, after creating the sun and moon, made
two water-jars, both covered at the top, but one gorgeously painted,
containing only rubbish, the other of plain earthenware, unpainted, but
containing flocks and herds and other valuables. The Navajoes, allowed
to choose before the Pueblos, took the beautiful but worthless jar;
whereupon the old men said: ‘Thus it will always be with the two nations.
You, Navajoes, will be a poor and wandering race; destitute of the
comforts of life and ever greedy for things on account of their outward
show rather than their intrinsic value; while the Pueblos will enjoy an
abundance of the good things of life, will occupy houses, and have plenty
of flocks and herds.’[14] According to the legend in the Zend-Avesta,
when Ormuzd created Meschia and Meschiana, the first man and woman, he
appointed heaven as their dwelling, under the sole condition of humility
and obedience to the law of pure thought, pure speech, and pure action.
For some time they were a blessing to one another and lived happily,
saying that it was from Ormuzd that all things came—the water and earth,
trees and animals, sun, moon, and stars, and all good roots and fruits
on the earth. But at last Ahriman became master over their thoughts,
and they ascribed the creation of all things to him. So they lost their
happiness and their virtue, and their souls were condemned to remain
in Duzakh until the resurrection of their bodies, when Sosiosch should
restore life to the dead.[15]

Among the myths, however, most widely spread over the world and common
to races in all stages of culture, from the most barbarous to the most
civilized, a prominent place is due to the legend of an all-destructive
deluge, a legend which, arising as it probably did in many different
places from exaggerated memories of purely local floods, must, in spite
of its seeming universality, remain a merely local myth, entirely
destitute of all bearing on the question of the unity of the human race,
or of any connection with the story told in Genesis. A local flood like
that which on the occasion of an earthquake in 1819 was caused by the
sea flowing in at the eastern mouth of the Indus and converting in the
space of a few hours a district of 2,000 square miles into a vast lagoon,
would naturally be an event which would remain for ever in the oral
traditions of the district and tend to become magnified when the event
itself was forgotten. In Australia, which is subject at certain epochs
and in certain localities to great inundations, and which bears evidence
of former floods in what are now waterless deserts, flood stories are
said to be ‘exceedingly common’ among all the tribes, one tribe having
a tradition that when they returned to their old hunting-grounds on
the banks of a river, after a great flood, they found the sea flowing
where had stood the other bank, nor any trace left of its former
inhabitants.[16]

Or, again, it is possible that alterations in the level of the sea and
land or the subsidence of a large continent, such as that of which on
geological as well as ethnological grounds it has been supposed that the
Polynesian islands are the remains, may have originated the tradition.
Thus, the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg imagined the submersion of a
large country in the Atlantic to account for the deluge-myths of the
Central American nations.[17] Dr. Brinton, indeed, suggests, that not
physics, but metaphysics is the exciting cause of beliefs in periodical
convulsions of the globe, maintaining that ‘by nothing short of a
miracle’ could savages preserve the remembrance of even the most terrible
catastrophe beyond a few generations. But it is at least as likely
that such remembrance should be possible as that savages, starting, as
he supposes, with an idea of creation as a reconstruction of existing
elements, should have added thereto the myth of a universal catastrophe,
‘to avoid the dilemma of a creation from nothing on the one hand and the
eternity of matter on the other.’[18] Perhaps, however, all such legends
are best regarded as pure nature-myths, to which we may possibly find
the key in the belief of the Esquimaux, that the souls of the dead are
encamped round a large lake in the sky, which when it overflows causes
rain upon earth and would cause a universal deluge if at any time its
floodgates were burst. The belief in a contingency is never far from the
assertion of its actuality, nor are the steps of thought always visible
which separate the possible from the real.

Although many of the deluge-myths of the world have doubtless owed their
origin to the zeal with which they have been sought for in the cause
of orthodox theories, it is improbable that all of them have been
produced in this way. Dr. Brinton, who has examined the evidence with
care, asserts that there are twenty-eight American nations among whom a
distinct and well-authenticated myth of the deluge was found.[19]

It would be tedious to allude to more than a few illustrations of the
belief as it exists in the world, or to try to distinguish the elements
in them of purely native growth from the influences of Christian
teaching. The Kamchadals believe that the earth was once flooded and many
persons drowned, though they tried to save themselves in boats, those
only succeeding who made great rafts of trees and let down stones for
anchors, to prevent themselves from drifting out to sea; when the waters
subsided their rafts rested on the mountain-tops. The Esquimaux appealed
to the bones of whales found on their mountains in support of their
assertion that the world had once been tilted over and all men drowned
but one. The Mandan Indians, according to Catlin, celebrated every year
in pantomime the subsidence of the great waters.[20]

It is noticeable that in most savage legends of a flood (and it may,
perhaps, be taken as some test of their authenticity) there is an entire
absence of the idea, so familiar to ourselves, of the flood having
resulted from any fault committed by the then inhabitants of the earth.
At most such an idea appears in germ, as in the tradition of the Society
Islanders, that a fisherman, catching his hook in the hair of the great
sea-god as he lay asleep in his coral grove, so angered that divinity
that he caused the waters to arise till they flooded the very tops of the
mountains and drowned the inhabitants, the fisherman and his family alone
being suffered to escape, and thereby serving to attest the genuineness
of the tradition. So in Fiji the deluge was caused by two grandsons of a
god killing his favourite bird, and instead of being apologetic acting
with insolence and fortifying the town they lived in for the purpose
of defying their grandfather. The connection of the catastrophe with
human wickedness belongs apparently to a more advanced state of thought,
of which the recently deciphered Chaldæan version may be taken as a
sample. In it Hasisadra, the sage, who with his wife escaped the general
destruction, tells Izdubar, the giant, how he built a vessel according to
the directions of Hea, to save himself and his family from the universal
deluge which the gods sent upon the earth to punish the wickedness of
men; how the deluge lasted six days, and on the seventh, when the storm
ceased, the vessel was stranded for seven days on the mountains of
Nizir; and how on the seventh day, he Hasisadra, sent out first a dove
and then a swallow, both of whom, finding no resting-place, returned to
the vessel, till a raven was sent forth and did not return; and Hasisadra
sent out the animals to the four winds, and poured out a libation in
thanksgiving, and built an altar on the summit of the mountain.

The belief in a future life—a belief perhaps first suggested in that
rude state of culture where the dreaming and waking life are not clearly
distinct but are both equally real—appears to prevail so generally among
the lower races, that it is more difficult to find instances where it is
_not_ found than instances where it is. The dead who visit the living in
their sleep are not thought of as dead, but as simply invisible; and for
this reason all over the globe it is so common to bury material things in
the graves of the departed, to serve them in that other world which is so
vividly conceived as but a continuation of this one. The Red Indian takes
his horses, the Greenlander his reindeer, and both the common requisites
of earthly economy; just as many tribes still take their slaves and
their wives to accompany them on that journey which, as it is imagined
so distinctly, is undertaken without mystery to a fresh existence. Till
lately, in parts of Sweden, a man’s pipe and tobacco-pouch, some money
and lights, were interred with him; and at Reichenbach, in Germany, a
man’s umbrella and goloshes are still placed in his grave.[21] In Russia
formerly a new pair of shoes was put on the feet of the dead for the long
journey before him, a custom also found among the natives of California,
and the Christian priest used to place on a man’s breast, as he lay in
his coffin, a pass, which, besides being inscribed with his Christian
name and the dates of his birth and death, was also a certificate of his
baptism, of the piety of his life, and of his having partaken of the
communion before his death.[22] These are but survivals of savage ideas,
which picture the continuation of consciousness far more vividly than
more advanced religions. The Ahts bury blankets with their dead, that
they may not shiver in the cold ones provided in the land of Chayher. The
Delawar Indian used to make an opening at the head-end of the coffin,
that the soul of the deceased might go in and out till it had thoroughly
settled on its future place of residence. When the Chippewyas killed
their aged relatives who could hunt no more, the medicine-song used
proves the simple faith which made the cruel deed an act of mercy: ‘The
Lord of life gives courage. It is true all Indians know that he loves us,
and we give over to him our father, that he may feel himself young in
another land and able to hunt.’

It is possible, indeed, that in many cases the attention shown by savages
to their dead, by the burial of property which would have been of use to
the survivors, or by the placing of food on their graves at periodical
feasts, arose rather from fear than from any kinder motive, dictated by
the dread always felt by the living of the dead and the wish to satisfy
them, if possible, by some peace-offering. The Samoyed sorcerer, after
a funeral, goes through the ceremony of soothing the departed, that he
may not trouble the survivors nor take their best game; a feeling still
further illustrated by their habit of not taking the dead out to be
buried by the regular hut door, but by a side-opening, that if possible
they may not find their way back—a habit found also in Greenland and in
many other parts of the world. For the fear of the dead is a universal
sentiment, common no less to the Abipones, who thought that sorcerers
could bring the dead from their graves to visit the living, or to the
Kaffirs, who think that bad men alone live a second time and try to kill
the living by night, than it is to the ignorant who still believe in
the blood-sucking vampire, a belief which little more than a century
ago amounted to a kind of epidemic in Hungary, resulting in a general
disinterment and the burning or staking of the suspected bodies. In the
sepulture, therefore, of men with their possessions, it was probably
the original thought that the dead would be less likely to haunt the
dwellings of the living, if they were not compelled to re-seek upon earth
those articles of daily use which they knew were to be found there.

But the savage belief in a future is very variable; nor could we expect
to find it much affected by ideas of earthly morality, when such ideas
themselves hardly appear to exist. At most it is men of rank and courage
who live again, while cowards and the commonalty perish utterly;
generally there is no qualification of any kind. The Bedouins have no
fixed belief at all, some thinking that after death they are changed
into screech-owls, and others that if a camel is slain on their graves
they will return to life riding on it, but otherwise on foot. All North
American Indians are said to believe in the continual life of the soul,
and, because they think themselves the highest beings on earth, postulate
a hereafter where all their earthly longings will be satisfied.[23] But
they trouble themselves little about it, thinking that the god they
recognise as supreme is too good to punish them. Thus the Indians of
Arauco look forward to an eternal life in a beautiful land which lies
to the west, far over the sea, whither souls are taken by the sailor
Tempulazy and where no punishment is expected: for Pillican, their god,
the Lord of the world, would not inflict pain.[24] The Tunguz Lapps look
on the next life as simply a continuation of this one; in it there will
be no punishment, for here everyone is as good as he can be, and the gods
kill men reluctantly, but are thereby satisfied. In the Polynesian future
there is a similar absence of any idea of retribution. There is, for
instance, no moral qualification, but only one of rank, for Bolotu, that
happy land of the dead which lies far away to the north-west of Tonga,
beyond the reach of Tongan boats and greater than all the Tongan islands
put together, wherein abound beautiful and useful trees, whose plucked
fruit instantly grows again; where a delicious fragrance fills the air,
and birds of the loveliest colours sit upon the trees; where the woods
swarm with pigs, which are immortal so long as they are not eaten by the
gods. Nothing, indeed, shows better how independent is imagination of
race than the great similarity of those idealised earths which constitute
the heavens of the most distant savage tribes. The American Indian, who
visits in a dream the unseen world, reports of it, in language recalling
that of Homer, that it is a land where there is neither day nor night,
where the sun never rises nor sets; where rain and tomahawks and arrows
are never seen; where pipes abound everywhere, lying ready to be smoked;
where the earth is ever green, the trees ever in leaf; where there is no
need of bearskin nor of hut; where, if you would travel, the rivers will
take your boat whithersoever you will, without the need of rudder or of
paddle. And just as in the Tongan Bolotu the plucked fruit is replaced,
so there the goat voluntarily offers its shoulder to the hungry man, in
full confidence that it will grow again, and the beaver for the same
reason makes a ready sacrifice of its beautiful tail.[25]

So far there is no idea of a future life as in any way affected by this
one. But such ideas do exist among savages, and are extremely interesting
as indications of the growth of their moral ideas. The quality most
necessary for a savage is pre-eminently courage, and courage, therefore,
appearing as the first recognised virtue, lays first claim, as such, to
consideration hereafter. The Brazilians believed that the souls of the
dead became beautiful birds, whilst cowards were turned into reptiles.
The Minnetarrees held that there were two villages which received the
dead; but that the cowardly and bad went to the small one, whilst the
brave and good occupied the larger. Among the Caribs, who entertain the
strange fancy that they have as many souls as they feel nerves in their
body, but that the chief of these resides in the heart and goes to
heaven at death, whilst the others go to the sea or the woods, we meet
again with the reservation of happiness to the souls of the brave. They
alone will live merrily, dancing, feasting, and talking; they alone will
swim in the great streams, feeling no fatigue; the Arawaks will either
serve them as slaves or wander about in desert mountains. Somewhat
similar was the faith of the old Mexicans, who divided the future world
into three parts: the first, the House of the Sun, where the days were
spent in joyful attendance on that luminary, with songs and games and
dances, by such brave soldiers as had died in battle or as prisoners
had been sacrificed to the gods, and by women who had died in giving
children to the community; the second, the kingdom of Tlalocan, hidden
among the Mexican mountains, not so bright as the former, but cool and
pleasant, and filled with unfailing pumpkins and tomatoes, reserved for
priests and for children sacrificed to Tlaloc and for all persons killed
by lightning, by drowning, or by sickness; the third, the kingdom of
Mictlauteuctli, reserved for all other persons, but with nothing said
of any punishment there awaiting them. One of the beliefs in Greenland
is, that heaven is situate in the sky or the moon, and that the journey
thither is so easy that a soul may reach it the same evening that it
quits the body, and play at ball and dance with those other departed
souls who are encamped round the great lake and shine in heaven as the
northern lights. But others say that it is only witches and bad people
who join the heavenly lights, where they not only enjoy no rest, owing
to the rapid revolutions of the sky, but are so plagued with ravens
that they cannot keep them from settling in their hair. They believe
that heaven lies under the earth or sea, where dwells Torngarsuk, the
Creator, with his mother, in perpetual summer and beautiful sunshine.
There the water is good and there is no night, and there are plenty of
birds, and fish, and seals, and reindeer, all to be caught at pleasure,
or ready cooking in a great kettle; but these delights are reserved for
persons who have done great deeds and worked steadfastly, who have caught
many whales or seals, who have been drowned at sea, or have died in
childbirth. These persons alone may hope to join the great company and
feast on inconsumable seals. Even then they must slide for five days down
the blood-stained precipice; and unhappy they to whom the journey falls
in stormy weather or in winter, for then they may suffer that other death
of total extinction, especially if their survivors disturb them by their
noise or affect them injuriously by the food they eat. The Kamchadal
belief is very curious, as showing how the idea of compensation in the
next world for the evils of this—an idea already apparent in the Mexican
and Greenland beliefs—may have served to bridge over the conception of a
mere continuance of life for the soul, and the conception of an actual
retribution awaiting it. They imagine that the dead come to a place under
the earth, where Haetsch dwells, son of Kutka the Creator, and the first
man who died on earth, now Lord of the under-world and general receiver
of souls. To those who come dressed in fine furs and drive fat dogs
before their sledges, he gives instead old ragged furs and lean dogs; but
to those who have known poverty on earth he gives new furs and beautiful
dogs and also a better place to live in than the others. The dead live
again as on earth; their wives are restored to them, they build ostrogs
again, and catch fish, and dance and sing; there is less storm and snow
than above ground, and more people; indeed, abundance of everything.

It is easy to conceive how, when once the idea had been reached that the
brave deserved compensation in the next world for their earthly courage,
the poor for their earthly wretchedness, or the sick for their earthly
sufferings, and all men for the misfortune of premature death, it should
also be inferred, as soon as any criterion between goodness and badness
more refined than the mere difference between courage and cowardice had
been attained, that the good should have some advantage over the bad, and
from such an inference to a complete theory of retribution and punishment
of the bad the logical steps seem fairly obvious. Few things, indeed, are
more remarkable among the lower races than the general absence of the
ideas we associate with hell.[26] At most the idea of future punishment
is negative, the lives of slaves and cowards terminating in a total
cessation of consciousness, as opposed to its continuance for warriors
and chiefs. Still, the idea of difficulty in attaining the blessed
abodes, such as that above noticed as prevalent in Greenland—an idea,
as Mr. Tylor suggests, probably connected with the sun’s passage across
the sky to the west, where the happy land is so generally figured to
lie—is very common, and from such an idea it is natural to connect the
difficulty of the journey to Paradise with the destruction of those whose
presence in it would mar its blessedness.

The trial of merit, varying with experiences of physical geography,
generally lies either in the passage of a river or gulf by a narrow
bridge, or in the climbing of a steep mountain. The Choctaws, for
instance, believe that the dead have to pass a long and slippery
pine-log, across a deep and rapid river, on the other side of which stand
six persons, who pelt new-comers with stones and cause the bad ones to
fall in.[27] In Khond theology the judge of the dead resides beyond
the sea, on the smooth and slippery Leaping Rock, below which flows a
black unfathomable river; and the souls of men take bold leaps to reach
the rock, those that fail contracting a deformity which is transferred
to the next soul animated on earth. The Blackfoot Indians, on the other
hand, believe that departed souls have to climb a steep mountain, from
the summit of which is seen a great plain, with new tents and swarms of
game; that the dwellers in that happy plain advance to them and welcome
those who have led a good life, but reject the bad—those who have soiled
their hands in the blood of their countrymen—and throw them headlong from
the mountain; whilst women who have been guilty of infanticide never
reach the mountain at all, but hover round the seat of their crimes with
branches of trees tied to their legs. The Fijians think that even the
brave have some difficulty in reaching the judgment-seat of Ndengei, and
they provide the dead with war-clubs to resist Sama and his host, who
will dispute their passage. But celibacy is in their eyes apparently
the only offence which calls for peremptory and hopeless punishment.
Unmarried Fijians are dashed to pieces by Nangananga as in vain attempts
to steal round to a certain reef they are driven ashore by the rising
tide.[28] The Norwegian Lapps consider that abstinence from stealing,
lying, and quarrelling entitles a man to compensation hereafter. Such
receive after death a new body, and live with the higher gods in Saiwo,
and indulge in hunting and magic, brandy-drinking and smoking, to a far
higher degree than was possible on earth. Wicked men, perjurers, and
thieves go to the place of the bad spirits, to Gerre-Mubben-Aimo.[29]
The idea of compensation of the good leads naturally to the idea of
retribution for the bad; and even among the Guinea Coast negroes we
find future inducements to the practice of such moral duties as they
recognise. For they are wont to make for themselves idols, called Sumanes
whose favour they endeavour to secure by abstinence from certain kinds
of foods, believing that after death those who have been constant in
their vows of abstinence and in offerings to the Sumanes will come to a
large inland river, where a god inquires of everyone how he has lived
his days on earth, and those who have not kept their vows are drowned
and destroyed for ever. The inland-dwelling negroes declare that at
this river dwells a powerful god in a beautiful house, which, though
always exposed, is never touched by rain. He knows all past and present
things; he can send any kind of weather, he can heal sicknesses and work
miracles. Before him must all the dead appear; the good to receive a
happy and peaceful life, the bad to be killed for ever by the large
wooden club which hangs before his door. Lastly, it may be noticed
that negro tribes believe that death will take them to the land of the
European and give them the white man’s skin; but, as they generally paint
their devil white, we cannot be sure that such a change is not rather
dreaded as a punishment for the bad than regarded as a change for the
better.

So far it appears that savages have developed from the promptings and
imaginings of their own minds some idea of a Creator and of a soul, as
well as of a future to some extent dependent on earthly antecedents. It
is of course difficult to judge how far the missionaries or travellers,
who have mainly supplied the only evidence we have, may have clearly
understood, or how much they may have unintentionally imported into,
beliefs they represent as purely indigenous. In many cases a remarkable
similarity may lead us to suspect that the belief is not native, but
implanted at some time by Christian or other influence, though traces
of such influence may be absolutely wanting or at least not proved.
There can, for instance, be little doubt whence Sissa, the devil of the
Guinea Coast negroes, derived the pair of horns and long tail with which
he is usually depicted. But, on the other hand, we cannot lay down any
rigid canon for the imaginations of men, nor say that if one belief is
identical with another a thousand miles off it must therefore have been
borrowed and cannot be of independent growth. Indeed, when we reflect on
the limited nature of the mental faculties of savages, on the limited
range of objects for their minds to work upon, on their childlike fear
of the dark and the unseen, and their still more childlike delight in
the indulgence of their fancy, so far from there being anything strange
in the analogies of thought between distant tribes, the strangeness
would rather be if such analogies did not exist. It is probable that
children tell one another much the same stories in London as they do at
the Antipodes, and there is no more reason to be surprised at finding
much the same theologies current in Africa as in Australia or Ceylon. The
same sun, which shines on men’s bodies alike, shines on their minds alike
too; and myths, like dreams, with all the apparent field for variety in
their formation, are really subject to the closest laws of uniformity and
sameness.

We have, however, to be careful, in applying terms of our own religious
phraseology to savage thoughts and fancies, to discriminate between the
higher and lower meaning they bear, and always to employ them in the
lower. The belief, already noticed, of the Kamchadals in Kutka well
illustrates how different is the meaning involved in the Kamchadal theory
of creation from that involved in Genesis or the Zend-Avesta. The same
is true of the belief in a soul and its future life; for the savage,
intensely vivid as is his future beyond the grave, seldom doubts for an
instant but that he will share it with all the rest, not only of the
animate, but of the inanimate world. For that reason he buries axes, and
clothes, and food with the dead, to be of service in the next world. The
Fijians used to show ‘the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of
stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the utensils of this
frail world, swimming, or rather tumbling one over the other,’ as they
were borne by a swift stream at the bottom of a deep hole to the regions
of immortality.[30] So of the animate world. The Kamchadal believes that
the smallest fly that breathes will rise after death to live again in
the under-world.[31] If the Laplander expects that all honest people
will re-meet in Aimo, he as fully expects that bears and wolves will
meet there too. The Greenlander believes that all the heavenly bodies
were once Greenlanders, _or animals_, and that they shine with a pale
or red light according to the food they ate on earth. He also believes
that when all things now living on the earth are dead, and the earth
cleansed from their blood by a great water-flood; when the purified dust
is consolidated again by a great wind, and a fairer earth, all plain and
no cliffs, is substituted for the present one; when Priksoma, he who is
above, breathes on men that they may live again—then animals will also
rise again and be in great abundance. The old inhabitants of Anahuac
and Egypt believed equally that animals would share the next world
with them; and, if the universality of an opinion were any reason for
its credibility, few opinions could claim a better title to acceptance
than this one. So confident were the Swedish Lapps of the future life
of animals, that whenever they killed one in sacrifice they buried the
bones in a box, that the gods might more easily restore it to life.[32]
There is really nothing very unnatural in this idea, when we remember
that in the lower stages of culture man not only admits the equality of
brutes with himself, but even acknowledges their superiority by actual
worship of them. It is not difficult to understand how it is that savages
who see deities in everything, in the motionless mountain or stone no
less than in the rushing river or wind, should see in animals deities of
extraordinary power, whose capacities infinitely transcend their own.
Recognising as they do in the tiger a strength, in the deer a speed, in
the monkey a cunning, all superior to their own, they naturally conceive
of them as deities whom above all others it is expedient to humour by
adoration and sacrifice. Some negro tribes, holding that all animals
enshrine a spirit, which may injure or benefit themselves, will refrain
from eating certain animals, otherwise perfectly edible, and endeavour
to propitiate them by lifelong attention. Thus some regularly offer food
at the earth-houses of termites, or fatten sheep and goats, for a purely
temporary and perfectly spiritual advantage. It is on account of their
divine and immortal nature that the well-known custom of apologising to
animals killed in the chase is so general among savages. It is generally
a deprecation of any post-mortem vindictiveness on the part of the
animal’s ghost. The natives of Greenland refrain from breaking seals’
heads or throwing them into the sea; but they pile them in a heap before
their hut door, that the souls of the seals may not be angry and in their
spite frighten living seals away. The Yuracares of Bolivia were careful
to put small fish-bones carefully aside, lest fish should disappear; and
other Indian tribes would keep the bones of beavers and sables from their
dogs for a year and then bury them, lest the spirits of those animals
should take offence and no more of them be killed or trapped.[33] The
Lapps are so afraid that the soul of the animal whose flesh they have
killed may take its revenge as a disembodied spirit, that before eating
it they not only entreat pardon for its death, but perform the ceremony
of treating it first with nuts or other delicacies, that it may be led
to believe it is present as a guest—not to be eaten, but to eat. Another
Kamchadal fancy indicates how savages, whose theory of cause and effect
appears to be that it is quite sufficient for two things to be connected
contemporaneously for one to be cause and the other effect, are led more
especially to see deities in birds, from the observation that changes
in weather are associated with their arrival and departure. Since to be
associated with a thing is to be caused by it, migratory birds take away
or bring the summer with them. For the reason that the spring and the
wagtails return together the Kamchadal thanks the wagtail for bringing
back the spring, and it is probably from a similar confusion of thought
that he thanks the ravens and crows for fine weather.

Whether, in conclusion, it be true or not that the more civilised nations
of the earth have gone through stages of growth in which their religious
conceptions resembled those of contemporary savage tribes, one result
at least is clear, that the actual standpoint of the savage with regard
to the great mysteries of existence is removed _toto cœlo_ from that of
Christian, or Mahometan, or Parsee. The Creator he believes in is not
so much the cause of all things as the maker of some things, because
seemingly the first father of men needed the wherewithal to exercise his
energies. The savage’s soul is simply his breath or ghost, which indeed
will survive his body, but which may lose its identity in the body of
an animal or thing, destined like himself to live again. He conceives
of himself generally as not mortal, but not therefore as immortal. His
future is but a repetition of his present, with the same base wants
and pursuits, only with a greater possibility of indulgence, and not
necessarily indefinite in duration. It is, perhaps, some compensation
for this, that, if it does not hold out great hopes, its prospect serves
to deprive death of its terror, and brightens the sufferings of the
passing day. To the native American death is said to be rather an event
of gladness than of terror, bringing him rest or enjoyment after his
period of toil; nor does he fear to go to a land ‘which all his life long
he has heard abounds in rewards without punishments.’[34] No thought of
possibly flying from present evils to find immeasurably greater ones
awaiting him after death would ever occur to a savage, and he will even
kill himself or cheerfully submit to be killed by his friends, in order
to realise the sooner the difference imagined between earth and heaven.
The powers of evil which vex him here will be absent hereafter, and the
Spirit he recognises as supreme in his hierarchy of invisible powers is
either conceived as too beneficent to punish, or, if he punishes at all,
as likely to punish at once and for ever.




II.

_SAVAGE MODES OF PRAYER._


In the same way as a child is insensibly educated by the very efforts of
an adult to place himself on its level, so any tribe of savages is to
some extent modified by the time that a stranger has fitted himself, by
long residence among them and the acquisition of their language, to tell
us anything about them. This primary difficulty, amounting theoretically
to insuperability, might alone suffice to invalidate most of the received
evidence which asserts or denies concerning savages anything whatsoever
in broad general terms. But when the evidence concerns religious ideas
another difficulty is superadded, and one which appertains to the subject
of religion alone—the reserve, that is, (attested by too many travellers
to need specific references,) with which savages guard their stock of
fundamental beliefs. The delicacy manifested by the most skilled of the
Iowa Indian tribe as to communicating fully or freely on religious
subjects, lest they should bring on themselves or their nation some
great calamity,[35] indicates the feeling that probably underlies such
religious reticence. If a savage dare not pronounce his own name, much
less the names of his dead, it is a fair matter of wonder that he should
ever have become so free with the names and attributes of his divinities
as to have rendered it possible for such systematic representations of
his theology as are current to appear before the world.

The evidence afforded by ethnology as to the nature of prayer among
savages is slighter than on most subjects relating to them, partly
from the natural disregard paid to such matters by most Christian
missionaries, partly from the secret and hidden character of prayer,
which alone would make its study impossible; but there is abundant
evidence to show that religious supplication of a certain kind enters
more deeply than might be supposed into the daily lives of the lower
races of mankind. Says Ellis of the Society Islanders: ‘Religious rites
were connected with almost every act of their lives. An _ubu_ or prayer
was offered before they ate their food, planted their gardens, built
their houses, launched their canoes, cast their nets, and commenced or
concluded a journey.’[36] In the Fijian Islands business transactions
were commonly terminated by a short wish or prayer; and in the Sandwich
Islands the priest would pray before a battle that the gods he addressed
would prove themselves stronger than the gods of his foes, promising
them hecatombs of victims in the event of victory. But the mere fact of
such prayers is of less interest than the actual formulas used; these,
however, have more rarely been thought worth recording.

According to a recent African traveller it is a daily prayer in some
parts of Guinea: ‘O God, I know thee not, but thou knowest me: thy aid is
necessary to me.’ Or again: ‘O God, help us; we do not know whether we
shall live to-morrow: we are in thy hand.’[37] A Bushman, being asked how
he prayed to Cagn (recognised by his tribe as the first being and creator
of all things), answered, in a low, imploring tone: ‘O Cagn, O Cagn, are
we not your children? do you not see our hunger? Give us food;’ ‘and,’
he added, ‘he gives us both hands full.’[38] It further appears that the
Bushmen address petitions to the sun, to the moon, and to the stars;[39]
and the Kamchadals, who have been made to dispute with them the lowest
rank of humanity, had a rude form of prayer to the Storm-god, which was
uttered by a small child, sent naked round the ostrog with a shell in
its uplifted hand: ‘Gsanlga, sit down and cease to storm; the mussel is
accustomed to salt, not to sweet water; you make me too wet, and from the
wet I must freeze. I have no clothes; see how I freeze.’[40] In a certain
African tribe it is said to be usual for the men to go every morning to a
river, and there, after splashing water in their faces, or throwing sand
over their heads, after clasping and loosing their hands and whispering
softly the words _Eksuvais_, to pray: ‘Give me to-day rice and yams,
gold and aggry-beads, slaves, riches, and health; make me active and
strong.’[41]

The Zulus of Africa and the Khonds of India supply good illustrations
of savage prayer. The head man of a Zulu village, at the sacrifice of
a bullock to the spirits of the dead, thus addresses them in prayer:
‘I pray for cattle that they may fill this pen. I pray for corn that
many people may come to this village of yours and make a noise and
glorify you. I also ask for children, that this village may have a large
population and that your name may never come to an end.’[42] The Khonds,
also, at the sacrifice of a bullock express their wishes with rather more
emphasis: ‘Let our herds be so numerous that they cannot be housed; let
children so abound that care of them shall overcome their parents, as
shall be seen by their burnt hands.’ Or, again, they will ask that their
swine may so abound that their fields shall require no other ploughs than
their ‘rooting snouts;’ that their poultry may be so numerous as to hide
the thatch of their houses; that neither fish, frog, nor worm shall be
able to live in their drinking ponds beneath the trampling feet of their
multitude of cattle.[43]

These may be taken as fair samples of primitive prayer; but it is only
just, as against the inference that a savage’s prayers have reference
solely to the good and evil things of this world, to notice indications
of higher sentiments. The Yebus of Africa, with faces bowed to the earth,
are said commonly to pray, not only for preservation from sickness and
death, but for the gifts of happiness and _wisdom_.[44] The Tahitian
priest, praying to the god by whom it was supposed that a dead man’s
spirit had been required, that the sins of the latter, especially that
one for which he had lost his life, might be buried in a hole then dug
in the ground and not attach to the survivors, points to the occasional
presence of a moral motive in prayer; though even here the deprecation
of further anger on the part of the gods appears the principal object
of concern.[45] So little indeed do thoughts of morality or of a future
state enter as factors into savage prayer, and so little does any
ethical distinction appear in the savage conception of supernatural
powers, that not unfrequently supplication is directed to the attainment
of ends morally the reverse of desirable. Like the Roman tradesman
praying to Mercury to aid him in cheating, the Nootka warrior would
entreat his god that he might find his foes asleep, and so kill a great
many of them.[46] But perhaps the best illustration of the perverted use
of prayer is one employed by a clan of the Hervey Islanders when engaged
on a thieving and murdering expedition, and uttered as near as possible
to the dwelling of the person about to be robbed. It is apparently
addressed to Rongo, or Oro, the great Polynesian god of war, and is thus
translated in Mr. Gill’s ‘Myths and Songs of the South Pacific’:—[47]

  We are on a thieving expedition;
  Be close to our left side to give aid.
    Let all be wrapped in sleep;
  Be as a lofty cocoa-nut tree to support us.

The god is then entreated to cause all things to sleep; the owner of the
house is entreated to sleep on, likewise the threshold of the house, the
insects, beetles, earwigs, and ants that inhabit it, the central post,
the several rafters and beams that support it; and after the thatch of
the house has been asked to sleep on, the prayer thus concludes:—

  The first of its inmates unluckily awaking
  Put soundly to sleep again.
  If the Divinity so please, man’s spirit must yield.
  O Rongo, grant thou complete success.

If, however, we may hope to find anywhere indications of a higher purpose
in prayer than the attainment of merely temporary or personal needs, we
must seek it (nor is the search entirely vain) in those rites of religion
which, from the highest to the lowest levels of culture, are customary
upon the entrance of a fresh life on the stage of this world’s trials and
sorrows. The popular saying, that the cries of a child at its christening
are the cries of the devil going out of it, expresses identically the
same belief which still prompts our savage contemporaries to drive
evil spirits from a new-born child by rites of mysterious spiritual
efficacy; and it is probably to the indigenous prevalence of baptism
among many savage tribes that some Catholic missionaries, complacently
identifying conversion with immersion, have owed the success of their
efforts. It would at least be interesting to know whether baptism was
a native African rite at the time that the Capuchin Merolla baptized
with his own hands 13,000 negroes, and Padre Jerom da Montefarchio his
100,000 in the space of twenty years.[48] Mungo Park gives an account of
a purely heathen festival held about a week after the birth of a child,
at which a priest, taking the latter in his arms, would pray, soliciting
repeatedly the blessing of God on the child and all the company. And
Bosman tells of a priest binding ropes, corals, and other things round
the limbs of a new-born child, and exorcising the spirits of sickness and
evil.[49]

It cannot, however, be proved with certainty that such rites are of
native growth wherever they have been found, though similar feelings of
natural impurity, of natural anxiety, may well have contributed to make
them common all the world over. With this reservation, let it suffice
to recall some illustrations drawn from the most distant parts of the
world. The most touching form of the custom is told of a tribe in the
Fiji Islands, where the priest, presented by the relations with food
with which to notify the event to the gods before the birth-festival,
would thus petition the latter: ‘This is the food of the little child:
take knowledge of it, ye gods. Be kind to him. Do not pelt him or spit
upon him, or seize him, but let him live to plant sugar-canes.’[50]
In New Zealand, the tohunga, or priest, dipping a green branch into a
calabash of water, sprinkled the child therewith and made incantations
according to its sex;[51] whilst in the Hervey Islands, where the
child was immersed in a taro leaf filled with water, the ceremony was
intimately connected with their system of tribes and dedication for
future sacrifice.[52] Crossing over to America, we find among the Indian
tribes of Guiana the native priest dancing about an infant and dashing
water over it, finishing the ceremony by passing his hands over its
limbs, muttering all the while incantations and charms.[53] In some North
American tribes, water having been boiled with a certain sweet-scented
root, and some of it having been first thrown into the fire and the rest
distributed to the company by the oldest woman present, the latter would
then offer a short prayer to the Master of Life, on behalf of the child,
that its life might be spared and that it might grow; and if, at the
festival held to commemorate the child’s first slain animal, one of the
chief persons present would entreat the Great Spirit to be kind to the
lad and let him grow to be a great hunter, in war to take many scalps and
not to behave like an old woman, it cannot be said that such a prayer was
purely selfish in its aim or confined solely to present necessities.[54]

Although, however, it is impossible to dissociate baptismal rites so rude
as these from a belief in magic, the idea of water as conferring moral as
well as physical purity appears to have been attained by some of the more
advanced heathen tribes. The rite of baptism, says Dr. Brinton, was of
immemorial antiquity among the Cherokees, Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians:
the use of water as symbolical of spiritual cleansing clearly appearing,
for instance, in the prayer of the Peruvian Indian, who after confessing
his guilt would bathe in the river and say: ‘O river, receive the sins
I have this day confessed unto the sun, carry them down to the sea, and
let them never more appear.’[55] It has often been told, on the original
authority of Sahagun, how the Mexican nurse, after bathing the new-born
child, would bid it approach its mother, the goddess of water; praying at
the same time to her that she would receive it and wash it, would take
away its inherited impurity, make it good and clean, and instil into it
good habits and manners.[56]

The mere enunciation of a wish often amounts among savages to a complete
prayer, it being conceived that the expression of desire is of more
moment than the manner of such expression; such a conception still
surviving among ourselves at certain wishing towers, wishing gates, or
on the occurrence of certain natural phenomena. In Fiji it was common
to shout aloud, after drinking a toast, the name of some object of
desire, and this was equivalent to a prayer for whatever it might be—for
food, wealth, a fair wind, or even for the gratification of cannibal
gluttony. Franklin tells how some Indians, disappointed in the chase, set
themselves to beat a large tambourine and sing an address to the Great
Spirit, praying for relief, their prayer consisting solely of three words
constantly repeated;[57] the tambourine probably being employed for the
same purpose that the Sioux Indians kept a whistle in the mouth of one of
their gods, namely, to make their invocation audible. The Ahts, praying
to the moon, sometimes say no more than _teech, teech_, that is, Health
or Life; and it is curious that the rude savages of Brazil exclaim _teh,
teh_, to the same luminary.[58] The Sioux would often say, ‘Spirits of
the dead, have mercy!’ adding thereto a notification of their wishes,
whether for good health, good luck in hunting, or anything else.[59] The
Zulus, however, sometimes carry this principle of brevity furthest, for
sometimes in their prayers to the spirits of their dead they simply say,
‘Ye people of our house,’ ‘the suppliant taking it for granted that the
Amatongo will know what he wants;’ though generally their addresses to
their ancestors are of a much more orthodox length than this.[60] When we
consider how large a place the spirits of the dead fill in the savage’s
spirit-world it appears possible that many of the prayers and sacrifices,
said to be offered to the Great Spirit or unknown divinities, are really
addressed to the all-controlling, ever-present spirits of the departed.

If we may believe the testimony of a great many travellers in all
parts of the world, the case of the Yezidis, who to the recognition
of a supreme being are said to join actual worship of the chief power
of evil, represents no exceptional phase of human thought. Yet even
the Yezidis, according to Dr. Latham, are said to be improperly called
Devil-worshippers, since they only try to conciliate Satan, speak of him
with respect or not at all, avoid his name in all their oaths, and are
pained if they hear people make a light use of it.[61] In Equatorial
Africa it is said that whilst Mburri, the spirit of evil, is worshipped
piously as a tyrant to be appeased, it is not considered necessary to
pray to Njambi, the good spirit.[62] Harmon says distinctly of all the
different Indian tribes east of the Rocky Mountains that they pray and
make frequent and costly sacrifices to the bad spirit for delivery from
evils they feel or fear, but that they seldom pray to the supreme good
spirit, to whom they ascribe every perfection, and whom they consider
too benevolent ever to inflict evil on his creatures.[63] There is,
indeed, little doubt that, if a certain amount of evidence suffices
the requirements of proof, we must yield consent to the fact, in
itself neither incredible nor unintelligible, that many savage tribes,
recognising and believing in a good and powerful spirit, make that very
goodness a reason for their neglect of him, and address their petitions
instead to the mercy of that other spirit to whose power for evil they
conceive the world to lie subject.[64] There is, however, much to be
said in favour of the view, that the mind in its primitive state is
unconscious of this moral dualism in the spirit-world, attributing
rather (in perfect accordance with the analogy of human relationships)
good and bad things alike to the agency of the same beings, according as
transitory impulses affect them.

Thus, according to Castren, an antagonism between absolute good and
absolute evil finds no place among the Samoyeds. They have no extreme
divinities corresponding in their attributes to Ahriman and Ormuzd. ‘The
human temper is the divine temper also, good and bad mixed.’[65] Mburri,
who, according to one writer, is the evil spirit in Equatorial Africa,
is, according to another, the good spirit, or at least the less wicked
of the two, both the good and bad receiving worship, and being endowed
with much the same powers.[66] The Beetjuans, venerating Morimo as the
source of all good and evil that happened to them, were not agreed as to
whether he was entirely a beneficent or a malevolent being; and, if they
thanked him for benefits, they never hesitated to curse him for ills or
for wishes unfulfilled.[67] ‘To the very same image,’ says Bosman of the
negroes, ‘they at one time make offerings to God and at another to the
devil, so that one image serves them in the capacity of god and devil.’
It was untrue, he declares, that the negroes prayed and made offerings to
the devil, though some of them would try to appease a devil by leaving
thousands of pots of victuals standing ever ready for his gratification;
on the contrary, the devil was annually banished from their towns with
great ceremony, being hunted away with dismal cries, and his spirit
pelted with wood and stones.[68]

The evidence, again, in this respect concerning the aborigines of
America is important. The Winnebagoes are said to have had a tradition
that soon after the creation a bad spirit appeared on the scene, whose
attempts to vie with the products of the Good Spirit resulted in making
a negro in failure of an Indian, a grizzly bear in failure of a black
one, and snakes which were endowed with venom; he also it was who made
all the worthless trees, thistles, and weeds, who tempted Indians to
lie, murder, and steal, and who receives bad Indians when they die. The
suspicion, however, of Christian influence among this tribe makes the
tradition of little value to the argument. Turning to other evidence,
amid Schoolcraft’s reiterated statements of the original dualism of
Indian theology, whereby the Indian was careful ‘to guard his good and
merciful God from all evil acts and intentions, by attributing the whole
catalogue of evil deeds among the sons of men to the Great Bad Spirit
of his theology,’ we yet find this admission, that ‘it is impossible to
witness closely the rites and ceremonies which the tribes practise in
their sacred and ceremonial societies without perceiving that _there is
no very accurate or uniform discrimination between the powers of the
two antagonistical deities_.’[69] Mr. Pond, who resided with the Sioux
Indians for eighteen years and had every opportunity to become acquainted
with such matters, declares that it was ‘next to impossible to penetrate’
into the subject of their divinities; but he was never able to discover
‘the least degree of evidence that they divide the gods into classes of
good and evil,’ nor did he believe that they ever distinguished the Great
Spirit from other divinities ‘till they learnt to do so from intercourse
with the whites;’ for they had no chants, feasts, dances, nor sacrificial
rites which had any reference to such a being, or which, if they had,
were not of recent origin.[70] Of the same people says Mr. Prescott, a
man related to and resident among them many years: ‘As to their belief in
evil spirits, they do not understand the difference between a great good
spirit and a great evil spirit, as we do. _The idea the Indians have is
that a spirit can be good if necessary, and do evil if it thinks fit._’
They ‘know very little about whether the Great Spirit has anything to do
with their affairs, present or future.’ Their idea of the Great Spirit
is of the vaguest possible kind, since they lack entirely any conception
of his power, or of the mode of, or of a reason for, man’s creation.
The Great Spirit they believe made everything but the wild rice and the
thunder; and they have been known to accuse their deity of badness in
sending storms to cause them misery.[71] In the same way the Comanches
of Texas neither worship the evil spirit nor are aware of his existence,
‘_attributing everything to arise from the Great Spirit, whether of good
or evil_.’[72] Had the ancient Jews been described by Greek travellers
instead of by themselves, we may fairly suspect that they would have
been introduced to posterity as a people, consciously theistic indeed,
but at the same time as addicted, in most of their rites, to demonolatry
and the propitiation of imaginary evil beings. The true view would
seem to be that the theology of the lower races does not admit of that
preciseness of terminology, of that clear distinction of qualities, of
that systematic marshalling of powers, which has been so often predicated
of it, but that in its growth it undergoes a period of flux and change
similar to that which may be seen to occur in the evolution of the lowest
forms of physical life into more determinate types of being.

The Sioux Indians, abusing their Great Spirit for sending them storms,
or the Kamschadals cursing Kutka for having created their mountains so
high and their streams so rapid, expose a state of thought relating to
the gods which is most difficult to reconcile with the savage’s habitual
dread of them, still more with a high conception of them, but which is
too well authenticated to admit of doubt. Franklin saw a Cree hunter
tie offerings (a cotton handkerchief, looking-glass, tin pin, some
ribbon and tobacco) to the value of twenty skins round an image of the
god Kepoochikan, at the same time praying to him in a rapid monotonous
tone to be propitious, explaining to him the value of his presents, and
strongly cautioning him against ingratitude.[73] If all the prayers and
presents made to their god by the Tahitians to save their chiefs from
dying proved in vain, his image was inexorably banished from the temple
and destroyed.[74] The Ostiaks of Siberia, if things went badly with
them, would pull down from their place of honour in the hut and in every
way maltreat the idols they generally honoured so exceedingly; the idols
whose mouths were always so diligently smeared with fish-fat, and within
whose reach a supply of snuff ever lay ready.[75] The Chinese are said
to do the same by their household gods, if for a long time they are deaf
to their prayers, and so do the Cinghalese;[76] so that the practice
is more than an impulsive manifestation of merely local feeling. That
such feelings occasionally crop out in civilised Catholic countries is
matter of more surprise; but it is an authentic historical fact that the
good people of Castelbranco, in Portugal, were once so angry with St.
Anthony for letting the Spaniards plunder their town, contrary to his
agreement, that they broke many of his statues in pieces, and, taking the
head off one they specially revered, substituted for it the head of St.
Francis.[77] Neapolitan fishermen are said to this day to throw their
saints overboard if they do not help them in a storm; and the images of
the Virgin or of St. Januarius, worn in Neapolitan caps, are in danger
of being trodden under foot and destroyed, if adverse contingencies
arise. The latter saint, indeed, once received during a famine very clear
intimation, that, unless corn came by a certain time, he would forfeit
his saintship.[78]

It is perhaps a refinement of thought when a present becomes an advisable
accompaniment to a simple petition; but the principle of exchange once
entered into, the relations between man and the supernatural lead
logically from the offering of fruits and flowers to the sacrifice of
animals and of men. Some Algonkin Indians, mistaking once a missionary
for a god, and petitioning his mercy, begged him to let the earth yield
them corn, the rivers fish, and to prevent sickness from slaying or
hunger from tormenting them. Their request they backed with the offer of
a pipe;[79] and in this ridiculous incident the whole of the savage’s
philosophy of sacrifice is contained. Prescott, coming with some Indians
to a lake they were to cross, saw his companions light their pipes
and smoke by way of invoking the winds to be calm.[80] And the Hurons
offered a similar prayer with tobacco to a local god, saying: ‘Oki,
thou who livest on this spot, we offer thee tobacco. Help us, save us
from shipwreck. Defend us from our enemies. Give us good trade, and
bring us safe back to our villages.’[81] In the island of Tanna, the
village priest, addressing the spirits of departed chiefs (thought to
preside over the growth of yams and fruits), after the firstfruits of
vegetation had been deposited on a stone, on the branch of a tree, or
on a rude altar of sticks, would pray: ‘Compassionate father, here is
some food; eat it, be kind to us on account of it;’ and in Samoa, too,
a libation of ava at the evening meal was the offering, in return for
which the father of a family would beg of the gods health and prosperity,
productiveness for his plantations, and for his tribe generally a strong
and large population for war.[82] In Fiji, again, when the chief priests
and leading men assembled to discuss public affairs in the yaquona or
kava circle, the chief herald, as the water was poured into the kava,
after naming the gods for whom the libation was prepared, would say:
‘Be gracious, ye lords, the gods, that the rain may cease, and the sun
shine forth;’ and again when the potion was ready: ‘Let the gods be of a
gracious mind, and send a wind from the east.’[83]

It is a somewhat obvious inference, if presents like these fail to obtain
corresponding results, that the spirit addressed is not satisfied,
and that he requires a greater value in exchange for the blessings at
his disposal. The crowning petition, therefore, of disappointed and
despairing humanity is, by an irrefragable chain of reasoning, the
sacrifice of a human life, or, if this fails, of many lives. Long and
frequent were the prayers of the Tahitians to the gods when their chiefs
were ill, for, under the idea that ‘the gods were always influenced by
the same motives as themselves, they imagined that the efficacy of their
prayers would be in exact proportion to the value of the offerings with
which they were accompanied.’ Hence, if the disease grew violent, the
fruits of whole plantain fields or more than a hundred pigs would be
hurried to the marae; nay, not unfrequently a number of men with ropes
round their necks would be led to the altar and presented to the idol,
with prayers that the mere sight of them might satisfy his wrath.[84]
It does not appear that on such occasions they were actually slain, but
we seem here rather to see the first step towards human sacrifice than
merely a survival of it, for the obtaining of this particular wish. The
process is naturally from the sacrifice of the least possible to the
sacrifice of the greatest possible, though after that point has been
reached there may well be a tendency, varying with the character of a
tribe, to fall back upon make-believe, curtailed losses. The Mandan
Indians, Catlin repeats, always sacrificed the best of its kind to the
Great Spirit, the favourite horse, the best arrow, or the best piece of
buffalo;[85] so that the sacrifice of their fingers was more probably
a form of incipient human sacrifice than, as it sometimes is, a relic
of a more complete self-surrender. Both the Aztecs and the Mayas, with
all the cruel forms of sacrifice that disgraced their civilization,
retained traditions of a time when the gods were contented with the
milder offerings of fruits and flowers; and in Yucatan, where hundreds of
young girls were sacrificed in the dark but sacred pit of Chichen, there
were recollections of a time when one victim sufficed the demands of
the spirit-world. And in this instance may be seen how human sacrifice,
besides being the highest gift man could offer to his god or gods, was in
yet another sense a mode of prayer; for whilst the victims stood round
the pit, whilst the incense burnt on the altar and in the braziers, the
officiating priest explained to the messengers from earth ‘the things
for which they were to implore the gods into whose presence they were
about to be introduced.’[86] So also the priests of Mexico would exhort
the deputation of eighteen souls they sent to the sun to remember the
mission for which they were sent, the people’s wants they were to make
known, the favours they were to ask for their countrymen.[87]

Less obviously connected with prayer than sacrifice is dancing, a custom
which the civilized world has long since ceased to regard as in any
sense connected with religion, but which among savages, besides being a
natural expression of joy in life, of thankfulness for sun or shower, is
not unfrequently a mode of prayer, a means employed for the attainment
of desire. This at least seems the case with those imitative dances or
pantomimes in which with marvellous exactitude the savage all the world
over acts the part of the animals he pursues in the chase. The national
dance of the Kamschadals consists in the imitation of the manners and
motions of seals and bears, varying from the gentlest movement of
their bodies to the most violent agitation of their thighs and knees,
accompanied with singing and stamping in time;[88] and it is remarkable
that in Vancouver’s Island also there is a seal dance, for which the
natives, stripping themselves naked, enter the water, regardless of the
cold of the night, and emerge ‘dragging their bodies along the sand like
seals,’ then enter the houses and crawl about the fires, and finally
jump up and dance about.[89]

But although it is intelligible that such facility and perfection of
beast-acting as, for instance, enabled the Dog-rib Indians to approach
and kill the reindeer, acquired originally by the necessities of the
chase, should be perpetuated as a religious ceremony to keep up a
habit of actual importance to existence, there are cases to which this
explanation would hardly apply, as, for example, to the African gorilla
dance, which has been so vividly described by a recent eye-witness,
and which, he says, ‘was a religious festival held on the eve of an
enterprise,’ the eve, namely, of a gorilla hunt. An African dancing to
a drum and harp imitated closely all the attitudes and movements of the
gorilla, being joined in the chorus by all the rest present. ‘Now he
would be seated on the ground, his legs apart, his hands resting on his
knees, his head drooping, and in his face the vacant expression of the
brute. Sometimes he folded his arms on his forehead. Suddenly he would
raise his head with prone ears and flaming eyes,’ till in the last act
he represented the gorilla attacked and killed.[90] But, unless gorillas
are ever killed by so clever an imitation of themselves that they really
mistake their African neighbours for their own brothers, the gorilla
dance must, by a phenomenon of thought not without analogy, be a mode
of prayer for obtaining a desired result; the same fetishistic law of
thought prevailing that is traceable in the idea that by pouring water
on a stone you can bring rain on the earth, or that you can injure your
enemy by an injury to his effigy.

It may be, however, that pantomimic dances were employed originally as a
clearer expression than mere words of the suppliant’s wishes, the acting
of a hunt or battle being equivalent to a petition for favour and success
in the same, and the unseen deities addressed being not unnaturally
conceived as more likely to see the bodily movements than to hear the
feeble voice of the petitioner. The analogy of the various tongues,
prevalent among birds, beasts, and men, might well suggest to a savage
the possibility of the spiritual world being unavoidably deaf to his
utterances from mere inability to comprehend them; whilst dealings with
the nearest tribe might make it natural for him to resort to the use of
signs and symbols as the least mistakable vehicle for his meaning. The
Ahts, retiring to the solitude of the woods, and there standing naked
with outstretched arms before the moon, employ set words and gestures
according to the nature of the object they desire. Thus in praying for
salmon the suppliant rubs the back of his hands, and, looking upwards,
says, ‘Many salmon, many salmon;’ in asking for deer he carefully rubs
both his eyes, for geese the back of his shoulders, for bears his sides
and legs, uttering in a sing-song way the usual formula. The meaning of
all these rubbings is obscure; but it has been suggested that the rubbing
of the hands indicates a wish that the hand may have the requisite
steadiness for throwing the salmon spear; the rubbing of the eyes, a
prayer, that they may be opened to discern deer in the forest.[91]
Among a Californian tribe it was usual, preparatory to the chase, to
resort to a certain stake-inclosure and there to pray to the god’s image
for success, by mimicry of the actions of the hunt, as by leaping and
twanging of the bow.[92] In the Society Islands, if the land had been in
any way defiled by an enemy, a mode of religious purification consisted
in offering pieces of coral, collected expressly, on the altar to the
gods, to induce them ‘to cleanse the land from pollution, that it might
be pure as the coral fresh from the sea.’[93]

The Voguls, whose most frequent prayers are for success in hunting, are
said to promote their fulfilment by ‘_images in the shape of the beast
more especially sought for, rudely shaped out of wood or stone_.’[94]
But to dance like the animal would naturally serve the purpose as well;
and so the interpretation of some dances as symbolised prayers explains
several American customs which are strikingly analogous to the African
gorilla dance already described. Every Mandan Indian was compelled by
social law to keep his buffalo’s mask, consisting of the skin and horns
of a buffalo’s head, in his lodge, ready to put on and wear in the
buffalo dance, whenever the protracted absence of that animal from the
prairie rendered it expedient to resort to this means for the purpose
of inducing the herds to change the direction of their wanderings and
bend their course towards the Mandan villages. And a principal part in
the annual celebration of the subsidence of the great waters consisted
in the buffalo dance, wherein eight men dressed in entire buffalo skins,
so as to imitate closely the appearance and motions of buffaloes, were
the chief actors, and four old men chanted prayers to the Great Spirit
for the continuation of his favours in sending them good supplies of
buffaloes for the coming year.[95] In this instance the close relation
between dance and prayer, the dance being either supplementary or
explicative, clearly appears; as it also does in a very similar buffalo
dance performed by a neighbouring tribe of the Mandans, the Minnatarees.
In their ceremony six elderly men acted the animals, imitating with
great perfection even the peculiar sound of their voice.[96] Behind them
came a man, who represented the driving of the beasts forward, and who,
at a certain point, placing his hands before his face, sang, and made a
long speech in the nature of a prayer, containing good wishes for the
buffalo hunt and for war, as also an appeal to the heavenly powers to be
propitious to the huntsmen and their arms. So again the Sioux Indians
for several days before starting on a bear hunt would hold a bear dance,
which was regarded as ‘a most important and indispensable form,’ and in
which the whole tribe joined in a song to the Bear Spirit, to conciliate
as well as to consult him. ‘All with the motions of their hands closely
imitated the movements of that animal; some representing its motion in
running, and others the peculiar attitude and hanging of the paws when
it is sitting up on its hind feet and looking out for the approach of an
enemy.’[97] And the same tribe, whenever they had bad luck in hunting,
would institute a dance to invoke the aid of one of their gods.[98]

To the African gorilla dance, the Mandan buffalo dance, the Sioux
bear dance, may be added the custom of the Koossa Kafirs, who, before
they start on a hunt, perform a wonderful game, which is considered
absolutely necessary to the success of the undertaking.[99] One of them,
representing some kind of game, takes a handful of grass in his mouth
and runs about on all fours; whilst the rest make-believe to transfix
him with their spears, till at last he throws himself on the ground as
if he were killed.[100] On the occasion of a Sioux Indian dreaming of
the fish-eating cormorant, a fish dance was instituted, to ward off any
danger portended, in which the most elaborate imitation of the cormorant
was observed. The medicine-men, dancing up to a fish, affixed to a pole,
began quacking, flapping their arms like wings, biting at the fish, and
pretending to hide a piece in their nests away from the wolves.[101] The
Ahts, again, Sproat observed, spent the eve of a deer hunt ‘in dancing
and singing and in various ceremonies intended to secure good luck on the
morrow.’[102] And in South Australia it is remarkable that, when boys of
a certain age undergo the ceremony of losing their front teeth, power is
conferred on them of killing the kangaroo by a kind of kangaroo dance.
First of all, a kangaroo of grass is deposited at their feet; and then
the actors, the adults of the tribe, having fitted themselves with long
tails of grass, set off ‘as a herd of kangaroos, now jumping along, then
lying down and scratching themselves, as those animals do when basking in
the sun,’ two armed men following them meanwhile, as it were to steal on
them unmolested and spear them.[103]

The same thought occurs in prayers for rain. Modern Servian peasants,
pouring water over a girl covered with grass and flowers, employ a mode
of petition for rain very similar to that in vogue near Lake Nyanza.
There, after a wild dance, a jar of water is placed before the village
chief: the woman who acts as priestess of the ceremonies washes her
hands, arms, and face with the water; then a large quantity of it is
poured over her, and finally all the women present rush to dip their
calabashes in the jar and to toss the water in the air with loud cries
and wild gesticulations.[104]

Again, the common savage war dance may be taken to have a religious
significance in addition to its secular motive of sustaining martial
feelings and habits. In the war dance of the Navajoes of New Mexico the
most important part of the war dance was the arrow dance, when a young
virgin, beautifully dressed, represented in gesture ‘the war path.’ An
eye-witness has described it as a really beautiful performance. Slowly
and steadily she would pursue her imaginary foe; suddenly her step would
quicken as she came in sight of the enemy; she would dance faster
and faster, and, seizing an arrow, demonstrate by the rapidity of her
movements that the fight had begun; she would point with the arrow, show
how it wings its course, how the scalp is taken, how the victory is
won.[105] Among the Winnebagoe Indians also it was part of the war dance
for a warrior to go through the pantomime of the discovery of the enemy,
of the ambuscade, the attack, the slaughter, and the scalping.[106] And
in this reference may be noted the curious proceeding of the women of
Accra, on the Guinea Coast, who, whilst the male population were engaged
in war with a neighbouring people, endeavoured every day to bring it to
a happy issue by dancing fetish; that is, by fighting sham battles with
wooden swords, flying to the boats on the beach and pretending to row,
throwing some one into the sea, taking a trowel and making believe to
build a wall—all actions literally symbolical of corresponding ones to
be performed by the men in the course of defeating their enemy.[107] In
Madagascar, too, when the men are absent in war, the custom of the women
to dance, in order to inspire their husbands with courage, has been
thought not to be destitute of a religious meaning.

That a dance may be in reality a form of prayer, a petition acted
instead of spoken, as more likely so to be understood, makes it possible
that prayers may be hidden under customs which are generally only cited
to illustrate the absurdity of primitive metaphysics. May it not be that
the Indian, when he thinks to ensure a successful chase by drawing a
figure of his game with a line leading to its heart from its mouth, and
by so subjecting its movements to himself, or when he thinks to cure a
man of sickness by shooting the bark-effigy of the animal supposed to
possess him—may it not be that he thereby hopes to influence known or
unknown natural forces in his favour by a clear representation of his
wants? The control of natural phenomena by witchcraft may thus have
been in its origin a direction to natural phenomena, or rather to the
spirits ruling them; an address perhaps to those spirits of the dead
which to a savage are his earliest and for long his only gods; and thus
the absurdities of fetishism might become intelligible as lifeless
prayers, with more or less of their primal meaning, descended from such
a philosophy of nature. The Kamschadal child sent out naked to make the
rain stop, clear as the meaning of the custom is with the prayer joined
to it, would without it appear in the light of ordinary fetishism. So
the Khond, carrying a branch cut from hostile soil to his god of war,
and there, after he has dressed it like one of the enemy, throwing it
down, with certain incantations, on the shrine of the divinity, urges
his petition in a way which even the god of war can scarcely fail to
understand. And the Basuto woman, who in her wish for children, prays
to her tutelary divinity for the accomplishment of her desires by
making dolls of clay and treating them as infants, affords yet another
illustration of the operation of the same law of thought.[108]

It remains to show how, in primitive theology, prayer attaches itself as
well to the material as the spiritual world, for it is here especially
that it finds its counterpart in the folk-lore of our own day. As,
however, there is scarcely an object in nature which in a state of
ignorance may not with reason be worshipped, a few illustrations must be
taken for thousands on a subject it were less easy to exhaust than the
patience of the reader.

‘As for animals having reasoning powers,’ says an exceptionally credible
witness, ‘I have heard Indians talk and reason with a horse the same
as with a person.’[109] Our fairy tales of talking animals would be
commonplace facts to a savage. Hence it can be no matter of surprise to
find that it is a common Indian custom to converse with rattlesnakes,
and to endeavour to propitiate them with presents of tobacco. On one
occasion, the Iowas having begun to build a village, the presence of
a rattlesnake on a neighbouring hill was suddenly announced, when
forthwith started the great snake doctor with tobacco and other presents:
when he had offered these, and had had a long talk with the snake, he
returned to his village, with the satisfactory news that his tribesmen
might now travel in safety, as peace had been made between them and the
snakes.[110]

But perhaps of all natural objects that have attracted human worship,
and been regarded as a supreme source of human woe or welfare, none can
compare with the moon. For the moon’s changes of aspect being far more
remarkable than any of the sun’s, and more calculated to inspire dread
by the nocturnal darkness they contend with, are held in popular fancy
nearly everywhere to cause, portend, or accord with changes in the lot of
mortals and all things terrestrial. In the Hervey Islands cocoa-nuts are
invariably planted at the full of the moon, the size of the latter being
held symbolical of the future fulness of the fruit;[111] and in South
Africa it is unlucky to begin a journey or any work of importance in the
last quarter of the moon.[112] The moon’s wane makes things on earth wane
too; when it is new or full, it is everywhere the proper season for new
crops to be sown, new households to be formed, new weather to begin.

The feeling of the Congo Africans, who at the sight of the new moon fall
on their knees or stand and clap their hands, praying that their lives
may be renewed like that of the moon, corresponds exactly with the idea
of English folk-lore that crops are more likely to be plentiful if sown
when the moon is young, or with the idea of German folk-lore that the new
moon is the season for counting money which it is desired may increase.
‘On the first appearance of the new moon, which,’ says Mungo Park,
‘the Kafirs look upon as newly created, the pagan natives, as well as
Mahomedans, say a short prayer,’ seemingly the only adoration they offer
to the Supreme Being;[113] so that the sentiment of the Congo prayer may
be guessed to underlie, consciously or not, the salutations by which the
new moon is greeted generally throughout Africa, from the salutations of
the Hottentots to the prayers of the Makololos, for the success of their
journeys or the destruction of their enemies.[114]

More difficult to understand than the worship of either animals or the
heavenly bodies is that of such inanimate things as stones, trees, or
rivers. Yet the state of thought is not so far remote from our own but
that we can still listen with pleasure, in stories like ‘Undine,’ to
the voices of the forest or the river. To a savage, however, it is not
only the motion or the sound of natural objects which suggests their
divinity, but the danger that is ever latent in them; and it is rather
to prevent the river from drowning him or the tree from falling on him
than from any perception of their beauty that he makes offerings to
them and pays them homage. Such feelings as that of the Cree Indians,
who believed that a deer, found dead within a few yards of a willow
bush which they worshipped and of which it had eaten, had fallen a
victim to the sin of its sacrilege, are not confined to savage lands nor
times.[115] As savages have been known to apologize to a slain elephant
or bear, assuring it that its death was accidental, so it is said that
in parts of Germany a woodcutter will still (or would recently) beg
the pardon of a fine healthy tree before cutting it down.[116] In our
own midland counties there is a feeling to this day against binding up
elder-wood with other faggots; and in Suffolk it is believed misfortune
will ensue if ever it is burnt. In Germany formerly an elder-tree might
not be cut down entirely; and Grimm was himself an eye-witness of a
peasant praying with bare head and folded hands before venturing to cut
its branches. That trees are still popularly endowed with a conscious
personality is further proved by the custom, not yet extinct, of trying
to secure the future favours of fruit trees by presents and prayers. The
placing of money in a hole dug at the foot of them, the presenting them
with money on New Year’s Day, the shaking under them of the remainder of
the Christmas dinner, the beating of them with rods on Holy Innocents’
Day—all German methods to incite fruit trees to further fertility—answer
closely to the English custom of apple-howling or wassailing, when at
Christmas or Epiphany the inhabitants of a parish, walking in procession
to the principal orchards, and there singling out the principal tree,
sprinkle it with cider, or place cider-soaked cakes of toast and sugar
in its branches, saluting it at the same time with set words in the form
of a prayer to the trees to be fruitful for the ensuing year, as the
doggerel verses following show plainly enough:—

  Here’s to thee, old apple tree,
  Whence thou mayst bud and whence thou mayst blow,
  And whence thou mayst bear apples enow,
  Hats full, caps full,
  Bushel, bushel, sacks full,
  And my pocket full too.[117]

And similar prayers, as lifeless now as the fossil shells on the shore of
some ancient coral sea, lie scattered abundantly in many an English rhyme
and ballad, serving to show how the philosophy of one age passes into the
nonsense of a later one, and how ideas which constituted a religion for
one time may only survive as an amusement for another.




III.

_SOME SAVAGE PROVERBS._


The German proverb, ‘Speak, that I may see thee,’ may be applied as
truly to a whole community as to an individual. For proverbs—or, roughly
defining, popular sayings—reflect conspicuously the general character of
a nation, constituting its actual code of social, political, and moral
philosophy. Besides the beauty and wisdom, from which alone many of
them derive an imperishable charm, they serve as a kind of literature
in miniature, in which the inner life of a nation is more clearly
legible than in its more voluminous writings. And in spite of the
general resemblance which seems to pervade the proverbial lore of the
world, arising partly from the direct interchange of thought inseparable
from international commerce of any kind, partly from a uniformity
of experience—such, for example, as has impressed on all people the
wisdom of caution and truth—there are yet well-marked differences in
the proverbs of nations, which as clearly retain the records of their
several histories as do their different laws and customs. Remarkable,
therefore, as is the substantial similarity of proverbial codes, of
which the general characteristic is a high sense of right coupled with
a mournful consciousness of human infirmity, they betray often in the
very expression of the same idea the individuality of their national
birthplace. It is obvious, for instance, that, largely as all modern
nations are indebted to a writer like Æsop for the thoughts they
share in common, each nation severally will owe more of its wisdom to
writers of its own, who, like Shakespeare or Cervantes, have, from
greater familiarity with the manners, been more competent to express
the feelings, of their different countries. But the way in which good
proverbs, like good gold, find acceptance everywhere, and pass readily
into the current coinage of different realms, may be illustrated by the
fact of the existence, in countries so widely remote as Spain, Arabia,
Persia, Afghanistan, and India, of a saying, second to none in all the
essentials of a good proverb, to the effect that ‘when God wills the
destruction of an ant, he supplies it with wings.’[118]

An instructive instance of the light thrown on national character by
proverbs may be supplied from a comparison of Italian, German, and
Persian teaching on the subject of vindictiveness. In communities
destitute of social organisation, the ‘vendetta,’ or duty of
blood-revenge, probably preceded and led the way to the practice of
legal punishment. Originally it was a kind of lynch-law, supplying
the default of any legal protection of life; and all nations bear
traces in their history of having passed through a stage of growth in
which the sacred duty of vengeance was the germ of any idea of a more
judicial retribution. Confucius made it a duty for a son to slay his
father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly retaliatory
penalty for bloodshed. The duty of revenge, which if it is yet extinct
in Corsica survives with so much interest in the play of ‘The Corsican
Brothers,’ to this day, in places like Fiji, still passes from father
to son, and from the son to the nearest relation. The longer survival
of such feelings in Italy, consequent on the different circumstances of
her history, is clearly impressed on the proverbial philosophy of her
people, constituting a remarkable contrast to the sentiments of other
countries. For the Italian, extolling the sweetness of revenge, declares
it a morsel fit for God; and, expressing pity or contempt for the man
who either cannot or will not carry out his revenge, counsels patience
and the waiting of time and place for its successful execution. In a
proverb so terribly expressive that you seem to hear in it the assassin’s
gnashing teeth, he will tell you that ‘revenge, though a hundred years
old, still has its milk teeth,’ a maxim which stands on no higher a level
than the pagan African saying, ‘Hate hath no medicine,’ or than that of
Afghanistan, ‘Speak good words to an enemy very softly, gradually destroy
him root and branch;’ and which may be fitly compared with the Fijian
expression of malice: ‘Let the shell of the oyster perish by reason of
years, and to these add a thousand more, still my hatred shall be hot.’
How much purer than the Italian is the German teaching, which declares
revenge to be fresh wrong, the conversion of a little right into a great
injustice, and sure in its turn to draw revenge after it; or how far
nobler still is the more positive sentiment of Persia, that to take
revenge for an injury is the sign of a mean spirit; that it is easy to
return evil for evil, but that the manly thing is to return good for it!

The contrast conveyed in these proverbs is the more striking, in that
Italy might pre-eminently call herself the Catholic, as against Germany
the heretical, or Persia the infidel, land. It has been said that
every tenth proverb in an Italian collection contains a selfish or
cynical maxim; and though the beauty and purity of many Italian sayings
counterbalance the baseness of others—those, for instance, on love being
as refined as those on revenge are barbarous—it may not be uninteresting
to compare generally the proverbs of Italy with those of a land like
Persia where the religious history has been so different.

The noblest Italian proverb is to the effect that a hundred years cannot
repair a moment’s loss of honour; the basest, perhaps, that bad as it
is to be a knave, it is worse to be known as one. To love a friend with
all his faults; to associate with the good in order to be good; to
work in order to rest; to do right in spite of consequences, and good
irrespectively of persons; to do evil never, whatever the benefit—these
are among the highest lessons of Italian proverb-lore. That among men of
honour a word is a bond, and that conscience is as good as a thousand
witnesses; that the best sermon is a good life, and that the gains of
begging are dearly bought, are maxims of the same upright tendency.
Yet, over against these, are proverbs pervaded by the saddest spirit
of universal mistrust, instilling utter disbelief of any sincerity in
friendship, and even counselling to selfish or downright wicked conduct.
What more melancholy evidence of this than is afforded by the following
common sayings?—

    He who suspects is seldom to blame.

    Trust was a good man, Trust-not a better.

    From those I trust God guard me; from those I mistrust I will
    guard myself.

    Who would have many friends let him test but few.

    Tell your secret to your friend, and he will set his foot on
    your neck.

Or, again, what can be thought of such maxims as, that it is expedient
to peel a fig for your friend but a peach for your enemy; that the man
who esteems none but himself is happy as a king; that public money, like
holy water, is the property of all men; or that with art and knavery men
may live through half the year, and with knavery and art through the
other?

The Persian proverbs seem to breathe a different moral atmosphere from
these, being as generous in character as the Italian are cynical, and
displaying a free spirit of liberality, trust, independence, above all,
of truthfulness, which is unsurpassed in any country of Europe. If in
Italy it is common to say that a man who cannot flatter knows not how
to talk, in Persia the sentiment prevails that to flatter is worse than
to abuse. The Persian, true to the character given of him by Herodotus,
holds boldly, that the man who speaks truth is always at ease; that men
never suffer from speaking the truth; that it behoves them to speak their
minds unreservedly, for that there is no hill in front of the tongue.
Add to this the popular sayings, that the accounts of friends are in the
heart, and that it is better to be in chains with friends than in the
garden with strangers. That it should have become proverbial in Persia,
that a man lowers himself by vexing the poor, and loses all claim to
greatness by finding fault with his inferiors, proves the purity of a
religion which has instilled such thoughts into the ethics of a nation;
nor could any language in Europe produce proverbs characterised by a
higher spirit of morality than is revealed in the following selection:—

    A high name is better than a high house.

    The cure for anger is silence.

    A man must cut out his own garments of reputation.

    Heaven is at the feet of mothers (_i.e._ lies in dutiful
    obedience).

    It is better to die of want than to beg.

    The liberal man is the friend of God.

    Practise liberality, but lay no stress on the obligation.

As another illustration of the way in which a few proverbs may condense
centuries of history, may be instanced the recorded experiences of
mankind touching priests and priestcraft. With no other evidence than
that of proverbs before him, a future historian of Europe might easily
detect a marked difference of feeling on this matter between Protestant
Germany and the Catholic countries of Europe. Not that the latter are
wanting in sayings to the prejudice of the priestly class, but they are
not so numerous as in Germany. The French have two proverbs, marked with
all the wit and boldness of their genius, one charging anyone who values
a clean house not to let into it either a priest or a pigeon; the other
declaring that it is human ignorance alone which causes the pot to boil
for priests. The Spanish experience also is, that it is best neither to
have a good friar for a friend nor a bad one for an enemy, and that
it is well to keep awake in a land thickly tenanted by monks. But the
Germans go much farther than this. In German estimation the priest is a
being who, in company with a woman, may be found at the bottom of all the
mischief that goes on in the world, and is as little likely as a woman
to forgive you an injury. Like the bites of wolves, those of priests are
hard to heal, so that it is best, if you fight with them at all, to beat
them to death. If they are ever hot, it is from eating, not from work;
for they always take care to bless themselves first, nor do they ever pay
any tithes to one another.

The above comparisons suffice to show how differences of national
character, and even how the operation of different forms of faith, may
reveal themselves in proverbs. Yet such estimates must be formed with
caution, in consideration of the wide possibilities of error which
are inseparable from so inexhaustible a subject. For not only may
the proverb-collector easily attribute to one country alone a saying
which belongs equally to, or may even have originated in, another,
but his canon of selection is somewhat arbitrary and dependent on his
preconceptions of what a proverb really is. ‘To take the ball on the
hop,’ for instance, is as genuine an English proverb as ‘to make hay
whilst the sun shines,’ which contains the same idea; yet whilst the one
might be heard every day, the other might not be heard once a year, so
that it might easily escape notice altogether, or if found be rejected
as obsolete. We can consequently, as in other branches of human study,
only make use, _on trust_, of such data as lie at hand, and, whilst
fully acknowledging the imperfection of the evidence, strive after an
approximation to truth, without hope for its actual attainment.

If now we extend the limits of our comparison, to take in some proverbs
of the lower races as well as of the higher, we shall find therein a
strong corroboration of the lesson already learnt in any comparison
of the superstitions, myths, and manners of different societies;
namely, that differences of race, colour, and even structure, sink into
insignificance when compared with the intellectual affinities which unite
the families of mankind, and that there is, perhaps, no phase of thought
nor shade of feeling belonging to the higher culture of the world to
which we may not find an antitype or even an equivalent in the lower. If
we take some of the proverbs collected from tribes confessedly low in
civilisation—those, for instance, of West Africa—and compare them with
proverbs still prevalent in Europe, we cannot fail to be struck with the
strong likeness between them, as well as impressed with the idea, that
many actually existent common sayings may have had their birth in days
of the most remote and savage antiquity. The immense number of modern
proverbs, drawn from the observation of the natural, and especially
of the animal, world (a number which must be nearly one out of five),
coupled with the coincidence that the same fact is perhaps the most
striking one in the proverbs collected from West Africa, seems to lend
some support to such a theory.

As an introductory instance let us take savage and civilised sentiments
about poverty, a belief in the misfortune of which is written clearly in
every language of Europe. Italian experience says that poverty has no
kin, and that poor men do penance for rich men’s sins; in Germany the
poor have to dance as the rich pipe; whilst in Spain and Denmark the evil
is expressed more graphically still, it being a matter of observation
in the one country that the poor man’s crop is destroyed by hail every
year; in the other, that the poor man’s corn always grows thin. And, in
the Oji dialect, spoken by about two millions of people, including the
Ashantees, Fantees, and others, it is also proverbial that the poor man
has no friend, that poverty makes a man a slave, and that hard words are
fit for the poor. And as the Dutch have learnt, that ‘poor folks’ wisdom
goes for little,’ or the Italians, that ‘the words of the poor go many to
the sackful,’ so in Oji exactly the same idea is conveyed in the saying,
that ‘when a poor man makes a proverb it does not spread’; in Yoruba, in
the saying, that ‘poverty destroys a man’s reputation;’ and in Accra in
the still cleverer proverb, that ‘a poor man’s pipe does not sound.’[119]

The proverbs of savages are moral and immoral, elevated and base,
precisely as are those of more civilised nations. The proverbs of the
Yorubas, justly observes the missionary, Mr. Bowen,[120] ‘are among the
most remarkable of the world;’ and indeed the intellectual powers and
moral ideas displayed in West African proverbs generally ought largely
to modify our conceptions of their originators, and make us sceptical
of that extreme dearth of mental wealth which has so frequently been
declared to attend a low standard of material advancement. Their wit,
terseness, vividness of illustration, and insight into life, are all
alike surprising; and acquaintance with them must suggest caution in
any estimate of the mental capacities of savages whose languages may
have been less investigated and consequently remain less known. ‘It has
always been passing travellers who have drawn the most doleful pictures
of so-called savages, and especially have asserted the poverty of their
language.’[121] It may well prove that better acquaintance with the
languages of tribes, classed at present for various reasons almost
outside the human family, may show them to combine, as Humboldt found
was the case with the once depreciated Carib language, ‘wealth, grace,
strength, and gentleness.’ It was said of the Veddahs once that they were
utterly destitute of either religion or _language_; and the Samojeds were
reported to shriek and chatter like apes.

The Basutos of South Africa are savages, yet the following proverbs are
current among them:—

    A good name makes one sleep well.

    Stolen goods do not make one grow.

    Famine dwells in the house of the quarrelsome.

    The thief catches himself.

    A lent knife does not come back alone. (_i.e._ a good deed is
    never thrown away.)[122]

Compare, for elevation of mind, these Yoruban proverbs with those already
noticed as current in Italy:—

    He that forgives gains the victory.

    He who injures another injures himself.

    Anger benefits no one.

    We should not treat others with contempt.[123]

On the other hand, ‘If a great man should wrong you, smile on him,’
may be compared with the Arabic advice about dangerous friends, ‘If a
serpent love thee, wear him as a necklace;’ or with the Pashto proverb
of the same intention, ‘Though your enemy be a rope of reeds, call him a
serpent.’

Here are some more proverbs with whose European equivalents everyone will
be familiar:—

ON FAULTFINDING.

    If you can pull out, pull out your own grey hairs. (Oji.)

    Before healing others, heal yourself. (Wolof.)

With which we may compare the Chinese:—

    Sweep the snow from your own doors without troubling about the
    frost on your neighbour’s tiles.

ON THE VALUE OF EXPERIENCE.

    Nobody is twice a fool. (Accra.)

    Nobody is twice ashamed. (Accra.)

    He is a fool whose sheep run away twice. (Oji.)

    He dreads a slowworm who has been bitten by a serpent. (Oji.)

With which we may compare our own—

    It’s a silly fish that’s caught twice with the same bait.

Or the German—

    An old fox is not caught twice in the same trap.

To which both Italy and Holland have exactly similar proverbs.

ON PERSEVERANCE.

    Perseverance always triumphs. (Basuto.)

    The moon does not grow full in a day. (Oji.)

    Perseverance is everything.

    Who has patience has all things. (Yoruba.)

    By going and coming a bird builds its nest. (Oji.)

Which latter may be compared with the Dutch proverb—

    By slow degrees a bird builds its nest.

And all of them with the Chinese—

    A mulberry-leaf becomes satin with time.

ON THE FORCE OF HABIT.

    The thread follows the needle.

    Its shell follows the snail wherever it goes. (Yoruba.)

    As is the sword so is the scabbard. (Oji.)

To which again China supplies a good parallel in

    The growth of the mulberry tree follows its early bent.

ON CAUSATION.

    If nothing touches the palm-leaves they do not rustle. (Oji.)

    Nobody hates another without a cause. (Accra.)

    A feather does not stick without gum. (A Pashto proverb.)

Again, the Turkish proverb, that curses, like chickens, come home to
roost, or the Italian one that, like processions, they come back to
their starting-point, is well matched by the Yoruba proverb that ‘ashes
fly back in the face of their thrower.’ Or the tendency of travellers
to exaggerate or tell lies, impressed as it has been on all human
experience, is also confirmed by the Oji proverb, that ‘he who travels
alone tells lies.’ And the universal belief in the ultimate exposure
of falsehood conveyed in such proverbs as the Arabian, ‘The liar is
short-lived;’ the Persian, ‘Liars have bad memories;’ or the still
more expressive Italian saying, that ‘the liar is sooner caught than a
cripple,’ finds itself corroborated by the Wolof proverb, that ‘lies,
though many, will be caught by Truth as soon as she rises up.’ Even in
Afghanistan, where it is said that no disgrace attaches to lying _per
se_, and where lying is called an honest man’s wings, while truth can
only be spoken by a strong man or a fool, there is also a proverb with
the moral, that the career of falsehood is short.[124]

That ‘hope is the pillar of the world,’ that ‘it is the heart which
carries one to hell or heaven,’ or that ‘preparation is better than
after-thought’—all experiences of the Kanuri, a Moslem tribe, who
think it a personal adornment to cut each side of their face in twenty
places—shows that there is no necessary connection between general
savagery and an absence of moral culture. The natives of New Zealand,
with all their barbarity, had in common use a saying which were a
desirable maxim for European diplomacy: ‘When you are on friendly terms,
settle your disputes in a friendly way; when you are at war, redress
your injuries by violence.’[125] Even the Fijians would say that an
unimproved day was not to be counted, and that no food was ever cooked by
gay clothes and frivolity.[126] A good Ashantee proverb warns people not
to speak ill of their benefactors, by forbidding them to call a forest a
shrubbery that has once given them shelter. The proverbs already quoted
from Yoruba teach the same lesson, nor would it be difficult to add many
more, all proving the existence among savages of a morality identical
in its main features with that of the higher group of nations to which
we ourselves belong, interpenetrated as it has been for ages with the
philosophies and religions of the civilised East.

A similar testimony to the intellectual powers of savages is afforded by
their proverbs, though of course the argument is only a suggestive one
from tribes whose language has been well studied to others not so well
known. That the Soudan negroes are on a higher level of general culture
than many savages of other islands or continents is proved by the fact
that all known Africans are acquainted with the art of smelting iron and
converting it into weapons and utensils; so that they may be said to be
living in the iron age, and thus, materially at least, are more advanced
than the Botocudos of Brazil, who are still in the age of polished stone
implements. From the fact alone that the Yorubas express their contempt
for a stupid man by saying that he cannot count nine times nine, we are
enabled at once to place them above tribes whose powers of numeration
fall short of such readiness. Hence we should not be justified in
expecting to find among Australian or American aborigines proverbs of so
high an intellectual order as abound in Africa, of which the following
may be selected as samples:—

    Were no elephant in the jungle the buffalo would be large;

or—

    The dust of the buffalo is lost in that of the elephant.

    A crab does not bring forth a bird.

    Two small antelopes beat a big one.

    Two crocodiles do not live in one hole.

    A child can crush a snail, but not a tortoise.

    A razor cannot shave itself.

    You cannot stop the sun by standing before it.

    If you like honey, do not fear the bees.

    When a fish is killed its tail is inserted in its own mouth.
    (Said of people who reap the reward of their deeds.)

The Zulus, speaking of the uncertainty of a result, say, ‘It is not
known what calf the cow will have;’[127] and when the Fantees tell you
to ‘cross the river before you abuse the crocodile,’[128] there is no
difficulty in translating their meaning into English. In all these
proverbs it is obvious how the facts of every-day life have readily
served everywhere as the basis of intellectual advancement, and how
similar lessons have everywhere been drawn from the observation of
similar occurrences.

Leaving now the analogy between African and European proverb-lore,
which the uniformity of moral experiences and the observation of similar
laws of nature sufficiently account for, let us endeavour to find among
civilised nations any proverbs which, by the figures involved in them
or their likeness to savage maxims, seem to bear a distinct impression
of a barbaric coinage. One French proverb may almost certainly be so
explained. It is, for instance, well known that the lower races very
generally account for eclipses of either sun or moon by supposing them
to be the victims of the fury or voracity of some ill-disposed animal,
whom they try to divert by every horrible noise they can produce, or by
any weapon they have learnt to fashion. A typical instance of this was
the belief of the Chiquitos of South America that the moon was hunted
across the sky by dogs, who tore her in pieces when they caught her, till
driven off by the Indian arrows. It has been suggested that the French
proverb, ‘Dieu garde la lune des loups,’ said in deprecation of a dread
of remote danger, is a survival of a similar rude philosophy of nature
which is still prevalent in the capital of Turkey, and in the days of St.
Augustine was current over Europe.[129]

Another instructive set of proverbs may be adduced to show how the social
philosophy current in the savage state may survive in contemporary
expressions of modern Europe. In Africa, where, speaking generally, a
man’s wife has no better status in society than that which attaches to
his slave or his ox, and a son has been known to wager his own mother
against a cow, we cannot be astonished at finding in vogue proverbs
strongly depreciatory of the worth of the female sex. Thus a wise Kanuri
is cautioned, that if a woman shall speak to him two words, he shall take
one and leave the other; nor should he give his heart to a woman, if he
would live, for a woman never brings a man into the right way. So, too,
Pashto proverbs say contemptuously, that a woman’s wisdom is under her
heel, and that she is well only in the house or in the grave. The same
feeling is endorsed by the Persians, who declare that both women and
dragons are best out of the world, classing the former with horses and
swords among their by-words of unfaithfulness.

The literatures of all countries are strongly tinged with sentiments
of the same unjust nature. Even the French say that a man of straw is
worth a woman of gold, though their proverb, ‘Ce que femme veut, Dieu le
veut,’ is as true as it is a witty variation of the well-known democratic
formula. The Italians have made the shrewd observation, that, whilst with
men every mortal sin is venial, with women every venial sin is mortal;
but no language has anything worse than this, that as both a good horse
and a bad horse need the spur, so both a good woman and a bad woman need
the stick.

It is, however, in Germany that the character of women has suffered most
from the shafts of that other half of the community, which (it might be
complained) has as unfair a monopoly of making proverbs as it has of
making laws. The humorous saying, that there are only two good women in
the world, one of whom is dead and the other not to be found, contains
the key to the common national sentiment. A woman is compared to good
fortune in her partiality for fools, and to wine in her power to make
them. Like a glass, she is in hourly danger; and, like a priest, she
never forgets. Her vengeance is boundless, and her mutability finds its
only parallel in nature in the uncertain skies of April. Her affections
change every moment, like luck at cards, the favour of princes, or the
leaves of a rose; and though you will never find her wanting in words,
there is not a needle-point’s difference betwixt her yea and her nay.
She only keeps silence where she is ignorant, and it is as fruitless to
try to hold a woman at her word as an eel by its tail. Her advice, like
corn sown in summer, may perhaps turn out well once in seven years; but
wherever there is mischief brewing in the world, rest assured that there
is a woman and a priest at the bottom of it. Every daughter of Eve would
rather be beautiful than good, and may be caught as surely by gold as a
hare by dogs or a gentleman by flattery. Even in the house she should
be allowed no power, for where a woman rules the devil is chief servant;
whilst two women in the same house will agree together like two cats over
a mouse or two dogs over a bone.

Spanish experience on this subject coincides with the Teutonic, but
without the expenditure of nearly so much spleen, and with several
glimpses of a happier experience. What can be worse than this: ‘Beware of
a bad woman, nor put any trust in a good one;’ or sadder than this: ‘What
is marriage, mother? Spinning, childbirth, and crying, daughter’? Yet the
Spanish woman, as hard to know as a melon, as little to be trusted as a
magpie, as fickle as the wind or as fortune, as ready to cry as a dog to
limp, in labour as patient as a mule, is not so destitute as the German
of any redeeming qualities for her failings. The Spaniard is taught to
believe that with a good wife he may bear any adversity, and that he
should believe nothing against her unless absolutely proved. It is also
in remarkable contrast to the experiences of other countries, that in
Spain it should have passed into a proverb, that whilst an unmarried man
advocates a daily beating for a wife, as soon as he marries he takes care
of his own.

Female talkativeness appears also to be a subject of lament all over the
world, from our own island, where a woman’s tongue proverbially wags like
a lamb’s tail, to the Celestial Empire, where it is likened to a sword,
never suffered by its owner to rust. Regard not a woman’s words, says the
Hindoo; and the African also is warned against trusting his secrets even
to his wife. The Spaniard believes that he has only to tell a woman what
he would wish to have published in the market-place; and all languages
have sayings to the same effect. The Scotch divine who, before the
Session, defended his heresy that women would find no place in heaven,
by the text, ‘There was silence in heaven for about the space of half an
hour,’ only expressed a sentiment of universal currency over the world.

The proverbs collected from the lower races are still very few, when
compared with the immense mass of those from nations with whose
literature we are more familiar. It is in the nature of things that
missionaries and travellers should have been first struck by, and first
given us information about, matters more directly challenging their
notice than phrases in common use, for a real knowledge of which the most
favourable conditions of a prolonged intimacy are obviously requisite.
The large collection of such proverbs from West Africa alone, revealing
as they do an elevation of feeling and a clearness of intelligence which
other facts of their social life would never have led us to suspect,
point at the possibility of such collections elsewhere largely modifying
our present views concerning other savage tribes. They at least should
teach us caution against accepting the conclusions which some writers
have drawn from their study of savage languages, when, from the absence
or loss in a dialect of such words as ‘love’ or ‘gratitude,’ they
proceed to explain, on the hypothesis of degradation, that rude state
of existence which is denoted by the word ‘savage,’ and which there
are abundant reasons for supposing was really the primitive germ, out
of which all subsequent civilisation has been unfolded. ‘Were,’ says
Archbishop Trench, ‘the savage the primitive man, we should then find
savage tribes furnished, scantily enough it might be, with the elements
of speech, yet, at the same time, with its fruitful beginnings, its
vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close
inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant
and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of
degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage—more fearful,
perhaps, even than that which is stamped upon his form.’[130] Yet,
whatever may be the case with some tribes, who may be shown historically
to have fallen from a higher state (and such are the exceptions), at
least the languages spoken in Africa bear no such ‘fearful impress of
degradation’ as are declared to be traceable _in every case_, if we may
judge of a language by the thoughts which it expresses rather than by the
words which it contains.




IV.

_SAVAGE MORAL PHILOSOPHY._


Lucretius, in his retrospect of prehistoric times, imagines primeval man
as unpossessed of any moral law, and is at pains to explain how, as men
were once ignorant of the property of either fire to warm or of skins to
cover them, so once there was a time when no moral restraints affected
the relations between man and man.[131] Across the Atlantic we find the
same strain of thought in the myths, common in many different stages of
progress, of those culture heroes who had come long ago to teach men the
arts and virtues of life, and had left their names to be worshipped by a
grateful posterity. The Peruvian legend, that moral law was unknown until
the Sun sent two of his children to raise humanity from their animal
condition, coincides with the modern hypothesis that the morality of the
cave-men resembled very much that of the cave-bear; so that it becomes a
subject worthy of inquiry whether any human communities ever have lived,
or are actually living, with no more idea of moral right and wrong than
is necessary for the social harmony of a wolf-pack or a wasp’s nest;
whether, in short, what to the Roman was a matter of speculation, or to
the American of legend, can fairly become for us one of science.

The Shoshones of North America, some of whom are said to have built
absolutely no dwellings, but to have lived in caves and among the rocks,
or burrowed like reptiles in the ground; or the Cochinis, who resorted
at night for shelter to caverns and holes in the ground, may be taken as
the best representatives of the ancient cave-dwellers, and the nearest
known approach to communities living in the state presupposed by the
legends of most latitudes.[132] Californians generally are said to have
had ‘no morals, nor any religion worth calling such;’ yet even the
Shoshones knew, like so many other American tribes, how to ratify either
a treaty or a bargain by the ceremony of smoking, and used shell-money
as an instrument of barter. But some moral notions must enter into the
rudest kind of barter, and barter was known to the ancient cave-dwellers
of Périgord, just as it is to the lowest contemporary savage tribes.
Rock crystal and Atlantic shells, found among the remains of men, tigers,
and bears, in the caves of Périgord, could, it is argued, only have got
thither by barter; so that the earliest human beings we have record
of must have possessed at least so much morality as is necessary for
commerce.[133]

As regards existing savages, evidence as to their moral ideas can only be
sought in incidental allusion to their customs, penalties, beliefs, or
myths, never in chapters expressly devoted to the delineation of their
moral character. Not only do such delineations by different writers
conflict hopelessly with one another, but inconsistencies abound in the
accounts of the same writer, as, for instance, where Cranz describes
Greenlanders as mild and peaceable, and a few pages further on as
‘naturally of a murderous disposition.’ The value of Cranz’ evidence is
marred by the fact that he writes expressly to rebut the Deistic idea of
a natural morality existing by the light of reason and independent of
Revelation; and the evidence of other writers, whenever a long residence
among savages entitles them to speak with any authority at all, is spoilt
by their several temptations to bias. Whether the temptation be to
enliven a book of travel, to inculcate the need and enhance the merit of
missionary labours, or to illustrate the uniformity of moral perceptions
and the universality of certain moral laws, in any case we are exposed
to the error of mistaking for habitual what is really peculiar, and of
misunderstanding the indications of facts which are as often anomalous as
they are illustrative.

The way, also, in which the love of theory may give rise to unjustifiable
credulity or even to absolute misstatement may be exemplified from the
common story of the Bushman who spoke with absolute unconcern of having
murdered his brother, or of the other Bushman who gave as an instance of
his idea of a good action, stealing some one else’s wife, and of a bad
one, losing in the same way his own. According to the original authority,
the Bushmen who were questioned, to test their intelligence, on a few
moral points, and especially on what they considered good actions and
what bad, belonged to a kraal of extremely poor, half-starved Bushmen,
seemingly ‘the outcasts of the Bushmen race;’ the interpreter, through
whom Burchell made his inquiries, said he could not make them understand
what he said, and to the specific question about good and bad actions
_they made no reply_, the missionary himself adding, as comment, that
‘their not understanding it must have been either pretended stupidity or
a wilful misrepresentation by the interpreter.’ This same interpreter is
suspected by Burchell, in the very same page, of such misrepresentation,
or of actual invention in respect of the story of the murder—a story
which, if true, adds the missionary, would have justified him in saying,
Here are men who know not right from wrong. Yet both these stories have
been quoted to exemplify the state of the moral destitution of the lower
races.[134]

The fear of incurring the ill-will of his fellow-beings or of those
invisible spirits disposed more or less hostilely towards him and
everywhere surrounding him, must have sufficed, even for prehistoric
man, to have marked out certain acts as less advisable than others, and
so far as wrong. The instinct to repel or revenge personal injuries, and
the instinct to appease the unknown forces of nature, neither of which,
be it assumed, acted less energetically in the past than the present,
must have always contributed to rank certain sets of actions as better to
be avoided. Personal or tribal well-being has probably always supplied
a sufficiently defined moral standard, sufficiently defended by real or
fanciful sanctions. So suggests theory; and in point of fact a savage
tribe is as difficult to find as it is to imagine, without a sense of a
difference in the quality of actions, arising from a difference in their
likely consequences to themselves.

The fear of revenge from a man’s survivors or from his ghost would at
any time tend to make homicide a prominent act of guilt. The vendetta,
sometimes carried out as much against a homicidal tiger or tree as
against a man, would scarcely ever be not dreaded by a human murderer;
and the associations are obvious and few between homicide as merely an
act to be avenged and a crime to be avoided. Even in instances where
bloodshed seems to have left but an external stain, affecting the hands
not the heart of the murderer, and calling simply for purification
by washing, the presence of a feeling of difference may be detected
between the killing of a man and the killing of a bear. But the dread of
vengeance from a murdered man’s ghost, which is said to have acted as a
check on murder among the Sioux Indians, or the dread of such vengeance
from the tutelary gods of the deceased, which is said to have acted as
a check on cannibalism in Samoa, points to the existence of prudential
restraints which are likely not to have been limited in their operation
to a tribe in America nor to an island in the Pacific.

But, besides spiritual terrors, secular punishment has a well-defined
place among savages, to check the extreme indulgence of hatred or
passion. It is doubtful whether any savage tribe is so indifferent to
the criminality of murder as to be destitute of customary penal laws to
prevent or punish it. These customs vary from the payment of a slight
compensation, payable either to the dead man’s family or to the tribal
chief, down to actual capital punishment. Among the Northern Californians
a few strings of shell-money compounded for the murder of a man, and
half a man’s price was paid for a woman; banishment from the tribe being
sometimes the penalty, death never.[135] Among the Kutchin tribes human
life was valued at forty beaver skins.[136] Even the Veddahs insist upon
compensation to survivors. The Tunguse Lapps, with whom homicide was a
brave rather than a shameful act, punished nevertheless a murderer with
blows, and compelled him to support the dead man’s relations.[137] In
some cases a slight penance was the only law against homicide. A Yuma
Indian, for instance, who killed a tribesman had perforce to starve for a
month on vegetables and water, bathing frequently during the day; whilst
a Pima who killed an Apache had to fast for sixteen days, living in the
woods, careful meanwhile to keep his eyes from the sight of a blazing
fire and his tongue from conversation.[138]

The custom, moreover, of extending to a whole family the guilt of an
individual is an additional protection to human life among savages. In
the same way as, till lately, English law avenged itself on the suicide
who had escaped its jurisdiction, by punishing the criminal’s relations,
savage custom satisfies indignation by taking any member of a family as a
substitute for a fugitive criminal. The Thlinkeet Indians, if they cannot
kill the actual murderer, kill one of his tribe or family instead.[139]
‘An Indian,’ says Kane, ‘in taking revenge for the death of a relative,
does not, in all cases, seek the actual offender; as, should the party
be one of his own tribe, any relative will do, however distant.’[140]
Catlin tells the story how, when a great Sioux warrior, the Little Bear,
had been shot by the Dog, the avengers of the former, failing to overtake
the Dog, caught and slew his brother instead, notwithstanding that he was
a man much esteemed by the tribe.[141] If a Californian criminal escaped
to a sacred refuge he was regarded as a coward, in that he diverted to
a relation a punishment he deserved himself.[142] In Samoa not only the
murderer but all his belongings would fly to another village as a city
of refuge, for in Samoan law a plaintiff might seek redress from ‘the
brother, son, or other relative of the guilty party.’[143] In Australia
wide-spread consternation followed the commission of a crime, especially
if the culprit escaped, for the brothers of the criminal held themselves
quite as guilty as he was, and only persons unconnected with the family
believed themselves safe.[144] In the Fiji Islands a warrior once left
his musket in such a position that it went off and killed two persons.
The owner of the musket was condemned to death; but, as he fled away, the
strangulation of his father instead of him perfectly satisfied the ends
of justice.[145]

The Samoans, as far back as it was possible to trace, had had customary
laws for the prevention of theft, adultery, assault, and murder, and
the penalties for such crimes appeared rather to have grown milder than
severer with time. Not only this, but they had penal customs for such
wrong acts as rude conduct to strangers, pulling down of fences, spoiling
fruit trees, or calling chiefs by opprobrious epithets. It is open to
doubt whether other savage tribes had not equally good safeguards for
preventing at least those greater social offences, whose immorality
furnishes the first principle of even the ethics of civilised communities.

In Fiji the criminality of actions is said to have varied with the social
rank of the offender, murder by a chief being accounted less heinous
than a petty larceny by a man of low rank. Theft, adultery, witchcraft,
violation of a _tabu_, arson, treason, and disrespect to a chief were
among the few crimes regarded as serious. With regard to murder, we are
told (and the passage is a favourite one for illustrating the extreme
variability of moral sentiment), that to a Fijian shedding of blood was
‘no crime, but a glory,’ and that to be an acknowledged murderer was
‘the object of his restless ambition.’ In a similar strain it has been
said, that in New Zealand intentional murder was either very meritorious
or of no consequence; the latter if the victim were a slave, the former
if he belonged to another tribe. The malicious destruction of a man of
the same tribe was, however, rare, the _lex talionis_ alone applying
to or checking it;[146] and it is probable that this reservation in
favour of native New Zealand should be made for all cases where murder
is spoken of as a trivial matter. Whenever murder is spoken of as no
crime, reference seems generally made to murder outside the tribe, so
that from the circumstances of savage life it resolves itself into an
act of ordinary hostility; or if the reference is to murder within the
tribe, it is to murder sanctioned by necessity, custom, or superstition.
The Carrier Indians, who did not think murders worth confessing when they
confessed other crimes of their lives, yet regarded the _murder of a
fellow-tribesman as something quite senseless_, and the man who committed
such a deed had to absent himself till he could pay the relatives,
since at home he was only safe if a chief lent him the refuge of his
tent or of one of his garments.[147] ‘A murder,’ says Sproat, ‘_if
not perpetrated on one of his own tribe_, or on a particular friend,
is no more to an Indian than the killing of a dog.’ The sutteeism and
parenticide, which missionaries describe as murders, are, from the
savage point of view, rather acts of mercy, being intimately connected
with their ideas of future existence, to which it is neither fair nor
scientific to apply the phraseology and associations of Christian
morality.[148]

Different tribes have evolved different institutions for the prevention
of wrongs, which supplement to a large extent the absence of fixed legal
remedies.

In Greenland there was the singing combat, in which anyone aggrieved,
dancing to the beat of a drum and accompanied by his partisans, recited
at a public meeting a satirical poem, telling ludicrous stories of his
adversary, and obliged to listen afterwards to similar abuse of himself,
till, after a long succession of charges and retorts, the assembled
spectators gave the victory to one of the combatants. These combats,
says Cranz, served to remind debtors of the duty of repayment, to brand
falsehood and detraction with infamy, to punish fraud and injustice,
and above all to overwhelm adultery with contempt. The fear of incurring
public disgrace at these combats was, with the fear of retaliation for
injury, the only motive to virtue which the writer allows to the natives
of Greenland.

In Samoa thieves could be scared from plantations by cocoa-nut leaflets
so plaited as to convey an imprecation; and a man who saw an artificial
sea-pike suspended from a tree would fear, that, if he accomplished his
theft, the next time he went fishing a real sea-pike would dart up and
wound him mortally. Images of a similar nature, conveying imprecations
of disease, death, lightning, or a plague of rats, seem also to have
been effective restraints upon thievish propensities;[149] and in the
Tonga Islands fruits and flowers were tabooed, that is, preserved,
by plaited representations of a lizard or a shark.[150] It is likely
that a similar meaning attached in Africa to certain branches of trees
which, stuck into the ground in a particular manner, with bits of broken
pottery, were enough to prevent the most determined robber from crossing
a threshold.[151] Similar _tabu_ marks were seen on some rocks at Tahiti,
placed there to prevent people fishing or getting shells from the Queen’s
preserves;[152] and it is possible that the origin of all _tabu_ customs
may have lain in the supposed efficacy of symbolical imprecation.

In New Zealand the institution of _muru_, or the legalized enforcement of
damages by plunder, extended the idea of sinfulness even to involuntary
wrongs or accidental sufferings. Involuntary homicide is said to have
involved more serious consequences than murder of malice prepense; and
if a man’s child fell into the fire, or his canoe was upset and himself
nearly drowned, he was not only cudgelled and robbed, but he would have
deemed it a personal slight not to have been so treated.[153] To escape
from drowning was indeed a common sin in savage life, for was it not to
escape the just wrath of the Water Spirit, and perhaps to turn it upon
some one else? In Kamschatka so heinous was the sin of cheating the Water
Spirit of his prey, by escape from drowning, that no one would receive
such a sinner into his house, speak to him, nor give him food: he became,
in short, socially dead. Fijians who escape shipwreck are supposed to
be saved in order to be eaten, and Williams tells, how on one occasion
fourteen of them who lost their canoe at sea only escaped becoming food
for sharks to become food for their friends on shore. If the Koossa
Kafirs see a person drowning, or indeed in any danger of his life, they
either run away from the spot or pelt the victim with stones as he
dies.[154] So also with death by fire: if an Indian falls into the fire
or is partially burnt, it is believed that the spirits of his ancestors
pushed him into the flames owing to his negligence in supplying them with
food.[155] The custom of an African tribe to expel from their community
anyone bitten by a zebra or an alligator, or even so much as splashed by
the tail of the latter, is evidently related to the same idea.[156]

Again, however much Catlin’s assertion that self-denial, torture,
and immolation were constant modes among North American Indians for
appealing to the Great Spirit for countenance and forgiveness, may
overstate the truth, it is remarkable that not only penance by fasting
and self-torture, but the practice of confession, should occur in the
lower culture as a mode of moral purification. Confession was common not
only in Mexico and Peru, but among widely remote savage tribes, being
closely connected with the belief in the power of sin to cause, and of
priestcraft to cure, dangerous sickness. The Carrier Indians of North
America thought, that the only chance of recovery from sickness lay in a
disclosure before a priest of every secret crime committed in life, and
that the concealment of a single fact would meet with the punishment of
instantaneous death.[157] The Samoan Islanders believing that all disease
was due to the wrath of some deity, would inquire of the village priest
the cause of sickness, who would sometimes in such cases command the
family to assemble and confess. At this confessional ceremony each member
of the family would confess his crimes, and any judgments he might have
invoked in anger on the family or the invalid himself; long-concealed
crimes being often thus disclosed.[158] In Yucatan, confession,
introduced by Cukulcan, the mythical author of their culture, was much
resorted to, ‘as death and disease were thought to be direct punishments
for sins committed.’ The natives of Cerquin, in Honduras, confessed, not
only in sickness, but in immediate danger of any kind, or to procure
divine blessings on any important occasion. So far did they carry it,
that, if a travelling party met a jaguar or puma, each would commend
himself to the gods, confessing loudly his sins, and imploring pardon; if
the beast still advanced they would cry out, ‘We have committed as many
more sins; do not kill us.’[159]

But over and above the wrong acts from which restraints lie in the
revenge of individuals, in punishment by the community, or in artificial
restrictions, there is a large class of acts, defended rather by
spiritual than secular sanctions, deriving their sinfulness from pure
misconceptions of things, and constituting for savages by far the larger
part of their field for right and wrong. The consciousness of having
trodden in the footstep of a bear would be as painful to a Kamschadal
as the consciousness of having stolen, the possible consequences of the
former being infinitely more dreadful. Such acts as the experience of
primitive times has thus generalized into acts provocative of unpleasant
expressions of dissatisfaction from the spiritual world, and so far
as sinful, become in the folk-lore of later date acts merely unlucky
or ominous. The feeling to this day prevalent in parts of England and
Germany, that if you transplant parsley you may cause its guardian spirit
to punish you or your relations with death, fairly illustrates how the
wrongful acts of bygone times may even in civilised countries continue to
be guarded by the very same sanction that gave them potency in the days
of savagery.

Of such regulations in restraint of the natural liberty of savage tribes
let it suffice to give some instances of sinful acts which derive all
their associations of wrong from rude notions concerning the nature of
storms, of ancestors, of names, and of animals. It will be seen that in
some cases such superstitions act as real checks to real wickedness;
though the connection between them seems purely accidental, rather than
the result of any intuitive discrimination of the qualities of actions.

As English sailors will refrain from whistling at sea, lest they should
provoke a storm, so the Kamschadals account many actions sinful on
account of their storm-breeding qualities. For this reason they will
never cut snow from off their shoes with a knife out of doors, nor go
barefooted outside their huts in winter, nor sharpen an axe or a knife
on a journey. The Fuejian natives brought away by Captain Fitzroy felt
sure that anything wrong said or done caused bad weather, especially the
sin of shooting young ducks. They declared their belief in an omniscient
Big Black Man, who had his living among the woods and mountains, and
influenced the weather according to men’s conduct; in illustration of
which they told a story of a murderer, who ascribed to the anger of
this being a storm of wind and snow which followed his crime.[160] In
Vancouver’s Island there is a mountain, the sin of mentioning which in
passing may cause a storm to overturn the offender’s canoe.[161]

Prominent among the moral checks of savage life is the fear of the
anger of the dead. Among savages the supposed wishes of their departed
friends, or deified forefathers, operate as real commands, girt with
all the sanction of superstitious terror, and clothing the most fanciful
customs with all the obligatory feelings of morality. A New Zealand
chief, for instance, would expect his dead ancestors to visit him with
disease or other calamity if he let food touch any part of his body,
or if he entered a dwelling where food hung from the ceiling.[162] The
wide prevalence of the feeling that disease and death are due to the
displeasure of the dead, who may return to earth, to reside in some part
of a living person’s body, may be illustrated by the Samoan custom of
taking valuable presents as a last expression of regard to the dying,
or by way of bribing them to forego their incorporeal privilege of
post-mortem revenge.[163] On the Gold Coast also friends make presents
to the dead of gold, brandy, or cloth, to be buried with them; just as
in ancient Mexico all classes of the population would beg of their dead
king to accept their offerings of food, robes, or slaves, which they vied
in giving him, or as the Mayas would place precious gifts or ornaments
near or upon the corpse of a deceased lord of a province. So the Bodos,
presenting food at the graves of their relations, would pray, saying,
‘Take and eat ... we come no more to you, come no more to us.’

Proper behaviour with regard to names is one of the most important points
of savage decorum. The confusion, amounting almost to identification,
between a person and his name is one of the most signal proofs of the
power of language over thought. As Catlin’s or Kane’s Indian pictures
were thought to detract from the originals something of their existence,
giving the painter such power over them that whilst living their bodies
would sympathise with every injury done to their pictures, and when dead
would not rest in their graves, so the feeling among savages is strong
that the knowledge of a person’s name gives to another a fatal control
over his destiny. An Indian once asked Kane ‘whether his wish to know
his name proceeded from a desire to steal it;’[164] whilst with the
Abipones it was positively sinful for anyone to pronounce his own name.
Kane could only discover Indians’ names through third parties; and it
is curious that the natives of one of the Fiji Islands will never tell
their names to an inquirer, if there should be anyone else to answer the
question.[165] Hence it is that the highest compliment a savage can pay a
person is to exchange names with him, a custom which Cook found prevalent
at Tahiti and in the Society Islands, and which was also common in North
America.[166] Warriors sometimes take the name of a slain enemy, from
the same motive apparently which, in some instances, is an inducement to
eat their flesh, namely, to appropriate their courage. The Lapps change a
child’s baptismal name, if it falls ill, rebaptizing it at every illness,
as if they thought to deceive the spirit that vexed it by the simple
stratagem of an _alias_;[167] and the Californian Shoshones, in changing
their names after such feats as scalping an enemy, stealing his horses,
or killing a grizzly bear, had, perhaps, some similar idea of avoiding
retaliation. Among the Chinook Indians near relations often changed their
names, lest the spirits of the dead should be drawn back to earth by
often hearing familiar names used.

With these ideas about names it is easy to understand how especial
reverence would become attached to the names of kings or dead persons
whose power to punish a light use of their appellations might well be
deemed exceptional. On accessions to royalty in the Society Islands all
words resembling the king’s name were changed, and any person bold enough
to continue the use of the superseded terms was put to death, with all
his relations.[168] From a similar state of thought the Abipones invented
new words for all things whose previous names recalled a dead person’s
memory, whilst to mention his name was ‘a nefarious proceeding.’[169] In
Dahome the king’s name must be pronounced with bated breath, and it is
death to utter it in his presence.[170] The degrees of guilt, attached
to the mention of a dead person, arising from a belief in the power of
spoken names to call back their owners, vary in sinfulness from its being
a positive crime, punishable by fine, to a mere rudeness, to be checked
in the young. Among the Northern Californians it was one of the most
strenuous laws that whoever mentioned a dead person’s name should be
liable to a heavy fine, payable to the relatives.[171] The tribe of Ainos
held it a great rudeness to speak of the dead by their names; whilst
young Ahts are instantly checked, if they make an unthinking use of the
name of a chief that has been relinquished in memory of some event of
importance.[172]

Several causes may have led to animal worship. The tendency to call men
by qualities or peculiarities in them fancifully recalling those of
some animal, and the tendency to apotheosize distinguished ancestors,
thus named after the tiger or the bear, may have led to a confusion of
thought between the animal and the man, till the divine attributes, once
attached to the individual, became transferred to the species of animal
that survived him in constant existence. Or the same fancy, which sees
inspiration in an idiot from his very lack of common reason, may have
attributed peculiar wisdom and looked with peculiar awe on the animal
world, by very reason of its speechlessness. Then, again, the idea that
the bodies of animals may be the depositories of departed human souls may
have led to the worship of certain animals: some Californians for this
reason refraining from the flesh of large game, because it is animated
by the souls of past generations, so that the term ‘eater of venison’
is one of reproach among them. Or the prohibitions of shamans may have
produced the result in some cases: the Thlinkeet Indians being found,
for this reason, abstinent from whale’s flesh or blubber, whilst both
are commonly eaten by surrounding tribes. But, whatever the original
causes may have been, tribes are found all over the world beset with a
feeling of sinfulness with regard to the injuring, eating, or in any way
offending different species of animals; of which, as no extreme instance,
may be mentioned the Fijian custom of presenting a string of new nuts,
gathered expressly, to a land crab, ‘to prevent the deity leaving with
an impression that he was neglected, and visiting his remiss worshippers
with drought, dearth, or death.’

Beyond, however, customs or ideas in prevention of acts prejudicial to
their real or supposed welfare, savage communities appear to have little
idea of any quality in actions rendering them good or bad independently
of consequences. Their prayers, their beliefs, and their mythology,
alike go to prove this. That they will pray for such temporal blessings
as health, food, rain, or victory, but not for such moral gains as the
conquest of passion or a truthful disposition, to some extent justifies
the inference that moral advancement forms no part of their code of
things desirable. Their good and evil spirit or spirits are simply
distinguished, where they are distinguished at all, as the causes
respectively of things agreeable or disagreeable, as taking sides for or
against struggling humanity, so that tribes which pay and sacrifice to
the source of evil, to the neglect of that of good, cannot be said not to
conform to reason. Their mythology, again, owes its very monotony mainly
to the lack of moral interest to relieve and sustain it. As Mr. Grote,
arguing from the mythology to the moral feeling of legendary Greece,
observes, that such a sentiment as a feeling of moral obligation between
man and man was ‘neither operative in the real world nor present to the
imaginations of the poets,’ so it may be said not less emphatically of
extant savage mythology. The Polynesian idea of a god, it has been well
said, is mere _power_ without any reference to goodness. The divine
denizens of Avaiki (the Hades of the Hervey Islands), as they marry,
quarrel, build, and live just like mortals, so they murder, drink,
thieve, and lie quite in accordance with terrestrial precedents.[173] The
unethical nature, however, of savage prayer or mythology is obviously
not incompatible with the practical recognition of certain moral
distinctions; in the same Hervey Islands, for instance, the greatest
possible sin was to kill a fellow-countryman by stealth, instead of in
battle.[174]

Ideas, again, relating to a future state and the dependence of future
welfare on the mode of life spent on earth, though they would seem to
afford some insight into the moral sentiments of those holding them, in
default of definition of the good or bad conduct so rewarded or punished,
do not really prove much. In the following instances, which offer several
shades of variety, there is scarcely any attempt at moral definition, and
the native belief has, perhaps, been adulterated by Christian influence.
The Good Spirit of the Mandans dwelt in a purgatory of cold and frost,
where he punished those who had offended him, before he would admit them
to that warmer and happier place, where the Bad Spirit dwelt and sought
to seduce the happy occupants.[175] For the Charocs of California were
two roads, one strewn with flowers, and leading the good to the bright
Western land, the other bristling with thorns and briers, and leading
the wicked to a place full of serpents. The souls of Chippewyans drifted
in a stone canoe to an enchanted island in a large lake; if the good
actions of their life predominated they were wafted safely ashore; but
if the bad, the canoe sank beneath their weight, leaving the wretches to
float for ever, in sight of their lost and nearly won felicity. Wicked
Okanagans, again, a Columbian tribe (and by the wicked are here specified
murderers and thieves), went to a place where an evil spirit, in human
form, with equine ears and tail, belaboured them with a stick.[176] The
Fijian belief appears truer to savage thought; for whilst such of their
dead as succeeded in reaching Mbula were happy or not, according as
they had lived so as to please the gods, mortals subjected to special
punishment were persons who had not their ears bored, women who were not
tattooed, and men who had not slain an enemy.[177]

Taking, however, these instances at their best, there is nothing to show
that the good or bad, rewarded or punished as above described, were
really anything more than those who on earth had fought and hunted with
courage or cowardice. Writers citing such beliefs do not always make
allowance for the difference between the savage and the civilised moral
standard. The code to be observed, says Schoolcraft, in order for the
soul to pass safely the stream which leads to the land of bliss, ‘appears
to be, as drawn from their funeral addresses, fidelity and success as a
hunter in providing for his family, and bravery as a warrior in defending
the rights and honour of his tribe. There is no moral code regulating the
duties and reciprocal intercourse between man and man.’[178] And if the
good American Indians above mentioned were distinguished by any higher
moral attributes than those of mere bravery and activity, it is difficult
to account for the fact that, while Mexican civilisation consigned all
who died natural deaths, good and bad alike, to the dull repose of
Mictlan, reserving for the higher pleasures of futurity those who met
their deaths in war or water, or from lightning, disease, or childbirth,
tribes whose culture stood to that of Mexico as far removed as that of
Polynesia from that of Europe, should have attained to the moral belief
of the influence of earthly conduct reaching beyond the grave.[179]

The foregoing brief review of some of the real evidence on the subject
would seem to indicate the conclusion that, in matters of morals, savages
are neither so low as they have been painted by most writers nor so
blameless as they have been portrayed by some. Their faults, such as
their vindictiveness, their ingratitude, or their mendacity, might be
predicated as easily of communities the most advanced in the world;
nor, in the face of the great neglect of precision of language in all
narratives of travel, can any evidence of the utter ignorance of right
and wrong among any tribe lay claim to the smallest scientific value. Of
the African Yorubas, whilst one writer asserts that they are not only
covetous and cruel, but ‘wholly deficient in what the civilised man calls
conscience,’ of the same people another says that they have several
words in their language to express honour, and ‘more proverbs against
ingratitude than perhaps any other people.’[180]

Perhaps no description of savage character is fairer than Mariner’s
of the Tongan Islanders. ‘Their notions,’ he says, ‘in respect to
honour and justice are tolerably well-defined, steady, and universal;
but in point of practice both the chiefs and the people, taking them
generally, are irregular and fickle, being in some respects extremely
honourable and just, and in others the contrary, as a variety of
causes may operate.’[181] But the justice of such remarks is lost in
their vagueness, and their impartial generality would render them of
world-wide rather than of merely local or insular application.

If, therefore, in consideration of the unsatisfactory nature of the
direct evidence, we resort to the indirect for the materials of our
judgment, we shall perhaps not err widely from the truth if we say that
average savage morality coincides very much with that of any contemporary
remote village of the civilised world, where the fear of retaliation and
disgrace is the chief preventive of great wickedness, and the natural
play of the social affections the main safeguard of good order. The
statement calls for but few limitations, that wherever travellers have
explored, or missionaries taught, they have been able to detect customary
laws regulating the relations of civil life, the orderly transference of
property by exchange or inheritance, no less than the fixed succession
to titles and dignities. They have found not only punishments for the
prevention, but judicial ordeals for the detection, of crimes; nor is
it possible to believe that such penal laws can exist without ideas of
wrongness attaching to the deeds they prohibit. But, besides the secular
absolution involved in legal penalties, they have found not unfrequently
a kind of spiritual purification by means of confession, penances, and
fasting; the practice of such confession alone proving that feelings of
remorse are not foreign to savage races, difficult as it must always be
to discriminate between actual remorse for wickedness and the mere dread
of contingent punishment. The greater social crimes, murder, theft, and
adultery, though not recognized as morally worse than many acts of purely
fanciful badness, are sufficiently prevented by the fear of revenge or
of tribal punishment; and statements concerning indifference to the
immorality of such actions either do not rest on good evidence or apply
to extra-tribal, that is, to hostile relations. It seems, therefore, that
fundamentally the two extremities of civilisation are ethically united;
each having for its standard of morality the idea of its own welfare,
and deriving a sense of moral obligation from a more or less vague dread
of consequences. The fundamental identity of human emotions, of the
operations of the feelings of love, fear, hope, and shame, appear to have
produced, in different stages of culture, very similar moral feelings;
nor is it conceivable that such feelings, howsoever much weaker, were
ever radically different in the most remote antiquity.




V.

_SAVAGE POLITICAL LIFE._


From the accounts of travellers respecting the nature of government among
uncivilised tribes it would not be a purely baseless theory to construct
a scale of successive developments, ranging from people entirely
destitute of political cohesion to people characterised by a quite
despotic form of government, and agreeing in the main with the fishing or
hunting and the agricultural stages of human advancement respectively.
The savage idea of monarchy is represented by all the possible gradations
between the most limited and the most absolute kind of government, and
we should naturally look for the best types of the latter among tribes
where geographical limitations or other causes have necessitated a
stationary and agricultural life. We should expect to find the first
germs of recognised leadership among people taught by war and the chase
to appreciate superior strength or skill; and to see such temporary
leaders pass into definite political chiefs, when a more settled mode
of life has given fixedness to ideas of property and made its defence
more desirable. We might infer _à priori_ that as men lived by hunting
or fishing before they drove flocks, and drove flocks before they tilled
the ground, so they lived in families before they lived in hordes, and in
hordes before they lived in larger social aggregates. As representatives
of the lowest stage of society, we might instance the Esquimaux, whom
Cranz found ‘destitute of the very shadow of a civil polity;’ and we
might pass from the hunting populations of America, who only choose
rulers for the temporary purposes of war or the chase, to the despotic
forms of government characteristic of the agricultural communities of
Africa or Polynesia.

It is not, however, worth insisting on an induction which would be at the
mercy of negative instances drawn from so large a surface as the whole
known globe. To supply only one instance, in which the hunting state
co-exists with a somewhat advanced political system. Most South American
tribes, who practised husbandry in addition to fishing and hunting to
a far greater extent than North American tribes, were found, in point
of social organisation, at a much lower level than the Northern tribes,
it being possible to classify the latter into nations by words supplied
by themselves, whilst in the South there were merely bands, and it was
necessary to invent names for such groups of bands as were allied
together by language.[182] Facts are the test of theories, not theories
of facts; and to insist on fitting facts to a theory is to fall into the
error of the unskilful shoemaker, who transposes the task of fitting
shoes to feet for the easier one of insisting that feet shall fit his
shoes.

Without, therefore, attempting to elaborate theories about the
development of political ideas from their rudest beginnings to their
expression in mature and complex state-systems, it may not be labour lost
to collect, within readable compass, some estimate of the notions of
sovereignty, the political organisations, the relations of classes, and
the peculiar institutions found among those communities of the earth who
seem the best representatives of primitive manners and the least advanced
from a state of primitive barbarism.

Statements concerning the total absence of civil government among
savages, like statements concerning their total ignorance of religion,
should be received with the reserve due to all propositions containing
terms of expansive signification. It is noteworthy that it is generally
tribes declared to be destitute of all religious feelings who in the
same sentence or paragraph are described as also destitute of political
ties; the statement that a tribe is entirely destitute of religion
or of any civil polity being, in fact, often only an hyperbolical
expression, intended to convey an extreme idea of their barbarity.
Bushmen, Californians, and Australians have severally been described as
not only not recognizing any gods, but as not recognizing any chiefs;
but subsequent research having proved that Bushmen, at least, possess an
elaborate mythology, worshipping the ethereal bodies, and having their
own distinctive myths concerning the Creation, suspicion is naturally
aroused that all broadly negative assertions of the same sort may be but
the results of insufficient observation.[183] ‘The Caribs,’ says one
writer, ‘had no chiefs; every man obeyed the dictates of his passions
unrestrained by government or laws;’ but according to another they lived
in hordes of from forty to fifty persons, under a patriarchal form of
government, and recognized a common chief whenever they went to war with
their neighbours.[184]

Undoubtedly, however, in countries where excess of numbers has not driven
communities to improve their condition by raids against their neighbours,
and where, consequently, military skill has attained no importance nor
authority, much looser social bonds may be found than in places where
a sense of property and of its value has arisen. Among people like
the Esquimaux, the Lapps, or the Kamschadals, who live together in
independent families, age is the only title to authority; and if skill in
seal-catching or in weather-lore procure for a Greenlander the deference
of younger members of his race, he has no power to compel any of them
to follow his counsels, and the only moral check to a refractory person
is a possible refusal on the part of his fellows to share the same hut
with him. If, in distant voyages, all the boatmen submit their kajaks to
the guidance of their countryman who is best acquainted with the way,
they are at perfect liberty to separate from him at pleasure. Beyond
this slight tie they have, or had when Cranz wrote, no political union,
no system of taxation or legislation of any kind, albeit they were not
wanting in methods for the enforcement of certain moral duties and the
prevention of certain moral wrongs. Of the Kamschadals, Steller tells us
that they had no chief, but that everyone was allowed to live according
to his pleasure; yet that they chose leaders for their expeditions,
who were without even power to decide private disputes, and that each
_ostrog_, or family settlement, had its ruler (generally the oldest
male), whose power to punish consisted solely in the right of verbal
correction.[185]

From the condition of the Kamschadals or Esquimaux to the condition of
Eastern Asia or Polynesia, where a king’s name is often so sacred as
to be avoided altogether, as many gradations of civil authority exist
as otherwise mark the difference of their respective civilisations. As
the progress of an individual from infancy to old age is marked at each
stage by a strict equipoise of good and evil, varying only in kind, so
every upward step in the social advancement of mankind seems attended
with some equivalent loss. Individual liberty is greatest where the
social bond is the loosest; and people like the rude hunting tribes of
Brazil, with only their hunting-grounds to defend and only temporary
leaders to obey, undoubtedly enjoy greater freedom than is compatible
with an agricultural life. As soon as tribes become settled and practise
husbandry they are naturally impelled to seek the labour of slaves,
which is a thing undesirable when a scanty subsistence is gained by
the exertions of the chase. And when once the existence of slavery has
established a difference between bondsmen and free, a way is open for all
those artificial divisions of society into ranks and castes which seem in
later times to belong to, nay, to constitute, the natural order of things.

It is, however, even at lower levels of general culture, often among
tribes who are still in the hunting stage, that we find all traces
disappear of that condition of freedom and equality once fondly imagined
to belong to a ‘state of nature.’ Savages seldom constitute pure
democracies, in the sense either of all being equal or of all being
free. Even where the monarchical power is quite rudimentary well-marked
distinctions serve to sever them into aristocracy and commonalty; for
the natural differences of capacity between men divide them, if less
strongly, not less definitely than slavery. Superiority in courage,
strength, sagacity, or experience, entitles a savage to much the
same privileges that, in more civilised countries, are allotted to
superiority in wealth or lineage. The conditions, however, of savage life
cause merit, and not birth, to be the primary qualification both for
chieftainship and nobility. Where military capacity is the sole basis of
authority it follows that such authority only descends to sons, if they
are as gifted as their parents with military prowess; also, that any
commoner may at any time become a noble if duly qualified for a leader,
and that for the same reason even the female sex is not excluded from a
career of political ambition. Among the Abipones women were often raised
to the dignity of cacique or captainship of a horde; nor is it rare to
find them capable of occupying positions of similar dignity among tribes
who, in other respects, treat their women as little better than beasts
of burthen. The Iroquois women, for instance, on whom devolved all
daily labour, such as planting the corn, cutting and carrying firewood,
bearing all burdens when marching, had their representatives in the
public councils, enjoyed a veto upon declarations of war, and the right
of interposing to bring about a peace.[186] Khond wives filled the
same important post of mediators and peace-makers in the wars between
the tribes of their husbands and their parents; and in Africa, where
the position of women is almost uniformly one of slavery, they are
ambassadors, traders, warriors, sometimes queens, besides tilling the
ground, tending the herds, or working in mines.[187]

As many savages surround the entrance to their paradise with imaginary
physical difficulties which only the bravest can overcome, so they
frequently make admission to the rank of their nobility dependent on the
performance of certain rites and ceremonies which sufficiently attest
the endurance of the aspirant to social elevation. An Indian tribe on
the Orinoco used to lay such a candidate on a hurdle, place burning
coals beneath, and then cover him with palm-leaves all over, in order
to make the heat more suffocating. Or, they would perhaps anoint him
with honey, and leave him for hours tied to a tree at the mercy of the
insects of those latitudes. The Abiponian plan was, to place a black
bead on a tribeman’s tongue and insist on his staying at home for three
days, abstaining all the while from the ordinary pleasures of food,
drink, and speech. Then on the eve of the day of his inauguration all
the women of the horde would come to his tent, in uncouth attire, and
lament loudly for the ancestors of the man who would fain be a noble.
The next day, after galloping spear in hand on horses decorated with
bells and feathers to the four quarters of the wind, he had to suffer the
priestess of the ceremonies to shave a band on his head, three inches
wide from the forehead backwards. A eulogy by the old woman, recording
his warlike character and noble actions, concluding with a change of name
befitting his change of rank, completed the ceremony of his installation.
In ancient Mexico a candidate for the noble order of the Tecuhtli had
to remain impassive whilst the high priest insulted him, whilst the
assistant priests mocked him as a coward and tore his clothes from his
body, and all this previous to a noviciate which lasted two years, and
ended with four days of severe penance, fastings, and prayers.[188]

The prevalence, indeed, of equality among savages is one of those
fictions which date from the time when writers drew on their own minds
for a knowledge of anthropology: a fiction due to the same tendency which
created for the Greeks their Elysian Fields, or for the Tongan islanders
their Bolotu, leading them to refer to the distant or the unknown
the actualisation of those longings and ideals which the immediate
surroundings of the world could not gratify. But the truth is, that so
firmly among most savages has the idea become fixed of an essential
difference in the nature of nobles and commons, of governors and
governed, that the demarcations of their mundane economy are transferred
into their speculations about the unseen world, and the inequalities of
this life are often perpetuated in the next. New Zealanders believed
that, whilst all spirits at death went as falling stars to Reinga, or
the lower world, those of chiefs went first of all to heaven, where
their left eye remained as a star.[189] Among the Zulus the snakes into
which departed chiefs turn are easily distinguishable from those which
embody commoner people.[190] As paupers and bondsmen were not admitted
to Valhalla, so the ‘masses’ of the Tongan islanders have neither souls
nor futurity. The Dahomans who call this world their plantation and the
next their home, believe that in the latter ‘the king is a king and the
slave a slave for ever and ever.’[191] In Samoa not only had chiefs a
larger hole than plebeians by which to descend to the under world, but
also a separate habitation, serving as columns to support the temple
of the underground god, and enjoying the best of food and all other
pleasures.[192] Whilst the Thlinkeets burnt most bodies, that they might
be warm in their new home, slaves were buried, as only deserving to
freeze there; and the Ahts, allotting a plenteous and sunny land in the
sky to dead chiefs, relegate persons of low degree to a subterranean
abode, where the houses are poor, the deer small, and the blankets
thin.[193]

Devices have varied all over the world for marking the innate or acquired
differences between men. The Tibboos of Africa denote difference of
rank by different scars on the face; but distinctions in dress or in
titles have been the usual resort of the civilised and semi-civilised
world alike; and the highest Fijian chiefs, who would style themselves
the ‘subjects of Heaven only,’ were prompted by the same natural vanity
that gave birth among ourselves to the ‘Knights of the Lion and Sun’
or to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. But the most striking
device in the lower grades of civilisation is the conscious invention
and use of a different form of speech, amounting almost to the use of
a different language, such as was the plan adopted by the Abipones to
mark the difference between noble and plebeian. Persons advanced to the
rank of nobles, or the Hocheri, were not only distinguished from their
fellows by a change of name (men adding the suffix _in_, women _en_, to
their former appellation), but the whole language spoken by the Hocheri
was, by the insertion or addition of syllables, so altered from the
vulgar tongue as to amount to a distinct aristocratic dialect.[194] It is
remarkable how a similar practice prevails in widely remote parts of the
globe. Among Circassians the language for the common people is one, that
for the princes and nobility another; nor may the commonalty, though they
understand it, venture to speak in the secret or court language.[195] ‘As
in the Malayan so in the Fijian language, there exists an aristocratical
dialect,’ and in some places ‘not a member of a chiefs body or the
commonest acts of his life are mentioned in ordinary phraseology,
but are all hyperbolised.’[196] In the Sandwich Islands ‘the chiefs
formed a conventional dialect, or court language, understood only among
themselves. If any of its terms became known by the lower orders they
were immediately discarded and others substituted.’[197] So, too, it is
said that the island Caribs held their war councils in a secret dialect,
known only to the chiefs and elders, into which they were initiated after
attaining distinction in war.[198] Of the Society Islanders, Ellis tells
us that ‘sounds in the language composing the names of the king and queen
could no longer be applied to ordinary significations’—a rule, he adds,
which brought about many changes in the words used for things.[199]
Lastly, in the Tongan islands something of the same kind also prevailed,
for there we find that among the ways of paying special honour to the
Tooitonga, or divine chief, was the employment, in speaking with him,
of words devoted exclusively to his use, as substitutes for words of
ordinary parlance.

Another method by which savages seek to mark the different grades of
society is to signalise by an excess of demonstration their sorrow for
the departure of persons of rank from among them. The custom of cutting
off finger-joints in token of grief, from its prevalence among the
Blackfeet Indians of North America, the Hottentots of South Africa,
some tribes of Australia, and among the female portion of the Charruas
of South America, may be considered to rank among the remarkable
analogies of world-culture, when we find that a similar custom prevailed
also among the Tongan Islanders whenever the death of a chief or a
superior relation left his survivors comfortless. It is possible that
the idea of propitiating angry gods by self-inflicted pains may have
originally underlain many of the practices in after times regarded as
mere manifestations of grief; for Captain Cook, speaking of the knocking
out of front teeth at funerals, says that he always understood that
this custom, like that of cutting off finger-joints, was not inflicted
from any violence of grief so much as intended for a propitiatory
sacrifice to the Atoa, to avert any possible danger or mischief from the
survivors.[200] Thus Bushmen sacrifice the end joints of their fingers in
sickness; and during the illness of a Tooitonga his countrymen would seek
to appease the god whose anger had caused the disease by the sacrifice
daily of the little finger of a young relation. Mariner mentions two
patriotic young Tonganers contesting with fist and foot the right thus
to testify their regard for the lord of their country. It is easily
conceivable how a practice, begun with the idea of conciliating the cause
of a disease, might be continued for the purpose of conciliating the
cause of death, and thus how (as in Fiji, where on the death of a king
orders were issued that one hundred fingers should be cut off) an archaic
superstition might pass into a meaningless formality.

There are, however, various other ways of exhibiting regret for departed
nobility. In the Sandwich Islands, if a chief dies, the highest mark
of respect his survivors can show is to strike out one of their front
teeth with a stone. They also tattoo their tongues, deprive themselves
of an ear, or shave their heads in fantastic designs. The latter is
a world-wide symbol of sorrow; more peculiar is the license to rob
and burn houses and commit other enormities, which is, or was once,
customary in Hawaii on the death of a chief. In Tonga and Tahiti it was
customary on such occasions to cut the forehead and breast with sharks’
teeth. Axes, clubs, knives, stones, or shells were employed freely for
self-mutilation, when Finow, the King of Tonga, died; his disconsolate
subjects seeking to induce him, by the energy of their blows and the
loudness of their prayers, to lay aside those suspicions of their loyalty
which had prompted him to depart from Tonga to Bolotu.[201]

In modern civilised life such clear distinctions exist no longer, but
there is at least one symbol of nobility which bears distinct traces of
descent from uncivilised conceptions and usages. From the common practice
of making a particular species of animal the totem, or representative,
of a particular person, family, or tribe, arose probably the custom of
distinguishing persons or families by crests, figurative of their patron
animals. Both among the Kolushs, a fishing North American tribe, and
their neighbours, the Haidahs, of Queen Charlotte’s Island, the existence
of an aristocracy of birth is proved from the presence of family crests
among them, derived from figures of certain animals. Sir G. Grey noticed
in Australia that each family adopted some animal or vegetable for its
crest or Kobong,[202] and the hereditary nobility of the rude Thlinkeet
Indians paint or carve the heraldic emblem of their clan on their houses,
boats, robes, shields, or wherever else they can find room for it.[203]
These few instances from the lower culture suffice to explain how animal
figures, supposed to be expressive of the character of gods or warriors,
came to be worn above their helmets; and how in the case of warriors at
least, they gradually passed from their helmets to their shields, till
they became part of armorial bearings, so highly prized and zealously
transmitted from generation to generation. Newton, the author of the
‘Display of Heraldry,’ expresses his belief that the most ancient class
of crests were taken from ferocious animals, which were regarded as
figuratively representing the bearer and his pursuits. Certain it is that
a far larger proportion of crests are derived from the animal world, from
beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, and even insects, than from any other
sublunary class of things.[204]

If now we turn to the savage conception of monarchy, we shall find that,
wherever regal authority exists, it is sustained by a more or less strong
belief in the divine origin of kings. The constitutional power of a king
varies with the amount of divinity ascribed to him. As Russians of the
sixteenth century held the will of their Grand Duke to be the will of
God, and whatever he did to be done by the will of God,[205] so now in
Africa the king of Loango is not only honoured as a god, but known by
the same name as the Deity; namely, Samba. His subjects, accrediting him
with power over the elements, pray to him for rain in times of drought.
But as a king’s divine origin means his divine right, or in other words
his despotic power, his subjects only enjoy their lives and property
on the tenure of his will, nor does there seem any moral limitation to
his regal rights, save an obligation to make use of native products and
dresses. The king of Dahomey, also revered as a god, appears to possess
power over his countrymen which is only so far limited, that he cannot
behead princes of the blood royal but must confine his vengeance against
them to strangulation or slavery. Without his leave no caboceer may alter
his house, wear European shoes, or carry an umbrella. Many kings of the
Fiji Islands claimed a divine origin and asserted the rights of deities,
their persons indeed being so religiously revered that even in battle
their inferiors would fear to strike them. In Tahiti, Oro, the chief
god, was called the king’s father, and the same homage that was paid to
the gods and their temples was paid also to the king and his dwellings,
the homage, namely, of stripping to the waist. At his coronation the
king asserted his dominion over the sea, by being rowed in Oro’s sacred
canoe and receiving congratulation from two divine sharks. So that it
was no mere spirit of bombastic adulation that caused the king’s houses
to be identified, in popular parlance, with the Clouds of Heaven, the
lights in them with the Lightning, or his canoe with the Rainbow; and
if his voice was described as the Thunder, it doubtless was due to that
common association of electricity with divinity, such as, for instance,
prompted the savages of Chili to employ the same name for Thunder and for
God. The ceremony of creating a Tahitian king consisted in girding him
with a girdle of red feathers, which, as they were taken from the chief
idols, were thought to be capable of conferring on the monarch the divine
attributes of power and vengeance. That a human sacrifice was essential,
not only at the commencement and completion of the girdle, but often for
every piece successively added to it, confirms the experience of all
ages and countries respecting the tendency of monarchical governments
in barbarous times, a tendency which was never better appreciated than
by the ancient Japanese. For they used to make their prince sit crowned
on his throne for some hours every morning, without suffering him to
move his hands or feet, his head or eyes, or indeed any part of his
body, believing that by this means alone could peace and tranquillity be
preserved; and ‘if unfortunately he turned himself on one side or the
other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it
was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune
was near at hand to desolate the country.’[206] The Samoans thought also
that some deadly influence radiated from the person of a king which could
only be broken by aspersion with water.[207]

Inasmuch, however, as government of any kind is impossible without a
subdivision of functions, and a king needs ministers to execute his will,
the limitation of a council is almost inseparable from even the most
absolute monarchy. A perfectly pure despotism exists, therefore, nowhere
save in the definitions of the science of politics. It is, indeed,
difficult to conceive an arbitrary government except as a synonym for
total anarchy. In Loango, where the king nominates and displaces his
officers at pleasure, and is absolute disposer of his subjects’ lives and
liberties, armed resistance is said to be often made against him, and his
power to depend on his wealth and connections. Even a king of Dahomey
said that he would imperil his life if he attempted to put down slavery
and human sacrifices all at once, and it is said that whatever despotic
acts may be witnessed in Africa they are all performed according to the
common law of the land.[208] Among the Ashantees there are four men at
the head of the nobility who exert great influence and serve to balance
the monarchical power.[209] Among the Kaffirs, the chiefs of hordes,
though with power of life and death, are restrained by the councillors
they themselves nominate from attacking ancient usages; and though the
king is despotic, his despotism must not transgress known laws. The right
of desertion also which practically belongs to every member of a horde,
acts as a most effectual moral check upon tyrannical tendencies. Indeed,
throughout Africa, the differentiation of functions of government, or the
division of political labour, is carried to an extent which proves how
little necessary connection there is between high political capacity and
high culture in other respects. In Dahomey, where a man’s life is less
sacred than that of a fox in England, there are two chief ministers in
constant attendance on the king, a third who is commander-in-chief of the
army, and a fourth who superintends the due punishment of crimes.

The existence, again, of grades of society, clearly marked by differences
of functions and privileges, is itself a proof of a political
organisation which implies limitations to the exercise of sovereignty.
Classes with distinct rights and relations prove the constraint of a
public law which even monarchs must recognise and respect. In Fetu in
Africa, where frequently from four to five hundred slaves are killed
at a king’s funeral to serve him beyond the grave, there is a distinct
class of freemen, with specific rights, sprung from the noble and slave
classes. So, also, wherever the Malay race has settled in the Pacific,
their feudal institutions and classes bear a striking resemblance to
those of mediæval Europe. In the Fiji Islands, such classes are said to
be so clearly defined as to amount almost to a system of caste. They are:—

    1. The kings and queens.

    2. Chiefs of large dependent islands or districts.

    3. Chiefs of towns, and priests.

    4. Warriors of low birth; chiefs of carpenters and of
    turtle-fishers.

    5. The people.

    6. The slaves taken in war.

With which may be compared the Tongan social scale:—

    1. The Tooitonga and Veachi, chiefs of divine descent.

    2. The king, or How.

    3. The Egi, or nobles; all persons in any way related to the
    two former classes.

    4. The priests.

    5. The Matabooles, attendants on chiefs, managers of
    ceremonies, preservers of records, &c.

    6. The Mooas, or younger sons or brothers of the Matabooles.

    7. The Tooas, or common people, who practise such arts as are
    not dignified enough to pass from father to son, as cookery,
    club carving, shaving, or tattooing.

These ranks are so fixed and unalterable that they form a prominent
feature in the Tongan conception of a future world. Rank, not merit,
constitutes the title of admission to Bolotu. All _noble_ souls arrive
there and enjoy a power similar but inferior to that of the original
deities, being capable, like the latter, of inspiring priests living on
earth. The Matabooles also gain admittance to Bolotu, but are unable to
cause priestly inspirations. The souls of the Tooas dissolve with the
body, as too plebeian to find a place in Paradise.

In the Sandwich Islands, there were formerly three aristocratic
orders—the first consisting of the king and queen, their relations, and
the chief councillors; the second of the chiefs of dependent districts;
the third of the chiefs of villages and of priests. Servile homage from
all the inferior classes was paid to these three orders, but particularly
to the priests and higher chiefs, their very persons and houses being
accounted sacred, and the sight of them a peremptory signal for
prostration. The people, as in mediæval Europe, were attached to the soil
and transferred with it: but a strong customary law is said nevertheless
to have regulated both the tenure of land and personal security.[210] If
they had no voice in the government, they sometimes took part in public
meetings, nor did the king ever resolve on matters of weight without the
counsel of his principal chiefs. Yet government was more despotic in
the Sandwich than in either the Society or the Fiji Islands. In Tahiti,
public assemblies were held, in which the speakers did not hesitate to
compare the state to a ship, of which the king was only the mast, but the
landed nobility the ropes that kept it upright.[211]

Many savage tribes have succeeded, by speciously devised forms and
ceremonies, in clothing arbitrary power with a cloak of legality,
inviolably divine. The most remarkable of these devices is the famous
institution of _tabu_, which, by transferring the divinity inherent
in a king or chief to everything that comes in contact with him, early
invested sovereign power with a most facile and elastic weapon of
government. For the principle, that whatever a king touched became sacred
to his use, supplied regal power with a most convenient immunity from
the shackles of ordinary morality. A Fijian king, by giving his dress to
an English sailor, enabled the latter to appropriate whatever food he
chose to envelope with the train of his dress. Whatever house a Tahitian
king or queen enters is vacated by its owners; the field they tread on
becomes theirs; their clothes, their canoes, the very men who carry them,
are invested with a sanctity the violation of which is death, and are
regarded as precisely as holy as objects less, ostensibly associated with
earthly necessities.

But whether or not the institution of _tabu_ was a clever invention of
kings for increasing their power, its inevitable extension reacted in
time as a limitation to it. This may be illustrated from the Tongan
Islands, where the regal power, owing probably to a long constitutional
struggle between the rival claims to sovereignty of birth and merit,
stood in a most anomalous position. For the king did not belong to
the highest rank of the people, his title depending in part on birth,
but principally on his reputation for personal strength and military
capacity. Tooitonga and Veachi, the direct descendants of the gods who
first visited the island, or (as we may perhaps rationalistically
translate it) the direct descendants of the earliest kings, occupied
a higher status than the actual king, and were honoured with
acknowledgments of their divinity which even the king himself had to pay.
To the posterity of bygone monarchs the actual king stood in the relation
of a peasant to a prince, being expected, like anyone else, to sit down
on the ground when they passed, though they might be his inferiors in
wealth nor possessed of any direct power save over their own families and
attendants. The dignity of the Tooitonga survived not only in his not
being circumcised nor tattooed as other men, and in peculiar ceremonies
attending his marriage or his burial, but in the more substantial
offerings of the firstfruits of the year at stated periodical festivals.
The king used to consult him before undertaking a war or expedition,
though often regardless of the counsel offered; and in reference to the
person of either descendant of the gods the king was subject to tabu, or
even in reference to ordinary chiefs in any way related to them. If he
but touched the body, the dress, or the sleeping mat of a chief nearer
related to Tooitonga and Veachi than himself, he could only exempt
himself from the inconveniences incurred by the violation of tabu by the
dispensation attached to the ceremony of touching, with both his hands,
the feet of such supernatural chief, or of some one his equal in rank.

In the Society Islands, in consequence of the regal attribute inseparable
from royalty of tabooing whatever ground it traversed, Tahitian kings
became in course of time either entirely restricted to walking in their
own domains, or subjected to the discomfort of a progress on servile
shoulders over whatever district they wished to visit. So that tabu in
both these instances acted as a limitation to the despotism of the king.

In Tahiti, however, the king’s power was further limited by a custom
which, extending as it did to all the noble classes, was perhaps the most
anomalous institution in the world, whether as regards the theory or the
practice of inherited rank. For the custom compelling a king or a noble
to transfer all his titles and dignity to his firstborn son at the moment
of his birth, whether instituted originally for securing an undisputed
succession to the regency or due to a similar rude confusion of ideas,
such as associates the sanctity of a man’s origin with the sanctity of
all he touches, carried the claims of primogeniture to a degree unknown
either by the Jewish or the English law. ‘Whatever might be the age of
the king, his influence in the state, or the political aspect of affairs
in respect to other tribes, as soon as a son (of noble birth) was born,
the monarch became a subject; the infant son was at once proclaimed
sovereign of the people; the royal name was conferred upon him, and his
father was the first to do him homage by saluting his feet and declaring
him king.’ The national herald, sent round the island with the infant
ruler’s flag, proclaimed his name in every district, and, if it were
acknowledged by the aristocracy, edicts were thenceforth issued in his
name. Not only the homage of his people, but the lands and other sources
of his father’s power, were transferred to the minor child, the father
only continuing to act as regent till his child’s capacity for government
was matured.

The Fijians also have a peculiar custom, the institution of Vasu, which
serves as a barrier both to regal and aristocratic oppression, and shows
how, even among savages, the caprice of individuals is held in bondage
by the traditions of the elders. Vasu signifies the common-law right of
a nephew to appropriate to his own use anything he chooses belonging to
an uncle or to anyone under his uncle’s power. The king often availed
himself of Vasu for his own benefit, it being customary for a nephew to
surrender as tribute most of the legal extortions which his title of Vasu
might enable him to levy. But the king himself was liable to Vasu; for we
are told that, ‘however high a chief may rank, _however powerful a king
may be_, if he has a nephew he has a master;’ for, except his lands and
his wives, neither chief nor king possessed anything which his nephew
might not appropriate at any moment. If, for instance, the uncle built
a canoe for himself, his nephew had only to come, mount the deck, and
sound his trumpet shell, to announce to all the world a legitimate and
indefeasible transfer of ownership. It is even said that on one occasion
a nephew at war with his uncle actually supplied himself, unresisted,
with ammunition from his enemy’s stores. It is difficult indeed to divine
the origin of so singular an institution, unless perhaps we regard it
as surviving from a time when as in so many parts of the world nephews
and not sons ranked as first in inheritance. In Loango the nephews of a
deceased king become princes, whilst his sons descend to the commonalty;
the throne of Ashantee passes not to a man’s natural heir, but to his
brother’s or sister’s son, and the same rule of descent prevails widely
over the world.[212]

In two respects especially, savages may be accredited with having secured
a certain stability for their institutions and saved them from some of
the dangers which have been the bane of more civilised countries. It
entitles them to no slight praise that they have generally so adjusted
the relations of the temporal and spiritual powers as to prevent their
clashing, and have taken its sting from taxation by making the day of
taxpaying a day of public rejoicing. In the Tongan Islands (before the
custom was abolished by a revolutionary king) the tax of the annual
payment of firstfruits to the Tooitonga was almost forgotten in the grand
ceremonies with which it was associated, and tributes received from
inferiors by chiefs came as much as possible in the way of presents,
whilst so far away as the Slave Coast, the feast of taxpaying is the
great recurring Saturnalia of the year. In Dahomey income-tax is ‘paid
under a polite disguise,’ each man bringing a present to the king in
proportion to his rank, and at an annual festival.[213] The feast lasts
a whole month; public plays take place every four or five days; singers
chant the king’s praises and the historical traditions of the country;
and the whole concludes with the ever popular African entertainment
of human sacrifice, on an unlimited scale. In Fiji also taxpaying was
associated with all that the people love; the time of its taking place
being ‘a high day, a day for the best attire, the pleasantest looks, and
the kindest words; a day for display.’ The Fijian carried his tribute
with every demonstration of joyful excitement, paying it in with songs
and dances to a king who received it with smiles and who provided a
feast for the happy taxpayers. So among the Kaffirs the presence of the
four royal[214] taxgatherers in the town was the signal for feasting and
amusements, and when payment had been at last demanded by them they were
conducted out of the town, as they had been welcomed into it, by dancers
and musicians.[215]

In all the lower communities of the globe the priest, as the Shaman who
can invoke rain, who can cause or cure diseases, who can detect the
unknown thief, or read the result of a coming battle, may be revered for
his power as a sorcerer, but he seldom enters into the scheme of the
body politic as an efficient political force. In the Sandwich Islands,
where priestly power was more developed than elsewhere, the priesthood,
though not merely an hereditary body and possessed of much property in
men and lands, but recipients of the same servile homage that was paid
to the highest chiefs, occupied, nevertheless, a subordinate position
to the governing class. As the nation retained a chief priest who had
charge of the national god, so each chief retained his own family priest,
whose function it was to follow him to the battle-field carrying his
war-god and to direct the sacred rites of his house. In New Zealand the
tohunga (or priest) was ‘not significative of a class separated from
the rest by certain distinctions of rank,’ but was an office open to
anyone.[216] In the Tongan Islands, a priest had no respect paid to
him beyond what was due to his family rank, owing to the fact that the
title to the priesthood was dependent on the accident of inspiration by
some god. Whenever a priest invoked the gods (and it was generally on
a person of the lower classes that such inspiration fell), the chiefs,
nay, even the king himself, would sit indiscriminately with the common
people in a circle round him, ‘on account of the sacredness of the
occasion, conceiving that such modest demeanour must be acceptable to
the gods.’[217] Whatever the priest then said was deemed a declaration
of the god, and, in accordance with a confusion of the human voice and
the divine, not unknown elsewhere, the oracle, in speaking, actually
made use of the first person, as though the relation of himself to
the god were not merely one of delegated authority, but of real and
complete identification. Except, however, on such special occasions, a
Tongan priest was distinguished by no particular dress, nor invested
with any official privileges. In Fiji, also, the priests ranked below
the principal chiefs; and the chief priest, though, as in Tahiti, it
was his office to perform the ceremony which introduced the monarch to
regal dignity, seems in nowise to have interfered afterwards with the
sovereignty of his temporal lord. It is remarkable that the power of
priestcraft increases with the increase of civilisation; ultimately
serving to arrest and retard the growth of which it is at once a symptom
and a measure.

If from the foregoing data, collected from the best accredited missionary
sources, it is permissible to speak in general terms of primitive
political life, it would appear that the social organisation of the lower
races stands at a far higher level than too rapid an inspection would
lead a critic to suspect. Their institutions are such as to presuppose
as much ingenuity in their evolution as sagacity in their preservation.
Their despotism is never so unlimited but that it recognises the
existence of a customary code beside and above it; nor is individual
liberty ever so unchecked as to outweigh the advantages or imperil the
existence of a life in common. In short, the subordination of classes,
the belief in the divine right of kings and in differences ordained
by nature between nobles and populace, the principle of hereditary
government (often so firmly fixed that not even women are excluded from
the highest offices), the prevalence of feudalism with its ever-recurring
wars and revolutions, not only prove an identity of social instinct
which is irrespective of latitude or race, but prove also among the
lower races the existence of a capacity for self-government, which is
disturbing to all preconceptions derived from accounts of their manners
and superstitions in other relations of life.




VI.

_SAVAGE PENAL LAWS._


If, interpreting the present by the past, and taking as our standard of
the past contemporary savage life, we endeavour to gain some insight into
the origin of those legal customs and ideas which are so interwoven with
our civilisation, the statements of travellers relating to the judicial
institutions of savage tribes gain considerably in interest and value.
For savage modes of redressing injuries, of assessing punishment, of
discovering truth, reveal not a few striking points of resemblance and
of contrast to the practices prevalent in civilised communities; whilst
they serve at the same time to illustrate the natural laws at work in the
evolution of society.

The different stages of progress from the lowest social state, where the
redress of wrongs is left to individual force or cunning, to the state
where the wrongs of individuals are regarded and punished as wrongs to
the community at large, may be all observed in the customs of modern
or recent savage tribes. Yet instances where the redress of wrongs
is purely a matter of personal retaliation are not really numerous,
occurring chiefly where the rulership of a tribe is ill-defined and is
an exercise of influence rather than authority, as among the Esquimaux,
the Kamschadals, and some Californian and other American tribes. In
such states of society, though some political sovereignty is vested in
the heads of the different families, they have but little power either
to make commands or to inflict punishments, so that self-help is for
individuals the first rule of existence. But generally this deficiency
in the legal protection of life and property is made up for by a
principle which lies at the root of savage law—the principle, that is, of
collective responsibility, of including in the guilt of an individual all
his blood relations jointly or singly.

This consideration of crimes as family or tribal rather than as personal
matters, (the duty of satisfying the family or tribe of anyone injured
devolving upon the family or tribe of the wrongdoer,) must have tended in
the earliest times to withdraw attention from the merely personal aspect
of injuries and to direct it to their more social relations. The common
test of likelihood is no bad guide in ethnology; and the difficulty of
conceiving any society of men, even the most savage, living together
absolutely unaffected by, or uninterested in, wrongs done by one of
their members to another, is only equalled by the difficulty of finding
credible records of any such community. Even in Kamschatka, where the
head of an ostrog had only the power to punish verbally, a man caught
stealing was held so infamous, that no one would befriend him, and he had
to live thenceforth alone without help from anybody; whilst, if the habit
seemed inveterate, the thief was bound to a tree, and his arms bound by
a piece of birch-bark to a pole stretched crosswise; the bark was then
ignited, and the man’s hands, thereby branded, marked his character in
future to all who might be interested in knowing it.[218] Even in so rude
a tribe as the Brazilian Topanazes, a murderer of a fellow-tribesman
would be conducted by his relations to those of the deceased, to be by
them forthwith strangled and buried, in satisfaction of their rights;
the two families eating together for several days after the event as
though for the purpose of reconciliation.[219] And several other tribes,
destitute of any chiefs possessing the power or right to judge or punish,
have fixed customs regulating such offences as theft or murder. Thus
the Nootka Indians avenge or compound for punishable acts, though their
chiefs have little or no voice in the matter. Where, as among the Haidahs
of Columbia, crime likewise has no legal punishment, murder being simply
an affair to be settled with the robbed family, we may detect the
beginnings of later legal practices in the occasional agreement among
the leading men to put to death disagreeable members of the tribe, such
as medicine-men, and other great offenders.[220] So that wherever, from
causes of war or otherwise, tribal chieftaincy has become at all fixed
and powerful, we may expect to find the chief or chiefs called upon to
settle disputes between individuals or families; and thus gradually a way
would be found for the addition of judicial functions to the more primary
duties of government.

From this natural tendency of submitting disputed claims or the measure
of redress to the decision of a single chieftain or of several, the
personal right of retaliation would soon become a tribal one; and though
ignorant of the science of jurisprudence, most savage tribes seem
early to have learnt to treat torts or offences against an individual
as crimes or offences against the community, taking as their standard
of punishment the measure of the wrong done to the individual. The
transfer of sovereignty from smaller units to the tribe is clearly
marked in instances where the chiefs of a tribe try crimes and decide
guilt, but leave the punishment of the offender to the discretion of the
injured persons or family; of which the following are characteristic
illustrations.

According to Catlin, every Indian tribe he visited had a council-house
in the middle of their village, where the chiefs would assemble, as well
for the investigation of crimes as for public business, giving decisions
after trial concerning capital offences, but leaving the punishment to
the nearest of kin, to be inflicted by him under the penalty of social
disgrace, but free from any control by them as to time, place, or
manner.[221] So also on the Gold Coast, where suits lay at the decision
of the caboceros or chiefs, the original conception of murder appears
clearly, in the practice for the murderer to get generally from the
relations of the deceased some abatement of the pecuniary penalty affixed
by law to his crime; they being the only persons the criminal had to
agree with, and free to take from him as little as they pleased, whilst
the king had no pretence to any share of the fine except what he might
get for his trouble in exacting it.[222] In the Central African kingdom
of Bornou, a convicted murderer was handed over to the discretional
revenge of the murdered man’s family.[223] In Samoa, again, the chief of
a village and the heads of families, forming as they did the judicial as
well as legislative body, might condemn a culprit to sit for hours naked
in the sun, to be hung by his head, to take five bites from a pungent
root, or to play at ball with a prickly sea-urchin, according to the
nature of his offence. But one punishment was especially remarkable, as
showing how the right of punishment originally belonging to the family
may survive in form long after it has in reality passed to a wider
political union. This was the punishment of binding a criminal hand and
foot and carrying him suspended from a prickly pole run through between
his hands and feet, to the family of the village against which he had
transgressed, and there depositing him before them, as if to signify that
he lay at their mercy.[224] And in the villages of Afghanistan, where an
assembly of the elders act as the judges of the people, a show is always
made of delivering up the criminal to the accuser and of giving the
latter the chance of retaliating, though it is perfectly understood that
he must comply with the wishes of the assembly. This instance, therefore,
illustrates the two distinct methods of legal punishment in process of
actual transition from one to the other.[225]

If then the original standard of punishment was just that amount of
severity which would suffice to prevent individuals from seeking
satisfaction by their private efforts and avenging their own wrongs,
it is intelligible that penal customs should be cruel in proportion to
their primitiveness. It is distinctly stated that in Samoa fines in food
and property gradually superseded more severe penalties. Yet, in the
face of the very varying penalties found in most different conditions of
culture, it is a subject on which it is difficult to lay down any rule.
Sometimes murder alone is a capital crime, sometimes theft, witchcraft,
and adultery as well; sometimes all or some of them are commutable by
fine. Nor does it seem that, wherever an offence is punishable by fine,
the penalty has been mitigated from one originally more severe. In some
cases the chief judges may have found their interest in assessing a more
humane, and to themselves more profitable, forfeit than that of life or
limb; but savages, living in the most primitive conditions, seem to have
been led by their natural reason alone to observe fitting proportions
between crime and retribution. For their punishments, in default
generally of imprisonment or banishment, are not as a rule gratuitously
cruel: though as occasional punishments among the Caffres are mentioned
the application of hot stones to the naked body, or exposure to the
torments of ants;[226] and slavery, so common a punishment in Africa,
far from being essentially cruel, is rather a sign of an amelioration
of manners, of a reasonable willingness to take the useful satisfaction
of a man’s labour in lieu of the useless one of his life. Severity of
the penal code would rather seem to be a concomitant of growth in
civilisation, of stronger and deeper moral feelings, of a sense of the
failure of milder means, than of a really primitive savagery. On the
whole continent of America no savage tribe ever approached the Aztecs in
cruelty of punishment, nor is it among people of a ruder type of culture
that we should ever look to find some form of death the penalty alike
for the lightest as for the gravest crimes, for slander no less than for
adultery, for intoxication as much as for homicide.[227]

It might naturally be inferred that, because the laws of savages are
unwritten and depend on usage alone for their preservation, therefore
they are entirely uncertain and arbitrary. This, however, is not often
the case. On few points are the statements of travellers less vague than
on the details of native penal customs; a fact which is only compatible
with their being both well known and regularly enforced. What the Abbé
Froyart says of the natives of Loango, may be said of all but the
lowest tribes: ‘There is no one ignorant of the cases which incur the
pain of death, and of those for which the offender becomes the slave
of the person offended.’[228] The laws of the Caffre tribes are said
to be a collection of precedents, of decisions of bygone chiefs and
councils, appealing solely to what has been customary in the past, never
to the abstract merits of the case. There appears, it is said, to be
no uncertainty whatever in their administration, the criminality of
different acts being measured exactly by a fixed number of cattle payable
in atonement. And the customs reported from Ashantee manifest a similar
sense of the value of fixed penalties. An Ashantee is at liberty to kill
his slave, but is punished if he kills his wife or child; only a chief
can sell his wife or put her to death for infidelity; whilst a great
man who kills his equal in rank is generally suffered to die by his own
hands. If a man brings a frivolous accusation against another, he must
give an entertainment to the family and friends of the accused; if he
breaks an Aggry bead in a scuffle, he must pay seven slaves to the owner.
A wife who betrays a secret forfeits her upper lip, an ear if she listens
to a private conversation of her husband.[229] Savage also as is the
kingdom of Dahomey, arbitrary power is so far limited, that no sentence
of death or slavery, adjudged by an assembly of chiefs, can be carried
out without confirmation from the throne; and such a sentence ‘must be
executed in the capital, and notice given of it by the public crier in
the market.’ It is no paradox to say, that human life, even in Dahomey,
enjoys more efficient legal protection at this day than it did in England
in times long subsequent to the signature of Magna Charta.

The forms of legal procedure manifest often no less regularity than the
laws themselves. In Congo the plaintiff opens his case on his knees
to the judge, who sits under a tree or in a great straw hut built on
purpose, holding a staff of authority in his hand. When he has heard the
plaintiff’s evidence he hears the defendant, then calls the witnesses,
and decides accordingly. The successful suitor pays a sum to the judge’s
box, and stretches himself at full length on the ground to testify
his gratitude.[230] In Loango, the king, acting as judge, has several
assessors to consult in difficult cases, and the suit begins by both
parties making a present to the king, who then proceeds to hear in turn
plaintiff, defendant, and witnesses. In default of witnesses the affair
is deferred, spies being sent to gather ampler information and ground for
judgment from the talk of the people. In the public trials of Ashantee
‘the accused is always heard fully, and is obliged either to commit or
exculpate himself on every point.’ On the Gold Coast a plaintiff would
sometimes defer his suit for thirty years, letting it devolve on his
heirs, if the judges, the caboceros, from interested motives, delayed to
grant him a trial and thus obliged him to wait, in hopes of finding less
impartial or else more amenable judges in the future.[231]

Several rules of savage jurisprudence betray curiously different notions
of equity from those of more civilised lands. The Abbé Froyart was
shocked that, on the complaint of the missionaries to the King of Loango
of nocturnal disturbances round their dwellings, the king should have
issued an ordinance making the disturbance of the missionaries’ repose a
capital crime. The reason the natives gave him for thus putting slight
offences on an equality with grave ones was, that, in proportion to
the ease of abstinence from anything forbidden, or of the performance
of anything commanded was the inexcusableness of disobedience and the
deserved severity of punishment. Again, impartiality with regard to rank
or wealth, which is now regarded in England as a self-evident principle
of justice, as a primary instinct of equity, is by no means so regarded
by savages; for not only is murder often atoned for according to the
rank of the murderer, as on the Gold Coast or in old Anglo-Saxon law,
on the basis, apparently, of the value to the individual of his loss in
death, but such difference of rank sometimes enters into the estimate of
the due punishment for robbery. Thus the Guinea Coast negroes thought
it reasonable to punish rich persons guilty of robbery more severely
than the poor, because, they said, the rich were not urged to it by
necessity, and could better spare the money-fines laid on them. Caffre
law distinguishes broadly and clearly between injuries to a man’s person
and injuries to his property, accounting the former as offences against
the chief to whom he belongs, and making such chief sole recipient of all
fines, allowing only personal redress where a man’s property has been
damaged. Thus Caffre law divides itself into lines bearing some analogy
to those of our criminal and civil law: such offences as treason, murder,
assault, and witchcraft entering into the criminal code, and constituting
injuries to the actual sufferer’s chief; whilst adultery, slander, and
other forms of theft, enter as it were into the civil law, as injuries
for which there are direct personal remedies.[232]

The almost universal test among savages of guilt or innocence, where
there is a want or conflict of evidence, is the ordeal. At first sight
it would appear that such a practice presupposes a belief in a personal
supernatural deity—that it is, in fact, as it was in the middle ages,
a judgment of God, an appeal to His decision. If so, a theistic belief
would be of wide extent, for the ordeal is common to very low strata of
culture; but, in consideration of the savage belief in the personality
and consciousness of natural objects or in spirits animating them, it
would seem best to regard the ordeal simply as a direct appeal to the
decision of such objects or spirits themselves, or through such objects
to the decision of dead ancestors, a means for the discovery of truth
that would naturally suggest itself to the shamanic class. For it is
at the peril of his life that a shaman, or priest, asserts a title to
superior power and wisdom; and as his skill is tested in every need or
peril that occurs, he is naturally as often called upon to detect hidden
guilt as to bring rain from the clouds, or drive sickness from the body.
Driven, therefore, to his inventive resources by the demands made upon
him, he thinks out a test which he may really consider just, or which,
by proving fatal to the suspected, may place alike his ingenuity and
the verdict beyond the reach of challenge. Such ordeals not only often
elicit true confessions of guilt by the very terror they inspire, so
that, according to Merolla, it sufficed for the Congo wizards to issue
proclamations for a restitution of stolen property under the threat of
otherwise resorting to their arts of detection, but they are valuable
in themselves to the shamanic class from being easily adapted to the
destruction of an enemy and offering a ready channel for the influx of
wealth. A comparison of some of these tests, which decide guilt not by an
appeal to the fear of falsehood, as an oath does, but by what is really
an appeal to the verdict of chance, will display so strong a family
resemblance, together with so many local peculiarities, as to make the
origin suggested appear not improbable.

Bosman mentions the following ordeals as customary on the Gold Coast in
offences of a trivial character:

    1. Stroking a red-hot copper arm-ring over the tongue of the
    suspected person.

    2. Squirting a vegetable juice into his eye.

    3. Drawing a greased fowl’s feather through his tongue.

    4. Making him draw cocks’ quills from a clod of earth.

Innocence was staked on the innocuousness of the two former proceedings,
on the facility of the execution of the two latter. For great crimes the
water ordeal was employed, a certain river being endowed with the quality
of wafting innocent persons across it, how little soever they could swim,
and of only drowning the guilty.[233]

Livingstone mentions the anxiety of negro women, suspected by their
husbands of having bewitched them, to drink a poisonous infusion prepared
by the shaman, and to submit their lives to the effect of this drink
on their bodies; a judicial method strikingly similar to the test of
bitter waters ordained in the Book of Numbers to decide the guilt of
Jewish wives whom their husbands had reason to suspect of infidelity. The
Barotse tribe, in Africa, who judge of the guilt of an accused person by
the effect of medicine poured down the throat of a dog or cock, manifest
more humanity in their system of detection.[234]

But perhaps the best collection of African ordeals is that given in the
voyage of the Capuchin Merolla to Congo in 1682. In case of treason a
shaman would present a compound of vegetable juices, serpents’ flesh,
and such things to the delinquent, who would die if he were guilty, but
not otherwise; it being of course open to the administrator to omit at
will the poisonous ingredients. Innocence was further proved, if a man
suffered nothing from a red-hot iron passed over his leg, if he felt
no bad effects from chewing the root of the banana, from eating the
poisoned fruit of a certain palm, from drinking water in which a torch
of bitumen or a red-hot iron had been quenched, or from drawing a stone
out of boiling water. The crime of theft was proved by the ignition or
the non-ignition of a long thread held at either end by the shaman and
the accused, on the application of a red-hot iron to the middle. Among
the Bongo tribe a murder is often traced to its source, by making plastic
representations so closely resembling the victim, that at a feast given
with dances and songs the criminal will generally manifest a desire to
leave the company.[235]

So great in general is the dread of such ordeals, that they often
actually serve as the most potent instruments for the discovery of
crimes. In the kingdom of Loango was kept a fetich in a large basket
before which all cases of theft and murder were tried; and when any great
man died, a whole town would be compelled to offer themselves for trial
for his murder by kissing and embracing the image, in the fear of falling
down dead if they fancied themselves guilty. In the space of one year
Andrew Battel witnessed the death of many natives in this way.

In the Tongan Islands the king would call the people together, and,
after washing his hands in a wooden bowl, command everyone to touch it.
From a firm belief that touching the bowl, in case of guilt, would cause
instantaneous death, refusal to touch it amounted to conviction.[236]

Among the Fijians, distinguished in so many points from other savages
by originality of conception, the ordeal of the scarf was the one of
greatest dread, extorting confession, it is said, as effectually as a
threat of the rack might have done. The chief or judge, having called for
a scarf, would proceed, if the culprit did not confess at the sight of
it, to wave it above his head, till he had caught the man’s soul, bereft
of which the culprit would be sure ultimately to pine away and die.[237]

Among the ordeals of the Sandwich Islanders was one called the
‘shaking-water.’ The accused persons, sitting round a calabash full
of water, were required in turns to hold their hands above it, that
the priest, by watching the water, might detect, when it trembled, the
presence of guilt. On the Society Islands the ordeal only differed
slightly, the priest reading in the water the reflected image of the
thief, after prayer to the gods to cause his spirit to be present. The
mere report that such a measure had been resorted to often led to timely
restitutions of stolen goods.[238]

In Sardinia there is, or was, a well, the waters of which were supposed
to blind a person suspected of robbery or lying, if he were guilty;
otherwise to strengthen and improve his sight.[239]

The above instances, remarkable for their practical efficiency no less
than for their puerile ingenuity, suffice to illustrate the nature of
savage judicial ordeals and the extreme variety displayed in their
invention. The identity of many ordeals among different people, such
as that by fire or water, is probably due to the readiness with which
such tests would suggest themselves to the imagination. ‘He who, holding
fire in his hand,’ said the Indian law, ‘is not burnt, or who, diving
under water, is not soon forced up by it, must be held veracious in his
testimony upon oath;’ and the same was the idea in China and Africa as
well as in Europe. That these ordeals, like others, were originated by
the class of shamans, and were traditionally preserved by them as one of
the sources of their power, derives probability from their close analogy
to the judicial ordeals invented and administered by the priests of early
Europe. The trial by the hallowed morsel, which decided guilt by the
effects of swallowing a piece of hallowed bread or cheese; the trial by
the cross, when both accuser and accused were placed under a cross with
their arms extended, and the wrong adjudged to him who first let his
hands fall; or the trial by the two dice, when innocence was proved if
the first dice taken at hazard bore the sign of the cross—though they
may have been metamorphosed heathen ordeals, seem rather to have been of
pure Christian invention; nor are they distinguished in any point above
corresponding practices on the coast of Guinea, except in this, that they
were called the judgments of God, and implied some belief in a personal
spirit, who could and would control the verdict of chance to prove guilt
or innocence.[240]

As in Europe after the fifteenth century the oath of canonical purgation
gradually displaced the older system of ordeals, so it would seem that
in savage life too the judicial oath succeeds in order of time the
judicial ordeal. An oath implies a prayer, an invocation of punishment
in case of perjury; and a man’s conscience is evidently more directly
appealed to where his guilt is tested to some extent by his own
confession, than where it is decided by something quite external to
himself.

The witness in a modern English law court, invoking upon himself divine
wrath if he swear falsely by the book he kisses, preserves with curious
exactitude the judicial oath of savage times and lands. Our English
judicial oath, in use though no longer compulsory, has withstood all
attacks upon it, for the insuperable practical reason that the majority
of men are more afraid of swearing falsely than of speaking falsely, and
that the fewer scruples a man feels about lying, the more he is likely to
feel about perjury. The notion that one is morally worse than the other
is probably due to the imaginary terrors which, associated time out of
mind with perjury, have given it a legal existence apart, and made it, so
to speak, a kind of lying-extraordinary, a crime outside the jurisdiction
of humanity.

In Samoa, as at Westminster, physical contact with a thing adds vast
weight to the value of a man’s evidence. Turner relates how in turn each
person suspected of a theft was obliged before the chiefs to touch a
sacred drinking-cup, made of cocoa-nut, and to invoke destruction upon
himself if he were the thief. The formula ran: ‘With my hand on this
cup, may the god look upon me and send swift destruction if I took the
thing which has been stolen.’ ‘Before this ordeal the truth was rarely
concealed,’ it being firmly believed that death would ensue, were the cup
touched and a lie told. Or the suspected would first place a handful of
grass on the stone or other representative of the village god, and laying
his hands on it, say, ‘In the presence of our chiefs now assembled, I
lay my hand on the stone; if I stole the thing, may I speedily die,’
the grass being a symbolical curse of the destruction he invoked on all
his family, of the _grass_ that might grow over their dwellings. The
older ordeal of fixing the guilt upon a person to whom the face of a
spun cocoa-nut pointed when it rested, shows how ordeals may survive in
use after the attainment of judicial oaths and contemporaneously with
them.[241]

To understand the binding force of oaths among savages it is necessary
to observe how closely connected they are with savage ideas of fetichism
and their belief in witchcraft as a really active natural force. The
hair or food of a man, which a savage burns to rid himself of an enemy,
is no mere symbol of that enemy so much as in some sense that enemy
himself. The physical act of touching the thing invoked has reference to
feelings of casual connection between things, as in Samoa, where a man,
to attest his veracity, would touch his eyes, to indicate a wish that
blindness might strike him if he lied, or would dig a hole in the ground,
to indicate a wish that he might be buried in the event of falsehood.
In Kamschatka, if a thief remained undetected, the elders would summon
all the ostrog together, young and old, and, forming a circle round the
fire, cause certain incantations to be employed. After the incantations
the sinews of the back and feet of a wild sheep were thrown into the fire
with magical words, and the wish expressed that the hands and feet of the
culprit might grow crooked; there being apparently a connection assumed
between the action of the fire on the animal’s sinews and on the limbs
of the man. And in Sweden there are still cunning men who can deprive a
real thief of his eye, by cutting a human figure on the bark of a tree
and driving nails and arrows into the representative feature. But perhaps
the best illustration of this feeling is the practice of the Ostiaks,
who offer their wives, if they suspect them of infidelity, a handful
of bear’s hairs, believing that, if they touch them and are guilty,
they will be bitten by a bear within the space of three days. It would
seem that oaths appeal to the same idea of vicarious or representative
influence, a real but invisible connection being imagined between the
actual thing touched and the calamity invoked in touching it.

Instances from the oaths of other tribes will manifest the operation of
the same feeling as that which makes grass a symbol of utter ruin in
Samoa, or some bear’s hairs of a bear’s bite among the Ostiaks.

North Asiatic tribes have in use three kinds of oaths, the first and
least solemn one being for the accused to face the sun with a knife,
pretending to fight against it, and to cry aloud, ‘If I am guilty,
may the sun cause sickness to rage in my body like this knife!’ The
second form of oath is to cry aloud from the tops of certain mountains,
invoking death, loss of children and cattle, or bad luck in hunting,
in the case of guilt being real. But the most solemn oath of all is to
exclaim, in drinking some of the blood of a dog, killed expressly by
the elders and burnt or thrown away, ‘If I die, may I perish, decay,
or burn away like this dog.’[242] Very similar is the oath in Sumatra,
where, a beast having been slain, the swearer says, ‘If I break my
oath, may I be slaughtered as this beast, and swallowed as this heart
I now consume.’[243] The most solemn oath of the Bedouins, that of the
cross-lines, is also characterised by the same belief which appears in
the case of the slain beast affecting with sympathetic decay anyone
guilty of perjury. If a Bedouin cannot convict a man he suspects of theft
it is usual for him to take the suspected before a sheikh or kady, and
there to call upon him to swear any oath he may demand. If the defendant
agrees, he is led to a certain distance from the camp, ‘because the
magical nature of the oath might prove pernicious to the general body
of Arabs were it to take place in their vicinity.’ Then the plaintiff
draws with his sekin, or crooked knife, a large circle in the sand with
many cross-lines inside it, places his right foot inside it, causes the
defendant to do the same, and makes him say after himself, ‘By God,
and in God, and through God, I swear I did not take the thing, nor is
it in my possession.’ To make the oath still more solemn, the accused
often puts also in the circle an ant and a bit of camel’s skin, the one
expressive of a hope that he may never be destitute of camel’s milk,
the other of a hope that he may never lack the winter substance of an
ant.[244]

Firm, however, as is the savage belief that the consequences of perjury
are death or disease, a belief which shows itself not unfrequently in
actually inferring the fact of perjury from the fact of death, escape
from the obligation of an oath is not unknown among savages. On the
Guinea Coast recourse was had to the common expedient of priestly
absolution, so that when a man took a draught-oath, imprecating death
on himself if he failed in his promise, the priests were sometimes
compelled to take an oath too, to the effect that they would not employ
their absolving powers to release him. In Abyssinia a simpler process
seems to be in vogue; for the king, on one occasion having sworn by a
cross, thus addressed his servants: ‘You see the oath I have taken; I
scrape it clean away from my tongue that made it.’ Thereupon he scraped
his tongue and spat away his oath, thus validly releasing himself from
it.[245]

It does not appear that savages refine on their motives for punishment,
the sum of their political philosophy in this respect being rather to
inflict penalties that accord with their ideas of retribution deserved
for each case or crime, than to deter other criminals by warning
examples. The statement that New Zealanders beat thieves to death, and
then hung them on a cross on the top of a hill, as a warning example,
conflicts with another account which says that thieves were punished
by banishment.[246] But, subject to the influence of collateral
circumstances, savage penal laws appear to be as fixed, regular,
and well-known, as inflexibly bound by precedent, as often improved
by the intelligence of individual chiefs, as penal laws are in more
advanced societies. The case of an Ashantee king, who, limiting the
number of lives to be sacrificed at his mother’s funeral, resisted all
importunities and appeals to precedent for a greater number, is not
without parallel in reforms of law. Thus we may read of one Caffre chief
who abolished in his tribe the fine payable for the crime of approaching
a chief’s krall with the head covered by a blanket; whilst another chief
made the homicide of a man taken in adultery a capital offence, thus
transferring the punishment for the crime from the individual to the
tribe.[247]

In legal customs analogous to those of the savage or rather
semi-civilized world, the legal institutions of civilized countries,
their methods of procedure, of extorting truth, of punishing crimes, seem
to have their root and explanation. For this reason the same interest
attaches to the legal institutions of modern savages as attaches to the
laws of the ancient Germanic tribes or to the ordinances of Menu, the
interest, that is, of descent or relationship. The oath, for instance,
of our law courts presupposes in the past, if not in the present,
precisely the same state of thought as the oath customary in Samoa; and
the same virtue inherent in touching and kissing the Bible in England,
or the cross in Russia, leads the Tunguse Lapp to touch and then kiss
the cannon, gun, or sword, by which he swears allegiance to the Russian
crown.[248] The Highlander of olden time, kissing his dirk, to invoke
death by it if he lied, is a similar instance of the survival of the
primitive conception, that physical contact with a thing creates a
spiritual dependence upon it. The ordeal, so lately the judicial test of
witchcraft, still retains a foothold of faith among our country people,
as is proved by the fact that not longer ago than 1863 an octogenarian
died in consequence of having been ‘swum’ as a wizard at Little
Hedingham, in Essex. And, lastly, the English law that no person could
inherit an estate from anyone convicted of treason, or from a suicide,
shows how naturally the savage law of collective responsibility, in
reality so unjust, may survive into times of civilisation, whilst the
ignominy still attached to the blood-relations of a criminal shows with
what difficulty the feeling is eradicated.




VII.

_EARLY WEDDING CUSTOMS._


Amid the wonderful uniformity which pervades the thoughts and customs of
the world some strange reversals here and there occur, as where white
is the colour significative of grief, or where to turn one’s back on
a person is a sign of reverence. But perhaps few such reversals are
more curious than the custom of the Garos, in India, who consider any
infringement of the rule that all proposals of marriage must come from
the female side as an insult to the _mahári_ to which the lady belongs,
only to be atoned for by liberal donations of beer and pigs from the
man’s _mahári_ to that of the ‘proposee.’ More curious, however, than
even this is their marriage ceremony; at which, after the bride has been
bathed in the nearest stream, the wedding party proceed to the house of
the bridegroom, ‘_who pretends to be unwilling and runs away, but is
caught_ and subjected to a similar ablution, and _then taken, in spite of
the resistance and counterfeited grief and lamentations of his parents,
to the bride’s house_.’[249]

An exactly analogous custom as regards the bride’s behaviour at her
wedding is sufficiently well known; and if it has been correctly
interpreted as the survival, in form and symbol, of a system of capturing
wives from a neighbouring tribe, there must have been a time when among
the Garos a husband could only have been obtained in a similar way. The
improbability of this suggests the possibility of some other explanation
underlying the reluctance, feigned or real, with which it is common in
savage life for a girl to enter upon the paths of matrimony, and for the
show of resistance with which her friends oppose her departure with her
husband.

In many instances this peculiar feature of primitive life appears as
simply the outcome of feelings and affections which are the same,
howsoever different in expression, in savage as in civilised lands. The
conviction that there is an utter absence of anything like love between
children and their parents, or between men and women, in the ruder social
communities, is so strong and has been so often dwelt upon, that in
speculations on this subject there is a tendency and danger of altogether
overlooking the influence of natural affection in the formation of
customs. It is needful, therefore, to preface the present chapter with a
brief reference to the express statements of missionaries and travellers;
for if it can be shown that there is such a thing as affection between
parents and children, the inference is fair that neither would parents
part with their children nor children leave their parents without mutual
regret, when the children are married.

Of the Fijians, so famous for their cannibalism and their parenticide,
it is declared to be ‘truly touching to see how parents are attached to
their children and children to their parents.’[250] Among the Tongans,
who would sacrifice their children cruelly for the recovery of the sick,
children were ‘taken the utmost care of.’[251] The New Zealanders were
not guiltless of infanticide, yet ‘some of them, and especially the
fathers, seemed fond of their children.’[252] The Papuans of New Guinea
manifested ‘respect for the aged, love for their children, and fidelity
to their wives.’[253] In Africa, Mungo Park says of the Mandingoes: ‘The
maternal affection is everywhere conspicuous among them, and creates
a corresponding return of tenderness in the child.’[254] Among the
Eastern Ethiopians were women who lived a wild life in the woods; yet
the testimony is the same: ‘However barbarous these people be by nature,
they yet are not devoid of feeling for their children; these they rear
with nicest care, and for their provision strive to amass what property
they can.’[255] Yoruba ‘children are much beloved by both parents.’[256]
Love for their children unites the greater number of the Bushmen for
their whole lives.[257] In North America the Thlinkeet Indians ‘treat
their wives and children with much affection and kindness.’[258] Among
the Greenlanders, says Cranz, ‘the bonds of filial and parental love
seem stronger than amongst any other nations.’ Their fondness for
their children is great; parents seldom let them out of their sight,
and mothers often throw themselves in the water to save a child from
drowning. In return ingratitude towards their aged parents is ‘scarcely
ever exemplified among them.’[259] Of the natives of Australia, Sir G.
Grey says that they ‘are always ardently attached to their children,’ and
similar testimony has been borne to the parental affection even of the
Tasmanians.[260]

But, lest it should be thought that these evidences are drawn from
the higher savagery, let appeal be made to the case of savages who
confessedly belong to the lowest known types of mankind, the Andaman
Islanders, the Veddahs, and the Fuejians.

In reference to the first it is said that ‘the parents are fond of their
children, and the affection is reciprocal.’[261] The Veddahs are not only
‘kind and constant to their wives,’ but ‘fond of their children;’[262]
whilst Mr. Parker Snow saw among the Fuejians ‘many instances of warm
love and affection for their children;’[263] so that if in the sequel
we find daughters at their marriage displaying a real or simulated
repugnance to their fate, the fact need not appear to us of such extreme
mystery as it otherwise might, nor as one in which natural affection can
play no part.

A recent Italian writer on the primitive domestic state says that ‘la
passione viva d’amore che suole attribuirsi ai popoli primitivi ... é
una pura illusione.’[264] But happily for the primitive populations,
their lot is far from being really thus unbrightened by love, though
with them, as with the rest of the world, it is a frequent cause of wars
and quarrels, interfering especially with the savage custom of infant
betrothal, and leading to elopements in defeat of parental contracts.
It is peculiar to neither sex. A Tahitian girl, love-stricken, but not
encouraged, led her friends, by her threats of suicide, to persuade the
object of her affections to make her his wife.[265] The Tongans had a
pretty legend of a young chief, who, having fallen in love with a maiden
already betrothed to a superior, saved her, when she was condemned to be
killed with the other relations of a rebel, by hiding her in a cavern he
had found, whence they finally effected their joint escape to Fiji.[266]
New Zealand mythology abounds in love-tales. There is the tale of Hinemoa
and Tutanekai, which begins with stolen glances, and ends in a nocturnal
swim on the part of Hinemoa to the island, whither the music of her
lover guided her. There is the tale also of Takaranji and Raumahora—of
Takaranji, who, though besieging her father in his fortress, consented
to present both of them with water in their distress. ‘And Takaranji
gazed eagerly at the young girl, and she too looked eagerly at Takaranji
... and as the warriors of the army of Takaranji looked on, lo, he had
climbed up and was sitting at the young maiden’s side; and they said
among themselves, “O comrades, our lord Takaranji loves war, but one
would think he likes Raumahora almost as well.’”[267]

Nor would it be fair to argue, because in most savage tribes the hard
work of life devolves upon the women, that therefore there is an
entire absence of affection in savage households, whether polygamous
or otherwise, during their continuance. It is scarcely a hundred years
ago that in Caithness ‘the hard work was chiefly done, and the burdens
borne, by the women; and if a cottier lost a horse, it was not unusual
for him to marry a wife as the cheapest substitute.’[268] The Fuejians,
whose condition Captain Weddell felt compelled to describe as that of
the lowest of mankind, and whose women did all the work, gathering the
shellfish, managing the canoes, and building the wigwams, are said to
have shown ‘a good deal of affection for their wives,’ and care for their
offspring.[269] Among the Fijians, who made their women carry all the
heavy loads and do all the field-work, and who remonstrated with the
Tongans for their more humane treatment of them, not only have widows
been known to kill themselves if their relatives refused to do the duty
which custom laid upon them—namely, of killing them at their husbands’
burial—but ‘even widowers, in the depth of their grief, have frequently
terminated their existence when deprived of a dearly beloved wife.’[270]
In India, Abor husbands treated their wives with a consideration that
appeared ‘singular in so rude a race.’[271] In America the lot of a
woman was generally one of hardship; yet, says Schoolcraft, ‘the gentler
affections have a much more extensive and powerful exercise among the
Indians than is generally believed.’[272] Carib husbands are said to
have had much love for their wives, like as it was to a straw fire,
except with respect to the first wife they married.[273] Of the Thlinkeet
Indians, characterised by great cruelty to prisoners and other marks of
much barbarity, it is said that ‘there are few savage nations in which
the women have greater influence or command greater respect.’[274] ‘It
is one of the fine traits,’ says Schweinfurth of the cannibal Niam-Niam,
‘that they display an affection for their wives which is unparalleled
among natives of so low a grade ... a husband will spare no sacrifice to
redeem an imprisoned wife.’[275] Though against this evidence there is
much of a darker character to be set, the above instances will suffice
to demonstrate the real existence, the real operation, among some of
the rudest representatives of our species, of ordinary feelings of love
and affection. As in geology so in ethnology it holds true, that the
action of known existing causes is sufficient to account for much that is
obscure in the past and for all that is strange in the present.

Having so far cleared the ground as to be justified in postulating the
existence of ordinary feelings of affection between parents and children,
and between men and women, as _veræ causæ_, or real forces, even in
the lowest known savage life, let us pass to the inference that at no
time are those feelings more likely to be called into play than at a
time when the daughter of a family is about to leave her parents, and
perhaps her clan, to live henceforth with a man whom she may not even
know, or knows only to dislike.[276] In China, where on the wedding-day
the bride is locked up in a sedan-chair, and the key and chair consigned
to the bridegroom, who may not see her before that day, a traveller
once witnessed a separation between the bride and her family. ‘All the
family appeared much affected, particularly the women, who sobbed aloud;
the father shed tears, and the daughter _was with difficulty torn from
the embraces of her parents_ and placed in the sedan-chair.’[277] It
seems more likely in this case that the reluctance and resistance were
real, than that they were merely the symbols, conventionally observed,
of a system of wife-capture. But in many instances it is impossible
to distinguish a real from a feigned grief. A witness of the marriage
ceremonies among the Tartars, who describes the bride and her girl
friends as raising piteous lamentations beforehand, says that the poor
girl either was or appeared to be a most unwilling victim.[278]

Jenkinson, one of the earliest English travellers in Russia, noticed the
same custom there, but thought it affectation. On the day of marriage
the bride would in nowise consent to leave the house to go to church,
but would resist, strive, and weep, only suffering herself to be led
there by force, with her face covered, to hide her simulated grief, and
making a great noise, as though she were sobbing and weeping, all the way
to the scene of her wedding.[279] But a modern French writer ascribes
some reality to the custom, mentioning that traditional songs are still
sung in which the young bride addresses words of regret and sorrow to
her parents in the midst of her preparations for the nuptial feast.[280]
Before this last ceremony she is accustomed to go the round of her
village, with a woman who calls for the sympathy of her hearers for the
young girl whose carefree existence is about to be exchanged for the
troubles and anxieties of married life.[281]

Yet, if in China and Russia, much more among uncivilized tribes, would
the life in prospect for a bride, unless perchance her wishes coincided
with her parents’ interest, cause her to leave the home of her youth with
something more than those ‘light regrets’ which cause tears to commingle
with smiles even in England. Greenland girls, says Cranz, do nothing
till they are fourteen but sing, dance, and romp about; but a life of
slavery is in store for them as soon as they are fit for it; ‘while
they remain with their parents they are well off, but from twenty years
of age till death their life is one series of anxieties, wretchedness,
and toil.’[282] Marriage is a fate they would not seek, but cannot
avoid. Should they, however, not oppose it, they must enter upon it with
reluctance, not with alacrity.

It is worth noticing the reason Cranz gives for this reluctance, because,
in so far as modern savages may be taken to represent primitive life,
it proves the existence, in that condition, of notions, howsoever they
may have arisen, which are exactly analogous to those we connote by
the word ‘modesty.’ When the two old women, commissioned to negotiate
with a girl’s parents on behalf of a young man, first give a hint of
their purpose by praise of him and of his family, ‘the damsel directly
falls into the greatest apparent consternation and runs out of doors,
tearing her bunch of hair; for _single women always affect the utmost
bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should
lose their reputation for modesty_, though their destined husbands
be previously well assured of their acquiescence.’[283] Not, indeed,
that the reluctance is always feigned, for sometimes the name of her
proposed husband causes her to swoon, to elope to a desert place, or to
effectually free herself from further addresses, by cutting off her hair
in token of grief. Should, however, her parents consent to the match,
the usual course is for the old women to go in search of her, ‘and _drag
her forcibly into the suitor’s house_, where she sits for several days
quite disconsolate, with dishevelled hair, and refuses nourishment. When
friendly exhortations are unavailing she is compelled by force, and even
blows, to receive her husband.’

In Greenland, then, as in China, the form of capture resolves itself
either into a most unequivocal reluctance to leave home or to a
reluctance so to do feigned from feelings of bashfulness. Nor about this
bashfulness does it appear that Cranz was in error, for Egede agrees
substantially with him, telling how the bridegroom, when he has obtained
her parents’ and relations’ consent, sends some old women _to carry away
the bride by force_; ‘for though she ever so much approves of the match,
yet _out of modesty she must make as if it went against the grain, and
as if she were much ruffled at it; else she will be blamed and get an
ill name_.’ When brought to his hut, therefore, she sits in a corner
with dishevelled hair, ‘covering her face, being bashful and ashamed.’
For ‘_a new-married woman is ashamed of having changed her condition
for a married state_;’[284] and this feeling occurs again plainly in
South-Eastern Russia, where, on the eve of marriage, the bride goes round
the village, throwing herself on her knees before the head of each house
and _begging his pardon_.[285]

This last statement of Egede is most important, since it proves the
existence of feelings which seem really to contain the keynote of the
symbol of capture, however slight the reasons for suspecting their
presence in particular cases. The sentiment prevalent in Greenland has
also been noticed among the Tartars, for an authentic witness writes,
‘that if one tells a Tartar girl that it is said she is about to be
married, she runs immediately out of the room and will never speak to a
stranger on that subject.’[286] It has been justly observed that it is
unlikely feminine delicacy should diminish with civilization. But the
principle _impuris omnia impura_ will meet the difficulty. The Aleutian
Islander, says a Russian writer, ‘knows nothing of what civilized nations
call modesty. He has his own ideas of what is modest and proper, while
we should consider them foolish.’[287] For, addicted though he is to the
worst vices of the Northern nations, he will yet blush to address his
wife or ask her for anything in the presence of strangers, and will be
bashful if he be caught doing anything unusual, as, for instance, buying
or selling directly for himself without the agency of an intermediary.

Characteristic as it is of savages to express all the feelings they share
with us with an energy intensified a hundredfold, as is shown abundantly
in our different manner of grieving for the dead, it is not surprising
if we find their feelings of the kind in question display themselves
in extraordinary and often ludicrous rules of social intercourse. The
same rule, that an Aleutian husband and wife might not be seen speaking
together, led Kolbe to think that no such thing as affection existed
among the Hottentots. But this was simply for the same reason that
prohibited the Hottentot wife from ever setting foot in her husband’s
apartment in the hut, or the latter from ever entering hers except by
stealth.[288] Among the Yorubas a woman betrothed by her parents is so
far a wife that prematrimonial unfaithfulness is accounted adultery;
‘yet conventional modesty forbids her to speak to her husband, or even
to see him, if it can be avoided.’[289] A minority of the Afghan tribes
are careful to keep up a similar reserve between the time of betrothal
and marriage, so that, as among the warlike Eusofyzes, no man can see
his wife till the completion of the marriage ceremony.[290] Among the
Mongols not only may bride and bridegroom not see each other within
the same period, but the bride is not allowed to see his parents.[291]
In Russia it was once a disgrace for a young man to propose directly
to a lady, and between the day of settling the dowry with her parents
and the day of marriage he was strictly forbidden the house of his
betrothed.[292] But many tribes continue such reserve even after
marriage. A Circassian bridegroom must not see his wife or live with
her without the greatest mystery: ‘this reserve continues during life.
A Circassian will sometimes permit a stranger to see his wife, but he
must not accompany him.’[293] In parts of Fiji which are still unmodified
by Christian teaching it is ‘quite contrary to ideas of delicacy that a
man ever remains under the same roof with his wife or wives at night.’
If they wish to meet, they must appoint a secret rendezvous.[294] And a
similar law of social decorum prevails, or prevailed, among the Spartans,
Lycians, Turcomans, and some tribes of America,[295] though the processes
of thought which led to such customs lie lost, perhaps hopelessly, behind
the darkness of a thousand ages.

The custom, again, of deserting a husband and returning home for a longer
or shorter period, as found among the Votyaks of Russia and the Mezeyne
Arabs, may possibly be traced to feelings of the same description, for we
read that among the Hos, ‘after remaining with her husband for three days
only, it is _the correct thing for the wife to run away_ from him and
tell all her friends that she loves him not, and will see him no more;’
it is also _correct_ for the husband to manifest great anxiety for his
loss, and diligently to seek his wife, and ‘when he finds her _he carries
her off by main force_.’[296] This second show of resistance, customary
also among the Votyaks, seems difficult to explain as a traditional
symbol of a system of capture.

It is possible that in similar primitive ideas originated the curious
restrictions on the intercourse between a man and his mother-in-law,
or between a woman and her father-in-law. On the theory that these are
remnants of the real anger shown by parents when capture was real, it
is not easy to account for the fact that in Fiji the restriction as
to eating or speaking together existed not only between parents and
children-in-law, or brothers and sisters-in-law, but between brothers
and sisters of the same family, and also between first cousins.[297] In
Suffolk ‘it is (or was) very remarkable that neither father nor mother
of bride or bridegroom come with them to church’ at the weddings of
agricultural labourers; and it is said that at Russian weddings also the
parents are forbidden to be present, though the priest sometimes waives
the prohibition in favour of persons of the higher classes.[298]

There is, therefore, no _à priori_ inconceivability against the theory
that kicking and screaming at weddings, where they do not arise from
genuine reluctance, are really a tribute to conventional propriety; that,
at the marriages of the uncivilized, just as at their burials, shrieks
and violence take the place of tears, and a vigorous struggle argues
a modest deportment. The evidence of quite independent eye-witnesses
confirms this interpretation. The Thlinkeet Indian, on his wedding-day,
goes to the bride’s house and sits with his back to her door. All her
relations then ‘raise a song, to allure the coy bride out of the corner
where she has been sitting;’ after which she goes to sit by her husband’s
side; but ‘_all this time she must keep her head bowed down_,’ nor is she
allowed to take part in the festivities of the day.[299]

Atkinson, who was witness of the first visit of a Kirghiz bridegroom
to his wife, declares that the latter could only be persuaded by the
pressure of her female relations to see him at all; ‘after a display
of much coyness she consented, and was led by her friends to his
dwelling.’[300]

In Kamschatka the original etiquette was for women to cover their faces
with some kind of veil when they went out, and if they met any man on the
road whom they could not avoid, to stand with their backs to him until
he had passed. They would also, if a stranger entered their huts, turn
their face to the wall or else hide behind a curtain of nettles.[301]
Kamschatka, however, being the last place where one would have looked
for such prudery, it is possible that the feelings of the Greenlanders
were also operative in the marriage customs of the Kamschadals. These
were rather extraordinary, the form of capture being anything but a mere
symbol for an aspirant to matrimony. Such an one, having looked for a
bride in some neighbouring village (seldom in his own), would offer his
services to the parent for a fixed term, and after some time would ask
for leave to seize the daughter for his bride. This obtained, he would
seek to find her alone or ill-attended, the marriage being complete
on his tearing from her some of the coats, fish-nets, and straps with
which from the day of proposal she was constantly enveloped. This was
never an easy matter, for she was never left alone a single instant,
her mother and a number of old women accompanying her everywhere,
sleeping with her, and never losing her out of sight upon any pretext
whatever. Any attempt to execute his task entailed upon the suitor
such kicking, hair-pulling, and face-scratching, at the hands of this
female body-guard, that sometimes a year or more would elapse before
he was entitled to call himself a husband; nay, there is record of one
pertinacious bachelor who found himself at the end of seven years, in
consequence of such treatment, not a husband, but a cripple. If he were
disheartened by repeated failures he incurred great disgrace and lost
all claim to the alliance; and if the bride continued obdurate from real
dislike, he was ultimately expelled from the village.[302] But, however
well-disposed towards him she might be, she had always to simulate
refusal as a point of honour, and proof was always required ‘that she was
taken by surprise and made fruitless efforts to defend herself.’[303]

The Bushmen, again, generally betroth their daughters as children without
consulting them; but should a girl grow up unbetrothed her consent to be
married is as necessary as that of her parents to her lover’s suit, ‘and
on this occasion his attentions are received with an affectation of great
alarm and disinclination on her part.’[304]

If, then, Greenlanders, Kamschadals, Thlinkeet Indians, and even Bushmen,
carry their notions of propriety to the extent asserted by eye-witnesses,
it is scarcely surprising to find very similar rules of etiquette among
the more advanced Zulus of Africa or Bedouins of Arabia in their wedding
ceremonials; especially when we are told that in some parts Bedouin
women sit down and turn their backs to any man they cannot avoid on the
road, and refuse to take anything from the hands of a stranger.[305]
‘The principal idea of a Kaffir wedding seems to be to show the great
unwillingness of the girl to be transformed into a wife,’ for which
reason a Zulu wife simulates several attempts to escape.[306] Both the
Arabs of Sinai and the Aenezes enact the form of capture to the greatest
perfection; among the latter ‘the bashful girl’ runs from the tent of
one friend to another till she is caught at last, whilst among the
former she acquires permanent repute in proportion to her struggles of
resistance. And if a Sinai Arab marries a bride belonging to a distant
tribe, she is placed on a camel and led to her husband’s camp escorted by
women: during which procession ‘_decency obliges her to cry and sob most
bitterly_.’[307] Also, among the modern Egyptians, ‘if the bridegroom
is young, one of his friends has to _carry him_ part of the way to the
hareem, to _show his bashfulness_.’[308] So that where the carrying of
the bride or bridegroom is not merely due to the same feelings that
caused our own ancestors to add solemnity to their weddings by such
singular sights as blue postilions, it appears in many cases to be
nothing more than a prudish way of saying, that matrimony is and ought to
be an estate forced upon reluctant victims, not entered upon by voluntary
agents. The early Christian Church said the same; but where the saint and
the savage meet in sentiment they differ in expression.

Were it not for some of the concomitant and incidental signs, the bowed
or veiled head, the dishevelled hair, it might be said that the positive
statements of Cranz, Egede, Burchell, and other writers arose from
malobservation or from pure mistake. This objection, therefore, is of
little avail; and however difficult it may be to account for the presence
of such sentiments among tribes of so rude a type as the Esquimaux,
the Kamschadals, and the Bushmen, the fact remains, that in the cases
above cited the ‘form of capture’ is explicable as having its origin in
primitive conceptions of what is due to delicacy; as being, in fact, the
original expression of them in the language of pantomime so common to
savages.[309] And the presence of such feelings of delicacy may be often
suspected, even where they are not directly mentioned, in the ceremony
of capture; as, for instance, in the African kingdom of Futa, where the
form of capture prevails in the usual way, but where we have the indirect
evidence that for months after marriage the bride never stirs abroad
without a veil, and that Futa wives are ‘so bashful that they never
permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their
marriage.’[310]

There is, however, no reason to press this explanation too far, nor
to account it the only efficient cause. Quite as potent, and perhaps
a more natural one, is dislike and disinclination on the part of the
bride, which compels the bridegroom to resort to force. The conditions
of savage life are a sufficient explanation of this, irrespective of any
old custom of capturing wives out of a tribe by reason of a prejudice
against marrying within it. A man proposes personally or mediately to
the parents or relations of the woman he fancies for a wife; if they
consent to accept him as a son-in-law and they agree as to a price, there
is a reserved stipulation on the part of the vendor: ‘_If you can get
her._’ In Tartary, in the thirteenth century, after such a bargain, the
daughter would flee to one of her kinsfolk to hide; the father would say
to the husband, ‘My daughter is yours; take her wheresoever you can find
her.’ The suitor, seeking with his friends till he found her, would then
take her by force and carry her home.[311] Here the girl’s reluctance is
not so much feigned as overridden, and is only so far formal in that it
is entirely disregarded. Often it is no mere ceremony on her part, but a
natural and genuine protest—a protest against being treated as a chattel,
not as an individual—but a protest which, opposed as it is to parental
persuasion and marital force, tends, as far as the husband is concerned,
to pass into the region of the merest ceremony.

A few instances will suffice to illustrate the co-operation of dislike
and force in savage matrimony. In some Californian tribes the consent
of the girl is necessary, although ‘if she violently opposes the match
she is seldom compelled to marry or to be sold.’ Among the Neshenam
tribe of the same people ‘the girl has no voice whatever in the matter,
and resistance on her part merely occasions brute force to be used by
her purchaser.’[312] So in the Utah country, where ‘families and tribes
living at peace would steal each others’ wives and children and sell
them as slaves,’ a wife is usually bought of her parents; but should she
refuse, ‘the warrior collects his friends, _carries off the recusant
fair_,’ and thus espouses her.[313] So among the Navajoes ‘the consent
of the father is absolute, and the one so purchased assents _or is taken
away by force_.’[314] It is the same with the Horse Indians of Patagonia.
There, as elsewhere, it is common for a cacique to have several wives,
and poor men only one, marriages being ‘made by sale more frequently
than by mutual agreement.’ The price is often high, and girls are
betrothed without their knowledge in infancy and married without their
consent at maturity. But ‘if a girl dislikes a match made for her she
resists; and although _dragged forcibly to the tent of her lawful owner_,
plagues him so much by her contumacy that he at last turns her away,
and sells her to the person on whom she has fixed her affections.’[315]
In Africa, Yorubas, Mandingoes, and Koossa Kafirs follow the custom of
infant betrothal (and it is worth notice as being quite in accordance
with the theory that kinship was originally traced through mothers,
that Yoruba, Mandingo, and Loango Africans, and some Esquimaux tribes,
regard the mother’s consent only as necessary to an engagement);[316]
but sometimes a Yoruba girl, when the time comes for her to fulfil her
mother’s engagement, preferring some other than the intended husband,
absolutely refuses to co-operate. ‘Then she is either teased and worried
into submission or the husband agrees to receive back her dowry and
release her.’[317] A Mandingo girl must either marry a suitor chosen for
her or remain ever afterwards unmarried. Should she refuse, the lover is
authorized by the parents ‘by the laws of the country to seize on the
girl as his slave.’[318] If a Koossa girl, bound by the contract of her
parents, ‘makes any attempt at resisting the union, corporal punishment
is even resorted to, in order to compel her submission.’[319]

It appears, therefore, that resistance on the part of the bride in many
cases procures her ultimate release, so that her wishes in the matter
are always an element to be considered. In all contracts of marriage,
to which she is seldom a party, there is accordingly, in the nature of
things, an implied covenant that a daughter shall be so far allowed
a voice in the matter that if she can make good her resistance she
shall not become the property of the intending purchaser. The frequency
with which it must have occurred that a girl would defeat a match she
disliked by flight, elopement, or resistance, would tend to create
a sort of common law right, for all daughters sold in marriage to a
certain ‘run’ for their independence;[320] and the amusement naturally
connected with the exercise of such a right would help to preserve the
custom in a modified form; so that, however slight in some cases might
be the modesty of the bride or her dislike of her suitor, her friends,
if only for the sport of the thing, would gladly enact the fiction of an
outrage to be resented, of a woman to be defended. In all the interesting
cases of the form of capture cited by Sir John Lubbock it appears that
in eight (that is, among the Mantras, the Kalmucks, the Fuejians, the
Fijians, the New Zealanders, the Papuans of New Guinea, the Philippine
Islanders, and the African Kafirs and Futas), the ceremony affords the
bride a chance of an effectual escape from a match she dislikes. Should
she fly, should she hide successfully, or should her friends defend her
successfully, the contract between her parents and suitor becomes null
and void; or sometimes, as among the Zulus and Bassutos, the price for
her is raised.[321] And it is remarkable with what precision the rules of
the chase have been elaborated in many instances; as by the Oleepas of
Central California, among whom, if a bride is found twice out of three
times, she is legally the seeker’s; and the bridegroom, if he fails the
first time, is allowed a second and final attempt a few weeks later.
‘The simple result is, that if the girl likes him she hides where she is
easily found; but if she disapproves of the match a dozen Indians cannot
find her.’[322]

Other feelings would also be present to sustain the pretence of
wife-capture. For the savage parent, in parting with his daughter for a
favourable settlement, does not act from gratuitous cruelty; he provides
for her future as best he can, sometimes in accordance with her wishes,
sometimes against them. As a rule marriage for her is a change for the
worse; but if she does not dislike the bridegroom to the extent of
availing herself of her prescriptive and real chance of escape, her
natural feelings for her parents and relations would make it incumbent
on her at least to affect a dutiful regret at leaving them (in cases
where she does), by a half-bashful, half-serious resistance. It would
be difficult to find a case of capture, whether in form or in fact,
which is not readily explicable as simply the outcome of the natural
affections and their protest against so artificial an arrangement as
marriage by purchase; for with marriage by purchase the form of capture
always co-exists, so that capture was not necessarily an earlier mode
of marriage than that by purchase or agreement. The mock fights between
the party of the bride and that of the bridegroom among so many Indian
tribes;[323] the dances, lasting several days, during which it is the
business of the squaws to keep the bridegroom at a distance from his
bride, among the Tucanas of South America;[324] the similar duty which
devolves on the matrons of the tribe at Sumatran weddings;[325] the mock
skirmishes at Arab weddings, and the efforts of the negresses to keep the
bridegroom away from the camel of the bride;[326] these are surely more
intelligible, as arising from the rude ideas and customs of savage life,
than as being survivals, artificially preserved, of a time when the bride
was really fought for or stolen; and if such explanation is sufficient,
should it not logically be admitted before resorting to the hypothesis
of a practice whose very existence is rather an inference from such
ceremonies than a cause observable in actual operation?

To pass to a third and quite distinct class of marriages by capture,
in which the essential element is not maidenly bashfulness nor real
repugnance, but the voluntary elopement of a girl with her lover, in
defeat of a prior contract of betrothal. The large part which questions
of profit and property play in savage betrothals can never be lost sight
of, in estimating the causes of real wife abduction, either within or
without the tribe. The primary conception of a daughter is a saleable
possession, a source of profit, to her clan in marketings with other
clans or to her parents in their bargains in her own clan. This fact
alone militates against the supposition of the wide prevalence of
female infanticide in primitive communities, the prejudice being rather
in favour of killing the boys than the girls; not solely for the use
of the latter as slaves and labourers, but for the price which even
among Fuejians or Bushmen is payable in some form or another for their
companionship as wives. Abiponian mothers spared their girls oftener than
their boys, because their sons when grown up would want wherewithal to
purchase a wife, and so tend to impoverish them; whilst their daughters
would bring them in money by their sale in that capacity.[327] To raise
the price by limiting the supply was also the reason why the Guanas of
America preferred to bury their girls alive rather than their boys.[328]

From this view of daughters as saleable commodities comes polygamy for
the rich, polyandry, or illicit elopement, for the poor. Among the Hos of
India so high at one time was the price in cattle placed by parents on
their daughters that the large number of adult unmarried girls became a
‘very peculiar feature in the social state of every considerable village
of the Kohlán.’ What, then, was the result? That ‘young men counteracted
the machinations of avaricious parents against the course of true love
by _forcibly carrying off the girl_,’ thus avoiding extortion by running
away with her. The parents in such cases had to submit to terms proposed
by arbitrators; but at last wife-abduction became so common that it could
only be checked by the limitation by general consent of the number of
cattle payable at marriage.[329]

‘A very singular scene,’ it is said, ‘may sometimes be noticed in the
markets of Singbhoom. A young man suddenly makes a pounce on a girl
and carries her off bodily, his friends covering the retreat (like a
group from the picture of the Rape of the Sabines). This is generally
a _summary method of surmounting the obstacles that cruel parents may
have placed in the lovers’ path_; but though it is sometimes done in
anticipation of the favourable inclination of the girl herself, and in
spite of her struggles and tears, no disinterested person interferes,
and the girls, late companions of the abducted maiden, often applaud the
exploit.’[330]

In Afghanistan the pecuniary value of women has given rise to the curious
custom of assessing part of the fines in criminal cases in a certain
number of young women payable in atonement as wives to the plaintiff or
to his relations from the family of the defendant. Thus murder is or was
expiated by the payment of twelve young women; the cutting off a hand,
an ear, or a nose by that of six; the breaking of a tooth by that of
three; a wound above the forehead by that of one. This was the logical
result of the state of thought which produces wife-purchase; but there
was also another. For in the country parts, where matches generally begin
in attachment, an enterprising lover may avoid the obstacle of parental
consent by a form of capture, which has a legal sanction, though it does
not exempt the captor from subsequent payment. This consists in a man’s
‘seizing an opportunity of cutting off a lock of her (the woman’s) hair,
snatching away her veil, or throwing a sheet over her, and claiming her
as his affianced wife.’ But the most common expedient is an ordinary
elopement; though this is held an outrage to a family equivalent to the
murder of one of its members; and being pursued with the same rancour,
is often the cause of long and bloody wars between the clans; for as the
fugitive couple are never refused an asylum, ‘the seduction of a woman of
one Oolooss by a man of another, or a man’s eloping with a girl of his
own Oolooss,’ is the commonest cause of feuds between the clans.[331]

Love attachments, in defeat of parental plans, lead to very similar
results in Bokhara. For ‘the daughter of a Turcoman has a high price;
and the swain, in despair of making a legitimate purchase, seizes his
sweetheart, seats her behind him on the same horse, and gallops off
to the nearest camp, where the parties are united, and separation
is impossible. The parents and relations pursue the lovers, and the
marriage is adjusted by an intermarriage with some female relation of
the bridegroom, while he himself becomes bound to pay so many camels and
horses as the price of his bride.’[332]

There is, therefore, evidence to justify the theory that the form of
capture may often be explained as an attempt to regulate by law the
danger to a tribe arising from too frequent elopements, naturally
resulting from the abuse of the parental right of selling daughters. In
Sumatra the defeat of matrimonial plans by an elopement with a preferred
suitor is so common as to be sanctioned and regulated by law, being
known as the system of marriage by _telari gadis_; the father in such
a case having to pay the fine to which he would have been liable for
bestowing his daughter after engagement to another suitor, and only being
allowed to recover her, if he catches her in immediate pursuit. ‘When
the parties,’ says Mr. McLennan, ‘cannot agree about the price, nothing
is more common among the Kalmucks, Kirghiz, Nogais, and Circassians than
to carry the lady off by actual force of arms. The wooer having once
got the lady into his _yurt_, she is his wife by the law, and peace is
established by her relations coming to terms as to the price.’ So too
in England, elopements have often preceded and promoted more definite
marriage settlements, or, with some slight observances, have stood
legally as a substitute for them.

Considering, then, that the affections and wishes do not count for
nothing even among savages; considering that among savages, more even
than in civilized life, marriage is a question of property and of means,
so that, whilst the richest members of a tribe almost universally have
several wives, it is often all that the poorer can do to get a wife
at all, we have a set of circumstances leading naturally sometimes to
voluntary elopement on the part of the girl, in defeat of her parents,
sometimes to literal wife-capture by a man otherwise unable to become a
husband. This condition of things leads of necessity to polyandry and
wife-robbery. In some Australian tribes, owing to a disproportion between
the sexes, many men have to steal a wife from a neighbouring horde. But
it is not their normal recognized mode of marriage. On the contrary,
their laws on this subject are somewhat elaborate; and as it appears
that before that state of society in which a daughter belongs to her
father there is one in which she belongs to her mother, and perhaps a
still prior state in which she belongs to her tribe, so from their birth
Australian girls are appropriated to certain males of the tribe, nor can
the parents annul the obligation. If the male dies the mother may then
bestow her daughter on whom she will, for by the death of her legal owner
the girl becomes to some extent the property of her relations, who have
certain claims on her services for the procurement of food. But to the
surrender of a girl by her mother the full consent of the whole tribe is
necessary; and if, as sometimes happens, ‘the young people, listening
rather to the dictates of inclination than those of law, improvise a
marriage by absconding together,’ they incur the fatal enmity of the
whole tribe.[333] According to Bonwick, a Tasmanian or Australian woman
was never stolen contrary to her expectations or wishes. Only if all
other schemes to have her own way failed, would a girl face the penalty
of having ‘the spear of the disappointed, the spear of the guardian, and
the spears of the tribe’ thrown at her, for her breach of tribal law.[334]

The conception of the daughters of a clan as its property, as a source
of contingent wealth to it, of additional income to it in sheep, dogs,
or whatever the medium of exchange, tends to keep up in many cases that
prohibition to marry in the same clan or subdivision of a tribe which is
known as exogamy. Among the Hindu Kafirs it is said to be uncertain why
a man may not sell his girls to his own tribe, and why a man must always
buy his wife from another; but it is certain that for this reason the
more girls a man has born to him the better he is pleased and the richer
his tribe becomes.[335] A Khond father distributes among the heads of the
families, belonging to his branch of a tribe, the sum raised on behalf of
a son-in-law by subscription from the son-in-law’s branch. But, supposing
a great inequality of wealth to arise between different clans, originally
united by profitable intermarriages, it might become more profitable
to sell within the clan than outside it, so that the same motives of
interest which, under some circumstances, would tend to encourage exogamy
would under others lead to the opposite principle, a rich bridegroom of
the same clan being preferable to a poor one of another, whether the gain
accrued to a girl’s parents or her clan. It is, perhaps, for this reason
that a Hindu Kooch incurs a fine if he marries a woman of another clan,
becoming a bondsman till his wife redeems him; that is, till she pays
back to his clan or its chief what the bridegroom, by purchasing her, has
alienated from the use of the tribe.[336] On the other hand, the reason
given by the Khonds for marrying women from distant places was, that they
gave much smaller sums than for women of their own tribe.[337]

Exogamy and endogamy would thus co-exist, as the customs of tribes that
have attained to a more or less complete recognition of the rights of
property, and are so far advanced as to be capable of preserving complex
rules of social organization. Marriages, therefore, under either _régime_
are matters generally of friendly settlement, of ordinary contract; and
where such arrangements are defeated by the perversity of the principal
parties—namely, the bride or the bridegroom—what more natural than the
device of giving legal sanction to an elopement by settling a subsequent
compensation with the parent?

The custom of exogamy is so widely spread over the world that its origin
must be sought in conditions as prevalent as itself, and it is possible
that it arose out of the same condition which certainly sustains it
and is co-extensive with itself, namely, from the marketable position
of women. That female infanticide should have led to it is improbable,
not only from the comparative rarity of the practice among the _rudest_
tribes, but from the negative instance of the Todas, a wild Indian
hill-tribe, who, notwithstanding the scarcity of their women, and a
scarcity actually attributed to former female infanticide, ‘never
contract marriage with the other tribes, though living together on most
friendly terms.’[338] Judging _à priori_, we should expect to find as of
earlier date a prejudice in favour of tribal exclusiveness, of strict
endogamy. The idea of the Abors that marriage out of the clan is a sin
only to be washed out by sacrifice—a sin so great as to cause war among
the elements, and even obscuration of the sun and moon—has a more archaic
appearance than the contrary principle; and the confinement of marriages
to a few families of known purity of descent is characteristic of some
of the lowest Hindu castes.[339] The prejudice against foreign women is
so strong that there is often a tendency to regard female prisoners of
war as merely slaves, as not of the same rank with the real wives of
their captors. Thus, ‘though the different tribes of the Aht nation are
frequently at war with one another, women are not captured from other
tribes for marriage, but only to be kept as slaves. The idea of slavery
connected with capture is so common that a free-born Aht would hesitate
to marry a woman taken in war, whatever her rank had been in her own
tribe.’[340] The Caribs, too, if they kept female prisoners as wives
always regarded them as slaves, as standing on a lower level than their
legitimate wives.[341]

Leaving, however, the obscure problem of the origin of exogamy, there
is a point of view from which both that and endogamy are one. For
exogamy as regards the subdivisions of a tribe is endogamy as regards
the tribe itself, tending in fact to preserve tribal unity and to check
an indefinite divergency of interests and dialects. For example, where
a Hindoo caste or tribe is composed of several Gotrams, no person of
whom may marry an individual of the same Gotram, it is evident that
the unity of the tribe is actually sustained by the exogamy of its
constituent parts. Such a custom therefore, howsoever originated, would,
as serviceable in maintaining tribal unity against hostile neighbouring
people, tend to survive from motives of common expediency, from its
adaptation to the interests of peace; a beneficial result of the system
which in Mr. Bancroft’s account of the Thlinkeet and Kutchin Indians
clearly appears.[342] The Thlinkeets are nationally divided into two
great clans, under the totems of the Wolf and the Raven, and these two
are again subdivided into numerous sub-totems. ‘In this clanship some
singular social facts present themselves. People are at once thrust
widely apart and yet drawn together. Tribes of the same clan may not war
on each other, but at the same time members of the same clan may not
marry each other. Thus the young Wolf warrior must seek his mate among
the Ravens.... _Obviously this singular social fancy tends greatly to
keep the various tribes of the nation at peace._’ The Kutchins, again,
are divided into three castes, resident in different territories, no two
persons of the same caste being allowed to marry. ‘_This system operates
strongly against war between the tribes_, as in war it is caste against
caste, not tribe against tribe. As the father is never of the same caste
as the son, who receives clanship from the mother, there can never be
international war without ranging fathers and sons against each other.’
So among the Khonds, who punish intermarriage between persons of the same
tribe with death, the intervention of the women was always essential to
peace, as they were neutral between the tribe of their fathers and that
of their husbands.[343] But it is difficult to think that, if hostile
relations between exogamous clans became permanent, the several clans
would still insist on exogamous marriages as the only marriages legally
valid, and consequently regard the use of force or fraud as the only
legitimate title to a wife.

It seems indeed certain that wherever the rule of exogamy exists it
may be analysed into a prohibition to marry within the divisions of a
larger group; that larger group being consciously recognised as uniting
the divergent families by resemblance of dialect, common political
ties, or a traditional common descent. The Kalmucks, for instance,
call themselves ‘the peculiar people,’ or ‘the four allies,’ and any
danger of their national dissolution is obviously diminished by the
very fact of the exogamy of their four clans. The Circassians, whose
constituent brotherhoods are exogamous, by the occasional assemblies of
the brotherhoods for the settlement of disputes, show a consciousness of
their political unity, which by the exogamy of the brotherhoods they help
to maintain. The Hindu castes preserve their mutual exclusiveness by the
very fact of compelling all their constituent families to intermingle
in marriage, and so preventing any one of them from dissolving the
common relationship by absolute separation or independent growth. So
that exogamy rather sustains than prevents a system of marriages
within the same stock, and is a mark of a higher conception of social
organisation, when people have learned to classify themselves with
respect to their neighbours, when tribal and personal property is well
established, and when, consequently, marriages between the groups can
be effected by purchase better than by violence. Exogamy therefore as
the product or concomitant of a somewhat advanced state of thought, not
of utter barbarism, would never make marriages by capture a necessity
of existence; but, if it did, it would argue so much culture in a tribe
capable of maintaining such rules, as would equally justify us in
ascribing to them moral feelings, not less advanced and refined than
those involved in their adherence to so restrictive a political system.

South Australia supplies a typical illustration of the confusion relating
to intertribal marriages which arises from the vague use of the word
_tribe_. For wherever there is reason to suspect that the word clan or
family should stand for the word tribe, it is probable that the exogamy
predicated of the tribe only prevails between its constituent elements;
in other words, that it is only, as among the Kalmucks, Circassians,
or Hindu castes, an extended form of the principle of endogamy. Thus,
Collins, describing wife-capture in New South Wales, says that ‘it
is believed’ the women so taken are always selected from women of a
different tribe from that of the males, and from one with whom they are
at enmity; that as wives ‘they are incorporated into the tribes to which
their husbands belong, and but seldom quit them for others.’ But he uses
the word tribe as convertible with the word family, as when he speaks of
the natives near Port Jackson being distributed into families, each under
the government of its own head, and deriving its name from its place of
residence.[344] And the statements of Captain Hunter, a previous writer,
that the natives are associated ‘in tribes of many families together,’
living apparently without a fixed residence; that ‘the tribe takes its
name, from the place of their general residence;’ and that, the different
families wander in different directions for food, but unite on occasion
of disputes with another tribe, make it still more probable that when
Collins spoke of different tribes he meant merely, different families,
or groups, which with all their separate wanderings united sometimes in
cases of common danger. So when Captain Hunter himself says that ‘there
is some reason to suppose that most of their wives are taken by force
from the tribes with whom they are at variance, as the females bear
no proportion to the males,’ we may take it that by tribes he means
families, and families who recognise their community of blood when a
really different tribe provokes their hostility by assembling as a tribe
themselves.[345] Mr. Stanbridge, who spent eighteen years in the wilds of
Victoria, corroborates this view; for, according to him, each tribe has
its own boundaries, the land of which is parcelled out amongst families
and carefully transmitted by direct descent; these boundaries being so
sacredly maintained that the member of no one family will venture on the
lands of a neighbouring one without invitation. The several families (or
tribes) unite for mutual purposes under a chief. The women often, but
not always, marry into distant tribes; they are generally betrothed in
their infancy, but if they grow up unbetrothed the father’s consent must
be solicited; failing him, the brother’s; then the uncle’s; and last of
all that of a council or a chief of a tribe.[346] That force was ever the
normal method by which marriages were effected in Australia, there is no
proof; that, on the contrary, mutual likings often set the law, is proved
by the story of the native captive girl, who, after living among the
colonists for some time, expressed a desire to go away and be married to
a young native of her acquaintance; albeit that she left him after three
days, returning sadly beaten and jealous of the other wife.[347]

Quite distinct, again, either from the real or pretended reluctance
of a savage girl to become a bride, or from the custom of forcing an
avaricious parent to a settlement by the shorter process of taking first
and paying afterwards, is the custom of stealing women from the same
or a neighbouring clan, a custom which prevailed widely in Ireland and
Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which in the
latter country has been ‘glorified in a whole literature of songs and
ballads.’[348]

That polygamy and wife-purchase and artificial tribal regulations often
lead to such a result cannot be denied; but that it is anywhere a
system, sustained by prejudices, whencesoever derived, seems completely
unwarranted by the evidence hitherto collected. The Coinmen of Patagonia,
who made annual inroads on the Tekeenica tribe, killing the men and
carrying off not only the women but the children, dogs, arrows, spears,
and canoes, seem to have been actuated rather by the ordinary motives
of freebooters (by such motives, for instance, as induced our early
convict settlers in Tasmania to set off with their bullock-chains to
make captives of the native women[349]) than by any scruples of marrying
relations at home. Carib wives taken in war were accounted slaves; and
so far were the Caribs from being dependent on aggression for their
wives, that before their customs were modified by acquaintance with the
Christians their only legitimate wives were their cousins.[350] If a man
had no cousin to marry, or put off doing so till it was too late, he
might then marry some non-relative, with the consent of her parents. At
the festival that followed a successful war the parents vied with one
another in offering their daughters as wives to those who were praised by
their captains as having fought with bravery. The Caribs of the continent
differed from those of the islands in that men and women spoke the same
language, not having corrupted their native tongue by marriages with
foreign women.[351] According to Humboldt, the language of the Caribs
of the continent was the same, from the source of the Rio Branco to the
steppes of Cumana; and the pride of race which led them to withdraw from
every other people, and was the cause of the failure of all missionary
efforts that tried to combine them with villages containing people of
another nation and speaking another idiom, would surely have militated
against making exogamy a preliminary condition of matrimony.[352]
Humboldt, indeed, says that polygamy was more extensively practised by
the Caribs and other nations that ‘preserved the custom of carrying off
young girls from the neighbouring tribe;’ but it would be contrary to
all previous accounts of the people to suppose these were their only
wives, such a supplement to domestic felicity being everywhere the
common reward, though seldom the chief object, of successful war. The
curious difference in the language of the men and of the women found to
exist among the Caribs of the West Indian Archipelago, and attributed
by tradition to the conquest of a former people on the islands, whose
wives the conquerors appropriated, has perhaps been rather exaggerated,
for in a list of 488 words and phrases employed by both sexes, in only
36 is there any difference marked between the language of the men and
that of the women. The origin of the difference may be doubted, as there
were also words and phrases used by the old men of the people which
the younger ones might not use; and there was a war-dialect of which
neither women, girls, or boys had any knowledge.[353] But probably the
difference arose from a custom similar to that of the Zulus, which makes
it unlawful for a woman to use any word containing the sound of her
father-in-law’s name or of the names of her husband’s male relations.
‘Whenever the emphatic syllable of either of their proper names occurs
in any other word, she must avoid it, by either substituting an entirely
new word, or at least another syllable in its place. Hence _this custom
has given rise to an almost distinct language among the women_.’[354] In
consequence of this _Hlonipa_ custom, according to another witness, ‘_the
language at this present time almost presents the phenomenon of a double
one_.’[355] That the Caribs maintained the common etiquette of reserve
between parents and children-in-law,[356] makes it not improbable that
the reserve extended itself to their language, and thus produced the same
phenomenon that we find in South Africa.

In the same way other cases of wife-capture appear simply in the light of
savage lawlessness, which may have been more common among quite primitive
tribes than it is in their nearest modern representatives; but which, if
it ever was widely prevalent, is most unlikely to have been perpetuated
in symbol, by a form of capture. If then the form is easily explicable
on other grounds, such as have been suggested, we have a reason the less
for supposing in the past a state of things which would exclude from
the relations between male and female the happy influence of that mutual
affection which has been shown not to have been entirely absent even
among, perhaps, the rudest of our species, the aborigines of Australia
or the Veddahs of Ceylon, and which is certainly disseminated more or
less widely, outside the human race, through a large part of the animal
creation.

It is probably impossible to resuscitate in imagination a picture of
primitive times. It is with the lower societies of the world as with the
lower animal organisms: the more they are studied, the more wonderful is
the complexity of structure they unfold. Tribal and subtribal divisions
of communities, tribal and subtribal divisions of territory, strong
distinctions of rank, stringent rules of etiquette, are found on all
sides to characterise populations in other circumstances of life scarcely
less rude than the brute creation around them. The first beginnings of
social evolution are lost, nor can they be observed in any known races
that appear to have advanced the least distance from the starting-point
of progress. But, as there is no reason to suppose that the external
conditions of primitive man were ever very different from those of
existing tribes; that those, for instance, of the shell-mound builders or
the cave-dwellers differed widely from those of existing Ahts or Bushmen,
so there is nothing unreasonable in believing, that the earliest human
denizens of the globe were endowed with the same rudiments of feelings
that prevail among them, and that these should, even in very early
times, have produced very similar social institutions. That Greeks and
Egyptians, Chinese and Hindus, had legends ascribing marriage to the
invention of a particular legislator, thereby implying there was a time
when marriage was not, no more proves that there was ever a time when
some sort of marriage was unrecognised than the many legends of the
origin of fire prove that mankind were ever destitute of the blessing
of its warmth. A minimum of reflection on the subject would produce the
legend, just as reflections on the world’s origin have produced countless
legends of its creation, of a time when it too was nonexistent. And
it will be found, wherever any known savage tribe really practises no
wedding customs, that the fact of the marriage is distinctly recognised,
either by payment in kind or labour by the bridegroom or by some
symbolical act notifying the union to all fellow-tribesmen. The Veddahs,
for instance, according to Tennant, used no marriage rites; but another
writer mentions, that on the day of marriage the husband received from
his bride a cord twisted by herself, which he had to wear round his waist
till his death, as a symbol of the lastingness of the union between them.
The Kherias of India, who have no word for marriage in their language,
give public recognition to the fact by certain rites and festivities,
closely analogous to those in vogue in neighbouring tribes. The Coroadas
of Brazil have no marriage solemnity, but the suitor presents the bride’s
parents with fruit or game, as a tacit engagement to support her by the
chase. Such a tacit expression of willingness and ability to take good
care of his wife is a common symbolical act among savages, even the
rudest; whilst the fact that for the married pair henceforth there will
be a union of life and fortune is indicated by many a wedding custom, of
no doubtful meaning, as by the eating of a cake together, or by the Dyak
custom of making the married couple sit together on two bars of iron, ‘to
intimate the wish of the bystanders that blessings as lasting and health
as vigorous as that metal may attend the pair.’

But symbolical acts like these—and they might be multiplied
indefinitely—presuppose an advanced state of thought and feeling, behind
which we cannot get in the observation of any existing savage tribes; and
since they are common wherever the pretence of capture is common, that
pretence may well be symbolical too; but symbolical, not of an earlier
system of marriage, but of a conventional regard for good manners.
Wherever the pretence of capture exists, it exists amid conditions
of life so far removed from what might naturally be conceived as the
most archaic, that it is quite legitimate to attribute the decorous
reluctance of the bride and the resistance of her relations at weddings
to such feelings as have been proved to prevail upon such occasions, and
so to consider the bride’s behaviour as something quite unconnected with
the lawless practice of wife-abduction, a practice which undoubtedly
prevails to a certain extent in the savage world (chiefly in consequence
of artificial social arrangements), which may have prevailed to a still
greater extent when men lived in the caves of Périgord or upon former
continents, but which it is incredible should ever have survived by
transmission as a symbol, as a custom worthy of religious preservation.




VIII.

_THE FAIRY-LORE OF SAVAGES._


A comparison of some of the fancies of the rudest known tribes of
the earth concerning the nature of the sun, the moon, and the stars,
proves abundantly not only that the demand for a reason for things is
a principle operative in every stage of human development, but that
the primitive explanation of things is sought in the occurrences of
daily experience and given in terms and figures originally applied to
terrestrial objects. From a philosophy of nature of so rude a type and
so humble an origin spring many of those marvellous traditions, which in
after times rank as the mythology, or perhaps serve as the religion, of
the people among whom they had birth.

To begin with some of the astro-mythological ideas of the Australians.
Mr. Stanbridge mentions the astonishment with which, as he sat by
his camp fire, he listened for the first time to the remarks of two
Australian natives as they pointed to the beautiful constellations of
Castor and Pollux, of the Pleiades and Orion. These men belonged to a
race who had ‘the reputation of being lowest in the scale of mankind,’
who were ‘cannibals of the lowest description,’ and ‘who had no name
for numerals above two;’ yet they could explain the wanderings of the
moon, by the story that, being once discovered trying to persuade the
wife of a certain star in Canis Major to elope with him, he was beaten
and put to flight by the angry husband. As so frequently elsewhere, most
of the stars were bound by the ties of human relationship, being wives,
brothers, sisters, or mothers to one another. The stars in the belt
of Orion were believed to be a group of young men dancing, whilst the
Pleiades were girls who played to them as they danced. Two large stars in
the fore legs of Centaurus were two brave brothers who speared Tchingal
to death, and the east stars of Crux were the points of the spears that
pierced his body.[357]

Few tribes of known savages appear to be without conceptions of a similar
nature. The Tasmanians, according to Bonwick, were no exception to the
connection of theology with astronomy. To them Capella was a kangaroo
pursued by Castor and Pollux, whose smoke as it was roasted might be seen
till the autumn. The Pleiades were maidens who courted the kangaroo
hunters of Orion and dug up roots for their suppers. Two other stars were
two black men who of old appeared suddenly on a hill and threw fire down
to earth for the use of its inhabitants; whilst two other luminaries were
two women whom a sting-ray had killed as they dived for cray-fish, but
whom these same fire-bringers restored to life, by placing stinging ants
on their breasts; then escorting them to heaven, after they had first
killed the sting-ray.[358]

Bushman star-lore is framed in exactly the same way, the planets of
distant solar systems sinking into the insignificance of daily African
surroundings. What is the moon but a man who, having incurred the wrath
of the sun, is pierced by his knife till he is nearly destroyed, and
who, having implored mercy, grows from the small piece left him, till
he is again large enough for the stabbing process to recommence? What
is the Milky Way but some wood ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by
a girl, that her people might be able to see their way home at night?
Other stars are reduced to mortal origin, or identified with certain
lions, tortoises, or clouds, that have place in Bushman mythology; nor
does it lie beyond their limits of belief that the sun should once have
been seen sitting by the wayside as he travelled on earth, and that
the jackal’s back is black to this day because he carried that burning
substance on his back.[359] This sun they believe was once a mortal on
earth who radiated light from his body, but only for a short space round
his house; till some children were sent to throw him as he slept into the
sky, whence he has ever since shone over the earth.[360] These children
belonged to an earlier race of Bushmen; and it is an odd coincidence that
in Victoria as in South Africa the belief about the sun is associated
with the tradition of a race that preceded both Bushmen and Australians
in their present homes. In the Australian creed, the earth lay in
darkness, till one of the former race threw an emu’s egg into space,
where it became the sun. That former race was translated in various forms
to the heavens, where they made all the celestial bodies, and where they
continue to cause all the good and evil that happens on earth. Such
traditions may point to a fact; for both Australians and Bushmen may be
degenerate from a better social type than they now present; but the fact
that, even if degenerate, they should preserve such tales and fictions,
makes it not inconceivable that such tales should arise, as spontaneous
products of the mind, among tribes that seem neither to have lapsed from
a higher condition, nor ever to have emerged from their primeval state of
barbarism.

Of the Esquimaux, Egede observes that ‘their notion about the stars is
that some of them have been men and others different sorts of animals
or fishes.’[361] Here two stars are two persons at a singing combat, or
two rival women taking each other by the hair; those other three are
certain Greenlanders who, when once out seal-catching, failed to find
their way home again and were taken to heaven. It is true such fancies,
taken primarily from Cranz, must be received with the reservation that
he makes, namely, that they were only harboured by the weaker heads
of Greenland, and that the natives had art enough to play off on the
Europeans quite as marvellous stories as any they received.[362] But the
possible reality of such belief is vouched for by other testimony from
all parts of the globe, of which two instances, taken from the Hervey
Islanders and the Thlinkeet Indians, will suffice to illustrate the
general character. According to the former, a twin boy and girl were
badly treated by their mother; so they left their home and leapt into
the sky, whither they were also followed by their parents, and where
all four may still be seen shining; ‘brother and dearly-loved sister,
still linked together, pursue their never-ceasing flight, resolved
never again to meet their justly-enraged parents.’[363] The Thlinkeet
Indians ascribe to a being called Yehl the liberation of the world from
its pristine darkness; for, amid the many conflicting stories told of
him, it is agreed that he it was who obtained light for men at a time
when ‘sun, moon, and stars were kept by a rich chief in separate boxes
which he allowed no one to touch.’ Yehl, having become grandson to this
chief, cried one day so much for these boxes that his grandfather let
him have one. ‘He opened it, and lo! there were stars in the sky.’ The
grandparent was next cheated out of the moon in the same way; but to get
the sunbox Yehl had to refuse food and become really ill, and then its
owner only parted with it on condition that it should not be opened. The
prohibition, however, was unheeded. Yehl turned into a raven, flew off
with the box, and blessed mankind with the light of the sun.[364]

From these samples of the fairy tales of savages, it is clear that, in
addition to the myths which arise from forgotten etymologies, there
are many others which are not formed at all by this process of gradual
forgetfulness, but spring directly from the use of the intellect and
the imagination, in obedience to the impulse to find a reason for
everything. To observe peculiarities in nature is the beginning of
science; to account for them in any way is science itself, true or false.
The science of savages is not limited to the skies, but is directed to
everything that calls for notice on earth; nor in the stories invented
by them to answer the various problems of existence, are they a whit
behind the traditions of European folk-lore on similar subjects,
their explanations of natural peculiarities disclosing quite as vivid
imaginative powers as the stories of the white race concerning birds or
beasts.

Let us take, for instance, as a parallel to the German reason for the owl
flying in solitude by night (namely, that when set to watch the wren,
imprisoned in a mousehole, he fell asleep, and was so ashamed at letting
him thus escape that he has never since dared show himself by day), the
story of the rude Ahts, made to account for the melancholy note of the
loon as it is heard flying about the wild lakes of Vancouver’s Island;
and as a good instance of the resemblance in construction of plot often
found in very distant regions, let us place side by side with it a story
of the Basutos in the south of Africa:—

    _THE AHT STORY._

    Two fishermen went one day in two canoes to catch halibut.
    But while one of them caught many, the other caught none. So
    the latter, angered by the taunts of his more fortunate but
    physically weaker companion, bethought himself how he might
    take all his fish from him by force, and cause him to return
    home fishless and ashamed. Suddenly, whilst his friend was
    pulling up a fish, he knocked him on the head with the wooden
    club he used for killing halibut, and, to prevent the tale
    ever being told, cut out his companion’s tongue, and took the
    fish home to his own wife. When the tongueless man arrived at
    the village, and his friends came to enquire of his sport, he
    could only answer by a noise resembling the note of the loon.
    ‘The great spirit, Quawteaht, was so angry at all this, that
    he changed the injured Indian into a loon, and the other into
    a crow; and the loon’s plaintive cry now is the voice of the
    fisherman trying to make himself understood.’[365]

    _THE BASUTO STORY._

    Two brothers, having gone in different directions to make
    their fortunes, met again, after sundry adventures, the elder
    enriched by a pack of dogs, the younger by a large number of
    cows. The younger offered his brother as many of these cows
    as he pleased, with the exception of a certain white one.
    This he would not part with; so as they went home, and the
    younger brother was drinking from a pool, Macilo, the elder,
    seized his brother’s head and held it under the water till
    he was dead. Then he buried the body, and covered it with a
    stone, and proceeded to drive back the whole flock as his own.
    He had not, however, gone far, before a small bird perched
    itself on the horn of the white cow and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has
    killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’
    Twice did Macilo kill the bird with a stone, but each time it
    reappeared and uttered the same words. So the third time he
    killed it he burnt it, and threw its ashes to the winds. Then
    proudly he entered his village, and when they all enquired for
    his brother, he said that they had taken different roads, and
    that he was ignorant where he was. The white cow was greatly
    admired, but suddenly a small bird perched itself on its horns
    and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of
    the white cow he coveted.’ Thus, through a bird into which
    the heart of the murdered man had been transformed, did the
    truth become known, and everyone departed with horror from the
    presence of the murderer.[366]

European folk-lore accounts for the redness of the robin’s breast,
either by the theory that he extracted a thorn from the thorn-crown of
Christ, or by the theory that he daily bears a drop of water to quench
the flames of hell. For either reason he might be justly called the
friend of man; but for the bird’s friendliness the Chippewya Indians
give a more poetical explanation than either of the above. There was
once, they say, a hunter so ambitious that his only son should signalise
himself by endurance, when he came to the time of life to undergo the
fast preparatory to his choosing his guardian spirit, that after the lad
had fasted for eight days, his father still pressed him to persevere. But
next day, when the father entered the hut, his son had paid the penalty
of violated nature, and in the form of a robin had just flown to the top
of the lodge. There, before he flew away to the woods, he entreated his
father not to mourn his transformation. ‘I shall be happier,’ he said,
‘in my present state than I could have been as a man. I shall always be
the friend of men and keep near their dwellings; I could not gratify your
pride as a warrior, but I will cheer you by my songs.... I am now free
from cares and pains, my food is furnished by the fields and mountains,
and my path is in the bright air.’[367]

Not less poetical is the Hervey Islanders’ account of the origin of some
peculiarities among fishes, and notably of the well-known conformation of
the head of the common sole. They relate how Ina, leaving the house of
her rich parents because she had been beaten and scolded for suffering
the arch-thief, Nyana, to steal certain treasures left in her charge,
resolved to make her way to the sea beach, and from thence to the Sacred
Isle that lay across the sea at the place where the sun set. Arrived
at the shore, she first asked the small fish, the _avini_, to bear her
across the sea; but the avini, unable to support her weight, soon let
her fall into the water, for which Ina in her anger struck it repeatedly
with her foot, thereby causing those beautiful stripes on its sides which
are called to this day ‘Ina’s tattooing.’ Trying next the _paoro_, and
meeting with the same mischance, she caused it in the same way to bear
ever after those blue marks which are now its glory; and it is said to be
historically true that tattooing on that island ‘was simply an imitation
of the stripes on the avini and the paoro.’ Then the _api_, a white
fish, incurring the same displeasure, became at once and for ever of
an intensely black hue. The sole, indeed, carried Ina farther than the
others, but no farther than the breakers by the reef; and Ina, now wild
with rage, stamped with such fury on its head that its underneath eye
was removed to the upper side, and thus it was condemned ever afterwards
to swim flatwise, unlike other fish, because one side of its face had no
eye. How Ina then caused a protuberance on the forehead of all sharks,
known to this day as Ina’s bump, by cracking a cocoa-nut she wished to
drink out of on the forehead of a shark that bore her, how the shark then
left her, and how she finally reached the Sacred Isle on the back of the
king of sharks, and became the wife of Timirau, the king of all fish, may
be read in further detail in Mr. Gill’s interesting collection of Myths
and Songs from the South Pacific.[368]

The necessity for a reason for everything, exemplified in these
traditions, exercises its influence on mythology itself, reasons being
invented for inexplicable customs or beliefs just as they are for strange
phenomena in nature. The custom, for instance, of hunting a wren to death
once a year, which has been observed in Ireland, the isle of Man, and
the South of France, has for its general explanation a belief that the
wren is a fairy who, after having decoyed many men to meet their deaths
in the sea, took the form of a wren to escape the plot laid for her by
a certain knight-errant. But the Irish have found quite another reason
for the custom, having invented the story, that on the eve of the battle
of the Boyne the Irish had stolen up to King William’s sleeping camp and
were on the point of putting an end to the heretics, when a wren hopped
upon the drum of a Protestant drummer, and by thus waking him caused
their defeat; a defeat which they avenge on every anniversary of the day
by the persecution of that unhappy bird.[369]

The story of the wren is well known; how, when the birds were competing
for the kingship by the test of the greatest height attained in flying,
the wren hid in the eagle’s feathers, and, when the eagle had flown
far beyond the other birds, darted himself yet a little above it. It
is said that the first appearance of this story is in a collection of
beast-fables, composed by a rabbi in the 13th century.[370] But the
resemblance between the wren-story as it is told in Germany or Ireland,
and a story of a linnet as told by the Odjibwas of North America, is so
striking a testimony of the way in which closely similar tales are framed
independently, that the two stories are worth comparing.

    _THE ODJIBWA STORY._

    ‘The birds met together one day to try which could fly the
    highest. Some flew up very swift, but soon got tired, and were
    passed by others of stronger wing. But the eagle went up beyond
    them all, and was ready to claim the victory, when the grey
    linnet, a very small bird, flew from the eagle’s back, where
    it had perched unperceived, and being fresh and unexhausted,
    succeeded in going the highest. When the birds came down and
    met in council to award the prize, it was given to the eagle,
    because that bird had not only gone up nearer to the sun than
    any of the larger birds, but it had carried the linnet on its
    back.’

    For this reason the eagle’s feathers became the most honourable
    marks of distinction a man could bear.[371]

    _THE IRISH STORY._

    ‘The birds all met together one day, and settled among
    themselves that whichever of them could fly highest was to be
    the king of all. Well, just as they were on the hinges of being
    off, what does the little rogue of a wren do, but hop up and
    perch himself unbeknown on the eagle’s tail. So they flew and
    flew ever so high, till the eagle was miles above all the rest,
    and could not fly another stroke, he was so tired. “Then,”
    says he, “I’m king of the birds....” “You lie,” says the wren,
    darting up a perch and a half above the big fellow. Well, the
    eagle was so mad to think how he was done, that when the wren
    was coming down, he gave him a stroke of his wing, and from
    that day to this the wren was never able to fly further than a
    hawthorn bush.’[372]

It is impossible to assign limits either to the vitality or to the
range of a story. If the commerce which has ever prevailed between the
different tribes of the world, as it prevails to this day, either by
conquest or by barter, has caused so wide a dispersion of the races and
products of the earth, the wonder would rather be if the products of
men’s thoughts and fancies had not prevailed so widely, had not taken so
deep root in man’s memory, seeing that they cost nothing either to carry
or to keep. For many stories therefore of wide range, agreeing in such
minute particulars as to render difficult the theory of their independent
origin, the mystery of their resemblance is amply solved by the theory of
their gradual dispersion, without their proving anything as to the common
origin of those who tell them. The story, for instance, of Faithful
John, the central idea of which is, that a friend can only apprise
some one of a danger he will incur on his wedding night, by himself
incurring suspicion and being turned into stone, is told with little
variation in Bohemia, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and the discovery of the
leading thought in a story in India makes it possible that it was there
originated.[373] In Polynesia, again, the story of stopping the motion
of the sun is widely spread; in New Zealand, Maui makes ropes of flax,
goes with his brothers to the point where the sun rises, hides from it by
day, and when it rises next day succeeds in his purpose before letting
it go further. In Tahiti, Maui is a priest, or chief of olden time, who
builds a marae which must be finished by the evening, and who therefore
seizes the sun by its rays and binds him to a tree till his work is
finished. In Hawaii Maui stops the sun till evening, because his wife has
to finish a certain dress by twilight. In Samoa, Maui appears as Itu, a
man who is anxious to build a house of great stones, but is unable to do
so because the sun goes too fast; he therefore takes a boat and lays nets
in the sun’s path, but as these are broken through, he makes a noose,
catches the sun, and only lets it free when his house is finished.[374]
Obviously, these stories are all related, but it is impossible to say
whether they spread from any one place to the others, or whether they
are remnants, retained in altered form, from the primitive mythology
of a common Polynesian home. It is, however, worthy of notice that in
Wallachian fairy lore also a cow pushes back the sun to the hour of
mid-day, to enable a youth who had fallen asleep to accomplish his
task,[375] and that the idea of catching the sun is not unknown to the
mythology of America.

There is, however, a large class of stories which arise independently,
and owe their remarkable family likeness neither to a common descent nor
to importation, but to the natural promptings of the imagination. Thus,
the idea of a tree so high that it reaches the heavens, and consequently
of the heavens as thereby attainable, naturally produces such a story as
Jack and the Beanstalk, a story which is said to be found all over the
world, but the versions of which agree in no other single point than in
the admission to the sky by dint of climbing.[376] In the same way many
of the ideas common to the Indo-European nations, and so often explained
as originally derived from the fanciful meteorology of the primitive
Aryans, find startling analogues outside the Aryan family, where there
is no reason to suppose them anything more than the direct offspring of
the dreamer or the story-teller. If the constancy of Penelope to Ulysses,
tormented by her suitors, is simply that of the evening light, assailed
by the powers of darkness, till the return of her husband the sun in the
morning,[377] shall we apply the same interpretation to the story of the
wife of the Red Swan, of the Odjibwas, who, when he returns from the
discovery of his magic arrows from the abode of the departed spirits,
finds that his two brothers have been quarrelling for the possession of
his wife, but been quarrelling in vain?[378] If the legend of Cadmus
recovering Europa, after she has been carried away by the white bull, the
spotless cloud, means that ‘the sun must journey westward until he sees
again the beautiful tints which greeted his eyes in the morning,’[379]
shall we say the same of a story current in North America, to the effect
that a man once had a beautiful daughter whom he forbade to leave the
lodge lest she should be carried off by the king of the buffaloes; and
that as she sat, notwithstanding, outside the house, combing her hair,
‘all of a sudden the king of the buffaloes came dashing on, with his herd
of followers, and taking her between his horns, away he cantered over
plains, plunged into a river which bounded his land, and carried her
safely to his lodge on the other side,’ whence she was finally recovered
by her father?[380]

Again, in Hindu mythology, Urvasi came down from heaven and became the
wife of the son of Budha, only on condition that two pet rams should
never be taken from her bedside and that she should never behold her
lord undressed. The immortals, however, wishing Urvasi back in heaven,
contrived to steal the rams; and as the king pursued the robbers with
his sword in the dark, the lightning revealed his person, the compact
was broken, and Urvasi disappeared.[381] This same story is found in
different forms among many people of Aryan and Turanian descent, the
central idea being that of a man marrying someone of aerial or aquatic
origin, and living happily with her till he breaks the condition on which
her residence with him depends. Thus there is the story of Raymond
of Toulouse, who chances in the hunt upon the beautiful Melusina at a
fountain and lives with her happily till he discovers her fish-nature and
she vanishes; but exactly parallel stories come no less from Borneo, the
Celebes, or North America than from Ireland or Germany; for which reason
it seems sufficient to receive them simply as they stand, as fairy tales
natural to every tribe of mankind that has a fixed belief in supernatural
beings, rather than to explain these wonderful wives as the ‘bright
fleecy clouds of early morning, which vanish as the splendour of the sun
is unveiled.’[382] Let us compare the story as it is told in America and
Bornoese tradition.

    _THE BORNOESE STORY._

    A certain Bornoese, when far from home, once climbed a tree to
    rest, and whilst there ‘was attracted by the most ravishing
    music, which ever and anon came nearer and nearer, until it
    seemingly approached the very roots of the tree, when a pure
    well of water burst out, at the bottom of which were seven
    beautiful virgins. Ravished at the sight, and determined to
    make one of them his son’s wife, he made a lasso of his rattan,
    and drew her up.’ One day, however, her husband hit her in
    anger, and she was taken up to the sky.[383]

    _THE AMERICAN STORY._

    Wampee, a great hunter, once came to a strange prairie, where
    he heard faint sounds of music, and looking up saw a speck in
    the sky, which proved itself to be a basket containing twelve
    most beautiful maidens, who, on reaching the earth, forthwith
    set themselves to dance. He tried to catch the youngest, but
    in vain; ultimately he succeeded by assuming the disguise of a
    mouse. He was very attentive to his new wife, who was really a
    daughter of one of the stars, but she wished to return home, so
    she made a wicker basket secretly, and by help of a charm she
    remembered, ascended to her father.[384]

It has been imagined that all the fairy tales of the world may be reduced
to certain fundamental story roots; but these story roots we should look
for not in the clouds, but upon the earth, not in the various aspects of
nature, but in the daily occurrences and surroundings of savage life. The
uniformity which appears in so many of the myths or fairy tales of the
world would thus simply arise from a uniformity of the experiences of
existence. The evidence concerning savage astro-mythology is conclusive,
that nothing is conceived of the heavenly bodies that has not its
prototype on earth; that the skies do but mirror the events or objects
of earth, where the memorable incidents of the chase or the battle are
told of the stars: nor is it strange if in a few years such tales should
have so gained in the telling, that it is often impossible to separate
the fact from the fiction, or to distinguish a crude supposition from the
creation of a fanciful myth.

For although it is difficult to lay down the boundaries between the
language of metaphor and the language of fact, inasmuch as what is faith
to one man is often but fancy to another, there is reason to believe
that savages really do very often confuse celestial with terrestrial
phenomena, that, for instance, the Zulus, when they speak of the stars as
the children of the sky and of the sun as their father, are expressing
rather a real belief than a poetical fancy, and that the conception
of the sun and moon as physically related is an actual belief quite
as much as a merely figurative explanation. If this be true, a large
part of mythology must be regarded not as a poetical explanation of
things, suggested by the grammatical form of words or by roots that lend
similar names to the most diverse conceptions, but as the direct effect
of primitive thought in its application to the phenomena of nature. It
is more likely that the early thoughts of men should have framed their
language than that the form of their language should have preceded
their form of thought. And if it be shown (by those who hold that the
personification of impersonal things is consequent on the grammatical
structure of a language) that the Kafirs and other tribes of South
Africa, whose language does not denote sex, are almost destitute of
myths and fables, whilst tribes who employ a sex-denoting language have
many,[385] it is noticeable that such personification has been shown to
exist among the natives of Australia, between the different dialects of
whose language it is said to have been one of the points of resemblance,
that they recognised no distinctions of gender.[386]

A story of the Ottawa Indians (by internal evidence posterior in date
to their acquaintance with guns and ships) may be taken as a sample of
savage traditions, which prove that the convertibility of mankind with
sun, moon, or stars, is as natural a belief to a savage, as that his
next-door neighbour may turn at pleasure into a wolf or a snake. Six
young men finding themselves on a hill-top in close proximity to the
sun, resolved to travel to it. Two of them finally reached a beautiful
plain, lighted by the moon, which, as they advanced, appeared as an aged
woman with a white face, who spoke to them and promised to conduct them
to her brother, then absent on his daily course through the sky. This
woman ‘they knew from her first appearance’ to be the moon. When she
introduced them to her brother, ‘the sun motioned them with his hand to
follow him,’ and they accompanied him with some difficulty till they were
restored safe and sound to the earth.[387] So Sir G. Grey, collecting
native legends concerning a cave in Australia, found that the only point
of agreement was ‘that originally _the moon who was a man_ had lived
there.’[388]

But, except on the assumption that savages are idiots, it is impossible
that such legends should not only obtain currency, but enjoy the vitality
of traditions, unless they conform to certain canons of belief, unless
they contain nothing inherently incredible. A fairy tale pleases a child,
not because it is known to be impossible, but because it carries the
mind further afield than actual experience does into the realms of the
possible; and a tale understood to be impossible would be as insipid to
a savage as it would be to a child. Schoolcraft, in reference to Indian
popular tales, speaks of the ‘belief of the narrators and listeners
in every wild and improbable thing told;’ and says, ‘Nothing is too
capacious for Indian belief.’[389] If, as their stories abundantly show,
they feel no difficulty in conceiving the instantaneous transformation
of men not merely into something living, but into stones or stumps, the
fact ceases to be strange, that in Indian faith ‘many of the planets are
transformed adventurers.’[390] What, then, more natural than that all
over the world the deeds of great tribesmen should be transferred to the
skies, and, under the action of uniform laws of fancy, should in time
become so overgrown with fiction as to pass into the domain of the purest
mythology, till at last they appear as mere figurative expressions of the
daily life of nature, of the struggle between the day and the night, of
the dispersion of the clouds by the sun?

The condition of things which makes such conceptions of the heavens
the natural outcome of primitive speculation may perhaps, to a certain
extent, be recovered by observation of the laws conditioning the actually
existent thoughts of the savage world.

The first entrance into Wonderland lies through Dreamland. Schoolcraft’s
testimony that ‘a dream or a fact is alike potent in the Indian mind’
accords with much other evidence to the effect that, with savages, the
sensations of the sleeping or waking life are equally real or but vaguely
distinguished. A native of Zululand will leave his work and travel to his
home, perhaps a hundred miles away, to test the truth of a dream,[391]
and so great is the importance the Zulus attach to such monitions, that
‘he who dreams is the great man of the village;’ whilst the gift to them
of ‘_sight by night in dreams_’ is ascribed to their first ancestor,
the great Unkulunkulu.[392] But how far surpassing even the normal
experiences of sleep must be the dreams of men in the hunting or nomad
state, the law of whose lives is either a want or an excess of food!
What richer fund for story-material can be imagined than the dreams of a
savage, or what more likely to introduce him to the mysteries of romance
than recollections of those sudden transformations or those weird images,
which have haunted the repose of his slumbering hours? And into what
strange lands of beauty and plenty, into what secrets of the skies,
would not the flights of his sleep give him an insight! In all fairy
tales and all mythology a remarkable conformity to the deranged ideas
of sleep does thus occur; and especially do the stories of the lower
races, as for instance those of Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ read
far more like the recollections of bad dreams than like the worn ideas
of a once pure religion, or of a poetical interpretation of nature. The
most beautiful of the Indian legends, that of the origin of Indian corn,
was in native tradition actually referred to a dream, and to a dream
purposely resorted to, to gain a clearer insight into the mysteries of
nature.[393] And as dreams do but deal with the incidents of the waking
life, exaggerating them and contorting them, but never passing beyond
them, may not the somewhat uniform incidents of savage life, whether of
hunting, fishing, fighting, or travelling, offer some explanation of that
general similarity, which is so conspicuous an element in the comparative
mythology or the fairy-lore of the world?

Then the fact that the dead reappear in dreams at that season of the
night in which also the stars are seen, would tend to confirm the
idea of some community of nature between the dead and the stars, such
community as is indeed not unfrequently found, as where the Aurora
Borealis or the Milky Way are identified with the souls of the departed.
So, too, a Californian tribe is mentioned as having believed that chiefs
and medicine-men became heavenly bodies after their death,[394] and even
Tasmanians could point to the stars they would go to at death.[395]

But there is another reason which would still further create a mental
confusion between the deeds of a mortal on earth and the motions of some
luminary in heaven, and that is the language of adulation, which, from
ascribing the possession of the sky to a chief, in order to gratify
him, becomes imperceptibly the language of belief. It is common for the
Zulus to say of a chief, ‘That man is the owner of heaven and everything
is his,’ and a native once expressed his gratitude to a missionary by
pointing to the heaven and saying, ‘Sir, the sun is yours.’ ‘It does
not suffice them to honour a great man unless they place the heaven
on his shoulders; they do not believe what they say, they merely wish
to ascribe all greatness to him.’ If when a chief goes to war the sky
becomes overcast, they say, ‘The heaven of the chief feels that the
chief is suffering.’ Nor was any chief known to deprecate the use of
such language; he ‘expected to have it said always that the heaven was
his.’[396]

Obviously, however, there is no fast line between the language of
flattery and the language of fact. From the Tahitians, who would speak of
their kings’ houses as the clouds of heaven, or the Kafirs of Ethiopia,
who called their kings lords of the sun and moon, it is easy to trace
the progress of thought which actually led the latter people to pray to
their kings for rain, fine weather, or the cessation of storms.[397]
The Zulus, like many other savages, think of the sky as at no great
distance from the earth, and thus as the roof of their king’s palace in
the same way that the earth is its floor. ‘Utshaka claimed to be king
of heaven as well as earth, and ordered the rain-doctors to be killed,
because in assuming power to control the weather they were interfering
with his royal prerogative.’[398] But if such confusion between royalty
and divinity can exist in the savage mind whilst the king is on earth,
how natural is it that a man, associated for so long in his lifetime
with power over the elements, should, after his removal from earth
and from sight, become still more mixed up with elemental forces, or
perhaps even localised in some point of space! The word Zulu actually
means the Heavens, and in Zululand King of the Zulus means king of the
heavens,[399] so that when the king is drawn in his waggon to the centre
of the kraal, it is not surprising that, among the other acclamations,
such as ‘Lion, King of the World,’ with which his creeping subjects
salute him, they should actually salute him as Zulu, Heaven.[400] It can
only be from the use of such language that among the Zulus ‘rain, storm,
sunshine, earthquakes, and all else which we ascribe to natural causes
are brought about or retarded by _various people_ to whom this power is
ascribed. Every rain that comes is spoken of as belonging to somebody,
and in a drought they say that the owners of rain are at variance among
themselves.’[401]

That in aftertime, from these modes of thinking and speaking, the
attributes of a Zulu or Tahitian chief might become those of a
heaven-supporter, such as Atlas, or of a cloud-gatherer, such as Zeus, or
that, according as his body was consigned to the earth or the sea, such a
chief might become the earth-shaker or the ocean-ruler, is not only what
might be expected _à priori_, but what is to some extent justified by
facts. In South Africa the word which the missionaries have adopted for
both Hottentots and Kafirs as the name for the Deity, from its being the
nearest approach to the Christian conception, is believed to be derived
from two words signifying Wounded Knee, a term applied generations back
to a Hottentot sorcerer of great fame and skill, who happened to have
sustained some injury to his knees. ‘Having been held in high repute for
extraordinary powers during life, he (Utixo) continued to be invoked
even after death as one who could still relieve and protect; and hence
in process of time he became nearest to their first conceptions of
God.’[402] And the legend of Mannan Mac Lear, mythical first inhabitant
and first legislator of the Isle of Man, discloses a germ of similar
origin underlying the myth of a culture-hero, as his story preserved in
the following lines will show:

  ‘This merchant Manxman of the solemn smile,
  First legislator of our rock-throned isle,
  Dwelt in a fort (withdrawn from vulgar sight),
  Cloud-capped Baroole, upon thy lofty height.
  From New Year tide round to the Ides of Yule,
  Nature submitted to his wizard rule.
  Her secret force he could with charms compel
  To brew a storm or raging tempests quell;
  Make one man seem like twenty in a fray,
  And drive the stranger (_i.e._ Scotch invaders) over seas away.’[403]

In other words, he was a great sorcerer and a great warrior, whose deeds
lived after him in story, and whose name lent itself as a nucleus, like
that of Charlemagne or of Alfred, for every adventure that was strange,
for every imagination that was wonderful.

There seems, indeed, no reason to seek for any higher genesis than this
for any of the culture-heroes of any mythology, notwithstanding that they
have with so much unanimity been forced into identification with the sun.
Zeus himself means but the same thing as Zulu, namely, the Sky or Heaven,
so that it is only natural that nothing that could be told of the sky
‘was not in some form or other ascribed to Zeus,’[404] just as we see
that modern Zulus ascribe to their chiefs all atmospheric phenomena, and
actually confer on them the appellation, Zulu. There is indeed nothing
in which Zeus differs essentially from Manabozho of North American
mythology, from Krishna of the Hindus, from Maui of the Polynesians, from
Quawteaht of the rude Ahts, or from Kutka of the still ruder Kamschadals.
The stories told of one may be more refined than those told of another,
but in no case are these divinities more than names, which serve as
convenient centres for the grouping of memorable feats or fictions.
Such names serve also, when once men have begun to reflect on the arts
or customs of their lives, as sufficient explanations of their origin;
and just as we find the institution of marriage attributed in China, or
Greece, or India to some mythical hero, so we find the discovery of fire
and light, or the invention of remarkable arts, duly ascribed to some
hypothetical originator. In Polynesian mythology, Maui, in Thlinkeet
Indian mythology, Yehl, played the part of Prometheus in procuring fire
for the use of men. From seeing a spider make its web, Manabozho invented
the art of making fishing nets; and Kutka (who, like Manabozho, is also
in some sense the maker of all things) taught the Kamschadals how to
build huts, how to catch birds, and beasts, and fish.[405] The supreme
deity of Finnish mythology not only brought fire for men from heaven but
was the inventor of music; yet like the other gods he was but a magician,
able to destroy the world at pleasure, to hold the sun captive in a box,
to conquer all monsters and heal all diseases.[406]

American mythology abounds in culture-heroes, mythical personages who
taught men useful arts and laws, and left, in the reverence attached to
their memory, a quasi-religious system for their posterity.[407] These
too have been resolved into observation of the phenomena of the sun or
the dawn. Manabozho or Michabo, the ancestor of the Algonquins, whose
name literally means the Great Hare, and conferred peculiar respect on
the clan who bore it as their totem, means in reality (according to this
theory) the Great Light, the Spirit of Dawn, or under another aspect
the North-west Wind; the confusion between the hare and the dawn being
supposed to have arisen from a root _wab_, which gave two words, one
meaning _white_ and the other _hare_, so that what was originally told
of the White Light came to be told of a Hare, and what was at first but
a personification of natural phenomena became a tissue of inconsistent
absurdities.[408] Ingenious, however, as such a solution undoubtedly is,
it is easier to believe that the stories of the Great Hare have grown
round a man, called, in complete accordance with American custom, after
the hare, and once a famous sorcerer or warrior like Mannan Mac Lear;
for in all the more recent traditions of him, there is much more of the
magician or shaman than of the wind or the dawn. He turns at will into a
wolf or an oak stump, he converses with all creation, he outwits serpents
by his cunning, he has a lodge from which he utters oracles; as brother
of the winds, by reason of his swiftness, there is no incongruity in
the idea that since his death he is the director of storms, and resides
in the region of his brother, the North Wind. It is curious that he
is swallowed up by the king of the fish, in this resembling in Aryan
mythology Pradyumna, the son of Vishnu, who after being swallowed by a
fish is ultimately restored to life,[409] or in Polynesian mythology
Maui, who is rescued by the sky from the embrace of the jelly fish. Maui,
like Tell, Sigurd, Hercules, and others, has recently been discovered
to be the sun, the fish which swallows him signifying really the earth;
for does not the earth swallow the sun every night, and is not the sun
only freed by the eastern sky in the morning?[410] Doubtless, on such a
reading of his life, Manabozho has as just a claim as Mani to a place in
the solar system; but then—who that has ever lived and died but has the
same?

Samé, the great name of Brazilian legend, came across the ocean from
the rising sun; he had power over the elements and tempests; the trees
of the forests would recede to make room for him, the animals used to
crouch before him; lakes and rivers became solid for him; and he taught
the use of agriculture and magic. Like him, Bochica, the great lawgiver
of the Muyscas and son of the sun, he who invented for them their
calendar and regulated their festivals, had a white beard, a detail in
which all the American culture-heroes agree.[411] It is not, however,
on this particular feature, so much as on their _whiteness_ in general
that stress has been laid to identify them with the great White Light of
Dawn. Of the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, Dr. Brinton says, ‘Like all the dawn
heroes he, too, was represented of white complexion, clothed in long
white robes.’ The white is the emphatic thing about them. So the name
Viracocha of the Peruvians, translated by Oviedo, ‘the foam of the sea,’
is, we are to believe, a metaphor: ‘the dawn rises above the horizon as
the snowy foam on the surface of the lake.’[412] But Peruvian tradition
was confused as to whether Viracocha was the highest god and creator of
the world, or only the first Inca; and such confusion between humanity
and divinity, which is everywhere the normal result of the deification of
the dead, is at least a more natural account of the origin of his worship
than a fancied resemblance between the sea-foam and the dawn.[413] Heitsi
Eibip, whom the Namaqua Hottentots call their Great Father, and on whose
graves they throw stones for luck, so far resembles a solar hero that
he is believed to have come like Samé from the East; yet, though much
that is wonderful already attaches to his memory, he has not yet thrown
off his human personality, but is known to have been merely a sorcerer
of great fame;[414] so that in his deification we have almost living
evidence of the process here assumed to have operated widely in the
formation of the world’s mythology.

To the influence of the language of adulation in the formation of
mythology, may also be added that of the language of affection or of
ridicule. Nicknames, taken at hazard from the animal world, or from any
object of earth, air, or water, would be obvious sources of improbable
stories, tending to the completest confusion between the doings of a
man and the attributes of the thing after which he was named. Nicknames
of affection would produce the same result; and if, as is likely,
other people besides the Finns call their daughters Moon, Sunshine, or
Water-glimmer, it is easy to see how, for instance, the departure of
Sunshine as a bride might come afterwards to be explained as a myth of
the dawn or of twilight, and in the same way anything else that happened
to her.[415]

An elemental explanation has been applied with such uniform effect,
first to Aryan and then to Polynesian and American mythology, that in
the resort to a more natural, albeit less poetical hypothesis, there may
be danger of carrying opposing theories too far. There are, however,
certain obvious limits; nor, if we doubt whether man in a primitive state
really had the poetical views of nature so generally claimed for him,
need we deny to him all poetical origination in the construction of his
mythology. Take, for instance, this typical Aryan passage, ‘By the early
Aryan mind the howling wind was conceived as a great dog or wolf. As the
fearful beast was heard speeding by the windows or over the house-top,
the inmates trembled, for none knew but his own soul might forthwith be
required of him. Hence to this day, among ignorant people, the howling
of a dog is supposed to portend a death in the family.’[416] When we
find that a dog’s howling portends the death of its master among the
Nubians,[417] and is regarded as a dreaded omen by the Kamschadals,[418]
as well as by the Fijians,[419] and that the Esquimaux lay a dog’s head
by the grave of a child to show it the way to the land of souls, we may
safely reject the Aryan pedigree of the superstition, nor go any farther
for its explanation than the nature of the sound itself. But though
Aryan mythology may be taken to have grown, like any other, round human
personalities, and though popular superstitions are in many instances
the primary products of the laws of psychology, ranking rather among
the sources than the _débris_ of mythology, there is proof from the
fairy-lore of savages that some of them have so far advanced in thought
as to be not incapable of personifying abstract ideas. Dr. Rink alludes
to the tendency of the Esquimaux to give figurative explanations of
things, to personify, for instance, human qualities, just as they are
personified in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’[420] The Chippewya Indians
personified sleep as Weeng, a giant insect that was once seen on a tree
in a wood, where it made a murmuring sound with its wings; and it was
generally conceived to cause sleep by sending a number of little fairies
to beat drowsy foreheads with their tiny clubs.[421] And the Odjibwas,
with a fancy which has been so poetically preserved by Longfellow,
identified Winter with an old hoary-headed man called Peboan, Spring with
a young man of quick step and rosy face called Segwun.[422]

The testimony, therefore, afforded by the observation of modern savage
races as to the growth of mythology discloses several ways in which,
as it is being formed now, we may infer that it was formed thousands
of years ago. The evidence of Steller that the Kamschadals explained
everything to themselves according to the liveliness of their fancy,
letting nothing escape their examination,[423] accords with evidence
concerning other races to the effect that some intellectual curiosity
enters as a constituent into the lowest human intelligence, giving birth
to explanations which are as absurd to us as they are natural to their
original framers. A ready capacity for invention is no rare trait of the
savage character. Sir G. Grey found that the capability of Australian
natives to invent marvels and wonders was proportioned to the quantity
of food he offered them, and that rather than confess ignorance of a
thing they would _invent_ a tradition;[424] whilst in the fondness of the
Koranna Hottentots, as they sit round their evening fires, of relating
fictitious adventures, lies a source of legendary lore which is not
likely to be limited to South Africa, and is probably aided elsewhere as
it is there by the knowledge, common to so many savage tribes, of the
preparation of intoxicating drinks.[425] If to these sources of mythology
be added the help supplied by dreams to the elaboration of fiction; the
misconceptions effected in traditions by the language of flattery, of
affection, or of ridicule; and, lastly, the tendency, probably consequent
on such confusion, to personify things or even abstract ideas; the wonder
will no longer be that the mythology of the different races of the world
displays so much uniformity, but that uniformity within limited ranges
should ever have been taken as a proof of a common ethnological origin.




IX.

_COMPARATIVE FOLK-LORE._


Folk-lore is often explained as the remains of ancient mythology, but
the explanation, though perhaps true of some traditional lore still
surviving in legends and fairy tales, seems of doubtful application to
those popular superstitions yet so prevalent among us, of which our
kitchens, our cottages, and our nurseries are the chief depositories.
Beliefs, fancies, and customs, however trivial in themselves, and locally
absurd, gain an interest from the area they cover and the races they
connect; suggesting past unions between nations now remote, in the same
way as the smallest weeds are capable of telling, by their geographical
dispersion, of lands that once stretched where seas now roll. To take
some instances. The English tradition that a swallow’s nest is lucky,
and its life protected by imaginary penalties, is one that in isolation
we should naturally and rightly disregard. But when we find that the
belief belongs to Germany, and that the supposed penalties are the same
in Yorkshire as they are in Swabia, our wonder is aroused; and when we
further learn that in China, too, the swallow’s nest is lucky and its
life inviolate, we become aware of a possible history and antiquity
attaching to the superstition, which offer an inviting field for
speculation and study. The belief, that the first appearance of mice in
a house betokens death, becomes of interest when we find it in Russia as
well as in Devonshire. Mothers there are both in Germany and in England
who fear their children may grow up to be thieves if their nails are cut
before their first year is over. Such superstitions, as we call them,
had, without doubt, once a reason; in some cases still to be traced, in
others effaced by the wear and tear of time. By the application to them
of the comparative method not only may we hope to explain and connect
ideas otherwise inexplicable, but also to come to conclusions not
uninteresting from an archæological point of view. For if it can be shown
that they are the remains of ancient barbarism rather than of ancient
mythology, their testimony may be added to that, long since given by the
more material relics and witnesses of early times, concerning the general
history of civilisation.

For the existence of similar traditions as of similar fairy-tales in
widely remote districts there are three possible hypotheses. These are,
migration, community of origin, or similarity of development. Either
they have spread from one place to another, or they are the legacies of
times when the people possessing them were actually united, or they have
sprung up independently in different localities, in virtue of the natural
laws of mental growth. It may be difficult of any given belief to say to
which of these three classes it belongs; but there are many beliefs, so
alike in general features, yet so divergent in detail, as best to accord
with the theory of a common descent or a common development. Some, for
instance, may be so common to the different nations of one stock, as to
be traceable to periods anterior to their dispersion; whilst others, yet
more widely spread than these, suggest relationships between races of men
more fundamental and remote than can be detected in language, and point
to an affinity that is older and stronger than mere affinity of blood, an
affinity, that is, in the conceptions and fancies of primitive thought.
For where actual relationship is not proved by language, analogies in
tradition are better accounted for by supposing similar grooves of mental
development than by any other theory. Philology may prove a relationship
between, let us say, the Nixens of Germany and the Nisses of Scandinavia:
but there is no relationship beyond similarity of conception between
the Nereids of antiquity and the mermaids of the North, or between the
Brownies of Scotland and the Lares of Latium. Children, of whatever race
or country they may be, dislike the dark, nor is it thought necessary to
account for this common trait by any theory of connection or descent.
So it is with nations. They are or were, in the face of nature, but as
children in the dark, and the nearly similar phenomena of sun and storm,
breeze and calm, have sufficed to create for them, in their several
homes, many of those fears and fancies we find common to them all.

No one who has not turned special attention to the subject, can form
any conception of the mass of purely pagan ideas, which, varnished over
by Christianity, but barely hidden by it, grow in rank profusion in our
very midst and exercise a living hold, which it is impossible either to
realise or to fathom, on the popular mind. Like old Roman or British
remains, buried under subsequent accumulations of earth and stones, or
superficially concealed by an overgrowth of herbage, uninjured during
all the length of time they have lain unobserved, there they lie just
beneath the surface of nineteenth-century life, as indelible records
of our mental history and origin. Only in the higher social strata can
they be deemed extinct; but if it can no longer be said, as it was in
the seventeenth century, that most houses of the West-end of London have
the horse-shoe on the threshold,[426] yet it may still be said of many
a farm or cottage in the country. The astronomer Tycho Brahe, if he met
an old woman or hare on leaving home, would take the hint to turn back:
but it seems to be only the working population of England, Scotland,
or Germany who still do the same. Statistics show that the receipts of
omnibus and railway companies in France are less on Friday than on any
other day; and many a German that lay dead on the carnage fields of the
late war was found to have carried his word-charm as his safest shield
against sword or bullet. Most English villages still have their wise men
or women, whose powers range, like those of the shamans in savage tribes,
from ruling the planets to curing rheumatics or detecting thieves; and
witchcraft still has its believers, occasionally its victims, as of
yore.[427]

We who have been brought up to look upon the classification of things
into animal, vegetable, and mineral, as primary, or indeed intuitive,
are apt to forget that savages never classify, and that animate and
inanimate to them are both alike. Sir John Lubbock has collected
conclusive evidence that so inconceivable a confusion of thought
exists.[428] The Tahitians, who sowed some iron nails that young ones
might grow from them; the Esquimaux, who thought a musical-box the child
of a small hand-organ; the Bushmen, who mistook a large waggon for the
mother of some smaller ones, show the tendency of savages to identify
motion with life, and to attribute feelings and relations such as actuate
or connect themselves to everything that moves of itself or is capable of
being moved. A native sent by one missionary to another with some loaves,
and a letter stating the number, having eaten two of them and been
detected through the letter, took the precaution the next time to put the
letter under a stone that it might not _see_ the theft committed.[429]
Now there are numerous superstitions, which there is reason to think are
relics of this savage state of thought, when all that existed existed
under the same conditions as man himself, capable of the same feelings,
and subject to the same wants and sorrows. Take, for example, bees. Bees
are credited with a perfect comprehension of all that men do and utter,
and, as members themselves of the family they belong to, they must
be treated in every way as human in their emotions. On the day of the
Purification in France it is customary in some parts for women to read
the Gospel of the day to the bees.[430] French children are taught that
the inmates of the hive will come out to sting them for any bad language
uttered within their hearing; and in South Russia it is believed ‘that
if any robbery be committed where a number of hives are kept, the whole
stock will gradually diminish, and in a short time die; for bees, they
say, will not suffer thieving.’[431] Many persons have probably at some
time of their lives, on seeing a crape-covered hive, learnt on inquiry
that the bees were in mourning for some member of their owner’s family.
In Suffolk, when a death occurs in a house, the inmates immediately
tell the bees, ask them formally to the funeral, and fix crape on their
hives; otherwise it is believed they would die or desert. And the same
custom, for the same reason, prevails, with local modifications, not only
in nearly every English county, but very widely over the continent. In
Normandy and Brittany may be seen, as in England, the crape-set hives;
in Yorkshire some of the funeral bread, in Lincolnshire some cake and
sugar, may be seen at the hive door; and a Devonshire nurse on her way
to a funeral has been known to send back a child to perform the duty
she herself had forgotten, of telling the bees. The usual explanation
of these customs and ideas is that they originated long ago with the
death or flight of some bees, consequent on the neglect they incurred
when the hand that once tended them could do so no longer. Yet a wider
survey of analogous facts leads to the explanation above suggested; for,
not to dwell on the fact that in some places in England they are informed
of weddings as well as of funerals, and their hives are decorated with
favours as well as with crape, the practice of giving information of
deaths extends in some parts not only to other animals as well, but, in
addition, to inanimate things. In Lithuania, deaths are announced, not
only to the bees, but to horses and cattle, by the rattling of a bunch of
keys, and the same custom is reported from Dartford in Kent. In the North
Riding, not long since, a farmer gravely attributed the loss of a cow
to his not having told it of his wife’s death. In Cornwall, the indoor
plants are often put into mourning as well as the hives; and at Rauen, in
North Germany, not only are the bees informed of their master’s death,
but the trees also, by means of shaking them. Near Speier, not only must
the bees be moved, but the wine and vinegar must be shaken, if it is
wished that they shall not turn bad. Near Würtemburg, the vinegar must be
shaken, the bird-cage hung differently, the cattle tied up differently,
and the beehive transposed. Near Ausbach the flower-pots must also
be moved, and the wine-casks knocked three times; while at Gernsheim,
not only must the wine in the cellar be shaken, to prevent it turning
sour, but the corn in the loft must be moved if the sown corn is to
sprout.[432] But all these customs, being too much alike to be unrelated,
and too widely spread to have sprung up without some reason, by some mere
caprice or coincidence, it is difficult to suggest any other reason for
them than that they go back to a time when not only bees and cattle, but
trees and flowers, vinegar and wine, were, like human beings, considered
liable to take offence, and capable also of being pacified by kind
treatment, since, according as their several temperaments predisposed
them, they were able, by deserting, dying, turning sour, or other
untoward conduct, to resent neglect or disrespect on the part of their
owners. Such beliefs belong to the lowest state of mental development, to
a time when the most obvious marks of natural differentiation were as yet
insufficient to produce corresponding distinctions in the minds of their
beholders.

Other popular traditions strengthen this interpretation. In Normandy
and Brittany it is thought that bees will not suffer themselves to be
bought or sold; in other words, that they would take offence if made the
subjects of sale and barter.[433] The same belief prevails in Cheshire,
Suffolk, Hampshire, Cornwall, and Devonshire, like the old Russian
rule that sacred images might not be spoken of as ‘bought’ but only as
‘exchanged for money.’[434] The value of bees is measured, not by money,
but by corn, hay, or some other exchangeable commodity; in Sussex, if any
money is given for bees, it must be gold. Connected with this idea of
the quasi-humanity of bees is the world-wide fear of slighting dangerous
animals by calling them by their customary names. Mahometan women dare
not call a snake a snake lest they should be bitten by one; Swedish
women avert the wrath of bears by speaking of them as old men. Livonian
fishermen, when at sea, fear to endanger their nets by calling any animal
by its common name. At Mecklenburg, in the twelve days after Christmas,
the fox goes by the appellation of the ‘Long Tail;’ even the timid mouse
by that of the ‘Floor-runner.’ The Esthonians at all times call the fox
‘Gray Coat,’ the bear ‘Broad-foot,’ and should they take the liberty of
too often mentioning the hare, their flax crops, they fear, would be in
peril. In Sweden people dare not mention to anyone in the course of the
day the number of fish they have caught, if they would catch any more; a
feeling to which is probably related the North-Country prejudice against
counting one’s fish before the day’s sport is over.

Witchcraft, although it represents a very low stage of religious
conception, yet in its primary idea of a sympathy or identity existing
between an original and its image, manifests some degree of intellectual
advancement. For the idea of vicarious or representative influence,
that if you wish to injure a man you can do so by an injury to a bit of
his clothing or a lock of his hair, is, so far as it goes, a spiritual
idea, presupposing notions about the interdependence of nature, and as
far as possible removed from what we understand by mere materialism.
Materialism indeed is one of the latest growths of the human mind, whilst
spiritualism is one of its earliest. For to a savage, everything that
exists lives and feels like himself, and the unseen spirits that surround
and affect him are as the motes in a sunbeam for variety and number. The
native Indian speaks of the earth as ‘the big plate where all the spirits
eat.’[435] Yet the fetichistic mode of thought is undoubtedly a low, and
to us an absurd one. Burnings in effigy may probably be traced to it, and
the stories so common in the annals of witchcraft of waxen images stuck
with pins or burned, in order to injure the person they represented,
undoubtedly belong to it. In America Kane found an Indian tribe who
believed that the hair of an enemy confined with a frog in a hole would
cause the owner of the hair to suffer the torments of the frog.[436] In
the Fiji Islands the health of a person can be made to fail with the
decay of a cocoa-nut buried under a temple.[437] The Finns are said to
this day to shoot in the water at images of their absent enemies. But
our own country has its analogies. In Suffolk, in the last century, if
an animal was thought to be bewitched, it was burned over a large fire,
under the idea that as it consumed away the author of its bewitchment
would consume away too. In Anglesey it is still believed that the name
of a person inscribed on a pipkin, containing a live frog stuck full of
pins, will injuriously affect the bearer of the name.

There are a numerous set of popular traditions which clearly relate to
the same state of thought. There is a feeling so wide that it may be
called European, that cut hair should always be burned, never thrown
away: the reason given in France, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, and
near Saalfeld in Germany, being, that its discovery by a witch would
subject its owner to sorcery; that generally given in England and also
in Swabia being, that if a bird took any of it for its nest the bearer
would suffer from headache or lose the rest of his hair. A similar idea
prevails about teeth: all over England children are taught to throw
extracted teeth into the fire, lest a dog by swallowing them should
induce the toothache. So with the nail that has scratched you, or the
knife that has cut you,—keep the nail or knife free from rust, and the
wound will not fester. But all such ideas are explained by those actually
existent in savage parts, by the custom, for instance, of the Fijians
of hiding their cut hair in the thatch of the house, that it may not be
used against them in witchcraft, or by the practice of Zulu sorcerers
to destroy their victims by burying some of his hair, his nails, or his
dress in a secret place, that the decay of the one may ensure that of
the other. And a similar philosophy lies at the root of most popular
charms for certain complaints. The remedies for warts, for instance, are
all vicarious. Both at home and abroad the most usual method is to rub
a black snail on the wart, and then to hang it on a hedge, trusting to
the sympathetic decay of the wart and snail. But a piece of stolen raw
meat, a stalk of wheat or a hair with as many knots in them as there are
warts on the hand, or two apple halves tied together, will, if applied
to the part and then buried, cause effectual relief. The essential thing
is to ensure the decay of the representative object. In Somersetshire a
good ague cure is to shut up a large black spider in a box and leave it
to perish, that spider and ague may disappear together. In many places,
it is thought that the whooping-cough may be transferred to a hairy
caterpillar tied in a bag round the neck: as the insect dies the cough
will go. And in Devonshire some of the patient’s hair is given to a dog
between two slices of buttered bread, that the dog may take the hair
and the cough together; whilst in Sunderland the head is shaved and the
hair (risking we must suppose a headache) left on a bush for the birds
to carry off, that the cough itself may pass to them. May it not be said
that such customs and fancies betray a mental constitution radically
different from our present one, taking us back and ever reminding us of
the savagery of our lineage as surely as do flint-flakes or bone-needles,
and teaching us that only by the slowest degrees can emancipation be
achieved from the superstitions, or, as some think, from the poetry, of
ignorance?

Again, trees, stones, waters, stars, serpents, or animals, are all to
this day worshipped far and wide by uncivilised races, and the marks
of a similar object-worship by our own race still survive in many a
popular tradition. A law of Canute earnestly forbade the heathenship of
reverencing ‘the sun or moon, fire or flood, waterwhylls, or stones,
or trees of the wood of any sort;’ yet, if such things are no longer
worshipped, it may be certainly said that some of them are still
reverenced. To take, for instance, tree-worship. Both in Guiana and
Africa the natives have so superstitious a reverence for the silk cotton
tree that they fear to cut it down lest death should ensue.[438] In New
Zealand mythology, Rata was rebuked and put to shame by the spirits
of the forest for cutting down a tall tree-divinity for making his
canoe.[439] The trees which occupy the most prominent place in European
folk-lore are the elder, the thorn, and the rowan or mountain ash. In
Denmark a twig of elder placed silently in the ground is a popular cure
for toothache or ague, whilst no furniture, least of all a cradle, may
be made of its wood; for the tree is protected by the Elder-mother,
without whose consent not a leaf may be touched, and who would strangle
the baby as it lay asleep. So also about Chemnitz, elder boughs fixed
before stalls keep witchcraft from the cattle; and wreaths of it hung up
in houses on Good Friday, after sunset, are believed to confer immunity
from the ravages of caterpillars. In Suffolk, it is the safest tree to
stand under in a thunderstorm, and misfortune will ensue if ever it is
burned. The legend that the cross was made of its wood is evidently an
aftergrowth, an attempt, of which we have so many examples, to give a
Christian colour to a heathen practice; for the elder was the tree under
which, in pre-Christian times, the old Prussian Earth-god was fabled to
dwell. Like the elder, the whitethorn was once an object of worship, for
it too is held to be scatheless in storms; and how else can we account
for the fact that in Switzerland, as in the Eastern counties of England,
to bring its flowers into a house is thought to bring death, than by
supposing it was once a tree too sacred to be touched, and likely to
avenge in some way the profanation that was done to it? Too deeply rooted
in popular veneration for its sacred character to disappear, the Church,
in course of time, wound its own legend round it, and by the fiction that
its wood had composed the Crown of Thorns, deprived the worship of its
heathen sting. But if round the elder and the thorn feelings of reverence
once gathered and still linger, yet more is it true of the rowan. In
England, Germany, and Sweden its leaves are still the most potent
instrument against the darker powers: Highlanders still insert crosses of
it with red thread in the lining of their clothes, and Cornish peasants
still carry some in their pocket and wind it round the horns of their
cattle in order to keep off evil eyes. In Lancashire sprigs of it are for
the same reason hung up at bedheads, and the churn staff is generally
made of its wood. It used to stand in nearly every churchyard in Wales,
and crosses of it were regularly distributed on Christian festivals as
sure preservatives against evil spirits. But this is another attempt to
Christianise what was heathen, for the ancient Danes always used some of
it for their ships, to secure them against the storms which Rân, the
great Ocean God’s wife, with her net for capsized mariners, was ever
ready and desirous to raise. The rowan in heathen mythology was called
Thor’s Helper, because it bent to his grasp in his passage over a flooded
river on his way to the land of the Frost Giants; and it has been thought
that the later sanctity of the tree may be due to the place it occupied
in mythological fancy. Yet it seems more reasonable to trace the myth to
a yet older superstition than to trace the superstition to the myth. For
from the exceeding beauty of their berries the rowan and the elder and
the thorn would naturally impress the savage mind with the feelings of
actual divinity, and would consequently lend themselves to the earliest
imaginings about the universe of things. It is more likely that they
progressed from a divinity on earth to their position in mythology than
from their position in mythology to a divinity on earth, for the mind
is capable of employing things for worship long before it is capable of
employing them for fable. Worship is the product of fear, and fable of
fancy; and before men can indulge in fancy they must to some extent have
cast off fear.

Certain traditions relating to birds and beasts are only explicable on
the supposition that they were once objects of divination or worship.
The old Germans, we know from Tacitus, used white horses, as the Romans
used chickens, for purposes of augury, and divined future events from
different intonations of neighings. Hence it probably is that the
discovery of a horse-shoe is so universally thought lucky, some of
the feelings that once attached to the animal still surviving round
the iron of its hoof. For horses, like dogs or birds, were invariably
accredited with a greater insight into futurity than man himself; and the
many superstitions connected with the flight or voice of birds resolve
themselves into the fancy, not inconceivable among men surrounded on all
sides by unintelligible tongues, that birds were the bearers of messages
and warnings to men, which skill and observation might hope to interpret.
Why is the robin’s life and nest sacred, and why does an injury to either
bring about bloody milk, lightning, or rain? It has been suggested that
the robin, on account of its colour, was once sacred to Thor, the god
of lightning; but it is possible that its red breast singled it out for
worship from among birds, just as its red berries the rowan from among
trees, long before its worshippers had arrived at any ideas of abstract
divinities. All over the world there is a regard for things red. Captain
Cook noticed a predilection for red feathers throughout all the islands
of the Pacific.[440] In the Highlands women tie some red thread round
the cows’ tails before turning them out to grass in spring, and tie red
silk round their own fingers to keep off the witches: and just as in
Esthonia, mothers put some red thread in their babies’ cradles, so in
China they tie some round their children’s wrists, and teach them to
regard red as the best known safeguard against evil spirits.

One, indeed, of the chief lessons of Comparative Folk-Lore is a caution
against the theory which deduces popular traditions from Aryan or other
mythology. The fact has been already alluded to, that in parts of China
the same feelings prevail about the swallow as in England or Germany. But
there are yet other analogies between the East and the West. A crowing
hen is an object of universal dislike in England and Brittany; and few
families in China will keep a crowing hen.[441] The owl’s voice is
ominous of death or other calamity in England and Germany, as it was in
Greece (except at Athens); but in the Celestial Empire also it presages
death, and is regarded as the bird which calls for the soul. And the crow
also is in China a bird of ill omen. Is it not therefore likely that
all popular fancies about birds and animals have begun in the same way,
among the same or different races of the globe, and were subsequently
adopted but never originated by mythology? May it not be that certain
birds or animals became prominent in mythology because they had already
been prominent in superstition, rather than that they became prominent
in superstition because they previously had been prominent in mythology?
For instance, instead of tracing a dog’s howling as a death omen to an
Aryan belief that the dog guided the soul from its earthly tenement to
its abode in heaven, may we not suppose that the myth arose from an
already existing omen, and that the latter arose, as omens still do,
from a coincidence which suggested a connection, subsequently sustained
by superficial observation? The St. Swithin fallacy, which arose within
historical memory and still holds its ground in an age of scientific
observation, well illustrates how one striking coincidence may grow
into a belief, which no amount of later evidence can weaken or destroy.
Just so, if it happened that a dog howled shortly before some calamity
occurred to our Aryan forefathers, thousands and thousands of years ago,
long before they had attained to any thoughts of soul or heaven, we can
well imagine that the dog, thus thought to betoken death, should, when
they came to frame the myth, be conceived as the guide which was waiting
for the soul to take it to heaven, and that the belief thus perpetuated
by the myth might survive to the latest ages.

There is abundant evidence in the practices to this very day, or till
lately, prevalent in England and Europe, that the worship of the sun
or of fire fills a large part in primitive religion. The passing of
children through the fire is not only a Semitic custom, but extends
wherever the human mind has attained to the idea of purification
and sacrifice. Some North American tribes used to burn to the sun a
man-offering in the spring, to the moon a woman-offering in the autumn,
expressing thereby their sense of the blessings of light and a desire
for their continuance. And traces of such fire-worship and of its
accompanying human sacrifices lasted in Europe into the very heart of
this century, and in many places still survive. The similarity that
exists between them, both in their seasons and mode of observance,
illustrates the marvellous sameness of ideas which may so often be found
among people in widely remote districts of the globe.

The three great festivals of the Druids took place on Mayday Eve, on
Midsummer Eve, and on All Hallow-e’en. On those days went up from cairns,
foothills, and Belenian heights fires and sacrifices to the sun-god
Beal: and from such fires the lord of the neighbourhood would take the
entrails of the sacrificed animal, and, walking barefoot over the ashes,
carry them to the Druid who presided over the ceremonies. These fires
have descended to us as the famous Beltane fires, lit still, or till
lately, in Ireland, Scotland, Northern England, and Cornwall, on the
eve of the summer solstice and at the equinoxes, usually on hill tops,
with rejoicing and merriment and leaping through the flames on the part
of all ages and sexes of the population.[442] It is possible that this
leaping through the flames is a relic of the time when men fell victims
to them, a modification of the more barbarous custom. In the Highlands,
where at the Beltane feast an oatmeal cake is toasted and portions of
it drawn for blindfold by the company as they sit in a trench round a
grass table, whosoever is the drawer of that portion which has been
purposely toasted black is devoted to Baal to be sacrificed, and must
leap perforce three times through the flames. In the same country it is,
or was, customary on Yeule or Christmas Eve to burn in a cartload of
lighted peat the stump of an old tree, which went by the name of Callac
Nollic, or Christmas Old Wife. And in several Continental traditions
we find the memory of a sacrifice still adhering to Midsummer Eve, or
St. John the Baptist’s Vigil. On that day, in Livonia, one or two old
boats were burned to the songs and dances of young and old; whilst at
Reichenbach, in the Voightland, a May-pole, planted on the green, was,
after similar festivities, thrown into the water. On the same day many
watermen still refrain from committing themselves to the Elbe, the
Unstrut, or the Elster, from the belief that upon that day those rivers
require a sacrifice; and the Saale is avoided for the same reason on
Walpurgis, or Mayday Eve, as well. From the latter cases we may infer
that, where rivers flowed near, a sacrifice by water was as usual as one
by fire, which possibly explains the custom so common in many places in
connection with these Beltane fires of rolling something lighted down a
hill, and, if possible, into a river. At Conz, on the Moselle, a burning
wheel was rolled down the hill into the river, and Scotch children at
the Beltane feast used to roll their bannocks three times down a hill
before consuming them round a good fire of heath and brushwood. So in
Swabia, wheels of lighted straw were rolled down the Frauenberg, and on
Scheiblen-Sonntag the young people still go by night to a hill, and after
dancing and singing round a fire, swing wooden wheels by means of a stick
round and round till they are thoroughly alight, and then fling them down
the hill. In North Germany, where the fires take place at Easter instead
of at Midsummer, lighted tar-barrels are rolled down the Osterberge.
The Church, to sanctify these fires, made the day of John the Baptist
coincident with Midsummer-day, and taught that the heathen customs were
symbolical of Christian doctrine. The fires themselves signified the
Baptist, that burning and shining light who was to precede the true
light; whilst the rolling wheels, as they represented the gradual descent
of the sun in heaven after it had reached the highest point, so they
illustrated the diminution of the fame of John, who was at first thought
to be the real Messiah, till on his own testimony he said, ‘He must
increase, but I must decrease.’ It has even been attempted in recent
times to show that the Midsummer fires, in spite of all their heathen
surroundings, were really of Christian origin, and in some way connected
with John the Baptist. The two chief objections to this theory are, the
survival of heathen names for the fires, as for instance, among others,
the name Himmelsfeuer, and not the usual Johannisfeuer, in one of the
districts of Upper Swabia, and also the close analogy, both in the idea
and mode of purification, which exists between the Midsummer fire for men
and the Needfires for cattle.

Needfires were fires through which cattle were driven if any disease
broke out amongst them. Such a fire was lit in Mull in 1767, and was not
only the method lately employed in Lower Saxony, but is said to be still
actually prevalent in Caithness. It would thus appear that after the
sacrifice to fire had been modified into the custom of passing through or
over it, the newer mode of cure gradually found its explanation in the
idea, that fire was a healing or purifying agent on account of its power
to drive away those evil spirits, which in savage estimation cause or
constitute natural disease. The essential thing was that all fires in the
neighbourhood should be first extinguished and new ones relit by means of
friction for the cattle to go through. The virtue lay in the new virgin
fire uncontaminated by previous use for any purpose whatsoever; and the
Forlorn Fires, which are said to be still lighted in Scotland when any
_man_ thinks himself the victim of witchcraft,[443] agree closely in
ceremonial with the Needfires for cattle. A notice having been given to
all the householders within the two nearest streams to extinguish all
lights and fires on a given morning, the sufferer and his friends on the
day cause the emission of new fire by a spinning-wheel or other means
of friction, and having spread it from some tow to a candle, thence to
a torch, and from the torch to a peatload, send it by messengers to
the expectant houses. But exactly similar purificatory effects were
attributed to the Midsummer fires. As far as their light reached, crops
enjoyed immunity from sorcery for a year, and the ashes collected from
them were a constant insurance against calamities of all sorts. Leaping
through them was held to avert malignant spirits for a year, and in many
places not only did men leap, but cattle were driven, through the flames.
Both America and Africa supply curious analogues to the Needfires of
Scotland. In the former the Mayas at a festivity in honour of their gods
of agriculture danced about the ashes of a burnt pile of wood, and passed
barefooted over the coals with or without injury, believing that thus
they would avert misfortune and appease the anger of the gods.[444] And
among the Hottentots Kolbe attests the custom of driving sheep through a
fire, and though the reason told to him for it was, the warding off the
attacks of wild dogs by the smell of smoke, the other ceremonies usual
on the occasion suggest the interpretation applicable to the Scotch
custom.[445] Purification by passing between two fires was also a custom
of the Tartars.[446]

Hence there is reason to think that the Midsummer fires were simply
annual and public Needfires, resembling the yearly harvest feasts of
the Creeks of North America, among whom, as among the ancients who
annually imported fresh fire from Delos to Lemnos, there was an idea
of a new and purified life commencing with a new and pure flame, after
all fires, debased by their subservience to human needs, had been first
extinguished. The Minnetarees at their feast of the new corn made a new
fire by drilling the end of a stick into a piece of hard wood;[447] and
the Sioux at their sacred feasts were wont to remove all fire from the
lodge and rekindle a fresh fire before cooking the food, in order to have
nothing unclean at the feast.[448] In India the Nagas, when they clear a
fresh piece of jungle, first put out their old fires, and produce a new
fire by friction, that of ordinary domestic use not being considered pure
enough for the purpose.[449]

The same idea has been found among the Indian tribes of South America.
There it was the duty of the high-priests ‘to guard the Eternal Fire in
the Rotunda; and, in the solemn, annual festival of the Busque, when
all the fires of the nation were extinguished, the high-priest alone
was commissioned, in the temple, to reproduce the celestial spark and
give new fire to the community.’[450] So that from this most remarkable
identity of conception between our forefathers and the native tribes of
America, it is evident there is nothing exclusively Indo-Germanic in the
holiness ascribed to virgin-fire, and that there is no need to ascribe to
Phœnician influence customs which occur where such influence is at most
uncertain. The wheel ignited by friction of its axle was, it has been
suggested, an emblem of the sun, and the old Aryan belief, that when the
sun was hidden by clouds its light was extinguished and needed renewing,
which could only take place by some god working a ‘pramantha’ in its cold
wheel till it glowed again, has been referred to as the possible root of
the custom. But such an origin being of difficult application outside the
geographical limits of Aryanism, it is obviously better to refer the myth
to the custom than the custom to the myth, and to a custom moreover which
is as wide as the world.

It may here be noticed in connection with the sacrificial customs which
were once a part of the heathen worship, that the idea of a sacrifice
to appease an angry spirit that has caused a disease is still far from
extinct. The burial of a live animal is still believed in Wärend and
North Sweden to prevent the cattle-plague, and an instance of such a
sacrifice to the earth spirits is said to have occurred in Jönköping so
recently as 1843. In Moray not long ago, whenever a herd of cattle was
seized with the murrain, one of them was buried alive, just as in the
North-west Highlands and in Cornwall a black cock is buried alive on the
spot where a person is first attacked by epilepsy; or as, in Algeria, one
is drowned in a sacred well for a similar purpose. A case is even cited
in this century of an Englishman who burned a live calf to counteract the
attacks of evil spirits.[451] Near Speier in Germany, if many hens or
pigs or ducks died in quick succession, one of their kind was thrown into
the fire, and the Esthonians, if a fire broke out, were wont to throw in
a black living fowl to appease the flames.

English country boys, when on the sight of a new moon they turn the
money in their pockets to ensure a constant supply there, have no idea
of the reason that once underlay the practice. But a wide comparison of
customs supplies us with a key; for we find everywhere a prevalent mental
association between the increase or wane of the moon and the increase or
wane of things on earth. Maladies, it is thought, will wane more readily
if the medicine be taken in the moon’s wane, and wood cut at that time
will burn better, just as, on the other hand, crops are more likely to
be plentiful if sown whilst the moon is young, and marriages more likely
to be happy. In some English counties pigs must be killed at the same
season, lest the pork should waste in boiling. In Germany it is the best
time for the father of a family to die, for in the latter half of the
month his death would portend the decrease of his whole family; it is
also the best time for counting money which it is desired may increase.
An invalid in face of a waning moon should pray that his pains may
diminish with it. Hence, too, the French idea that hair cut in the moon’s
wane will never grow again, or the similar one in Devonshire and Iceland,
that the rest will fall off; and hence probably the popular English
belief that the weather of the new moon foreshadows the weather for the
month. But are all these fancies relics of an old moon-worship, of the
existence of which we have other evidence, or simply expressions of that
feeling, once so prevalent, that there existed an intimate sympathy
between man and nature, and that everything which affected the former was
in some way or another typified by the latter? Analogy seems to favour
the latter hypothesis. For instance, all along the East coast of England
it is thought that most deaths occur at the fall of the tide, a sympathy
being imagined between the ebbing of the water and the ebbing of life;
and it is curious that Aristotle and Pliny entertained a similar idea,
the former with respect to all animals, the latter only about man; and
though Pliny’s observation of the fact was instigated by the statement
of his predecessor, it is likely that the latter was led to the inquiry
by the notoriety of a popular belief. The Cornish idea that deaths
are delayed till the ebb-tide, or the Icelandic one that more blood
flows from sheep killed while the sea is running out, or that chimneys
smoke more if built when the sea is running in, may be cited as similar
instances. The inhabitants of Esthonia, if a wolf runs away with a lamb,
think, by a kind of sympathy, to cause the wolf to drop it by themselves
dropping something out of their pockets. And in parts of England to this
day, the bloodstone is a remedy for a bleeding nose, and nettle-tea for a
nettle-rash; just as turmeric was once accounted a cure for the jaundice
on account of its yellow colour, and the lungs of a fox were held good
for asthma on account of that animal’s respiratory powers.

Water-worship, whether as river, lake, or spring, seems as widely spread
as that of trees or other natural objects, and the numerous traditions
connected with it form yet another link between our civilised present
and our barbarous past. ‘There is scarcely,’ says a writer on Lancashire
Folk-Lore, ‘a stream of any magnitude in either Lancashire or Yorkshire,
which does not possess a presiding spirit in some part of its course.’
A water-spirit that haunts some stepping-stones near Clitheroe is still
believed once in every seven years to require a human life; nor is it
long since a farmer in Anglesea had to drain a well belonging to him,
on account of the damage done by persons resorting thither, under the
belief that if they cursed the disease they suffered from and dropped
pins about the well, they would shortly be cured. There is still a
pin-well in Northumberland, and another in Westmoreland, wherein country
girls in passing throw an offering of pins to the resident spirits. So in
Ireland, votive rags may be seen on trees and hedges that surround sacred
wells, whither people travel great distances in order to crawl an uneven
number of times in the sun’s direction round the water, hoping thereby to
propitiate the fairies and to avert sorceries.[452] St. Gowen’s well on
the coast of Pembroke was lately or is still frequented for the cure of
paralysis and other maladies, and there are few counties in England where
the dedication of curative wells to Christian saints does not betray
the attempt to hallow and hide a heathen practice under a Christian
name. In Northampton alone we find St. Lawrence’s at Peterborough, St.
John’s at Boughton, St. Rumbald’s at Brackley, St. Loy’s at Weedon-Loys,
St. Dennis’ at Naseby, St. Mary’s at Hardwick, and St. Thomas’ at
Northampton. So in Normandy, people still resort from all parts of the
province, on the eve of the first of June, to the fountain of St.
Clotilde, near Andelys, and there are other French wells of no inferior
celebrity. As English peasants propitiate bad water-spirits by presents
of pins, so do the Bretons by slices of bread and butter; and the
Livonians, before starting on a voyage, calm the sea-mother by a libation
of brandy.[453] But water, in addition to its dangerous and curative
properties, is supposed to contain prophetic ones as well. The Castalian
fountain in Greece was prophetic; and as the Laconians, by cakes thrown
into a pool sacred to Juno, used to augur good or bad to themselves
according as their cakes sank or floated, so do our Cornish countrymen
by dropping pins or pebbles into wells read futurity in the signs of the
bubbles.

The belief in unseen spirits, which underlies many of the foregoing
superstitions, as it is one of the earliest beliefs of the human mind,
so it is one of the most persistent. The worship of water, fire, and
other natural objects probably arose from a dread of spirits thought
to be resident within them, whom it was as well to cajole by gifts and
prayers. Earth and air, like fire and water, were peopled respectively
with invisible demons, which survive in still current traditions of the
Gabriel Hounds, the Seven Whistlers, fairies, elves, and all their tribe.
Our countrymen in Cornwall, if the breeze fail while they are winnowing,
whistle to the Spriggian, or air-spirits, to bring it back; and the
Esthonians on the Gulf of Finland do, or did, precisely the same. In
Northamptonshire, till lately, women used to sweep the hearth before they
went to bed, and leave vessels of water for the ablutions of the fairies
or spirits of the earth, just as in Siberia food is placed daily in the
cellar for the benefit of the Domavoi or house-spirits. In Scotland green
patches may still be seen on field or moor left uncultivated as ‘the
gudeman’s croft,’ by which it has been hoped to buy the goodwill of the
otherwise evil-disposed Devil or earth-spirit; and it is doubtless from
a similar fear of showing neglect or disrespect that Esthonian peasants
dislike parting with any earth from their fields, and in drinking beer
or eating bread recognise the existence and wants of the earth-spirit by
letting some drops of the one and some crumbs of the other find their way
to the floor.[454]

The foregoing instances of actual Folk-Lore, many of them now mere
meaningless survivals, seem only intelligible on the ground that they
have descended to us either from the earliest inhabitants of Western
Europe, or from times when our Aryan progenitors were perhaps not unlike
modern Fuejians. The existence has been proved, not only in England but
throughout Europe, of phases of thought and modes of worship closely
similar to those still found among actual savages. There is no nation
that we know in the present or read of in the past so cultivated as not
to retain many spots from the dark ages of its infancy and ignorance;
but these, absurd as they may seem, hold the rank and claim the interest
of prehistoric antiquities. The fact that there still survive among
civilised people ideas and practices, corresponding in structure to those
found in the various stages of the lower races, is of the same force to
prove that we once went through those several stages, as the survival of
traits in the growth of the individual, similar to those actually found
in lower animals, point to our gradual ascent from a lower scale of
being. The belief in, and dread of, evil spirits; the endeavour to affect
them by acting on their fetishes or substitutes; the worship of natural
objects, as trees, animals, water or even stones; the mistaking of mere
sequence in time for causal connection and the consequent importance
attached to such occurrences as have been observed to precede remarkable
phenomena,—these and many other characteristics of modern savages find
abundant representation in modern civilisation, and it is more likely
they are there as survivals than as importations.

But it may be urged that no necessary antiquity can be asserted of
traditions simply on account of the wide area they range over, and
instances may be cited of Christian superstitions no less widely extended
than many above mentioned. The belief, for instance, that about midnight
on Christmas Eve, cattle rise on their knees to salute the Nativity, is
found with slight modifications in England, Brittany, the Netherlands,
and Denmark. In Cornwall a strong prejudice exists against burying on
the north side of a church, and precisely the same feeling is found in
Esthonia, for the reason there given that at the end of the world all
churches will fall on that side. So, too, the custom of opening all
doors and windows at a death, to give free outlet to the departing soul,
prevails no less in the south of Spain than in England or in parts of
Germany.

To this objection there are two answers: first, that the capacity of
superstitions to spread widely and rapidly is by no means denied;
secondly, that many Christian traditions are really heathen, though their
origin and meaning may now be lost. For the policy of the Church towards
paganism, though at times one of radical opposition, was generally one
better calculated for success. It learned to prefer gradual triumphs
to speedy conquests, aware that the former were more likely to last,
and was pleased to satisfy its conscience and hide its impotence under
connivance and compromise. It assimilated beliefs which it could not
destroy, and glossed over what it could not erase, substituting simply
its saints and angels for the gods and spirits of older cults. On Monte
Casino, near Rome, there existed down to the sixth century a temple
sacred to Apollo, till St. Benedict came and, like another Josiah, broke
the idols and overthrew the altar and burned the grove, but set up a
temple to St. Martin in its stead. And this case is typical of the way
in which obstinate heathen rites were diverted and customs consecrated.
Some illustrations may be added to those already incidentally alluded
to, since they serve to explain how so many relics of heathenism have
resisted centuries of Christian teaching. The Scandinavian water-spirit,
Nikur, inhabitant of lakes and rivers and raiser of storms, whose favour
could only be won by sacrifices, became in the middle ages St. Nicholas,
the patron of sailors and sole refuge in danger; and near St. Nicholas’
church at Liverpool there stood a statue of the Christian saint, to whom
sailors used to present a peace-offering when they went to sea, and a
wave-offering when they returned. So it was with sacred trees and flowers
and waters. Their sanctity was transferred, not destroyed. St. Boniface,
with the wood of the oak he so miraculously felled, raised an oratory
to St. Peter, to whom were thenceforth paid the honours of Thor. Nobody
ventured the more to touch the famous oak at Kenmare when blown down
by a storm, because it had been handed over to the protection of St.
Columba, nor did a fragment of St. Colman’s oak held in the mouth the
less avert death by hanging because it had been sanctified by the name of
a saint. The Breton princes, before they entered the church at Vretou,
offered prayers under a yew outside, which was said to have sprung from
St. Martin’s staff and to have been so replete with holiness that the
very birds of the air left its berries untouched. The great goddess
Freja could only be banished from men’s thoughts by transferring what
had been sacred to her to the Virgin Mary; and the names of such common
plants as Lady’s Grass, Lady’s Smock, Lady’s Slipper, Lady’s Mantle,
and others, attest to this day the wrong that was done to the Northern
goddess. Bits of seaweed called Lady’s Trees still decorate many a
Cornish chimney-piece, and protect the house from fire and other evils.
The Ladybird was once Freja’s bird; and Orion’s belt, which in Sweden is
still called Freja’s spindle, in Zealand now belongs to her successor
Mary. In the same way Christmas has supplanted the old Yule festival, and
the Yule log still testifies to the rites of fire-worship once connected
with the season. So we now keep Easter at the time when our pagan
forefathers used to sacrifice to the goddess Eostre, and hot cross-buns
are perhaps the descendants of cakes once eaten in her honour, on which
the mark of Christianity has taken the place of some heathen sign.

Such then is the evidence which Comparative Folk-Lore affords in
confirmation of the teaching of history, that the people from whom we
inherit our popular traditions were once as miserable and savage as those
we now place in the lowest scale of the human family. The evidence that
the nations now highest in culture were once in the position of those now
the lowest is ever increasing, and the study of Folk-Lore corroborates
the conclusions long since arrived at by archæological science. For, just
as stone monuments, flint knives, lake-piles, or shell-mounds point to
a time when Europeans resembled races where such things are still part
of actual life, so do the traces in our social organism of fetishism,
totemism, and other low forms of thought, connect our past with people
where such forms of thought are still predominant. The analogies with
barbarism which still flourish in civilised communities seem only
explicable on the theory of a slow and more or less uniform metamorphosis
to higher types and modes of life, whilst they enforce the belief that
before long it will appear a law of development, as firmly established
on the inconceivability of the contrary, that civilisation should emerge
from barbarism, as that butterflies should first be caterpillars, or
that ignorance should precede knowledge. In this way superstition itself
turns to the service of science, confirming its teaching, that the
history of humanity has been a rise, not a fall, not a degradation from
completeness to imperfection, but a constantly accelerating progress from
savagery to culture; that, in short, the iron age of the world belongs to
the past, its golden one to the future.




FOOTNOTES


[1] The justification of the use of the word _force_ is not far to seek.
One of the demands in the ultimatum addressed to Cetewayo, which helped
to bring about the present unhappy Zulu war, was for the reinstatement
of missionaries in Zululand. A Natal correspondent of the _Times_,
January 28, 1879, justly observes about this: ‘If the Zulus object to
missionaries—_who certainly in many cases have acted as spies_—why
_force_ missionaries upon them?’ The italics are not the correspondent’s.

[2] See on this subject Mr. Wallace’s _Tropical Nature_, pp. 290-300.

[3] Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, ii. 312, 313, 333.

[4] Sproat, _Savage Life_, 178, 179, 209, 210.

[5] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 173; and Bancroft, iii. 105.

[6] Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 121-4.

[7] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, v. p. 155.

[8] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, iv. 496. See Dr. Brinton’s explanation of the
story in his _Myths of the New World_, pp. 170-3.

[9] Humboldt, _Personal Narrative_, v. 595-7.

[10] Forbes Leslie, _Early Races in Scotland_, i. 177.

[11] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 155-7, where the beliefs are
referred to. Franklin’s _Second Journey_, p. 308. They are so remarkable
as to arouse suspicion that European influence has affected the native
imagination; but the influence, if any, seems beyond the reach of
criticism in this as in other striking cases of analogy.

[12] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, iv. 255.

[13] Hutton, _Voyage to Africa_, p. 320; and Bosman in Pinkerton, xvi.
396.

[14] Schoolcraft, iv. 90.

[15] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, vii. 368.

[16] _Trans. Eth. Soc._ iii. 233, 234; Oldfield’s _Aborigines of
Australia_.

[17] Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific States_, iii. 112.

[18] Brinton, pp. 198, 199.

[19] Brinton, p. 210.

[20] Catlin, ii. 127. For some other deluge-myths of a similar kind see
Bancroft, iii. 46, 47, 64, 75, 76, 88, 100; Turner’s _Polynesia_, p. 249;
Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 386; Franklin, i. 113; Sir G. Grey,
_Polynesian Mythology_, 61; Brett, _Indian Tribes of Guiana_, pp. 381,
385, 398, 399; Dall, _Alaska_, p. 423.

[21] Koehler, _Volksbrauch im Voightland_, p. 444. ‘Dem Verstorbenen
giebt man die Gegenstände mit in das Grab, welche er im Leben am liebsten
hatte: so ist es geschehen, dass man selbst Regenschirm und Gummischühe
mitgab. (Reichenbach.) ... In Schweden hat man dem Todten Tabakspfeife,
Tabaksbeutel, Geld und Feuerzeug mitgegeben, damit er nicht spuke.... In
einem Grabe des Gottesackers zu Elsterberg wurde eine Anzahl Kupfermünzen
gefunden.’

[22] This fact has been denied in King’s _Greek Church_, p. 358, but it
is mentioned by most of the earliest English travellers in Russia; by
Chancelor, in _Hackluyt’s Voyages_, i. 283; Jenkinson, ibid., p. 361; and
Fletcher, _Russe Commonwealth_, 106; as well as by later ones.

[23] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 165.

[24] Stevenson, _Travels in South America_, i. 58.

[25] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 166.

[26] See Brinton, p. 242. ‘Nowhere (in the New World) was any
well-defined doctrine that moral turpitude was judged and punished in the
next world. No contrast is discoverable between a place of torments and a
realm of joy; at the worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar,
the coward, and the niggard.’

[27] For other instances of the myth of the heaven-bridge, and its wide
range, see Mr. Tylor’s _Early History of Mankind_, p. 348.

[28] Williams, _Fiji_, i. 244.

[29] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, iii. 71-77.

[30] Mariner, ii. 137.

[31] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 315. ‘Jedes Thier, auch die kleinste
Fliege, ersteht sofort nach ihrem Tode und lebt unter der Erde.’

[32] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, iii. 83. ‘Endlich wurden die besonderten
Theile nebst den Knochen in der Kiste begraben. Man glaubte, das
Opferthier werde von den Göttern wieder belebt und in den Saiwo versetzt.’

[33] Dall, _Alaska_, p. 89.

[34] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, v. 91, 403; ii. 68.

[35] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iii. 268.

[36] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 350.

[37] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 536.

[38] _Cape Monthly Magazine_, July 1874.

[39] Bleek, _Bushman Folk-lore_, pp. 15, 18.

[40] Steller, _Kamschatka_, p. 280.

[41] Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, ii. 170.

[42] Callaway, _Religious System of the Amazulu_, pt. ii. 182.

[43] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, ii. 437-444.

[44] Waitz, ii. 169.

[45] Ellis, i. 402.

[46] Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, p. 297.

[47] Page 150.

[48] Pinkerton, xvi. 304.

[49] Pinkerton, xvi. 388, 874.

[50] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 176.

[51] Dieffenbach, p. 28.

[52] Gill, p. 36.

[53] Brett, _Indian Tribes of Guiana_, p. 370.

[54] Harmon, _Journal of Voyages, &c._, p. 345.

[55] Brinton, p. 126.

[56] Bancroft, iii. 370-3. For baptismal rites in Northern Europe before
Christianity, see Mallet, _Northern Antiquities_, p. 205.

[57] Franklin, _Journey to the Polar Sea_, p. 255.

[58] Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, ii. 299.

[59] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iii. 237.

[60] Callaway, i. 33.

[61] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, ii. 187.

[62] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 250.

[63] Harmon, _Journal of Voyages_, p. 363.

[64] Lord Kames, _History of Man_, vol. iv., asserts this of many tribes,
the Tahitians, Hottentots, and others. See also pp. 234, 238, 297.

[65] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, i. 480.

[66] Cf. Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 250, and Du Chaillu’s _Explorations_,
pp. 202-3.

[67] Lichtenstein, ii. 332; Callaway, i. 111.

[68] Pinkerton, xvi. 402, 530.

[69] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iv. 635-7. The admission quoted seems
to cancel the statements repeated clearly and positively in i. 16, 17,
32, 35, 38, and iii. 60, of a dualism as decided as that between Ahriman
and Ormuzd. In i. 32 it is said that the _first_ notice of such a
doctrine occurs in Charlevoix, _Voyage to North America in 1721_.

[70] Schoolcraft, iv. 642-3.

[71] _Ibid._, ii. 195, 197; iii. 231.

[72] Schoolcraft, ii. 131.

[73] Franklin, i. 114-15.

[74] Ellis, i. 350.

[75] Klemm, iii. 120.

[76] Kames, _History of Man_, iv. 327.

[77] Kames, _History of Man_, iv. 321.

[78] Klemm, vi. 423.

[79] Brinton, p. 298.

[80] Schoolcraft, iii. 226.

[81] Brinton, p. 297.

[82] Turner, _Nineteen Years in Polynesia_, pp. 88, 200, 239.

[83] Williams, p. 144.

[84] Ellis, i. 349.

[85] Catlin, i. 133; ii. 247. Cf. Schoolcraft, iii. 243.

[86] Bancroft, _Native Races, &c._, ii. 705.

[87] Bancroft, _Native Races, &c._, iii. 428; Burton, _Mission to
Gelele_, ii. 18-25.

[88] Klemm, ii. 216, from Langsdorf, ii. 261.

[89] Sproat, p. 66. The Juangs of Bengal practise a bear dance, a pigeon
dance, a pig dance, a tortoise dance, a quail dance, a vulture dance.
Dalton, _Desc. Eth. of Bengal_, p. 156; and see _New Encyc. Brit._ for
similar cases: article, ‘Dance.’

[90] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 200.

[91] Sproat, p. 208.

[92] Bancroft, _Native Races_, iii. 167.

[93] Ellis, i. 348.

[94] Latham, _Desc. Eth._, i. 459.

[95] Catlin, i. 127, 164, 182.

[96] Klemm, ii. 120. ‘Ahmten die knarrende röchelnde Stimme des
Bisonthiers in grosser Vollkommenheit nach.’

[97] Catlin, i. 244-5.

[98] Schoolcraft, iii. 487.

[99] ‘Ein wunderbares Spiel, das zum glücklichen Erfolg des Untermehmens
_durchaus nothwendig_ gehalten wird.’

[100] Lichtenstein, i. 444.

[101] Mrs. Eastman, _Dahcotah_, p. 77.

[102] Sproat, p. 146.

[103] Collins, _New South Wales_, p. 368.

[104] Callaway, i. 125.

[105] Schoolcraft, iv. 80.

[106] _Ibid._, iii. 285.

[107] Isert, _Guinea_, in French translation, p. 204: ‘L’action de ramer
voulait dire que leurs maris allaient passer la rivière Volta pour se
battre avec les Augéens et les noyer; la truelle et le travail de maçon
indiquait l’érection de fort Konigstein.’

[108] Casalis, p. 265.

[109] Schoolcraft (Prescott), iii. 230.

[110] Schoolcraft, iii. 273, 231.

[111] Gill, 312.

[112] Pinkerton, xvi. 875.

[113] Pinkerton, xvi. 875.

[114] Livingstone, _South Africa_, p. 235.

[115] Franklin, _First Journey_, i. 160.

[116] Wuttke, _Deutsche Volksaberglaube_, p. 14.

[117] Polwhele, _History of Cornwall_, p. 48.

[118] ‘Da Dios alas á la hormiga para que se pierda mas aina,’ is the
Spanish version.—_Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs_, 210. Compare with
Roebuck’s _Persian and Hindoostanee Proverbs_, i. 365, and ii. 283;
Thornburn’s _Afghan Frontier_, 279; and Burckhardt’s _Arabic Proverbs_.

[119] Most of the African proverbs here referred to are taken from
Captain Burton’s collection from various sources in his _Wit and Wisdom
of West Africa_.

[120] _Central Africa_, p. 289.

[121] Oscar Peschel, _The Races of Mankind_, translation, p. 150.

[122] Casalis, _Les Basutos_, pp. 324-8.

[123] Captain Burton justly calls attention to the possibility of many
Yoruban proverbs being relics of the Moslems, who, in the tenth century,
overran the Soudan.

[124] For a collection of Pashto proverbs see Thornburn’s _Afghan
Frontier_, 1876.

[125] Sir G. Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, p. 21.

[126] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 97.

[127] Callaway, ii. 171.

[128] Burton, _Mission to Dahome_, ii.

[129] Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, i. 333.

[130] Trench, _On the Study of Words_, p. 17.

[131]

   ‘Nec commune bonum poterant spectare nec ullis
  Moribus inter se scierant nec legibus uti.’—V. 956.

So Virgil, _Æn._, viii. 317.

[132] Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific States of North America_, i.
426, 560.

[133] Peschel, _Races of Man_, pp. 39, 209.

[134] Burchell, _Travels in Southern Africa_, i. 456-62. Compare Waitz,
_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, i. 376. Also Wuttke, _Geschichte des
Heidenthums_, p. 164. _Ein Brudermord wurde von ihnen als etwas ganz
Harmloses erzählt._

[135] Bancroft, _Native Races_, i. 348.

[136] _Ibid._, i. 130.

[137] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iii. 69.

[138] Bancroft, i. 520, 553.

[139] Dall, _Alaska_, p. 416.

[140] Kane, _Wanderings of an Artist_, p. 115.

[141] Catlin, _North American Indians_, ii. 192.

[142] Bancroft, iii. 167.

[143] Turner, _Nineteen Years in Polynesia_, p. 285.

[144] Sir G. Grey, _Journals in Australia_, ii. 239.

[145] Williams, _Fiji_.

[146] _Old New Zealand._ By a Pakeha Maori, p. 105.

[147] Harmon’s _Journal_, pp. 299, 300.

[148] Seemann says of Fijian cruelty (_Viti_, p. 192): ‘Affection for the
departed—of course mistaken affection—prompted their relatives or friends
to dispatch widows at the time of their husband’s burial,’ &c.

[149] Turner, _Polynesia_, pp. 294-5.

[150] Mariner, ii. 233.

[151] Pinkerton, xvi. 595, from Froyart’s _Loango_.

[152] Fitzroy, _Voyages of ‘Adventure’ and ‘Beagle,’_ ii. 574.

[153] _Old New Zealand_, pp. 96-100.

[154] Lichtenstein, i. 259.

[155] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, i. 39.

[156] Livingstone, _Missionary Travels in South Africa_, p. 255.

[157] Harmon, _Journal_, p. 300.

[158] Turner, _Polynesia_, p. 224.

[159] Bancroft, iii. 486.

[160] Fitzroy, _Voyages_, ii. 180.

[161] Sproat, _Scenes and Studies of Savage Life_, p. 265.

[162] Shortland, _Southern Districts of New Zealand_, p. 30.

[163] Turner, _Polynesia_, pp. 225, 236.

[164] Kane, p. 205.

[165] _Ibid._; Seemann, p. 190.

[166] Bancroft, i. 245, 285, 438.

[167] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iii. 78.

[168] Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 158.

[169] Dobritzhoffer, _Abipones_, ii. 203, 274.

[170] Burton, _Mission_, i. 231.

[171] Bancroft, ii. 357.

[172] Dali, _Alaska_, 524. For instances of the feeling in North America
see Bancroft, i. 205, 288, 544, 745; iii. 521, 522.

[173] Gill, _Myths and Songs of the South Pacific_, p. 154.

[174] _Ibid._, p. 38.

[175] Catlin, _North American Indians_, i. 157.

[176] Bancroft, iii. 519; and other instances in the same work, chapter
xii.

[177] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 247.

[178] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 403, 404.

[179] Dr. Brinton (p. 250) says that no ethical bearing was assigned
to the myth of the future by the red race till they were taught by
Europeans, and that all Father Brebeuf could find was, that the souls of
suicides and persons killed in war lived apart from others after death.

[180] Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 285.

[181] Mariner, _Tongan Islands_, ii. 154.

[182] Peschel, 428-31.

[183] The collection of native Bushman literature is said to have reached
eighty-four volumes! In Dr. Bleek’s _Brief Account of Bushman Folk-lore_,
and in the _Cape Monthly Magazine_ for July 1874, some account is given
of their mythology.

[184] Comp. Bancroft, i. 771, and Humboldt, _Personal Narrative_, v. 269.

[185] Steller, _Kamschatka_, pp. 234, 355.

[186] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, iii. 191.

[187] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 51; Burton, _Dahome_, ii. 76; Pinkerton,
xvi. 492.

[188] Bancroft, ii. 194, and i. 414, 280. Compare Catlin, i. 170; and
Grote’s _Greece_, for an ordeal at Sparta.

[189] Dieffenbach, p. 667.

[190] Callaway, ii. 196.

[191] Burton, _Mission_, ii. 157.

[192] Turner, p. 236.

[193] Sproat, p. 213.

[194] Dobritzhoffer, _Abipones_, ii. 204, 441.

[195] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iv. 101.

[196] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 29.

[197] Jarves, _History of Hawaii_, p. 23.

[198] Brett, _Wild Tribes of Guiana_, p. 131.

[199] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iii. 104.

[200] Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 149.

[201] Mariner, _Tongan Islands_, i. 380, 403.

[202] _Travels in Australia_, ii. 228.

[203] Bancroft, i. 109

[204] In Papworth’s _Ordinary of British Armorials_, no less than 124
pages are filled with the names of families who take their crest from
some animal; 34 pages of families take their crests from the lion alone.

[205] Herberstein, i. 32.

[206] Kempper, _Japan_; Pinkerton, vii. 718.

[207] Turner, p. 343.

[208] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 43.

[209] Burton, _Mission_, ii. 367; and Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 318.

[210] Jarves, _History of Hawaii_, pp. 21, 23.

[211] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iii. 97.

[212] _See_ Klemm, iii. 330, for the custom in Loango; Reade, _Savage
Africa_, p. 43, for that in Ashantee; and Peschel, _Races of Man_, p.
235, for other instances.

[213] _Savage Africa_, p. 48.

[214] Williams, p. 40.

[215] Santo, _Eastern Ethiopia_. Pink, xvi. 698.

[216] Dieffenbach, ii. 100.

[217] Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 100. It has generally been thought
best, in referring to books written some time ago, to employ the past
tense where possibly the present would still be applicable. Wherever the
present is used, it must be taken to refer not necessarily to the actual
present but to the present of the original authority for the fact.

[218] Steller, _Kamschatka_, p. 356.

[219] Eschwege, _Brazilien_, i. 221.

[220] Bancroft, _Native Races of Pacific States_, i. 168.

[221] Catlin, ii. 240.

[222] Pinkerton. Bosnian, _Guinea_, xvi. 406.

[223] Denham, _Discoveries in Africa_, i. 167.

[224] Turner, _Polynesia_, p. 286.

[225] Elphinstone, _Caubul_, ii. 223.

[226] Thompson, _South Africa_, ii. 351.

[227] _See_ Bancroft, ii. 454-472, for the penal code of the Aztecs.

[228] Pinkerton. Froyart, _History of Loango_, xvi. 581.

[229] Hutton, _Voyage to Africa_, p. 319.

[230] Pinkerton, xvi. 242, in Merolla’s _Voyage to Congo_.

[231] Pinkerton. Bosman, _Guinea_, xvi. 405. For an account of a savage
law suit, see Maclean’s _Caffre Laws and Customs_, pp. 38-43.

[232] Maclean, _Caffre Laws_, p. 34.

[233] Pinkerton, xvi. 259.

[234] Livingstone, _South Africa_, pp. 621, 642.

[235] Schweinfurth, _Heart of Africa_, i. 285.

[236] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iii. 334.

[237] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 250.

[238] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 378; iv. 423.

[239] Pinkerton, xvi. 690.

[240] Wuttke, _Geschichte des Heidenthums_, p. 102, speaking of savage
ordeals, says: ‘Wir können nicht sagen, dass ein monotheistischer Gedanke
hier vorhanden sei; die Menschen glauben an die Gerechtigkeit des
Schicksals noch nicht an einen gerechten Gott.’

[241] Turner, _Polynesia_, pp. 215, 241, 293.

[242] Klemm, iii. 68.

[243] Wuttke, _Geschichte des Heidenthums_, p. 103.

[244] Burckhardt, _Notes on the Bedouins_, p. 73.

[245] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, ii. 98.

[246] Klemm, iv. 334.

[247] Maclean, pp. 124, 110.

[248] Klemm, iii. 69.

[249] Dalton, _Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal_, p. 64.

[250] Seemann, _Mission to Viti_, p. 192.

[251] Mariner, ii. 302.

[252] Ellis, iii. 349.

[253] Earle, _Indian Archipelago_, p. 81.

[254] Pinkerton, xvi. 872.

[255] _Ibid._, p. 697.

[256] Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 305.

[257] Lichtenstein, ii. 48.

[258] Portlock’s _Voyage_, p. 260, in Bancroft, i. 110.

[259] Cranz, i. 149, 150, 174, 218.

[260] _Travels in Australia_, ii. 355; and Bonwick, _Daily Life of the
Tasmanians_, pp. 10, 78-98.

[261] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, Prof. Owen, ii. 36.

[262] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, ii. 291.

[263] _Ibid._, i. 264.

[264] _Nuova Antologia_, Jan. 1876.

[265] Ellis, i. 268.

[266] Mariner, i. 271-7.

[267] These stories are worth reading at length in Grey’s _Polynesian
Mythology_, pp. 233-246, 296-301. See also pp. 246-273, 301-313. For a
good Zulu love-story see Leslie’s _Among the Zulus_, pp. 275-284; and,
for a Tasmanian love-legend, Bonwick, p. 34.

[268] Smiles, _Self-help_, p. 325; Pennant’s _Tour_, in Pinkerton, iii.
89: ‘Their tender sex are their only animals of burden.’

[269] Weddell, _Voyage to South Pole_, 1825, p. 156.

[270] Seemann, p. 192.

[271] Dalton, _Bengal_, p. 28.

[272] _Indian Tribes_, v. 131-2.

[273] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, p. 544.

[274] Bancroft, i. 110.

[275] _Heart of Africa_, i. 472; ii. 28.

[276] The best illustration of this side of savage life, of the sorrow
felt by a bride on leaving her home, occurs in the _Finnish Kalewala_, in
Schiefner’s German translation, pp. 126-132, 147-150.

[277] Dobell, _Travels in Kamtschatka_, &c., ii. 293.

[278] Holderness, _Journey from Riga_, p. 233.

[279] Hakluyt, i. 360; Pierson, _Russlands Vergangenheit_, pp. 202, 208.

[280] Marmier, _Sur la Russie_, ii. 154. ‘Au moment de se mettre en
marche pour l’église, elle soupire, pleure, refuse de sortir. Tous ses
parents essayent de la consoler,’ &c.

P. 149: ‘Rien ne donne une idée plus touchante du caractère du peuple
russe que ces paroles de regret et de douleur que la jeune fiancée
adresse à ses parents au milieu des joyeux préparatifs de la fête
nuptiale.’

[281] Marmier, i. 127, 229.

[282] Cranz, i. 151.

[283] _Ibid._, i. 146.

[284] Egede, pp. 143-145.

[285] Chambers, _Book of Days_, ii. 721.

[286] Holderness, p. 234.

[287] Dall, _Alaska_, pp. 396, 399.

[288] Kolbe, in Medley’s translation, i. 161.

[289] Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 303.

[290] Elphinstone, _Caubul_, i. 240.

[291] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, i. 313.

[292] Herberstein, i. 92.

[293] Pinkerton, _Modern Geography_, ii. 524.

[294] Seemann, _Mission to Fiji_, p. 190.

[295] Si J. Lubbock, _Origin of Civilization_, pp. 75-76.

[296] Dalton, _Bengal_, p. 193.

[297] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 136.

[298] Chambers, _Book of Days_, ii. 733; Holman, _Travels_, i. 153.

[299] Dall, _Alaska_, p. 415.

[300] _Trans. Eth. Soc._, i. 98.

[301] Krashenninonikov, _Kamtshatka_, p. 215.

[302] ‘Beschwerte sich aber die Braut, dass sie den Brautigam durchaus
nicht haben noch sich von ihm erobern lassen wollte, so musste er aus dem
Ostrog fort.’—Steller, _Kamtschatka_, p. 345.

[303] Lesseps, _Travels in Kamtschatka_ (translated), ii. 93. The account
here given of the Kamschadal marriage customs is from Krashenninonikov
(translated by Grieve), _Travels in Kamtshatka_, pp. 212-214 (1764);
Steller, pp. 343-349 (1774); Lesseps, ii. 93 (1790). They differ in some
minor details.

[304] Burchell, ii. 56.

[305] Burckhardt, _Notes on the Bedouins_, p. 200.

[306] Leslie, pp. 117, 196.

[307] Burckhardt, _Notes_, p. 151.

[308] Lane, _Modern Egyptians_, i. 217.

[309] Gaya, _Marriage Ceremonies_ (pp. 30, 48, 81), for similar old
customs, interpreted in the same way, formerly in vogue in France,
Germany, and Turkey.

[310] Astley, _Collection of Voyages_, ii. 240, 273. It is a common rule
of etiquette that, when a proposal of marriage is made, the purport
of the visit shall only be approached indirectly and cursorily. It is
curious to find such a rule among the Red Indians (_Algic Researches_,
ii. 24; i. 130), the Kafirs (Maclean, p. 47), the Esquimaux (Cranz, i.
146), even the Hottentots (Kolbe, i. 149).

[311] Pinkerton, vii. 34.

[312] Bancroft, _Native Races_, &c., i. 389.

[313] _Ibid._, i. 436.

[314] _Ibid._, i. 512.

[315] Fitzroy, _Voyage of ‘Beagle,’_ ii. 152.

[316] Compare Bowen’s _Central Africa_, pp. 303-304; Gray’s _Travels in
South Africa_, p. 56; Pinkerton, xvi. 568-569; and Bancroft, i. 66.

[317] Bowen, p. 104.

[318] Pinkerton, xvi. 873.

[319] Lichtenstein, i. 263.

[320] Thus Bonwick mentions a custom whereby a woman ‘was allowed some
chance in her life-settlement. The applicant for her hand was permitted
on a certain day to _run_ for her;’ if she passed three appointed trees
without being caught she was free.—_Daily Life, &c._, p. 70.

[321] It is also an old custom in Finland, that, when a suitor tells a
girl he has settled matters with her parents, she should ask him what he
has given, and then, declaring it to be too little, should proceed to run
away from him.—_Marmier_, i. 176.

[322] Delano, _Life on the Plains_, p. 346. In _Notes and Queries_, 1861,
vol. xii. 414, it is said that in Wales a girl would often escape a
disliked suitor through the custom of the pursuit on horseback—by taking
a line of country of her own.

[323] Dalton, _Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal_, pp. 16, 194, 234, 252,
319.

[324] Bates, _Naturalist on the River Amazon_, p. 382.

[325] Marsden, _Sumatra_, p. 269.

[326] Denham, _Discoveries in Africa_, i. 32-35.

[327] Dobritzhoffer, ii. 97.

[328] Wuttke, _Heidenthum_, i. 185. ‘Die Guanas in Amerika begraben ihre
Kinder lebendig, besonders die Mädchen, um diese _seltner und gesuchter
zu machen_.’

[329] Dalton, p. 192.

[330] Colonel Dalton, in _Trans. Eth. Soc._, vi. 27.

[331] Elphinstone, _Cabul_, i. 239; ii. 23.

[332] Burnes, _Travels to Bokhara_, iii. 47.

[333] _Trans. Eth. Soc._, iii. 348-351, in Oldfield’s _Aborigines of
Australia_, 1864.

[334] Bonwick, pp. 65-68.

[335] Latham, _Desc. Ethn._, ii. 159.

[336] Latham, _Desc. Ethn._, i. 96.

[337] Campbell, _Indian Journal_, 142.

[338] _Journal of Anthropology_ (July 1870), p. 33; _Trans. Eth. Soc._,
vii. 236, 242.

[339] Buchanan, _Travels_, i. 251, 273, 321, 358, 394; iii. 100.

[340] Sproat, p. 98.

[341] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, 545.

[342] Bancroft, _Native Races_, i. 109, 132.

[343] Macpherson, 65.

[344] Collins (1796), _New South Wales_, 362, 351-3.

[345] Hunter (1790), _Voyage to New South Wales_, 62, 494.

[346] _Trans. Eth. Soc._, i. 217-8, and compare Sir G. Grey, _Travels,
&c._, ii. 224.

[347] Hunter, 466, 479.

[348] Lecky, _Hist. of England in Eighteenth Century_, ii. 366.

[349] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 60.

[350] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, 545. ‘Ils ne prenaient pour femmes
légitimes que leurs cousines, qui leur étoyent aquises de droit naturel.’
Compare Burckhardt’s _Notes on the Bedouins_, 64: ‘A man has an exclusive
right to the hand of his cousin;’ not that he was obliged to marry her,
but without his consent she could marry no one else.’

[351] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, 460. ‘Il est à remarquer que les
Caraibes du continent, hommes et femmes, parlent un même langage, n’ayant
point corrumpu leur langue naturelle par des mariages avec des femmes
étrangères.’ (1511.)

[352] Humboldt, personal narrative, vi. 40-43.

[353] See chapter on Carib language in _Les Îles Antilles_, 449, and
collection of words, where those used exclusively by either sex are
marked with an H and F (_Hommes et Femmes_) respectively.

[354] Maclean, 95.

[355] Leslie, 177.

[356] Du Tertre, _Hist. Gén. des Antilles_, 378.

[357] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, i. 301-3.

[358] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 188, 206. The author
suggestively calls attention to the similarity of this legend to the
Hindu legend of Indra, who delivers the lovely Apas from the monster
Vitra in the dark cavern of Ahi, a legend which has been taken to mean
the fire-god who destroys the dark storm cloud that chases and maltreats
the fleecy maidens of the sky.

[359] Bleek, _Hottentot Fables_, 67.

[360] Bleek, _Bushman Folk-lore_.

[361] Egede, 209.

[362] Cranz, i. 213.

[363] Gill, 40-2.

[364] Dall, _Alaska_.

[365] Sproat, p. 182.

[366] Casalis, _Les Basutos_. With this story Grimm compares a German
one, _Kinder und Hausmärchen_, i. 172.

[367] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, ii. 229-30.

[368] Gill, 88-98.

[369] Mrs. Cookson, _Legends of the Manx_, 27-30.

[370] Wolf, _Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie_, i. 2.

[371] _Algic Researches_, ii. 216.

[372] Kelly, _Indo-European Traditions_, 78. See the German version of
the tale in Grimm’s _Hausmärchen_, ii. 394.

[373] Köhler, _Weimarische Beiträge zur Literatur_, Jan. 1865.

[374] Schirren, _Wandersagen der Neuseeländer_, 31, 37-39.

[375] Grimm, _Hausmärchen_, i. Pref. 53.

[376] See the different versions in Mr. Tylor’s _Early History of
Mankind_, 344.

[377] Cox, _Aryan Mythology_, ii. 173.

[378] _Algic Researches_, ii. 1-33.

[379] _Aryan Mythology_, ii. 85.

[380] _Algic Researches_, ii. 34.

[381] Wilson, _Vishnu Purana_, 394-5.

[382] Fiske, _Myths and Myth Makers_, 97, and Cox, _Aryan Mythology_, ii.
282.

[383] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, ii. 27.

[384] _Algic Researches_, i. 67.

[385] Bleek, _Hottentot Fables_, Pref. xxv.

[386] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 148.

[387] _Algic Researches_, ii. 40.

[388] _Travels in Australia_, i. 261.

[389] Schoolcraft, _Algic Researches_, i. 41.

[390] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 409.

[391] D. Leslie, _Among the Zulus_, 168.

[392] Callaway, _Religious System of the Amazulu_, Part i. 5.

[393] _Algic Researches_, i. 122-8.

[394] Bancroft, _Native Races_, iii. 526.

[395] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 182.

[396] Callaway, _Religious System of the Amazulu_, Part i. 122-3.

[397] Pinkerton, xvi. 689.

[398] Callaway, _Zulu Nursery Tales_, i. 152.

[399] Leslie, 81, 98.

[400] _Ibid._ 79.

[401] _Ibid._ 169.

[402] Appleyard, _Kafir Grammar_, 13.

[403] Mrs. Cookson, _Legends of the Manx_, 23.

[404] Prof. Max Müller, _Science of Language_, ii. 444.

[405] Steller, 253-4.

[406] Léouzon le Duc, _La Finlande_, 51, 87. ‘À dire vrai, _tous les
dieux de la mythologie finnoise ne sont que les magiciens_.’

[407] Bancroft, v. 23.

[408] Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, 164.

[409] Vishnu Purana, 575.

[410] Schirren, 144. Maui wird im Meere geformt, von einem Fisch
verschluckt, mit diesem ans Land geworfen und herausgeschnitten. _Der
Fisch ist die Erde welche die Sonne zur Nacht verschlingt; der Himmel im
Osten befreit die Sonne aus der Erde._

[411] Bancroft, v. 23.

[412] Brinton, 180.

[413] Waitz (_Anthropologie_, iv. 394, 448, 455) adopts the view of the
human origin of Viracocha.

[414] Bleek, _Hottentot Fables_, 75.

[415] Schiefner, _Kalewala_, 129. In the lamentations over an approaching
marriage, an old man says to the bride:

  ‘_Seinen Mond nannt’ dich der Vater,_
  _Sonnenschein nannt’ dich die Mutter,_
  _Wasserschimmer dich der Bruder,_’ &c.

[416] Fiske, 35, 76.

[417] Schweinfurth, _Heart of Africa_, ii. 326.

[418] Steller, 279.

[419] Williams, _Fiji_, 204.

[420] Rink, _Tales, &c. of the Esquimaux_, 90.

[421] _Algic Researches_, ii. 226.

[422] _Hiawatha_, Canto xxi.

[423] Steller, 267. ‘Die Italmanes geben nach ihrer _ungemein lebhaften
Phantasie_ von allen Dingen Raison, und lassen nicht das geringste ohne
Critic vorbei.’ Yet they had neither reverence nor names for the stars,
calling only the Great Bear the moving star, 281.

[424] _Travels in Australia_, i. 261, 297.

[425] Thompson, _South Africa_, ii. 34.

[426] Aubrey’s _Miscellanies_, 197.

[427] Those who doubt the existence of much popular superstition in this
century may judge of the amount and value of the evidence by referring
to the following books: 1. All the volumes of _Notes and Queries_,
Index, Folk-Lore. 2. Harland and Wilkinson, _Lancashire Folk-Lore_,
1867. 3. Henderson’s _Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of
England and the Borders_, 1866. 4. Kelly’s _Curiosities of Indo-European
Tradition and Folk-Lore_, 1863. 5. Stewart’s _Popular Superstitions of
the Highlanders of Scotland_, 1851. 6. Sternberg’s _Dialect and Folk-Lore
of Northamptonshire_, 1851. 7. Thorpe’s _Northern Mythology_, 1851. 8.
Birlinger, _Volksthümliches aus Schwaben_, 1861. 9. Koehler, _Volksbrauch
im Voigtlande_, 1867. 10. Bosquet, _La Normandie Romanesque_, 1845.

[428] _Origin of Civilisation_, 33.

[429] _Ibid._, 23.

[430] Hammerton, _Round my House_, 254.

[431] Holderness, _Journey from Riga to the Crimea_, 254.

[432] Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, ‘Aberglaube,’ cases 576, 664, 698,
898. These practices, even if no longer existent, throw light upon those
that still are.

[433] Amélie Bosquet, _La Normandie pittoresque_, 217.

[434] Fletcher, _Russe Commonweal_, 78.

[435] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 419.

[436] Kane, 216.

[437] Williams, 248.

[438] Brett, _Indian Tribes of Guiana_, 369.

[439] Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, 111-114.

[440] Cook, vi. 192.

[441] Doolittle, _Social Life of the Chinese_, ii. 328.

[442] There are several derivations for Beltane or Bealteine: 1. From
Baal or Belus, the Phœnician god, the worship being supposed to be
of Phœnician origin; 2. from Baldur, one of the gods of Valhalla who
represented the Sun; 3. from lá = day, teine = fire, and Beal = the name
of some god, but not Belus; 4. from Paleteine, Pales’ fire, the worship
being identified with that of the Roman goddess Pales, who presided over
cattle and pastures, and to whom, on April 21, prayers and offerings were
made. At the Palilia shepherds purified their flocks by sulphur and fires
of olive and pine wood, and presented the goddess with cakes of millet
and milk, whilst the people leaped thrice through straw fires kindled
in a row. Yet we should probably be right if we connected the Palilia
and the Beltanes, not as directly borrowed one from the other, but as
co-descendants from one and the same origin.

Mr. Forbes-Leslie speaks of Beltane fires as still to be seen in 1865.
The Beltane feast proper was on May-day, but the word was also applied to
fires kindled in honour of Bel on other days, as on Midsummer Eve, All
Hallow-e’en, and Yeule, now Christmas. (_Early Races of Scotland_, i.
120-1.)

[443] Stewart, _Popular Superstitions of the Highlanders_, p. 149.

[444] Bancroft, iii. 701.

[445] Kolbe, _Caput bonæ Spei_, ii. 431-2, and Thunberg, in Pinkerton,
xvi. 143. Kolbe gives a picture of the practice.

[446] Kerr, _Voyages_, i. 131.

[447] Catlin, ii. 189.

[448] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iii. 228.

[449] Latham, _Desc. Ethn._, i. 141.

[450] Jones, _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 21, and
Schoolcraft, _I.T._, v. 267.

[451] _Lancashire Folk-Lore_, p. 63.

[452] Sir W. Betham, _Gael and Cimbri_: 1834. ‘The branches of a tree
near the Stone of Fire Temple in the Persian province of Fars were found
thickly hung with rags, and the same offerings are common on bushes round
sacred wells in the Dekkan of India and Ceylon.’ (Forbes-Leslie, _Early
Races of Scotland_, i. 163.)

[453] Schiefner, _Introduction to Sjögren’s Livische Grammatik_. St.
Petersburg, 1861.

[454] The instances of Esthonian superstitions are taken from Grimm’s
collection in the _Deutsche Mythologie_. Their date is 1788. The same
interest attaches to them from an archæological point of view, whether
they exist still or have become extinct.


THE END.