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Title: Religions of Primitive Peoples

Author: Daniel G. Brinton

Release date: January 22, 2020 [eBook #61220]

Language: English

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Produced by Julia Miller and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)










                        _AMERICAN LECTURES ON THE
                          HISTORY OF RELIGIONS_

                         SECOND SERIES—1896-1897

                         RELIGIONS OF PRIMITIVE
                                 PEOPLES

                                   BY
               DANIEL G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D., SC.D.
         Professor of American Archæology and Linguistics in the
                University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

                           _FOURTH IMPRESSION_

                           G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
                           NEW YORK AND LONDON
                         The Knickerbocker Press

                             COPYRIGHT, 1897
                                   BY
                           G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

                   Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London

                    The Knickerbocker Press, New York




ANNOUNCEMENT.


On the 24th of December, 1891, fifteen persons interested in promoting
the historical study of religions united in issuing a circular-letter,
inviting a conference in the Council Chambers of the Historical Society
of Philadelphia, on the 30th of the same month, for the purpose of
instituting “popular courses in the History of Religions, somewhat after
the style of the Hibbert lectures in England, to be delivered annually
by the best scholars of Europe and this country, in various cities, such
as Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and
others.” There participated in this conference personally or by letter
from Philadelphia, Rev. Prof. E. T. Bartlett, D.D., Rev. George Dana
Boardman, D.D., Prof. D. G. Brinton, M.D., Sc.D., Horace Howard Furness,
LL.D., Prof. E. J. James, Ph.D., Prof. Morris Jastrow, Jr., Ph.D.,
Provost Wm. Pepper, M.D., LL.D., of the University of Pennsylvania,
Hon. Mayer Sulzberger, Mrs. Cornelius Stevenson, and Talcott Williams,
LL.D.; from Baltimore, Prest. D. C. Gilman, LL.D., of the Johns Hopkins
University, and Prof. Paul Haupt, Ph.D.; from Boston and Cambridge, Rev.
E. E. Hale, D.D., Prof. C. R. Lanman, Ph.D., Prof. D. G. Lyon, Ph.D., and
Prof. C. H. Toy, LL.D.; from Brooklyn, Rev. Edward S. Braislin, D.D.,
and Prof. Franklin W. Hooper of the Brooklyn Institute; from Chicago,
Prest. W. R. Harper, Ph.D., of the University of Chicago, and Rev. Prof.
Emil G. Hirsch, Ph.D.; from New York, Rev. Prof. C. A. Briggs, D.D.,
LL.D., Rev. Prof. Francis Brown, D.D., Rev. G. Gottheil, D.D., Prof. R.
J. H. Gottheil, Ph.D., Rev. John P. Peters, Ph.D., and Rev. W. Hayes
Ward, D.D., LL.D.; from Ithaca, N. Y., Prest. J. G. Schurman of Cornell
University, and Hon. Andrew D. White, LL.D.

At this conference Prof. Jastrow submitted a plan for establishing
popular lecture courses on the historical study of religions by securing
the co-operation of existing institutions and lecture associations, such
as the Lowell, Brooklyn, and Peabody Institutes, the University Lecture
Association of Philadelphia, and some of our colleges and universities.
Each course, according to this plan, was to consist of from six to eight
lectures, and the engagement of lecturers, choice of subjects, and so
forth were to be in the hands of a committee chosen from the different
cities, and representing the various institutions and associations
participating. This general scheme met with the cordial approval of the
conference, which voted the project both a timely and useful one, and
which appointed Dean Bartlett, Prof. Jastrow, and Dr. Peters a committee
to elaborate a plan of organisation and report at an adjourned meeting.
That meeting was held at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City,
February 6, 1892, and, as a result, an association was organised for the
purpose of encouraging the study of religions. The _terms_ of association
then adopted, with slight modifications introduced later, are as follows:

    1.—The object of this Association shall be to provide courses
    of lectures on the history of religions, to be delivered in
    various cities.

    2.—The Association shall be composed of delegates from
    institutions agreeing to co-operate, or from local boards,
    organised where such co-operation is not possible.

    3.—These Delegates—one from each Institution or Local
    Board—shall constitute themselves a council under the name
    of the “American Committee for Lectures on the History of
    Religions.”

    4.—The Council shall elect out of its number a President, a
    Secretary, and a Treasurer.

    5.—All matters of local detail shall be left to the
    Institutions or Local Boards, under whose auspices the lectures
    are to be delivered.

    6.—A course of lectures on some religion, or phase of religion,
    from an historical point of view, or on a subject germane to
    the study of religions, shall be delivered annually, or at such
    intervals as may be found practicable, in the different cities
    represented by this Association.

    7.—The Council (_a_) shall be charged with the selection of the
    lecturers, (_b_) shall have charge of the funds, (_c_) shall
    assign the time for the lectures in each city, and perform such
    other functions as may be necessary.

    8.—Polemical subjects, as well as polemics in the treatment of
    subjects, shall be positively excluded.

    9.—The lecturer shall be chosen by the Council at least ten
    months before the date fixed for the course of lectures.

    10.—The lectures shall be delivered in the various cities
    between the months of October and June.

    11.—The copyright of the lectures shall be the property of the
    Association.

    12.—One half of the lecturer’s compensation shall be paid at
    the completion of this entire course, and the second half upon
    the publication of the lectures.

    13.—The compensation offered to the lecturer shall be fixed in
    each case by the Council.

    14.—The lecturer is not to deliver elsewhere any of the
    lectures for which he is engaged by the Committee, except with
    the sanction of the Committee.

The Committee appointed to carry out this plan as now constituted, is as
follows:

    Prof. C. H. Toy, of Harvard University, Chairman.

    Prof. Morris Jastrow, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania,
    Secretary.

    Rev. John P. Peters, D. D., of New York, Treasurer.

    Prof. Richard J. H. Gottheil, of Columbia University.

    Prof. Paul Haupt, of the Johns Hopkins University.

    Prof. F. W. Hooper, of the Brooklyn Institute.

    Prof. J. F. Jameson, of Brown University.

    Prof. F. K. Sanders, of Yale University.

    President J. G. Schurman, of Cornell University.

For its first course the Committee selected as lecturer Prof. T. W.
Rhys Davids, Ph.D. LL.D., of London, England, who delivered a course
of lectures in the winter of 1894-95 on The History and Literature
of Buddhism, at the following places, with the co-operation of the
institutions named:

    Baltimore, before the Johns Hopkins University.

    Boston, at the Lowell Institute.

    Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Institute.

    Ithaca, before the Cornell University.

    New York, before the Columbia University.

    Philadelphia, before the University of Pennsylvania Lecture
    Association.

    Providence, before the Brown University Lecture Association.

Professor Davids’ lectures were published in 1896 by arrangement with
Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the publishers to the Committee, as the
First Series of The American Lectures on the History of Religions.
As the second lecturer, the Committee chose Prof. Daniel G. Brinton,
A.M., M.D., LL.D., Sc.D., of Philadelphia; and as the subject, “The
Religions of Primitive Peoples.” Dr. Brinton, who holds the chair of
American Archæology and Linguistics in the University of Pennsylvania,
is a leading authority on the languages and customs of the American
Indians, and on Anthropology in general. His studies have led him also
into the domain of Prehistoric Archæology and Comparative Mythology. As
the product of his investigations in the latter field, he published as
early as 1868, _The Myths of The New World_, which at once attracted the
attention of scholars, and has passed through several editions since.
In 1876 he issued an important contribution to the Science of Religion,
under the title, _The Religious Sentiment_. In addition to this he has
published a large number of works on American Languages on Anthropology,
and Archæology, the most notable of which is the series Library of
Aboriginal American Literature. His papers, scattered in various
scientific periodicals of this country and Europe, number several hundred.

The lectures delivered by him under the auspices of the Committee
represent the ripe fruit of many years of study, and will, we feel
assured, be welcomed as an important contribution to a subject now
attracting much attention.

The lectures were delivered during the winter of 1896-97, at the
following places:

    Boston, (Lowell Institute).

    Brooklyn, (Brooklyn Institute).

    Ithaca, (Cornell University).

    New Haven, (Yale University).

    New York, (New York University).

    Philadelphia, (University of Pennsylvania).

    Providence, (Brown University Lecture Association).

The object of this Association is to provide the best opportunities for
bringing to the knowledge of the public at large the methods and results
of those distinguished specialists who have devoted their lives to the
study of the religions of other countries and other ages. It is safe to
say that there is no other subject of modern research which concerns
all classes so nearly as the study of religions. It is the hope of the
Committee to provide courses at intervals of two years, or oftener, if
the encouragement which the undertaking receives warrants it, and the
practical difficulties involved in securing competent lecturers do not
make it impossible.

Arrangements have been made for a course of lectures during the winter of
1897-98, by the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, M.A., D.D., Professor of Old Testament
Interpretation at Oriel College, Oxford, and Canon of Rochester;
whose subject will be Religious Thought and Life among the Hebrews in
Post-Exilic Days, to be followed in 1898-99 by a complementary course
on Religious Life and Thought among the Hebrews in Pre-Exilic Days, by
Professor Karl Budde, of the University of Strasburg, Germany.

                                                      JOHN P. PETERS,
                                                      C. H. TOY,
                                                      MORRIS JASTROW, JR.

_Committee on Publication._

_May 10, 1897._




CONTENTS.


                                                                      PAGE

     LECTURE I. THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS—METHODS
                            AND DEFINITIONS.

  Ethnology Defined—The Scientific Study of Religions—It is not
  Theology—Its Methods: 1. The Historic Method; 2. The Comparative
  Method; 3. The Psychologic Method—Strange Coincidences in
  Human Thought—Conspicuous in Primitive Religions—“Primitive”
  Peoples Defined—The Savage Mind—Examples—Means of Study: 1.
  Archæology; 2. Language: 3. Folk-Lore; 4. Descriptions of
  Travellers—Examples: The Early Aryans, Etruscans, Semites,
  Egyptians, American Tribes, Australians, Polynesians,
  etc.—“Religions” Defined—Compared with “Superstitions”—No One
  Belief Essential to Religion—Atheistic Religions—Fundamental
  Identity of Religions—No Tribe Known Devoid of a Religion—How the
  Opposite Opinion Arose—Earliest Men probably had No Religion—No
  Signs of Religion in Lower Animals—Power of Religion in Primitive
  Society—True Source of Religion                                        1

       LECTURE II. THE ORIGIN AND CONTENTS OF PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS.

  Former Theories of the Origin of Religions—Inadequacy of
  these—Universal Postulate of Religions that Conscious
  Volition is the Source of Force—How Mind was Assigned
  to Nature—Communion between the Human and the Divine
  Mind—Universality of “Inspiration”—Inspiration the Product of
  the Sub-Conscious Mind—Known to Science as “Suggestion”—This
  Explained—Examples—Illustrations from Language—No Primitive
  Monotheism—The Special Stimuli of the Religious Emotions:
  1. Dreaming and Allied Conditions—Life as a Dream—2. The
  Apprehension of Life and Death and the Notion of the Soul—3. The
  Perception of Light and Darkness; Day and Night—The Sky God as
  the High God—4. The Observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions of
  Force—The Thunder God—5. The Impression of Vastness—Dignity of
  the Sub-Conscious Intelligence                                        41

        LECTURE III. PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION: IN THE WORD.

  An Echo Myth—The Power of Words—Their Magical Potency—The
  Curse—Power Independent of Meaning—The Name as an Attribute—The
  Sacred Names—The Ineffable Name—“Myrionomous” Gods—“Theophorous”
  Names—Suggestion and Repetition as Stimulants—I. The Word
  _to_ the gods: Prayer—Its Forms, Contents, and Aims—II. The
  Word _from_ the gods: The Law and the Prophecy—The Ceremonial
  Law, or _tabu_—Examples—Divination and Prediction—III. The
  Word _concerning_ the gods: The Myths—Their Sources chiefly
  Psychic—Some from Language—Examples—Transference—Similarities—The
  Universal Mythical Cycles: 1. The Cosmical Concepts; 2. The
  Sacred Numbers; 3. The Drama of the Universe; Creation and Deluge
  Myths; 4. The Earthly Paradise; 5. The Conflict of Nature; 6. The
  Returning Saviour; 7. The Journey of the Soul—Conclusion as to
  these Identities                                                      86

       LECTURE IV. PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION: IN THE OBJECT.

  Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship only—Identical with
  Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a Stadium of Religion—The
  Chief Groups of Religious Objects: 1. The Celestial Bodies—Sun
  and Moon Worship—Astrolatry; 2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the
  Winds), Water, and the Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones
  and Rocks—Thunderbolts—Memorial Stones—Divining Stones; 4. Trees
  and Plants—The Tree of Life—The Sacred Pole and the Cross—The
  Plant-Soul—The Tree of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—High Places
  and Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird, the Serpent, etc.; 7.
  Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Worship of Beauty; 8. Life and its
  Transmission—Examples—Genesiac Cults—The Fatherhood of God—Love
  as Religion’s Crown                                                  130

         LECTURE V. PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION: IN THE RITE.

  The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical Rites—Division of Rites
  into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I. Communal Rites: 1. The
  Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The Festal Function—Joyous Character of
  Primitive Rites—Commensality—The “Ceremonial Circuit”—Masks and
  Dramas—3. The Sacrifice—Early and Later Forms—4. The Communion
  with God—Pagan Eucharists. II. Personal Rites: 1. Relating
  to Birth—Vows and Baptism—2. Relating to Naming—The Personal
  Name—3. Relating to Puberty—Initiation of Boys and Girls—4.
  Relating to Marriage—Marriage “by Capture” and “by Purchase”—5.
  Relating to Death—Early Cannibalism—Sepulchral Monuments—Funerary
  Ceremonies—Modes of Burial—Customs of Mourning                       172

      LECTURE VI. THE LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS.

  Pagan Religions not wholly Bad—Their Lines of Development as
  Connected with: 1. The Primitive Social Bond—The Totem, the
  Priesthood, and the Law; 2. The Family and the Position of Woman;
  3. The Growth of Jurisprudence—The Ordeal, Trial by Battle,
  Oaths, and the Right of Sanctuary—Religion is Anarchic; 4. The
  Development of Ethics—Dualism of Primitive Ethics—Opposition of
  Religion to Ethics; 5. The Advance in Positive Knowledge—Religion
  _versus_ Science; 6. The Fostering of the Arts—The Aim for
  Beauty and Perfection—Colour-Symbolism, Sculpture, Metre,
  Music, Oratory, Graphic Methods—Useful Arts, Architecture;
  7. The Independent Life of the Individual—His Freedom and
  Happiness—Inner Stadia of Progress: 1. From the Object to the
  Symbol; 2. From the Ceremonial Law to the Personal Ideal; 3. From
  the Tribal to the National Conception of Religion—Conclusion         214




RELIGIONS OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES




LECTURE I.

The Scientific Study of Primitive Religions—Methods and Definitions.

    CONTENTS:—Ethnology Defined—The Scientific Study of
    Religions—It is not Theology—Its Methods: 1. The Historic
    Method; 2. The Comparative Method; 3. The Psychologic
    Method—Strange Coincidences in Human Thought—Conspicuous in
    Primitive Religions—“Primitive” Peoples Defined—The Savage
    Mind—Examples—Means of Study: 1. Archæology; 2. Language;
    3. Folk-Lore; 4. Descriptions of Travellers—Examples: The
    Early Aryans, Etruscans, Semites, Egyptians, American
    Tribes, Australians, Polynesians, etc.—“Religions”
    Defined—Compared with “Superstitions”—No One Belief Essential
    to Religion—Atheistic Religions—Fundamental Identity of
    Religions—No Tribe Known Devoid of a Religion—How the Opposite
    Opinion Arose—Earliest Men probably had No Religion—No Signs
    of Religion in Lower Animals—Power of Religion in Primitive
    Society—True Source of Religion.


The youngest in the sisterhood of the sciences is that which deals with
Man. In its widest scope it is called Anthropology, and as such includes
both the physical and mental life of the species, from the beginning
until now. That branch of it which especially concerns itself with the
development of man as indicated by his advance in civilisation, is known
as Ethnology.

When we analyse the directive forces which have brought about this
advance, and whose study therefore makes up Ethnology, they can be
reduced to four, to wit, Language, Laws, Arts, and Religion. Do not
imagine, however, that these are separable, independent forces. On the
contrary, they are inseparable, constituent elements of an organic unity,
each working through the others, and on the symmetrical adjustment of all
of them to the needs of a community depend its prosperity and growth. No
one of them can be omitted or exaggerated without stunting or distorting
the national expansion. This lesson, taught by all ages and confirmed by
every example, warns us to be cautious in giving precedence to one over
the others in any general scheme; but we can profitably separate one from
the others, and study its origins and influence.

On this occasion I invite your attention to Religion, and especially as
displayed in its earliest and simplest forms, in the faiths and rites of
primitive peoples. I shall present these to you in accordance with the
principles and methods of Ethnology.

There is what has been called the “science of religion.” The expression
seems to me a little presumptuous—or, at least, premature. We do not yet
speak of a “science of jurisprudence,” although we have better materials
for it than for a science of religion. I shall content myself, therefore,
in calling what I have to offer a study of early religions according to
scientific methods.

I need not remind you that such a method is absolutely without bias or
partisanship; that it looks upon all religions alike as more or less
enlightened expressions of mental traits common to all mankind in every
known age.[1] It concedes the exclusive possession of truth to none, and
still less does it aim to set up any other standard than past experience
by which to measure the claims of any. It brings no new canons of faith
or doctrine, and lays no other foundation than that which has been laid
even from the beginning until now.

But just there its immediate utility and practical bearings are
manifested. It seeks to lay bare those eternal foundations on which the
sacred edifices of religion have ever been and must ever be erected. It
aims to accomplish this by clearing away the incidental and adventitious
in religions so as to discover what in them is permanent and universal.
Those sacred ideas and institutions which we find repeated among all the
early peoples of the earth, often developing in after ages along parallel
lines, will form the special objects of our investigation. The departures
from these universal forms, we shall see, can be traced to local or
temporary causes, they turn on questions of environment, and serve merely
to define the limits of variability of the ubiquitous principles of
religion as a psychic phenomenon, wherever we find it.

This is not “theology.” That branch of learning aims to measure the
objective reality, the concrete truth, of some one or another opinion
concerning God and divine things; while the scientific study of religions
confines itself exclusively to examining such opinions as phases of human
mental activity, and ascertaining what influence they have exerted on the
development of the species or of some branch of it. Therefore it is never
“polemic.” It neither attacks nor defends the beliefs which it studies.
It confines itself to examining their character and influence by the
lights of reason and history.

The methods which we employ in this process of reduction are three in
number: 1. The Historic Method; 2. The Comparative Method; 3. The
Psychologic Method. A few words will explain the scope of each of these.

The Historic Method studies the history of beliefs and the development of
worship. It seeks to discover what influences have been exerted on them
by environment, transmission, heredity, and conquest, and to bring into
full relief what is peculiar to the tribe or group under consideration,
and what is exotic. For in one sense it is true that every nation and
tribe, even every man, has his own religion.

Such ethnic traits merit the closest scrutiny. They are so marked
and constant as to modify profoundly the history of even the ripest
religions. It is quite true, as has been observed by an historian of
Christianity, that “there is in every people an hereditary disposition to
some particular heresy,”[2] that is, to altering any religion which they
accept in accordance with the special constitution of their own minds.

The Comparative Method notes the similarities and differences between the
religions of different tribes or groups, and, gradually extending its
field to embrace the whole species, endeavors, by excluding what is local
or temporal, to define those forms of religious thought and expression
which are common to humanity at large.

The Psychologic Method takes the results of both the previous methods
and aims to explain them by referring the local manifestations to the
special mental traits of the tribe or group, and the universal features
to equally universal characteristics of the human mind.

The last, the Psychologic Method, is the crown and completion of the
quest; for every advanced student of religion will subscribe to the
declaration of Professor Granger, that “all mythology and all history
of beliefs must finally turn to psychology for their satisfactory
elucidation.”[3] In other words, the laws of human thought can alone
explain its own products.

And here I must mention a startling discovery, the most startling, it
seems to me, of recent times. It is that these laws of human thought are
frightfully rigid, are indeed automatic and inflexible. The human mind
seems to be a machine; give it the same materials, and it will infallibly
grind out the same product. So deeply impressed by this is an eminent
modern writer that he lays it down as “a fundamental maxim of ethnology”
that, “we do not think; thinking merely goes on within us.”[4]

These strange coincidences find their explanation in experimental
psychology. This science, in its modern developments, establishes the
fact that the origin of ideas is due to impressions on the nerves of
sense. The five senses give rise to five classes of ideas, the most
numerous of which are those from the sense of sight, visual ideas, and
those from the sense of hearing, auditory ideas. The former yield the
conceptions of space, motion, and lustre (colour, brightness, etc.),
the latter that of time. From the sense of touch arise the “tactual”
impressions, which yield the ideas of power and might, through the
sensations of resistance and pressure, pleasure and pain. From these
primary ideas (or perceptions), drawn directly from impressions,
are derived secondary, abstract, and general ideas (apperceptions)
by comparison and association (the laws of Identity, Diversity, and
Similarity).

Under ordinary conditions of human life there are many more impressions
on the senses which are everywhere the same or similar, than the
reverse. Hence, the ideas, both primary and secondary (perceptions and
apperceptions), drawn from them are much more likely to resemble than to
differ.

The consequence of this is that the same laws of growth which develop the
physical man everywhere into the traits of the species, act also on his
psychical powers, and not less absolutely, to bring their products into
conformity.

This is true not only of his logical faculties, but of his lightest
fancies and wildest vagaries. “Man’s imagination,” observes Mr. Hartland,
“like every other known power, works by fixed laws, the existence and
operation of which it is possible to trace; and it works upon the same
material,—the external universe, the mental and moral constitution of
man, and his social relations.”[5]

In reference to my particular subject, Professor Buchmann expressed some
years ago what I believe to be the correct result of modern research
in these words: “It is easy to prove that the striking similarity
in primitive religious ideas comes not from tradition nor from the
relationship or historic connections of early peoples, but from the
identity in the mental construction of the individual man, wherever he is
found.”[6]

We can scarcely escape a painful shock to discover that we are bound by
such adamantine chains. As the primitive man could not conceive that
inflexible mechanical laws control the processes of nature, so are we
slow to acknowledge that others, not less rigid, rule our thoughts and
fancies.

Nowhere, however, is the truth of it more clearly demonstrated than in
primitive religions. Without a full appreciation of this fact, it is
impossible to comprehend them; and for the lack of it, much that has
been written upon them is worthless. The astonishing similarity, the
absolute identities, which constantly present themselves in myths and
cults separated by oceans and continents, have been construed as evidence
of common descent or of distant transmission; whereas they are the
proofs of a fundamental unity of the human mind and of its processes,
“before which,” as a German writer says, “the differences in individual,
national, or even racial divisions sink into insignificance.”[7] Wherever
we turn, in time or in space, to the earliest and simplest religions of
the world, we find them dealing with nearly the same objective facts in
nearly the same subjective fashion, the differences being due to local
and temporal causes.

This cardinal and basic truth of the unity of action of man’s
intelligence, which is established just as much for the arts, the laws,
and the institutions of men as for their religions, enables me to
present to you broadly the faiths of primitive peoples as one coherent
whole, the product of a common humanity, a mirror reflecting the deepest
thoughts of the whole species on the mighty questions of religious life
and hope, not the isolated or borrowed opinions of one or another tribe
or people.

Of course, the recognition of this principle does not diminish the
attention to be paid to the ethnic or local developments of culture and
to the borrowing or transference of myths and rites. Wherever this can be
shown to have occurred, it is an adequate explanation of identities; but
in tribes geographically remote, the presumption is that such identities
are due to the common element of humanity in the species.

Such similarities are by no means confined to the primitive forms of
religion; but in them they are more obvious, and their causes are
more apparent; so for that reason, a study of such primitive forms is
peculiarly remunerative to one who would acquaint himself with the
elements of religion in general. No one, in fact, can pretend to a
thorough knowledge of the great historic religions of the world who has
not traced their outlines back to the humble faiths of early tribes from
which they emerged.

He must have recourse to them for like reasons that the biologist, who
would learn the morphology of a mammal, betakes himself to the study of
the cells and fibres of the simplest living organisms; for in their
uncomplicated forms he can discover the basic activities which animate
the highest structures.

I must define, however, more closely what ethnologists mean by “primitive
peoples”; because the word is not used in the sense of “first” or
“earliest,” as its derivation would indicate. We know little, if
anything, about the earliest men, and their religion would make a short
chapter. “Primitive” to the ethnologist means the earliest of a given
race or tribe of whom he has trusty information. It has reference to a
stage of culture, rather than to time. Peoples who are in a savage or
barbarous condition, with slight knowledge of the arts, lax governments,
and feeble institutions, are spoken of as “primitive,” although they may
be our contemporaries. They are very far from being the earliest men or
resembling them. Hundreds of generations have toiled to produce even
their low stage of culture up through others, far inferior, of which we
can form some idea by the aid of language and prehistoric archæology.

They are therefore not degenerates, ruins fallen from some former high
estate, some condition of pristine nobility. That is an ancient error,
now, I hope, exploded and dismissed from sane teaching. Even the rudest
of savages is a creation of steady, long-continued advancement from the
primeval man. We have the evidence of what he was, in his implements
and weapons preserved in pre-glacial strata and in the mud-floors of the
caves he inhabited.

These announce to us a law of progressive advancement for all races, over
all the earth, on the same lines of progress, toward the same goals of
culture, extremely slow at the outset, and unequal especially in later
ages, but vindicating the unity of the species and the identity of its
hopes and aims everywhere.

You will understand, therefore, that by “primitive peoples,” I mean
savage or barbarous tribes, wherever they are or have been, and that I
claim for them brotherhood with ourselves in all the traits that go to
make up oneness of species. A few hundred years ago the ancestors of the
English-speaking nations were as savage as the savagest, without temples
to their gods, in perpetual and bloody war, untamed cannibals; add a few
thousand years to the perspective, and man over the whole globe was in
the same condition.

The savage state was the childhood of the race, and by some the mind of
the savage has been likened to that of the child. But the resemblance
is merely superficial. It rather resembles that of the uncultivated and
ignorant adult among ourselves. The same inaccurate observation and
illogical modes of thought characterise both. These depend on certain
mental traits, which it is well to define, because they explain most of
the absurdities of primitive religions.

The first is, that the idea is accepted as true, without the process of
logical reasoning or inductive observation. In other words, what appears
true to the individual is accepted by him as true, without further
question. His dreams seem real to him; therefore they are real. What the
tribe believes, he believes, no matter what his senses tell him.

When an Australian Black is on a journey and fears being overtaken by the
night, he will place a lump of clay in the forks of a tree, believing
that thus he can arrest the motion of the sun and prolong the day. It is
not a religious act, but a piece of natural science current in the tribe,
which no experience will refute in their minds.[8]

Just such a notion recurs among the Mandan Indians. Captain Clark
observed near their villages upright poles fifteen or twenty feet
long with bundles of female clothing tied to them. He asked what they
signified, and one of the old men explained thus: “If you watch the sun
closely, you will see that he stops for a short time just as he rises,
and again at midday, and as he sets. The reason is that he rests a few
moments to smoke in the lodges of three immortal women, and we offer them
this clothing that they may be induced to say a kind word to him in our
behalf. We were told by our ancestors not to forget this.”[9] The fact
that the orb does not stop was of no consequence in the face of this
tradition.

The second trait is the extreme nervous susceptibility of savages. It
is much higher than ours, although the contrary is often taught. Their
emotions or feelings control their reasoning powers, and direct their
actions. Neurotic diseases, especially of a contagious character, are
very frequent among them, and they are far more prone than ourselves to
yield to impressions upon their sensory organs. The traveller Castren
relates that a sudden blow on the outside of a tent of the Samoyeds will
sometimes throw the occupants into spasms; and the missionary Livingstone
draws a touching picture of young slaves dying of “a broken heart,” when
they heard the song and music of the villagers and could not join in the
revelry.[10]

These two traits, therefore, the acceptance of the idea as subjectively
true, and the subordination of reason to the feelings, are the main
features of the undeveloped mind. They are common in civilised
conditions, but are universal in savagery.

The question has often been considered whether the mental powers of the
savage are distinctly inferior. This has been answered by taking the
children of savages when quite young and bringing them up in civilised
surroundings. The verdict is unanimous that they display as much aptitude
for the acquisition of knowledge, and as much respect for the precepts
of morality, as the average English or German boy or girl; but with less
originality or “initiative.”

I have been in close relations to several full-blood American Indians,
who had been removed from an aboriginal environment and instructed in
this manner; and I could not perceive that they were either in intellect
or sympathies inferior to the usual type of the American gentleman.
One of them notably had a refined sense of humour, as well as uncommon
acuteness of observation.

The assertion, however, is frequently advanced that in their savage state
they are of the earth earthy, that their whole time is taken up with the
gratification of sensuous desires, and that they neither think nor care
for speculations of a super-sensuous or spiritual character.

The investigation of this point is desirable in a study of their
religions, for upon it depends the decision whether we can assign to
their myths and rites a meaning deeper than that of deception, or
passion, or frivolity.

To reach a decision, I take the most unfavourable example which can
be suggested,—the Australian Blacks. Considering their number and the
extent of their territory, they were, when discovered, the most degraded
people on the globe. They had nothing which could be called a government,
and some dialects have no word for chief. None of them could count the
fingers on one hand, for none of the dialects had any words for numerals
beyond _three_ or _four_. Mr. Hale, the eminent ethnographer, who was
among them in 1843, says that they evinced “an almost brutal stupidity,”
“downright childishness and imbecility.”[11]

Their natural feelings and moral perceptions seem incredibly blunted. I
can best illustrate this by narrating an incident which happened at a
frontier station, one of many of the same character.

The white family employed a native girl named Mattie about fifteen years
old. She had a baby, which one day disappeared. On inquiry she stated
that her mother had said that she was too young to take care of a baby,
and had therefore cooked and eaten it with some of her cronies. Mattie
cried in telling this. Because her baby had been killed? Oh no! but
because her mother had given her none of the tidbits, but only the bones
to pick![12]

Yet even these seemingly hopeless brutes have an intricate system of
kinship and marriage laws, the most rigid of any known. Marriage with
sisters or first cousins is not only forbidden, “It is not conceived as
possible.” The prohibitions about food are so absolute that the natives
would perish of hunger rather than break them. Some of their religious
ceremonies entail voluntary mutilations of the most dreadful description.
Their mythology is extensive, and I shall have frequent occasion to quote
it. And so far are they from an obtuse indifference to the future and the
past, an accurate observer who lived among them says: “They wonder among
themselves and talk at night about these things, and the past existence
of their race, and how they came here.”[13]

Savage tribes are distinctly unlettered. They belong in a stage of
culture where the art of writing, as we understand it, is unknown. They
have no bibles, no sacred books, by which to teach their religions. What
means have we, therefore, to learn their opinions about holy things?

The question is one which demands an answer, the more because I shall
often refer to the religions of tribes long since extinct, and whose very
names are forgotten. How do we dare to speak with confidence of what they
thought about the gods?

We can do so, and it is one of the marvels of modern scientific research,
quite as admirable as its more familiar and practical results.

Our sources of information regarding primitive peoples may be classed
under four titles, Archæology, Language, Folk-lore, and Ethnographic
descriptions.

By the first of these, archæology, we become acquainted with the
objective remains of beliefs long since extinguished. The temples, idols,
and altars of dead gods reveal to us the attributes assigned to them by
their votaries and the influences they were believed to exert. We can
interpret their symbols, and from rude carvings re-construct the story of
their divine struggles. Especially, from ancient sepulchres and the modes
of disposal of the dead which they reveal, can we discern what hopes
vanished nations held of a life to come.

In this direction, we are powerfully aided by that close similarity of
mental products in like stages of culture, to which I have referred,
and shall often refer. By comparing a living tribe with one which ten
thousand years ago was in a similar condition as shown by its relics, we
can with the highest probability interpret the use and motives of the
latter’s remains.

We are further assisted in such research by the critical analysis of
the early forms of language, which is one of the achievements of modern
linguistics. By establishing the identities of names, we can trace the
diffusion of myths, and by tracing such names to their proper dialect and
original meaning, we can locate geographically and psychologically the
origin of given forms of religions. In fact, the value of linguistics
to the study of religions cannot be overestimated. No one is competent
to describe the sacred beliefs of a nation, its myths and adjurations,
unless he has a sufficient knowledge of its tongue to ascertain the true
sense of the terms employed in its liturgies.

But these so obvious applications are the least that language can
furnish. Its impress on religions goes much deeper. It was well remarked
by the Chevalier Bunsen that in primitive conditions the two poles of
human life, around which all else centres, are language and religion,
and that each conditions the other, that is, imparts to it special forms
and limits.

For instance, those languages which have grammatic gender almost
necessarily divide their deities according to sex[14]; those in which the
passive voice is absent or feebly developed, will be led to associate
with their deities higher conceptions of activity than where the passive
is a favourite form: those which have no substantive verb cannot express
God as pure being, but must associate with Him either position, action,
or suffering.

In the speech of the Algonquin Indians, there is no grammatic distinction
of sex; but there is broad discrimination between objects which are
animate and those which are inanimate. When the Catholic missionaries
brought to them the rosary, the natives at first spoke of it as
inanimate; but as their reverence for it grew, it was transferred to the
animate gender, and was thus on its way to a personification.[15]

The third source of information is that which is called folk-lore. Its
field of research is to collect the relics and survivals of primitive
modes of thought and expression, beliefs, customs, and notions, in the
present conditions of culture. It is, therefore, especially useful in
a study like the present, the more so on account of the extraordinary
permanence and conservative character of religious sentiments and
ceremonies. Among the peasantry of Europe, the paganism of the days of
Julius Cæsar flourishes with scarcely abated vigour, though it may be
under new names. “The primitive Aryan,” writes Professor Frazer,[16] “is
not extinct; he is with us to-day.” And another English writer does not
go too far when he says: “There is not a rite or ceremony yet practised
and revered among us that is not the lineal descendant of barbaric
thought and usage.”[17] It is this which gives to folk-lore its extremely
instructive character for the student of early religion.

The fourth source of information is the description of native religions
by travellers. You might expect this to be the most accurate and
therefore valuable of all the sources; but it is just the reverse.
Omitting the ordinary tourist and globe-trotter, who is not expected
to know anything thoroughly, and never deceives the expectation, even
painstaking observers, who have lived long with savage tribes, sometimes
mastering their languages, are, for reasons I shall presently state,
constantly at fault about the native religions. We must always take their
narratives with hesitation, and weigh them against others by persons of
a different nationality and education. Indeed, of all elements of native
life, this of religion is the most liable to be misunderstood by the
foreign visitor.

Bearing in mind these various sources of information, what tribes,
about which we have sufficient knowledge, could fairly be considered as
examples of primitive conditions?

Beginning with those remotest in time, I believe we know enough about
the early Aryans to claim it for them. The acute researches of recent
scholars, so admirably summed up in the work of Professor Schrader,
have thrown a flood of light on the domestic, cultural, and religious
condition of the pristine epoch of Aryan society from the side of
language; while the tireless prosecution of prehistoric archæology in
Europe has put us into possession of thousands of objects illustrating
the religious arts and usages then in vogue. Classical mythology and
ritual, as well as modern folk-lore, lend further efficient aid toward
reconstructing the modes and expressions of their sacred thought.

A very ancient people, possibly of Aryan blood, but more likely, I
believe, to have come from North Africa and to be of Libyan affinities,
were the Etruscans. They were extremely religious, and their theological
opinions deeply coloured the worship of the Romans. We know the general
outlines of their doctrine of the gods, and its simplicity and grandeur
bespeak our admiration. I shall draw from this venerable “Etruscan
discipline” from time to time for illustrations.

Quite as much may be said of the diligence of the explorers and scholars
in the field of Semitic antiquity. We can without room for doubt trace
the stream of Semitic religious thought through the Hebrew Bible and
the Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets to a possibly non-Semitic
source among the Accadian or Sumerian population, which ten thousand
years ago had already begun to develop an artistic and agricultural life
on the Babylonian plain. Numerous students have restored the outlines and
motives of this ancient faith, whose forms and doctrines bind and shape
our lives in America to-day.

Of the possibly still older culture of Egypt, so much cannot be said. The
original creeds of its religion have been less successfully divined. Like
its early inscriptions, they were erased and overlaid so often by the
caprice or prejudice of successive dynasties, and so profoundly modified
by foreign influences, that with our present knowledge they are no
longer legible.[18]

Turning to the religions which have preserved their primitive forms to
modern times, the first place should be conceded to those of America. Up
to four hundred years ago, all of them, throughout the continent, had
developed from an unknown antiquity untouched by the teachings of Asian
or European instructors; for no really sane scholar nowadays believes
either that St. Thomas preached Christianity in the New World in the
first century, or that Buddhist monks in the seventh or any other century
carried their tenets into Mexico and Guatemala.

Many of the American tribes, moreover, lived in the rudest stages of
social life, ignorant of agriculture, without fixed abodes, naked
or nearly so, in constant bloody strife, destitute even of tribal
government. Here, if anywhere, we should find the religious sentiment, if
it exists at all, in its simplest elements.

On the other hand, the first European explorers found in Peru, Yucatan,
and Mexico numerous tribes in almost a civilised condition, builders
of huge edifices of carved stones, cultivating the soil, and acquainted
with a partly phonetic system of writing. Their mythology was ample and
their ritual elaborate, so that it could scarcely be called primitive in
appearance; but in all these instances, myth and ritual were so obviously
identical in character with those of the vagrant tribes elsewhere, that
we shall make no mistake in classifying them together.

Equally isolated and surely as rude as the rudest were the native
Australians, the wavy-haired, bearded, black people who sparsely
inhabited that huge island, two thousand miles wide by two thousand five
hundred miles long. Isolated by arid stretches of desert, the struggle
for life was incessant, and there is little wonder that we find them
in an incredibly debased condition associated with unending war and
cannibalism. For these very reasons, their religious notions deserve our
closest scrutiny.

The vast island-world of Polynesia was peopled by related tribes, usually
of limited cultivation, but with a rich mythology, of which we have
many strange and beautiful fragments. They are primitive in form and
expression, with singular differences as well as analogies to the beliefs
of continental tribes.

Africa, with its countless dusky hordes, offers a less promising field
to the student of the earliest phases of religion than we might expect.
The conditions of the arts, and the ruins of foreign-built cities unite
with the classic historians to show that in remote ages the influence
of distant nations, from Egypt, Arabia, and India, on the typical black
population was profound and far-reaching. The white Hamites of the north
crossed the Sahara and extended their arms far into the Soudan; while
on the east coast, the black Hamites and Arabic Ethiopians drove the
aborigines far to the South. Later, Arabic influences penetrated into the
interior, dissolving the older faiths or discolouring them. Thus, little
of the independent development of religious thought remains in Africa.
Its most primitive features are probably best preserved in the extreme
South, among the Hottentots, Bushmen, and Zulus.

On the Asian continent, some of the Sibiric tribes in the north and some
of those of Dravidian descent in the mountains of Hindoostan preserved
to a late day their primitive traits; while the fading remnants of the
Veddahs in Ceylon and the black islanders of Melanesia still continue in
the simple faiths of their ancestors.

These hints will indicate the chief sources from which I shall draw the
material to illustrate the rudimentary stages of religious thought and
act, the embryonic period, as it were, of those emotions and beliefs
which to us, in riper forms, are so dear and so holy.

Here I must define what is meant in these lectures by “religions.” Most
people confine that term to the historic faiths and cults, calling others
“superstitions” and “paganisms.” Some will not acknowledge that there is
any religion whatever except their own; all other beliefs are heresies,
apostasies, or heathenisms. Even such an intelligent writer as Sir John
Lubbock expressed doubts in one of his works whether he ought to apply
the word “religions” to the worship tendered their deities by savages.

On the other hand, a Protestant will freely denounce the practices
of the Roman Church as “superstitions,” and will claim that they are
degenerations of religion; while among Protestants, the Quaker looks upon
all external rites as equally “superstitious.”

No such distinctions can be recognised in ethnology. The principle at
the basis of all religions and all superstitions is the same, as I shall
show in the next lecture, and the grossest rites of barbarism deserve the
name of “religion” just as much as the refined ceremonies of Christian
churches. The aims of the worshipper may be selfish and sensuous, there
may be an entire absence of ethical intention, his rites may be empty
formalities and his creed immoral, but this will be his religion all the
same, and we should not apply to it any other name.[19]

There is no one belief or set of beliefs which constitutes a religion.
We are apt to suppose that every creed must teach a belief in a god or
gods, in an immortal soul, and in a divine government of the world. The
Parliament of Religions, which lately met at Chicago, announced, in its
preliminary call, these elements as essential to the idea of religion.

No mistake could be greater. The religion which to-day counts the largest
number of adherents, Buddhism, rejects every one of these items.[20] The
Jewish doctrine of the Old Testament, the Roman religion of the time
of Julius Cæsar, and many others, have not admitted the existence of a
soul, or the continuance of the individual life after death.[21] Some
believe in souls, but not in gods; while a divine government is a thought
rarely present in savage minds. They do not, as a rule, recognise any
such principle as that of good and evil, or any doctrine of rewards and
punishment hereafter for conduct in the present life.

There is, in fact, not any one item in any creed which is accepted
by all religions; yet a common source, a common end in view, and the
closest analogy of means to that end, bind all in one, representing
an indefeasible element of human nature, the lowest containing the
potentiality of the highest, the highest being but the necessary
evolution of the lowest. The same promptings which led the earliest of
men to frame their crude ideas about the super-sensuous around them have
nourished and developed religions ever since, and keep them alive to-day.
Temples may crumble and creeds decay, but the spirit remains the same.

This inherent unity of all religious feeling and expression was
long ago perceived by St. Augustine. In a well-known passage of his
_Retractations_ he makes the striking remark: “Res ipsa, quæ nunc religio
Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis
humani”; “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among
the ancients, and in fact was with the human race from the beginning.”

This is, essentially, the maxim of modern ethnology. The religiosity
of man is a part of his psychical being. In the nature and laws of the
human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions, and passions, lie the
well-springs of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen.
To these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors,
falsehoods, bigotry, or cruelty have stained man’s creeds and cults: to
them we must credit whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have hallowed
and glorified his long search for the perfect and the eternal.

If this opinion of the place of religion in ethnology is correct, we
should not expect to find any considerable number of men, in the present
epoch of the race’s development, devoid of some form of worship and
belief.

The fact is that there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude,
known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be
destitute of religion, under some form.

The contrary of this has been asserted by various modern writers of
weight, for example by Herbert Spencer and Sir John Lubbock, not from
their own observation, for neither ever saw a savage tribe, but from the
reports of travellers and missionaries.

I speak advisedly when I say that every assertion to this effect when
tested by careful examination has proved erroneous.[22]

What led to such a mistaken opinion is easily seen. The missionaries
would not recognise as religion the beliefs which were so different from
and inferior to their own. The god of the heathens was to them no god
whatever. When they heard stories of ghosts, magic, and charms, they
spurned these as old wives’ fables, and confidently proclaimed that the
tribe had no religion. Thus it was with those who first worked in South
Africa. They returned and proclaimed that atheism was “endemic” among the
tribes of that region. Later observers, acquainting themselves with the
languages of the Blacks, found an ample mythology and an extensive ritual
of worship.[23]

Another example may be quoted from a recent description of the Motu
tribe of New Guinea. The writer, a missionary, denies that they have any
religion whatever; but immediately proceeds to describe their numerous
“superstitious” rites, their belief in spirits, their ceremonial law,
etc.![24]

Another and potent cause of error was the unwillingness of the natives
to speak to foreigners of the sacred mysteries. This is not peculiar to
them, but obtains everywhere. In the polite society of our own cities, it
is held to be an infraction of etiquette to question a person about his
religious opinions and practices. Greater repugnance would be felt were
it known that the questioner could have no sympathy with one’s opinions,
and would probably hold them up to derision and contempt.

Even a stronger deterrent motive closes the mouth of most savages giving
such information. It is _tabu_, prohibited under severe penalties, to
impart it to any stranger, or even to another tribesman. The tendency
to secrecy, to the esoteric, belongs to all religions, and especially
to those in which the emotions are predominant, as is the case with
primitive cults.

Even with a willing narrator, it is impossible to acquire a true
understanding of a religion without a knowledge of the language in which
its myths and precepts are couched. Ordinary interpreters are worse than
useless. Captain Bourke tells us that time and again he was assured by
Mexican interpreters who had lived for years among the Apaches that this
tribe had no religion and no sacred ceremonies.

“These interpreters,” he adds, “had no intention to deceive; they were
simply unable to disengage themselves from their own prejudices; they
could not credit the existence of any such thing as religion save
and except that taught them at their mother’s knees.”[25] If these
Spanish-Mexicans, who had passed half their lives among the natives,
denied them religion, what can we expect the ordinary traveller to learn
in a few weeks’ visit?

Religion, therefore, is and has been, so far as history informs us,
universal in the human race. Can we go farther back in time than history
leads us, and say that it has ever been an element of humanity?

The resources at our command to answer this inquiry lie in prehistoric
archæology and linguistics.

Beyond historic ages, and beyond those referred to by vague tradition,
which we may call semi-historic, lies the epoch of culture called from
its chief industry the Stone Age, divided into the more recent or
“neolithic” period, and the older or “palæolithic” period.

Concerning the former, there can be no doubt whatever that religion
exercised a tremendous influence on men’s minds. We have numberless
sepulchres of peoples then living, mighty mounds and massive temples,
such as Stonehenge and Karnac; we have them by the tens of thousands,
over vast areas, remaining as indubitable proofs that the chief market
of the time of those early sons of the soil was to worship the gods and
prepare for death. We have their idols, amulets, and mystic symbols,
their altars and their talismans, so as to leave no doubt of their deep
devotion. No archæologist questions this.

When we come to palæolithic man, however, especially to those ancient
tribes who lived in Western Europe when the great continental glacier
chilled the air of Southern France to an arctic frigidity, or still
earlier, in that pre-glacial summer when the hippopotamus found a
congenial home in the river Thames, we are not so sure. Among the many
thousands of artificially shaped stone and bone objects which have been
collected from that horizon, there is not one which we can positively
identify as of religious purport, as a charm, amulet, fetish, or idol.
The rare instances in which the bones of the men of that age have been
preserved reveal no positive signs of funerary rites.

For these reasons some able archæologists, such as Professor G. de
Mortillet, have maintained that man, as he then was, had not yet
developed his religious faculties. The evidence for this, is, indeed,
negative, and fresh discoveries may refute it, but the present
probability is that in the infancy of the race there was at least no
objective expression of religious feeling.[26]

This appears supported by testimony from another quarter. When we can
trace back the sacred words of a language to their original roots, we
find that these roots do not have religious associations, but refer to
concrete and sensuous images. There must have been a time, therefore,
when those who spoke that original dialect employed these words without
any religious meaning attached to them, and therefore had no religious
ideas expressed in their language, and presumably none defined in their
minds.

I am not sure, however, that this argument is so valid as some writers
claim. Those early men may have had other religious terms, now lost;
and the current belief among linguists that all radicals had at first
concrete meanings is one I seriously doubt. Mental processes and feelings
are just as real as actions, and in the aboriginal tongues of America
are expressed by radicals as distinct and as ancient as any for sensuous
perception.

There must, however, have been a time in the progress of organic forms
from some lower to that highest mammal, Man, when he did not have a
religious consciousness; for it is doubtful if even the slightest traces
of it can be discerned in the inferior animals.

Mr. Darwin, indeed, put in a plea that his favourite dog manifested the
same psychical traits which lead savages to believe in gods or spiritual
agencies[27]; and lately Professor Pinsero, of Palermo, has argued that
the anthropoid apes cultivate a worship of serpents, even burying them
with considerable ceremony, and placing in their tombs a provision of
insects for their consumption in their future life![28]

But these scientific speculations have not found general acceptance, and
even Professor Pinsero himself, while conceding religion to the ape,
denies it to prehistoric man of the earlier epochs.

We may conclude, therefore, that the development of the religious side of
man’s nature began at a very early period in his history as a species,
though probably it was extremely vague or practically absent in his first
stadia; and that it is something distinctly human, and not shared in any
definite form by even the best developed of the lower animals.

It is the only trait in which he is qualitatively separated from them.
They, too, communicate knowledge by sounds; they have governments and
arts; but never do we see anywhere among them the notion of the Divine.
This was the spark of Promethean fire which has guided man along the
darksome and devious ways of his earthly pilgrimage to the supremacy he
now enjoys.

The Greek fable tells us of the shepherd lad Endymion, who fed his sheep
on Mt. Latmus, and dreamed of no higher ambition, until in his sleep the
goddess Selene descended from heaven and embraced him. Inspired by her
divine touch, he waked to noble aspirations, and went forth to become
monarch of Elis and father of a line of kings.

So the human mind groped for dateless ages amid brutish toils and
pleasures, unconscious of grander aims; until the thought of God, rising
to consciousness within the soul, whispered to it of endless progress and
divine ideals, in quest of which it has sought and will ever continue
seeking, with tireless endeavour and constantly increasing reward.

This question settled, another arises. The religions thus found
everywhere among the rudest tribes, did they take root and exert a deep
influence on the individual and society, or were they superficially felt,
and of slight moment in practical life?

In reference to this I can scarcely be too positive. No opinion can
be more erroneous than the one sometimes advanced that savages are
indifferent to their faiths. On the contrary, the rule, with very few
exceptions, is that religion absorbs nearly the whole life of a man under
primitive conditions. From birth to death, but especially during adult
years, his daily actions are governed by ceremonial laws of the severest,
often the most irksome and painful characters. He has no independent
action or code of conduct, and is a very slave to the conditions which
such laws create.

This is especially visible in the world-wide customs of totemic divisions
and the _tabu_, or religious prohibitions. These govern his food and
drink, his marriage and social relations, the disposition of property,
and the choice of his wives. An infraction of them is out of the
question. It means exile or death. The notions of tolerance, freedom
of conscience, higher law, are non-existent in primitive communities,
except under certain personal conditions which I shall mention in a later
lecture.

As has been tersely said by Professor Granger, “Religion in the ancient
world comprised every social function”; and the identity of its rules
with those of common life is correctly put by Professor Thiele in these
words: “The idea of a separation between Church and State is utterly
foreign to all the religions of antiquity.”[29]

What was true in those ancient days is equally so in this age among
savage peoples. Let us take as an example the Dyaks of Borneo. A recent
observer describes them as utter slaves to their “superstitions,” that
is, to their religion.[30] “When they lay out their fields, gather
the harvest, go hunting or fishing, contract a marriage, start on an
expedition, propose a commercial journey, or anything of importance,
they always consult the gods, offer sacrifices, celebrate feasts, study
the omens, obtain talismans, and so on, often thus losing the best
opportunity for the business itself.”

This is equally the case with most savage tribes. Mr. J. Walter Fewkes
informed me that it was a severe moral shock to the Pueblo Indians to see
the white settlers plant corn without any religious ceremony; and a much
greater one to perceive that the corn grew, flourished, and bore abundant
crops! The result did more to shatter their simple faith than a dozen
missionary crusades.

To the simple mind of the primitive man, as to the Mohammedan to-day,
there is no such thing as an intermediate law, directing phenomena, and
capable of expression in set terms. To him, every event of nature and of
life is an immediate manifestation of the power of God, _eine Kraftprobe
Gottes_.[31]

Religion, however, does not begin from any external pressure, no matter
how strong this may be. If it has any vitality, if it is anything more
than the barrenest ceremonial, it must start within, from the soul
itself. Thus it did in primordial ages in all tribes of men.

Therefore in studying its origin and pursuing its development we must
commence with its fonts and springs in the mind of man, its psychic
sources. These understood, we can proceed to its three chief expressions,
in Words, in Objects, and in Rites.




LECTURE II.

The Origin and Contents of Primitive Religions.

    CONTENTS:—Former Theories of the Origin of Religions—Inadequacy
    of these—Universal Postulate of Religions that Conscious
    Volition is the Source of Force—How Mind was Assigned
    to Nature—Communion between the Human and the Divine
    Mind—Universality of “Inspiration”—Inspiration the Product of
    the Sub-Conscious Mind—Known to Science as “Suggestion”—This
    Explained—Examples—Illustrations from Language—No Primitive
    Monotheism—The Special Stimuli of the Religious Emotions:
    1. Dreaming and Allied Conditions—Life as a Dream—2. The
    Apprehension of Life and Death and the Notion of the Soul—3.
    The Perception of Light and Darkness; Day and Night—The Sky God
    as the High God—4. The Observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions
    of Force—The Thunder God—5. The Impression of Vastness—Dignity
    of the Sub-Conscious Intelligence.


In the last lecture we have seen that all tribes of men, so far as is
known, have had religions. How this happened, what general cause brought
about so universal a fact, has puzzled the brains of philosophers and
theologians. Their explanations have been as various and as conflicting
on this as on most other subjects.

A goodly number of philosophers, ancient and modern, have looked upon
religion of any kind as a symptom of a diseased brain. Thus Empedocles,
in the fifth century B.C., declared it to be a sickness of the mind,
and Feuerbach, in the present century, has characterised it as the
most pernicious malady of humanity. Regarding all forms of religions
as delusions, detrimental therefore to sound reason and the pursuit of
truth, they believed the human intellect could freely employ its powers
only when liberated from such shackles.

Another ancient theory still survives, that which has its name from
Euhemerus, a Sicilian writer of the time of Alexander the Great. He
claimed that religions arose from the respect and reverence paid to kings
and heroes during their lives, continued by custom after their deaths.
Under the modern name of “ancestor worship” this has been maintained by
Herbert Spencer and others as the primitive source of all worship.

Yet another philosophical opinion has been that religions were due
to the craft of rulers and priests, who, by the aid of superstitious
fear, sought to keep their subjects and votaries in subjection. These
tricksters invented the terrors of another world to secure their own
power and places in this one. This opinion was a favourite about the time
of the French Revolution and is mirrored in the poems of Shelley, who
announced it as one of his missions, “to unveil the religious frauds by
which nations have been deluded into submission.”[32]

The prevailing theory of the great world-religions, Christianity and
Mohammedanism, has been substantially that of Empedocles. They have
regarded all the religions of the world as cunning fabrications of the
Devil and his imps, snares spread for human souls; always with one
exception however: each excepts itself. This is the view so grandly
expressed in Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ and quite common yet in civilised
lands.

On the other hand, a strong school of Christian writers, led early in
this century by Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand and represented in
our tongue by Archdeacon Trench, have asserted that all faiths, even
the most savage, are fragments and reminiscences, distorted and broken
indeed, of a primitive revelation vouchsafed by the Almighty to the
human race everywhere at the beginning. These have occupied themselves
in pointing out the analogies of savage and pagan creeds and rites with
those of Christianity, in proof of their theory.

Not remote from them are the teachers of the doctrine of the “inner
light,” that “light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world,”
disclosing unto him the existence of God and the fact of his soul. They
teach, with Wordsworth, that

    “Trailing clouds of glory do we come
    From God who is our home;”

and that it is by perversion or wilful blindness that any man avers
ignorance of these primal truths.

The philosophic aspect of this theory has been presented by the master
minds of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Kant identified the idea of God with
the Ideal of Reason, the perfect Intelligence, toward which all minds,
even the humblest, must necessarily strive. Hegel, in a fine passage of
his _Philosophy of Religion_, urges the study of pagan and primitive
religions with a view to define their real significance and to discover
the grains of truth which ever lie within them, the reason and the
goodness which give them life.

The modern German ethnographers, such as Peschel, Ratzel, and
Schurtz,[33] have not ventured to follow these earlier thinkers of their
nation, but have contented themselves with tracing the origin of religion
to one characteristic of the human intellect, to wit, the notion of
Cause. The relation of cause and effect, they claim, is so ingrained in
the thinking mind that it inevitably leads all men to assume causes,
such as spiritual agencies, when others are not visible.

This popular view seems weak; for not only is the relation of cause to
effect a mere assumption, and, indeed, rejected by exact science; but
it dodges the very question at issue, which is to explain why spiritual
agencies are imagined as causes of material effects.

Similar objections lie to deriving primitive religions from a vague
“perception of the Infinite,” or a _sensus numinis_, some _deus in
nobis_, “warning us,” as Virgil says, “by his quick motion.” These are
unclear, unsatisfying expressions, offering no rational explanation, and
full of equivocations.

A favourite theory in all times is that religions arose from the emotion
of fear. It was taught by the Latin poet Petronius in a famous line,
where he says “Fear first made the gods”; and it has been strenuously
advocated by many modern philosophers and ethnologists.

Now if this emotion is alone sufficient to evoke religious feeling, why,
I ask, is that feeling absent in the craven and timid lower animals? Why
is it so feeble in many a coward? Why has it been so strong in many a
hero?

Moreover, the spirit of many early religions is the reverse of that of
fear. They are, as Dr. Robertson Smith correctly said, “predominantly
joyous.”

These are proofs enough that this ancient and popular notion rests on
a misconception of facts. The “fear of God” enters, indeed, into every
religion; but religion itself did not arise from it. We must already have
a notion of God, before we can fear Him.

If we are going to apply the scientific method to the study of religions
we must offer an explanation for their existence which is intelligible,
which is verifiable, and which holds good for all of them, primitive or
developed, those of the remotest ages and those of to-day. Only thus can
the ethnologist treat them as one element of the history of Humanity, a
property of the species.

This has not been done, so far as I know, up to the present time. In
fact, much of the teaching of modern anthropology has been calculated to
deter it. The outspoken advocacy of atheism and materialism by the French
School has led its disciples to consider the effort unprofitable;[34] and
the acceptance of the doctrine of “Animism” as a sufficient explanation
of early cults has led to the neglect, in English-speaking lands, of
their profounder analysis. Such a writer, for instance, as Andrew Lang
does not hesitate to teach that, “The origin of a belief in God is beyond
the ken of history and speculation.”[35]

The real explanation of the origin of religion is simple and universal.
Let any man ask himself on what his own religious belief is founded, and
the answer, if true, will hold good for every member of the race, past
and present. It makes no difference whether we analyse the superstitions
of the rudest savages, or the lofty utterances of John the Evangelist, or
of Spinoza the “god-intoxicated philosopher”; we shall find one and the
same postulate to the faith of all.

This universal postulate, the psychic origin of all religious thought,
is the recognition, or, if you please, the assumption, _that conscious
volition is the ultimate source of all Force_. It is the belief that
behind the sensuous, phenomenal world, distinct from it, giving it form,
existence, and activity, lies the ultimate, invisible, immeasurable power
of Mind, of conscious Will, of Intelligence, analogous in some way to our
own; and,—mark this essential corollary,—_that man is in communication
with it_.

What the highest religions thus assume was likewise the foundation of the
earliest and most primitive cults. The one universal trait amid their
endless forms of expression was the unalterable faith in Mind, in the
super-sensuous, as the ultimate source of all force, all life, all being.

Science and Christianity teach the same, but with this difference: the
progress of observation has taught us the existence of certain uniform
sequences which we call “laws of nature,” based solely on Mind, but
representing its processes of realisation. The savage knew not these. He
imagined every motion in nature was the immediate exhibition of Will, his
own will in his own motions, some seen or unseen will in other motions.
The seen were of another being like himself; the unseen were to that
extent unknown, and these were his gods.

I repeat, wherever we find the divine, the spiritual agency, set forth in
myth or symbol, creed or rite, we find it characterised by two traits: it
is of the nature of the human mind, that is, super-sensuous; and it is
the ultimate source of power. It will be my aim to show the expressions
of these universal postulates of the religious sentiment in the rudest
faiths of the world.

You may ask, by what process of thinking did primitive man assign
mind to nature. The process is extremely simple, and is illustrated
by the action of any child. Let one be accidentally hurt by an empty
rocking-chair in motion; at once, it is angry at the chair, and is
gratified to see it whipped! The child-mind assigns to the object the
will and the sensations of which it is conscious in itself. This is the
simplest explanation it can imagine for action.

Precisely so is it with the savage man. Wherever he perceives motion,
independent of a living being, he assumes the presence of a conscious
agent, not visible to his senses. As Professor Sayce remarks of the early
Chaldeans: “To them the spiritual, the _Zi_, was that which manifested
life, and the test of the manifestation of life was movement.”[36] This
is universally true of primitive faiths.

But this was not enough. To most if not all primitive men, movement was
not the only manifestation of life. To them, the immovable, the rock,
the mountain, any inanimate object, was likewise a conscious spiritual
agency, a thinking being. This, too, has its explanation in one of the
simplest, most elementary traits of mind, the sense of Personality. To
the undeveloped reason, the Other is ever conceived as Another, a Self,
and is clothed with the attributes of _the_ Self, of the thinking Ego.
This is always the case in the tales of children and the myths of savage
tribes.[37]

These are the earliest concepts of the religious faculty; but they would
have been powerless to seize upon the emotions and to develop the great
religions of the world, had they not been supported by that which is the
corner-stone of every creed on earth, the corollary I mentioned, to wit,
the direct communion between the human and the divine mind, between the
Man and God.

This is the one trait shared by the highest as well as the lowest, it is
the one proof of authenticity which each proclaims for itself. I shall
tell you of religions so crude as to have no temples or altars, no rites
or prayers; but I can tell you of none that does not teach the belief of
the intercommunion of the spiritual powers and man. Every religion is a
Revelation—in the opinion of its votaries. Those which are called the
“book-religions” depend mainly upon the _record_ of a revelation, while
in all primitive faiths inspiration is actual and constant. The human
soul, regarded in its origin as an emanation of the Divine, is in its
nature omniscient when in moments of ecstasy it frees itself from its
material envelope.[38]

When an Australian native is asked if he has ever seen the great Creator,
Baiame, he will reply: “No, not seen him, but I have felt [or inwardly
perceived] him.”[39] A Basuto chief replied to the question whether his
people knew of God before the missionaries came: “We did not know Him,
but we dreamed of Him.”

All shamanism is based on a direct relation to divinity. The shaman is an
inspired prophet and healer, and believes as firmly in his inspiration
as do his credulous adherents. From shamanism was developed in India the
practice known as _Yoga_, characterised by ecstatic seizures, periods of
cerebral exaltation, and alleged divine powers.[40] To the same origin
we must attribute the similar phenomena of “speaking with tongues,” and
religious mania.

I am not speaking of deceptions or illusions. When I say that all
religions depend for their origin and continuance directly upon
inspiration, I state an historic fact. It may be known under other
names, of credit or discredit, as mysticism, ecstasy, rhapsody,
demoniac possession, the divine afflatus, the gnosis, or in its latest
christening, “cosmic consciousness.”[41] All are but expressions of a
belief that knowledge arises, words are uttered, or actions performed,
not through conscious ideation and reflective purpose, but through the
promptings of a power above or beyond the individual mind.[42] Prophets
and shamans, evangelists and Indian medicine-men, all claim, and all
claim with honesty, to be moved by the god within, the _deus in nobis_,
and to speak the words of the Lord.

The intensity of purpose, and the suppression of the reason which
everywhere and at all times this sense of inspiration brings with it,
cannot be overestimated in their influence on the history of the race. To
them are due all fanaticism, religious bigotry, and illiberality.

He who has walked with God, who has felt the pressure of the divine hand,
who has been rewarded with the “beatific vision,” to him all lesser ties
are weak, all knowledge vain. He will say: “It is better to know God and
be ignorant of all else, than to know all else and be ignorant of God.”
No reasoning can convince him of error, for his logic acknowledges not
the laws of human thought; no appeal will soften his judgments, for he
utters not the decision of a man, but the unalterable edict of the God.

Unless we can offer a rational explanation for this universal trait, all
religions become inexplicable. Fortunately the investigations of modern
psychology enable us to present such an explanation. It teaches us by
innumerable examples that by far the majority of the impressions on
our senses leave no trace in conscious recollection, although they are
stored in the records of the brain; that what seems lost to memory, still
lingers in its recesses; and that mental action is constantly going on
and reaching results, wholly without our knowledge.

The psychologist calls this process by the terms “unconscious
cerebration,” or “psychic automatism.” It is the function of the
“sub-limital consciousness,” or, for short, the “sub-consciousness.” Not
only is it common, it is constant, and the results of this unperceived
labour of our minds is often far more valuable than those of our
intelligent efforts. The most complex mechanical inventions, the most
impressive art-work of the world, even the most difficult mathematical
solutions, have been attained through this unknowing mechanism of mind.
They seemed real inspirations, but we may be sure that the mind through
long _conscious_ effort had been storing the material and laying the
foundation for the perfect edifice which sprang so magically into
existence.

The psychologist has gone farther. Not resting content with the detection
of this automatic mental machinery, he has studied how it is set a-going,
and is prepared to show that in all its forms it can be produced at will
under favourable conditions. Like an ancient necromancer, he can inspire
and bewitch, he can exorcise demons and cast out devils.

His power is not occult, for it belongs to science, and science has no
secrets. It is known as “suggestion,” and in it lies the sociologic power
of all religions and superstitions whatever, primitive or present. It is
necessary, therefore, that I devote a few words to its explanation.

Suggestion in its simplest form is the indirect evocation of an idea in
the mind as the starting-point of a process of thought and feeling. The
idea may be impressed by a repetition of the stimulus, by association
with allied ideas, or by sensory contacts. It may be evoked by deliberate
effort of our own, which is called “auto-suggestion”; or the impression
may be derived from or directed to a number of individuals, which is
termed “collective suggestion.”

Powerful means of suggestion are the monotonous repetitions of certain
words; the fixation of the sight on a single object; the concentration
of the mind on one thought; the reduction of the ordinary nutrition;
association with persons already under its influence; continuance of the
same motions; prolonged hearing the same note or rhythmic chord; silence,
darkness, and solitude. These may be variously combined and brought to
bear upon the mind in such a manner as entirely to alter its ordinary
habits, and seemingly to evoke another personality.

The rationale by which this is reached is through developing the
automatic and unconscious action of the mind into a conscious display
of its powers. This may be repulsive or admirable, above or below the
normal capacities; but is always correlated to the individual, and
connected with his experiences.

This is the explanation of nearly all the religious experiences of
primitive peoples, as it is of what is known as “theopathy” everywhere,
and of the modern forms of theosophy, mesmerism, and hypnotism.[43]

All religious teachings and associations, in the lowest as well as the
highest faiths, aim to cultivate these mystical feelings by increasing
the intensity of the suggestions which give rise to them, and diminishing
the force of other suggestions which may interfere.

Even in civilised communities it is extraordinary with what facility
suggestive sense-delusions can be produced in waking persons. At least
ninety out of every hundred individuals can be persuaded thus to deceive
themselves. The extreme contagiousness of such delusions, common enough
in civilised conditions, is greatly increased in the savage state. In
their lives the phenomena of auto-suggestion are strikingly frequent.
Among the African Zulus any adult can cast himself or herself into
the hypnotic state, and by this obtain what they consider second
sight,—“the power to see where lost objects are, and how absent friends
are occupied.” When asked to explain this state of mind, they can only
say that it is one “in which a man is awake, but sees things which he
would not see, if he were not in this state”[44]; which reminds us of the
remarkable doctrine of the Sanscrit Upanishads—“There is no limit to the
knowing of the Self that knows.”[45] Among many Australian tribes, among
the Kamschatkans, and among the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, as well as
many other peoples, the mysterious power of the shamans or medicine men
is shared by all adults in a greater or less degree.[46]

These are at the bottom of the scale. One degree higher, and we find
the priesthood a separate class, usually of both sexes, but chosen by
natural selection from those members of the community who by temperament
or cultivation possess in the highest degree this tendency to mystical
power. This is generally indicated by the clearness and character of the
dreams and visions which appear at the time he or she enters adult life.
These are considered to be direct inspirations from the spirit world,
either from the souls of the dead, or the powers other than those which
control the destiny of man.

These inspired seers represent the priesthood of every primitive
religion. They cultivate and preserve it, and in them the missionaries
of higher faiths have ever found their most resolute foes and successful
opponents. The reason is, as I have said, that the shaman has himself
been face to face with God, has heard His voice, and felt His presence.
His faith therefore is real, and cannot be shaken by any argument. He may
indeed, and he generally does, assist his public performances with some
trickery, some thaumaturgy; but that this is merely superadded for effect
is proved by the general custom that when one such adept is ill or in
straits he will solicit the aid of another.[47]

Among his associates he is looked upon as set apart from other men by the
divinity which chooses him for its agent, or dwells within him. In the
Polynesian islands this is forcibly expressed in the terms applied to
the native priests, _pia atua_, “god boxes,” receptacles of divinity; and
_amama_, “open mouths,” for through them the god speaks, not their own
selves.[48]

The presence of divinity is recognised and felt only in unusual mental
states, in moments of ecstasy or trance, in periods of rapture,
intoxication, or frenzy. Hence in all early and many late religions
abnormal and pathological mental seizures are regarded as cases of
inspiration, or else of demoniac possession. In the Quichua language of
Peru the word _huaca_ is their most general term for the divine, but
_huaca runa_, “divine man,” means one who is crazy[49]; and in Greek, the
word _mania_ was used for both madness and prophetic inspiration.

We thus see that in this mental state we find the psychic development of
the primitive idea of the divine, the notion of God. It is not, as has
sometimes been claimed, the sudden result of a single feeling; it is a
complex conception, from a multitude of obscurely felt impressions and
emotions. It is neither an intuition nor an induction; it is neither an
inference from observation, nor the conclusion of a logical process.
A study of its aspect in savage life shows that it arises from the
perception of the latent activity of the sub-consciousness, from the
strange sense of activity, will, and power which, under favourable
conditions of concentration (suggestion), it imparts to the more or less
conscious Self. This influence is at first vague, impersonal, undefined,
but is gradually differentiated and personified. Furthermore, it is
constantly strengthened and sustained by the agency of that cultivated
suggestion I have described, which is intended to bring the individual
into contact with unknown activities. Thus the idea of the superhuman is
developed from the unconscious human powers of Mind.

Conclusive evidence of this is offered by language. From the abundant
material at hand let us choose three examples, widely separated, one
from the Dakotan stock of North American Indians, one from the ancient
Peruvians, and one from the South Sea Islanders.

The hidden and mysterious power of the universe is expressed in the
Dakotan dialects by the word _wakan_. This term expresses infinite will;
it is, as Miss Fletcher tells us, “the deification of that peculiar
quality or power of which man is conscious within himself as directing
his own acts or willing a course to bring about certain results.”
From the word _wacin_, will, are derived the terms for what we call
“telepathy,” a belief in which is nigh universal in primitive cults; for
intelligence or mentality; and for the sacred dance.[50]

While the meaning of _wakan_ in Dakota is well defined, its derivation
is uncertain. It is singular that precisely the same word with the same
meaning reappears in the Quichua and Aymara languages of the interior
of Peru. It is there applied to everything which is extraordinary or
immense, out of the course of nature, and especially to everything sacred
or divine. It was not a deity, but expressed the deific power believed to
be present in men, animals, or things.[51]

The identity of the two words is probably no mere coincidence, nor is
the one borrowed from the other. In Quichua _wakan_ expresses the sound
characteristic of any animal, as _allco wakan_, the dog howls, _huallpa
wakan_ the cock crows, and this in turn is derived from the interjection
of surprise or astonishment or admiration, _hua_. It was that which was
employed in the sacred invocations.

Strange as it may seem, the English word “God” is traced by Aryan
scholars through the Gothic _guth_ to the Sanscrit verb _hua_ to
call upon, to invoke (past participle, _hutha_), the same primitive
interjection in verbal form; and the holy name of the Hebrews, _Yahve_,
is now believed to be that of the Chaldean god of the earth, waters, and
fertility, in whose name _Eā_, _Ya_, or _Yah_, we recognize a cognate
interjection or refrain, the same which, shouted in the orgiastic rites,
gave the name, Bacchus or Iachus.[52]

Turning to the island world of the Pacific we find through its countless
groups of sunny isles the impersonal Divine expressed by one general
term, _mana_. The natives believed in the agency of departed souls and
also of spirits of independent origin (_vui_); but the supernatural power
through which both acted on nature or events was this _mana_. If a man
prospered in his affairs and gained influence in the tribe, it was not by
his own efforts, but because he had _mana_; precisely as pious persons
among ourselves attribute their prosperity and that of their worthy
neighbors to the favour of the Lord. The original meaning of _mana_
appears to be “that which is within one,” and, later, the intelligence on
mind, whence power or might, as the expressions of Will applied to the
concept of universal life and motion.[53]

These words, I repeat, do not convey any idea of personality. They are
not evidences of a primitive monotheism, as has often been claimed. They,
and all like them, are vague, indefinite terms for the supernatural, that
which was inexplicable by the limited knowledge of the most ignorant of
our species.[54]

The media of suggestion act primarily through the emotions, and in the
religious suggestion those emotions especially are concerned which give
rise to thoughts concerning the super-sensuous and the manifestation of
power.

But none of these emotions in itself, neither fear, hope, awe, wonder,
nor any other, has the power to evoke the notion of the supernatural. It
arises from those deeper intellectual traits which are peculiarly human.

Yet it is true that such emotions are potent stimuli to those forms of
suggestion which lead up to the religious feelings; they are part of
them, and what arouses and incites those, develops and strengthens these;
and they thus have their place as suggestive accessories.

To the savage, all nature testifies to the presence of the mysterious
power which is behind its forms and motions. He sees the Divine
everywhere. But from this multitude of impressions which excited him
to religious thought we may separate a limited number as beyond others
potent and universal. These are special stimuli to the religious
emotions. They are five in number:

1. Dreaming and allied conditions.

2. The apprehension of Life and Death, from which arises the notion of
the Soul.

3. The perception of Light and Darkness.

4. The observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions of Force.

5. The impression of Vastness.

1. A line of Lucretius asserts that “the dreams of men peopled the heaven
with gods.” We have a right to reply that if dreams alone give us the
gods, why are they absent from the lives of dogs, who are vivid dreamers?

Certain it is, however, that among all savage tribes dreams are regarded
as a part of the experience of life. To primitive man, they are real:
he sees and hears in them as he does in his waking hours; he does not
distinguish between the subjective creation of his brain cells and
objective existence.

In what they differ from daily life, they are divine. They reveal the
future and summon the absent. The Kamschatkans, we are told, gather
together every morning to narrate their dreams and to guess at their
interpretation. Of the Eskimos it is stated that their daily lives “are
to a great extent guided by their dreams.” The Bororo of Brazil take a
dream so literally that a whole village will decamp and seek a distant
site, if one dreams of the approach of an enemy.[55]

The physiological character of dreams easily explains the superstitious
attention they have received in all ages and nations. The absence of
external impressions during sleep favours the rise of unconscious mental
action into consciousness. In them memory is often more active than while
waking; our personality seems doubled, because it has no longer the will
to react against the throngs of varied impressions which arise. The
emotions in sleep are excitable, and both fear and joy are often more
intense than when awake. Add to this that many persons, especially those
of nervous temperament, are subject to peculiarly vivid illusions during
the moments between waking and sleeping, which seem to belong as much to
the former as to the latter conditions,[56] and we have reasons enough
for the part they play in primitive religions.

There are reasons for believing that the dreams of ruder races are
more vivid than our own, more like pictures and realities.[57] They
certainly do not draw the line so sharply between the sights and sounds
of sleeping and waking as we do. With wide-open eyes they see spectres
and apparitions, such as are not unknown, but are ever growing scarcer,
in civilised lands. These waking visions are assiduously cultivated,
and become, as I have already said, the chief bond between man and
divinity.[58]

Not only by fasting, solitude, and intense expectation centred on the
expected revelation, is it brought into reality, but in nearly every
savage tribe we find a knowledge of narcotic plants which were employed
to induce strange and vivid hallucinations or dreams. The negroes of
the Niger had their “fetish water,” the Creek Indians of Florida their
“black drink,” for this purpose. In many parts of the United States the
natives smoked stramonium, the Mexican tribes swallowed the _peyotl_ and
the snake-plant, the tribes of California and the Samoyeds of Siberia had
found a poisonous toadstool;—all to bring about communion with the Divine
and to induce ecstatic visions.[59] Whatever the means employed, their
aim was everywhere the same, and was directed primarily and essentially
towards the excitation of the religious emotions, towards securing a
revelation of the will of the gods.

Thus it came that the whole of life, waking and sleeping, assumed a
dreamy, unreal character. The traveller Spix says of the forest tribes of
Brazil that they never seem fully awake; and a Pawnee war song begins
by an appeal to the gods to decide if this life itself is aught but a
dream.[60]

The ancient Mexicans had developed the doctrine that this life is a dream
and that death is the awakening, the passing into a living condition.
They spoke of dying as the appearance of the dawn, and the approach of
light. This is closely akin to that doctrine of _mâyâ_, or the unreality
of the duality of the subject and object, which “is the very life of the
primitive [East] Indian philosophy.”[61]

The influence which such a view must have exerted on the religious
thought of a nation is manifest.

2. The question has been discussed by some philosophers whether the idea
of Life is anterior in the human mind to that of Death. Had they studied
the beliefs of primitive peoples, their doubts would have disappeared.
The savage knows not death as a natural occurrence. His language has no
word meaning “to die,” but only “to be killed.” Disease is an unseen
shaft, or the work of a malignant sorcerer. To him, all things live
and live forever. Each bird, each bush, each rock has its own vital
principle. By reason of the consciousness of his own living Self, he
imputes life to all around him, but in a higher degree and of some rarer
quality to those existences which he holds as his deities. His god is
supremely a living god, the source of Life, its creator, preserver, and
sustainer.

If we seek the recondite meaning hidden behind the two words which
throughout Polynesia expressed in its most general sense the concept of
the Divine, _io_, and _atua_, we discover that it is in both “the central
cause or essentiality of Life.”[62] So among the Indians of Michoacan the
epithet of the chief goddess of their cult was, “The Sustainer of Life”;
the highest divinity of the Aztecs was Tonacatecutli, “God of Our Life”;
and in the Muskoghean tribes His name was “The Master of Life.”

So full, I say, was the mind of primitive man with the vision of
universal and immortal life, that to him there was no such thing as
death. The fact, indeed, remained. The tree was shrivelled by the
lightning, the brute fell by the arrow, man himself gasped his last
breath and lay an inert mass. The loved child, the warrior hero, passed
out of sight to the unseen beyond.

But not forever! No! They hovered around the familiar spot, they visited
the living in dreams, their voices were heard in the rustling leaves and
the falling waters. Not only men, but all things lived again. In the
mythology of the Vitians there is a heaven even for cocoanuts! To the
Kamschatkans the smallest flies have souls which are immortal.[63]

This is the doctrine of souls, the source of those innumerable
beliefs and rites which are centred around the sepulchre, so solemn,
so profoundly significant, that many writers have maintained that
“religion began, when the living thought seriously of the dead”;
that “all religions have crystallised around the tomb”; and that in
the propitiation of departed souls, in the worship of the spirits of
ancestors, and in the preparation in this life for another beyond the
grave, the whole aim and essence of religion are embraced.[64]

I have already said that this is a hasty assertion, for there are
religions which recognise a soul scarcely or at all; but they are not
of a primitive character.[65] In the latter, some such belief is
universally shown either by the treatment of the corpse, or the modes of
mourning for the dead, or by myths concerning the life and actions of the
departed.

It is generally held that the soul is multiple, two, three, or four being
assigned to a person. One or more of these may perish with the body, or
shortly afterwards; but one at least survives indefinitely, and concerns
itself with the doings of those it has left behind in life. Its powers
for good and evil are increased by its translation to another sphere of
existence; and to secure its assistance, or at least its neutrality,
is the aim of that cult of the departed souls and of the spirits of
ancestors which is so widely defined in primitive conditions.

They are not identical, and we find in many tribes much attention paid
to conciliating the souls of the dead where ancestor worship is unknown.
In fact, the former is the older and more general observance. The aim is
to get rid of the soul, to put it to rest or send it on its journey to a
better land, otherwise it will annoy the survivors.[66]

In many primitive tribes, therefore, there is little fear of death. The
soul leaves the body in sleep to wander over the earth, and the only
difference of death is that it does not return in time. More than this,
the soul of the living can visit the realms of the dead. The Comanches
knew of men who had spent two days looking at the white tents of the
encampment of souls far west under the setting sun; and the Zuñi mothers
who had lost their little darlings are reconciled by being cast into a
deep sleep, during which they go and see them in the mystic world beyond.
So also believe the Australians and numberless other tribes.[67]

We need not look for any definiteness of statement as to what the soul
is. In many tribes the word for it is akin to that for breath, as in our
own expression, “the breath of life.” Frequently it is identified with
the shadow, as among the Zulus of Africa, and the Eskimos, Algonquins,
and Quiches of America. Others, as the Mincopies (Andaman Islands), think
they see it in the reflection of the body in still water or a mirror.
The Australians assert that it is a mist, fog, or smoke, etc.

These ideas are, of course, material. They impute to the soul similar
wants to that of the corporeal man. It desires a dwelling, needs food,
takes visible forms, and the like; but also it is endowed with faculties
transcending those it possessed in the flesh, and these may be directed
to the benefit or the injury of the survivors. Therefore its wants should
be gratified, and its temper conciliated by offerings and appropriate
funeral rites.[68]

3. I turn now to a perception of the primitive man, a contrast of
impressions on his senses, more potent, I believe, than even the
immeasurable one of Life and Death. It is Light and Darkness. This
universal, ever recurring change in nature controlled all his actions,
and reacted as a powerful stimulus on his religious emotions. I could
almost be willing to subscribe to the expression of a German writer that
“the adoration of Light was the foundation of all religion.”[69] The rude
litanies of paganism all over the world seem to join in the solemn chant
of the Evangelist—“God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”

We may begin with the Australian Blacks, who averred the supreme divinity
lives in _keladi_, eternal brightness, up above the sky. His name is
_Baiame_, meaning “the maker” or “the cutter out,” as one cuts out
patterns from a skin. He sees and knows all things.[70]

Through most of Polynesia, the chief deity was Ka-ne, which means
sunlight, the opposite of darkness, and is allied to the verb _kanea_, to
see. Another name for Ka-ne is Tangaloa, the lord of light. The colour
red is sacred to him, he was portrayed with long blond hair, and children
who had light hair or were albinos were deemed his progeny. When the
fair-skinned Europeans first landed on the islands they were called the
“children of Tangaloa.”[71]

Sometimes the myths represent Tangaloa as the son of Vatea (Avatea,
Wakea), “noon” or “noon-day.” He was father of gods and man, half man,
half fish, to typify land and water, and it was said of him that his
right eye was the sun, his left the moon. So far removed was he that no
worship was ever paid him, and no representation made of him.[72]

If we turn to the extremely savage inhabitants of the Andaman Islands,
a remnant of the ancient, almost pygmy, black race of Southern Asia, we
find that their supreme being is Puluga, the creator of all things, who
was never born and will never die. He is invisible, but of the nature
of light; he lives in the sky, and placed there the sun and moon. He is
omniscient, but only while it is day, when he can see.[73]

As the red rays of the morning and evening light caused in Polynesia all
things red to be sacred to Tangaloa, so among the Hottentots of South
Africa their supreme being was named Tsuni Goab, the red light of the
Dawn, who in mythology stood in opposition to Gaunah, the Dark Sky.[74]

This worship of light has several constant associations in religious
thought which find expression in the myth and cult.

In nature, light is a potent stimulus of organic growth, and this fact,
obscurely apprehended by the primitive mind, led to the equivalence of
Light and Life. Light as the vital principle recurs in most mythologies.
As we obtain light artificially from fire, whose general warmth also
is akin to that of the living as contrasted to the dead body, the soul
or living element was allied to flame. In ancient German mythology the
soul was called a torch or taper (J. Grimm), and in the beliefs of the
Polynesians and American Indians the ghosts of the dead usually appear as
luminous masses.[75] All will remember the words of Othello—

    “Put out the light, and then,—put out the light!”

A second association of light was with the sky, in day the home of the
bright sun, at night where glitter a thousand points of brilliancy.

In most mythologies the sky is supposed to be a solid, shining arch or
dome which covers the earth like a roof. Upon it, out of sight to mortal
eyes, live the gods. It constitutes the “Hill of Heaven,” the celestial
mountain upon which are the homes of the divine beings. So it is oft
likened to some known terrestrial elevation, as in Greek mythology, Mt.
Olympus, and in that of India, Mt. Meru. Such sacred hills are mentioned
by most of the American tribes.[76] In Polynesian myth it was “the blue
mountain, the land of the divine water,” a fluid of such vital virtue
that were even a dead man sprinkled with it he would come to life. On
the island of Mangaia a certain hill was pointed out which in old times
propped up the sky.[77]

The Tehuelches of Patagonia relate that the Creator first moulded men and
all animals on the “Hill of God” and then set them loose to people the
earth. The natives of Southern Borneo assign to their supreme divinity
Atala a home in the highest heaven, on the shore of the “celestial lake,
moved by the Moon and surrounding the Sun.” Homi, the high heaven, is the
deity of the Hottentots, who pours the rains, blows the wind, and sends
heat and cold on earth.[78]

Thus it is that everywhere the Sky God is also the High God. This
blending of the ideas of life and light with the sky led to another and
obvious association which has left its mark on every religion, primitive
or developed. The sky is, in direction, above us. The god of the sky is
therefore the god on high. He is the one who dwells above, our lord in
the heaven.

This he is in all mythologies. Among the Indians of the plains he is
(or, It is) “the great medicine _above_,” and in the sign language, to
indicate this, when the sign is made for “medicine” (mystery) the finger
is pointed to the zenith.[79] The Puluga of the Andamanese “lives in the
sky.” Tangaloa is addressed as “He above in the heavens”; the Finnish
Ukko is also called “The Navel of the Sky,” and so on.[80]

Examples are innumerable. But what need of collecting them? Do we not
ourselves constantly use the adjective the _Supreme_ Being, for God,
which means simply the highest being? And did not the founder of our
religion forbid his followers to swear by the sky, giving as the reason
that it was the throne of God, who sitteth upon it?[81]

This idea runs through the whole of his teachings. In the Gospel of
Matthew the same term, οὐρανιος, or, ἐν τοῖς οὐρανιος as a descriptive
term of divinity, is applied not less than eighty-eight times; and
in the first clause of the Lord’s Prayer, it is to “Our Father in the
Skies,” that the invocation is addressed.

Strange that this very word οἰρανὀς, in Sanscrit Uaruna, is that which,
in the primitive religion of the Aryan peoples, was applied to the most
exalted of their gods, to him “whose realm is above us,” “the very
strong,” “the shining one,” “the king of sky and earth,” “creator of all,
the earth-enveloping sky.”[82]

What more striking evidence do we wish of the indissoluble unity of
religious thought, no matter what its stage of development, in all
centuries and all races?

In the Polynesian mythology, Tangaloa, the bright daylight, has as his
brother, Rongo, the god of darkness and night. Tangaloa is fair-haired
and light in hue, Rongo is black in hair and skin. Tangaloa is
beneficent, the dispenser of good, and inventor of the arts of peace;
Rongo is the fomenter of strife, the god of war and author of bloodshed.
In accordance with these, all the gods were classed in two orders,
“dwellers in day,” and “dwellers in night.”[83]

The contrast which is here presented prevails throughout early cults.
The night, when man, deprived of light and sight, becomes the prey of
stealthy beasts, was everywhere considered the time when the unseen
powers of destruction are let loose and the malevolent agencies of the
spirit-world run riot.

This is one of the most primitive of religious beliefs and is discovered
in the rudest tribes. The Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego say that the
invisible spirits go about at night; the Australian tribes everywhere
manifested a deep dread of the darkness, not like the unconscious
shuddering of a child on entering a dark room, but because they believed
spirits walked in the gloom seeking whom they could devour. It is then,
said they, that Cuchi (Kootche) goes forth, either in the form of a snake
or some nocturnal bird. He it is who causes sickness among men. The
thunder is the growl of his anger, the whirlwinds his breath, and the
aurora australis the fitful light of his camp fire.[84]

Associated with the gloom of night, was the darkness of the storm, which
in many mythologies is contrasted with the sunshine in some divine
struggle. Endless are the tales and rites which bear upon this contest in
early religions. Indeed, according to some, they are the chief staple of
all mythologies.[85]

4. I have already mentioned that the idea of Power is one of the first
to be connected with deity. The god is one who can do more than man.
Especially any sudden and striking display of force, either in the
material or immaterial world, stimulates the religious sense. The
historian Buckle claimed that the inhabitants of countries subject
to earthquakes are peculiarly superstitious. In myths and names, the
hurricane of the tropics, the storm-winds of higher latitudes, indeed
all sudden and tremendous outbreaks of natural violence, are regarded as
exhibitions of divine Power.

Notably is this the case with the thunder storm. That manifestation
of tremendous power has excited the religious feelings of all races.
Moreover, the highly charged electrical atmosphere exerts a special
influence on the nervous system, predisposing it to emotional outbreaks.
The roll and reverberation of the thunder, the zigzag flash and
destructive blow of the lightning and the roar of the tempest, combine
to present the phenomenon as a manifest display of supernatural power.
Hence in innumerable tribes the thunder god was identified with, or was
the peer of, the highest in the Pantheon.[86] The same is true of potent
and coercive mental traits. Their possessors are regarded as partaking
of the deific being to a greater extent than others, or even actually
divine. It is not merely that they excite the emotion of fear. That is
a shallow interpretation of the psychic process. Underlying it is the
deeper suggestion of energy, of action, of the spiritual mastery of
material existence. This is as real, though not so clear, in the mind of
the savage as in that of the philosopher.

This is also seen in the names and titles applied to the concept of
Divinity by all nations. They speak of God “All-mighty,” the “Omnipotent
Ruler”; and ever the attribute of indefinite power belongs to the great
gods.

In early religions the manifestations of power are personified as
single deities. We thus find in native American myths the figures of
Huracan, the hurricane; Huemac, the Strong Hand, god of earthquakes, and
numberless thunder, lightning, and storm gods.

5. It has been remarked by a German historian that the richest
development of early poetry has been found among tribes dwelling by the
ocean or among mountains; and another writer has claimed that the most
rapid development of religions has taken place where the broad expanses
of deserts or seas have stimulated the mind to contemplation of spacial
magnitude on earth and in the sky.[87]

The languages of primitive peoples bear traces of this. In the Aztec
tongue any wide level prairie is called _teotlalli_, godland; and the
ocean, _teoatl_, godwater; among the Peruvians the term _huaca_, holy, is
synonymous with “vast” or “immense.” With the Polynesians _taula_, the
ocean space, is the home of the gods and where the souls go at death.
The traveller Castren once stood on the shore of the Arctic Ocean with a
Samoyed. Turning to the native, he asked, “where is Num?” (their chief
god). “There,” instantly replied the Samoyed, waving his hand toward
where “loomed the dark broad sea.”[88]

In many cults this idea is attempted expression by assigning to deities
hugeness of size. The colossal stone images of Easter Island, the huge
statues of the Maoris, are endeavours to present it to the senses.

In more developed faiths the same tendency prevails. The Buddhists
rival each other in constructing enormous statues of Sakya Muni; in the
Sanscrit Upanishads, Aditi, who represents the endless visible expanse,
is termed “mother and father of all gods and men, the substance of
whatever has been or shall be born”[89]; and according to some Mahommedan
writers, God is so great that it is 72,000 days’ journey between his eyes!

       *       *       *       *       *

Such are some of the potent stimuli which stir the depths of man’s
psychical nature, awakening in him the belief in unknown powers far
beyond his ability to measure or to cope with. Not from any conscious
act of intelligence, not from any process of voluntary reasoning, is
that belief born, but from the unknown, the unplumbed abyss of the
sub-conscious mind.

Let not this be considered as something degrading to the religious
conceptions themselves. Though all are drawn from out the human spirit
itself, and are nowise the direct revelations their believers think
them, yet who dare measure the height and the depth of the sub-conscious
intelligence? It draws its knowledge from sources which elude scientific
research, from the strange powers which we perceive in insects and other
lower animals, almost, but not wholly, obliterated in the human line
of organic descent; and from others, now merely nascent or embryonic,
new senses, destined in some far off æon to endow our posterity with
faculties as wondrous to us as would be sight to the sightless.

More than this: the teachings of the severest science tell us that Matter
is, in its last analysis, Motion, and that motion is nought else than
Mind[90]; and who dare deny that in their unconscious functions our minds
may catch some overtones, as it were, from the harmonies of the Universal
Intelligence thus demonstrated by inductive research, and vibrate in
unison therewith?




LECTURE III.

Primitive Religious Expression: in the Word.

    CONTENTS:—An Echo Myth—The Power of Words—Their Magical
    Potency—The Curse—Power Independent of Meaning—The Name as an
    Attribute—The Sacred Names—The Ineffable Name—“Myrionomous”
    Gods—“Theophorous” Names—Suggestion and Repetition as
    Stimulants—I. The Word _to_ the gods: Prayer—Its Forms,
    Contents, and Aims—II. The Word _from_ the gods: The Law and
    the Prophecy—The Ceremonial Law, or _tabu_—Examples—Divination
    and Prediction—III. The Word _concerning_ the gods:
    The Myths—Their Sources chiefly Psychic—Some from
    Language—Examples—Transference—Similarities—The Universal
    Mythical Cycles: 1. The Cosmical Concepts; 2. The Sacred
    Numbers; 3. The Drama of the Universe; Creation and Deluge
    Myths; 4. The Earthly Paradise; 5. The Conflict of Nature; 6.
    The Returning Saviour; 7. The Journey of the Soul—Conclusion as
    to these Identities.


There is a pleasant myth told by the inhabitants of the island of Mangaia
in the South Pacific. When the Creator of all things had ordered the
solid land to rise from the primeval waters, he walked abroad to survey
his work. “It is good,” said he aloud to himself. “Good,” answered
an echo from a neighbouring hill. “What!” exclaimed the Creator. “Is
some one here already? Am not I first?” “I first,” answered the echo.
Therefore the Mangaians assert that earliest of all existences is the
bodiless Voice.[91] It is their way of saying, “In the beginning was the
Word.”

Not only may we call it the first, it is also the mightiest of the unseen
agencies which mould man and his destinies.

“Power over men,” remarks Count Tolstoï in one of his essays, “lies not
in material force, but in thought and its clear expression.” Disraeli,
that subtlest of diplomats, once said, “We govern men with—words.”

No idea can be clearly conveyed to another unless there is a word to
express it. Inward thought and outward utterance are the correlated
conditions of intelligent advancement. The spoken word evokes in the mind
of the hearer the picture, the emotion, the reasoning, which is occupying
our own. A thousand minds are brought instantly to bear on the same
thought by the words in the mouth of one. I cannot place too high the
instant and magical effect of the word.

Not only does it convey a new thought to the mind, but it is itself
the begetter of thought. It is a seed sown, which grows and branches,
bearing flower and fruit, beauteous and everlasting, or noxious and
destructive.

Through the faculty of speech, social life becomes possible; on it
depends the sweet interchange of souls; by it we are led to think in
unison; through it we share the meditations of the philosopher, and the
inspired visions of the poet and the prophet.

If there is any way in which the spirits of the sky and air, the hosts of
the Divine, can touch and teach our souls, it must be chiefly through the
spoken word.

Every religion of the world bears witness to this. There is no other
element in them in which all join with like unanimity. From the rudest
to the ripest they echo the verse of the evangelist philosopher when he
wrote: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.”

The highest teachings of them all are expressed in the formula: “And the
word of the Lord came saying—”

We may go back to the earliest forms of the ancient Egyptian religion,
and we find the doctrine that the man who had learned and could pronounce
the divine words revealed through the god Thoth (Thought, Mind), by
their utterance would be elevated to the god, and be blended with
him, as one and inseparable. “The primary idea concerning the ritual
formulas was assimilation to God, brought about by the power of the words
themselves.”[92]

Probably in all primitive faiths the word is regarded as a magical power
in itself. In Egypt it was believed that by words the most powerful of
the gods could be made obedient to the will of man. By them, as exorcisms
or incantations everywhere, demons could be loosed or bound, and
spirits summoned from the vasty deep. The stock in trade of the Indian
medicine-man is principally his store of exorcisms, and among the Goras
of North-Western India any one can become a priest who will learn the
formulas which compel the demons.[93]

Our word “charm” comes from the Latin _carmen_, the sacred rhythmic
formula, such as Virgil averred could by its occult power drag the moon
from the sky.

    “Carmina vel cælo possunt deducere lunam.”

There were such songs scarcely less potent among the Australian Blacks,
which could summon the rain in dry seasons or cause it to cease in
floods.[94]

No demon, however malevolent, can resist, in their belief, the power of
the right word. The natives of New South Wales say that an evil spirit
in the shape of a dwarf with monstrous head roams the woods at night and
devours those whom he meets. But if the man utters the word “Boonbolong,”
the dwarf passes on his way and does not harm him.[95]

When Jesus was in Capernaum, and at his command an unclean spirit had
gone out of a man possessed, the multitude said one to the other,—τις
εστι ουτος λογος, “What is this Word, by the authority and might of which
this man casts out devils?” (Luke iv., 36.) They believed he used some
cabalistic formula of exorcism which constrained the demons to obey his
will.

Nowhere did the Word display its terrible effect more fearfully than in
the curse or imprecation. In ancient Assyria, writes Professor Sayce,
“The power of the _mamit_, or curse, was such that the gods themselves
could not transgress it.”[96] Not only did it unloose the demons of
destruction, but it constrained the gods against their will, changing
them from protectors to enemies.[97]

Amid savage tribes, in undoubted and repeated instances, the curse kills
as certainly as a knife. Among the western Indians of our country, when
a medicine-man “gathers his medicine,” that is, rises to the full height
of inspired volition, and utters a withering curse on his antagonist,
commanding him to die, the latter knows all hope is lost. Sometimes
he drops dead on the spot, or at best lingers through a few days of
misery.[98] The Australians believe that the curse of a potent magician
will kill at the distance of a hundred miles.[99]

Not only is the word thus mighty in the unseen world, but it is itself
the very efflux and medium of the divine power itself.

Thus in the drama of creation recorded in the first chapter of Genesis
we read: “And God said, ‘Light, be,’ and light was”; and in the
corresponding myth of the Quiche Indians of Central America, the maker of
the world calls forth, _Uleu!_ Earth! and at the word the solid land grew
forth.[100]

Sir George Grey relates a story that in New Zealand there was a huge,
carved wooden head, which could speak, and by the dreadful might of its
words slew all who approached it. But when by superior magic its voice
was reduced to a whisper, its power was gone and it was destroyed.[101]

It is to be noted that the magical influence of the word is _independent
of its meaning_. It is distinctly _not_ the idea, image, or truth which
it conveys to which is ascribed its efficacy. On the contrary, the most
potent of all words are those which have no meaning at all or of which
the sense has been lost.

This is constantly seen in the formulas of savage tribes. They preserve
archaisms of language no longer understood by those who utter them,
and in other instances they are obviously made up of syllables strung
together without regard to intelligibility.

The same fact is abundantly shown in the cabalistic jargon of classical
and mediæval diviners, and in the charms drawn from contemporary
folk-lore. Indeed, the famous cabalist, Pico de Mirandola, asserts that a
word without meaning has most influence over the demons.

Not only one or a few words may be thus unintelligible, but long
communications may be in articulate sounds conveying no thought whatever.
This is the “gift of tongues,” the power to speak in unknown languages.

It is common in savage life. Many of the important chants at the sacred
ceremonies are mere iterations of meaningless syllables. The idea would
seem to be that what men cannot understand, the gods do; or else, that
it is the god expressing himself through human organs but in a speech
unknown to human ears. Bishop Galloway says that the charm songs of the
Zulus are often quite unintelligible to themselves[102]; and this is one
of many examples.

Of all words, the most sacred is the Name. In primitive thought, the
personal name of an individual is not merely an attribute, it is an
integral part of his Self, his Ego. The Eskimos say that a man consists
of three parts, his body, his soul, and his name, and of these the
last mentioned alone achieves immortality. This seems very advanced.
Most of our ambitious men appear to think more of rendering their
names than their souls worthy of immortality. Very generally, the name
was associated with the personal guardian spirit, derived from it or
indicating it, and hence received a ceremonial sanctity.[103]

As being a part of oneself, injury or contumely heaped upon a name
reacted upon the individual who bore it, and even life could be destroyed
in this manner.

For this reason, throughout America the natives rarely disclosed their
real appellations, but were designated by nicknames. In Australia some
tribes were so cautious that the young men on entering adult life
renounced the names by which they had been known and assumed no other;
while a woman preserved indeed her appellation, but no one except her
husband was entitled to pronounce it.[104] The Dyaks take the prudent
precaution, after an attack of illness, to change their names; so that
the demon who sent the sickness may not recognise them, and continue his
malevolent pursuit.[105]

In Polynesia, where the name was not thus concealed, it could be applied,
according to the ceremonial law, only to the person, although it was
generally a common noun. Hence arose the curious custom called _tepi_.
All words which formed part of the name of the chieftain, and all
syllables of other words which had a similar sound were dropped from the
language and others substituted for them during his lifetime. Thus, forty
or fifty of the most common terms of the language would drop out of use
at once, and as many more be materially changed in sound, to the great
annoyance of missionaries and visitors.[106]

The Kamschatkans were so particular that they would not name the bear
or wolf, for these animals understood the language of men, and would be
offended at such familiarity![107]

Even if it does not hear, the power for good or evil which a being has,
can, in primitive opinion, be communicated through its name. For that
reason the priest known as the _flamen dialis_ among the Romans would
not only avoid touching a dog or bear, but he would not pronounce their
names, lest he should be contaminated! And to this day a Mohammedan, if
he pronounces the word for “hog,” will spit, that his mouth may not be
defiled by the name of the unclean beast.

Even more universal was the avoidance of the names of the dead. This
prevailed throughout Africa, Australia, Tasmania, Polynesia, and America.
The reason was, that the name was held to be a part of the spirit of
the departed, and to pronounce it would disturb the rest of the grave,
and probably indeed bring the perturbed spirit to the circle of
auditors.[108]

If such was the case with the names of men and beasts, how sacred must be
the names of the gods!

This is an extraordinary feature, common to the rudest superstitions of
savage and the most developed faiths of civilised lands, and it has for
its basis the conception of the name as a real attribute, a part of the
Self.

“In all the religions of ancient Asia,” writes Lenormant, “the mysterious
Name was considered a real and divine being, who had a personal existence
and exclusive power over both nature and the world of spirits.”[109]

In the name dwelt the essential power of the deity. An Egyptian magical
formula, placed in the mouth of a god, reads:

    “I am the elect of millions of years.
    Were my name spoken on the bank of a river, it would be consumed;
    Were it uttered on earth, fire would burst from the ground.”[110]

The knowledge of this name by another enabled him to exert a power over
the god himself. That by naming a demon, he can be forced to appear,
was a cardinal principle of ancient magic. “The list of divine names
possessed by the Roman pontiffs in their _indigitamenta_ was their most
efficacious magical instrument, laying at their mercy all the forces of
the spirit world.”[111]

For this reason, the gods of ancient Egypt sedulously concealed their
names, and we cannot doubt that it was the fear of some such subjection
of their deity through the malicious use of his name, which led the early
Jews to conceal it so well that it is now lost. It was the same with
the Semitic Arabians. Instead of the true divine name, they substituted
Allah, the Mighty One, so that now the original is conjectural or unknown.

This extends to the rudest tribes. The African traveller Holub says that
the actual name of the god of the Marutse and allied tribes along the
Zambesi river is Njambe; but to avoid revealing this, they employ the
term Molemo, “He above.” Among the south-eastern Australian tribes their
leading deity is Turramulun (the One-legged), who lives in the sky. His
name is never revealed to women, nor to youths before their initiation to
manhood.[112]

The Choctaw Indians regarded the name of their highest divinity as
self-existing, essential, and unspeakable. Therefore, when it was
necessary to refer to him, they adopted a circumlocution, for, says their
historian, “according to their fixed standard of speech, had they made
any nearer approach to the beloved Name, it would have been reckoned a
profanation.”[113]

How completely this notion has survived among ourselves is shown by
the second clause of that prayer on which we have all been brought up,
“Hallowed be Thy Name.” But how few who repeat it reflect that the name
referred to, whatever it was, is now through long concealment totally
lost!

Thus we see that the doctrine of “the ineffable Name” is the common
property of savage and cultured faiths.

From the misuse of the name to compel the obedience of the god, or
to injure his dignity and worth, came the idea of profanity, sternly
forbidden by the early Jewish law,—“Take not the name of the Lord in
vain”—and by many other faiths of a primitive aspect.

Quite consistently with this idea of real existence in names, the god who
had many names had just as many powers or faculties. For that reason,
the prominent gods of ancient Egypt, especially Isis, were called upon
by so numerous epithets that the Greeks spoke of them as “myrionomous,”
ten-thousand-named. In later Babylonian times all the names of the fifty
great gods were ascribed to Êa, by which process they were themselves
absorbed into his being. “When they lost their names, they lost their
personality as well.”[114] To the Mohammedan the “One hundred names of
God” repeated in the Koran express the multitude of His powers.

The same tendency is visible in the native religions of America. The
Mexicans applied many names to the same divinity, and in the _Popol Vuh_,
the sacred book of the Quiches, the chief deity is called by a variety of
titles, some sounding strange to us, as “the opossum-hunter,” the “green
snake,” the “calebash,” all of symbolic sense.[115]

In the South Seas, the name of a god, adopted by a chief, identified
him in the opinion of the people with the god and secured for him the
reverence and adoration ascribed to his divine namesake.[116]

This idea is that which in many early and later faiths led to what are
called the “theophorous” or god-bearing names, where the individual
is called by the proper name of a saint or god. They were especially
frequent in early Semitic religions, and are customary among Catholics
to-day.[117]

We find their origin in the custom, very general among the American
Indians, for the person to take the name of the spirit who appears
to him during the vigils and fasts which attend the ceremonies of
initiation to manhood. By assuming the name of the divinity, the two
natures or essences are believed to be united. This was precisely also
the opinion of the early Christians, as we see in the expression of St.
Ephrem, a Syrian saint of the fourth century: “Merciful was the Lord in
that He clad on our Names. His Names make us great; our Names make Him
small.”[118]

If we seek the explanation of this strange power attributed to words
and names, often apart from their signification, we shall find it in
their extreme activity as agents of mental suggestion. They are intense
psychic stimulants, stirring the soul to its depths. The Word is by odds
the most effective of all agencies to bring about altered and abnormal
mental conditions either in the individual or in the mass. Through it,
judiciously applied, the profoundest hypnotic trance, or the wildest,
maniacal nervous seizures can be produced at will.[119]

The repetition of a word greatly heightens its suggestive influence
and promotes the exclusion from the mind of all other concepts and
associations than its own. In many languages, a word repeated is
equivalent to the superlative degree, and in every tongue the repetition
has a similar effect, as in the phrase: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of
Sabaoth.”

No words in this relation are more efficient than names. Consider what
our own lives would be if we had to change our names every year, how it
would seem to obliterate our personality, how it would dissipate all
dreams of posthumous glory and renown. Our consciousness of Self would
suffer diminution, and the keenest interest of our lives would be lost.
Our name is really and truly a part of ourselves, and he who would rob
us of it would leave us poor indeed. Why is every point of view carved
with the names of obscure tourists, why does it give us pleasure to note
our names among the hundreds at some grand function, but that we think
it more desirable to live “as naked nominations, without desert or noble
deeds,” as Sir Thomas Browne said, than to pass away and leave not that
little which the Roman poet considered the least,—_nominis umbra_, “the
shadow of a name.”

For the practical purposes of life the name confers or creates the
personality. This fact exerted a profound influence in the earliest
development of religion. The vague sense of spiritual power first became
centred in the idea of an individual, of a personal god, when it received
a name.

The primitive words of barbaric tongues used to signifying the divine
have not the connotation of individuality. _Wakan_, _mahopa_, _manito_,
_teotl_, _huaca_, _ku_, are such words from American languages, not one
of which conveys the concept of personality. That concept was first
gained when some single expression of spiritual power was differentiated
and named.[120]

The essential religious element in the Word is its power to bring man
into relation to the gods. This is possible in three directions,—we may
address them; they may address us; or we may talk about them. These
furnish the three forms of sacred expression in speech: 1. The word _to_
the gods,—Prayer; 2. The word _from_ the gods,—Revelation; and 3. The
word _about_ the gods,—the Myth. We will consider each of these.

I. THE WORD TO THE GODS.—1. The Word to the gods is Prayer. It is a
very prominent and nigh universal element in primitive religions. The
injunction “Pray always” is nowhere else so nearly carried out. Captain
Clark, an officer of our army with the widest experience of Indian life,
writes: “It seems a startling assertion, but it is, I think, true, that
there are no people who pray more than Indians. Both superstition and
custom keep always in their minds the necessity for placating the anger
of the invisible and omnipotent power, and for supplicating the active
exercise of his faculties in their behalf.”[121]

In fact, Prayer may be said to be the life of the faith of savage tribes,
and it is so recognised by themselves. According to the legends of the
Maoris of New Zealand, when they first migrated to that island from
Hawaii, they did not bring with them their ancestral gods, but took care
to carry along the potent prayers which the gods cannot but hear and
grant.[122]

Some writers have claimed that certain tribes have been found without any
notion of an appeal to unseen agencies, and have quoted as instances the
Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, and the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands.
But closer examination proves that the priests of the Yahgans call upon a
mysterious being, Aiapakal,[123] and other invisible existences, and the
Mincopies are acknowledged to have prayers at the present time.

The earliest hymns and prayers do not, as a rule, contain definite
requests, but are general appeals to the god to be present, to partake
of the feast which is spread, or to join the dance and to continue his
good offices toward those who call upon him. Such are the hymns of
the Rig Veda, and those of ancient Mexico, which I have collected and
published.[124] They are like the _evocatio deorum_ of the Romans.

The three forms of “the Word to the gods,” or Prayer, are those of
thanksgiving, by praise or laudation; of petition for assistance or
protection; and of penitence or contrition for neglect of duty. All
these are common in the most primitive faiths. In all of them you
will find the deity appealed to as great, mighty, a lord, a king,
terror-inspiring, loving his followers, and by hundreds of such epithets
of amplification and flattery. He is addressed endearingly as father or
grandfather; not at all implying a physical relationship, as some modern
writers have erroneously stated; but with reference to the loving care he
is supposed to extend to his worshippers.

As we might expect, most of the petitions in primitive prayers are for
material benefits. The burden of most of them is well expressed by one in
the Rig Veda: “O God, prosper us in getting and in keeping!” They ask for
increase of goods, abundant food, success in war, and fine weather.

Yet among the rudest there are signs of an appreciation of something
higher. A prayer of the Khonds, a Dravidian tribe of Northern India,
reads: “O Lord, we know not what is good for us. Thou knowest what it is.
For it we pray.”

It is strange to find among the Navahoes, a rude hunting tribe of our
western territories, an intense longing for the beautiful. One of their
prayers runs: “O Lord on high, whose youth is immortal, ruler above, I
have made you the offering, preserve my body and members, preserve it in
beauty, make all things beautiful, let all be completed in beauty.”[125]

At other times the prayer is for moral control, as in this of a Sioux
Indian: “O my grandfather, the Earth, I ask that thou givest me a long
life and strength of body. When I go to war, let me capture many horses
and kill many enemies. But in peace, let not anger enter my heart.”[126]

Penitential prayers are uttered when one has broken the ceremonial law or
_tabu_; and in general, when misfortune and defeat seem to indicate that
the gods are irritated at some insult offered them, though the worshipper
may not be clear what it is.

“O merciful Lord,” says an Aztec prayer, “let this chastisement with
which thou hast visited us give us freedom from evil and follies.”[127]

In many prayers we find formulas preserved which are no longer
understood; and very frequently the power of the prayer is believed to
be increased by repeating it a number of times. The prayer choruses of
nearly all savage tribes offer endless examples of this. The notion
of increased force by repetition, a notion founded on the augmented
suggestive power of the Word through its iteration, to which I have
already referred, is so common that it was especially noted and condemned
by Jesus as of no spiritual value.

This form of prayer, indeed, degenerated into a mere magical formula,
as we see was the case with the apostolic benediction of the Christian
church during the middle ages, which became a charm in use by
necromancers and sorcerers.

In its sublimest essence, however, prayer has been recognised as
something far beyond any form of suppliancy. It is, as an orthodox
authority says, “the habitual state of a being who constantly lives in
relation to God, and cultivates a constant exchange with Him.”[128]
So understood, it is even more than inspiration; it is a communion of
spiritual life, a dwelling in God. This is the precise mental condition
of many of the mystics and devotees of primitive religions. They are with
the god, the god with and in them.

II. THE WORD FROM THE GODS.—If the mere name of the god was thus mighty
and thus venerated, how much more the words he himself uttered! The “Word
of God,” as understood by the worshippers, is the kernel and core of
every faith on earth. Every religion is, to its votaries, a revelation.
None is so material, none so primitive, as to claim any other foundation
than the expressed will of divinity. None is so devoid of ritual as to
lack some means of ascertaining this will.

The word from the gods is clothed under two forms, the Law and the
Prophets,—in other terms, Precept and Prediction. In every religion, from
the most primitive to the highest, we find these two modes of divine
utterance.

In the earliest phases of religion, the law is essentially prohibitory.
It is in the form of the negative, “Thou shalt not——.” Ethnologists have
adopted for this a word from Polynesian dialects, _tabu_, or _tapu_, akin
to _tapa_, to name,[129] that which was solemnly named or announced being
sacred, and hence forbidden to the _profanum vulgus_.

The _tabu_ extends its veto into every department of primitive life.
It forbids the use of certain articles of food or raiment; it hallows
the sacred areas; it lays restrictions on marriage, and thus originates
what is known as the totemic bond; it denounces various actions, often
the most trivial and innocent, and thus lays the foundation for the
ceremonial law.

The penalty for the infraction of the _tabu_ includes all that flows from
the anger of the gods, reaching to death itself. A few examples, from the
very rudest religions, will serve to illustrate this.

The Kamschatkans in the beginning of the last century were very low in
the scale of humanity and curiously pessimistic. They had a hero-god,
Kutka, their mythic progenitor, of whom they told many strange and
disgusting stories. They cursed him oftener than they blessed him, and
refused to believe that anything good could come from the gods. But to
escape the ill-will of these malevolent beings they practised various
ceremonies and refrained from sundry actions calculated to displease
those capricious spirits. Thus, one must not cook fish and flesh in the
same pot, or he would be punished with sores; he must not step in the
tracks of a bear, or he would be visited with a skin disease; he must not
scrape the snow from his shoes with a knife, or there would be violent
storms; and so on, through a long law of prohibitions.[130]

The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands have no forms of worship, they have
no invocations to the gods, their language, indeed, has no original word
for “prayer.” They believe firmly, however, in the existence of numerous
spirits, not the souls of the deceased, but self-created and undying,
who will injure them if they commit certain transgressions, such as to
cook turtle or fish by burning a particular kind of wood; to roast a pig
instead of boiling it, and so on.[131]

The Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego have been often, though erroneously,
quoted as a tribe devoid of religion. Their ceremonial law was rigid. The
hairs that fell from the head must be burned, or the individual would
fall ill; the name of the dead must not be mentioned, or the ghost would
return and plague them; the young ducklings must not be killed, or bad
weather would follow.[132]

The _tabu_ in Polynesia, whence it derives its name, was carried to an
incredible degree of stringency. The dread of its violation was so vivid,
that in itself it was often the cause of the death of the offender.[133]

The second form of the “Word from God” was when it was uttered as
a prophecy, a prediction of the future. In this form it appears
throughout the world under the innumerable aspects of divination, as
oracles, prophetic utterances, forecasts of time to come, second-sight,
clairvoyance, and the like.

The essence of every religious rite may be said to be divinatory,
inasmuch as its final aim is either to learn or to modify the Will of
God, and thus to influence the future of the individual or society by
extra-natural agencies.

There is nothing in this derogatory to religion as an element of mind.
The constant effort of the reason is to banish the idea of chance from
the universe; and he who regards the Will of God as a law of the universe
does exclude chance from its events just in proportion as he learns that
Will and acts in conformity to it.

Prediction in primitive religions is by two widely different methods,
Divination and Prophecy.

The diviner, relying on his own sense and reasoning powers, foretells
the future by observation of certain trains of events which he believes
reveal the intentions of the gods; the prophet is one inspired by the
divine mind itself to speak its own words and to convey directly the
thoughts and wishes of deity.

This distinction is visible in early religions. Any one can learn the
“signs” and “omens” which will be auspicious or inauspicious for his
undertakings; though, of course, to read their full significance one must
have made special studies in the art of augury. To become an inspired
prophet requires a much more serious preparation, and some form of
communion direct with the gods must be established.

III.—THE WORD CONCERNING THE GODS. A brilliant French writer (E. Scherer)
has said: “It was the Word that made the gods,” “_Le mot, c’est l’artisan
des idoles_.” He but expressed in a pointed apothegm what the profound
German mythologist Kuhn stated in more formal terms when he wrote: “The
foundation of mythology is to be looked for in the domain of language.”

What, indeed, does the term “myth” itself mean? It is merely the Greek
for “a word,” something spoken, and in this general sense it is used
by Homer. Later, its connotation became restricted to what was spoken
concerning the gods, the narratives of their doings, the descriptions of
their abodes and attributes.

Men began to frame such tales the moment they consciously recognised the
existence of such unseen agencies. They were founded on visions, dreams,
and those vague mental states which, as I have shown, fill up so large a
part of savage life. They were not intentional fictions, by any means,
for the criteria between the real and unreal fade away in those psychic
conditions, and the faintest hold on actuality is enough to guarantee an
indefinitely complex fancy.

It was a strange error by one of the most earnest students of primitive
religions, the Reverend W. Robertson Smith, when he advocated his theory
that the myth was derived from the ritual, not the ritual from the
myth.[134] Had he studied the actual religious condition of the rudest
tribes, he would have found them with scarcely any ritual but a most
abundant mythology; and he would have discovered that where the myth
was taken from the ritual, it is when the latter has lost its original
meaning, and some other is devised to explain it.

As examples of such notions, I may take the Bushmen of South Africa. They
enjoy the general reputation of being the lowest of the human race. They
have no temples, no altars, no ritual; yet the missionary Bleek collected
among them thousands of tales concerning their gods in their relations to
men and animals.[135]

The Andamanese are alleged to have no forms of worship whatever; but they
have many myths about the mighty Puluga, self-created and immortal, about
the origin of fire, and the transactions of the invisible spirits.

It would be easy to give many other examples, but it is enough to refute
such an opinion by referring to the vast body of myths in all religious
peoples which have no reference to ritual whatever.

The sources of mythology are psychic. They are not to be traced to the
external world, whether ritual or natural. Myths are not figurative
explanations of natural phenomena, they are not vague memories of
ancestors and departed heroes, they are not philosophic speculations
or poetic fancies. They are distinctly religious in origin, and, when
genuine, are the fruit of that insight into the divine, that “beatific
vision,” on which I have laid such emphasis as the real and only
foundation of all religions whatsoever.

They receive their form and expression through spoken language, and are,
therefore, intimately associated with, often dependent upon its sounds,
and laws. In how many ways this may influence them I may briefly mention.

Primitive language is predominantly concrete. The connotations of its
terms are mainly objective. By this necessity arose the materialisation
of the spiritual thought. It had to be expressed under external imagery.

Primitive languages are usually intensely individualising and specific.
There is scarcely a native tongue in America in which one could say
“hand”; one must always add a pronoun indicating whose hand is meant,
“my, thy, his,” hand.

The generic distinctions in such tongues are often far reaching and
real, not purely formal, as with us. A word in the masculine or feminine
gender is understood to mean that the object to which it refers is
positively male or female. Many other distinctions are thus conveyed, as
what is animate and inanimate, noble or vulgar, etc.

The result of these distinctions in such languages as the Aryan and
Semitic was that the gods perforce were arranged sexually as male and
female, and this persists to-day even in our English tongue.

Many myths arose directly from words, through casual similarities
between them which were attributed to some divine cause. This is the
theory so well known by the advocacy of Professor Max Müller, who is
charged, unfairly I believe, with having called mythology a “disease of
language.” He, Professor Kuhn, and others lay great and just stress on
the influence of “paronomy,” that is, similarity in the sound of words,
as the starting-point of myths. They have adduced endless examples from
the classical tongues, but I shall content myself with two from wholly
primitive sources.

I have just referred to the Andamanese as at the bottom of religious
growth, but with an abundant mythology. In their tongue it happens that
the word _garub_ means “night” and also a species of caterpillar. It is
probably a mere coincidence of sound. But they saw in it much more.
Night to them is a depressing period, and it would not have been created
by the supreme Puluga without just cause. Evidently the double meaning
of the word _garub_ indicated this. And as the wise men proceed on that
universally sound opinion that when there is a row there is a woman in
it, they perceive that some woman must have wantonly killed a _garub_, a
caterpillar, in order that Puluga should have sent _garub_, the night, as
a punishment. And this is the sum of a long mythical story.[136]

Another example is from a far distant area, from among the Carrier
Indians of British America. The arctic fox which they hunt has a sharp
yelp which sounds _khaih_. Their word for “light” is _yekkhaih_.
Evidently the fox was the animal who first called for the light and, by
the magical power of the word, obtained it. Through what difficulties he
accomplished this is told in a long and curious myth obtained from them
by Father Morice.[137]

In the development of myths it was, indeed, often the case that those
concerning one deity could be told of another—singularly incongruous as
it often was,—or that the divine attributes primarily assigned to a
deity and drawn from its character could be transferred to a human type,
as when those of a flower were placed on the god.[138]

It is equally an error to suppose that myths were at first mere stories
and received their religious character later. The true myth has a
religious aim from the outset, and is not the product of an idle fancy.
Those who have taught otherwise have been misled by a superficial
acquaintance with the psychology of savage tribes. Mythology comes from
religion, not religion from mythology.

The savage understands perfectly the difference between a sacred and a
secular story, between a narrative of the doings of the gods handed down
from his ancestors, and the creation of the idle fancy brought forth to
amuse a circle of listeners.

I have already referred to the strange similarity in the myths of savage
nations far asunder in space and kinship. The explanation of this is
not to be found in borrowing or in recollections from a common, remote
unity; but in the laws of the human mind. The same myths are found all
over the world, with the same symbolism and imagery, woven into cycles
dealing with the same great questions of human thought. This is because
they arise from identical psychic sources, and find expression under
obligatory forms, depending on the relations of man to his environment,
and on the unity of mental process throughout the race.

It is not possible for me at the present time to enter far into the vast
temple of mythology. I must content myself with selecting a few of the
most prominent mythical cycles, aiming by these to show how they form the
ground-plan and substructure of the whole edifice of mythical narrative.

I will select seven which are the most prominent, those relating to:
1. the Cosmical Concepts; 2. the Sacred Numbers; 3. the Drama of the
Universe; 4. the Earthly Paradise; 5. the Conflict of Nature; 6. the
Returning Saviour; and 7. the Journey of the Soul.

_1._ _The Cosmical Concepts._—Wherever man is placed on the earth, he
is guided in his movements by space and direction. These are among the
earliest notions he derives from the impressions on his senses. His
anatomical conformation, the anterior and posterior planes of his body
and his right and left sides, lead him to a fourfold division of space,
as before him and behind him, to one side or the other. He conceives the
earth, therefore, as a plain with four quarters, the chief directions
as four, to wit, the cardinal points, and the winds as four principal
currents from these points. The sky is to him a solid covering, supported
at each of its four corners by a tree, a pillar, or a giant, and is
itself divided into four courts or regions like the earth.

These were his cosmical concepts, his primal ideas of the universe, and
they entered deeply into his life, his acts, and his beliefs. He founded
his social organisation on them, he pitched his tents or built his cities
on their model, he oriented his edifices to simulate them, and framed his
myths to explain and perpetuate them.

We find these concepts practically universal. The symbolic figures which
represent them are scratched in the soil at the _Bora_, or initiation
ceremonies of the Australians; they are etched into the pots and jars
we dig up in the mounds of the Mississippi valley; they are painted
in strange figures on the manuscripts of the Mayas and Mexicans; they
reappear in the mysterious symbols of the svastika and the Chinese Ta-Ki;
they underlie the foundation stones of Egyptian pyramids, and recur in
the lowest strata of Babylonian ziggarats.[139]

_2. The Sacred Numbers._—The cosmical concepts were closely connected
with the sacred numbers. Wherever we turn in myth and rite, in symbolism
or sacred art, we find certain numbers which have a hallowed priority
in religious thought. These numbers are pre-eminently the three and
the four, and those derived from them. They are distinctly antithetic
in character, arising from contrasting psychical sources, which I will
briefly explain.

The number _four_ derives its sacredness in mythology from the cosmical
concepts just mentioned. It was, therefore, connected with the objective
and phenomenal world, and had a material and concrete origin and
applications.

The number _three_, on the other hand, was surrounded with the halo of
sanctity from the operations of the mind itself. These, the processes
of thinking, are carried on by a triple or rather triune action of the
intelligence, which logicians express in the three fundamental “laws of
thought,” and in the trilogy of the syllogism. These ever-present laws of
thinking impress themselves on the mind and mental acts whether they are
recognised or not, and all the more absolutely in that involuntary action
in which, as “sub-limital consciousness” or “psychic automatism,” I have
revealed to you the true source of the conception of the Divine.[140]

How natural, then, that we should find in so many primitive faiths the
belief in the triplicate nature of divinity, should find myths, idols,
rites, so devised as to reflect and inculcate this! Such is the case,
and it is easy to quote examples, whether we turn to the Indians of
America or the Indians of Hindostan, whether we touch on the triads of
ancient Egypt or those of the Druids, whether we recall the three Norns
of Teutonic myth or the three Fates of the Hellenes. As a writer, who
has made the subject his special branch, observes: “It is impossible to
study any single system of worship throughout the world, without being
struck with the peculiar persistence of the triple number in regard to
Divinity.”[141]

The exception to this would naturally be where the concept of the number
itself was too feeble to impress itself upon the myth. There are tribes
who cannot count four, whose languages have no word for any number
beyond two, and yet who are by no means deficient either in mythologies
or practical arts.[142] Among these, we should look in vain for the
sacredness of numbers.

_3. The Drama of the Universe._—I have already quoted the saying of the
wise men of ancient India, “There is no limit to the knowing of the Self
that knows.” He who through meditation and prayer has become one with
God, knows what God knows. Thus it is that in the rudest tribes we find
the story of the beginning of things clearly told as coming from the
inspired knowledge of the seers.

This story has many points of similarity, wherever we find it, not
owing, I hasten again to say, to any unity of origin in place, but due
to the higher unity of the mind of man, and the necessary results of its
activity.

Look in what continent we please, we shall find the myth of a Creation
or of a primeval construction, of a Deluge or a destruction, and of an
expected Restoration. We shall find that man has ever looked on this
present world as a passing scene in the shifting panorama of time, to be
ended by some cataclysm and to be followed by some period of millennial
glory.

Whenever we have a fairly complete body of the mythology of a primitive
stock, we discover the same scenario of the vast drama of the universe,
varying abundantly in detail and local colour, but true to the grandiose
lines of its composition.

It is instructive to analyse its various elements and trace them to their
psychic sources. Let us begin with the modes of action of the creative
power itself.

This mysterious power is known to man under three forms.

The simplest is that of the moulder or manufacturer, as the potter makes
his pots, the shoemaker his shoes. This is the conception which underlies
many myths of the Creator, as is shown by the names he bears. Thus the
Australians called him Baiame, “the cutter-out,” as one cuts out a sandal
from a skin, or a figure from bark. The Maya Indians used the term Patol,
from the verb _pat_, to mould, as a potter his clay, Bitol, which has
the same meaning, and Tzacol, the builder, as of a house.[143] With
the Dyaks of Borneo, the Creator is Tupa, the forger, as one forges a
spear-blade[144]; and so on.

The second form is that of creation in the sense of generation, and this
is a constant simile in the myths, with reference to the process both in
the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

The Creator is often referred to as the Father, the parent, more or
less literally, of all that is. He has many such titles in the myths of
America and Polynesia. In bi-sexual myths he is associated with some
universal mother as the genetrix.

The third form is more recondite and loftier. In an earlier lecture I
have emphasised how man is conscious within himself of the Will as an
ultimate source of power. This he clearly recognised in his primitive
conditions, and to its exertion repeatedly in his myths did he attribute
the origin of things. They were self-evolved in the thought of the primal
Being, or, as the native American expression is, they were “created by
thought.”

We find this in the rudest tribes of North America; and among the
sedentary Zuñis of New Mexico, it is said of their demiurge Awonawilona
that at the beginning “he conceived within himself and thought outward in
space,” in order to bring nature into existence. We see the connection in
the Vitian dialect of Polynesian, in which _mania_ is “to think”; _mana_,
a miracle, and the power to perform one. According to the myths of
Hawaii, it was “by an act of the will” that their triple-natured Creator
“broke up the night” (Po), and from its fragments evoked into being the
world of light and life.[145]

Whatever the mode of creation, it was felt that it did not tell the whole
story. The conceptions of time and space are in their essence limitless,
and any creation must have been within them. Thus in Polynesian myth,
Po represents not a dateless chaos but the debris of some former state
of things; and in Algonquin legend the primeval ocean had engulfed some
older world.[146]

This psychic molimen, ceaselessly acting, led in more developed
mythologies to some defined fancies of these earlier periods of cosmic
existence and thus to the myths of the Ages of the World or the Epochs of
Nature. These are clearly outlined among the Mexicans, Mayas, Peruvians,
and other tribes of the New World and among many on the Eastern
Hemisphere. The Aztecs count them as four, each followed by a formidable
catastrophe, nearly or quite destroying all that lived.

The last of these destructions was generally blended with the notion of
the emergence of the solid land from the primeval waters; and this is the
origin of the Deluge Myth, the story of the Universal Flood, which we
find in so many primitive peoples. It has excited especial attention, and
by writers has been explained as the remembrance of some local overflow,
or the recollection of the Hebrew tradition. Its real origin, purely
psychic and derived from the myth of the Epochs of Nature, I explained
thirty years ago in discussing its prevalence among American tribes.[147]

_4. The Earthly Paradise._—Associated with this cycle is the myth of
the terrestrial Paradise, watered by its four rivers, and enclosing the
tree of life,—the happy abode of early man. The four rivers are the
celestial streams from the four corners of the earth, watering the tree
as the emblem of life. Thus we find it among the American Indians, the
Sioux and the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Polynesians, the ancient Aryans and
Semites, etc.[148] Its origin is purely psychic, and though we can easily
understand how the writer of the Book of Genesis sought to identify these
mythical streams with some known to him, it is strangely out of date for
scholars of to-day to follow his footsteps in that vain quest.[149]

_5. The Conflict of Nature._—Another great cycle of psychic myths arose
from the conflict of nature as apprehended by the primitive mind.
Everywhere it seems to be raging around us. The hourly struggle of light
with darkness; of day with night; of sunshine with storm; of summer with
winter; of youth with age, of health with disease; of life with death; of
all that makes toward good with all that makes toward evil—this endless
battle of two principles underlies all movement and is forever stirring
the soul to throw itself into the fray.

In a thousand forms this eternal combat was portrayed in myths, all
pregnant with one meaning, bodying it forth in varied symbol and
expression. The world-wide stories of the conflict of the first two
brothers, of men with gods, of giants with heroes, of the deities among
themselves, arose from this perception of the unceasing interaction of
natural forces, imagined as a war between conscious existences.

_6. The Returning Saviour._—Out of this imagined turmoil and slaughter
grew the wonderful mythical cycles concerning the Deliverer and Saviour.
He would come from afar, out of the morning light or the distant sky,
or he would be born of a virgin and the son of a god. He would lead his
people to happiness and power, crushing by his might the enemies who
afflicted them, whether on earth or among the envious gods. Blond-bearded
and light-haired, even among Polynesians and Americans, we cannot
err in seeing in this majestic figure the personified idea of Light,
transferred from the plane of physical phenomena into that of psychical
anticipation.[150]

_7. The Journey of the Soul._—Lastly, I mention the cycle which describes
the journey of the soul after death. The extraordinary similarity which
I and others have pointed out between the opinions on this subject among
Egyptians, Greeks, ancient Celts, and North American Indians,[151] is not
to be explained by any theory of inter-communication, nor “by chance,”
as some have argued, but by fixed psychic laws, working over the same
material under similar conditions.

The soul passes toward the west, crosses a sea or river to the abode
of the departed, and meets everywhere nearly the same obstacles, to
be overcome by proper preparations and mortuary ceremonies. I need
not rehearse the details. They can be compared elsewhere. But their
substantial identity confirms in an emphatic manner the thesis I am
advocating, that in these universal mythical cycles we are dealing not
with fragments of some one set of fancies borrowed from a common source,
but with independent creations of the human intellect, framed under
laws common to it everywhere, and which tend always to produce fruits
generically everywhere the same.




LECTURE IV.

Primitive Religious Expression: In the Object.

    CONTENTS:—Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship
    only—Identical with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a
    Stadium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Objects:
    1. The Celestial Bodies—Sun and Moon Worship—Astrolatry;
    2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the Winds), Water,
    and the Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones and
    Rocks—Thunderbolts—Memorial Stones—Divining Stones; 4. Trees
    and Plants—The Tree of Life—The Sacred Pole and the Cross—The
    Plant-Soul—The Tree of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—High
    Places and Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird, the Serpent,
    etc.; 7. Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Worship of Beauty;
    8. Life and its Transmission—Examples—Genesiac Cults—The
    Fatherhood of God—Love as Religion’s Crown.


If we analyse the concepts which occupy our minds, we shall find
that most of them are derived from the sense of sight; they are what
psychologists call “visual ideas.” To these alone we owe the notions of
space, size, form, colour, brightness, and motion.

By filling the brain with such images, sight becomes a mental stimulus
of the highest order, and as we find it exerting its influence in other
directions, so in the development of the religious sense it has always
held a conspicuous place. It has led to the objective expression of
that sense under visible forms, in images, pictures, sacred structures,
symbolic colours and shapes, and natural substances.

This expression, universal in primitive conditions, is called fetishism,
polytheism, and idolatry, the worship of stocks and stones. But I wish to
impress upon you that nowhere in the world did man ever worship a stock
or a stone, as such. Every fetish, be it a rag-baby or a pebble from the
road-side, is adored, not as itself, but as possessing some mysterious,
transcendental power, by which it can influence the future. In some
obscure way it is the medium or agent of that supernatural Will, the
recognition of which is at the basis of every religion.

The relation of the fetish to the spiritual power behind it, though
everywhere recognised, was not easy to define. The Melanesians believe
that the souls of the dead act through bones; while the independent
spirits (_vui_) choose stones as their mediums; and they say that
these objects are, as it were, limbs or members of these incorporeal
powers.[152]

That the fetish itself is something else than the mere object, and is
certainly not identified with it (as writers have often asserted), is
evident from the words and actions of fetish worshippers. A South African
negro offered food to a tree in the presence of an European traveller.
The latter observed that a tree cannot eat. “Oh,” replied the negro,
“tree not fetish. Fetish spirit; not seen; live in tree.”[153]

If a fetish does not bring good luck, it is thrown away, burned, or
broken, as having lost its virtue, ceased to be the abode of power. One
of efficacy, on the other hand, will bring a good price, and such are
often sold and bought. Among the Papuans of New Guinea the fetishes are
small wooden dolls dressed in coloured rags. They are believed to be the
media through which the ancestral spirits operate. But if a man has bad
luck, he will beat, or break, or cast away, as of no account, such an
impotent object.[154]

These and scores of other examples which could be adduced disprove the
assertion that man, even in his lowest phases of religious life, ever
worshipped an object as an object. Even then, his intellectual insight
penetrated to the recognition of something higher than phenomena in
the world about him. As has been well said by a German writer, what
is really worshipped in the object anywhere is not itself but “a
transcendental _x_,” within and beyond it.[155]

It has been abundantly shown that amid the tribes of the West Coast of
Africa, to whose gods the term fetish, _feitiço_, was first applied
by the Portuguese, the recognition and worship of tribal and national
divinities and even of a Supreme Being, ruler and creator of the world,
are clearly displayed.[156]

The house of cards therefore, erected by Auguste Comte, to represent the
religious progress of the race, the first floor of which was fetishism,
the second polytheism, and the third monotheism, falls helplessly to the
ground.

There is no real distinction between fetishism and idolatry, unless
we choose to say that the latter refers to the worship of objects
artificially shaped; but many fetishes are so likewise.

Nor can we say, with Professor Rialle, that fetishism confounds the
unseen agent with the thing itself, while the idolatry of developed
polytheism regards the agent as something exterior to the object, an
independent existence.[157] For not only does fetishism recognise the
power of the supernatural outside of all objects, but the idols of
polytheism are unquestionably just as holy, just as much limbs of the
gods, as the dolls of the Melanesians.

We cannot even take fetishism as a special form of the cult or external
worship; for it goes hand in hand with every phase of objective religion.
It is quite as prevalent now, in proportion to the general strength of
the religious sentiment, as it ever was, and is visible in the sacredness
which all sects of the highest religions attach to certain objects and
places. When the Christian touches the bone of a saint that he may be
healed of an infirmity, or when he speaks of his church edifice as “the
house of God,” or when he packs in his trunk a Bible “for luck’s sake,”
he is as much a fetish worshipper as the negro _caboceer_ who collects
around him a thousand pieces of rubbish because he thinks they have
brought him good fortune.[158]

Modern folk-lore is full of fetishism, and it is a development of the
religious sentiment which flourishes in all times and climes. Amulets,
charms, lucky stones, everything that we now call by the familiar term
of _mascot_, partakes of the nature of a fetish. Through some fancied
potency, not to be found among its physical qualities, it is believed to
bring us good fortune.

Nor is it a distinctive character of fetish worship, as has been
maintained by some, that in it compulsion or constraint is endeavoured to
be exercised on the gods to force them to be favourable and exert their
power in aid of the supplicant. The earliest prayers are not of this
character, as I showed in my last lecture; and, on the other hand, the
notion of constraining the gods extended widely in higher religions and,
indeed, probably in a metaphysical sense, was taught by the founder of
Christianity himself, as in the parable of the unjust judge.

As there is nothing deeper than an external distinction between fetishism
and idolatry, so there is no special form of religious thought which
expresses itself as what has been called by Dr. Tylor, “animism,” the
belief that inanimate objects are animated and possess souls or spirits.
This opinion, which in one guise or another, is common to all religions
and many philosophies, is merely a secondary phenomenon of the religious
sentiment, and not a trait characteristic of primitive faiths. The
idea of the World-Soul, manifesting itself individually in every form
of matter from the star to the clod, is as truly the belief of the
Sioux Indian or the Fijian cannibal, as it was of Spinoza or Giordano
Bruno.[159]

This vague and universal divine potency extends through all nature,
organic and inorganic, expressing itself in personality wherever
separateness, oneness, is visible. Not merely did animals and trees share
in the World-soul, but every object whatever. With the American Indians,
the commonest sticks and stones, even the household vessel fashioned
out of clay, or the hollowed stone on which the maize was pounded,
had its spiritual essence, which might speak, act, and require to be
venerated.[160] The Vitian Islanders held that each cocoanut had its own
spirit, and occasionally many cocoanuts assembled for a jollification,
at which times the joyous cracking of their sides kept the natives
awake![161]

But no error would be greater than to confound this with a veneration of
such objects in themselves.

To the mind of the savage, whatever displayed movement, emitted sound or
odour, or by its defined limits and form indicated unity, was to him
a manifestation in personality of that impersonal, spiritual Power of
which he felt himself but one of the expressions. All other expressions
shared his powers, and did not, in essence, differ from him. The brute,
the plant, the stone, the wandering orbs of night, the howling wind,
the crackling fire, the towering hill, all were his fellow-creatures,
inspired by the same life as himself, drawing it from the same universal
font of life.

It is not without reason, therefore, that the undeveloped religious
longings ask for something concrete to represent divinity. Through its
visible and audible traits the power of the Unseen Ruler is brought
sharply to the consciousness. We sympathise even with the poor Oraons
of Bengal, who, seeing nothing nobler to embody the divine, place a
ploughshare on their altar as the object of adoration.[162]

Although in the limitless field of his religious insight everything in
nature was to him a manifestation of divinity, primitive man everywhere
indicated a preference for certain objects and groups of objects,
evidently led to single them out on account of the strength or frequency
of the appeals they make to his senses of sight and hearing.

With the utmost brevity I will enumerate the most important of these
groups, and endeavour at the same time to point out why they were
everywhere selected to convey conceptions of the nature and attributes of
God.

_1. The Celestial Bodies._—The first group that I shall mention is that
of the Celestial Bodies, the Sun, Moon, and Stars. The traits which
connected them with the ideas of the divine are almost too obvious to
require mention. They are bringers of light and warmth, they define the
momentous change of day and night, their motions usher in the seasons and
mark the progress of time. They are remote, aloft, inscrutable, dwellers
in a realm which man may distantly perceive but never enter.

So much has been written of solar myths and star worship that every
reader is aware of their practical universality among early nations. It
is probable that the division of our week into seven days arose either
from the dedication of one to each of the seven greatest luminaries or
to a division of the moon’s apparent course into four parts. Judicial
astrology, which is not yet wholly dead, always maintained that the
nativities were decided by the position of the stars.

All such survivals carry us back to primitive religions in which the
astral bodies were prominent figures in the cult. Many writers have
maintained that the American Indians from north to south were always and
mainly sun-worshippers. Though this is too hasty a statement, everyone
will acknowledge that the sun is ever a conspicuous figure in their myths
and rites. So it is among the Polynesians and Africans, and so we find it
in the early forms of Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian belief.

It is at first sight strange that in many mythologies the moon plays a
more important rôle than the sun. But if we reflect that the night is the
time when spirits walk abroad; when sounds strike the ear with mysterious
notes; when nocturnal birds and beasts stir the senses with strange
cries; when, on the other hand, the cooling zephyrs and soft moonlight
bring sweet ease, and the gentle dews refresh the parched leaves; then we
can understand why, both in modern folk-lore[163] and in primitive myths,
the moon and the stars are often far more conspicuous than the flaming
sun. The night, in fact, draws the veil from the spiritual world; as has
been said so beautifully by Shelley:

    “As if yet around her he lingering were,
    Though the _veil of daylight_ concealed him from her.”

A few examples will illustrate this: The Dieyeris of Australia believe
that man and all other beings were created by the moon. In many American
languages the moon is regarded as male and the sun is referred to as “his
companion.” The Ipurinas, a Brazilian tribe, address the orb as “Our
Father,” and imagine him a little old man who was their ancestor and
still watches over their prosperity. In like manner the eastern Eskimos
say that their ancestors came from the moon to the earth. With the rude
tribes of southern Borneo it is stated that the veneration of the moon
forms the chief basis of their worship and myths.[164]

I can but refer to the lesser luminaries of the night. The stars have
at all times been associated with religious meditations. The various
constellations are familiar to most primitive peoples and are personified
under living forms. Widely in South America and Polynesia the Pleiades
enjoyed an especial homage, as marking the advent of the seasons and
as connected with the production of vegetable life. In Peru they were
styled the gods of rains; and the natives of the Gulf of California
venerated them to that degree that even to look at them heedlessly was
deemed calamitous; while some Australians held that it was from them
that fire first descended to the world.[165] In such remote districts as
Australia and Greenland the Milky-way was regarded as the path by which
the souls ascended to their homes in the sky. In the one land the Aurora
Australis, in the other the Aurora Borealis, was looked upon as the dance
of the gods across the star-lit vault. Indeed, the study of the stellar
bodies and the definition of their periodical appearance date directly to
the veneration they excited in religious minds.

_2. The Four Elements._—The simple theory that the world is composed of
four elements, fire, water, air, and earth, is one which presents itself
so naturally to primitive thought that traces of it can be seen in most
mythologies which have passed beyond the rudimentary forms.

Each of these elements has its own group of religious associations, and
they present themselves with that uniformity which we find so universal
in religious expression, to be explained, as I have so often said, by
the identity everywhere of the psychic sources of religion.

Perhaps the earliest of all the elements to receive this adoration
was _fire_. With its discovery man first entered into human social
life. Everywhere and in all peoples it has been in a manner sacred.
With the Kafirs every religious ceremony must be performed in front
of a fire.[166] In the Rig Veda the crackling of the blazing twigs is
regarded as the speech of the gods, just as it is to-day in Borneo. The
institutions of the sacred fire and the perpetual fire recur in every
continent, and we have but to enter a church of the Roman communion
on the morning of Holy Saturday to witness the impressive ceremonies
with which the creation of the “new fire” is to this day celebrated in
our midst. The custom of passing an infant “through the fire” was as
much practised by the Aztecs in Mexico as by the Moloch worshippers of
Syria.[167] The Peruvians held that divine inspiration was to be obtained
by sacrifices to the god of fire; and those of Guatemala adored it as
their greatest and oldest deity.[168]

In all these and in a hundred other examples which I might cite, the main
thought is that in fire and its products—warmth, heat, light, flame—lies
the essential principle of life; and the worship of Life was the central,
positive conception in primitive ceremonies.

The _air_ to early man is recognised in motion as the winds; and these,
in his myths and rites, occupy a conspicuous position. Conceived as four,
blowing more or less directly from the four corners of the earth-plane,
they are the rain-bringers, the gods of the seasons and the year,
controlling the products of the harvest and hence the happiness and life
of man. The outlines of the story are the same whether we listen to the
Maoris of New Zealand, who tell us of Tawhiri-matea, god of the winds,
who divided his progeny into four broods and sent one to each quarter of
the compass; to the Eskimos, who narrate just the same of Sillam Innua,
owner of the winds, and his four sons; or to a score of like myths which
I could quote from American storyland.[169]

The house of the winds, where they are imagined to be stored, a mythical
notion which Professor Schwartz has shown to be so wide-spread in the Old
World, recurs with scarcely less frequency in the New World.[170]

_Water_, as moisture, the dew, the fertilising showers, the green
bordered streams and lakes, was ever connected with vegetable life and
its symbols. In most cosmogonies the land rose from the bosom of some
primal sea; in most primitive geographies the solid earth is surrounded
by the mighty ocean-stream which stretches out to the uttermost space.

“All of us,” said the Aztecs, “are children of water.” Hence the spring,
the stream, the lake, was ever regarded as a beneficent being, who should
rightly call for the adoration of the true in soul. Tlaloc, god of rains,
and the many-named gods of the heavenly vase in which the rains were
stored on high, were conspicuous figures in the American pantheon.[171]

Virgil speaks of “Oceanus, _pater rerum_”; and in the Finnish epic, the
Kalewala, it reads: “Three infants came forth from the same womb; water
the oldest, fire the youngest, and iron between them.”[172]

Water also entered into numberless rites of purification, of penitence,
and sanctification.[173] Baptism by sprinkling or immersion belongs to
the most ancient sacred rites; and the use of the fluid in divination,
lustration, and libation was world-wide.

The most venerable god of Chaldean mythology was Êa, lord of the _earth_
and “the waters under the earth.” He was the deity in whose gift were
the harvest, the germination of seeds, the fertility of the soil.
Extending the idea to embrace all life, the Aztecs worshipped the earth
as Tonantzin, Our Beloved Mother, and the Peruvians as Mama Cocha, Mother
Earth. From her womb, said they, do all that live proceed, and to her
silent breast will all again return. Far below her opaque surface is the
realm which the sun lights at night, the abode of happy souls, said the
Aztecs, ruled by the clement Quetzalcoatl, who there abides until the
time fixed for his return to men.

From beneath the earth, repeat a hundred mythologies, did the first of
men emerge seeking the light above but losing the joy below. So that
in such distant points as Kamtschatka and the Andaman Islands we meet
the same prophetic myth that at the end of the world the present earth
will be turned upside down, and its then inhabitants will rejoice in the
perennial warmth and light of the happier under-world.[174]

Intimately associated with the worship of the four elements, and also
with the myths of the cosmical concepts, we trace through primitive
religions the sacredness and symbolism of _colours_. Everywhere, in all
cults, they are connected with certain trains of religious thoughts,
certain expressions of religious emotions, though by no means always
the same. But I can only refer, in passing, to this extended subject,
which has not yet received the psychologic analysis which its importance
demands.[175]

_3. Stones and Rocks._—When we turn from these universal elements, which
we can readily conceive portrayed with some commensurate greatness the
idea of the supernatural, to such a gross and material object as a
_stone_, a common stone or rock, it is at first difficult to understand
its wide-spread acceptance as a symbol of the divine. But if we reflect
on its hardness and durability, on its colour and lustre, and on the
strange shapes in which it is found, we can see why it was so chosen.

In the early Semitic records we often read of Beth-el, the House of God.
This was usually nothing but an amorphous stone, which the god was
supposed to inhabit. The holy Kaaba of Mahometanism is no doubt such
an one, a rough, black piece of rock. The sacred image of Diana of the
Ephesians was nothing more, and the Latin father Arnobius tells us that
the image of earth, the Great Mother, brought to Rome from Phrygia with
sumptuous pomp, was merely “a small black stone, rough and unhewn.”[176]

To this instance, where the stone represents the Earth as the common
mother, we find many exact parallels in savage faiths. In the Tahitian
myths, _Papa_, Rock, was the name of the wife of the first man, mother
of the race of men, and under this form she was adored.[177] The Zulus
considered certain stones as sacred, because from one such, which split
in two, their ancestors emerged. Their neighbours, the Basutos, entertain
the same notion of a spheroidal granite boulder in their country, and
their worship of it consists in dancing around it and spitting at it. The
Indians of Colombia asserted that all men were once stones, and all will
again become such.[178] Those of Guatemala were wont to place a small
polished stone in the mouth of the dying to receive the soul, and thus
supply it with a permanent abode.

The most common of mascots is a “lucky stone,” and this goes back to the
time when such was the favourite material for household fetishes. To this
day the Canaras of India believe that the Bhutas, or familiar spirits,
inhabit rough stones, and in Melanesia similar stones are held to be the
abode of the _vui_ or demonic intelligences.[179]

Another source of the sacredness of stones was their identification as
“thunderbolts.” Certain ones were believed to be the missiles hurled from
the sky by the Thunder God in the lightning flash; though the Peruvians
had the prettier belief that, as the product of the heavenly fire, they
must retain its ardency, and therefore used them as love charms.[180]
Flint, which when struck with a bit of pyrites emits a spark, and
meteoric stones were especially recognised by these marks as of celestial
origin.

Such a flint stone, say the legends of the Nahuas, in the beginning of
the world fell from heaven to earth; as it broke to pieces each fragment
rose to life as a demi-god. All men, added the Mexicans, came originally
from such stones.[181]

Yet another origin of god-stones was the custom of erecting them as
monuments of the dead. We can see this in its simplicity in Southern
Polynesia. When a chief dies, a coral slab about three feet long is
placed erect over his grave—a tombstone, in other words. This is decked
with flowers and garlands, food is offered it, and invocations pronounced
before it, precisely as to a divinity. This is because the spirit of the
departed chief is believed to dwell within it.[182]

It was equally sacred when the stone was a mere cenotaph erected in
memory of a departed chief or saint. Such are found in all lands and in
all cults. They are the _menhirs_ of the Celts, and the grave-stones of
the Koders of India, often painted in strong colours.[183]

Certain stones, especially those we call “precious,” the gems, have
physical traits of transparency, lustre, and colour, which have ever made
them prized, and led to the belief that they exercise peculiar powers on
the mind.

Throughout Asia and America the varieties of jade or nephrite, a
greenish, semi-translucent mineral, has had a wide-spread reputation for
sacred meaning and magical potency. The _chalchiuhite_ of the Mexicans,
small green stones, believed to control the weather and representative of
the goddess of the waters and the rains, were of this material.

By attentively gazing into the transparency of a quartz crystal, the
Maya shaman of Yucatan still believes that he will see in its depths,
unfolded by the god whose dwelling it is, the picture of the future and
the decrees of fate.

_4. Trees and Plants._—Primitive man was arboreal. A hollow tree was
his home, its branches his place of refuge, its fruit his sustenance.
Naturally the tree became associated with his earliest religious
thoughts. It represented his protecting deity. He would not willingly
injure it. When the Mandans cut a pole for their tents, they swath it in
bandages so that its pain may be allayed. The Hidatsas would not cut down
a large cottonwood tree, because it guarded their tribe. The Algonquins
decked an old oak with offerings suspended to its branches, for the same
reason.[184]

Trees from their dripping foliage, and because their shade was associated
with the grey of a cloudy day, were believed to make the rains and thus
to refresh the fields and fertilise the seeds of the vegetable world.
The step was easily taken to extend this to all germs, animal as well
as vegetable. Thus the tree came to symbolise the source of Life, and to
represent both the clouds and rains and the fatherhood of men and brutes.
It could cause flocks to multiply and the barren womb to conceive.[185]

Among the Mexicans, the tree was invoked as Tota, “Our Father,” and was
spoken of as god of the waters and the green foliage. Some particular
species was chosen as the totem of various American gentes, and in the
earliest legends of Greece and Persia sundry famous families traced their
descent from a tree.

These ideas led to the mythical association of the tree with the origin
of life, and with various objective expressions of this in the cult.

In most American stories where we hear of the first of men emerging
from the under-world, it is by climbing a tree. This tree also supports
the sky, and is so represented in the native books of the Mayas and
Nahuas.[186] The Yurucares of Bolivia relate that their god Tiri, when he
would people the earth with men, cleft a tree, and from the opening came
forth the various tribes of the world.[187]

When the tree was not worshipped as itself, but under a symbolic form,
this was usually as the sacred pole or the cross.

The sacred pole was found widely among the American Indians. It was
planted in the centre of their villages, or, if the tribe was nomadic, it
was carried about in an ark or wrapping and set up in a tent by itself
in their encampment. It typified the communal life of the tribe and
represented the “mystery tree,” which was intimately associated in their
legendary origin.[188]

In early art the cross as a sacred design is often derived from the
conventional figure of a tree, and symbolises the force of life, the four
winds, the rain, and the waters. This is notably the case in Mexico and
Central America, where we have abundant testimony that this is the origin
and meaning of the cross-symbol so frequent on their monuments.

The sacred tree is a conspicuous figure in the earliest bas-reliefs
of the Chaldeans. It is often represented in a cruciform shape, and
frequently a winged seraph is holding up to it a pine cone, the fruit of
the sacred cedar, either as an emblem of fertility, or, more likely, as
an aspergillum, with which to bedew it from the holy water, which is
carried in a bucket in the other hand.[189]

That a tree is a “thing of life” it is hard for us even yet to doubt,
and we can scarcely avoid being attracted by Fechner’s pleasing theories
of a “plant-soul.”[190] The sound of the wind in the leaves, rising from
the softest of mystic whispers to the roaring of the wild blast, seems to
proceed from some mind or spirit. The Australians say that these are the
voices of the ghosts of the dead, communing one with another, or warning
the living of what is to come. They and other tribes also believe that
it is through understanding this mysterious language that the “doctors,”
or shamans, communicate with the world of spirits and derive their
supernatural knowledge.[191] Hence we can easily see arose the myth of
“the tree of knowledge,” which we find in the earliest Semitic annals and
monuments. It belonged to the same species as the oracular oak of Zeus at
Dodona, and the laurel of Apollo at Delphi, from the whispers of whose
leaves the sibyls interpreted the sayings of the gods.

Not only was a tree the earliest house of man, it was also his first
temple. That very word “temple” bears witness to the fact, for it is
from the Greek τέμενος, a sacred grove set apart as a place of worship.
The aspiring lines of Gothic cathedrals simulate the trunks of slender
and majestic trees carrying the eye and the soul aloft, and by their
overreaching limbs shutting out the glare of day, thus leading the mind
to holy meditation. Tacitus describes the Germans as building no temples,
but worshipping their mysterious divinity, _secretum illud_, in the gloom
of the forest.

_5. Places and Sites._—Early man stays close to the soil. It is proved,
by the distribution of the oldest stone implements, that primitive
tribes were not generally migratory, and had little intercourse with
their neighbours. Hence the more closely did they study their immediate
surroundings; and a spot which was marked by some peculiar feature was
soon associated with their all-permeating religious notions, and was
deemed sacred.

These features can usually be easily recognised. A spring, well, or
fountain, where from dry earth, or out of the rock, pours forth the
crystal fluid on which depends the life of man and brute and plant, was
everywhere a holy spot. The brook which flowed from it, chattering its
endless tale among the pebbles, was scarcely less so. It was directly
said and oft repeated by the Greeks that the _manteia_, the holy
inspiration, was imparted at the fountain of Parnassus or at the Pierian
spring. The Moxos of Bolivia claim descent from the stream on which
their villages are situated, a more than figurative expression of their
dependence on it for food and drink.[192]

The sacred character of “high places,” such as hills, mountains, or
elevated plateaux, is intimately connected with the universal belief
in “the Father in Heaven,” the sky as the home and the throne of the
greatest divinities. I have already referred to the terrestrial “Hills of
Heaven,” located, as a rule, within the tribal area.[193]

A high hill or mountain, regarded by itself as a personality, would
justly be looked upon as of extraordinary might, and invoked as a potent
aid in the undertakings of life. In the invocations of the Quiches of
Central America, who live in the midst of lofty peaks, over one hundred
of them are named and implored for aid. The “Heart of the Hills” is the
title which the ancient Mexicans applied to one of their greatest gods.

A third and important trait which gave them sacredness is the strength of
the echo which is returned from their narrow gorges or precipitous sides.
Mountain worship is very generally oracular in character. Classical and
familiar examples of this are the Pythoness and the Roman Sibyl.

Mountain caves are natural temples, and as the cave, like the hollow
tree, is a ready-built house for the wandering savage, so it is also
marvellously adapted to his ends as a shrine. Throughout Mexico and
Central America we find the caves chosen as the temples of the mightiest
deities and the depositories of the holiest relics.[194]

The sacredness of some spots arose from their adaptation to certain
rites, religious or magical. Thus, for the haruspices to practise their
specialty in divination, they must choose a spot where they could watch
the flight of birds. The sacrifices to the god of heaven should be under
the open sky, and the Mayas of Yucatan believed that when the sun was
in the zenith and the sacred fire was kindled beneath it, the ineffable
Deity descended in the form of a bright plumaged _ara_ and partook of the
offering.

Places of this kind were of course laid under _tabu_, and thus reserved
for their sacred uses only. Sometimes they were enclosed, but often the
community was sufficiently informed about them to make this unnecessary.

The fame of these sacred places and the powers of the gods who dwelt
within them extended widely even in very primitive conditions. This gave
rise to the custom of pilgrimages, quite as familiar to the American
Indians before Columbus as to the Europeans of the Middle Ages. There
were famous holy places on the island of Cozumel and in Colombia and
Peru, to which pious palmers wended their way over many hundred miles of
weary journeying.

The local divinity naturally drew his colouring and his main attributes
from the spot itself, and those in turn gave a similar local physiognomy
to his rites and functions. We have thus a kind of geographical character
impressed on early religions, which their later developments retained
long after they had been severed from their first meanings and had
drifted to other climes and alien races.

_6. The Lower Animals._—The primitive mind did not recognise any deep
distinction between the lower animals and man. The savage knew that
the beast was his superior in many points, in craft and strength, in
fleetness and intuition, and he regarded it with respect. To him, the
brute had a soul not inferior to his own, and a language which the wise
among men might on occasion learn. The strange powers and mysterious
faculties they often possess were to him inexplicable by any other
doctrine than that they were divine; therefore, with wide unanimity, he
placed certain species of animals nearer to God than is man himself, or
even identified them with the manifestations of the Highest.

None was in this respect a greater favourite than the bird. Its soaring
flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues of its plumage,
combined to render it a fit emblem of power and beauty.

The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to Singalang Burong, the god of
birds; and birds as the ancestors of the totemic family are extremely
common among the American Indians. The Eskimos say that they have the
faculty of soul or life beyond all other creatures, and in most primitive
tribes they have been regarded as the messengers of the divine and the
special purveyors of the vital principle.

According to the myths of the Polynesians, the gods in the old times
used to speak to man through the carols of the feathered songsters; and
everywhere, to be able to understand the language of birds was equivalent
to being able to converse with the gods.

The chief god of the Murray River Australians was Nourali. He was
immortal, self-created, and the creator of all. The form under which
they conceived him was that of a bird, a crow or eagle. Among nearly all
the tribes of the North-west Coast and the adjacent interior of British
America, the creation of the world is attributed to a raven, Yetl, who is
personated in the dark thunder-cloud.

South of them, in the wide-spread Algonquin stock, this “thunder-bird”
is a conspicuous figure in art and myth; and we could pursue our way
quite to the extreme south of the continent, and everywhere among
the aboriginal tribes we should discover similar sacred associations
connected with the birds.

They are universal in religions, and those which we meet in Christian
art, the eagle, the dove, etc., carry with them significations allied to
those they bear in earlier and primitive symbolism.[195]

Closely connected with these ideas was the reverence of the egg as the
symbol of the origin of life. Plutarch tells us that in the Bacchic
mysteries the egg represented matter in its germinal condition, that
is, the potentiality of life; and this meaning we have retained with
the symbol in our customs relating to Easter eggs on the morning of the
Resurrection.

The derivation from the observation of the bird brooding on its nest is
obvious, and no wonder therefore that the symbol with allied myths and
rites extends through all religions.

In the creation legend of the Yaros, a Dravida tribe of Northern India,
the goddess Nustoo, who created the world, came into life from a
self-evolved egg, and dwelt on the petals of a water-lily until she had
formed and moulded the land for her abode. The Dyaks of Borneo relate
that after the Supreme Being had created the world, the god Ranying
descended to the new earth and formed there seven eggs, which contained
the germs of man and woman, all animals and plants.[196]

This example, of the bird, which I have given in some detail, will
illustrate the cult of an animal form. It by no means stands alone
in its universality. Perhaps even more striking is the so-called
“serpent-worship,” which has occupied the attention of so many writers.
The adoration of the serpent-symbol is wonderfully wide-spread. Scarcely
a native tribe can be named in regions where this animal is known, which
does not pay it some sort of reverence. Some writers have traced the
sentiment back to the anthropoid progenitor of man, supposed to dwell in
tropical forests abounding in venomous snakes. But into this extensive
question I cannot enter.

The symbolic value of most animal deities can be traced to some peculiar
trait of the species. Thus the lizard, very prominent in the religions
of Polynesia, Australia, and South Africa, derived its significance
from the nocturnal habits of some species and the diurnal habits of
others.[197] In America, the frog was the symbol of water, over a vast
area; and that it has precisely the same meaning in Australia, will cause
no astonishment when we recall its amphibious nature. The fish, as the
emblem of life, familiar in Christian symbolism, dates back to earliest
Chaldean times, when Oannes, a form of the god Êa, appeared as half fish
and half man, and is a parallel of the fish-god who sows the seed of
man in the flood myths of both the Brahmans and the Mexicans. It is but
another expression of the recognition of water as the source or condition
of life.

The totemic animals, or “eponymous ancestors,” of the clans or gentes
among the American Indians, are not to be taken literally. They were not
understood as animals of the sort we see to-day, but as mythical, ancient
beings, of supernatural attributes, who clothed themselves in those forms
for their own purposes.

_7. Man._—That when the brute was at times invested with the aureole of
the Divine, man himself should at times partake of its glory, need be
expected. But here let an important distinction be drawn. Never _as man_
was he clothed in the attributes of Deity, but just in so far as he was
deemed to be _more than man_. The Latin saying, _deus homini deus_, never
was true anywhere in its literal sense. Anthropism never existed in any
religion. Man or the likeness of man was never worshipped by reason of
any human attribute, but solely for those believed to be more than human,
superhuman.

The tribes of Polynesia did adore their chieftains; the ancient Egyptians
and many another people did pay their rulers divine honour, and rank them
among the gods; but always because they considered them partakers of the
divine nature, sharers in that which is ever beyond mere humanity.[198]

This profound distinction between the human and the humanised divine
was sought to be expressed by most tribes by fashioning the images of
the gods in vaguely human shapes, but with non-human elements. Diana
with her hundred breasts, Brahma with his dozens of arms, Janus with
his double face, and scores of other instances will at once rise in the
memory. Enormous size, impossible features, accessories such as wings,
tails, multiple heads and limbs, indicate not, as some would have it, a
depraved artistic taste, but the effort of the pious carver to express
in his work the non-human and superhuman character of the being he sets
before the adoring eyes of the votaries.

It was only in a few gifted and glorious natures, notably the ancient
Greeks, that the true distinction rose to full consciousness in the
artistic soul—that in their corporeal forms the gods differ from men in
their superior and matchless beauty, in their perfect symmetry and noble
proportions. They recognised that there is something in beauty itself,
which, in its highest expression, partakes truly and really of the
divine, and leads man to the contemplation of laws beyond those of nature
or of life, laws which are the expression of the deep harmonies of the
universe.

This was the triumph of anthropomorphism. Pursuing the merely objective,
the merely animal, it was led by the unseen hand which guides man to his
destiny into the path which conducted far beyond what the senses can
teach, into the realm of the ideal and the eternal, to

            “the measures and the forms,
    Which the abstract intelligence supplies,
    Whose kingdom is where Time and Space are not.”

Such are some of the numberless objects with which primitive man
associated his idea of the Divine. The nature of this association must
not be misunderstood. I repeat what I have already said, that it was not
an identification of the spiritual with the material. The object was
hallowed, not from anything in itself, but as the medium of invisible
power.

_8. Life and its Transmission._—What Professor Otfried Müller has so
well said of the oldest forms of the Greek and Etruscan religions holds
true in all primitive faiths: “To them, divinity seemed a world of
Life, blossoming forth from an impenetrable depth into definite forms
and individual expressions.”[199] All gods and holy objects were merely
vehicles through which Life and Power poured into the world from the
inexhaustible and impersonal source of both.

I will illustrate this first from the very ancient religion of the
Etruscans and then point out sufficient analogies in modern savage tribes.

That venerable people, whose massive cities built before Rome was founded
still survive, held that there was a single source of all existence,
animate and inanimate. Its immediate agents were the mysterious “veiled
gods,” whose number was unknown and whose names were never uttered. They
were the channels of the divine Will, through which it passed to the
twelve highest known gods, called the _Consentes_ or Companions, and
these transmitted it through those innumerable spirits, whom the Latins
called Genii, to its realisation in objective existence.

The word _genius_ means a producer or begetter; but not in any literal
sense, for not only every man and animate being had such a genius, but
also every plant, every city, every place, every inanimate object, had
one also. Clearly, therefore, the word refers to an act of the creative
power in the abstract or spiritual sense. The genii were the proximate
causes of existence, but they were themselves “emanations from the great
gods,” and these in turn were merely the channels of the inexhaustible
source of all life beyond.

This was the doctrine of the Etruscans and also of the Greeks. I may
compare it with the belief of one of the most brutish of barbarian
hordes, the Itelmen of Kamtschatka.

Beyond all visible things, say they, is the ultimate Power,
Dusdachtschish, invisible, remote. No worship and no offerings are
tendered him other than that certain pillars are erected and decked
with flowers and garlands in his honour. Their Jupiter is Kutka. It was
said of him that he had married all creatures and was the common father
of all. It was he who made land and water in their present forms and
invented all arts. To him the visible world owed its existence, though
not its origin. Many discreditable stories were told of him, and he is as
much cursed for the evils of life as praised for its advantages. It is he
who finds souls for all existences, and preserves their spirits when the
body decays.

We must not be blinded to the true significance of such myths by the
often material, coarse, and vulgar images under which they are presented.
Indeed, if they are properly comprehended, we may explain and redeem
from obloquy much in the heathen legends which Arnobius[200] and other
fathers of the Church denounced with bitter and vehement imprecation.
We should consider whether they are not naïve symbols, chosen, with a
crude innocence of evil, to convey objectively the idea of the eternally
renewed life of nature.

This reflection will explain to us the true significance of those
objects from ancient and savage cults which are preserved in the locked
rooms of museums, in their secret drawers and curtained cases. They are
too apt to be construed as proofs of impurity and degradation. Such an
interpretation would be sadly at variance with the fact.

There were, indeed, and often, licentious rites, deliberate indecencies,
practised under the cloak of religion by unscrupulous rulers and debased
priests. These were alienations and prostitutions of religion. In the
genuine and primitive faiths, the symbols of the reproduction and
transmission of life were frequent and public, and were not associated
with thoughts or acts of debauchery. They were visible emblems of that
Spirit of Life which, beyond all else, was the unifying instinct of
religious expression.

This instinct led man everywhere to call upon God as Father, as parent of
whatever is, “Pan-genitor,” as he is styled in the Orphic hymns. In every
race, in all ages, have men’s prayers ascended to “Our Father who art in
heaven.”

Were we to listen to the rude Australian, we should hear him invoking
_Papang_, “Father”; or _Mamin-gata_, or _Mungan-naur_, “Our Father,” in
his various dialects. Among the Aztecs of Mexico, it would be _To-ta_,
“Our Father”; with the American tribes of the north, “grand-father,” or
“great father”; in the Brahmānas of India, _Pita_, “Father”; with the
Greeks and Romans, _Dios Pater_, “the heavenly Father”; and with the
northern Vikings, _Odin All-father_.[201]

But a vital distinction has been claimed to exist between such terms and
that fatherhood of God which we have been taught to acknowledge. “In
heathen religions,” asserts an eminent writer, “the fatherhood of the
gods is physical fatherhood only”; and this is repeated by many Christian
theologians and commentators.[202]

It is easy to refute this assertion. It would not have been made but for
religious partisanship. Ethnologists are well aware that the word for
“Father” in primitive life is much more frequently a term of respect,
applied to elders, than necessarily denotive of kinship. The father,
_Pita_, of the Brahmānas is at once the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer
of all things, and far remote from physical parentage[203]; neither
in American nor Australian myths is “the Father above” identified
as the ancestor of the gens; among the Zulus, the best instructed
missionaries report that Unkululu, the “Father” of their creeds, was
not meant literally so, but only as “the means of helping the race into
being”[204]; and this is the general sense of the term in every instance
which I have analysed.

As some sort of a crude effort to express this comprehensibly, we
find that frequently in primitive myths and art the god, regarded
as the creator, is shown or spoken of as “androgynous,”—that is,
of both sexes at once. He is addressed as “father-mother,” or
“mother-father,”—bi-sexual rather than non-sexual in nature.[205]
Such expressions are of constant occurrence, and some of the most
objectionable portions of the ritual and of idolatrous art arose from the
effort to translate this mystical characteristic into objective forms.

Yet it remains true that the sexual antithesis, that which mythologists
call the worship of “the reciprocal principles of nature,” is interwoven
with the fibre of nearly all religions, primitive or developed. Under
one form or another, it is the impulse which ever appeals most potently
to the human heart.

The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the other, the passion of
Love, exceeds all others in the power it exerts on the individual life.
This it is, which in some of its forms, rude or refined, is at the
root of half the expressions of the religious sentiment. We may trace
it from crude and coarse beginnings in the genesiac cults of primitive
peoples, through ever nobler and more delicate expressions, up through
the celibate sacrifices of both sexes, spouses of God,[206] until in its
complete expansion it reaches the perfect _agape_, where the union of the
human with the divine in the life eternal, here on earth, or beyond, one
and the same, is believed to have been reached.[207]

This, the loftiest of all the religious mystical ideals is but the result
of a gradual evolution from those low beginnings which I have mentioned
as perceptible in most primitive religions.

It is the ripened manifestation of that profound psychical truth, so
incomparably expressed in the lines of the philosopher-poet, Coleridge:

    “All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
      Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
    All are but ministers of Love,
      And feed his sacred flame.”




LECTURE V.

Primitive Religious Expression: In the Rite.

    CONTENTS:—The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical
    Rites—Division of Rites into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I.
    Communal Rites: 1. The Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The Festal
    Function—Joyous Character of Primitive Rites—Commensality—The
    “Ceremonial Circuit”—Masks and Dramas—3. The Sacrifice—Early
    and Later Forms—4. The Communion with God—Pagan Eucharists.
    II. Personal Rites: 1. Relating to Birth—Vows and
    Baptism—2. Relating to Naming—The Personal Name—3. Relating
    to Puberty—Initiation of Boys and Girls—4. Relating to
    Marriage—Marriage “by Capture” and “by Purchase”—5. Relating
    to Death—Early Cannibalism—Sepulchral Monuments—Funerary
    Ceremonies—Modes of Burial—Customs of Mourning.


We have seen how the religious sentiment finds expression in the Word and
in the Object. It remains to consider it as revealed in the Act. This
is known as the Rite or the Ritual. It is a combination of forms and
ceremonies collectively known as Worship.

So important is it that one eminent German authority has declared the
ritual to be “the source of all religions”[208]; and Dr. W. Robertson
Smith, also a profound student of the subject, has maintained that “in
the study of ancient religions we must begin, not with the myth, but with
the ritual”; because, he adds, “in almost every case the myth was derived
from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth.”[209]

If I do not follow these authorities, it is because my own studies have
led me to a different opinion from theirs. I believe that every rite is
originally based on a myth. In later days the myth was often obscured or
lost, and another coined to explain the rite; and this second growth is
what has misled the authors I have quoted.

The evidence which has convinced me is, that in truly primitive condition
the rite is constantly a mimicry of the supposed doings of the god; or
it is a means of summoning him according to accepted statements; or it
is a method of communing with the Divine, plainly drawn from the facts
of suggestion and sub-conscious mentality. Occasionally it is a magical
procedure to constrain the deities; but this is rare in primitive
conditions.[210]

The mimicry or imitative origin of rites is well illustrated in that
in use for “rain-making,” one of the commonest of all. In periods of
drought, “The Indian rain-maker mounts to the roof of his hut, and
rattling vigorously a dry gourd containing pebbles to represent the
thunder, scatters water through a reed on the ground beneath, as he
imagines up above in the clouds do the spirits of the storm.”[211]

The Australian rite is analogous. The women of the tribe erect a hut of
leaves and branches, in which are placed some stones. The men enter, and
while some scatter bird’s down in the air, others scarify their arms and
let the blood drop upon the stones. These are then placed high up in
trees, and the hut demolished. The symbolism is, that the hut represents
the firmament; the down, the light cirrus clouds which precede the storm;
the stones, the heavy rain-clouds; the dropping blood, the fertilising
rain.[212] This is again an imitation of their myth of the making of rain
by the celestial powers.

Very many rites are of this character. Others again are of the nature of
an invitation to the divinity, based on beliefs and narratives of his
supposed actions or customs. The Mayas of Yucatan, for instance, had a
deity doubtless of solar character, who bore the name, “The Eye of the
Day.” The myth stated that his form was that of a bird of brilliant
plumage, and that he was nearest the earth at high noon about the summer
solstice. At that time, therefore, they constructed an altar in an open
spot, built upon it a fire and placed the sacred offerings. The people
then witnessed the gorgeous parrot, the sacred _ara_, descend through
the air to take the offerings, who was none other than the god himself,
responding to the invitation.[213]

The magical class of rites was common in the Orient. To this day in China
it is believed that if a military camp be laid out in a particular form,
and under the proper auspicious conditions, not only is it impregnable
by foes, but neither gods nor demons can prevail against it. Many later
rituals are thus magical, or have magical elements in them by the aid of
which the celebrant claims to control the powers divine.

The Mexican Nagualist, or priest, for instance, after he has performed
his magical rites and spoken the words of power, does not hesitate to
shout: “Lo! I myself am here! I am most furious! I make the loudest
noise! I respect no one! Even sticks and stones tremble before me! What
god or mighty demon dares face me?”[214] Here, through the power of the
rite, the celebrant has become as one of the gods themselves.

These examples further serve to illustrate a fundamental distinction in
rites themselves. It has been well expressed by a German writer, Dr.
Freihold, who has said that their tendencies point toward one of two
aims, either to bring down the god to men, to have “God with us”; or,
to elevate the man to God, to clothe him with supernatural powers. The
one culminates in the epiphany, the other in the apotheosis. The writer
quoted believes that this special culmination of one or the other of
these tendencies is largely a matter of race, that it is an ethnic trait,
and explains much otherwise obscure in the historical development of
religions.[215]

Without entering into this interesting but too extensive inquiry, I will
remark that these two tendencies run closely parallel to the division of
rites which I shall adopt, a division based on a comparison of the large
numbers which I have classified in the study of primitive religions.

This division is also twofold. It embraces, first, all those rites which
are primarily intended for the benefit of the community; and, second, all
those primarily intended for the benefit of the individual. The former I
shall call _communal_, the latter, _personal_ rites.

It is the more necessary that I shall insist on this distinction because
it has been overlooked and even denied by some eminent scholars. Dr.
Robertson Smith, for example, with whom I have been before compelled to
disagree, refused to recognise personal worship in primitive conditions.
He wrote thus: “It was the community and not the individual who was sure
of the help of its deity.” The individual, he adds, was obliged to have
recourse to merely magical measures for his own protection.[216]

This statement is contradicted by nearly every primitive religion known
to me; and it can be explained only by the concentration of the writer’s
mind on a faith so peculiar as that of the ancient Hebrews.[217]

I. THE COMMUNAL RITES, those for the benefit of the community, be it
large or small, may be classed under four forms: 1, the assemblage; 2,
the festal function; 3, the sacrifice; and 4, the communion with the
Divine.

_1. The Assemblage._—Of these the _assemblage_ should first be
considered, as it is the necessary condition of all communal worship. The
_ecclesia_, the meeting, the gathering together, the congregation, has a
far higher importance than for the mere purpose of unity in an outward
function. It is the means by which that most potent agent in religious
life, _collective suggestion_, is brought to bear upon the mind. It
has been instinctively recognised by every religion, and especially by
mystical teachers, as an indispensable element in the dissemination of
doctrine.

Strange, indeed, is the influence on the individual of “the crowd,”
when it is animated by deep feeling, by positive belief, by intense
activity! It is difficult even for the calmest mind not to be thrilled
with the contagious impulses of an assemblage tossed on the waves of wild
religious emotion. Its vertiginous passion whirls those who yield to it
out of themselves, beyond their senses, into some lofty, hyper-sensuous
state, where reason totters and reality fades. We have but to watch
an active “revival,” or the hysterical outbursts of an old-fashioned
“camp-meeting,” to be convinced of this.

These effects are hastened and strengthened by the Liturgy, the
responsive songs and chants, the music, the dancing hand in hand, the
touch of flesh, and the intoxication of breath with breath,—all that the
theologians class as the _anaphora_, the going back and forth of mind and
mind, through the varied forms of sensuous expression.[218]

All this is perfectly familiar to primitive religions. Among the rude
tribes of our Western plains, the Dakotas and Chipeways for instance,
thousands will gather at the annual festivals to unite in common worship
and ceremonies. The first missionaries to Mexico report it a common sight
to see six or seven thousand natives moving as one man in the swaying
figures of the sacred dances; and it were easy to multiply examples.
Everywhere was the religious value of worship in common recognised.

_2. The Festal Function._—I have already referred to the fact that
although the fear of demons and ghosts prevailed generally in early
faiths, their prevailing character was by no means always gloomy.

In early conditions the public religious ceremonies have an atmosphere
of joyousness about them. They are thanksgivings and merrymakings,
such as still exist among us in pale survivals in our harvest homes,
Christmas festivities, and Easter-tide amusements. In ancient Greek
and Roman rites this is still more visible. “Worship the gods with a
joyous heart,” prescribes Cicero; and true to the precept, the Romans
included among their acts of worship such cheering adjuncts as theatrical
performances, horse races, games, and dancing girls. No sign of mourning
was permitted, no word of lamentation was allowed, and a serene mood, a
joyous countenance and bright garments were enjoined, that the gaiety of
the occasion might not suffer diminution.[219]

There was nothing in this peculiar to the Romans. The same is well
known to be true of the Greeks; Jacob Grimm is our authority that the
religious rites of the ancient Germans were as a rule cheerful, and those
which were most cheerful were “the earliest and the commonest”; while
Robertson Smith testifies to the effect that the early Semitic ceremonies
were likewise gay and festal, passing at times into a truly orgiastic
character.[220]

Probably most of us will feel some surprise when this trait of early
and heathen religions is pressed upon our attention. We have been
accustomed to hear of their dark and cruel mysteries, their immolations
and holocausts, their cries of anguish and blood-stained altars, until
we have imagined that light-hearted gaiety was even farther from their
teachings than it is from our own faith, whose cardinal principle is the
holiness of suffering and self-abnegation.

Nothing could be wider from the truth. Probably the first of all public
rites of worship was one of joyousness, to wit, the invitation to the
god to be present and partake of the repast. To spread a meal and ask
the deity to share it, that which is called _commensality_, belongs to
the most archaic of ceremonies. Captain Clark tells us of the Western
Indians that “feasts form an essential part of every ceremony.” There is
a certain solemnity observed about them, even when not strictly religious
in character. The first mouthful is offered to the gods, and “something
in the manner of a grace” is usual when the person begins and finishes
his meal.[221]

It was but a step from this to purely religious banquets, festal
commemorations for thanksgiving, in acknowledgment of benefits received.
They were derived from the older practice of asking the god to share
the common meal, not, as some have argued, from the later custom of
offering food before the idols. Such solemn banquets occur where idols
are unknown, or form a minor element in religious expression. Sacrificial
banquets assume a different phase, to which I shall presently refer.

Next in antiquity to the commensality of God with man, was the sacred
procession, that which is known as the “ceremonial circuit.”

Jacob Grimm informs us that the ancient Germans were accustomed at
certain seasons to carry the images of the gods, Holda, Bertha, and
others, or the sacred symbols, the plough, the ship, etc., around the
borders or marches of the tribal territory, over which they were held to
exercise especial protection. Thus they bestowed the active beneficence
of their personal presence on these confines. This divine progress was
accompanied with shouts and songs and joyous acclamations.[222]

To this day in central France, when the seed is sown in the spring and
the husbandman has trusted his labour and his grain to the uncertain
season, the image of Our Lady of Mercy is solemnly carried through the
prepared fields, with song and prayer, that her blessing may rest upon
them, and the grain return a hundred-fold.

Far away from France and Germany, up in the chilly valleys of the
Peruvian Andes, when the natives used to fear, for their crops, killing
frost or withering drought, the sacred _huaca_, the divine guardian of
the village, was brought forth and carried in solemn procession around
the fields, and its intercession beseeched in moving cries and with
abundant gifts.[223]

Numberless other examples of this universal rite might be mentioned, a
rite the shadow of which still falls among us in the processional and
recessional of high Protestant churches. Among primitive peoples and in
the folk-lore of modern nations, it develops into the forms which are
known as “the sinistral and dextral circuits,” depending on whether the
procession is from right to left or the reverse, connected doubtless with
the motion of the celestial bodies, and with the reverse of that motion,
each appropriate to certain forms of worship. Throughout the American
tribes this is always a point of the greatest importance, and constantly
appears, not merely in their religious exercises, but in their social
customs, their arts, and their habits of life.[224]

I mentioned that the old Romans used to consider theatrical
entertainments a proper part of a religious ceremony. They were not alone
in that. In fact, the opinion was so universal that students of literary
origins are agreed that the beginning of the drama, both comedy and
tragedy, was in sacred scenic representations of the supposed doings of
the gods. We may recognise the earliest form of the drama in the masked
actors of the American Indian medicine dances. They usually take the
part of some lower animal, comic or serious, the face concealed either
with a part of its hide, or with a wooden mask, on which is painted
some semblance or symbol of the animal. The language of the actor is
appropriate to his rôle, and often involves curious modifications of the
customary tongue, to suit the creature he represents.[225]

Long before the discovery of America by Columbus the native tribes of
Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru had developed from this source a dramatic
literature, which, like that of the early Greek classic period, had
thrown off its first, purely religious garb, and had developed into an
independent art, devoted equally to Melpomene and Thalia, the tragic and
the comic muses.

These latter, of which a few specimens survive, were exotic plants
compared to the indigenous growth of the American sacred dramas. So
essential, indeed had these become to the native notions of worship of
any sort, that the Christian missionaries were fain to compromise the
situation, and permit them to remain, merely changing the names of the
heathen gods to those of Christian saints, and modifying where necessary
the wording of the older text and its heathen _scenario_.

The extreme of these festal rejoicings is seen in the orgiastic
ceremonies so widely prevalent in early cults, the Bacchanalia, the
Saturnalia, the “Witches’ Sabbath” of the Middle Ages, and the like. They
are nowise peculiar to primitive religions, although in them they hold a
more conspicuous place. Within a year, the “angel-dancers” of Hoboken,
New Jersey, have reproduced them in their true original colours, and they
are always ready to crop out under the influence of the proper stimuli to
the religious emotions.

In their earliest forms, they are far from deserving the odium which
attached to them later. The Bacchantes of Greece were, at first, not a
rout of dissolute women, but an inspired train of devout virgins and
chaste matrons. No man was permitted in the ranks under pain of death.
This was true also in Rome, in the Orient, and in many tribes of America.
It was a later and an evil innovation which sanctioned the unrestrained
mingling of the sexes in these wild processions of intoxicated fanatics.
Their intoxication was, however, with the divine spirit, not the purple
grape-juice. They were, as the Greeks said, “theoleptic,” possessed or
infuriated with the maddening joy of the gods, drunk with the celestial
ambrosia.

To our cold observation, they were in hysterical mania, with minds
disordered by religious excitement, worked up to a high contagious pitch
through collective suggestion, following crazily the disordered fancies
of their sub-conscious selves, mistaking them for the inspiration of
divine emanations.

_3. The Sacrifice._—In the custom of offering to the divine visitant a
portion of the food and drink, we discover the origin of sacrifice. The
word has acquired sad associations, seen in our common expression “to
make a sacrifice,” which signifies some painful self-surrender.

This was foreign to its original meaning. The sacrifice at first was a
free-will offering, a pleasing and grateful recognition of the kindness
of the deity. The first-fruits, the young kid, the earliest ear of corn
to mature, were offered to the beneficent being who had sent them for the
good of man. It was the willing acknowledgment we pay to a kind friend.
The earliest species of sacrifice is in the nature of a thank-offering.
They were of the class which has been termed “honorific,” and were little
more than “meals offered to the deity.”[226]

I may illustrate it from a custom of the Papuans of New Guinea. They
believe, being ancestral worshippers, that the good things of life are
mainly owing to the continuing solicitude of their departed progenitors.
Therefore, to testify their gratitude, once in several years they dig up
the skulls of those deceased relations, paint them with chalk, decorate
them with feathers and flowers, and placing them on a scaffold, offer to
them food and trinkets.[227]

There is nothing of fear in this rite, and nothing fearful, for it is
made the occasion of a merry festival.

Soon, however, in the development of the cult it was perceived that loss
and affliction abounded and increased; the gods grew careless of their
votaries, or angry with them. They must be pacified and propitiated.
Hence arose the second form of sacrifices, those which are called
“conciliatory” or “piacular.”[228] They were atoning in significance,
mystic in their symbolism, expiatory in their aims. The gods were
displeased at what man had done or had left undone, and they must be
reconciled by humility and self-abnegation.

In this the primitive worshipper acted towards his deity just as he would
toward an earthly superior whose displeasure he had incurred. There was
no new sentiment or line of action introduced. The rite of sacrifice
in any of its phases offers nothing apart from the general motives of
mankind.

The most common reason for early sacrifice was to expiate breaches of the
ceremonial law. Whether this occurred intentionally or not of purpose, it
was deemed requisite to make amends by some painful act, to pacify the
demonic power behind the law.

Naturally, the greater the self-denial displayed in the offering, the
higher its merit and the more efficacious its character. The ancient
Germans laid it down that in time of famine beasts should first be
slain and offered to the gods. Did these bring no relief, then men must
be slaughtered; and if still there was no aid from on high, then the
chieftain of the tribe himself must mount the altar[229]; for the nobler
and dearer the victim, the more pleased were the gods!

The same doctrine prevailed practically through most primitive religions,
and was carried to a like extent. Painful mutilations of oneself, the
lopping of a finger, scarification, driving thorns through the tongue or
the flesh elsewhere, burning with hot coals, scourging, and supporting
crushing weights: these are but a few of the many terrible sufferings
which the individual inflicted on himself.

Thus steeled to pain in his own person, he knew no limit to its
infliction on others. The tortures of captives or of slaves dedicated to
the gods, common in American religions, formed part of the religious
value of the ceremony. Not merely captives and slaves, but those of his
own household and blood, his nearest and his dearest, must the true
worshipper be prepared to surrender, were it his first-born son or the
wife of his bosom. It was not heartlessness or cruelty which prompted
him, but obedience to that law of the supernatural, which ever claims for
itself supremacy over all laws and all passions of the natural man.

Traces of human sacrifice are discovered in the early history of even the
noblest religions, and the rite extended so widely that scarce a cult can
be named in which it did not exist.

What rendered them the more general was the underlying belief that, let
the sacrifice be sufficiently exalted, the gods _could not_ resist it.
They were constrained by its magical power, and whatever was desired
could be extorted from them, with or without their volition. So to this
day teach the Hindu priests, and so believed the ancient Romans and
various primitive nations.

_4. The Communion with God._—The idea of atonement in the piacular
sacrifice is in reality that of being _one with the god_, that of
entering into union or communion with him. This, indeed, lies largely at
the base of all the forms of ritualistic worship. Its purpose, more or
less clearly avowed, is to bring into spiritual unison the worshipper and
the worshipped.

A few examples from American rites will illustrate this.

The natives of Nicaragua at the time of maize gathering were accustomed
to sacrifice a man to the gods of the harvest. Around the altar were
strewn grains of corn. Over these the worshippers stood and with flint
knives let blood from the most sensitive parts of their bodies, the drops
falling on the grains. These were then eaten as holy food, part of the
sacrifice.[230]

Something very similar obtained in Peru. At the time of the vernal
equinox, all strangers were bidden to leave the sacred city of Cuzco,
where the Inca resided. A human victim was immolated, and the spotless
“Virgins of the Sun” were deputed to mingle his blood with meal and bake
it into small cakes. These were distributed among the people and eaten,
and one was sent to every holy shrine and temple in the kingdom.[231]
Precisely such a rite prevailed among the ancient Germans. At the harvest
supper the spirit of the corn, represented latterly under the form of an
animal but in earlier days as a child, was slain and eaten by those who
had aided in the harvest. It was the literal and corporeal union of man
and the god.[232]

Still clearer was the similar ceremony of the Aztecs. A youth was chosen
and named for the god. For months his every wish was gratified. Then he
was slain on the altar and his fresh blood was mixed with dough which was
divided among the worshippers and eaten. Thus they became partakers of
the Divine Nature.[233]

The fearful similarity of this ceremony both in its form and in its
intention to that of the Christian Eucharist could not escape the
notice of the Spanish missionaries. They attributed it to the malicious
suggestions of the Devil, thus parodying in cruel and debased traits the
sacred mysteries of the Church. But the psychologist sees in them all the
same inherent tendency, the same yearning of the feeble human soul to
reach out towards and make itself a part of the Divine Mind.

II. THE PERSONAL RITES, those for the benefit of the individual, will
next occupy us.

I have already observed that while the tribe or gens in primitive
conditions worships in common one or several divinities, most of the
religious acts of the individual are directed toward a deity whom he may
claim as his own special guardian and friend. This is his tutelary god,
his personal δαίμων, his “mystagogue,” who will not merely look after the
welfare of his human ward, but introduce him into the higher and occult
knowledge and power.

This personal deity reveals himself at birth, or may await some later
year or incident of life to manifest his name and nature. He may be the
spirit of some ancestor or great chieftain or mighty shaman; or he may
belong to those deities who never assume mortal habiliments. The teachers
of early faiths differed on these points; but nearly all agreed that to
each person some such guardian angel or genius was assigned. From these
spirits the personal names were frequently received, and, lest these
should be misused, they were usually kept secret.

These beliefs are too wide-spread to require support from examples.
Probably every American tribe shared them. They are familiar in classic
Greece and Rome. The Finns and the ancient Celtic peoples possessed them
in marked forms; and they survive in the tutelary Saints of the Roman
Church.

Principally to these the adults paid their devotions and offered their
vows for what concerned their personal welfare; and many of the rites
which I am about to describe, derive their meaning from their connection
with this belief. I shall classify them as relating: 1, to birth; 2, to
naming; 3, to puberty; 4, to marriage; and 5, to death and the disposal
of the corpse.

_1. Rites Relating to Birth._—Although the immediate act of childbirth
may not cause the savage mother severe suffering, the appearance of a new
human being in the world is not considered of light importance. In her
description of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, Mrs. Stevenson remarks
that some “of their most sacred and exclusive rites are connected with
childbirth,” and her full and accurate account of them reveals in a
strong light how solemn the event was considered.[234]

In many tribes the child was considered bound to its father by some
mysterious tie closer than connected it with its mother. Among the
Northern Indians, the father will not bridle a horse or perform sundry
other acts for a fixed period after the birth of his child, for if he
did it would die![235] In the rites of Mexico and South America, this
refraining from certain labours passed into the strange custom of the
_couvade_. This was, that upon the birth of the child, the _father_ took
to his bed and remained there for a number of days. Did he neglect this,
it was believed that the child would die or have bad luck. For the same
reason he had to be extremely careful of his own health and guarded in
his actions during his wife’s pregnancy, or otherwise the unborn babe
would suffer.[236]

Not less strange are the wide-spread rites and opinions connected with
the umbilical cord. As it united the unborn infant to the life of the
mother, it was generally held to retain that power in a mystical sense.
Among the American Indians, it was a frequent custom to carry it to a
distance and bury it, and it became the duty of the individual, in his
later life, to visit alone from time to time that spot, and perform
certain ceremonies.[237]

Thus the religious life of a person began with his birth. Not
infrequently at that time his tutelary divinity was ascertained by the
priests and assigned him, as among the Mayas, and the Africans of the
Congo River. With the latter, it was also customary to lay upon the
new-born babe a series of “vows,” or resolutions touching his conduct in
life. These were impressed on the mother, who adopted it as a sacred duty
to bring up her child in obedience to them. A similar habit prevailed in
the Andaman Islands and elsewhere.[238]

With these vows was often associated the rite of baptism, by sprinkling
or by immersion in water. Even among the rude Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego
we find that the child, when born, was promptly dipped in water, not for
sanitary but for religious reasons.

The ancient inhabitants of Teneriffe considered it necessary to have
a child formally asperged by a priestess before acknowledging it as a
member of the family,[239] and some such rite was prevalent in many
tribes. It was in one sense an initiation, as it was with the neophytes
of the mysteries of Mithras, who, according to Tertullian, were baptised
upon entering the novitiate. In another, it would seem to have been a
purification from inherited sin, in which sense it was practised by the
Nahuas of Mexico and the Quichuas of Peru. With the Mayas of Yucatan, it
was in common usage and was known by the significant name, “the second
birth.”[240]

_2. Relating to the Name_.—The Name, as we have already seen, was
looked upon as a part of the person, one of his forms or modes of life.
Very generally, its selection was a matter of religious moment, and
accompanied with solemn ceremonies. A person might have many names, but
there was one which was taken from or referred to his or her tutelary
spirit, and this was holy and not to be lightly used.

Among the Nahuas this was generally announced by the priest on the
seventh day after birth, but as it would be profane to speak it
constantly, another was employed for ordinary conversation. The Algonquin
children, says one who lived among them long, are taught by their mothers
not to divulge their real names, lest by so doing they should offend the
personal god who has taken them under his protection.[241]

When a babe, among the Seminoles of Florida, was about a fortnight old,
the mother took it in her arms and walked three times around the public
square of the village, calling aloud the name given it; but this name
was not that by which it was later known; and “they were always averse
to telling it.”[242] With some tribes, as the Choctaws, the idea of
profanity existed only if the person himself spoke his name; so that, “it
is impossible to get it from him unless he has an acquaintance present,
whom he will request to tell it for him.”[243] Analogous customs abound
in early religions and many of them survive in modern folk-lore.[244]

In some instances the American Indian would exchange his name for that
of a friend, or extend to him his name; a rare and high sign of amity,
as it signified that the receiver was thus placed under the guardianship
of the same tutelar deity. This custom extended widely throughout the
island world of the Pacific and among many primitive peoples. It has
often been noted, but its peculiarly religious meaning has generally been
misunderstood.

That certain names are auspicious and others inauspicious is a belief
that belongs everywhere to mankind in the primitive stage of thought.
But it is curious to note that while generally the auspicious names are
those of sweet sound and favourable sense, in Tonkin, Siam, and some
other regions ugly and unpleasant names are preferred, because these will
frighten away the evil spirits.[245]

_3. Rites Relating to Puberty._—On the momentous crisis in the personal
life when the boy enters into manhood and the girl becomes a woman, in
nearly all primitive tribes a solemn rite is prescribed, the object of
which is to prepare the child for the duties of the wider life, which it
is about to begin.

No better example for such a ceremony could be selected than that which
prevails among the southern tribes of Australia. It is their principal
public act of worship. The name by which it is known is the _Bora_,[246]
a word derived from the belt or girdle which the men wear, and which is
at that time conferred on the youth. Its celebration involves extensive
preparations and occupies a number of days. The youths are submitted to
severe tests and sometimes to dreadful mutilations. They are taught the
holy names and sacred traditions; and when they have satisfied their
elders of their endurance and fidelity, they are admitted to the manhood
of the tribe.

The _Bora_ is a distinctly religious ceremony. It is said to have been
instituted by their chief god Turamulun himself, and remains under
his spiritual charge. Its rites “involve the idea of a dedication to
supernatural powers,” and the figure of the god, moulded in high relief
on the earth in the costume and attitude of the sacred dance, is intended
to represent his personal presence. The aim is the education of the
individual to fill his place properly in the tribal life; and one of the
most intelligent of English observers expresses his conviction that
“every rule of conduct under which the novice is placed is directly
intended to some end beneficent to the community or believed to be.”

Throughout most of America, a similar initiation was required of the
youth before he was entitled to the privileges of manhood. It was
frequently accompanied by the most painful tests of his courage and
endurance. His naked back was lacerated with rods, his strength was tried
by prolonged hunger, thongs were inserted into his flesh and torn out by
the bystanders.

More frequently the boy was sent alone into the woods, and there,
exposed to inclement weather, cold, hunger and thirst, self-torture and
meditation, awaited the divine revelation which entitled him to call
himself a man!

“Could it be possible,” exclaims an intelligent traveller, “to hear
anything stranger, more wonderful, than these stories of unheard-of
castigations and torments to which boys of thirteen or fourteen subject
themselves, merely for the sake of an idea, a dream, the fulfilment of a
religious duty? More surprising is it that not merely some extraordinary
youth is capable of this, but that every young Indian, without exception,
displays such heroism.”[247]

The same rule applied to the girl. As it became evident that the period
had arrived in her life-history when she was capable of the sacred duties
of motherhood, she either retired into the forest, there to commune alone
with her guardian spirit, or, as among the Sioux Indians, the fact was
made known to the village, and a solemn feast announced by her parents.
At this, some venerable priest addressed the guests, “calling attention
to the sacred and mysterious manner in which nature had announced the
fact that she was ready to embrace the duties of matrimony!”[248]

In these ceremonies, which may be said to belong to primitive religions
in all times, we recognise again the one idea which more than any other
permeated all their myths and rites,—the idea of Life. It was because
the boy and girl, passing to riper years, indicated the acquisition of
the power to perpetuate and transmit Life, that at this age it was held
necessary for them to mark the epoch by rites of the most sacred import.

_4. Rites Relating to Marriage._—If the notion of life was thus the
inspiration of the rites of puberty, still more potently did it control
those relating to marriage.

Much has been written by special students concerning the forms of
primitive marriage, and much of what has been written is theory only, not
supported by actual and intimate knowledge of facts.

The assertion is common in works of the kind that the earliest form of
marriage was no marriage at all,—mere promiscuity,—and that, later, a
modified form of the same, known as “communal” marriage, prevailed.
Not a single example of either of these has been known in history or
in ethnology, and it is a gratuitous hypothesis only that either ever
prevailed in a permanent community.

What we first discern is the family, generally centred around the mother,
and tracing descent through the maternal ancestors only. This is the
“matriarchal” as distinguished from the “patriarchal” system, the latter
being that in which the father is the centre and head of the family, and
the genealogy is traced in his line. Both these forms, however, have
existed, so far as we know, in wholly primitive conditions. The selection
of one or the other was a matter of local accident or incident.

The primitive family, held together by one or other of these ties of
blood-relationship, was a close corporation. It might adopt outsiders,
but after admission they were considered of the same blood and lineage.
Its property was in common, its laws were laid on all, its very gods
were its own. Especially, the rules relating to marriage were prescribed
with rigid formality.

The general practice was that the youth must seek his bride from another
recognised family (gens or totem) of the tribe. To choose her from his
own immediate family was a crime of such deep dye that even an Australian
savage “could not consider such a thing possible”; although, in later
conditions, this artificial barrier was often weakened.[249]

In matriarchal systems, the husband usually went to live with the gens
of the wife, but did not become a member of it. He was looked upon as a
stranger and an interloper. Among some Australian and American tribes,
he never spoke directly to his wife’s mother, or even looked at her.
His children did not acknowledge him as a blood-relation, and when he
grew old and useless, he had to look to his own family, not to his own
offspring, for his maintenance.

The origin of these strange usages was strictly religious. They have been
analysed as they existed in many nations by one of the ablest of German
ethnologists, and their source has been shown to be that the gods of
the one gens never willingly accept the introduction of a stranger into
the household except by the regular formulas of adoption, which would
prevent marriage; hence, the husband is, and ever remains, a foreigner
and an interloper in the matriarchal household. His wife’s god is not his
god, nor are her people his people.[250]

The actual ceremony of marriage itself often indicates this. Much has
been said by writers on ethnology of “marriage by capture,” and it is
often asserted to be that most usual among primitive peoples, and to
continue in survivals in higher conditions of culture.

There is, indeed, very frequently a ceremony which presents the
appearance of violently seizing and carrying away by main force the
bride-elect. But it is not to be understood as the reminiscence of a
time when the man went forth and snatched a girl from some neighbouring
tribe to become his slave and his wife. I doubt if in the true totemic
marriage, considered as distinct from concubinage, any such method was
practised. It is not so to-day, even among the Australian Blacks. If they
steal a woman, they first inquire as to her kinship, and if she belongs
to a class into which her captor cannot marry, according to the laws of
his clan, he sets her free.[251]

The so-called “marriage by capture” was either a recognised tribute
to maidenly coyness, by which her real or feigned resistance was to
be overcome in a manner creditable to herself,—a sentiment constantly
witnessed in the lower animals as well as in modern life; or it was a
method of conciliating her household gods, the deities of the gens, by
giving the appearance of constraint and succumbing to force on the part
of the girl. Some of the northern tribes of America carried these notions
to the extent of a pretended concealment of the marriage long after it
had been performed. The husband was obliged to enter the home of his wife
by night and secretly. To approach it in daytime or to be seen in her
company would have been a grave impropriety.[252]

The second primitive form of marriage is by purchase. This also is
far less usual than many writers have assumed. There is indeed, very
commonly, as in civilised society, an exchange of goods along with or
previous to the marital ceremony. But with us it is not regarded as a
purchase and sale when an American girl’s father gives his daughter and a
million to a foreign nobleman in exchange for the title conferred on the
bride. It may in reality be a mere commercial transaction, but in theory
it is not so.

Just as little is the “marriage by purchase” among most of the aboriginal
tribes, where we find it in vogue. The exchange of goods is often a form
of compensation to the household gods for the privilege of remaining
a member of the clan, or for the permission to enter its ranks as an
authorised resident.

Of course, women were bought and sold as any other commodity; they were
part of the booty of victors, and were dispensed as gifts, or kept for
enjoyment. But when we confine ourselves to the examination of the
strictly totemic marriage we find even among the wildest tribes that it
was generally founded in mutual liking, that it was contracted under the
sanction of the recognised family laws, and that its ritual was that
of a religious ceremony.[253] The poor Bushmen, even, believe that the
laws relating to marriage are of divine origin, enacted by the sacred
ant-eater, and that their infraction will be severely punished.[254]

The gifts which accompanied the rite were in the nature of offerings.
Ceremonies of lustration and purification, in which the sacred
elements, fire and water, took a prominent part, were general, and
the relationship established was in its essence one of religious
significance, and not one of mere secular import.

_5. Relating to Death._—An attractive writer, Professor Frank Granger,
remarks in a recent volume: “The first attitude of primitive man to his
dead seems to have been one of almost unmixed terror.”[255] Would that we
could give primitive man so much credit! But we cannot. The evidence is
mountain-high that in the earliest and rudest period of human history the
corpse inspired so little terror that it was nearly always eaten by the
surviving friends![256]

We can look back clearly through the corridors of time to that stage of
development when death and the dead inspired no more terror or aversion
in man than they do to-day among the carnivorous brutes.

Throughout the whole of the palæolithic period of culture we discover
extremely faint traces of any mode of sepulture, any respect for the dead.

The oldest cemeteries or funeral monuments of any sort date from the
neolithic period. Then the full meaning of Death seems to have broken
suddenly on man, and his whole life became little more than a _meditatio
mortis_, a preparation for the world beyond the tomb. What Professor
Granger says of the ancient Romans applies to very many primitive tribes:
“In the belief of the Romans, the right to live was not estimated more
highly than the right to receive proper burial.”[257]

The funeral or mortuary ceremonies, which are often so elaborate, and
so punctiliously performed in savage tribes, have a twofold purpose.
They are equally for the benefit of the individual and for that of the
community. If they are neglected or inadequately conducted, the restless
spirit of the departed cannot reach the realm of joyous peace, and
therefore he returns to lurk about his former home and to plague the
survivors for their carelessness.

It was therefore to lay the ghost, to avoid the anger of the disembodied
spirit, that the living instituted and performed the burial ceremonies;
while it became to the interest of the individual to provide for it that
those rites should be carried out which would conduct his own soul to the
abode of the blessed.

These were as various as were the myths of the after-world and the
fancies as to the number and destiny of the personal souls.

Most common of them all was some sort of funeral feast. The disagreeable
suggestion is close, that this was a survival of the habit of eating
the corpse itself. Up to a very recent date that habit prevailed among
the Bolivian Indians; and so desirable an end was it esteemed that the
traveller D’Orbigny tells of an old man he met there whose only regret at
embracing Christianity was that his body would be eaten by worms instead
of by his relations!

The later theory, however, was that then the soul itself was supplied
with food. It partook spiritually of the viands and thus, well fortified
for its long journey, departed in good humour with those it left behind.
The same notion led to the world-wide custom of providing it with many
articles by placing them in the tomb or burning them on the funeral pyre.
This extended not only to weapons, utensils, ornaments, and clothing,
but not infrequently to companions. On the coast of Peru the wives of
a man were burned alive with his dead body, and among the Natchez they
were knocked on the head and interred under the same mounds.[258] I have
seen the mummy of a woman from the Cliff Dwellers of Arizona, holding
in her arms the body of her babe which had been strangled with a cord,
still tightly stretched around its little neck. Plainly the sympathetic
survivors had reflected how lonely the poor mother would be in the next
world without her babe, and had determined that its soul should accompany
hers. Elsewhere, slaves or companions in arms were slain or slew
themselves that they might accompany some famous chieftain to his long
home.

In these funeral rites the disposal of the corpse depended upon ethnic
traits, ancestral usage, or the instructions of the priests.

Perhaps the earliest was simple exposure. The body was left in the forest
for the beasts and birds to consume, as among the Caddo Indians and
others; or it was sunk in the waters that the fish should perform the
same office; the usual object being to obtain the bones with the least
trouble. The oldest of all burials yet discovered, those in the caves in
the south of France, were of this character, simple “seposition” as it
is called. The body was merely laid in a posture of repose on the cave
floor, with the weapons and ornaments it had used during life.[259]

Next in point of time doubtless came inhumation, the interment of the
body in the ground or covering it, laid on the surface, with stones and
earth,—the burial mound. Homeric Greeks, American Indians, and tribes of
all continents practised this method in different ages, and the barrows
or tumuli thus erected remain in thousands to this day to attest the
religious earnestness of those early peoples. The vast monuments which
at times they constructed for their dead, the pyramids, dolmens, and
teocalli, have never since been equalled in magnitude or cubical contents.

Another and significant funeral rite of high antiquity is that of
cremation or incineration. It was symbolic in character, the body being
given to the flames in order that the spirit, by their purifying agency,
should promptly be set free and united with the gods. This method
also prevailed extensively among the American race, and was quite in
consonance with their opinions of the after-life. “It is the one passion
of his superstition,” writes Mr. Powers of the Californian Indian, “to
think of the soul of his departed friend as set free, and purified by the
flames; not bound to the mouldering body, but borne up on the soft clouds
of the smoke toward the beautiful sun.”[260]

Other peoples entertained the opinion that the body as it is, in all
its parts, must be preserved in order that it might be again habitable
for the soul, when this ethereal essence should return to earth from
its celestial wanderings. Therefore, with utmost care they sought for
means to preserve the fleshly tenement. In Virginia, in some parts of
South America, on the Madeira Islands, the aboriginal population dried
the corpse over a slow fire into a condition that resisted decay;
while elsewhere, the nitrous soil of caves offered a natural means of
embalming. The Alaskan and Peruvian mummies, like those of ancient
Egypt, were artificially prepared and swathed in numerous cerecloths.
In all, the same faith in the literal resurrection of the flesh was the
prevailing motive.

More generally, the belief was held that the soul remained attached in
some way to the bones. These were carefully cleaned and either preserved
in the house, or stored in ossuaries. Frequently they were kept as
amulets or mascots, in the notion that the friendly spirit which animated
the living person would continue to hover around his skeleton or skull,
and exert its amicable power. The Peruvians held that the bones of
their deceased priests were oracular, speaking good counsel, and the
missionaries were obliged to break them into small fragments to dispel
this superstition[261]; though they themselves continued to hold it
heretical to doubt the efficacy of the bones of the saints! A tribe on
the Orinoco was wont to beat the bones of their dead into powder and mix
it with their cassava bread, holding that thus their friends and parents
lived again in the bodies of the eaters!

After cremation, the ashes were left upon the altar, and the whole
covered with earth; or they were preserved in urns with the fragments of
the bones; or, as with a tribe of the Amazon, they were cast upon the
waters of the great river and floated down to the limitless ocean.

Thus closed the last scene in the existence of the primitive man. From
birth to death he had been surrounded and governed by the ceremonies of
his religion; and on his passage out of this life, he confidently looked
to another in which he should find a compensation and a consolation for
the woes of his present condition.

Following these funerary functions came the customs of mourning. They
were often excessively protracted and severe, involving self-mutilation,
as the lopping of a finger or an ear, scarification, flagellation,
fasting, and cutting the hair. These were shared by the friends and
relatives of the deceased, and at the death of some famous chief “the
whole tribe will prostrate themselves to their woe.”

The psychic explanation of these demonstrations is not wholly clear. By
some they have been interpreted as a commutation for cannibalism, and
by others as an excuse for not accompanying the corpse into the other
world. One writer says: “Barbarism, abandoned to sorrow, finds physical
suffering a relief from mental agony.”[262] On the other hand, a recent
student of the subject claims that in these rites we perceive “the oldest
evidence of active conscience in the human race; the individual laid
hands on himself in order to restore the moral equilibrium.”[263] Need
we go farther than to see in them merely exaggerated forms of the same
emotional outbursts which lead nervous temperaments everywhere to wring
the hands and tear the hair in moments of violent grief?




LECTURE VI.

The Lines of Development of Primitive Religions.

    CONTENTS:—Pagan Religions not wholly Bad—Their Lines of
    Development as Connected with: 1. The Primitive Social Bond—The
    Totem, the Priesthood, and the Law; 2. The Family and the
    Position of Woman; 3. The Growth of Jurisprudence—The Ordeal,
    Trial by Battle, Oaths, and the Right of Sanctuary—Religion is
    Anarchic; 4. The Development of Ethics—Dualism of Primitive
    Ethics—Opposition of Religion to Ethics; 5. The Advance in
    Positive Knowledge—Religion _versus_ Science; 6. The Fostering
    of the Arts—The Aim for Beauty and Perfection—Colour-Symbolism,
    Sculpture, Metre, Music, Oratory, Graphic Methods—Useful Arts,
    Architecture; 7. The Independent Life of the Individual—His
    Freedom and Happiness—Inner Stadia of Progress: 1. From the
    Object to the Symbol; 2. From the Ceremonial Law to the
    Personal Ideal; 3. From the Tribal to the National Conception
    of Religion—Conclusion.


It has always been, and is now, the prevailing belief in Christendom that
pagan or heathen religions cannot exert and never have exerted any good
influence on their votaries.

This opinion has also been defended by some modern and eminent
authorities in the science of ethnology, as, for example, the late
Professor Waitz.[264] It is a favourite teaching in missionary societies
and in works of travellers who are keen observers of the shortcomings of
others’ faiths.

I have never been able to share such a view. The lowest religions
seem to have in them the elements which exist in the ripest and the
noblest; and these elements work for good wherever they exist. However
rude the form of belief in agencies above those of the material world,
in a higher law than that confessedly of solely human enactment, and
in a standard of duty prescribed by something loftier than immediate
advantage,—such a belief must prompt the individual, anywhere, to a
salutary self-discipline which will steadily raise him above his merely
animal instincts, and imbue him with nobler conceptions of the aims of
life.

When he feels himself under the protection of some unseen, but ever near,
beneficent power, his emotions of gratitude and love will be stimulated;
and when he recognises in the ceremonial law a divine prescription for
his own welfare and that of his tribe, he will cheerfully submit to the
rigours of its discipline.

The various lines of development which were thus marked out and pursued
through the influence of early religious thought, and which reacted to
develop it, deserve to be pointed out in detail, since they have so
generally been overlooked or misunderstood.

For convenience of presentation they may be examined under seven
headings, as they were connected with: 1. The primitive social bond; 2.
The family and the position of woman; 3. The growth of jurisprudence; 4.
The development of ethics; 5. The advance in positive knowledge; 6. The
fostering of the arts; and 7. The independent life of the individual.

These are the main elements of ethnology; and as they progressed to
higher forms and finer specialisations, partly through the influence of
religion, they in turn reflected back to it their brighter lustre, and
the symmetrical growth of a richer culture was thus secured.

1. The first to be named should be the construction of the primitive
society. This was essentially religious. I have already emphasised how
completely the savage is bound up in his faith, how it enters into nigh
every act and thought of his daily life. This may be illustrated by its
part in four very early and widely existing forms of social ties—the
totem, the sacred society, the priesthood, and the ceremonial law.

The totemic bond I have previously explained. It existed in many
American and Australian tribes and relics of it can be discerned in
the early peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Its constitution was
avowedly religious. The supposed or “eponymous” ancestor of the totem
was a mythical existence, a sort of deity. He was known only through
a revelation, either in visions, or, through the assertions of the
elders of the clan, in which latter case the myth was the origin of the
relationship. Theoretically, all members of the totem were kinfolk, “of
one blood,” and the numerous rites connected with the letting of blood
were generally to symbolise this teaching.[265]

In various tribes, as among the Sioux and in Polynesia, the totem did
not prevail. Its place was taken by societies, sacred in character, the
members of which were bound closely together by some supernatural tie. As
our Indians say, all the members “had the same medicine.” The relation
these societies bear to the tribe is not dissimilar to that elsewhere
held by totems.

In nearly all primitive peoples the priesthood exerts a powerful
influence in preserving the unity of the tribe, in presenting an
immovable opposition to external control. This is well known to the
Christian missionaries and bitterly resented by them. These shamans
and “medicine-men” are the most persistent opponents of civilisation
and Christianity; but it must be remembered that the same conservatism
on their part has for centuries been the chief preventive of tribal
dissolution and decay. While we regret that they should resist what is
good, we must recognise the value of their services to their people in
the past.[266]

The ceremonial law belongs, as I have elsewhere said, to the primary
forms of religion. It is in full force, as among the Mincopies and
Yahgans, where it is difficult to perceive any other form of religious
expression. It is deemed by all to be divine in origin, imparted in
dreams or visions by supernatural visitors, transcending therefore all
human enactments. It defines the proper conduct of the individual, and
prescribes what is allowed and what is forbidden to him. Obedience to it
is constantly inculcated under the threat of the severest penalties.

These are the main forces which moulded the earliest human societies
known to us, and may be said to have first created society itself. They
are all distinctly religious, and their consideration obliges us to
acknowledge the correctness of the statement of a distinguished Italian,
Professor Tito Vignoli,—“There is no society, however rude and primitive,
in which all the relations, both of the individual and of the society
itself, are not visibly based on superstitions and mythical beliefs.”[267]

2. Earlier, perhaps, than any definite social organisation was the
family bond which united together those of one kinship. This rested upon
marriage, the religious character of which in even the rudest tribes I
dwelt upon in the last lecture. I then explained the matriarchal system
prevalent in so many savage peoples. Necessarily, this exalted the
position of woman, by conferring upon her the titular position of head of
the house, and often the actual ownership of the family property.

It is a general truth in sociology that we may gauge the tendencies of a
given society towards progressive growth by the position it assigns to
woman, by the amount of freedom it gives her, and by the respect it pays
to her peculiar faculties. Religions which, like Mohammedanism, reduce
her to a very subordinate place in life, wholly secondary to that of the
male, have worked detrimentally to the advancement of the peoples who
have adopted them.

In some savage tribes, the woman is a mere chattel or slave, denied
actual participation in religious rites. But that is by no means the
case with all. Among the Hottentots, for example,—who were, when first
discovered, a people of respectable culture,—a man can take no higher
oath than to swear by his eldest sister; and such is the respect
inculcated through his religion, that he never speaks to her unless she
addresses him first.[268]

The more delicate nervous organisation of women adapts them peculiarly
to the perception of those sub-conscious states which are the psychic
sources of inspiration and revelation. Very widely, therefore, in
primitive religions they occupied the position of seeresses and
priestesses, and were reverenced in accordance therewith. Among the Dyaks
of Borneo, in former days, all the recognised priestly class were women.
Their bodies were supposed to be the chosen residence of the Sangsangs,
beautiful beings, friendly to men. These inspired women, called Bilians
or Borich, were subject to theoleptic fits, in which they gave advice,
foretold the future, recited rhythmic songs, etc. They were under no
restraint of conduct, as what they did, it was held, was the prompting of
the god. So firm was their influence that, when, in modern days, the men
also became priests, they were obliged to wear the garb of women.[269]

The Siamese also entertain this opinion. Their gods speak through the
mouth of some chosen woman. When she feels the visit of the spirit to be
near, she arrays herself in a handsome red silk garment, and as the deity
enters her, she discourses of the other world, tells where lost objects
are to be found, and the like. The assembled company worship her, or
rather the god in her. On recovering from her theopneustic trance, she
professes entire unconsciousness of what has taken place.[270]

The American Indians very generally concede to their women an exalted
rank in their religious mysteries. The Algonquins had quite as famous
“medicine-women” as medicine-men, and the same was true generally. Mr.
Cushing tells me that there is only one person among the Zuñis who is a
member of all the sacred societies and thus knows the secrets of all, and
that person is a woman.

When Votan, the legendary hero of the Tzentals of Chiapas, left them for
his long journey, he placed his sacred apparatus and his magical scrolls
in a cave under the charge of a high priestess, who was to appoint her
successor of the same sex until his return. The secret was faithfully
kept and the successors appointed for more than a hundred and fifty years
after their conversion to Christianity; until, in 1692, on the occasion
of the visit of the Bishop to the hamlet where the priestess lived, she
disclosed the story, and the holy relics were burned.[271]

Twenty years later, as if to avenge this, the Tzentals revolted in a
body, their leader being an inspired prophetess of their tribe, a girl of
twenty, fired with enthusiasm to drive the Spaniards from the land and
restore the worship of the ancient gods.[272]

It is quite usual to find in early religions many rites, such as dances
and sacrifices, which women alone carry out, and to which it is _tabu_
for any man to be admitted. This naturally arises in those cults where
the deities are divided sexually into male and female. Such in their
origin were the Bacchanals of ancient Greece, participated in at first by
women and girls only, celebrated in devotion to the productive powers of
nature, which were held to belong more especially to the female sex.[273]
The “wise women” of many primitive faiths formed a close caste by
themselves, no male being admitted, in imitation of their mythological
prototypes in the heavens. The “witches” of the Middle Ages were lineal
successors of the Teutonic priestesses, who took as their model the
“swan-maidens” or “wish-women” of Odin.[274]

Another form of early institutions was that of the societies of virgins,
such as that which from primitive Italic times kept alive the holy fire
of Vesta, goddess of the hearth and home. Extensive associations of a
similar nature were found by the European explorers in Mexico, Yucatan,
Peru, and elsewhere.

A curious teaching of several wide-spread cults was that women alone
were endowed with immortality. Such was the opinion of the natives of
the Marquesas Islands, and in Samoa the myth related that the god Supa
(paralysis) ordained in the council of creation that the life of a man
should be like a torch, which, when blown out, cannot be again lighted by
blowing; but that a woman’s soul should live always.[275]

No one can doubt that in thus assigning a high and often the highest
place in the religious mysteries to woman, many primitive religions
surrounded her with a sacredness which was constantly recognised, and
thus aided in the improvement of her social relations. The value of
virtue and purity was increased, mere animal desires were subjected to
religious restraint, and the relations of sex came increasingly to be
regarded as instituted by divine wisdom for special purposes.

3. Although the specifications of the ceremonial law were often
capricious and absurd, and sometimes positively hurtful, yet it developed
the habit of obedience and the respect for authority. In this manner it
potently aided the evolution of jurisprudence—that is, of those rules
of conduct which grow out of the habit of men living together and which
are necessary to preserve amicable relations. These had their origin in
other than religious considerations, but when once consciously recognised
as beneficial, the religion of the tribe generally adopted them, claimed
their creation, and threw around them the garb of its own protective
power. Religion then actively aided in the fulfilment of purely social
duties, as these were understood by the tribe.

In primitive conditions, all laws are God’s laws. As we would say, there
is no separation of the civil and criminal from the canon law. To the
Mohammedan, the Koran is the source of all jurisprudence. This is a
survival from early thought.

From this it followed that the punishment of crime and the decisions
between litigants were, properly, judgments of God. This universal
opinion is reflected in a number of traits in jurisprudence, some of
which are still in vogue in civilised lands. The most noteworthy are the
ordeal, trial by battle, oaths, and the privilege of sanctuary.

Ordeals were universal. They all rested on the belief that the gods would
rescue the innocent man from danger. He might be required to hold red-hot
iron in his hands; he might be plunged long under water; swallow poison;
or in any other way expose himself to pain or death; if he were unjustly
accused, the invisible powers would protect him.[276]

The trial by battle involved the same opinion. “If the Lord is on my
side, why should I fear?” is the confident belief at the basis of every
such test of skill and strength.[277]

These forms of decision have disappeared, but the oath remains as
vigorous as ever in our law courts. It is, however, as has been pointed
out by the able ethnologist and lawyer, Dr. Post, originally and in
spirit nothing else than an ordeal. The false witness, the perjurer,
is believed to expose himself to the wrath of God and to suffer the
consequences in this or another life.[278]

The rite of sanctuary was distinctly religious. The criminal among the
Hebrews, who could escape to the temple and cling to the horns of the
altar, must not be seized by the officers of justice. The Cherokee
Indians, like the Israelites, had “cities of refuge,” which they called
“white towns.” With the Acagchemem, a Californian tribe, the temples were
so purifying that the evil-doer, were he guilty even of murder, who could
reach them before he was caught, was cleansed of his sin and absolved
ever after from any punishment for it.[279]

In these vital relations we see how religion entered deeply into civil
life, and became a guide and director of its most essential procedures.
Its development grew with its responsibilities and with the intimacy it
cultivated with practical affairs.

The codes of statutes instituted by ancient legislators, usually
personified under some one famous name, as Moses, Manu, Menes, or the
like, obtained general adoption through the belief that they emanated
directly from divinity, and were part of the ceremonial law. Under favour
of this disguise, they worked for the good of those who followed them,
and gained a credence which would not have been conceded to them, had it
been thought that they were of human manufacture.

Toward merely human law the religious sentiment is in its nature and
derivation in frequent opposition. It claims a nobler lineage and a
higher title. In theory, the Church must always be above the State,
as God is superior to man. Religion, when vital and active, is ever
revolutionary and anarchic. It ever aims at substituting divine for human
ordinances.

This has been from earliest times its constant tendency. It has been a
potent dissolvent of states and governments and of such older religious
expressions as have become humanised by usage and formality.

In this manner it has been the most powerful of all levers in stimulating
the human mind to active enterprise and the use of all its faculties. Man
owes less to his conscious than to his sub-conscious intelligence, and of
this religion has been the chief interpreter.

4. The severest blows have been dealt at primitive or pagan religions on
account of the inferiority of their ethics. It has often been asserted
that they do not cultivate the moral faculties and benevolent emotions,
but stifle and pervert them. They are, therefore, considered to be
distinctly evil in tendency.

This important criticism cannot be disposed of by a mere denial. There is
no doubt that the ethics of barbarism is not that of a high civilisation.
But if we understand the necessary conditions of tribal life in the
unending conflicts of the savage state, we can see that the highest moral
code would find no place there.

All tribal religions preach a dualism of ethics, one for the members of
the tribe, who are bound together by ties of kinship and by union to
preserve existence; and the other, for the rest of the world. To the
former are due aid, kindness, justice, truth and fair dealing; to the
latter, enmity, hatred, injury, falsehood, and deceit. The latter is just
as much a duty as the former, and is just as positively enjoined by both
religion and tribal law.[280]

The state of barbarism is one of perpetual war, in which each petty
tribe is striving to conquer, rob, and destroy its neighbours. The
Patagonians and Australians wander about their sterile lands in small
bands, naked and shelterless, owning nothing but the barest necessities.
But whenever two of these bands approach each other, it is the signal for
a murderous struggle, in order to obtain possession of the wretched rags
and trumperies of the opponent.

For this reason, the development of ethics must be studied on inclusive
lines, as to what extent they were cultivated between members of the
same social unit, the totem or the tribe. The duty of kindness to others
extended to a very limited distance, but, within that area, may have
been, and generally was, punctually observed. The devotion of members
of the same gens to each other, even to the sacrifice of life, has been
often noted among savages. The duties involved by this connection were
frequently onerous and dangerous, as in the common custom of blood
revenge, where a man, at the imminent peril and often at the loss of his
own life, felt constrained to slay the murderer of a fellow-clansman.

The character of the early gods was, as a rule, non-ethical. They
were generally neither wholly good nor wholly bad. They were more or
less friendly toward men, but rarely constantly either beneficent or
malignant. They were too human for that.[281]

Hence the religions which were founded upon such conceptions were not in
their prescriptions of conduct chiefly ethical, but rather ceremonial.
Moral conduct was of less importance than the performance of the rites,
the recitation of the formulas, and the respect for the _tabu_.[282]

I may go farther, and say that in all religions, in the essence of
religion itself, there lies concealed a certain contempt for the merely
ethical, as compared with the mystical, in life. That which is wholly
religious in thought and emotion is conscious of another, and, it claims,
a loftier origin than that which is moral only, based as the latter is,
on solely social considerations. I have heard from the pulpits of our own
land very gloomy predictions of the fate of the “merely moral man.”[283]

5. That which we call “modern progress” is due to the increase of
positive knowledge, the enlargement of the domain of objective truth.
To this, religion in its early stages made important contributions. The
motions of the celestial bodies were studied at first for ceremonial
reasons only. They fixed the sacred year and the periods for festivals
and sacrifices. Out of this grew astronomy, the civil calendar, and other
departments of infantile science.

The rudiments of mathematics were discovered and developed chiefly by the
priestly class, and at first for hieratic purposes; and the same is true
of the elements of botanical and zoölogical knowledge. The practice of
medicine owes some of its most useful resources to the observations of
the “medicine-men” or shamans of savage tribes.

While this much and more may justly be stated concerning the
contributions of Religion to Science, there can be no question of the
irreconcilable conflict between the two. They arise in totally different
tracts of the human mind, Science from the conscious, Religion from the
sub- or unconscious intelligence. Therefore, there is no common measure
between them.

Science proclaims that man is born to know, not to believe, and that
truth, to be such, must be verifiable. Religion proclaims that faith is
superior to knowledge, and that the truth which is intuitive is and must
be higher than that which depends on observation. Science acknowledges
that it can reach no certain conclusions; its final decisions are always
followed by a mark of interrogation. Religion despises such hesitancy,
and proceeds in perfect confidence of possessing the central and eternal
verity. Science looks upon the ultimate knowable laws of the universe as
mechanical, religion as spiritual or demonologic.

These differences have always existed, and have, in the main, resulted
in placing religions at all times in antagonism to universal ethics, to
general rules of conduct, and to objective knowledge. Everywhere, the
religious portion of the community have entertained a secret or open
contempt for “worldly learning”; everywhere they have proclaimed that
the knowledge of God is superior to the knowledge of his works; and that
obedience to his law is of more import than the love of humanity.

We may turn to the American Indians, the tribes of Siberia or the Dyaks
of Borneo, and we shall find that the ordinary “doctor” who cured by
a knowledge of herbs, of nursing, and of simple mechanical means, was
far less esteemed than the shaman who depended not on special knowledge
but on the possession of mysterious powers which gave him control over
demons[284]; or we may take that Protestant sect of the Reformation, who
opposed anyone learning the alphabet, lest he should waste his time on
vain human knowledge[285]; or a thousand other examples; and the contrast
is always the same.

The conclusion, therefore, is that early religion did assist the
development of the race along these lines, but only incidentally and, as
it were, unwittingly; while it was, at heart, unfriendly to them.

6. It is otherwise when we turn to Art, especially esthetic Art. Its aim
is the realisation, the expression in the object, of the idea of the
Beautiful. This idea does not belong to the conscious intelligence. It
cannot be expressed in the formulas of positive knowledge. The esthetic,
like the religious, emotions, send their roots far down into the opaque
structure of the sub-conscious intelligence, and hence the two are
natural associates. What Professor Bain says of Art may be extended to
Religion: “Nature is not its standard, nor is [objective] truth its chief
end.”[286]

It has been seriously questioned whether the idea of the beautiful
existed among primitive peoples, apart from a desire for mere gaudy
colouring or striking display. No one would doubt its universal presence
could he but free his judgment from his own canons of the beautiful, and
accept those which prevail in the savage tribe he is studying. Darwin,
in his work on the _Descent of Man_, collected evidence from the rudest
hordes of all continents to prove that all were passionate admirers
of beauty, as measured by their own criteria; and he reached also the
important conclusion that their completest expression of it was to be
found in their religious art. “In every nation,” he says, “sufficiently
advanced to have made effigies of their gods, or of their deified rulers,
the sculptors no doubt have endeavoured to express their highest idea of
beauty.”[287]

We should also remember that the same great teacher says: “It is
certainly not true that there is in the human mind any universal
standard of beauty;” and this is so, both of the human form and of those
expressions of the beautiful which appeal to the ear and the touch. The
music and the metre of one race generally displease another; and there
is no one norm by which the superiority of either can be absolutely
ascertained.

In their own way, however, Art and Religion have this in common, that
they make a study of Perfection, and aim to embody it in actuality;
whereas Science or positive knowledge confines itself to reality, which
is ever imperfect.

Perfection is, however, an unconditioned mode of existence, not
measurable by our senses, and hence outside the domain of inductive
research. The tendency of organic forms and cosmic motions is always
toward it, but they always fall short of it.[288] We are aware of it only
through the longings of our sub-conscious minds, not through the laws of
our reasoning intelligence. Yet so intense is our conviction, not only
that it is true, but that final truth lies in it alone, that it has ever
been and will ever be the highest and strongest motive of human action.

Beginning with those arts which are avowedly the expression of beauty
in line, colour, or form, it is easy to show how they were fostered by
the religious sense. The inscribed shells and tablets from the mounds of
the Mississippi Valley present complex and symmetrical drawings, clearly
intended for some mythical being or supernatural personage.

Among the Salishan Indians of British Columbia, when a girl reaches
maturity she must go alone to the hills and undergo a long period of
retirement. At its close, she records her experiences by drawing a
number of rude figures in red paint on a boulder, indicating the rites
she has performed and the visions she has had.[289] Such rock-writing,
or petroglyphs, nearly always of religious import, are found in every
continent, and offer the beginnings of the art of drawing.

It is possible that the oldest known examples, scratched with a flint
on the bones of reindeers dug up in the caves of southern France, may
represent the totems or deified heroes of the clan. Certain it is that
a class of symbolic figures, which recur the world over, often dating
from remote ages, such as the crescent, the cross, the svastika, the
triskeles, the circle, and the square, were of religious intention, and
conveyed mystic knowledge or supernatural protection in the opinion of
those who drew them.

The early cultivation of painting in religious art arose chiefly from
the symbolism of colours, to which I previously made a passing allusion.
Its origin was in the effect which certain hues have upon the mind,
either specifically or from association. Colour-symbolism, indeed, forms
a prominent feature in nearly every primitive religion. The import of
the different colours varies, but not to the degree which excludes some
general tendencies. The white and the blue are usually of cheerful and
peaceful signification, the black and the red are ominous of strife and
darkness. In many tribes the yellow bore the deepest religious meaning.
The Mayas of Yucatan assigned it to the dawn and the east; and when the
Aztecs gathered around the dying bed of one they loved, and raised their
voices in the paean which was to waft the soul to its higher life beyond
the grave, they sang: “Already does the dawn appear, the light advances.
Already do the birds of yellow plumage tune their songs to greet thee.”

These symbolic colours are those with which the early temples were tinted
and the rude images of the gods stained. They were rarely harmonious,
but they were effective, and appealed to the people for whom they were
intended. Their preparation and their technical employment were improved,
and, as the art advanced, it reacted on the religion, directing its
conceptions of divinity into higher walks and toward nobler ideals.

Art in line and colour is of vast antiquity, probably preceding that in
shape or form, carving or sculpture. But this, too, we find was fairly
understood by the cave-dwellers of France and Switzerland at a time when
the great glacier still covered a good part of the European continent,
and there is scarcely a savage tribe to-day that does not make some rude
attempts at carving the images of its deities.

A natural object which has a chance resemblance to a man or beast is
chosen as a fetish, and the worshipper by chipping or rubbing increases
slightly the likeness. This is the infancy of the sculptor’s art, and
it is usually for a religious purpose that it is exercised. Soon it is
developed, and in stone, or bone, or wood, in baked clay, or rags, or
leaves, we find thousands of effigies in use to represent the tutelary
deities and the other denizens of the supernatural world.

So prominent was the early progress of religious art in this direction
that it gave the name to early religion itself. It was distinctly
“idolatry,” or “image worship,” the objective expression overwhelming the
inward sentiment.

Its excess in this direction led to reactions and protests as long ago as
the dawn of history. “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image,
nor the likeness of anything,” was a command taken so literally that it
has swept away ever since in some of the Semitic peoples all interest in
plastic or pictorial art, whether sacred or secular. It was believed that
the contemplation of a divinity not represented by any visible object
would maintain and develop a higher conception than if portrayed under
tangible form, no matter how beautiful or how symbolic.

This opinion would not and did not exclude the cultivation of the
beautiful under non-sensuous forms, such as appeal to the ear rather
than to the eye. I refer to metre and music, to oratory and literary
composition.

From some cause which it might be difficult to explain satisfactorily
the natural expression of religious emotion in language is universally
metrical. The rites of every barbarous tribe are conducted in or
accompanied by rude chants or songs, which both stimulate the religious
feelings and give appropriate vent to them. Many of these chants are
mere repetitions of phrases, or refrains, destitute of meaning, but
they answer the purpose, and are the germs from which, in appropriate
surroundings, have been developed the great poems of the race, the
inspirations of its immortal bards.

Hundreds of examples of these primitive religious chants have been
collected of recent years, when, for the first time, their ethnologic
importance has been understood. They present a striking similarity,
whether from the Polynesian Islands, the desert-dwellers of Australia, or
the Navahoes and Sioux of our own reservations. Many of them are scarcely
more than inarticulate cries, but even these have a certain likeness,
containing the same class of vowels, and often leading, through this
physiological correlation of sound to emotion, to similar words in the
religious language of far-distant peoples.

Everywhere we find these metrical outbursts controlled by the sense of
rhythmical repetition; and it was to accentuate this that instruments of
music were first invented. Their rudest forms may be seen in the two flat
sticks which the Australians use to beat time for their singing in their
_corroborees_, or festal ceremonies; or in the hollow log, pounded by a
club, which some Central American tribes still employ. All the native
American musical instruments appear to have been first invented for
aiding the ritual; and tradition assigns with probability the same origin
for most of those in the Old World.

Uniform rhythmic motion is a powerful means of intensifying collective
suggestion; and its action is the more potent the more we yield our minds
to the control of their unconscious activities,—the realm in which the
religious sentiment is supreme.

In the initiation ceremonies of the Australians—called the _Bora_—the
youth are obliged to listen to long speeches from the old men, containing
instructions in conduct and the ancestral religious beliefs. Such
customs as this,—and in one or another form they are universal in
primitive religions—led to the development of the art of Oratory. It
was cultivated assiduously in primitive conditions. We have several
volumes largely filled with the prolix addresses of the Aztec priests and
priestesses on various solemn occasions, as birth, entering adult life,
marriage, etc.[290] To learn these long formulas by heart was one of the
duties, and not an easy one, of the neophytes.

In most tribes they are couched in forms apart from those of daily use,
the words being unusual, with full vowels and sonorous terminations. Some
of these peculiarities survive in the “pulpit eloquence” of our own day,
testifying to the influence of religious thought on the development of
the modes of dignified expression.

It was in this connection and under this inspiration that man invented
the greatest boon which humanity has ever enjoyed,—a system of writing, a
means of recording and preserving facts and ideas. Our present alphabet
is traced lineally back to the sacred picture-writing of ancient Egypt;
and the less efficient method employed by the natives of Mexico and
Central America originated in devices to preserve the liturgic songs
and religious formulas. For generations, in both areas, its chief
cultivation and extension lay with the priestly class: although its
final application to the uses of daily life was due to merchants rather
than to scholars.

This discovery made possible such a treasure as a literature; and that we
find its beginnings and oldest memorials chiefly of religious contents
is ample testimony to this incalculable debt we owe to the religious
sentiment. The papyri of Egypt, the codices of Central America, the
Sanscrit Rig Veda, and the Persian Vendidad testify to the diligence with
which the ancient worshippers sought to preserve the sacred chants and
formulas.

We discern the same anxiety among rude savages to pass down in their
integrity the liturgies of their worship; and in the “meday sticks” of
the Chipeways and the curiously incised wooden tablets of Easter Island,
we have the beginnings of written literature,—always the purpose being
religious in character.

It is unnecessary to dwell in detail upon the fostering influence of
early religion on the useful arts. In their numerous applications to the
ritual and the objective expression of the religious sentiment, they were
constantly stimulated by it and by the reward it was ever prepared to
offer, both in this world and that to come.

But one art of utility was so pre-eminently religious in its source that
it merits especial comment, that is, building or architecture. Nearly
all the great monuments of the ancient world, most of the important
structures of primitive tribes everywhere, have in them something
religious in aim, or are avowedly so. We know little or nothing of the
builders of the mysterious “megalithic monuments,” the dolmens and
cromlechs which to the number of thousands rise on the soil of France
and England; but their arrangement and character leave no doubt that
they were for some religious purpose. So the mighty piles which excite
our astonishment in the valley of the Nile or the Euphrates, or on the
highlands of Mexico, or in the tropical forests of Yucatan, reveal the
same inspiration.

In his altars and temples, in his shrines and funerary monuments, his
fanes and cathedrals, man has at all times expended his efforts and his
means with a prodigality lavished on no other edifices. The orders of
architecture arose from his desire to erect dwellings worthy of the god
who should inhabit them. No beauty of line, no majesty of proportion,
no abundance of decoration, was too great to secure this purpose. Such
surroundings in time imparted dignity and permanence to the cult, and
embellished the religious sentiment through noble artistic associations.

7. Let us now turn from these considerations of a general nature to the
more pointed one, whether primitive religions exerted an improving
influence on the independent life of the individual; for that is the test
to which all institutions should finally be brought.

The savage is not the type of a free man, although in popular estimation
he is generally so considered. He is, in fact, tyrannically fettered by
traditional laws and tribal customs. He is merged in his clan or gens,
against whose rules, often most painful and arbitrary, he dares take no
step. As an individual, he cannot escape from their invisible chains.[291]

His only avenue to permitted freedom is through the higher law of his
personal religion. If he pleads that his own tutelary spirit has ordered
him to an act contrary to custom, or that his own magical powers enable
him to defy established usage, his disregard of it will be condoned.

In savage life, the inspired and the insane are always ranked in the same
category as above the law. Among the Kamschatkans, if a man declares that
his personal divinity has in a dream commanded him to unite with some
woman of the tribe, it is her duty to obey, no matter what her position
or relationship.[292]

Although at times this freedom was doubtless abused, it secured for the
individual a degree of personal liberty which he could have attained in
no other manner. By recognising a law for the single conscience above
that of either ancestral usage or popular religion, it paved the way to
the development of the individual, free from all restraints other than
his clear judgment would lay upon himself.

He who possessed the hidden knowledge, the esoteric _gnosis_, was by that
knowledge released from bondage to his fellow-men. As the poet Chapman so
well says:

    “There is no danger to a man who knows
    What life and death is; there’s not any law
    Exceeds his knowledge: neither is it lawful
    That he should stoop to any other law.”

This sense of superiority to all surroundings is disclosed everywhere in
mystic religions. A Hindu prophetess was a few years ago imprisoned by
the English civic judge for violation of the local laws and disturbing
the peace. Her only statement in defence was: “Years ago, when a girl,
I met in the jungle, face to face, the god Siva. He entered into my
bosom. He abides in me now. My blessing is his blessing; my curse his
curse.”[293] The Malay, when he “runs amuck,” regards himself exonerated
from all restraint, moral or social; and that custom and belief are not
confined to his race.[294]

It was held among the ancients that those who are “born of God,” that is,
inspired by the divine afflatus, are not only above human law, but “are
not subject even to the decrees of Fate.”[295]

The ceremonial law, so powerful in primitive condition, must have exerted
a beneficial influence on the training of the individual. Its severe
restrictions, its minute and ceaseless regulations of his life, taught
him self-control and self-sacrifice. His first duty was not to himself
but to the other members of his clan or totem. Obedience and systematic
restraint were useful lessons inculcated on him from earliest childhood.
The Congo Negro, the Andaman Islander, the American Indian, for whom his
sponsors had taken vows at his birth, grew up to consider the fulfilment
of these the chief end of his life. Their violation would entail disaster
and disgrace not merely on himself but on his people. His religious
education, therefore, cultivated in him some of the finest qualities
of perfected manhood,—self-abnegation and altruism; for, as Professor
Granger well says, “The primitive idea of holiness implies as its chief
element, relation to the _communal_ life.”[296]

If, therefore, with some writers, we must concede that in primitive
conditions the individual was ever conceived with reference to the gens
or community, on the other hand, we must recognise the potency of the
religious element occasionally to separate him from others as one of “the
elect”; to train him in self-realisation and self-government; and to
cherish in his mind the germs of a free personality.[297]

More difficult is the decision of the question whether primitive
religions increased the happiness of the individual.

I have mentioned more than once the generally joyous character of many
of them, as seen in their rituals. But it would be a grave error not to
dwell also upon the dread of evil spirits which is so conspicuous a part
of most, and which keeps their votaries in a state of perpetual anxiety.
Nor can the self-sacrifice I have referred to increase the cheerfulness
of life, associated as it often is with painful mutilations, with
prolonged fasting, and exposure to cold and heat. The cruelty of the
ceremonies is often shocking, the edicts of the religious code merciless.

To compensate this, “the fearful looking forward to the wrath to come,”
the fertile source of mental misery in advanced faiths, scarcely exists
in those of primitive conditions. Death itself is thus deprived of its
greatest terror, and the indifference with which it is met by most
savages is matter of common note among travellers.

Nor does there exist in primitive conditions that fertile source of
human misery, religious bigotry or intolerance, with its fatal train
of persecutions, torture, and suspicion. The bloodiest sacrifices of
heathendom have never entailed such personal unhappiness as the gloomy
fanaticism of some forms of Christianity.

All these several lines of development are, it will be noted, external to
religion itself. They modify it, and are modified by it. But there are
other changes, wrought within the religious sense itself, which we must
now consider.

Religions, like all other institutions, are subject to growth and decay,
evolution and retrogression, development and death.

The vast majority of primitive faiths have disappeared totally, leaving
no trace behind except the nameless images of their gods, or not even
these. They were obliterated by conquest, or merged and lost in other
forms of belief, or degenerated and petrified until they died a natural
death.

Others grew and extended, vitalised by new thoughts, appropriate to
the new environment, or were carried far and wide by victorious rulers
or enthusiastic votaries. It is generally true, as Professor Toy has
observed, that, in early conditions, the life of a religion depends
on the life of the tribe or state which has adopted it, and that “the
larger the community, the more persistent and vigorous its religion will
be.”[298]

But the secret of success lay within rather than without; the particular
faith must pass through certain internal transformations in order to
fit it for the wider field opened to it. The chief of these stadia of
progress may be described as a transference of religious thought: 1. From
the object to the symbol; 2. From the ceremonial law to the personal
ideal; and 3. From the tribal to the national conception of religion.

1. The rudest phases of religion connect the ideas of the Divine with
particular external objects, a tree, a rock, a special place, around
which grow up a series of local myths and usages. Such ideas, to develop,
must break away from these connections with concrete and localised
relations. They must become generalised, and the symbol be substituted
for the object.

Instead of a particular tree, for instance, the sign of the tree, the
cross or the pole (_asherim_), will be adopted. This represents not the
original object but the personified activity, the spirit or god which was
supposed earlier to inhabit the given object or spot.

Thus the mind is freed from its bondage to a purely material,
geographically single, perception, and the first step is taken toward
universal or world-ideas of divinity. In metaphysical terms, it is a
passage from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the
general, from the real to the ideal; a line of progress which must
necessarily be followed by man’s intelligence in order to develop his
especially human attributes.

2. The second important step was that which substituted for the bare
and cold prescriptions of the ceremonial law the ideal of personal
perfection. The beginnings of this are visible even in the lowest
faiths, as we see in their veneration of those who, they considered, had
fulfilled most completely their notions of duty. Such persons were held
to have descended from the gods, or were inspired by them.

It is true these early ideals are of little more than physical strength
and mental cunning; but their attributes gradually expanded to include
corporeal beauty, intellectual power, and ethical grandeur.

We thus arrive, still in primitive conditions, to such personal ideals
as Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs, of whom it was said in their legends
that he was of majestic presence, chaste in life, averse to war, wise and
generous in actions, and delighting in the cultivation of the arts of
peace; or as we see among the Peruvians, in their culture hero Tonapa,
of whose teachings a Catholic writer of the sixteenth century says: “So
closely did they resemble the precepts of Jesus, that nothing was lacking
in them but His name and that of His Father.”[299]

When these ideals were not distinctly men, but were partially or wholly
divine, nevertheless the contemplation of an existence whose chief aim
was to do good to those who complied with his instructions, to protect
those who fled to him, and to grant the petitions of those who prayed to
him, was both a comforting and ennobling conception.

3. Professor Thiele in his work on the ancient Egyptian religion
makes the wise observation: “The revolution brought about by religious
universalism is the greatest and most complete which the history of the
world can show.”[300]

It is true that no primitive religion aimed at universalism or even
deemed it desirable or possible. The gods of the gens or tribe belonged
to that community, were its own exclusively, and stood in antagonism to
all other gods. There was no notion of proselytising or missionary work,
no desire to extend the worship of the tribal god beyond the limits of
the tribe.

This exclusiveness was broken down by the inter-communication of
tribes, their confederations and conquests, which forced the religious
conceptions to take broader views. The priests and philosophers began
to recognise in the deities of other nations types of their own, as we
see in Greek and Roman writers. This gradually led to the comprehensive
speculations of the world-religions, in which all men are considered to
stand equally before God, and all entitled to the same share of His grace.

The early stages of these transitions are easily recognised in primitive
faiths. The adoption of foreign gods appears early. When a tribe met with
frequent reverses, it began to distrust the power of its own deities,
and apply to those of its conquerors for aid. The custom of exogamy
introduced divinities of other gentes. Personal and communal wants led to
pilgrimages to the famous oracles and fanes of distant religions, and the
votaries in returning brought with them the memory and the cult of alien
gods. In many such ways the barriers of the tribal faith were gradually
broken down.

       *       *       *       *       *

We may expect to find faint traits or none of the purely abstract stage
of religion in the cults of savage tribes. Yet they are not absolutely
lacking.

This abstract stage is when the Idea, no longer merged in the Ideal,
stands by itself as the recognised guide of conscious effort. The
conception of infinity or perfection is not then conceived in relation
to a being or personality. It will still act as the loftiest motive of
action, the deepest source of spiritual joy.

Thus understood and recognised, it will not be a cold product of the
reason, but the warm and potent efflux of the heart, of the impulses,
and the emotions. In him who rises to this height, the sympathy for
and the active love of the good and the true will be all the stronger,
because he will see that man must hope only from man, from diligent
self-perfecting; but may thus hope confidently from the best there is in
man.

Toward this end, though unseen and unacknowledged, were all religions of
primitive peoples unconsciously directing and impelling the human mind.
Long has been the path, many the false routes followed, far away is still
the goal; but ever firmer in faith, and clearer in purpose, man will in
due time and fit season be established in this, the last and innermost
mystery of his religious nature.




FOOTNOTES


[1] “Religion,” observes Professor Toy, “must be treated as a product of
human thought, as a branch of Sociology, subject to all the laws that
control general human progress.”—_Judaism and Christianity_, p. 1.

[2] Rev. John M. Neale, _History of the Holy Eastern Church_, vol. i., p.
37.

[3] Granger, _The Worship of the Romans_, p. vii.

[4] A. H. Post, _Grundriss der ethnologischen Jurisprudenz_, Bd. i., s. 4.

[5] _The Science of Fairy Tales_, p. 2.

[6] _Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_, Bd. xi., s. 124.

[7] J. J. Honegger, _Allgemeine Culturgeschichte_, Bd. i., s.
332. “Similar conceptions,” observes Professor Bastian, “repeat
themselves, under fixed laws, in localities wide apart, in ages far
remote.”—_Grundzüge der Ethnologie_, p. 73.

[8] E. M. Curr, _The Australian Race_, vol. i., p. 50.

[9] W. P. Clark, U. S. A., _Indian Sign Language_, p. 241.

[10] This subject is fully discussed by Flügel, _Zeit. für.
Völkerpsychologie_, Bd. xi.; by Prof. James Sully in his _Studies of
Childhood_; and by Dr. Friedmann, _Centralblatt für Anthropologie_, Bd.
i. The last mentioned argues that the mind of the savage has more points
of resemblance to the insane than to the child mind. The higher emotional
susceptibility of savages can be illustrated by abundant examples.

[11] _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring
Expedition_, p. 108.

[12] The case was not exceptional. Among several tribes it was an
established custom for a mother to kill and eat her first child, as
it was believed to strengthen her for later births. See examples in
_Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_, Bd. xiv., pp. 460, _sq._

[13] Palmer in _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, vol. xiii., pp. 294, 399.

[14] Professor Sayce believes that the Sumerian of ancient Babylonia was
genderless; and that the local gods were first endowed with sex on being
adopted by the Semites.—_Hibbert Lectures_, p. 176.

[15] Cuoq, _Lexique Algonquine_, p. 21, note.

[16] _The Golden Bough_, Preface.

[17] Ed. Clodd, _Myths and Dreams_, p. 168.

[18] Besides the general works on Egyptian religion, I may note R.
Pietschmann, “Aegypt. Fetischdienst und Götterglaube,” in _Zeitschrift
für Ethnologie_, Bd. x., s. 153, _sq._ He points out that there was no
unity in the ancient cults of Egypt, as the gods were those of the nomes
only. The worship of Osiris did not prevail generally till after the
sixth dynasty (p. 165).

[19] Some have explained superstition as “degenerate religion”; others
as “religious error”; others (Pfleiderer) as “a pathological condition
of normal belief”; but all such definitions depend on the view-point. As
Roskoff remarks: “The man who is plunged in superstition is sure to hold
it for the only true faith, and is contented with it so long as he is not
troubled with doubts.”—_Das Religionswesen der Naturvölker_, p. 17.

[20] See T. Rhys Davids, _Indian Buddhism_, p. 29 (Hibbert Lectures), and
in the first volume of the present series of lectures.

[21] Death was to the Roman the _somnum eternale_. Prof. Sayce remarks
of the ancient Chaldeans that they had no definite belief in an after
life.—_Hibbert Lectures_, p. 358.

[22] The question has been carefully examined by G. Roskoff in his
work _Das Religionswesen der Rohesten Naturvölker_ (Leipzig, 1880). He
conclusively refutes the assertions that tribes have been encountered
without religion.

[23] Calloway, _Religious System of the Amazulus_, p. 113.

[24] Rev. W. Y. Turner in _Jour. Anthrop. Institute_, vol. vii., p. 492.

[25] _Medicine Men of the Apache_, pp. 499, 500.

[26] The question is carefully discussed by Hoernes, _Urgeschichte des
Menschen_, p. 93, _sq._, who disputes Mortillet’s opinion. The latter is
given in his _Préhistorique Antiquité de l’Homme_, p. 603, _sq._

[27] _The Descent of Man_, p. 95.

[28] Quoted in _L’Anthropologie_, vol. viii., p. 334.

[29] Granger, _Religion of the Romans_, p. 21; Thiele, _Hist. of the
Egyptian Religion_, Introd.

[30] Dr. Schwaner, in H. Ling Roth, _The Natives of Sarawak_, vol. ii.,
App. p. clxii.

[31] H. Grimme, _Mohammed_, p. 38.

[32] In his Preface to _The Revolt of Islam_.

[33] O. Peschel, _Völkerkunde_, s. 255; F. Ratzel, _Ethnographie_, Bd.
i;—Schurtz, _Catechismus der Völkerkunde_, s. 88.

[34] The eminent anthropologist Broca denied that _religiosity_ is a
distinctive trait of humanity. See further in Hovelacque et Hervé,
_Précis d’Anthropologie_, pp. 634-636.

[35] _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, vol. i., chap. xi.

[36] _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 328. Darwin has a parallel passage, _Descent
of Man_, p. 95.

[37] “Everything, animate or inanimate, which has an independent being,
or can be individualised, possesses a spirit, or, more properly, a shade
(_idahi_, a shadow, or reflection).” Washington Matthews, _Ethnog. of
the Hidatsa_, p. 48. This expresses the general _Weltanschauung_ of the
savage mind. Let it be remembered that it is also characteristic of the
poetic, or personifying representation of nature, and thus belongs to the
highest artistic expressions of the human mind as well as to its feeblest
utterances.

[38] This was the universal opinion of classical antiquity. See Payne
Knight, _Ancient Art_, p. 45. It was also the orthodox theory of the
early Church concerning the redeemed soul. It “will know all things
as God doth. Whatsoever is in Heaven and whatsoever is in earth,
everything will he see with that veritable knowledge which nothing
escapeth.”—_Select Works of St. Ephrem the Syrian_, translated by Rev. J.
B. Morris, p. 353.

[39] Ridley, in _Jour. Anthrop. Institute_, vol. ii., p. 269.

[40] Mr. A. E. Gough gives reasons for the opinion that the _yogin_,
who practises the _yoga_, is a lineal follower of the ancient local
shaman.—_Philosophy of the Upanishads_, p. 221.

[41] This curious recent development of most ancient experience is
described by Dr. M. Bucke in the work, _In Re Walt Whitman_.

[42] The phenomena of “demoniac possession” are so remarkable, and so
frequent in lower conditions of culture that they have been defended as
the actual influence of evil spirits by intelligent modern observers
(see the work of Rev. Dr. Nevins, _Demoniac Possession in China_, etc.).
Bishop Calloway says most of the negro converts in Natal have such
attacks after embracing Christianity (_Jour. Anthrop. Society_, vol.
i., p. 171). Brough Smith describes such attacks among the Australians.
Strong men are suddenly seized with violent convulsions. They dance
wildly, scream at the top of their voices, foam at the mouth, and
continue until utterly exhausted. They are homicidal when in this
condition, and their companions fear to approach them (_The Aborigines of
Victoria_, vol. i., p. 466).

[43] The most complete study of this subject in connection with the
development of religions is the work of Dr. Otto Stoll, _Suggestion und
Hypnotismus in der Völkerpsychologie_ (Leipzig, 1894).

[44] Bishop Calloway, in _Jour. Anthrop. Institute_, i., p. 177; and in
his _Religious System of the Amazulu_, p. 232. The Bushmen explain it
as “a kind of beating of the flesh,” which tells them the future, and
where lost things may be found. They add: “Those who are stupid do not
understand this teaching.”—Bleek, _Bushman Folk-lore_, p. 17.

[45] A. E. Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, p. 243.

[46] Klemm, _Allgemeine Culturgeschichte_, Bd. ii., s. 337; A. M. Curr,
_The Australian Race_, vol. i., p. 48.

[47] Curr notes this among the Australians, _ubi supra_, vol. i., p. 48;
and it is general among American Indians.

[48] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 35.

[49] Middendorf, _Keshua Wörterbuch_, s. v.

[50] _Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science_, 1896. Sect. H.

[51] On the meaning of _huaca_ see von Tschudi, _Beiträge zur Kennt. des
alten Peru_, p. 156; Bertonio, _Vocab. de la Lengua Aymara_, s. v.

[52] The probable identity of Heb. _Iah_ with Chald. _Iah_ is
acknowledged by Pinches, Sayce, and other eminent Assyriologists (see
an article by the former, in the _Proc._ of the Victorian Institute for
1895). That the Greek Iachus is from the Chaldeo-Syrian (as his myth
claims, referring to him as “The Assyrian stranger,” etc., L. Dyer _The
Gods in Greece_, p. 165) was maintained by Herodotus, Macrobius, and
Plutarch, among the ancients, and by various modern authors. It can be
shown, however, that _Yah_ as a name of God was derived from a sacred
interjection or cry of the same phonetic value, which recurs repeatedly
in the cults of America, Polynesia, and Australia. This is also true of
_hua_ or _wa_, the radical of the English “God.” They are both what have
been called “universal” radicals.

[53] Codrington in _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, vol. x., p. 279; Fornander,
_The Polynesian Race_, vol. iii., pp. 225-7. In some dialects _mana_ has
the special meanings, omen; the thunder; the breath; the belly (_i.e._,
the interior), etc. Hale gives the definition “power” as common to all
dialects (_Polynesian Lexicon_, s. v.). Fornander notes the similarity to
Sanscrit, _mana_, _manu_, mind, thought.

[54] I have dwelt on the absence of monotheism among the American tribes
in _Myths of the New World_, p. 75. Dr. Washington Matthews, a most
competent, authority, expresses the universally correct view, when,
speaking of Mahopa, the divine conception of the Hidatsa Indians, he
says: “It refers to an influence or power above all things, but not
attaching to it any ideas of personality.”—_Ethnography of the Hidatsa
Indians_, p. 48.

[55] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, Bd. ii., s. 338; L. M. Turner, _The
Hudson Bay Eskimos_, p. 272; von den Steinen, _Die Naturvölker
Zentral-Brasiliens_, p. 340. Among the Australians, both men and women
become “doctors” or shamans by dreaming.—Curr, _The Australian Race_,
vol., ii., p. 74.

[56] These are called “hypnogogic hallucinations.” They have been studied
by Maury, _Annales Medico-psychologiques_, tome xi., p. 252, _sq._

[57] This point is discussed by Professor Granger, _Worship of the
Romans_, pp. 28, _sq._

[58] Bishop Calloway describes the regimen adopted to become inspired
among the Zulus, in _Jour. Anthrop. Soc._, vol. i., p. 175. Among the
Dyaks of Borneo the ceremony is called _nampok_, and its conditions are:
1. To be alone; 2. To pass the night on a mountain top; 3. To offer a
sacrifice and call for the god. Ling Roth, _Natives of Sarawak_, vol. i.,
p. 185.

[59] I have treated this question at some length in my _Myths of the New
World_, p. 314, and _Nagualism_, p. 7, _sq._

[60] I have given a translation of it in _Essays of an Americanist_, p.
293.

[61] A. E. Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, p. 237. The Mexican
adjurations referred to are given by Sahagun, _Historia de Nueva España_,
lib. x., cap. 29.

[62] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs of the South Pacific_, pp. 28, 34. The
concrete meaning of both words is pith, kernel, core, centre, etc.

[63] Hale, _Ethnography of the U.S. Exploring Expedition_, p. 55; Klemm,
_Culturgeschichte_, Bd. ii., s. 315; after Stoll. The Algonkian myth
relates that the hero-god Nanabojou could converse with the spirits of
all things, with trees, flowers, butterflies, the thunder, etc. (Clark,
_Indian Sign Language_, p. 113).

[64] Elysée Reclus, _Le Primitif d’Australie_, p. 232.

[65] The Greeks had but vague notions of an after life, and Professor
Schrader remarks: “The cult of the dead has no place in the Homeric
world.” _Prehist. Antiqs. of the Aryan Peoples_, p. 424. The “indigetes
dii” of the Romans were rather heroes than divinities, though Arnobius,
_Adv. Gentes_, lib. i., cap. 64, asserts that they were worshipped.

[66] The most satisfactory recent study on the worship of ancestors and
of the dead, is that by Dr. S. R. Steinmetz in his _Ethnologische Studien
zur ersten Entwicklung der Strafe_, Bd. i., ss. 141-287 (Leiden, 1894).

[67] Clark, _Indian Sign Language_, pp. 121, 165, 199, 207, etc.; Howitt
in _Jour. Anthrop. Institute_, vol. xiii., p. 186. If one wakes a sleeper
suddenly, he may die, as his vagrant soul may not get back in time. Von
den Steinen, _Naturvölker Zentral-Brasiliens_, p. 510. In all these
primitive views the real soul is regarded as merely a tenant of the body
(not a function or the result of functions), as it is to-day in the
popular religions of civilised lands.

[68] The fear of ghosts in civilised countries is the survival of a
wide-spread, ancient belief in the malevolence of souls. I have found
no instance of this more striking than among the Finns. They believed
that the souls of the dead lie in wait for the living, in order to kill
and eat them, especially their hearts and lungs, so that the slain
could not live again. The ghosts did not spare their nearest relatives,
and the story is told of an old man, who warned his beloved young wife
not to follow his corpse to the grave, or his ghost would eat her. She
disobeyed, and saved herself only by pronouncing the name of God. _Cong.
Internat. d’Archéologie de Moscou_, Tom. ii., p. 316. In about one third
of known savage tribes, the ghosts are considered kind and friendly to
the survivors. See Steinmetz’s analysis in his _Entwicklung der Strafe_,
Bd. i., s. 142, _sq._

[69] Friedrich Freihold, _Die Lebensgeschichte der Menschheit_, Bd. i.,
s. 35.

[70] Baiame is from the verb bhai. _Jour. Anthrop. Institute_, vol.
viii., p. 242. The “Nurali” of the Murray River tribes is also an
embodiment of light. B. B. Smyth, _Aborigines of Victoria_, vol. i., p.
423.

[71] Gill, _Myths and Songs_, p. 13; Fornander, _The Polynesian Race_,
vol. iii., p. 153.

[72] Gill, _ubi supra_, pp. 3, 17, 44.

[73] E. W. Man, in _Jour. Anthrop. Institute_, vol. xii., p. 166.

[74] Th. Hahn, _Tsuni ǁGoam_, pp. 124, 126.

[75] Clark, _Indian Sign Language_, p. 186; _Jour. Anthrop. Institute_,
vol. x., p. 285.

[76] _Myths of the New World_, pp. 97, 165, etc.

[77] Fornander, _Polynesian Race_, vol. i., p. 78; Gill, _Myths and
Songs_, p. 18.

[78] Musters, _Among the Patagonians_, ch. v.; Ling Roth, _Natives of
Sarawak_, vol. ii., App., p. clxx.; Hahn, _Tsuni ǁGoam_, p. 37.

[79] Clark, _Indian Sign Language_, p. 189.

[80] Castren observes: “Es hat innerhalb der weitgestreckten Gränzen
Asiens kaum ein einziges Volk gegeben, welches nicht den Himmel verehrt
hätte.”—_Finnische Mythologie_, p. 14. He might as well have said, “the
habitable globe” instead of Asia only.

[81] Matthew, v., 34.

[82] Hopkins, _Religions of India_, pp. 62, _seq._

[83] Gill, _ubi supra_, pp. 10-14; Sir George Grey, _Polynesian
Mythology_, ch. i.

[84] B. Brough Smith, _Aborigines of Victoria_, vol. i., p. 457.

[85] Notably by Prof. F. L. W. Schwartz in his numerous works, and in his
contributions to the _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, etc.

[86] The Hebrew name Jahve (Jehovah) is derived by some from the verb “to
thunder.” In the Vedas, Parjanja, the Thunderer, is a conspicuous figure.
Mumpal, the Thunder, say the Australians, created all things. (_Reise der
Fregatte Novara_, Anthrop. Theil, s. ix.) Among the Bechuanas, “When it
thunders, every one trembles, and each asks the other, ‘Is there anyone
among us who has devoured the wealth of others?’” (Calloway, _Relig.
System of the Amazulu_, p. 117). Any number of other examples could be
added.

[87] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, Bd. i., s. 64; Honegger,
_Culturgeschichte_, Bd. i., s. 332.

[88] Castren, _Finnische Mythologie_, p. 17.

[89] Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, p. 17.

[90] I refer especially to the results of the physical investigations of
Helmholtz, and to their logical application to mental science, by George
J. Romanes, in his _Mind and Motion_; to the position of Prof. Paulsen
in his _Introduction to Philosophy_; and to such lines of thought as are
presented in Professor Dolbear’s _Matter, Ether, and Motion_.

[91] Related in Gill’s _Myths and Songs of the South Pacific_. M. van
Ende, in his _Histoire Naturelle de la Croyance_, p. 83, sq., has some
suggestive remarks on sound as regarded by primitive nations as a mark of
life. Hence, their myths of brooks, trees, etc., as conscious beings.

[92] A Lenormant, _Chaldean Magic_, p. 96.

[93] E. F. Dalton, _Ethnology of Bengal_, p. 60. “Nothing more colors
Hindu life,” writes Mr. Walhouse, “than the belief in the efficacy of
_mantras_—forms of prayer or powerful words, by which all the relations
of life may be influenced, and even the gods may be bound.”—_Jour.
Anthrop, Inst._, vol. xiv., p. 189.

[94] Curr, _The Australian Race_, vol. i., p. 48.

[95] _Report of Com. of N. South Wales to the Columbian Exposition_, p. 7.

[96] Sayce, _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 309.

[97] Lenormant, _Chaldean Magic_, p. 63.

[98] Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, p. 318.

[99] The appropriate rite thus to destroy an enemy is described by Curr,
_The Australian Race_, vol. ii., p. 610.

[100] _Popol Vuh, le Livre Sacré des Quiches_, p. 10.

[101] _Polynesian Mythology_, p. 284.

[102] _Religious System of the Amazulu_, p. 413.

[103] The expression in the Algonkin tongue for a person of the same name
is _nind owiawina_, “He is another myself” (Cuoq, _Lexique Algonquine_,
p. 113).

[104] Curr, _ubi supra_, p. 246.

[105] Ling Roth, _Natives of Sarawak_, vol. i., p. 288.

[106] H. Hale, _Ethnography of the U. S. Exploring Expedition_, p. 288.

[107] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, Bd. ii., p. 329.

[108] This subject has been discussed by Andree, _Ethnographische
Parallelen_, pp. 165-184, and other writers. On the “name soul” among the
American Indians I have collected material in _Myths of the New World_,
p. 277, _sq._ Most American and Australian tribes would not name the
dead. On the other hand, in the robust religion of the ancient Germans,
the names of the loved departed and of great chiefs were shouted out at
the banquets, and a horn drained to their _minni_, affectionate memory.
J. Grimm, _Teutonic Mythology_, vol. i., p. 59.

[109] _Chaldean Magic_, p. 104.

[110] The original is in the Turin papyrus.

[111] Granger, _Worship of the Romans_, p. 277.

[112] Howitt, in _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, xiii., p. 192.

[113] James Adair, _Hist. of the North Am. Indians_, p. 54.

[114] Prof. Sayce in _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 305.

[115] Sahagun, _Historia de Nueva España_, lib. i., _passim_; _Popol
Vuh_, cap. i.; Stoll, _Ethnographie der Rep. Guatemala_, p. 118.

[116] Gill, _Myths and Songs of the South Pacific_, p. 6.

[117] Comp. W. Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, p. 41.

[118] _Select Works of St. Ephrem_, p. 122. (Trans. by the Rev. J.
B. Morris.) The name of Jesus was regarded by the early church as
magical in itself. Arnobius says of him, “whose Name, when heard,
puts to flight evil spirits, imposes silence on soothsayers, prevents
men from consulting the augurs, and frustrates the efforts of
magicians.”—_Adversus Gentes_, lib. i., cap. 46.

[119] See Stoll, _Suggestion und Hypnotismus_, p. 14, _seq._

[120] The _pĕtara_ of the Borneans is at times used as a personal name
of the chief divine being, at others in the vague sense of “duty” or
“supernatural.” Ling Roth, _Natives of Sarawak_, vol. i., 179. Analogous
instances have already been mentioned.

[121] _Indian Sign Language_, p. 309.

[122] Sir George Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, p. 164.

[123] Hyades et Deniker, _Mission Scientifique au Cap Horn_, p. 376.
Earlier voyagers write: “They certainly have ideas of a spiritual
existence.”—_Narrative of the Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle_, vol.
ii., p. 179.

[124] _Ancient Nahuatl Poetry_ (Philadelphia, 1890); _Rig Veda
Americanus_ (Philadelphia, 1890).

[125] Dr. W. Matthews, _The Mountain Chant of the Navahoes_, p. 465.

[126] Clark, _Indian Sign Language_, p. 309.

[127] Sahagun, _Hist. de Nueva España_, lib. vi. Other examples are given
by this writer.

[128] _Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses_, s. v. Prière.

[129] Other forms are _tapui_, to make sacred; _tabui_, to keep from;
_tabuaki_, to bless. Here, as elsewhere, there is a synonomy between
“sacred” or “holy” and “accursed,” because it is accursed to defile that
which is holy. Another, and less probable, derivation is given by Frazer,
in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, s. v. “Taboo.” He is perfectly right,
however, in saying that the original form of the _tabu_ is due, not to
its civil, but to its religious element.

[130] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, vol. ii., pp. 368, _sq._, after Steller,
who visited Kamschatka about 1740.

[131] Man, in _Jour. Anthrop. Society_, vol. xii., pp. 159, 173.

[132] Authorities above quoted, and Darwin, _Descent of Man_, p. 95.

[133] For abundant examples of the _tabu_ in various nations see Frazer’s
article in the _Encyc. Britannica_ above referred to.

[134] _Religion of the Semites_, p. 18.

[135] Filling in manuscript, he says, seventy-seven quarto volumes, and
far from exhausting the supply! _Bushman Folk-lore_, p. 6. (London, 1875.)

[136] Man, _ubi supra_, p. 172.

[137] Morice, _Trans. Roy. Soc. Canada_, 1892, p. 125.

[138] This branch of the subject has been fully discussed by Keary,
_Outlines of Prim. Belief_, Preface and chapter i.; and Frazer, _The
Golden Bough_, _passim_.

[139] See _Myths of the New World_, chap. iii.; also, an article on
symbolism in ancient American art, by Prof. Putnam and Mr. Willoughby in
_Proc. Am. Ass. Adv. Science_, vol. xliv., p. 302.

[140] I have presented this subject with greater detail in an article “On
the Origin of Sacred Numbers” in the _American Anthropologist_, April,
1894. The contrast of symbolism of the three and the four is familiar
to students. Such a popular text-book as Keil’s _Manual of Biblical
Archæology_ states that four was the predominating number in the temples,
altars, and rites of the ancient world, it being, “according to an idea
common to all antiquity, the symbol of the cosmos”; while the three was
“the mark of the Divine Being in His various manifestations” (pp. 127,
128).

[141] Westcott, _Symbolism of Numbers_, p. 7. I have given several
examples of triple or triune deities in America in _Myths of the New
World_, pp. 84, 187, 188. From other fields I may note the triad Kane,
Ku, and Lono of Hawaii (Fornander, _Polynesian Race_, vol. i., p.
61); that on the Marquesas objectively represented by three sticks
tied together (Dr. Tautain, in _L’Anthropologie_, tom. vii., p. 544);
the triad of Tangaloa, Creator, Maui, Sustainer, and Tiki, Revealer,
elsewhere in Polynesia (Hale, _Ethnog. and Philol._, p. 24).

[142] Numerous examples are collected in L. L. Conant, _The Number
Concept_, chap. ii.

[143] In the Quiche and Tzental dialects.

[144] From the verb _tumpa_, to forge. Ling Roth, _Natives of Sarawak_,
vol. i., p. 165.

[145] The Tinné of British America have the word _Nayéweri_, he who
creates by thought (Petitot, _Les Dené Dindjie_, p. 63); the Algonquian
Kitché Manito created the world “by an act of his will” (Schoolcraft,
_Oneóta_, p. 342). For the Zuñians, see Cushing, _Zuñi Creation Myths_,
p. 379; for the Polynesians, Hale, _Ethnography of the U. S. Exploring
Expedition_, p. 399, and Fornander, _The Polynesian Race_, vol. i., p. 62.

There is no distinction between these opinions and that of the Christian
church, so beautifully expressed by St. Ephrem the Syrian: “At the nod of
His will, noiseless and gentle, out of nothing He created all.” (_Select
Works_, Translated by Rev. J. B. Morris, p. 185.)

[146] Fornander, _The Polynesian Race_, vol. i., p. 67; _Rel. de la Nouv.
France_, 1634, p. 13.

[147] In _Myths of the New World_, ch. vii. (first ed., 1868). Numerous
writers, Klee, Andree, Lucas, etc., have treated the deluge myth with
fulness. It is found even among the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands
(Man, _u. s._) and is quite common throughout Polynesia (Fornander, _u.
s._, vol. i., pp. 88, _sq._). Various Australian tribes record it in
detail, Smyth, _The Aborigines of Victoria_, vol. i., p. 430.

[148] Fornander (_u. s._, vol. i., p. 79, _sq._) discusses it in
Polynesia. Their “tree of life” was a sacred “tabooed” bread-fruit tree.
For America, see _Myths of the New World_, pp. 103-106.

[149] For this reason the works of Delitsch, Haupt, etc., on the
question, _Wo lag das Paradies?_, are much less to the point than if
their writers had studied the comparative mythology of the subject.

[150] This mythical cycle, as it arose among the native tribes of
America, was made by me the special subject of a volume, _American
Hero-Myths_ (pp. 251, Philadelphia, 1882).

[151] See my _Essays of an Americanist_, pp. 135-147; J. Grimm, _Teutonic
Mythology_, vol. ii., p. 832; Schrader and Jevons, _Prehistoric
Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_, p. 424.

[152] Codrington in _Jour. Anthrop. Soc._, vol. x., p. 285.

[153] Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, Bd. ii., p. 188.

[154] Von Hasselt, in _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, Bd. viii., p. 196.

[155] J. G. Pfleiderer, _Die Genesis des Mythus der Indogermanischen
Völker_, p. 48.

[156] References in Pietschmann, _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, Bd. x., p.
159, who points out that fetishism should be, as a term, confined to the
cult and not applied to the content of a religion.

[157] Rialle, _La Mythologie Comparée_, ch. i.

[158] Prof. Granger remarks that “the influence of the fetish is
interpreted as a kind of life of which the fetish is the seat.”—_Worship
of the Romans_, p. 201. Bastian defines it as “an incorporation of a
subjective emotional state,” and his disciple Achelis recognises that it
is not a stadium of religious development. See his _Moderne Völkerkunde_,
p. 366.

[159] The insufficiency of animism as a theory of primitive religions has
been previously urged by Van Ende, _Histoire Naturelle de la Croyance_,
p. 21. Like fetishism and shamanism, animism should be regarded, not as a
form or stadium of religion, but, to use Castren’s excellent expression,
“nur ein Moment in der Götterlehre.” _Finnische Mythologie_, Einleitung.

[160] Dorsey, _Siouan Cults_, p. 433; the _Popol Vuh_, _passim_.

[161] Hale, _Ethnog. and Philol. of the U. S. Exploring Expd._, p. 55.

[162] E. T. Dalton, _Ethnology of Bengal_, p. 258.

[163] See remarks of W. W. Newell in his introduction to Fanny D. Bergen,
_Current Superstitions_ (_Mems. Amer. Folk-lore Society_, vol. iv.).

[164] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, Bd. ii., s. 316; Ling Roth, _Natives of
Sarawak_, vol. ii., App., p. cxcviii.; Brinton, _Myths of the New World_,
p. 154; Curr, _The Australian Race_, vol. ii., p. 48. The moon was sacred
to Tina, the chief god of the Etruscans. Müller, _Die Etrusker_, Bd. ii.,
p. 43. Ně dîdâ, better known as Dido, has been identified with the moon
as the leading deity of the Carthaginians and Phœnicians. Otto Meltzer,
_Geschichte der Karthager_, Bd. i., s. 128. Danu, the goddess who
presided over the Irish pantheon, the _tuatha de Danann_, was the moon
(from _daon_, to rise).

[165] Montesinos, _Ancien Perou_, p. 17; Venegas, _Hist of California_,
p. 107; Smyth, _Aborigines of Victoria_, vol. i., p. 459.

[166] Brincker in _Globus_, Bd. lxviii., p. 97.

[167] Martin de Leon, _Camino del Cielo_, fol. 101.

[168] Montesinos, _Ancien Perou_, pp. 14-16; Ximenes, _Origen de los
Indios de Guatemala_, p. 157.

[169] Sir George Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, p. 5; Egede, _Nachrichten
von Grönland_, s. 137.

[170] _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, Bd. ix. The Eskimo called it _Sillam
Eipane_, winds-house. Egede, _u. s._

[171] The urn or vase was, in classical antiquity, the emblem of the
fecundating waters (Guigniaut, _Religions de l’Antiquité_, tom. i.,
p. 509). Vases full of water were interred with the dead in Peru to
symbolise the life beyond. Meyen, _Die Ureinwohner von Peru_, p. 29.

[172] _Kalewala_, Runa iv.

[173] Probably for this reason the ceremonial law of the Bushmen,
especially that relating to puberty and marriage, enjoins “to avoid the
wrath of the Water.” Bleek, _Bushman Folk-lore_, p. 18.

[174] Compare Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, Bd. ii., s. 315 (after Steller),
with Man, in _Jour. Anthrop. Soc._, vol. xii., p. 163.

[175] The specific effect of certain colours on the sub-consciousness,
and thus on the religious emotions, is practically recognised in sacred
art; but so far as I know this has not been made a subject of study
by the experimental psychologist. Allowance must always be made for
association of ideas; as when the Mozambique negroes paint the images of
their bad spirits white, on account of their hatred of Europeans!

[176] Arnobius, _Adversus Gentes_, lib. vii., cap. 49.

[177] Fornander, _The Polynesian Race_, _u. s._; Hale, _Ethnog. and
Philol_., p. 25.

[178] Calloway, _Relig. System of the Amazulus_, p. 34; Hahn, _Tsuni
ǁGoam_, p. 91; Garcia, _Origen de los Indios_, lib. iv., cap. 26.

[179] _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, vols. v., p. 412, x., p. 280.

[180] They were called _huacanqui_. Montesinos, _Mems. Hist. sur l’ancien
Perou_, p. 161.

[181] Garcia, _Origen de los Indios_, lib. iv., cap. 26; Torquemada,
_Monarquia Indiana_, lib. vi., cap. 41.

[182] Hale, _Ethnog. and Philol. of the U. S. Explor. Exped._, p. 97.

[183] Hopkins, _Religions of India_, p. 97.

[184] Clark, _Indian Sign Language_, p. 241; Matthews, _Ethnog. of the
Hidatsa_, p. 48, etc.

[185] See Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, _passim_.

[186] See, for illustrative examples, my _Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphics_,
p. 49, etc.; and comp. Keary, _Outlines of Primitive Belief_, p. 63, _sq._

[187] A. d’Orbigny, _L’Homme Américain_, tome ii., p. 365.

[188] Dorsey, _Siouan Cults_, pp. 390, 455; Alice C. Fletcher in _Proc.
Amer. Assoc. Adv. Science_, 1895 and 1896; Brinton, _Myths of New World_,
pp. 118, 119, and _Nagualism_, pp. 42, 47, 48.

[189] As suggested by E. Bonavia, _Flora of the Assyrian Monuments_
(1894). This is a more likely interpretation than that of Dr. Tylor, that
the conical object is the inflorescence of the male date palm; as it is
in some bas-reliefs shown presented toward a city gate, a person, etc.

[190] Fechner, _Nana, oder das Seelenleben der Pflanze_.

[191] Curr, _The Australian Race_, vol. ii., p. 199; Palmer in _Jour.
Anthrop. Inst._, vol. xiii., p. 292.

[192] A. d’Orbigny, _L’Homme Américain_, tom. i., p. 240.

[193] A careful discussion of “Höhencultus,” by Baron von Andrian, may be
found in the _Bericht der Deutschen Anthrop. Gesellschaft_, August, 1889.
He believes the earliest form to have been that of the individualised
height; later, that of its cosmic relations.

[194] On the Mexican cave-god, Oztoteotl, see my _Nagualism_, pp. 38-41.

[195] Walcott, _Sacred Archæology_, pp. 233, 236, etc.

[196] Dalton, _Ethnology of Bengal_, p. 59; Ling Roth, _Natives of
Sarawak_, vol. ii., App., p. clxx.

[197] M. d’Estrey, in _L’Anthropologie_, tom. iii., pp. 712, _sq._, has
made an interesting study of the lizard symbol in Polynesia, to which
much could be added from other fields of primitive life.

[198] As Keary well says: “The essence of primitive belief lies not in
any likeness to humanity, but in differences from it.” _Outlines of
Prim. Belief_, p. 26. The Neo-Platonic doctrine of “emanation” led to
the belief that a man might become so filled with the divine essence as
to become divine himself. This was the claim of Simon the Magician, who
“became confessedly a god to his silly followers,” says Hippolytus in his
_Refutation of all Heresies_, bk. vi., cap. 13.

[199] _Die Etrusker_, Bd. ii., s. 111.

[200] Speaking of Jupiter, this fiery preacher exclaims: “Nor is there
any kind of baseness in which you do not associate his name with
passionate lusts.”—_Adversus Gentes_, lib. v., cap. 22.

[201] Howitt, in _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, vol. xiii., pp. 192, 194; vol.
xiv., p. 313.

[202] Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, p. 41; Herzog und
Plitt, _Real-Encyclopädie für Prot. Theologie_, _s. v._ Gebet, etc.

[203] Hopkins, _Religions of India_, p. 412.

[204] Calloway, _Religious System of the Amazulu_, p. 34.

[205] As examples, I may name Unkululu, among the Zulus (Calloway,
_Relig. System of the Amazulu_, pp. 40, 43); Singbonga, of the
Munga-Kohls (Jellinghaus, in _Zeit. für Ethnologie_, Bd. iii., p. 330);
the Hunahpu of the Quiches (_Popol Vuh_, p. 1); the Ahsonnuth of the
Navahoes (_8th Rep. Bur. Ethnol._, p. 275); etc. I have discussed the
psychic origin of androgynous deities in _The Religious Sentiment_, pp.
66, _sqq._ It was also strong in the early Christian Church, Origen and
others of the fathers teaching that the Holy Ghost was the feminine
principle in God (C. J. Wood, _Survivals in Christianity_, p. 63).

[206] These were frequent in quite primitive faiths. Some of the priests
of ancient Mexico, for example, wholly extirpated the genitalia.—Davila
Padilla, _Hist. de la Prov. de Mexico_, lib. ii., cap. 88. Comp.
Charlevoix, _Journal Historique_, p. 350.

[207] I have pointed out that in various American dialects, as the
Chipeway and Cree, the Maya, Quichua, etc., there are words of native
origin, which were used to convey the notion of the love of the gods
in pure and high senses. See the article on “The Conception of Love in
American Languages,” in _Essays of an Americanist_, pp. 416, 421, 428,
etc.

[208] Otto Gruppe, quoted by Schrader.

[209] _Religion of the Semites_, p. 18.

[210] The idea of mimicry survived long, and indeed still exists, in what
is called “sympathetic magic”; when, for instance, to produce blindness
in an enemy, an image is made of him and its eyes transfixed with thorns.
Compare Lenormant, _Chaldean Magic_, p. 12.

[211] _Myths of the New World_, p. 17.

[212] Curr, _The Australian Race_, vol. ii., pp. 66, 67.

[213] Cogolludo, _Historia de Yucatan_, lib. iv., cap. viii.

[214] Brinton, _Nagualism_, p. 53.

[215] Freihold, _Die Lebensgeschichte der Menschheit_, p. 134. His
expressions are: 1. Das Menschenwerden des Göttlichen; and, 2. Die
Vergötterung des Menschen.

[216] _Religion of the Semites_, p. 263. This statement will also be
considered in the sixth lecture of this series.

[217] Indeed, among the Patagonian Indians, according to a competent
observer, there are no fixed religious ceremonies whatever, except
those of a personal character, referring to births, marriages, deaths
etc.—George C. Musters, _Among the Patagonians_, chap. v.

[218] The anaphora, remarks the Rev. John M. Neale, in his _History of
the Holy Eastern Church_, vol. ii., chap, i., has always been “by far the
most important part” of the Christian liturgies. It recurs in nearly all
primitive worship.

[219] Granger, _Worship of the Romans_, pp. 272, 303, etc.

[220] Grimm, _Teutonic Mythology_, vol. i., p. 42; Robertson Smith,
_Religion of the Semites_, p. 260; Payne Knight, _Ancient Art_, p. 50.

[221] _Indian Sign Language_, pp. 167-70.

[222] _Teutonic Mythology_, vol. i., p. 42.

[223] Von Tschudi, _Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Alten Peru_, p. 156.

[224] See _Myths of the New World_, pp. 112, _sq._

[225] See Richard Andree’s remarks on “die Masken im Kultus,” in his
_Ethnographische Parallelen_, _Neue Folge_, p. 109, _sq._

[226] Jacob Grimm, _Teutonic Mythology_, vol. i., p. 48, _sq._

[227] A. B. Meyer, in _Globus_, Bd. lxvii., p. 334.

[228] The terms “honorific” and “piacular” were, I believe, first
suggested by Dr. W. Robertson Smith. They are very appropriate.

[229] Holtzmann, _Deutsche Mythologie_, p. 232.

[230] Oviedo, _Historia de las Indias_, lib. x., cap. xi.

[231] Balboa, _Histoire du Perou_, pp. 125-7.

[232] Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, vol. ii., p. 31.

[233] Sahagun, _Historia de la Nueva España_, lib. i.

[234] Mrs. M. C. Stevenson, in _An. Rep. Bureau of Ethnology_, vol. xi.,
p. 132.

[235] Dorsey, _Siouan Cults_, p. 511.

[236] A. d’Orbigny, _L’Homme Américain_, tom. i., p. 237.

[237] Examples in my _Native Calendar of Central America_, p. 18. It was
a favourite amulet among the Crees (Mackenzie, _Hist. of the Fur Trade_,
p. 86).

[238] Achelis, _Moderne Völkerkunde_, p. 370; Man, in _Jour. Anthrop.
Inst._, vol. xii., p. 172.

[239] Charlevoix, _Hist. de la Nouvelle France_, ch. vi. Sprinkling the
new-born child as a religious ceremony prevailed in New Zealand and
throughout Polynesia. (Fornander, _The Polynesian Race_, vol. i., p. 236.)

[240] Cogolludo, _Historia de Yucatan_, lib. iv., cap. vi. The same
belief prevailed in some African tribes; see Achelis, _Moderne
Völkerkunde_, p. 393.

[241] H. R. Schoolcraft, _Oneóta_, pp. 331, 456.

[242] _Notices of East Florida by a Recent Traveller_, p. 79.

[243] Gregg, _Commerce of the Prairies_, vol. ii., p. 271.

[244] Examples in E. S. Hartland’s _Science of Fairy Tales_, p. 309.

[245] R. Andree, _Ethnographische Parallelen_, p. 177.

[246] The _Bora_ has been often described, by no one better than Mr. A.
W. Howitt in _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, vol. vii., p. 242, _sq._, and vol.
xiv., p. 306, _sq._

[247] J. G. Kohl, _Kitchi Gami_, p. 228.

[248] Captain Clark, _Indian Sign Language_, p. 254. D’Orbigny describes
the bloody ordeals through which girls in South American tribes were
obliged to pass. _L’Homme Américain_, tom. i., pp. 193, 237.

[249] Curr, _The Australian Race_ vol. i., pp. 45-50; Palmer, in _Jour.
Anthrop. Inst._, vol. xiii., p. 301.

[250] See Post, in _Globus_, B. lxvii., s. 274.

[251] Palmer, _ubi supra_, p. 301.

[252] Lafitau, _Mœurs des Sauvages Américains_, lib. ii., ch. vi.

[253] Musters asserts this positively of the Tehuelche and other tribes
(_Among the Patagonians_, chap. v.); Captain Clark, whose long experience
among our Western tribes constituted him an authority of the first rank,
takes pains to correct the notion that _among the natives_ wives are
bought, although they are by white men (_Indian Sign Language_, pp.
245-6). It would be easy to multiply references to the same effect.

[254] Bleek, _Bushman Folk-lore_, p. 13.

[255] _Worship of the Romans_, p. 67.

[256] This has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt by Dr. S. K.
Steinmetz in a remarkable study of “Endo-cannibalismus,” in the _Archiv
für Anthropologie_, 1896.

[257] Granger, _ubi supra_, p. 37. The word “burial” in ethnology is used
to denote all modes of disposal of the corpse. This is etymologically
correct. See Yarrow, _Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians_, p.
5.

[258] Navarrete, _Viages_, tom. iii., p. 401; Dumont, _Mems. Hist. sur la
Louisiane_, tom. i., p. 178; Gumilla, _Hist. del Orinoco_, p. 201. Coréal
says, the widows esteemed it a privilege to be buried with the corpse and
disputed among themselves for the honour, _Voiages_, tom. ii., pp. 93,
94. The Taenzas had the same customs as the Natchez, Tonty, _Mémoire_, in
French, _Hist. Colls. of Louisiana_, p. 61.

[259] Arthur J. Evans, in _Proc. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Science_, 1896, Sect.
H.

[260] Stephen Powers, _Indians of California_, pp. 181, 207. The
Tasmanians and Fuegians, probably the lowest of known tribes, burned
their dead. Hyades et Deniker, _Mission Scientifique_, p. 379; Fenton,
_History of Tasmania_, p. 95. Some tribes gave as a reason for burning
their dead that otherwise bears and wolves would eat the corpse, and the
soul would be obliged to take on their forms.—_Pres. Message and Ac.
Docs._, 1851, pt. iii., p. 506.

[261] Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, _Itinerario para Parrocos de Indios_,
p. 185 (Madrid, 1771).

[262] Clark, _Indian Sign Language_, p. 263.

[263] K. T. Preuss, in the _Bastian Festschrift_.

[264] _Anthropologie des Naturvölker_, Bd. i., p. 459.

[265] The application of the blood, observes Professor Granger, “bound
together in some way those who were present at the rite” (_Worship of the
Romans_, p. 210). This subject is fully discussed by Dr. H. C. Trumbull
in his works, _The Blood Covenant_, and _The Threshold Covenant_.

[266] Castren, in the Introduction to his _Finnische Mythologie_, has
some excellent remarks on the beneficial effects of shamanism. It is an
effort to free the human mind from the shackles of blind natural forces;
it recognises the dependence of the subjective on an objective will, etc.

[267] _Myth and Science_, p. 41.

[268] Hahn, _Tsuni ǁGoam_, p. 21.

[269] Ling Roth, _Natives of Sarawak_, vol. i., pp. 259, 271, 282; vol.
ii., App., p. clxxv.

[270] Walthouse, in _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, vol. v., p. 415.

[271] Nuñez de la Vega, _Constituciones Diocesanas de Chiapas_, fol. 9.

[272] The locally famous Maria Candelaria. At the head of fifteen
thousand warriors, she defied the Spanish army for nearly a year, and,
though defeated, was never captured. Her story is scantily recorded by
Vicente Pineda, in his _Historia de las Sublevaciones Indigenas en el
Estado de Chiapas_, pp. 38-70.

[273] Otfried Müller, _Die Etrusker_, Bd. ii., ss. 77, 78.

[274] Compare Keary, _Outlines of Primitive Belief_, p. 60; and Maury,
_La Magie et Astrologie_, p. 386, _sq._

[275] Geo. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 9; Dr. Tautain, in _L’Anthropologie_, tome
vii., p. 548.

[276] On the ordeal, see Post, _Ethnologisches Jurisprudenz_, Bd. ii.,
ss. 459, _sq._, 479; Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, Bd. i.,
s. 461. The assertion by some writers that the ordeal was not known to
the American Indians is incorrect. For example, Captain Clark recounts
those to test the virtue of women who have been accused. _Indian Sign
Language_, pp. 45, 208.

[277] See S. K. Steinmetz on “Der Zweikampf als Ordal” in his
_Ethnologische Studien zur ersten Entwicklung der Strafe_, Bd. ii., s.
76, _sq._

[278] Post, _ubi supra_, Bd. ii., s. 478.

[279] Adair, _Hist. of the N. American Indians_, p. 158; Boscana, _Acc.
of the Indians of California_, p. 262.

[280] This is presented admirably and at length by M. Kulischer in an
article “Der Dualismus der Ethik bei den primitiven Völkern,” in the
_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, Bd. xvii., pp. 205, _sqq._ He also sees
clearly enough that the same principle, masked and denied though it be,
reigns to-day. The “categorical imperative” of Kant, is as far from
realisation as is “the golden rule.”

[281] There were, of course, some hobgoblins always ready to eat up or
injure man; but not for any moral or ethical reason. “They afflict men,
not out of anger or to punish sin, but because it is their nature to do
so,” as Dalton says of the devils of the Oraons. _Ethnology of Bengal_,
p. 256.

[282] This explains what Dr. Robertson Smith, in his _Religion of the
Semites_, p. 140, says is so difficult to grasp,—that the primitive idea
of holiness is apart from personal character, and even shameful wretches
could lay claim to it. Entirely parallel instances are found in the
history of Christian heresies, as the Anomians and Anabaptists, who were
so holy that they could commit no sin, and hence allowed themselves the
wildest licence.

[283] It is in this sense that Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote: “Wahre Tugend
ist unverträglich mit auf Autorität geglaubter Religion.” (_Gesammelte
Werke_, Bd. vii., p. 72.) This is a cardinal principle in studying the
history of ethics.

[284] Ling Roth, _Natives of Sarawak_, vol. i., p. 271; Hoffman, _Secret
Societies of the Ojibway_, _passim_.

[285] They were called the Abecedarians, because they distrusted even the
ABC. Some learned scholars actually threw away their books and joined
them.

[286] Bain, _The Senses and the Intellect_, p. 607.

[287] _The Descent of Man_, p. 581.

[288] As Wilhelm von Humboldt remarked: “Das Streben der Natur ist auf
etwas Unbeschränktes gerichtet.” The meaning of this profound observation
is ably discussed by Steinthal, _Die sprachphilosophischen Werke W. von
Humboldt’s_, p. 178.

[289] _Bull. Amer. Museum Nat. History_, vol. viii., p. 227.

[290] They were preserved in the original tongue by the first
missionaries, Sahagun, Olmos, Bautista, etc., and have, in part, been
published.

[291] This is further set forth in Rostock, _Das Religionswesen der
rohesten Naturvölker_, p. 145, sq.; and Curr, _The Australian Race_, vol.
i., pp. 51-54.

[292] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, Bd. ii., s. 309.

[293] Walthouse, in _Jour. Anthrop. Soc._, vol. xiv., p. 189.

[294] The _amok_ of the Malays, the _mali-mali_ of the Tagalese, etc., is
a maniacal religious psychosis in which the subject will rush violently
through a street, killing or wounding any one he meets. See Dr. Rasch’s
discussion of it in _Centralblatt für Anthropologie_, vol. i., p. 54, who
considers it a “suggestive influence.” Similar examples are common among
American Indians.

[295] Arnobius, _Adversus Gentes_, bk. ii., cap. 62.

[296] _Worship of the Romans_, p. 211. This was, of course, but one side
of it, though usually the most important.

[297] Professor Lazarus observes: “In der Religion zeigt sich der ganze
Mensch” (_Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_, Bd. i., s. 47). That is,
that the individual in no other condition of mind realises and reveals
his full personality so completely as in that which is created by the
religious sentiment.

[298] _Judaism and Christianity_, pp. 5-7.

[299] The literature relating to these august characters in American
legendary literature is presented in my _American Hero-Myths_, _passim;_
also, _Myths of the New World_, pp. 336, 337.

[300] _Ancient Egyptian Religion_, Introduction.


THE END.




INDEX OF AUTHORITIES.


  Achelis, Th., 134, 194, 195

  Adair, J., 98, 226

  Andree, R., 96, 126, 184, 197

  Andrian, von, 155

  Arnobius, 71, 100, 147, 166, 246

  Augustine, St., 29


  Bain, A., 233

  Balboa, M. C., 190

  Bastian, A., 9, 134

  Bautista, J., 241

  Bergen, Fanny D., 139

  Bertonio, L., 67

  Bleek, W. H., 57, 113, 144, 205

  Bonavia, E., 152

  Boscana, Y. de, 226

  Bourke, J. G., 32

  Brincker, H., 142

  Broca, P., 46

  Bruno, G., 136

  Buchmann, Prof., 8

  Bucke, M., 52

  Buckle, 81


  Calloway, Bishop, 31, 52, 57, 66, 82, 93, 147, 169

  Castren, A., 14, 78, 83, 218

  Chapman, J., 245

  Charlevoix, P., 170, 195

  Cicero, M. T., 180

  Clark, W. P., 14, 70, 72, 76, 103, 181, 205, 213

  Clodd, E., 21

  Codrington, R. H., 63, 131

  Cogolludo, P., 175, 195

  Coleridge, S. T., 171

  Comte, A., 133

  Conant, L. L., 122

  Coréal, F., 208

  Cuoq, M., 20, 93

  Curr, E. M., 13, 57, 58, 65, 90, 140, 174

  Cushing, F. H., 125, 221


  Dalton, E. F., 89, 137, 160, 230

  Darwin, Ch., 36, 49, 110, 234

  Davis, T. Rhys, 28

  Disraeli, B., 87

  Dolbear, Prof., 85

  Dorsey, J. O., 136, 152, 193

  Dyer, L., 62


  Egede, P., 143

  Ende, Van, M., 87, 136

  Ephrem, Saint, 51, 100, 125

  d’Estrey, M., 161

  Evans, Arthur J., 209


  Fechner, 153

  Fenton, 210

  Fewkes, J. W., 39

  Fletcher, Alice, 60, 152

  Flügel, Dr., 14

  Fornander, A., 63, 77, 126

  Frazer, J. G., 21, 108, 117, 151, 191

  Freihold, F., 74, 175

  Friedmann, Dr., 14


  Garcia, G. de, 148

  Gill, W. W., 59, 69, 74, 77, 87, 100

  Gough, A. E., 51, 57, 68, 84

  Granger, F., 6, 38, 66, 97, 134, 180, 206, 217, 247

  Gregg, Capt., 196

  Grey, George, 79, 91, 104

  Grimm, J., 76, 96, 128, 180, 182, 186

  Grimme, H., 40

  Gruppe, Otto, 172

  Guigniaut, 144

  Gumilla, P., 208


  Hahn, Th., 75, 77, 220

  Hale, Horatio, 16, 63, 70, 95, 121, 125, 136, 149

  Hartland, E. L., 8, 197

  Hasselt, von, 132

  Helmholtz, Prof., 85

  Hervé, G., 46

  Herzog and Plitt, 168

  Hippolytus, 162

  Hoernes, M., 35

  Hoffman, W., 233

  Holtzmann, 188

  Holub, H., 97

  Honegger, J. J., 9, 83

  Hovelacque, A., 46

  Hopkins, E. W., 79, 149, 168

  Howitt, A. B., 72, 98, 168, 198

  Humboldt, W. von, 230, 235

  Hyades, Dr., 104


  Jellinghaus, 169


  Kalewala, the, 144

  Kant, I., 228

  Keary, C. F., 117, 151, 162, 223

  Keil, Prof., 121

  Klemm, K., 57, 65, 95, 109

  Knight, P., 51, 180

  Kohl, J. G., 199

  Koran, the, 99, 225

  Kuhn, Prof., 112, 115

  Kulischer, M., 228


  Lafitau, P., 204

  Lang, A., 47

  Lazarus, Prof., 247

  Lenormant, F., 89, 91, 96, 173

  Leon, Martin de, 142

  Lubbock, Sir John, 27, 30


  Mackenzie, A., 194

  Maistre, J. de, 43

  Man, E. W., 75, 110, 126, 145

  Matthews, W., 50, 63, 106, 150

  Maury, A., 66, 223

  Meltzer, Otto, 140

  Meyen, H., 144

  Meyer, A. B., 187

  Middendorf, Dr., 59

  Mirandola, P. de, 92

  Montenegro, A. de la P., 212

  Montesinos, F., 141, 148

  Morice, P., 116

  Morris, J. B., 51, 100

  Mortillet, G. de, 34, 35

  Müller, F. Max, 115

  Müller, O., 140, 164, 222

  Musters, G. C., 77, 177, 205


  Navarrete, M., 208

  Neale, J. M., 5, 179

  Nevins, Dr., 52

  Newell, W. W., 139


  Olmos, A. de, 241

  d’Orbigny, A., 151, 155, 200

  Oviedo, F., 190


  Padilla, D., 170

  Palmer, E., 17, 153, 202

  Paulsen, F., 85

  Peschel, O., 44

  Petitot, E., 125

  Pfleiderer, J. G., 28, 133

  Pietschmann, R., 24, 133

  Pinches, 62

  Pineda, V., 222

  Pinsero, Prof., 36

  Popol Vuh, the, 91, 99, 136, 169

  Post, A. H., 6, 203, 225, 226

  Powers, Stephen, 210

  Preuss, K. T., 213

  Putnam, F. W., 119


  Rasch, Dr., 246

  Ratzel, F., 44

  Reclus, E., 70

  Rialle, G. de, 133

  Ridley, W., 51

  Romanes, G. J., 85

  Roskoff, G., 28, 31, 244

  Roth, H. Ling, 39, 67, 77, 94, 102, 140, 160


  Sahagun, B., 68, 99, 106, 191

  Sayce, Professor, 20, 49, 90, 99

  Scherer, E., 112

  Schoolcraft, H. H., 125, 196

  Schrader, Prof., 22, 28, 70, 128

  Schurtz, H., 44

  Schwaner, Dr., 39

  Schwartz, F. L. W., 80

  Shelley, P. B., 42, 139

  Smith, W. Robertson, 46, 112, 168, 172, 177, 180, 187, 230

  Smyth, B. B., 52, 74, 80

  Spencer, Herbert, 30, 42

  Spinoza, B., 47, 136

  Steinen, K. von den, 65, 72

  Steinmetz, S. R., 71, 73, 206, 225

  Steinthal, H., 235

  Stevenson, Maria C., 193

  Stoll, Otto, 56, 99, 101

  Sully, James, 14


  Tautain, Dr., 121

  Thiele, C. P., 38, 251

  Tolstoï, Count, 87

  Tonty, S. de, 208

  Torquemada, P., 148

  Toy, C. H., 3, 249

  Trumbull, H. C., 217

  Tschudi, J. von, 61, 183

  Turner, George, 223

  Turner, L. M., 65

  Turner, W. Y., 31

  Tyler, E. B., 135, 153


  Vega, N. de la, 222

  Vignoli, T., 219

  Venegas, M., 141


  Waitz, Th., 132, 213, 225

  Walcott, 159

  Walthouse, J., 89, 221, 245

  Westcott, S., 121

  Willoughby, C. C., 119

  Wood, C. J., 169


  Ximenes, F., 142


  Yarrow, H. C., 207




INDEX OF SUBJECTS.


  Abecedarians, sect of, 233

  Accadians, the, 23

  Aditi, a Sanscrit Deity, 83

  African tribes, 26

  Ages of the World, the, 125

  Aiapakal, deity of the Yahgans, 104

  Air, worship of, 143

  Algonkian myths, 70, 72, 150

  Alphabet, origin of, 241

  Amazulus, the, 57, 169

  American culture indigenous, 24

  Amok, the, of Malays, 246

  Anaphora, influence of the, 179

  Ancestor-worship, 42, 70, 71

  Andaman Islanders, beliefs of, 72, 75, 113, 115, _see_ Mincopies.

  Androgynous deities, 169

  Animism as a religious theory, 46, 135

  Anthropism, 162

  Anthropology, defined, 1

  Apache Indians, the, 32, 33

  Archæology, what it teaches, 18

  Architecture, religious, 243

  Art and religion, 233

  Aryans, the early, 22

  Asherim, the sacred pole, 250

  Atala, deity in Borneo, 77

  Atheism, in Buddhism, 28

  ” among Africans, 31

  Aurora Australis and Borealis, 141

  Australians, native, 13, 16, 17, 25, 51, 52, 65, 72, 126, 140, 153,
    158, 167, 174, 198

  Automatism of the human mind, 6

  “Auto-suggestion,” 55

  Avatea, _see_ Vatea

  Awonawilona, god of the Zuñis, 124

  Aztec prayers, 106

  Aztecs, the, 126, 144, 145, 167, 191, 240


  Babylonia, ancient, 20, 23

  Bacchanalia, the, 185, 222

  Baiame, an Australian deity, 74

  Baptism, rite of, 144, 145

  Basutos, their knowledge of God, 51

  Battle, trial by, 225

  “Beatific vision,” the, 53, 114

  Beauty, the ideal of, 234

  Bechuanas, beliefs of, 82

  Beth-el, in Semitic myth, 146

  Bilians, inspired women, 220

  Bird as a sacred animal, 158

  Birth, rites relating to, 193

  Bi-sexual deities, 169

  Bitol, a deity of the Mayas, 123

  Black drink of Creek Indians, 67

  Bones, beliefs respecting, 131, 211

  “Book-religions,” 50

  Boonbolong, a magic word, 90

  Bora, the Australian, 119, 198, 240

  Borneo, natives of, _see_ Dyaks

  Bororos, the, 65

  Brazil, native tribes of, 65, 67, 140

  Brutes, devoid of religious sentiment, 36;
    worship of, 157

  Buddhism, alleged in America, 24

  Buddhism, atheistic in creed, 28

  Burial, modes of, 207

  Bushmen, the, 57, 113, 144, 205


  Cabalistic doctrines, 92

  Canaras, a Dravidian tribe, 148

  Cannibalism, 17, 190, 206, 208

  Carrier Indians, myths of, 116

  Cause, the notion of, 44, 45

  Caves as holy places, 156

  Ceremonial circuit, the, 182

  Chaldean mythology, 145, 152, 161

  Charm-songs, 89, 93

  Child mind compared to Savage mind, 14

  Chinese magical rites, 175

  Choctaws, myths of, 98, 196

  Colours, symbolism of, 146, 236

  Comanche Indians, the, 72

  Commensality in rites, 181

  Communal rites, 177;
    marriage, 201

  Comparative method, the, 5

  Cosmic consciousness, 52

  Cosmical concepts, the, 118

  Couvade, the, explained, 193

  Creation, the, how understood, 123 _sq._

  Creek Indians, the, 67

  Cross, symbolism of the, 152

  Crowd, influence of, 178

  Cuchi, an Australian deity, 80


  Dakotas, religious views of the, 60

  Danu, an Irish Goddess, 140

  Dawn, myths of the, 75

  Dead, cult of the, 70, 71

  Death, rites relating to, 206

  Deluge, myth of the, 122, 126

  Demoniac possession, 52

  Diana, the Ephesian, 147

  Dido, a moon goddess, 140

  Dieyeris, an Australian tribe, 140

  Divination, methods of, 111

  Drama, of the Universe, 122;
    religious, origin of, 183 _sq._

  Dravidian tribes, the, 26, 105

  Dreams and dreaming, 64 _sqq._

  Dusdachtschish, a Kamtschatkan god, 165

  Dyaks, the, of Borneo, 39, 67, 123, 158, 220


  Êa, a Babylonian deity, 99, 145, 161

  Earth, worship of the, 145

  Easter Island, images in, 83

  Echo in myths, 86

  Egg as a religious symbol, 159

  Egypt, early religions of, 23, 24

  Elements, worship of the, 141

  Emanation, the doctrine of, 162, 165

  Endymion, fable of, 37

  Epochs of Nature, the, 125

  Eponymous ancestors, 161

  Eskimos, the, 65, 72, 158

  Ethics and religion, 228 _sq._

  Ethiopians, the, 26

  Ethnology defined, 2

  Etruscans, the, 23, 142

  Eucharist, heathen analogies to, 191

  Euhemerus, doctrines of, 42

  Evocatio deorum, the, 104


  Family, the primitive, 201, 219

  Fatherhood of God, the, 124, 167

  Fear in religion, 45, 46

  Fetishism explained, 131 _sq._

  Fetish water of Africans, 67

  Finns, beliefs of the, 73, 192

  Fire, worship of, 142

  Fish in sacred art, 161

  Flint stone in myths, 149

  Folk-lore, value of, 20

  Four as sacred number, 120

  Freedom, limited in savage tribes, 244

  Frog as a sacred animal, 161


  “Genius,” explained, 165

  Ghosts, the fear of, 73;
    beliefs about, 76

  Gnosis, the esoteric, 245

  “God,” derivation of, 61, 62

  God-stones, 149

  Goras, customs of, 89


  Hamites, the, 26

  Happiness and religion, 247

  Hidatsa Indians, the, 63, 150

  High places sacred, 155

  Hills sacred, 77, 155

  Hill of God, 77, 155

  Hill of Heaven, the, 76, 155

  Historic method, the, 5

  Holiness, primitive idea of, 108, 230

  Homi, deity of Hottentots, 77

  _Hua_, a sacred interjection, 61

  Huaca in Peru, 102, 182

  Huemac, an Aztec deity, 82

  Human sacrifices, 189 _sq._

  Huracan, an American deity, 82

  Hypnogogic hallucinations, 66


  “Ideal of Reason,” the, 44

  Idolatry in early religion, 238

  Illogical reasoning of savages, 13

  Incineration of dead, 210

  “Indigetes dii,” the Roman, 71

  _Indigitamenta_, of Romans, 97

  Infinite, the perception of the, 45

  Inhumation of dead, 209

  “Inner light,” the, 43

  Insanity, of savage mind, 14

  Ipurinas, a Brazilian tribe, 140

  Isis, the many-named, 99

  Itelmen, a Kamtschatkan tribe, 165


  Jade, in myths, 149

  Joyous character of early rites, 179

  Jupiter, his base traits, 166


  Kaaba, a stone, 147

  Kamtschatkans, the, 57, 65, 109, 165, 244

  Ka-ne, a Polynesian deity, 74

  Khonds, a Dravidian tribe, 105

  Knowledge, tree of, 153

  Koders, a Dravidian tribe, 149

  Ku, a Polynesian deity, 121

  Kutka, god of the Kamtschatkans, 109, 166


  Language and myth, 114 _sq._

  Law, the ceremonial, 218, 224

  Life and Death, ideas of, 68 _sq._

  Life, as a divine attribute, 68;
    and its transmission, 164, 200

  Light, the adoration of, 74 _sq._

  Linguistics, the study of, 19, 35, 115;
    influence on religious ideas, 20, 115

  Liturgy, power of the, 178

  Lizard, the, as a symbol, 161

  Lono, a Polynesian deity, 121

  Love as a root of religion, 170

  Love charms, 148


  Magic, sympathetic, 173

  Magical rites, 175

  Mahopa, a name of divinity, 63

  Mamit, the curse, 90

  Man worshipped as a god, 161

  _Mana_ in Polynesian dialects, 62

  Mandan Indians, 13, 150

  Mangaians, myths of, 77, 86

  Manito of Algonquins, 102, 125

  Mantras, power of, 89

  Maoris, the, 83, 103, 143

  Maria Candelaria, a heroine, 222

  Marriage, rites relating to, 200, 219

  Masks, religious use of, 184

  “Master of Life,” the, 69

  _Mâyâ_, the doctrine of, 68

  Mayas, the tribe of, 123, 125, 151, 156, 174, 199;
    shamans, 150

  Meday sticks, 242

  Medicine-men, Indian, 52;
    women, 221

  Melanesians, beliefs of, 131, 148

  Menhirs, of Celts, 149

  Mexicans, ancient, 125, 148, 149, 151, 155, 179

  Mexico, ancient, 24

  Michoacan, Indians of, 69

  Milky way, worship of, 141

  Mincopies, beliefs of the, 72, 109, 115, 126, _see_ Andamanese

  Molemo, an African deity, 97

  Moon-worship, 139 _sq._

  Motu, a tribe, 31

  Mourning, customs of, 212

  Moxos, an American tribe, 155

  Mummies, why made, 211

  Mumpal, an Australian deity, 81

  Music in religion, 240

  Mysticism, religious, source of, 56

  Mythical cycles, the Universal, 118

  Myths, meaning of, 112 _sq._


  Nagualism, references to, 67, 156, 175

  Nahuas, myths of the, 148, 151, 195, 196

  Name, the sacred, 93 _sq._

  Name-soul, the, 96

  Names, rites relating to, 195

  Names of the dead avoided, 95

  Nanabojou, a hero-god, 70

  Natal, natives of, 52

  Nature, conflict of, 127

  Navahoes, a prayer of the, 105;
    deity of the, 169

  Navel of the Sky, the, 78

  Neolithic period, the, 33

  Nervous susceptibility of savages, 14

  Nicaraguans, customs of, 190

  Njambe, god of the Marutse, 97

  Norns of Teutonic mythology, 121

  Num, god of the Samoyeds, 83

  Numbers, the sacred, 119

  Nurali, an Australian deity, 74, 159


  Oannes, a Chaldean god, 161

  Oaths are ordeals, 226

  One-legged god, the, 98

  Oraons, cult of the, 137, 230

  Ordeals in religions, 225

  Origin of religion, theories about, 41 _sq._

  Osiris, worship of, 24

  Oztoteotl, a Mexican god, 156


  Palæolithic man, 34

  _Papa_, Rock, a god of the Tahitians, 147

  Papuans, customs of, 186

  Paradise, the earthly, 126

  Parjanja, deity in the Vedas, 81

  Parliament of Religions, the, 28

  Patagonians, 177

  Patol, a deity of the Mayas, 123

  Pawnee war song, 67

  Perfection the aim of Religion, 235

  Personality, the Sense of, 49

  Personal rites, 191

  Peru, culture of, 24

  Peruvians, myths and rites of, 141, 142, 148, 190, 251

  Pĕtara, sacred name in Borneo, 102

  _Peyotl_, an intoxicant, 67

  Pilgrimages in primitive religions, 157, 253

  Pita, Father, the Brahmanic, 168

  Places, worship of, 154

  Plant-soul, the, 153

  Pleiades, worship of the, 140

  Po in Polynesian Myths, 125

  Pole, the sacred, 152, 250

  Polynesians, the, 25, 58, 59, 121, 124, 127, 140, 149, 158, 195

  Prayer in primitive faiths, 103 _sq._

  “Primitive” peoples defined, 11

  Prophecy explained, 110

  Psychic automatism, 54

  Psychologic Method, the, 6

  Psychology, experimental, 7

  Puberty, rites relating to, 197

  Pueblo Indians, the, 39

  Puluga, god of the Mincopies, 75, 78, 113, 116


  Quetzalcoatl, a hero-god, 145, 251

  Quiche Indians, the, 72, 155, 169


  Rain-making, rites of, 174

  Reciprocal principle, worship of, 169

  Revelation, universality of, 50

  Ritual in Religion, 172 _sq._

  Rongo, a Polynesian deity, 79


  Sacrifice as a rite, 186 _sq._

  Samoyeds, beliefs of, 14, 67, 83

  Sanctuary, rite of, 226

  Sangsangs of Borneo, 220

  Saviour, myths of the, 128

  Science and religion, 231

  “Science of religion” premature, 3

  Selene, the goddess, 37

  Seminoles, customs of, 196

  Semites, primitive, 23

  Seposition of dead, 209

  Serpent-worship, 160

  Sex in deities, 20

  Shamanism, origin of, 51, 57;
    nature of, 136, 218

  Shamans, their occult powers, 65, 232

  Sibiric tribes, the, 26

  Sioux Indians, prayer of, 106

  Sky, the notions concerning, 76

  Sky-god, the, 78

  Song in religion, 239

  Soul, journey of the, 128

  Souls, the doctrine of, 28, 70 _sq._;
    beliefs concerning, 76

  Star-worship, 140

  Stone Age, the, 33

  Stonehenge, monuments of, 33

  Stones, worship of, 146

  “Sub-limital consciousness,” the, 54

  “Suggestion” explained, 54 _sq._

  Sumerians, gods of, 20, 23

  Sun-worship, 138 _sq._

  Supa, a Samoan god, 223

  Superstition, a form of religion, 27

  Svastika, the, 119, 236

  Swan-maidens, the, 223


  Tabu, the, 32, 38, 108, 156, 222, 230

  Tahitians, myths of the, 147

  Tangaloa, a Polynesian deity, 74, 75, 78, 99

  Tehuelches, myth of, 77

  Tepi, the custom of, 94

  Teutonic rites, 182, 188, 190, 223

  Theoleptic worshippers, 185

  Theology, its aim, 4

  “Theopathy” explained, 56

  Theophorous names, 100

  Thought, creation by, 124

  Three as sacred number, 120

  Thunder in mythology, 80, 81

  Tina, an Etruscan god, 140

  Tinné, an American tribe, 125

  Tonantzin, an Aztec deity, 145

  Tongues, the gift of, 93

  Tota, a Mexican deity, 151, 167

  Totemic animals, the, 161;
    bond, the, 216

  Tree of knowledge, the, 153

  Trees, worship of, 150 _sq._

  Trinities of heathen religions, 121

  Tsuni ǁGoab, a deity of the Hottentots, 75

  Tupa, a deity of the Dyaks, 123

  Turramulun, an Australian god, 98

  Tutelary personal deities, 192

  Tzentals, customs of, 221, 222


  Ukko, deity of Finns, 78

  Umbilical cord, rites respecting, 194

  Unconscious cerebration, 54

  Unity of human intelligence, 9

  Unkululu, deity of the Zulus, 168

  Upanishads, teachings of the, 57, 83


  Varuna, Sanscrit deity, 79

  Vase, symbolism of the, 144

  Vatea, a Polynesian deity, 75

  Veddahs, the, 26

  “Veiled gods” of Etruscans, 165

  Vesta, the goddess, 223

  Virgins of the Sun, 190

  Visual ideas, 130

  Votan, hero-god of the Tzentals, 221

  Vows taken at birth, 193


  _Wakan_, in Dakota, 60, 61;
    in Quichua, 61

  Waking visions, 66

  Water, worship of, 144

  Will as the source of Force, 47 _sq._

  Winds, worship of the, 143

  Witches’ Sabbath, the, 185

  Woman, her position in Religion, 219

  Word, the, in religion, 88 _sq._

  World-soul, belief in a, 136

  Writing, religious origin of, 241


  _Yah_, a sacred interjection, 62

  Yahgans, the, 57, 80, 104, 110, 195

  Yahve, derivations of, 62, 81

  Yetl, a sacred bird, 159

  Yoga philosophy, the, 51

  Yucatan, culture of, 24, 150

  Yurucares, tribe of, 151


  Zi, Chaldean term for spirits, 49

  Zulus, the, their beliefs, 26, 56, 67, 147, 168

  Zuñi Indians, the, 72, 124, 125, 221




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