Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume I Part 29

Aristophanes, too, in the Birds (686) talks of men as (Greek text omitted), figures kneaded of clay. Thus there are sufficient traces in Greek tradition of the savage myth that man was made of clay by some superior being, like Pund-jel in the quaint Australian story.

We saw that among various rude races other theories of the origin of man were current. Men were thought to have come out of a hole in the ground or a bed of reeds, and sometimes the very scene of their first appearance was still known and pointed out to the curious. This myth was current among races who regarded themselves as the only people whose origin needed explanation. Other stories represented man as the fruit of a tree, or the child of a rock or stone, or as the descendant of one of the lower animals. Examples of these opinions in Greek legend are now to be given. In the first place, we have a fragment of Pindar, in which the poet enumerates several of the centres from which different Greek tribes believed men to have sprung. "Hard it is to find out whether Alalkomeneus, first of men, arose on the marsh of Cephissus, or whether the Curetes of Ida first, a stock divine, arose, or if it was the Phrygian Corybantes that the sun earliest saw--men like trees walking;" and Pindar mentions Egyptian and Libyan legends of the same description.(1) The Thebans and the Arcadians held themselves to be "earth-born". "The black earth bore Pelasgus on the high wooded hills,"

says an ancient line of Asius. The Dryopians were an example of a race of men born from ash-trees. The myth of gens virum truncis et duro robore nata, "born of tree-trunk and the heart of oak," had pa.s.sed into a proverb even in Homer's time.(2) Lucian mentions(3) the Athenian myth "that men grew like cabbages out of the earth". As to Greek myths of the descent of families from animals, these will be examined in the discussion of the legend of Zeus.

(1) Preller, Aus. Auf., p. 158.

(2) Virgil Aen., viii. 315; Odyssey, xix. 163; Iliad, ii. xxii. 120; Juvenal, vi. 11. Cf. also Bouche Leclerq, De Origine Generis Humani.

(3) Philops. iii.

CHAPTER XI. SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS.

The origin of a belief in G.o.d beyond the ken of history and of speculation--Sketch of conjectural theories--Two elements in all beliefs, whether of backward or civilised races--The Mythical and the Religious--These may be coeval, or either may be older than the other--Difficulty of study--The current anthropological theory--Stated objections to the theory--G.o.ds and spirits--Suggestion that savage religion is borrowed from Europeans--Reply to Mr. Tylor's arguments on this head--The morality of savages.

"The question of the origin of a belief in Deity does not come within the scope of a strictly historical inquiry. No man can watch the idea of G.o.d in the making or in the beginning. We are acquainted with no race whose beginning does not lie far back in the unpenetrated past. Even on the hypothesis that the natives of Australia, for example, were discovered in a state of culture more backward than that of other known races, yet the inst.i.tutions and ideas of the Australians must have required for their development an incalculable series of centuries.

The notions of man about the Deity, man's religious sentiments and his mythical narratives, must be taken as we find them. There have been, and are, many theories as to the origin of the conception of a supernatural being or beings, concerned with the fortunes of mankind, and once active in the making of the earth and its inhabitants. There is the hypothesis of an original divine tradition, darkened by the smoke of foolish mortal fancies. There is the hypothesis of an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced to man by the very nature of his knowledge and perceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise a finite and an infinite. There is the hypothesis that G.o.ds were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, seeking in his early speculations for the causes of things, and conscious of his own powers as an active cause, projected his own shadow on the mists of the unknown, and peopled the void with figures of magnified non-natural men, his own parents and protectors, and the makers of many of the things in the world.

"Since the actual truth cannot be determined by observation and experiment, the question as to the first germs of the divine conception must here be left unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and examine apart the two chief elements in the earliest as in the latest ideas of G.o.dhead. Among the lowest and most backward, as among the most advanced races, there coexist the MYTHICAL and the RELIGIOUS elements in belief. The rational factor (or what approves itself to us as the rational factor) is visible in religion; the irrational is prominent in myth. The Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in hours of danger and necessity 'yearns after the G.o.ds,' and has present in his heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element.

The same man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always traces back to the belief in a power that is benign and works for righteousness. Myth, even in Homer or the Rig-Veda, perpetually falls back on the old stock of absurd and immoral divine adventures.(1)

(1) M. Knappert here, in a note to the Dutch translation, denies the lowest mythical element to the Hebrews, as their doc.u.ments have reached us.

"It would be rash, in the present state of knowledge, to p.r.o.nounce that the germ of the serious Homeric sense of the justice and power of the Divinity is earlier or later than the germ of the Homeric stories of G.o.ds disguised as animals, or imprisoned by mortals, or kicked out of Olympus. The rational and irrational aspects of mythology and religion may be of coeval antiquity for all that is certainly known, or either of them, in the dark backward of mortal experience, may have preceded the other. There is probably no religion nor mythology which does not offer both aspects to the student. But it is the part of advancing civilisation to adorn and purify the rational element, and to subordinate and supersede the irrational element, as far as religious conservatism, ritual and priestly dogma will permit."

Such were the general remarks with which this chapter opened in the original edition of the present work. But reading, reflection and certain additions to the author's knowledge of facts, have made it seem advisable to state, more fully and forcibly than before, that, in his opinion, not only the puzzling element of myth, but the purer element of a religious belief sanctioning morality is derived by civilised people from a remote past of savagery. It is also necessary to draw attention to a singular religious phenomena, a break, or "fault," as geologists call it, in the religious strata. While the most backward savages, in certain cases, present the conception of a Being who sanctions ethics, and while that conception recurs at a given stage of civilisation, it appears to fade, or even to disappear in some conditions of barbarism.

Among some barbaric peoples, such as the Zulus, and the Red Indians of French Canada when first observed, as among some Polynesians and some tribes of Western and Central Africa little trace of a supreme being is found, except a name, and that name is even occasionally a matter of ridicule. The highest religious conception has been reached, and is generally known, yet the Being conceived of as creative is utterly neglected, while ghosts, or minor G.o.ds, are served and adored. To this religious phenomenon (if correctly observed) we must attempt to a.s.sign a cause. For this purpose it is necessary to state again what may be called the current or popular anthropological theory of the evolution of G.o.ds.

That theory takes varying shapes. In the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer we find a pure Euhemerism. G.o.ds are but ghosts of dead men, raised to a higher and finally to the highest power. In the somewhat a.n.a.logous but not identical system of Mr. Tylor, man first attains to the idea of spirit by reflection on various physical, psychological and psychical experiences, such as sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, hallucinations, breath and death, and he gradually extends the conception of soul or ghost till all nature is peopled with spirits. Of these spirits one is finally promoted to supremacy, where the conception of a supreme being occurs. In the lowest faiths there is said, on this theory, to be no connection, or very little connection, between religion and morality. To supply a religious sanction of morals is the work of advancing thought.(1)

(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 381. Huxley's Science and Hebrew Tradition, pp.

346,372.

This current hypothesis is, confessedly, "animistic," in Mr. Tylor's phrase, or, in Mr. Spencer's terminology, it is "the ghost theory". The human soul, says Mr. Tylor, has been the model on which all man's ideas of spiritual beings, from "the tiniest elf" to "the heavenly Creator and ruler of the world, the Great Spirit," have been framed.(1) Thus it has been necessary for Mr. Tylor and for Mr. Spencer to discover first an origin of man's idea of his own soul, and that supposed origin in psychological, physical and psychical experiences is no doubt adequate.

By reflection on these facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached, though the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor may contain points as yet unexplained by Materialism. From these sources are derived all really "animistic" G.o.ds, all that from the first partake of the nature of hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though in certain cases that hunger may have been transferred, we surmise, by wors.h.i.+ppers to G.o.ds not ORIGINALLY animistic.

(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 109

In answer to this theory of an animistic or ghostly origin of all G.o.ds, it must first be observed that all G.o.ds are not necessarily, it would seem, of animistic origin. Among certain of the lowest savages, although they believe in ghosts, the animistic conception, the spiritual idea, is not attached to the relatively supreme being of their faith. He is merely a powerful BEING, unborn, and not subject to death. The purely metaphysical question "was he a ghost?" does not seem always to have been asked. Consequently there is no logical reason why man's idea of a Maker should not be prior to man's idea that there are such things as souls, ghosts and spirits. Therefore the animistic theory is not necessary as material for the "G.o.d-idea". We cannot, of course, prove that the "G.o.d-idea" was historically prior to the "ghost-idea," for we know no savages who have a G.o.d and yet are ignorant of ghosts. But we can show that the idea of G.o.d may exist, in germ, without explicitly involving the idea of spirit. Thus G.o.ds MAY be prior in evolution to ghosts, and therefore the animistic theory of the origin of G.o.ds in ghosts need not necessarily be accepted.

In the first place, the original evolution of a G.o.d out of a ghost need not be conceded, because in perhaps all known savage theological philosophy the G.o.d, the Maker and Master, is regarded as a being who existed before death entered the world. Everywhere, practically speaking, death is looked on as a comparatively late intruder. He came not only after G.o.d was active, but after men and beasts had populated the world. Scores of myths accounting for this invasion of death have been collected all over the world.(1) Thus the relatively supreme being, or beings, of religion are looked on as prior to Death, therefore, not as ghosts. They are sometimes expressly distinguished as "original G.o.ds" from other G.o.ds who are secondary, being souls of chiefs. Thus all Tongan G.o.ds are Atua, but all Atua are not "original G.o.ds".(2) The word Atua, according to Mr. White, is "A-tu-a". "A" was the name given to the author of the universe, and signifies: "Am the unlimited in power," "The Conception," "the Leader," "the Beyond All". "Tua" means "Beyond that which is most distant," "Behind all matter," and "Behind every action".

Clearly these conceptions are not more mythical (indeed A does not seem to occur in the myths), nor are they more involved in ghosts, than the unknown absolute of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Yet the word Atua denotes G.o.ds who are recognised as ghosts of chiefs, no less than it denotes the supreme existence.(3) These ideas are the metaphysical theology of a race considerably above the lowest level. They lend no a.s.sistance to a theory that A was, or was evolved out of, a human ghost, and he is not found in Maori MYTHOLOGY as far as our knowledge goes. But, among the lowest known savages, the Australians, we read that "the Creator was a gigantic black, once on earth, now among the stars". This is in Gippsland; the deities of the Fuegians and the Blackfoot Indians are also Beings, anthropomorphic, unborn and undying, like Mangarrah, the creative being of the Larrakeah tribe in Australia. "A very good man called Mangarrah lives in the sky.... He made everything" (blacks excepted). He never dies.(4) The Melanesian Vui "never were men," were "something different," and "were NOT ghosts". It is as a Being, not as a Spirit, that the Kurnai deity Munganngaur (Our Father) is described.(5) In short, though Europeans often speak of these divine beings of low savages as "spirits," it does not appear that the natives themselves advance here the metaphysical idea of spirit. These G.o.ds are just BEINGS, anthropomorphic, or (in myth and fable), very often b.e.s.t.i.a.l, "theriomorphic".(6) It is manifest that a divine being envisaged thus need not have been evolved out of the theory of spirits or ghosts, and may even have been prior to the rise of the belief in ghosts.

(1) See Modern Mythology, "Myths of Origin of Death".

(2) Mariner, ii. 127.

(3) White, Ancient History of the Maoris, vol. i. p. 4; other views in Gill's Myths of the Pacific. I am not committed to Mr. White's opinion.

(4) Journal Anthrop. Inst., Nov., 1894, p. 191.

(5) Ibid., 1886, p. 313.

(6) See Making of Religion, pp. 201-210, for a more copious statement.

Again, these powerful, or omnipotent divine beings are looked on as guardians of morality, punishers of sin, rewarders of righteousness, both in this world and in a future life, in places where ghosts, though believed in, ARE NOT WORs.h.i.+PPED, NOR IN RECEIPT OF SACRIFICE, and where, great grandfathers being forgotten, ancestral ghosts can scarcely swell into G.o.ds. This occurs among Andamanese, Fuegians and Australians, therefore, among non-ghost-wors.h.i.+pping races, ghosts cannot have developed into deities who are not even necessarily spirits. These G.o.ds, again, do not receive sacrifice, and thus lack the note of descent from hungry food-craving ghosts. In Australia, indeed, while ghosts are not known to receive any offerings, "the recent custom of providing food for it"--the dead body of a friend--"is derided by the intelligent old aborigines as 'white fellow's gammon'".(1)

(1) Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 51, 1881.

The Australians possess no chiefs like "Vich Ian Vohr or Chingachgook"

whose ghosts might be said to swell into supreme moral deities.

"Headmen" they have, leaders of various degrees of authority, but no Vich Ian Vohr, no semi-sacred representative of the tribe.(1) Nor are the ghosts of the Headmen known to receive any particular posthumous attention or wors.h.i.+p. Thus it really seems impossible to show proof that Australian G.o.ds grew out of Australian ghosts, a subject to which we shall return.

(1) Howitt, Organisation of Australian Tribes, pp. 101-113.

"Transactions of Royal Society of Victoria," 1889.

Some supporters of the current theory therefore fall back on the hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate.(1) Chiefs, it is argued, or kings, they once had, and the G.o.ds are surviving ghosts of these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor have correctly argued that the soil of Australia has not yet yielded so much as a fragment of native pottery, nor any trace of native metal work, not a vestige of stone buildings occurs, nor of any work beyond the present native level of culture, unless we reckon weirs for fish-catching. "The Australian boomerang," writes Mr. Tylor, "has been claimed as derived from some hypothetical high culture, whereas the transition-stages through which it is connected with the club are to be observed in its own country, while no civilised race possesses the weapon."(2)

(1) See Prof. Menzie's History of Religion, pp. 16, 17, where a singular inconsistency has escaped the author.

(2) Prim. Cult., i. 57, 67.

Therefore the Australian, with his boomerang, represents no degeneration but advance on his ancestors, who had not yet developed the boomerang out of the club. If the excessively complex nature of Australian rules of prohibited degrees be appealed to as proof of degeneration from the stage in which they were evolved, we reply that civilisation everywhere tends not to complicate but to simplify such rules, as it also notoriously simplifies the forms of language.

The Australian people, when discovered, were only emerging from palaeolithic culture, while the neighbouring Tasmanians were frankly palaeolithic.(1) Far from degenerating, the Australians show advance when they supersede their beast or other totem by an eponymous human hero.(2) The eponymous hero, however, changed with each generation, so that no one name was fixed as that of tribal father, later perhaps to become a tribal G.o.d. We find several tribes in which the children now follow the FATHER'S cla.s.s, and thus paternal kin takes the place of the usual early savage method of reckoning kins.h.i.+p by the mother's side, elsewhere prevalent in Australia. In one of these tribes, dwelling between the Glenelg and Mount Napier, headmans.h.i.+p is hereditary, but nothing is said of any wors.h.i.+p of the ghosts of chiefs. All this social improvement denotes advance on the usual Australian standard.(3) Of degeneration (except when produced recently by European vices and diseases) I know no trace in Australia. Their highest religious conceptions, therefore, are not to be disposed of as survivals of a religion of the ghosts of such chiefs as the Australians are not shown ever to have recognised. The "G.o.d idea" in Australia, or among the Andamanese, must have some other source than the Ghost-Theory. This is all the more obvious because not only are ghosts not wors.h.i.+pped by the Australians, but also the divine beings who are alleged to form links between the ghost and the moral G.o.d are absent. There are no departmental G.o.ds, as of war, peace, the chase, love, and so forth. Sun, sky and earth are equally unwors.h.i.+pped. There is nothing in religion between a Being, on one hand (with a son or sons), and vague mischievous spirits, boilyas or mrarts, and ghosts (who are not wors.h.i.+pped), on the other hand. The friends of the idea that the G.o.d is an ancient evolution from the ghost of such a chief as is not proved to have existed, must apparently believe that the intermediate stages in religious evolution, departmental G.o.ds, nature G.o.ds and G.o.ds of polytheism in general once existed in Australia, and have all been swept away in a deluge of degeneration. That deluge left in religion a moral, potently active Father and Judge. Now that conception is considerably above the obsolescent belief in an otiose G.o.d which is usually found among barbaric races of the type from which the Australians are said to have degenerated. There is no proof of degeneracy, and, if degeneration has occurred, why has it left just the kind of deity who, in the higher barbaric culture, is not commonly found? Clearly this attempt to explain the highest aspect of Australian religion by an undemonstrated degeneration is an effort of despair.

(1) Tylor, preface to Ling Roth's Aborigines of Tasmania, pp. v.-viii.

(2) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231.

(3) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 277, 278.