Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 5

Though all these mythical beings are in a sense departmental G.o.ds, they yield in renown to a later child of their race, Maui, the great culture-hero, who is an advanced form of the culture-heroes, mainly theriomorphic, of the lower races.*

Maui, like many heroes of myth, was a youngest son. He was prematurely born (a similar story comes in the Brahmanic legend of the Adityas); his mother wrapped him up in her long hair and threw him out to sea. A kinsman rescued him, and he grew up to be much the most important member of his family, like Qat in his larger circle of brethren. Maui it was who snared the sun, beat him,** and taught him to run his appointed course, instead of careering at will and at any pace he chose about the heavens.

* Te-Heu-Heu, a powerful chief, described to Mr. Taylor the departmental character of his G.o.ds. "Is there one maker of things among Europeans? Is not one a carpenter, another a blacksmith, another a s.h.i.+pbuilder? So it was in the beginning. One made this, another that. Tane made trees, Ru mountains, Tangaroa fish, and so forth." Taylor, New Zealand, p. 108, note.

** The sun, when beaten, cried out and revealed his great name, exactly as Indra did in his terror and flight after slaying the serpent. Taylor, op. cit., p. 131.

He was the culture-hero who invented barbs for spears and hooks; he turned his brother into the first dog, whence dogs are sacred, he fished New Zealand out of the sea; he stole fire for men. How Maui performed this feat, and how he "brought death into the world and all our woe," are topics that belong to the myths of _Death_ and of the _Fire-Stealer_.* Maui could not only change men into animals, but could himself a.s.sume animal shapes at will.

Such is a brief account of the ancient traditions of mythical Maori G.o.ds and of the culture-hero. In practice, the conception of _Atua_ (or a kind of extra-natural power or powers) possesses much influence in New Zealand. All manner of spirits in all manner of forms are _Atuas_. "A great chief was regarded as a malignant G.o.d in life, and a still worse one after death."** Again, "after Maui came a host of G.o.ds, each with his history and wonderful deeds.... These were ancestors who became deified by their respective tribes,"***--a statement which must be regarded as theoretical.

* See La Mythologie, A. L., Paris, 1886.

** Taylor, op. cit., pp. 134, 136.

***Op. cit., p. 136.

It is odd enough, if true, that Maru should be the war-G.o.d of the southern island, and that the planet Mars is called after him Maru.

"There were also G.o.ds in human forms, and others with those of reptiles.... At one period there seems to have been a mixed offspring from the same parents. Thus while Tawaki was of the human form, his brethren were _taniwa_ and sharks; there were likewise mixed marriages among them." These legends are the natural result of that lack of distinction between man and the other things in the world which, as we demonstrated, prevails in early thought. It appears that the great mythical G.o.ds of the Maoris have not much concern with their morality.

The myths are "but a magnified history of their chiefs, their wars, murders and l.u.s.ts, with the addition of some supernatural powers"--such as the chiefs are very apt to claim.* In the opinion of a competent observer, the G.o.ds, or Atua, who are feared in daily life, are "spirits of the dead," and _their_ attention is chiefly confined to the conduct of their living descendants and clansmen. They inspire courage, the leading virtue. When converted, the natives are said not to expel, but merely to subordinate their Atua, "believing Christ to be a more powerful Atua".**

* Op. cit., p. 137.

** Shortland, Trad, and Superst. of New Zealanders, 1856, pp. 83-85.

The Maoris are perhaps the least elevated race in which a well-developed polytheism has obscured almost wholly that belief in a moral Maker which we find among the lowest savages who have but a rudimentary polytheism.

When we advance to ancient civilised peoples, like the Greeks, we shall find the archaic Theism obscured, or obliterated, in a similar way.

In the beliefs of Samoa (formerly called the Navigators' Islands, and discovered by a Dutch expedition in 1722) may be observed a most interesting moment in the development of religion and myth. In many regions it has been shown that animals are wors.h.i.+pped as totems, and that the G.o.ds are invested with the shape of animals. In the temples of higher civilisations will be found divine images still retaining in human form certain animal attributes, and a minor wors.h.i.+p of various beasts will be shown to have grouped itself in Greece round the altars of Zeus, or Apollo, or Demeter. Now in Samoa we may perhaps trace the actual process of the "transition," as Mr. Tylor says, "from the spirit inhabiting an individual body to the deity presiding over all individuals of a kind". In other words, whereas in Australia or America each totem-kindred reveres each animal supposed to be of its own lineage--the "Cranes" revering all cranes, the "Kangaroos" all kangaroos--in Samoa the various clans exhibit the same faith, but combine it with the belief that one spiritual deity reveals itself in each separate animal, as in a kind of avatar. For example, the several Australian totem-kindreds do not conceive that Pund-jel incarnates himself in the emu for one stock, in the crow for another, in the c.o.c.katoo for a third, and they do not by these, but by other means, attain a religious unity, transcending the diversity caused by the totemic inst.i.tutions. In Samoa this kind of spiritual unity is actually reached by various stocks.

The Samoans were originally spoken of by travellers as the "G.o.dless Samoans," an example of a common error. Probably there is no people whose practices and opinions, if duly investigated, do not attest their faith in something of the nature of G.o.ds. Certainly the Samoans, far from being "G.o.dless," rather deserve the reproach of being "in all things too superst.i.tious". "The G.o.ds were supposed to appear in some _visible incarnation_, and the particular thing in which his G.o.d was in the habit of appearing was to the Samoanan object of veneration."*

* Turner's Samoa, p. 17.

Here we find that the religious sentiment has already become more or less self-conscious, and has begun to reason on its own practices. In pure totemism it is their kindred animal that men revere. The Samoans explain their wors.h.i.+p of animals, not on the ground of kins.h.i.+p and common blood or "one flesh" (as in Australia), but by the comparatively advanced hypothesis that a spiritual power is _in_ the animal. "One, for instance, saw his G.o.d in the eel, another in the shark, another in the turtle, another in the dog, another in the owl, another in the lizard,"

and so on, even to sh.e.l.l-fish. The creed so far is exactly what Garcila.s.so de la Vega found among the remote and ruder neighbours of the Incas, and attributed to the pre-Inca populations. "A man," as in Egypt, and in totemic countries generally, "would eat freely of what was regarded as the incarnation of the G.o.d of another man", but the incarnation of his own G.o.d he would consider it death to injure or eat.

The G.o.d was supposed to avenge the insult by taking up his abode in that person's body, and causing to generate there the very thing which he had eaten until it produced death. The G.o.d used to be heard within the man, saying, "I am killing this man; he ate my incarnation". This cla.s.s of tutelary deities they called _aitu fale_, or "G.o.ds of the house," G.o.ds of the stock or kindred. In totemistic countries the totem is respected _per se_, in Samoa the animal is wors.h.i.+pful because a G.o.d abides within him. This appears to be a theory by which the reflective Samoans have explained to themselves what was once pure totemism.

Not only the household, but the village has its animal G.o.ds or G.o.d incarnate in an animal As some Arab tribes piously bury dead gazelles, as Athenians piously buried wolves, and Egyptians cats, so in Samoa "if a man found a dead owl by the roadside, and if that happened to be the incarnation of his village G.o.d, he would sit down and weep over it, and beat his forehead with a stone till the blood came. This was supposed to be pleasing to the deity. Then the bird would be wrapped up and buried with care and ceremony, as if it were a human body. This, however, was not the death of the G.o.d." Like the solemnly sacrificed buzzard in California, like the bull in the Attic _Dupolia_, "he was supposed to be yet alive and incarnate in all the owls in existence".*

In addition to these minor and local divinities, the Samoans have G.o.ds of sky, earth, disease and other natural departments.** Of their origin we only know that they fell from heaven, and all were incarnated or embodied in birds, beasts, plants, stones and fishes. But they can change shapes, and appear in the moon when she is not visible, or in any other guise they choose. If in Samoa the sky-G.o.d was once on the usual level of sky-G.o.ds elsewhere, he seems now to be degenerate.

* (------------------) Porph., De Abst.t ii. 29; Samoa, p.

21.

** I am careful not to call Samoan sacred animals "Totems."

to which Mr. Tylor justly objects, but I think the Samoan belief has Totemistic origins.

CHAPTER XIV. AMERICAN DIVINE MYTHS

Novelty of the "New World "--Different stages of culture represented there--Question of American Monotheism-- Authorities and evidence cited--Myths examined: Eskimo, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Iroquois, the Great Hare--Dr. Brinton's theory of the hare--Zuni myths--Transition to Mexican mythology.

The divine myths of the vast American continent are a topic which a lifetime entirely devoted to the study could not exhaust. At best it is only a sketch in outline that can be offered in a work on the development of mythology in general. The subject is the more interesting as anything like systematic borrowing of myths from the Old World is all but impossible, as has already been argued in chapter xi. America, it is true, may have been partially "discovered" many times; there probably have been several points and moments of contact between the New and the Old World. Yet at the time when the Spaniards landed there, and while the first conquests and discoveries were being pursued, the land and the people were to Europeans practically as novel as the races and territories of a strange planet.* But the New World only revealed the old stock of humanity in many of its familiar stages of culture, and, consequently, with the old sort of G.o.ds, and myths, and creeds.

* Reville, Hibbert Lectures, 1884, p. 8

In the evolution of politics, society, ritual, and in all the outward and visible parts of religion, the American races ranged between a culture rather below the ancient Egyptian and a rudeness on a level with Australian or Bushman inst.i.tutions. The more civilised peoples, Aztecs and Peruvians, had many peculiarities in common with the races of ancient Egypt, China and India; where they fell short was in the lack of alphabet or syllabary. The Mexican MSS. are but an advanced picture-writing, more organised than that of the Ojibbeways; the Peruvian Quipus was scarcely better than the Red Indian wampum records.

Mexicans and Peruvians were settled in what deserved to be called cities; they had developed a monumental and elaborately decorated architecture; they were industrious in the arts known to them, though ignorant of iron. Among the Aztecs, at least, weapons and tools of bronze, if rare, were not unknown. They were sedulous in agriculture, disciplined in war, capable of absorbing and amalgamating with conquered tribes.

In Peru the ruling family, the Incas, enjoyed all the sway of a hierarchy, and the chief Inca occupied nearly as secure a position, religious, social and political, as any Rameses or Thothmes. In Mexico, doubtless, the monarch's power was at least nominally limited, in much the same way as that of the Persian king. The royal rule devolved on the elected member of an ancient family, but once he became prince he was surrounded by imposing ceremony. In both these two civilised peoples the priesthood enjoyed great power, and in Mexico, though not so extensively, if at all, in Peru, practised an appalling ritual of cannibalism and human sacrifice. It is extremely probable, or rather certain, that both of these civilisations were younger than the culture of other American peoples long pa.s.sed away, whose cities stand in colossal ruin among the forests, whose hieroglyphs seem undecipherable, and whose copper-mines were worked at an unknown date on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Superior. Over the origin and date of those "crowned races" it were vain to linger here. They have sometimes left the shadows of names--Toltecs and Chichimecs--and relics more marvellous than the fainter traces of miners and builders in Southern and Central Africa.

The rest is silence. We shall never know why the dwellers in Palenque deserted their majestic city while "the staircases were new, the steps whole, the edges sharp, and nowhere did traces of wear and tear give certain proof of long habitation".* On a much lower level than the great urban peoples, but tending, as it were, in the same direction, and presenting the same features of state communism in their social arrangements, were, and are, the cave and cliff dwellers, the agricultural village Indians (Pueblo Indians) of New Mexico and Arizona.

In the sides of the canons towns have been burrowed, and men have dwelt in them like sand-martins in a sand-bank. The traveller views "perpendicular cliffs everywhere riddled with human habitations, which resemble the cells of a honeycomb more than anything else". In lowland villages the dwellings are built of clay and stone.

* Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 328.

"The San Juan valley is strewn with ruins for hundreds of miles; some buildings, three storeys high, of masonry, are still standing."* The Moquis, Zunis and Navahos of to-day, whose habits and religious rites are known from the works of Mr. Cus.h.i.+ng, Mr. Matthews, and Captain John G. Bourke, are apparently descendants of "a sedentary, agricultural and comparatively cultivated race," whose decadence perhaps began "before the arrival of the Spaniards."**

Rather lower in the scale of culture than the settled Pueblo Indians were the hunter tribes of North America generally. They dwelt, indeed, in collections of wigwams which were partially settled, and the "long house" of the Iroquois looks like an approach to the communal system of the Pueblos.*** But while such races as Iroquois, Mandans and Ojibbeways cultivated the maize plant, they depended for food more than did the Pueblo peoples on success in the chase. Deer, elk, buffalo, the wild turkey, the bear, with ducks and other birds, supplied the big kettle with its contents. Their society was totemistic, as has already been described; kins.h.i.+p, as a rule, was traced through the female line; the Sachems or chiefs and counsellors were elected, generally out of certain totem-kindreds; the war-chiefs were also elected when a military expedition started on the war-path; and Jossakeeds or medicine-men (the t.i.tle varied in different dialects) had no small share of secular power.

*Nadaillac, p. 222.

** Ibid., p. 257. See Bourke's Snake-Dance of the Natives of Arizona, and the fifth report of the Archaeological Inst.i.tute of America, with an account of the development of Pueblo buildings. It seems scarcely necessary to discuss Mr.

Lewis Morgan's attempt to show that the Aztecs of Cortes's time were only on the level of the modern Pueblo Indians.

*** Mr. Lewis Morgan's valuable League of the Iroquois and the Iroquois Book of Rites (Brinton, Philadelphia, 1883) may be consulted.

In war these tribes displayed that deliberate cruelty which survived under the Aztec rulers as the enormous cannibal ritual of human sacrifice. A curious point in Red Indian custom was the familiar inst.i.tution of scalping the slain in war. Other races are head-hunters, but scalping is probably peculiar to the Red Men and the Scythians.*

* Herodotus, iv. 64.

On a level, yet lower than that of the Algonkin and other hunter tribes, are the American races whom circ.u.mstances have driven into desolate infertile regions; who live, like the Ahts, mainly on fish; like the Eskimos, in a world of frost and winter; or like the Fuegians, on crustaceans and seaweed. The minute gradations of culture cannot be closely examined here, but the process is upwards, from people like the Fuegians and Diggers, to the builders of the kitchen-middens--probably quite equals of the Eskimos***--and so through the condition of Ahts.

*** Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 66.

The resemblance between Scythian and Red Indian manners exercised the learned in the time of Grotius. It has been acutely remarked by J. G.

Muller, that in America one stage of society, as developed in the Old World, is absent. There is no pastoral stage. The natives had neither domesticated kine, goats nor sheep. From this lack of interest in the well-being of the domesticated lower animals he is inclined to deduce the peculiarly savage cruelty of American war and American religion.

Sympathy was undeveloped. Possibly the lack of tame animals may have encouraged the prevalence of human sacrifice. The Brahmana shows how, in Hindostan, the lower animals became vicarious subst.i.tutes for man in sacrifice, as the fawn of Artemis or the ram of Jehovah took the place of Iphigenia or of Isaac. Cf. J. G. Muller, Oeschichte der Amerikanisehen Urreligionen, pp. 22, 23.

Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and other rude tribes of the North-west Pacific Coast, to that of Sioux, Blackfeet, Mandans, Iroquois, and then to the settled state of the Pueblo folk, the southern comforts of the Natchez, and finally to the organisation of the Mayas, and the summit occupied by the Aztecs and Incas.

Through the creeds of all these races, whether originally of the same stock or not, run many strands of religious and mythical beliefs--the very threads that are woven into the varied faiths of the Old World. The dread of ghosts; the religious adoration paid to animals; the belief in kindred and protecting beasts; the wors.h.i.+p of inanimate objects, roughly styled fetishes; a certain reverence for the great heavenly bodies, sun, moon and Pleiades; a tendency to regard the stars, with all other things and phenomena, as animated and personal--with a belief in a Supreme Creator, these are the warp, as it were, of the fabric of American religion.*

* The arguments against the borrowing of the Creator from missionaries have already been stated.

In one stage of culture one set of those ideas may be more predominant than in another stage, but they are present in all. The zoo-morphic or theriomorphic mythologies and creeds are nowhere more vivacious than in America. Not content with the tribal zoomorphic guardian and friend, the totem, each Indian was in the habit of seeking for a special animal protector of his own. This being, which he called his Manitou, revealed itself to him in the long fasts of that savage sacrament which consecrates the entrance on full manhood. Even in the elaborate religions of the civilised races, Peruvians and Aztecs, the animal deities survive, and sacred beasts gather in the shrine of Pachacamac, or a rudimentary remnant of ancestral beak or feather clings to the statue of Huitzilopochtli. But among the civilised peoples, in which the division of labour found its place and human ranks were minutely discriminated, the G.o.ds too had their divisions and departments. An organised polytheism prevailed, and in the temples of Centeotl and Tlazolteotl, Herodotus or Pausanias would have readily recognised the Demeter and the Aphrodite of Mexico.