ANIMISM
OR,
THOUGHT CURRENTS OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES,
BY
GEORGE WILLIAM GILMORE
BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
MDCCCCXIX (1919)
PREFACE
THE result of recent historical studies, whether on anthropological,
sociological, archeological, or religious lines, has brought
into ever clearer vision as the substratum of all civilizations
that stage of culture from which this book takes its title. One
consequence is: general recognition of animism as a life factor,
the power of which is not yet exhausted, the study of which fascinates
because of its almost infinite variety and its persistent force.
The words "animism," "animistic," have come
to fall ever so lightly from tongue and pen and meet us at every
turn. Yet what animism is few who use the term adequately realize.
Though Sir E. B. Tylor in his imperishable monograph on Primitive
Culture exhibited many of its phenomena and blocked out the
main lines of investigation over forty years ago, comparatively
few understand its significance or are acquainted with its manifestations
even yet. Fewer still comprehend the doings and beliefs as actual
or realize the state of mind--operations of perception and reason--of
those whose acts and beliefs we call animistic.
There seemed to be room, then, for a small volume which should
exhibit the phenomena and the related and inferred beliefs of
this complex stage in a simple manner, with sufficiently numerous
citations to illustrate clearly, yet without the overlay of too
abundant references. The references here given have been drawn
almost entirely from very recent and authoritative sources gathered
in the writer's own reading, easily accessible in the current
of books on travel now pouring from the press. Most of the volumes
to which reference has been made in this discussion belong to
the twentieth century. Moreover these sources are primary. Recourse
has seldom been had even to so valuable a collection of facts
as Fraser's quite exhaustive Golden Bough in its third edition.
The facts there adduced were employed by the talented author
for quite another end than the present writer's, and this might
easily have led to confusion.
What value a knowledge of the features of this agglomerate
of facts and beliefs has becomes evident when it is remembered
that over half the population of the globe is animistic in its
main features of faith and action, that a large part of humanity
entertains beliefs only one remove away from this and regards
as fundamental a philosophy of life grounded in animistic thought,
and that at least three basal tenets of Christianity itself are
common to Christians and animists. Japanese, Koreans, Chinese,
the larger part of the population of India, the North Asiatic
tribes, Oceanicans, Africans, and American Indians are, or were
recently, animists. No stage of culture, no great religion, has
ever been able to disown some of the commonest heirlooms left
by primitive modes of thinking. From the standpoints both of
culture and of religion animism may be described (not defined)
as the taproot which sinks deepest in racial human experience
and continues its cellular and fibrous structure in the tree
trunk of modern conviction. It is not less important than the
surface roots of accrued beliefs that branch out on all sides,
drawing a wide-sourced sustenance, while the taproot penetrates
the subsoil of man's most intimate soul-substance.
Hardly less interesting is the fact that in some fundamentals--religious
and social--the advanced thought of the day is returning to some
convictions essential to animistic culture. One would not be
drawing the long bow were he to affirm that in that stage every
act in life had a religious aspect. Nothing a man could do but
might be regarded as either pleasing to spirits or the reverse.
One might say that animists went far beyond Matthew Arnold's
dictum that conduct is three-fourths of life--for them it embraced
the whole of life. That is precisely what advanced thinkers are
maintaining today, and in that tenet is the best promise for
improvement in modern conditions among all classes.
In another aspect, too, the social, we are returning to early
conceptions. Under totemism, the foundation of which is an animistic
view of things non-human, the individualism that became so marked
a feature in some philosophies of the last centuries and gave
impetus even to revolutions was unknown. The characteristic of
totemic and derived society was much nearer that slogan which
has now advanced beyond the circle of purely socialistic propaganda:
"Each for all and all for each."
Theologically also we find ourselves returning to old, old
views of man's relation to the supernatural. The comparatively
recent doctrine of sin is being discarded. The implacability
of Deity, the notion of that Deity's infinity as the measure
of offence, making of sin an enormity that clouds eternally the
face of God and requires an infinite and exactly equivalent penalty,
no longer holds the entire field. On the other hand, the act
itself, its effect on the doer and his kind, its indelibility
of effect on the one side, and the propitiability of the offended
Spirit, his desire to have man reinstate himself in divine favor--the
willingness to come more than half way (to state the matter in
the language of every-day life)--are now standing out in relief.
It seems hardly necessary to remark that, of course, in all
these cases the effect is not that of the return of a circle's
circumference into itself. There has been marked, if spiral,
progress, progress comparable to that of the earth in the solar
system toward its distant goal in the constellation of Hercules.
The one encouraging result of this study is that from the beginning
the heart of man was essentially sound, though his vagaries were
many during the centuries in which he was feeling his way. To
use a significant term, man has ever been essentially theotropic,
though he was not always conscious of the direction of his tropism.
In studying this subject, then, we are engaged in discovering
the paths our own ancestors have trodden, and our gratitude is
due them for leading us with increasing certitude to a nobler
way of thought, so that we see in the heavens not deities, but
the work of One; and in the earth the effects of that same One's
immanence, his gift to his sons and daughters.
The author takes this opportunity to acknowledge with gratitude
the kindness of Mr. Francis Medhurst who has read all the proofs
and offered many valuable suggestions.
CONTENTS
I. THE ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE--THE CASE STATED
II. THE DISCOVERY OF THE SOUL
III. THE SOUL'S NATURE
IV. THE EXTERNAL OR SEPARABLE SOUL
V. PARITY OF BEING
VI. BELIEF IN "FREE SPIRITS"
VII. "FREE SPIRITS"-THEIR CONSTRUCTION AND ACTIVITIES
VIII. LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF PARITY OF BEING
IX. DEATH NOT ALWAYS REGARDED AS INEVITABLE
X. THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL
XI. MODIFICATIONS OF THE IDEA OF CONTINUANCE
XII. CONDITION OF THE DISCARNATE SOUL
XIII. THE HOME OF THE SOUL
XIV. DESCENSUS AVERNI
XV. WORSHIP
XVI. RESIDUA OF ANIMISM
XVII. LITERATURE TO WHICH REFERENCE IS MADE IN THIS VOLUME
ANIMISM
I
THE ANIMISTIC STAGE OF CULTURE--THE CASE STATED
THE following narrative, taken from The Japan Weekly
for March 16, 1916, recounts the story of an event occurring
in that land of "advanced civilization" in the winter
Of 1915-16, and some of the sequels.
DEATH OF THE SUMA SNAKE
"The huge snake that had been leading a precarious existence
at the Suma Garden during the last three years--a captive in
a different clime from that in which it was born--recently died,
unable to bear the rigours of the winter. Although the reptile
was a magnificent specimen of its species, as it measured 25
feet in length and 28 inches round the thickest part, it never
made itself unpleasantly obtrusive and most of its time at Suma
was spent in lethargic retirement. When the demise of the snake
was made known in the neighbourhood much sympathy was manifested
among its many acquaintances, who asked the management of the
Garden to bury the snake in the vicinity with due ceremony. It
was accordingly interred in the pine groves at the rear of the
Kagetsu restaurant.
"Someone made the discovery on looking at an almanac
that the day on which the reptile died was a Day of the Snake,
and remembered an old superstition that toothache may be cured
by worshipping a snake. The grave of the Suma snake consequently
began to be visited by the superstitious, who proclaimed to the
world the supernatural means of healing toothache by worshipping
there. The report has since travelled far and wide, and scores
of people are visiting the grave every day, bringing much gain
to the Hyogo tramway, who need no faith to be assured of the
benefits accruing from the virtues of the departed snake. Some
of the people whose toothache has been cured by the spirit of
the snake have decided to build a shrine on the ground where
the reptile was buried. The place has already been fenced in
and a sign erected preparatory to the commencement of work."
The exhibit is therefore that of belief in the continued existence
and exercise of benevolent activity on behalf of man of a snake
which had according to our notions passed completely out of life
and beyond any possible potency to affect human existence. It
shows one of the characteristic phenomena of the stage of culture
we are to examine, a stage which, as we shall discover, is a
present fact over a large part of the globe.
In Gen. 28:10-22 occurs the interesting account of a night
in Jacob's life, his interpretation of it, and the ensuing course
of action. The two noteworthy events, from the present point
of view, are (1) the dream, with Jacob's conclusion that it revealed
to him the fact that the place where he lay was an abiding place
of deity; (2) the deity was evidently in the stone, or was the
stone, as is shown by the anointing of it. This story could be
paralleled in its essentials from many sources. Again, in Josh.
24: 27, Joshua is represented declaring of a certain stone: "it
hath heard all the words, . . it shall be therefore a witness
against you." And, once more, Acts 19:35 makes mention of
an object of worship which "fell from Jupiter," i.e.,
evidently a meteorite.
These three facts taken together, viz., the importance of
a dream and the performance of worshipful ads upon or attribution
of sentience to a stone, bring into notice a cultural condition,
a method of thinking, which is by common consent called animistic.
Animism is by many regarded as the earliest form which religion
took, and as the root from which was derived all religious beliefs
which the world has known, and was also the earliest basis of
all that is dignified by the name of culture. Moreover, we may
trace its effects and its action into the present.[1] Others,
however, regard it as not the primary, but as a secondary, stage
in mental and religious development, seeking the primary in a
vaguer series of beliefs to which they give the name "naturism"
or "dynamism."[2] Our present concern is with Animism.
[1. McDougall, Body and Mind. A History
and Defence of Animism.
2. Cf. Clodd, Animism; and Leuba, A Psychological Study
of Religion.]
And what is this? Menzies defines it as "the worship
of spirits as opposed to that of Gods."[3] To this E. B.
Tylor, whose work [4] is facile princeps among the expositions
of animism, might object that it supposes a sharp dividing line
between spirits and gods which has no existence in fact and is
therefore arbitrarily drawn. It is, perhaps, impossible to state
where the worship of spirits stops and that of gods begins, to
decide exactly where the spirit shades into the deity. Who can
say exactly the moment when the conception of a being which has
been but one of a host of spirits has passed into that of a state
of divinity? Such transitions have been made.[5] Accordingly,
Tylor would define animism as "the doctrine of spirits or
of spiritual beings."[6] He furthermore proposes as a minimum
definition of religion "belief in spiritual beings ."[7]
While one may criticize this last as leaving out the objective
result of "belief in spiritual beings" in worship or
cult, Tylor
[3. History of Religion, p. 39.
4. Primitive Culture, new ed., London, 1903.
5. E.g., Enlil of Babylonia; cf. A. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures,
1887, p. 103.
6. Primitive Culture, i. 425.
7. Ib., i. 324.]
is altogether right in asserting that, whatever the original
condition of mankind, such belief is found among all races, even
the lowest, concerning whom exact knowledge is possessed.
Just criticism may be passed, however, upon Tylor's definition
of animism as so vague that it gives no grip upon the actual
conditions which attend an animistic stage of thought or upon
that thought itself. It is necessary, therefore, to point out
that the word represents a stage in the psychological development
of man, in his cultural unfolding, in which his conceptions (i)
of himself and (2) of the world about him differ essentially
from those of "civilized" man. From the point of view
of modern psychology, he may be said to possess as yet only an
unintegrated consciousness. He does not distinguish himself in
kind from objects that are about him. As one writer declares:
"A Central Australian pointing to a photograph of himself
will say, 'That one is just the same as me, so is a kangaroo
(his totem).' We say the Central Australian 'belongs to the kangaroo
tribe'; he knows better, he is kangaroo. Now it is this persistent
affirmation of primitive man in the totemistic stage that he
is an animal or a plant, that he is a kangaroo or an opossum
. . . that instantly arrests our attention," etc.[8]
To man in the advanced stage of thinking to which civilized
peoples have attained such a condition as this appears almost
unbelievable. And yet expert testimony to this effect is abundantly
available. Thus Professor Hobhouse says of the thinking of men
in this stage:
"One conception melts readily into another, just as in
primitive fancy a sorcerer turns into a dragon, a mouse, a stone,
and a butterfly without the smallest difficulty. Hence similarity
is treated as if it were physical identity. The physical individuality
of things is not observed. The fact that a thing was mine makes
it appear as though there were something of me in it, so that
by burning it you make me smart. The borders or limits of things
are not marked out, but their influence and their capacity to
be influenced extends, as it were, in a misty halo over everything
connected with them in any fashion. If the attributes of things
are made too solid and material in primitive thought, things
themselves are too fluid and undefined, passing
[8. Miss Harrison, Themis, p. 121.]
into each other by loose and easy identifications which prevent
all clear and crisp distinctions of thought. In a word, primitive
thought has not yet evolved those distinctions of substance and
attribute, quality and relation, cause and effect, identity and
difference, which are the common property of civilized thought.
These categories which among us every child soon comes to distinguish
in practice are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion,
and this confusion is the intellectual basis of animism and of
magic." [9]
The idea is expressed similarly by Aston:
"I would describe (primitive man's) mental attitude as
a piecemeal conception of the universe as alive, just as he looks
upon his fellow man as alive without analyzing him into the two
distinct entities of body and soul."[10]
The "piecemeal conception of the universe" contains
the idea that animistic man regards other objects in the world
about him as being on a parity of existence with himself in that
they are conceived as having sentient and volitional life. He
interprets all things in terms of his own consciousness. On the
[9. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution,
ii. 20-21.
10. Shinto, p. 26.]
other hand, practically all the data In our possession which
bear upon the subject indicate that as far back as we can trace
man, he had already analyzed his kind into body and soul. Even
Neolithic man, and with great probability also Palæolithic
man, had the conception of a possessing or obsessing spirit.
The trepanning done by Neolithic man during life is most easily
explicable on the theory that disease was caused by a spirit
which had obsessed the sick, and was to be conjured forth only
after an incision had been made in the skull. The fact that Kabyles
have been known within the memory of man to perform this operation
for this reason, and that the modus operandi is in accord
with other methods among primitive races, can lead at once to
this conclusion. Up to 1888 there had been discovered in France
in the valley of the Torn over two hundred trepanned skulls,
in many cases among these the trepanning was ante mortem,
with evident signs of healing. And in the Wellcome Historical
Medical Museum in London there is a case of flint instruments
some of which almost equal in sharpness of edge and point surgical
instruments of our own day, used, it is believed for this purpose.[11]
We shall find other reasons for believing in the early discovery
by man of his own soul. Meanwhile to prove that is not our purpose
here. What we are concerned with is man's outlook on the universe,
his estimate of what we call nature.
"Man in that stage (i.e., the animistic) may hold that
a stone, a tree, a mountain, a stream, a wild animal, a heavenly
body, a wind, an instrument of the hunt or of labor or of domestic
utility--indeed, any object within the range of real or fancied
existence (and fancy looms large in this domain)--possesses just
such a soul as he conceives himself to have, and that it is animated
by desires, moved by emotions, and empowered by abilities parallel
to those he perceives in himself."[12]
Testimonies to this fact might be adduced from many quarters
and illustrated in many ways. Thus: "The African does not
believe in anything soulless, he even regards matter Itself as
a form of soul, low because not lively." [13]
[11. Cf. New York Medical Journal,
Oct. 16, 1909, p. 751; British Congregationalist, May
28, 1914; New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, iii. 193-194.
12. New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, iii. 194; cf. Bros,
La Religion des peuples non-civilisés, chap. II.
13. Miss Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 199.]
Père Lejeune says that the savages of New France "se
persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux,
mais que les autres choses sont ammées."[14] E. S.
Hartland puts it this way: "Starting from his personal consciousness,
the savage attributes the like consciousness to everything he
sees or feels around him."[15] And Reinach is equally emphatic:
"Animism gives a soul and a will to mountains, rivers,
rocks, trees, stones, the heavenly bodies, the earth and sky.
A tree, a post, a pillar, the hollow of a rock, are the seat
or throne of invisible spirits. These spirits are conceived and
figured at a later stage under animal form, and then under human
form. A spring was . . . Pegasus, Apollo's horse. A river is
a bull with a human face.... The laurel was Daphne, whom Apollo
had pursued; the oak was Zeus himself, before being the tree
of Zeus, and Dionysos was supposed to live in the tree, after
he had ceased to be himself the tree. The earth was Gaea, emerging
from the soil in the shape of a woman who implores the sky to
water her."[16]
[14. Relations de la Nouvelle France,
p. 199.
15. Legend of Perseus, ii. 441.
16 Orpheus, p. 79.]
Thus, to give one final testimony, Im Thurn says of the Indians
of Guiana:
"It is absolutely necessary to premise here that all
tangible objects, animate . . . and inanimate alike, consist
each of two separable parts--a body and a spirit; and that these
are not only always readily separable involuntarily, as in death,
and daily in sleep, but are also, in certain individuals, always
voluntarily separable."[17]
The preceding, then, affords a prima facie basis for
a tentative definition of animism, the justification or demonstration
of which must wait for a later chapter. We assume that "animism"
stands for a stage of culture in which man may regard any object,
real or imaginary, as possessing emotional, volitional, and actional
potency like that he himself possesses. Things, of whatsoever
sort, he may consider the subjects of feelings--likes and dislikes,
appetites or disinclinations, affections or antipathies, desires
and longings; of will--to help or injure, to act or refrain from
acting; and of the power to act according to the promptings of
these feelings and the determinations of will.
[17. Im Thurn, Indians of Guiana, p. 329.]
But-animism is thought. The enormous significance of these
three words must not be overlooked. They mark the difference
between man and the whole creation beneath him. The whole chain
of acts implied in the word under discussion involves mental
processes passing over into action with well defined intention
having their issue in the future and being immeasurably removed
from instinct. It is true that we shall find this thought at
times pitifully infantile, paralleled by the conceptions in some
cases of four-year-olds of the present;[18] but it is still thought.
And we shall show that reason is on the throne. The outcome of
this discussion will, it is believed, show the general logicality
of primitive man's mental processes, once the basis from which
he starts is granted. The beliefs in ghosts, spirits, gods, in
transmigration and metempsychosis, are not the chance hit or
miss conclusions of early man, but flow rationally from the premise
we have assumed. That
[18. The Chicago Tribune reports that "during
a sudden thunderstorm a little four-year-old came running into
the Kindergarten, crying as if her heart would break. When the
Kindergartner asked the cause of her trouble, she said, 'O Miss
E., the sky barked at me.'"]
this reason is often aberrant in its premises, that it is
not seldom fitfully inconsequent, may indeed appear. But what
we find is reason, thought at least of a kind, and in many cases
frightfully logical.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE SOUL
ON THE hypothesis that the method of man's creation was evolution,
that he is the finest product of nature's forces working in continuous
upward striving, how are we to explain man's arrival at the realization
of soul or spirit, of something which is intelligently and not
merely instinctively directive of action? The possession of soul,
in this sense, by even the highest animals is disallowed by scientists;
though recognition is growing that elements that are acknowledged
to belong to the intellectual and even to the moral powers already
exist in brute psychology. Such elements are shame or chagrin,
and fear of what seems to the animal what we might call the uncanny.
The writer remembers a scene in Meadville, Pa., where as reminiscences
of a former iron foundry there exist in some of the dooryards
castings of dogs. One day notice was attracted by a street cur
which had stopped a few feet distant from one of these cast-iron
dogs. The cur was "pointing" at the image and wagging
rapidly his short tail in the manner of dogs intimating friendly
intentions towards another dog, and desire for acquaintance with
it. Seeing no hostile demonstrations on the part of the acquaintance-to-be,
he went up to the iron replica slowly, smelt of it, and at once
dropped his apology for a tail and made off with chagrin plainly
stamped in his entire demeanor. Mr. Romanes tells of a trick
on a pet dog that was fond of playing with bones, which it would
worry and toss and growl at, evidently making believe that they
were alive. The owner tied a thin but strong thread to the bone
with which it was one day playing, and after a little time, when
the dog had cast the bone some distance away and was creeping
up to it as to an object of prey, he began gently to pull the
string. The manner of the dog changed at once, first evidently
in surprise; then it continued to crawl up to investigate. But
as the bone continued to retreat, the dog finally withdrew and
hid under the furniture.[1] The animal evidently recognized (1)
that the bone was lifeless, inert, therefore (2) unendowed with
power of motion. But (3) this thing had moved, and fear (dread
[1. Cited by Clodd, in Animism, pp. 22-23.]
of the unknown) entered evidently as the result of a sort
of rational process. It will be noted that this case is to be
differentiated from those where fear enters as the result of
punishment, in which case the "fear" may be only the
result of association of ideas and the formation of "instinctive"
habit. There was manifestation of chagrin in the first case cited,
for such was the clear impression furnished when the animal looked
back at the witnesses of the scene as they burst into laughter;
and of fear in the second case, since the animal showed what
in a human being we should call superstitious apprehension. There
is therefore no adequate reason for denying to primeval man a
large degree of rationality, growing in extension and intension
with enlarging experience and exercise. He was no longer sheer
animal. Of course, it was by achievement of rationality, in however
small degree, that be became man. He was no longer a mere observer--animals
are observant--but a thinker, who reflected and reasoned, however
faultily, upon his observations. The salient mark of his differentiation
from the animal lies in his recognition of possession of this
quality. Before this, relapse into sheer animality was perhaps
possible; after it, such relapse is inconceivable. How then did
this come about?
The answer most in favor with anthropologists is that it began
(1) with the phenomena of sleep--(a) the evident difference between
that state and waking life, combined with (b) the occurrence
of dreams which often so closely mimic or deal with the active
and conscious existence of the individual;[2] and (2) in the
difference between the living and the dead. It is to be recognized
that (1a) and (2) are compared and combined in the logic of the
savage, and afford new ground for his belief in something apart
from and different from the body which eventually becomes known
as soul. Through observation often repeated, and through reasoning
and reflection upon the facts thus presented, man arrived at
the conclusion that he is himself a dual being, possessing body
and (what was eventually recognized as) soul or spirit. Having
arrived at this conclusion, he deduced from
[2. Cf. the dreams of Pharaoh's butler and
of his baker, as narrated in Gen. 39; each of the individuals
dreams of matters connected with his specific duties.]
experience and observation, or else jumped to the conclusion,
that other objects were similarly constituted; he might attribute
life, soul, intention, and action to each and every object, to
any object, that came under his observation, no matter what its
constitution. It may be remarked, en passant, that the dream
life of man is separated from that of animals probably only by
the character of the content of his dream, as it reproduces or
recomposes experiences registered in the (conscious or unconscious,
subliminal) memory. It is well known that some animals dream.
The twitching of the muscles or the whining or even barking of
a dog in sleep has often been noticed, and is explicable best
on the hypothesis of a dream. If animals dream and exhibit elements
of consciousness, there is every reason to carry back to a very
early period in human history the beginning of the chain of thinking
that, on the hypothesis here presented, led to the conception
of spirit or soul as animating physical objects.
How this could come about is abundantly illustrated from the
interpretations of dream phenomena by primitive peoples. The
dream life of a savage being is conditioned by his waking existence,
it mirrors more or less perfectly the life he leads. It is very
probable that the dreams of savages mimic even more closely the
waking existence than those of man in a more advanced stage of
culture. The reason for this is that the primitive mode of existence
is less complex. Fewer elements of interest go to make up life,
and the course of events is more uniform. Mr. F. Granger remarks:
"If yesterday was like the day before, and is going to be
repeated in a thousand tomorrows, the dreams which echo the life
of the past will presage, with fair accuracy, the life of the
days to come. Add to all this that the primitive mind distinguishes
with difficulty [we should prefer to say, distinguishes not at
all] between what is real and what is imagined [i.e., to the
savage the dream and the vision of the night are equally real
with the sights and experiences of his waking hours] and we can
understand why the dream existence is often placed on a level
with that of waking hours.[3] Lying down to rest, the savage
dreams of the chase or of the search for vegetable food. On awaking
he tells his
[3. Worship of The Romans, pp. 28-29;
cf. Fiske, Myths and Myth-makers, p. 18.]
companions that he has been away on a hunt or the like, and
relates the adventures through which he believes he has passed.
But his companions assure him that his body has been with them
all the time, and both he and they naturally deduce a dual existence-an
invisible soul, usually inhabiting but on occasion leaving a
visible body.[4] Here then is one almost certain source of the
idea of soul.
How conclusive such reasoning is to the primitive mind, how
firmly the savage believes in the dream as consisting of actual
experience, may be seen in the comparatively exhaustive collection
of cases by Dr. J. G. Frazer.[5] Thus an Indian dreamed that
at his master's orders he had (during the night) hauled a canoe
up a series of rapids, and next morning reproached the master
for making him work so hard in the hours appropriated to rest.[6]
To this savage the dream was real and the toll exhausting. Of
the actuality of the belief in the absence of the soul during
sleep there is abundant evidence. Numerous peoples in a
[4. C.f. Budge, Osiris and The Egyptian
Resurrection, ii. 122, 135-136. Gomes, Seventeen Years
among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 177.
5. Taboo, chap. V.
6. pp. 36, 37; c.f. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p.
161.]
lowly stage of culture use caution in awaking a sleeper. It
is held that his soul is away, and that he must be aroused gradually
so that the soul may have time to return; the same reasoning
applies to infants.[7] Melanesians explain the phenomena of a
fainting fit in the same way, holding that such cases indicate
premature death, but that the soul was not yet wanted in the
spirit world and so was sent back to earth.[8]
A different source of the idea of soul is found in the phenomena
of death, powerfully reënforcing the deductions made from
sleep and dreams. While in the one case there was seen the inertness
of the body, perhaps with breathing hardly perceptible, which
yet was experiencing dreams that were interpreted as the activity
of the absent soul; in the other there was noted the expiring
breath and the subsequent inertness of the body, only more pronounced
than in sleep, passing into rigidity and finally into decay.
Action had ceased with that last exhalation. If in sleep the
dream was interpreted as absence of
[7. Frazer, Taboo, pp. 39-42; Roscoe,
The Baganda, p. 18; Seligmann, Melanesians, pp.
189 ff.
8. Brown, Melanesians, pp. 192 ff.]
soul, much more applicable would that interpretation seem
when the bystanders had noted the last breath and the (consequent)
absence of motion, action, speech, life. Something had gone away
with the last sigh, something unseen, the absence of which brought
about a great change. That man lying there--companion, husband,
father, brother, friend--used to live and move and talk and breathe.
He was wont to respond to call and to react to the various stimuli
about him. Now calls were unheard, appeals brought no reply,
promptings met no response. And the difference was brought about
(so men reasoned) by the absence of that which had issued forth
unseen, never to return, at least to its former home, as survivors
would observe.
But the full consequences of observance of the phenomena of
death in the direction under investigation are not seen till
we take into account certain other phases of human fallibility.
Particularly is it necessary to note primitive man's relatively
smaller experience and confused perceptions, and the aberrant
conclusions often drawn from these.[9]
Most men are and always have been deficient
[9. Granger, Worship of the Romans, pp. 28-29.]
in power both of observation and of deduction. (1) They assume
as real many things that do riot exist, events that do not occur,
and relations that have no reality. Illustrations are found in
the belief in the existence of a directive power in the object
picked up by the fetish worshiper, the superstition of the Celt
that a fairy has left in the place of his own baby a fairy changeling,[10]
and the belief in the descent of a human gens from, e.g., eagle,
fox, or snake, as in totemism. Similarly boys of Mafulu, New
Guinea, while making a drum must drink only what is found in
axils of certain plants, else the embers which are to hollow
out their drums will not burn-drinking any other water will put
it out, or certain other restrictions are felt to be necessary.[11]
(2) They take obvious facts and interpret them wrongly. Thus
in the mediæval ordeal of the sacrament (a late example
chosen only because of its familiarity, but exemplifying perfectly
earlier conditions-, the phenomena can be parallelled in any
quarter of the world and every grade of culture) the sacramental
wafer was employed
[10, Rhys, Celtic Folk-lore, p. 102.
11. Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 258-259.]
as a proof of innocence or guilt. Constriction of the throat
and inability to swallow was often the result of the administration
of the wafer. If it did not result, deity was held to have shown
the innocence of the accused; if it did, guilt was declared manifest.
How really irrelative this test was to the facts is shown by
the frequent experience of inability to swallow a medicinal pill
or tablet without the aid of a liquid to "wash it down."
Yet here is no question of innocence or guilt. The explanation
is that attention to the ad of swallowing (which is usually effortless
and automatic) causes effort and so constriction. Swallowing
in the ordeal was doubtless sometimes impossible just for the
reason given here; but deity did not intervene, guilt or innocence
was not necessarily revealed by this fact, nor did inability
to swallow necessarily result from guilt-the innocent might also
find the task difficult simply because of the attention directed
to it.
On the difference in respect of observational and reasoning
power of savage and highly civilized man let Grant Allen speak.
"To us the conception of human life as a relatively short
period, bounded by a known duration, and naturally terminated
at a fixed end, is a common and familiar one. We forget, however,
that to the savage this is quite otherwise. He lives in a small
and scattered community, where deaths are rare, and where natural
death is comparatively infrequent. Most of his people are killed
in war, or devoured by wild beasts, or destroyed by accident
in the chase, or by thirst or starvation. Some are drowned in
rapid rivers; some crushed by falling trees or stones; some poisoned
by deadly fruits, or bitten by venomous snakes; some massacred
by chiefs or murdered in quarrels with their own tribesmen. In
a large majority of instances there is some open and obvious
cause of death, and this cause is generally due either to the
hand of man or to some other animal; or failing that, to some
apparently active effort of external nature, such as flood or
lightning or forest fires or landslip or earthquake."[12]
Man recognized his own volitional agency in causing death
in the chase or in personal conflicts. So to each of the agencies
which had produced disaster he attributed powers like his own--the
volitional behind the
[11. Evolution of the Idea of God, pp. 44-45.]
physical. He had, perhaps, himself narrowly escaped the fate
he had seen befall others and ascribed his escape to his own
cleverness. But not all of his acquaintances had suffered what
we should call a violent death. Some had passed away in disease
or even in old age. Surely it was evident, one would say, that
no external cause was at work there. But that was not his way
of thinking. He knew of unseen powers that send or are the wind,
the storm, the lightning.[13] And so the body that was racked
with pain and eventually became inert in death was held to be
tortured by an invisible something. In many cases, he knew, death
resulted from external violence; in all cases, he reasoned, the
great change was wrought by powers external to the victim, which
sometimes worked with invisible weapons.[14]
Bearing in mind, then, the faulty observation and logic of
primitives, and connecting the two sources of the idea of soul
previously discussed, viz. (1) sleep and dreams, and (2) the
phenomenon of death, together with
[12. The Ekoi of South Africa regard thunder
as a giant who strides across the heavens, while lightning is
either his servant or his enemy. Talbot, In the Shadow of
the Bush, p. 73.
13. See chapter IX for cases of disbelief in natural death.]
(3) the inference therefrom of a something that leaves the
body either temporarily in sleep or permanently in death, we
are brought to notice next what apparently corroborated the evidence
(as it would seem) respecting the existence of soul, that is,
the appearance in dreams of those who had died. This was in all
probability a more frequent occurrence with early than with modern
man, because of the smaller content of his experience and the
consequent more frequent repetition of its elements. We have
already remarked that the distinction between reality and fancy,
fact and the merely apparent, is often missed in early cultural
stages. It was quite in accordance with natural logic to reason
that the apparition in the dream was real. The dead, therefore,
still lived, had been seen, and had possibly engaged in conversation,
The wandering spirit of the dreamer had met the disembodied spirit;
or the latter had visited his former friends while they slept.[15]
The tremendous consequences flowing from these beliefs will be
developed a little later.
By these various experiences, dovetailing and appearing to
force a conclusion, man
[15. Lang, The Making of Religion, pp. 54
ff.]
certainly in a very primitive stage of culture drew the inference
that he was a duality - the body which he could see and feel,
and a something of which in his conscious existence he knew nothing
except that it existed. Moreover, it is demonstrable that among
many primitive peoples the priority in importance is assigned
to the spirit. Thus of the New Guineans it is affirmed: "These
and other things [specified in the context] seem to show that
a sharp distinction is drawn between body and spirit by the natives.
Certainly the body gains from long associations virtues from
the indwelling spirit; but it is the spirit which is the real
man, higher than, and superior to, the body in which the spirit
dwells."[16]
One can not go far astray if he maintain that it was the discovery
of the soul which was the most momentous in the history of the
human race; to it must be traced all man's uplift in the millenniums
of his existence.
[16. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 194.]
III
THE SOUL'S NATURE
AN important inquiry meets us at this point: How did man think
of this second something that usually inhabited his body but
sometimes left it for a time and at death left it permanently?
For it would soon have been borne in upon him (even though he
did not consciously recognize the soul's presence and operations)
that the permanent absence of soul meant death, and that therefore
while he lived it was present. What did he think concerning the
nature of this all-important part of him? It is very clear from
a number of circumstances that the notion of the soul was governed
by the phenomenon of death. Decisive upon this point is the wonderful
accord of meaning in so many languages of the word which expresses
this inner elusive reality. In the developed languages we may
note the root idea of such words as the Latin spiritus,
anima, animus, Irish anam, Sanskrit atman,
Greek psyche, pneuma, thumos, German Geist,
Dutch geest, English ghost, Hebrew nephesh,
ruah, Sumerian zid, Babylonian napishtu,
Egyptian kneph, all of which go back to the notion of
breath, or of a gentle movement of air or wind. One may forage
at large and observe the same root notion and a similar usage
in many other different regions, discovering the Australian wang,
Mohawk atonritz, Californian-Oregonian wkrisha,
piuts, Dakotan niya, Javanese nawa, Aztec
ehecatl, Nicaraguan julio, Gypsy duk, and
Finnish far. This line of thought is fortified by the
conception of the insubstantiality of the soul, expressed in
such words as skia, umbra, and "shade,"
used to denote the disembodied spirit. Terms of similar content
were used not only by the cultured Greeks and Romans, but are
known to be employed among North American Indians, Zulus and
Basutos in Africa, among the Calabars, and elsewhere. One recalls
the Hebrew rephaim. The survival of the belief in the
insubstantiality of the disembodied spirit till the Middle Ages
is shown by Dante, for according to him the souls in purgatory
knew that the poet had not passed through death by the fact that
his figure cast a shadow. Indeed, the idea of communication by
a disembodied spirit with the living in dreams was entrenched
by the reflection that its very immateriality enabled it to hold
communication with sleeping persons without arousing them from
sleep.
How early man came to realize that this part which is designated
by breath or puff of air is his real self is impossible to say.
But what is significant is that in many languages the word meaning
spirit, life, or breath has also the connotation "self,"
as has, e.g., the Hebrew nephesh. And how natural such
a signification is can be illustrated by the concrete fact that
Laura Bridgman, the blind-deaf-mute, is said to have expressed
the thought of death in a dream by the statement that "God
took away my breath to heaven." Among the Ekoi of Nigeria
ghost and soul and breath are connected as phases of the same
thing or as equivalents. One must not forget that the phenomenon
of death which is most obvious is the expiring sigh or last breath,
after the departure of which life ceases to exist. What more
natural than that the breath thus finally exhaled should be associated
with the soul or spirit, or, as in some cases, be thought to
carry the soul with it? Since in dreams a person deceased has
been seen and addressed while the body was known to have dissolved,
the way is direct and the step short to the conclusion that the
self, the real person, is that same breath or soul.[1]
But did primitive peoples endow the soul with form? The testimony
to this is abundant and cogent.[2] The most natural and perhaps
most common idea of the soul's shape is that it is a: miniature
of the possessor's form. Among those who have held this belief
are American Indians such as the Hurons, the natives of British
Columbia, Alaska, and the Esquimaux of the districts adjacent
to Behring Straits, islanders such as the Niassians near Sumatra
and the Fijians, and continental dwellers such as the Malays
and West Africans. To give a single example, Nigerian Etoi believe
that "when a man's body decays a new form comes out of it,
in every way like the man himself when be was above ground
[1. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush,
p. 230.
2. It has been collected not only by Tyler in his Primitive
Culture, but also by Frazer, Taboo, chap. II.
3. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 17, 230;
cf. Frazer, Taboo, p. 39.]
For the Egyptians abundant testimony is available as to the
belief in the double, existing indeed from birth.[4] There is
a picture in the Roman catacombs portraying the death of a Christian,
in which the soul is represented as leaving the mouth of the
dying in a cloud-like shape that takes his own form. What is
practically a replica of this is found on the walls of the Campo
Santo at Pisa; and in the east transept of Salisbury Cathedral
on the sculptured monument over the tomb of Bishop Giles de Bridgport
the soul appears as a naked figure carried by an angel.[5] The
usual notion is that the soul is invisible. But as in other respects
shamans or medicine men are credited with extraordinary powers,
so they are supposed to be able to discern the spirits or souls
moving about or endeavoring to escape from the body. Sometimes
the organ of detection is the ear, which can note the motion
of the soul's wings. Or, the soul being of human shape, it leaves
faint footmarks as indications of its presence, and light
[4. A notable case among many is the bas-relief
in the temple at Luxor, exhibiting the presentation at birth
to Ra of the royal child Amenhotep III and his double. Cf. Budge,
Osiris, etc., p. 119.
5. Clodd, Animism, p. 40.]
ashes strewn on the ground may betray its presence to the
keen-sighted medicine man.
Mention has been made of the return of the soul of one deceased
to the haunts of the body as evidenced by dreams. The form appearing
in the dream was recognized as that of a friend, again testifying
to the assumed fact that the soul has the shape of the body.
Further testimony to this belief is found in the faith that the
soul is held to suffer in some degree the fate of the body. Brazilian
Indians, for example, believe that the soul arrives in the other
world hacked and torn, or uninjured, exactly as was the condition
of the body at death.[6] Australians tie together the toes and
bind together the thumbs behind the back, or mutilate the body
and fill it with stones, or, again, they lop off the thumb of
a slain enemy, that the ghost may not hurl shadowy spear or pull
the bowstring in the land of spirits.[7] Chinese and Africans
abhor mutilation, especially decapitation, as a punishment, for
the latter produces headless ghosts.[8] And Shakespeare makes
Macbeth cry out:
[6. Im Thum, Among the Indians of Guiana,
passim.
7. Cases of the kind are cited in Frazer, The Dying God,
pp. 10-11; and Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 449, 474.
8. Cf. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 281-282.]
"Shake not thy GORY locks at me." The ghost retains
the bloody form in which the body was left at its departure.
From classical Greece and Rome the evidence for this same idea
of the soul's form is abundant and cogent; and it would not be
difficult to show, since so much has been revealed in the frescoes
and vase paintings recovered in the Mediterranean region, that
this idea comes down from very primitive times. In the paintings
which represent Hermes Psychopompus directing the issue and return
of souls, the latter are figured as winged mannikins, coming
from or returning to burial jars.[9] The form of Patroklos' shade
was that of the living hero.[11]
A notion closely akin to the foregoing is that which connects
the soul with the shadow. While many curious ideas which gather
around the latter--such as the Brahman belief that the shadow
of a pariah falling on food defiles it--do not involve the identity
of the two, in many cases there can be little doubt that soul
and shadow are not only closely related but are regarded as identical.
Some believe that an assault upon the shadow may be fatal
[9. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 43, and Themis,
p. 205.
10. Iliad, xxiii. 65 ff.]
to its possessor, or at least extremely harmful. The Indians
of the lower Frazer River hold that man has four souls, of which
one is the shadow. The Euahlayi of Australia believe that man
has a dream spirit, a shadow spirit, perhaps an animal spirit,
and one that leaves only at death.[11] Other Australians consider
that each individual has a choi, a sort of disembodied
soul, and a ngai, which lives in the heart. The choi
awaits reincarnation after death, the ngai passes immediately
after death into the children of the deceased. It is the latter
that sometimes leaves a person temporarily in his lifetime, e.g.,
when he faints. The choi has some sort of vague relationship
with the shadow.[12] The Kai of New Guinea also believe that
man has two souls,[13] as do some of the Fijians, one of these
being light (as a reflection in the water), the other dark, like
the shadow.[14] Dyaks assert the possession of three or even
of seven, souls; one may leave the body temporarily, the man
dies only when all leave."
[11. Mrs. Parker, Euahlayi Tribe, p.
35.
12. Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 129.
13. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 112.
14. Williams, Fiji, i. 242.
15. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 177; cf. Hastings,
ERE, vi. 226.]
Gilyaks may have three souls. The Balong of the Cameroon think
that one may have several souls, one in his own body and others
in different animals. The death of one of these animals, say,
at the hand of a hunter causes the man's death.[16] The equivalence
of the shadow to the man himself is proved by its use (or that
of its-dimensions, in a later stage of culture) in the same manner
as the body in foundation sacrifice--to give stability to the
structure. After an exactly similar manner of thought the reflection
of a body in water or a mirror is regarded as the soul. Injury
to reflection or shadow may result in injury to the corresponding
member of the body. Among the Congo people shadow or picture
or reflection is the equivalent of soul.[17] This whole manner
of thought explains why in so many regions the natives do not
willingly submit to being photographed or represented on canvas.[18]
While the usual mode of thought represents
[16. Globus, lxix (1896), 277, cited in Hastings,
ERE, iv. 412-13.
17. Weeks, Among Congo Cannibals, p. 162; cf. Talbot,
In the Shadow of The Bush, p. 230.
18. Cases cited in Frazer, Golden Bough, Part II; Taboo,
ii. 77-100.]
the human soul as a mannikin, other ideas are found. Among
the ancient Egyptians, in Brazil, in Melanesia, in Bohemia, Malaysia,
Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and elsewhere the shape of the spirit
may be that of a bird;[19] in British Columbia the bird is enclosed
in an egg in the nape of the neck. Or the soul may take the form
of a mouse (Brunswick, Transylvania, Swabia, Saxony), which may
differ in color in different regions; or of a fly (Transylvania),
a lizard (India), or an indistinct cloudy form (Scotland ).[20]
Greeks and Serbs thought of the soul also as a butterfly, and
the Greek name for one species of this insect is Psyche.
As to the constitution of this part of man's duality there
is a wide consensus along the lines already indicated. Primitive
peoples throughout the world describe it as a vapor, a shadowy,
filmy substance, related to the body as the perfume to the flower.
It is pale and yielding to the touch, without flesh and bone,
thin, impalpable, discerned as the figure in the human eye. Its
movements may be
[19. Bros, La Religion des peuples non-civilisis,
p. 54.
20. Miller, My Schools and Schoolmasters, pp. 106-107,
cited by Frazer, Taboo, pp. 40-41; Brown, Melanesians,
pp. 141 ff.--here bird, rat, lizard, etc., are forms the soul
takes.]
as swift as the wind, and so it is sometimes regarded as winged.
Yet it has a certain materiality, and consequently has necessities.
After death, for instance, it needs nourishment and partakes
of the spirit, the essential part, of the material things sometimes
provided for it. Egyptians, carrying the idea still further,
provided pictures or models of food, furniture, and the like,
which in a similar way became available to the spirit. The semi-materiality
of the soul is illustrated by the fact of the return to his temple
being known by marks alleged to be found in maize flour strewed
on the threshold of his temple-pyramid.[21]
[21 Spence, Civilization of Ancient Mexico,
p. 47]
IV
THE EXTERNAL OR SEPARABLE SOUL
IF what precedes be accepted, it can be taken as; established
that primitive man, or at least man in an early stage of culture,
determined himself to be a duality, soul and body. But the two
constituents did not appear to be inseparably connected. The
soul might leave the body, either temporarily or permanently,
and in the latter case the body perished. The presence of the
soul is therefore essential to life. But incidentally reference
has been made to the absence of the soul for periods usually
brief. In fact, primitive races hold that the soul absents itself
voluntarily at times, goes on travels, performs tasks, and the
like; and also that some have the power to send forth the soul--their
own or others'--for their own purposes. It may even happen that
the soul is either lured forth or departs unwisely, and has to
return. In New Guinea when a person faints, he is said to be
dead; and when he revives, the explanation is that he "died
green," and perhaps because the soul was not wanted in the
spirit land, it had to take up again its old life with the body.[1]
For the wandering of the soul in dreams there is abundant testimony,--so
abundant, in fact, that we will content ourselves with a single
reference.[2] The Japanese are persuaded that this same constituent
of personality leaves the body that it may sport itself untrammelled.[3]
The satirist Lucian and the scientist Pliny relate the story
of the seer Hermotimus, who sent forth his spirit to explore
distant regions. At last, during an unwontedly long absence,
his wife supposed him to be dead and burned his body, so that
on its return the spirit found no dwelling for itself.[4] A slightly
different case is that reported of the Scandinavian chief Ingimund,
who shut up three Finns that their spirits might visit Iceland,
discover the lie of the land where he proposed to settle, and
report to him on their return. An instance
[1. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 220.
2, Kingsley, West African Studies, pp. 200 ff.
3. Griffis, Mikado's Empire, p. 472.
4. Cited by Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 439; cf. Jevons,
Introduction, pp. 44 ff., and the cases there cited.]
like that of Hermotimus is the case of Epimenides, the Cretan
prophet and magician, who was reputed to be able to dispatch
his spirit in quest of knowledge and recall it at will.[5] And
Hermotimus had in recent years an African disciple, whose exploits
were worthy, if reports are to be credited, of his unknown master.[6]
Since belief in the absence of the soul, at least for a temporary
period, could be held over so wide an area and even among comparatively
developed peoples, it is not surprising that there should arise
a belief in the existence of the animating spirit seated not
in the body, but in some place where security would be greater.
The evidences are many of a belief that the soul might reside
either from birth or from some later period in some object other
than its normal home. This is the phenomenon known to anthropologists
as the "external" or "separable" soul. A
dilution of this is the form which is christened "the life
token," in which the clouding of a liquid or the tarnishing
of a weapon is the sign either of danger, sickness, or death
of the
[5. Hesychius, Lexikon, under "Epimenides."
6. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 231.]
person for whom the liquid or object stands. It can be shown,
however, in most cases, that when the life token is the center
of the story, it is the result of an advanced stage of culture,
if it is not directly stated that such object is the residence
of the soul.
The earliest example of this belief so far known to literature
occurs in the Egyptian tale of "Anpu and Bata, or the Two
Brothers."[7] The younger brother commits his soul apparently
to the keeping successively of acacia flowers, of a bull, and
then of two trees, while a chip from one of the latter causes
conception. Another view of the latter experiences, however,
is that they are cases of transmigration. The case of the Balong
of the Cameroons who believe that a man may have several souls,
one in his own body and others in different animals of the jungle,
has already been cited. It is quite usual for them to account
for a man's sudden death by supposing that one of his soul-containing
animals has been killed by a hunter.[8] Frequent in folk-lore
is the theme of the wicked and oppressive ogre or giant or wizard
who
[7. Petrie, Egyptian Tales, 2d series,
pp. 48 ff.
6. Globus, 69 (1896), 277, cited in Hastings, ERE,
4, 412-413.]
holds in his power maiden or youth, and is invincible to ordinary
attack because his soul is safe-guarded in an egg inside a duck
that swims on a pond in a distant island guarded by a dragon
within a walled and inaccessible fortress. Not until the many
obstacles have been overcome and the egg obtained is the luckless
maiden or youth released by the crushing of the egg and the consequent
immediate demise of ogre, giant, or wizard. This theme of a receptacle
strongly guarded (though in this case it is not a soul, but the
"Book of Thoth," a book of magic) comes, curiously
enough, in its earliest form from Egypt, and suggests that this
idea of an object, and perhaps the separable soul, secured by
many safeguards, may have been a particularly widely diffused
idea. The "Book of Thoth" was in an iron box, which
enclosed successively one of bronze, of kété-wood,
of ivory and ebony, of silver, and last of gold, the entire nest
being in the middle of the river, surrounded by snakes, scorpions,
and "all manner of creeping things," and above all
by a snake that no man could kill--which however a man did kill.
In this case, as in most of those in folk-lore where the soul
is supposedly unassailable, the conquest is effected through
magic.[9]
In many cases the story has to do with the miraculous birth
(not always virgin birth, however) of twins or triplets, simultaneous
with which appears some plant or tree or other copied which is
the repository of the soul or is the "life-token."
The fading or withering of bloom or plant here indicates disaster.
Sometimes, instead of the plants, weapons (which undergo modernization
in successive generations of story-tellers) spring up, or a spring
wells forth, and in them reside the souls of the children. Then
if hilt falls from sword or sheen tarnishes on blade, or if lock
looses from gun or the clear water of the spring begins to run
clouded, the event betokens danger or catastrophe to the possessor
of the soul.[10] In the Ramayana, Garuda says to Rama:
"I am thy friend, thy life free-
[1. The story of the Book of Thoth is told
in Petrie, Egyptian Tales, ii. 89 ff.; Spiegelberg, Demotische
Papyrus; and Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp.
31 ff.
2. A number of interesting cases exhibiting these phenomena,
not usually cited in the books can be found in Parker, Village
Folk Tales of Ceylon (e.g., i. 164, 166-168, 190, et passim);
Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal, pp. 2, 6, 85-86, 189, 253, etc.; Indian
Antiquary, i. 86, 117, xvii. 54; Steel, Tales of the Punjab,
pp. 52, 55, 75, etc.]
ranging, external to thyself."[11] It may be sufficient
here, without going further into details in this interesting
subject, to note that a considerable number of folk-tales of
this and kindred types have been brought together and their points
of similarity and difference discussed in Hartland's fascinating
volumes,[12] a work which is urged upon all who wish to note
the salient characteristics of this fertile field. It is interesting
to remark that a new area for the existence of this curious belief
has recently been discovered in the far north, since it is a
part of the mental possessions of the Tshimsheans of Alaska.[13]
If it be objected that the principal evidence for all this
is found in the region of Märchen, of folk-tale,
and therefore purely imaginative, the reply is: even were this
all, it shows a mode of thought and possibilities of conception,
of psychological activity. But above all this, we can adduce
the fact that transition to actual belief is furnished by the
many cases in which a tree is planted when a child is born, and
the life of tree and child are thought
[11. Nivedita, Myths of Hindus, p.
82.
12. The Legend of Perseus, 3 vols.
13. Arctander, Apostle of Alaska, p. 93.]
to be intimately connected. The Maori bury the navel cord
or the placenta and plant a tree over the spot, and the latter
becomes the life token .[14] Similarly, in Old Calibar the burial
of the placenta and planting of a tree are conjoined.[15] In
Pomerania a tree already growing is employed. Similar beliefs
may be cited from Western Africa, Oceanica (e.g., Banks Islands
[16]), Madagascar, Russia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and England,
and even in China traces of like customs are found.[17] In these
cases fate of tree and person are so bound together that withering
of or damage to the tree results in or indicates harm to the
person. Thus certain Nigerian tribes hold that a tree has the
life or breath of a person in it, and that harm to either may
mean death to the other.[18]
[14 Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 184.
15. Burton, Wit and Wisdom from West Africa, p. 411.
16. Rivers, Melanesian Society i. 155.
17. Cases are collected in Hartland, Legend of Perseus,
ii. 28 ff.
18. Thomas, Anthropological Report, pp. 29, 31, et
passim.]
V
PARITY OF BEING
THIS opens the way to the next branch of the subject. If the
human soul could reside in objects, why should not these objects
themselves possess spirits? The evident conviction of early and
primitive races as to the existence, form, and substance of the
human soul has, it is believed, been adequately presented in
the foregoing. But is the possession of soul limited by these
races to humanity? Do primitive peoples regard other beings as
also so endowed? The definition of animism already furnished
involves an affirmative answer, but we must look a little further
into this phase of the subject. There is an "epigram of
Christian pantheism" which declares that "God sleeps
in the stone, dreams in the plant, awakens in the animal, and
is self-conscious in man."[1] This expresses in some
[1. Basil Wilberforce, Steps in Spiritual
Growth, p. 50. 61]
degree what primitive man thought of things about him, except
that he would have demurred at the idea of mere sleep or dream
of the sentient in the world of the non-human. He doubtless from
the beginning made himself the measure of things. And so, as
was briefly shown at the beginning of this discussion,[2] any
object in nature might be conceived by primitive or savage as
a duality, like himself, the body of which was visible and tangible,
and the soul, like his own, invisible except to the soul itself
or to the skilled shaman. With the untutored, nothing exists
in nature but may give occasion to this conception of possession
of soul. Omaha Indians represent this by the statement that all
forms mark where Wakonda has stopped and brought them into existence.
"Man . . . becomes literally a part of nature, connected
with it physically and related to it psychically." So endowments
of animals may be transferred to man, and Wakonda helps in answer
to prayer by sending the animal which has the endowment proper
to the end desired. This explains in part the "animal totem,"
found in almost exactly parallel form among the Tamaniu of
[2. pp.10 ff., above.]
the Banks Islands.[3] Another statement of the fact is the
following:
"The quality of savage mind which perhaps most profoundly
illuminates our subject is its hazy sense of personality, the
difficulty it experiences in marking off its 'self' from other
selves; in other words, the absence of sharp dualisms. This is
revealed in creation myths, in primitive notions of kinship and
relationship, in the almost universal savage belief in metamorphosis,
in the savage's identification of 'self ' with the name, shadow,
dream-self, likeness, clothing and other property. . . . And
the wide-spread belief in 'possession' by good or evil spirits
further confirms the principle."[4]
More advanced peoples may own to a complete animism. Examples
are found in the advanced philosophies and religions of India.
"Only last summer in a conversation with an orthodox Brahman
in Kashmir I discovered that he regarded everything in nature,
down to separate stick and stone and blade of
[3. A. C. Fletcher and F. La Flesche, in Twenty-seventh
Annual Report of The Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 600; Rivers,
Melanesian Society, i. 154.
4. Todd, The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency, pp.
9-10.]
grass, as possessed by its own spirit."[5] It is not
wonderful that man should endow with life, soul, and power the
great objects of nature, the heavenly bodies, for instance. Nor
can we wonder that such objects as a volcano with its manifestation
of mysterious force, a mountain range which seems to clothe itself
in clouds and to launch forth the avalanche, the sea, with its
varied moods and mystery, that appals even the modern experienced
traveler, the river with its ceaseless flow and its occasional
devastations, the forest with its reaches of silence or its monotone
under the soughing of the wind, call up convictions of dread
personality. These things alone suffice to suggest that primitive
man felt himself ever in the presence of mystery. Few objects
there were but seemed to possess each its own basis for arousing
admiration or fear.
It is necessary here to inquire somewhat more minutely into
the drift of the thoughts of primitive man concerning the things
he saw or felt or imagined. And in doing this we are to recall
that three avenues are open along which to advance in this inquiry.
First
[1. Professor Hervey D. Griswold, in The
Biblical World, Sept. 1912, p. 165.]
there is the avenue of cult, where definite acts of devotion
or gift (sacrifice) unfailingly indicate belief in the sentient
and potent capabilities of the object addressed. It is obvious
that even the most naive of savages pay no attention of this
sort to objects which they conceive to be without the qualities
of life, sensation, emotion, and power. The second avenue is
that of folk-lore and mythology. To some this may appear trivial
and unworthy of serious attention. Yet these are "the sedimentary
deposits of the traditions of remotely distant epochs."[6]
just as children's games and festivals in May or in harvest season
recall and are founded on practices that once obtained in real
earnest, so folk-tales encyst, like a fly in the amber or a fossil
in the rock, the indications of life in some cases long past.
In other instances not a few they represent thought that still
lingers, if we but knew where to look for it. Stories of men
and women transformed into beasts, either voluntarily or involuntarily,
of cats or hares which prove to be the forms witches assume for
mischievous ends, seem to us foolish; the tales of were-wolves,
told in
[6. Cox, Introduction to Folk-lore, pp. 3-4.]
earnest even yet in parts of Europe, seem to the educated
impossible and merely laughable. Yet we shall see that the modern
African believes them, and at times looks askance at his neighbor
who has the reputation of being an "elephant-man" or
a "leopard-man." The third avenue is that of beliefs
still or recently current among savages comparatively or completely
unaffected by the higher civilizations. Even in India which has
so long been in contact with the culture of the West, old beliefs
linger, often in passive but effective resistance to more enlightened
ideas, while in Africa and among the indigenes of the Americas
and of Australia and Oceanica native forms of thought continue,
sometimes but little adulterated, as where relationship is claimed
by a clan or tribe with this or that genus of plant or animal
life.
1. INANIMATE OBJECTS IN NATURE POSSESS SOUL
It seems superfluous here to cite cases of the belief which
has existed so nearly universally that the sun, the planets,
and the stars are living objects possessed of soul. The stage
in which a deity is supposed to inhabit or to rule or to have
as his special sphere of control one of these heavenly objects
registers, of course, an advanced culture, when pure animism
has given way to a higher mode of thought and a truer perception
of facts.[7] But that once these objects were regarded as sentient
is clear from poetry, myth, and remainder in folk-lore and song.
Among Oceanicans the sun is in form like a man, but possessed
of fearful energy. He has many legs, and various other members
in excess.[8] Worthy of special notice in this connection is
the conception of the earth as the great mother, a belief that
was historical in Babylonia, Asia Minor particularly, and in
Greece, where it influenced in especial manner practice and ritual.
Speaking of the Sumerians Langdon says:
"The nourishing life of earth, warmed by the sunshine,
refreshed by the rains, furnished
[7. On Zeus as an example of this, see Cook's
Zeus, p. 3, note 2.
8. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp. 50, 52. For a collection
of indications of worship of the sun (itself proof of the way
in which this luminary was regarded), see the author's article
in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge,
xi. 137-45; for star-worship, ib., xi. 68-69; and for
worship of the moon among the Hebrews, ib., vii. 492-494.]
the prehistoric Sumerians . . . with their first god. And
this deity who fostered all life was conceived of as a mother,
unbegotten, genderless, producing animal and vegetable life as
a virgin. But primitive peoples do not think in abstract terms,
nor do they produce ideas as abstract principles. They conceived
the earth goddess under that form of life with which they were
most familiar. In the case of this people the grape vine appears
to have been the plant which appealed to them as most efficiently
manifesting the power of the great mother. Hence they called
this goddess 'Mother Vine-Stalk,' or simply 'Goddess Vine-Stalk.'"[9]
In Nigeria the ground is an object which underlies many taboos,
and to it sacrifices are offered of many kinds.[10] The feeling
among the Ibo-speaking peoples seems much like that, if not the
same, which governed in Greece and Asia Minor before the personalizing
of the Great Mother.[11] At the other extreme the sky is regarded
as father, though in the Egyptian myth, which speaks of the
[9. Langdon, Tammuz and Ishtar, p.
43.
10. Thomas, Anthropological Report, i. ii, et passim.
11. Cf, for instance, Harrison, Prolegomena, pp. 260-271.]
separation of earth and heaven (a myth that is characterized
by its diffusion or else is indigenous in many regions), curiously
enough in a way adumbrating the theory of the evolutionary origin
of the worlds and appearing in Gen. 1, the respective genders
of earth and sky are reversed.[12]
But such faith is not confined to celestial objects and the
earth. Things terrestrial, tangible or intangible, had each its
own spirit and life. Thus, to group a number of these, winds,
lightning, mountains, and forests are sentient beings. Thus of
some Africans it is said that they hold that: "The wind
talks to the forest and the forest to the wind. The tornado is
often nothing more than a quarrel between mountain and forest,
lightning and wind which latter is a servant of something else];
and we ourselves the Africans] may get hit with the bits."[13]
Pima Indians think of Wind and Storm-cloud (Rain-man) as supernatural
persons who once did menial
[12. For a descriptive picture of this separation,
cf. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Aegypter, p.
210, reproduced in Homiletic Review, Oct., 1912, p. 275.
For a crude form of this myth of the separation of heaven and
earth, see Westervelt, Legend; of Maui, pp. 31 ff.
13 Milligan, Fetish Folk of West Africa, p. 215.]
service for mortals, while Thunder also possesses personality,
owns fire, and detects the thief of fire (the essentials of the
story of Prometheus are here);[14] and the notions of the Omahas
are quite similar. The Uriankhai of Mongolia deify mountains,
rivers, and the wind.[15] The Zulus regard their rainmakers as
operating upon clouds as the Greeks thought of Zeus the Cloud-gatherer,
and to them cloud and lightning are still sentient beings, alive
and full of power, though controlled by the medicine men.[16]
The sea is regarded in the same way. Hartland cites the case
of the ancient Celts reported by Ælian, supported in substance
by native evidence from Celtic tradition, who used to meet the
overflowing sea with drawn swords and menacing spears, employing
the same methods as those used towards human enemies." Mr.
Hartland refers also to the same notion as exhibited by the Malays
and reported by Skeat. It would be easy to adduce testimony to
this same effect from Africa, where the
[14. Fewkes, 28th Annual Report of Bureau
of Am. Ethnology, pp. 43, 47; Fletcher and La Flesche, 22d
Report, passim.
15. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 243.
16. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 109.
17 Hartland, Ritual and Belief, pp. 161 ff.]
natives of the West shore offer sacrifice to the sea in order
to induce it to grant an easy landing. In folk-lore this idea
is transformed later in culture-history into the kelpies and
what-not that inhabit the waters; but students of folk tales
have no doubt that in the original form the sea was regarded
as possessing full personality with all that is involved.
It seems superfluous almost to cite cases of rivers which
have personality, since classic stories abound which bear out
the claim. Yet it is useful to show that such ideas are not confined
to the literature of Greece.[18] For instance, a traveler who
was being conveyed by canoe and paddle up a river was persuaded
by the Africans to turn back because a cloud appeared over the
stream, and they supposed that it was caused by the river in
displeasure at the profanation of its waters by a stranger. In
other cases the river is simply possessed by a spirit, to which
offerings should be made in
[18. For citations of rivers regarded as divinities
by Greeks the reader may consult Halliday, Greek Divination,
pp. 116-117. He will find there that springs also come under
the same category. Thus the spring at Kolophon rendered inspired
the priest who drank it (Tacitus, Annals, ii. 54; Pliny,
ii. 103, 232). One recalls inevitably the many sacred springs
throughout the world, the sanctity being but the attenuated form
in which the old belief has come down to us.]
order that no calamity may be suffered in the crossing."
The survival in poetry of the thought of a river as a person
may be illustrated from the Ramayana, where a river becomes the
wife of a king (xv. 20:13), or falls in love and bears a son
(xiii. 2:18). The Ganges is a daughter and a goddess, becomes
a spouse and bears a son. In the days of wife-capture, primitives
would see in a torrent into which a maiden had fallen a male
capturing his wife; or, in case of a man falling in, they might
think of a fierce female seizing a husband. It will be recalled
that the Egyptians thought of the Nile as a short ugly male with
huge woman's breasts, symbolizing the fertility which the river
brought to the land. In New Guinea the rivers are besought as
persons to make gifts of fish to the Mafulu.[20] In Mongolia
they are deified.[20a] The views of fire as a person, having
attributes that correspond, might be easily supported by reference
to the Vedic and Brahmanic teaching respecting Agni, whose name
reappears in the Latin as ignis, fire.
[19 Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 318-319.
20. Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 231.
20a. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 243.]
The Kai of German New Guinea assert deliberately that fine
has soul.[21] One might with profit investigate the background
of the Zoroastrian notion of the extreme sanctity of fire, and
the Aryo-Indian conceptions already noted would be found lurking
therein. Similarly Malabars hold that a flame has life and spirit,
and fear the ghost of a flame that has suddenly been quenched.[22]
The evidence of belief in the life and power, even of the
divinity, of rocks and stones is too abundant to be cited at
any length. In the Semitic sphere William Robertson Smith has
offered irrefutable evidence of worship of such objects-worship,
it will be seen at once, being evidence of belief in possession
of attributes equivalent to soul and spirit by the object of
devotion.[21] It is among the curiosities of history that the
stones of Carnac in France and of Rollright in England are said
to leave their positions and to go down to the sea, or to a spring
to drink.[24] Africans report that a large stone near a village
patrols
[21. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii.
143-144.
22. Folk-lore, v. 297 ff.
23. Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, and Religion
of the Semites.
24. Folk-lore, v. 297 ff.]
the outskirts of that village during danger.[25] A great rock
in the African region inhabited by the Baganda is deemed sacred
and is an object of worship and propitiation, and the same is
true of a meteorite.[26] The stone of Nimm, an Etoi goddess,
is now an attar, and this is doubtless but a development from
the conception of it as endowed with life, as might be abundantly
illustrated from other sources.[27] In Mongolia stones are among
the objects of worship.[28] In Melanesia stones and rocks of
many sorts receive offerings, and are regarded either as the
homes of spirits or as being the possessors of these--the two
are not so far apart; also in the Solomon Islands spirit is associated
with stone. In the New Hebrides large rocks are especially sacred.
Banks Islanders regard certain long stones as so much alive that
they can draw out a man's soul if his shadow fall on them. In
Florida Island any peculiarly shaped stone may have life and
soul attributed to it.[29]
[25. D'Alviella, Hibbert Leaures, p.
54.
26. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 271-272, 290.
27. Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, pp. 171-172.
28. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 56ff.
21 Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 119, 140, 143, 169,
et passim; Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 178.]
In many cases of this sort the attitude toward them seems
to imply in them a kind of sanctity, which is however but a more
developed way of thinking and is evidential of an earlier and
cruder mode of thought. A survival of this character is in evidence
near Laguna, New Mexico, where seven jagged rocks are the prisons
of seven spirits.[30] The stone of the Omaha sweat lodge was
regarded anthropopathically.[31] The case of the Baganda meteorite
cited above is but one of many instances of the kind in which
veneration has been paid. The two stones of the Kaaba at once
occur to the mind .[32] Acts 19:35 furnishes a notable instance.
One may recall the very numerous cases from ancient Greece-the
sacred stone at Delphi, that at Hyettos, the thirty worshipped
by the Pharæans, the many Hermæ along the Greek roads
referred to so often by the classical writers." These were
worshipped and anointed with oil--compare the treatment accorded
Jacob's pillar (above, p. 5).
[30. Quoted by Wallis in JRP, July
1912, from Southern Workman, Nov. 1910.
31. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., pp.
575-578.
32. New Schaf-Herzog Encyclopedia, vi. 289.
33 Theophrastus, Characteres ethici, xvi.; Pausanias,
ed. Frazer, VIII. xxxiv. 3; X. xxiv. 6, etc.]
At Aneiteum in Melanesia stones thought to resemble objects
of desire or striving received worship from various classes of
people. Thus one that was fish-shaped was venerated by fishermen.[34]
To catalogue here the various objects in nature which have
had life attributed to them would require much space. Mention
will be made of only the following in addition to those already
adduced. The rainbow is a thing of life in Australia, inhabiting
deep waterholes in the mountains; it is seen only when it is
passing from one of these to another. Approximately the same
notion obtains in Africa." Among the Baganda of Africa,
rainwater is a totem (i.e., it is either an ancestor or an ally).[36]
By Arabs the resin or gum from which the frankincense of commerce
is derived is regarded as the blood of a tree, the soul of which
is a divinity, and the gathering of the gum is attended by special
ceremonies.[37] The Tshemsheans of Alaska find their devotional
spirit awakened, as in the presence of a
[34. Turner, Samoa, p. 327.
35. Mathew, Eagle-hawk and Crow, p. 146; Missions
Catholiques, no. 239, p. 592.
36. Roscoe, The Baganda, p. 140.
37. Zehnpfund, in New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, iv.
372.]
supernatural being, by precipices, tidal waves, or indeed
almost any object or phenomenon that is strange to them.[38]
2. SOUL IN THINGS ARTIFICIAL
A rather noted controversy over theories of language, and
incidentally of myth and religion, once took place between Professors
Max Müller and Whitney, in which, a little after the event,
the late Andrew Lang took a hand. The Oxford scholar saw in myth
"a disease of language," and Mr. Lang replied that
what the data showed was a disease of thought. By this Mr. Lang
intended to convey the idea that man was astray either in his
observations or in the deductions he made from them. How far
astray from the truth man often was we have already seen. But
notions even more strange are yet to be cited. One of the earliest
literary testimonies to the class of ideas to be noted in this
section is found in one of the minor prophets, who declares:
"They (men) sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense
unto their drags; because by them their portion is fat, and their
meat
[38. Arctander, Apostle of Alaska, pp. 100
ff.]
plenteous.[39]" Here we have a fact stated, as well as
the reason for the fact which can be duplicated from many different
quarters even in our own day. Objects which were the product
of man's own handicraft, the genesis of which and whole production
and mode of use he knew, received his homage. Hunting implements
and those used in agriculture are by man endowed with life and
power before which he bows in reverence. In India there is a
festival lasting three days, observed in October by Hindoos of
all castes, including the Brahmins, which has to do with the
worship of all sorts of tools and implements. In many cases it
is doubtless but the survival of a custom; in very many others,
however, the original element of ascription of life or divinity
still inheres.[40] It is not so very difficult to see the reason
for the primitive mind's being affected in this way. Why should
the mere scratching of the earth with a rude hoe and the deposition
of a seed produce so bountiful and, to it, strange results? What
did early man know of the chemistry of nature? Was it not the
spirit in the hoe
[39. Habakkuk 1:16.
40. Cf. Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, pp. 174-175.]
that made the gift of the harvest? If we were to study fetishism,
we should discover that man believes that he can bring together
"odds and ends" in a bundle or bag, and that a spirit
will take up its abode there. Why should not with easy plausibility
the hoe or net or drag equally be or become animate? It is perhaps
not at all wonderful that in India particularly, perhaps elsewhere,
the fire-drill was an object of devotion and conceived to be
divine. When we recall the fact, now so familiar to us, but remaining
to the Hindoos for millenniums one of the arcana of nature, viz.,
that from a place where apparently there was no fire, fire may
be evoked, literally called into being, we can begin to appreciate
in some small degree man's awe before such phenomena. We can
find the same awe existing in Fiji, where, besides stones, houses,
and canoes, tools of various sorts are credited with souls and
believed to be immortal.[41] In the same region so isolated and
insignificant a thing as a whale's tooth is credited with life
and immortality; so the Fijian ghost in the spirit land on occasion
throws at a pandanus tree the
[41. Williams, Fiji, i. 241.]
ghost of the whale's tooth that was buried with his body.[42]
Not less curious than the foregoing is the fact that food
and the like have been and still are regarded as animate and
possessed of spirit. The ancient Egyptians provided for the ka,
soul or double of the deceased, articles of food, drink, or clothing,
so that it need not suffer hunger, thirst, or cold. But the ka,
being ethereal, did not use the things themselves, but only the
parts of them that stood in the same relation to the things as
the ka did to the deceased, i.e., their souls or doubles.
So that there a conception wondrously like that of spirit or
soul is attributed to articles of food, drink, and clothing.
In the earlier stages of Egyptian civilization, the things devoted
to the deceased were purposely mutilated; and it requires no
stretch of the imagination, had we no contemporaneous testimony
to the fact, to see in this mutilation of the offerings the same
process as we are familiar with In another connection, viz.,
the killing of the offerings.[43] Just as slaves and wives were
sent through the gates of death
[42. Williams, Fiji, i. 243 ff.
43. Ancient Egypt, ii (1914), 123.]
to serve their dead lord, so were implements, weapons, ornaments
and food. In Nigeria around funeral shrines are fragments of
household belongings, which have been broken so that their astral
forms may be set free to be carried by the owner's shade to its
spirit home.[44] In perfect agreement with this trend of thought,
the Dyaks of Borneo bury with the body various utensils, and
hold that these have spirits which the deceased takes along with
him to his new home and puts to good use.[45] In Central Africa
baskets, hoe-handles, pots that have been perforated, broken
cups and the like are placed at graves, having been killed by
breaking that their spirits may go to the spirit land there to
do service.[46] In like fashion the Bakongos endow bottles, cloths,
umbrellas and similar articles with spirit.[47] Talbot learned
in Africa that to a cloth can be imparted personal qualities,
so that it breaks out into speech.[48] Even ornaments may have
soul, according to the Melanesians
[44. Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection,
ii. 119-120; Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, pp. 6
ff.
45. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 138, 142
46. Werner, Native Races, pp. 155, 159.
47. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, pp. 269, 272.
46. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 226.]
of New Guinea, and their souls, evaporated by fire, are offered
to disease demons which have operated by extracting a human soul
from its abode.[49] The Kai of German New Guinea offer food and
viands to the ghosts of their dead, which considerately eat only
the soul thereof and leave the substance to those who offer.[50]
It would seem from certain passages in the Old Testament that
the conception once existed that even a part of the body might
have individual life and power. Witness the expression, "El
(God) of my hand" (Gen. 31:29; Deut. 28:32; Micah 2:1; Prov.
3:27; Neh. 5:5).[51] Even so abstract a conception as the year
receives homage as a personality among the Ibo-speaking peoples,
who, by the way, place rivers among the great powers which they
name Alose.[51]
[49 Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 189
ff.
50. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 145 ff., 489
ff., 513 ff.
51. B. D. Eerdmans, in Expositor, Nov. 1913, p. 386.
52. Thomas, Anthropological Report, pp. 27 ff.]
3. SOUL OR SPIRIT IN THE VEGETABLE WORLD
If things so obviously inanimate as those we have just noticed
could be regarded as possessing the attributes of life and soul,
it is no wonder that the vegetable world was thought to exhibit
the same qualities. The plant has the power of producing pregnancy
in the human species, since leaf and flower from certain specified
kinds of plants, falling on a woman, get her with child.[53]
In Melanesia the Cycas and the Casuarina are sacred, and in folk-lore
the Cycas becomes a maiden. Children also are believed to have
sprung from trees, fruits, and other vegetable growths."
In Australia the cones of the Casuarina are supposed to have
eidola which, when released by burning, attack the eyes of bystanders
and cause blindness--in all probability the stinging character
of the smoke is thus explained.[55] Trees have souls, feel pain,
and even hold conversation, and this is not confined
[53. Roscoe, The Baganda, p. 48.
54. Codrington, Melanesians, p. 187; cf. Talbot, In
the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 133-135.
55. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-east Australia,
pp. 363, 366, 376-377, 453]
to the larger growths, being extended to plants or shrubs,
and some skilled humans have had the knowledge of plant language.[56]
The fertilization of trees may be regarded as the result of desire
and voluntative action. Malays believe implicitly in the souls
of trees and consider it appropriate to make offerings to them.[57]
The tree as oracle in Ancient Greece and elsewhere is a well
known fact--cf. the sacred oak at Dodona, whose character is
standing evidence of belief in its divinity, and this in ancient
times included the idea of intelligent life and soul. One might
produce abundance of evidence of ascription of these possessions
to plants from the phenomena of totemism, the idea here being
either descent from or alliance with some particular species
of plant, treatment of which was always respectful and like that
accorded to members of the human tribe or clan. Thus, to cite
but a single instance out of the many available, such plants
as the bean, mushroom, and yam
[56. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush,
pp. 30-36, 177-178, 181, 287, 299-300; D'Alviella, Hibbert
Lectures, pp. 53 ff. In the tale of Anpu and Bata (Petrie,
Egyptian Tales, 2d series, pp. 48 ff.) the tree has power
of speech.
57. Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 194; Homiletic Review,
July, 1912, pp. 14-15; Hartland, Legend of Perseus, ii.
441.]
occur as totems among the Baganda.[56] Among the Ibo-speaking
peoples trees known as Ojuku and Ngu belong to the powers known
as Alose, and so akin to man are certain trees that in the process
of reincarnation their souls may animate human bodies.[57] The
worship of the tree has received attention so frequent and elaborate
as here not to call for extended treatment. From the British
Isles across Europe and Asia evidence of this cult is abundant,
and has been increased in the excavations which have brought
to light the ancient Mycenaean and Mediterranean civilizations.
How widespread this worship has been in India may be seen from
the sculpture still in existence, some of which has been illustrated
and studied by Fergusson.[60]
Among the Mafulu of New Guinea the yam is regarded as having
personality, and possessing a sweetheart plant.[61] One of the
most remarkable testimonies to the feeling of primitive man in
reference to the forest is the following from Lange; speaking
of an Indian alone in the bush:
[58. J. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 138-140.
59. N. W. Thomas, Anthropological Report, i. 27, 28,
31, et passim.
60. Tree and Serpent Worship; cf. Homiletic Review,
July, 1912.
61. Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 233 ff.]
"It appears to the Indian that he is beside himself;
he feels strange exterior influences of an almost overwhelming
character, foreign to men who are only used to a civilized life
and whose path is far away from the wilderness. It appears to
him now that an invisible and almost irresistible force is trying
to attract him, and to lead him deeper and deeper into the forest,
perhaps there to perish. He feels the sense of fear; he argues
with himself: 'The forest wants to destroy me, to kill me, to
absorb me.' After he returns to his hut, he says: 'I was hunting,
the forest wanted to kill me, and got me almost into its power,
but I escaped and I have returned safely.'"[62]
4. SOUL OR SPIRIT IN ANIMALS
If the principle of "parity of being" involves the
conception of life and soul in inanimate objects and in the plant
world, a fortiori we should expect that animals would be endowed,
in the mind of primitives, with the same qualities. Here again
no exhaustive examination and collection of cases can be presented,
[62. Lange, The Lower Amazon, p. 424.]
so extensive is the evidence. What will be offered will show
simply the range of the idea and the completeness with which
it is carried out.
"In all African fables the various animals are but thinly
disguised human beings."[63] Even the lower forms of animal
life, such as the starfish, indeed totally mythical examples
of this species, have been regarded as possessed of or as being
spirit. Thus in the Murray River region of Australia a huge starfish
is supposed to be a spirit and to inhabit a deep water hole.[64]
Animals like lions, leopards, crocodiles, sheep, reptiles, and
others have ghosts that are dangerous after death and must be
placated or guarded against.[65] Ainus treat as a god a captive
bear, and when it is killed for food, some of its own flesh is
offered to it as a sacrifice.[66] Many other peoples in different
quarters of the world-American Indians, Malays, and so on-treat
with pretended or real honor the game animal they slay, or attempt
to cajole it or deceive it,
[63. Milligan, Fetish Folk of West Africa,
p. 215.
64. Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 138.
65. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 288-289.
66. Batchelor, Ainus and Their Folk-lore, pp. 486-496.]
just as they would attempt to cajole or deceive one of their
own species if success seemed likely, in order that its spirit
or its blood kin may not avenge its slaughter. Malays will cry
out to a tiger which they have trapped that "Mohammed set
the trap," so as to send its spirit on a false scent when
it starts out for revenge.[67] Among the Dyaks the crocodile
when caught "is addressed in eulogistic language and beguiled,
so the people say, into offering no resistance. He is called
a rajah among animals, and is told that he has come on a friendly
visit and must behave accordingly. . . . Though the animal is
spoken to in such flattering terms before he is secured, the
moment . . . he is powerless for evil, they deride him for his
stupidity."[68] Their treatment of bears and tigers is quite
similar. Few facts could more emphatically demonstrate the complete
parity of animals with man, as conceived by various races, than
the remarkable one that animals have been credited with organization
into kinships, families, societies, and governments, and
[67. Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 167; cf.
Charlevoix, Journal d'un voyage dans 1'Amérique septentrionale,
v. 173.
68. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 59-60.]
that they are held to perform even worship.[69] The extreme
example of what Andrew Lang called "disease of thought"
in this direction has already been noted, in the cases where
man regards himself indifferently as a cassowary or some other
totem gens, or on the other hand considers the animal species
as the same as himself.[70] This curious operation of the mind
may be further illustrated by two other examples. The islanders
of Mabuiag say of the cassowary that "he all same as relation,
he belong same family," and Alaskans took the first Russians
whom they saw for cuttle fish because of the buttons on their
clothes." It is, after this, no subject for wonder if a
Zuni Indian see in a turtle or rabbit or hedgehog the embodiment
of one of his ancestors, or that a totem clan can trace origins
back to planet or sun, to bird, beast, or reptile.[72] The complete
parity of different states of existence is here in evidence;
and implicit
[69. Illustrations of monkeys performing the
acts of worship are abundantly found in the sculptures of India;
cf. worship of the sacred tree in Fergusson's Tree and Serpent
Worship, and Homiletic Review, July, 1912.
70. See p. 8.
71. Frazer, Golden Bough 2, ii. 388 ff.
72. F. Cushing, in Century Magazine, May, 1883; and
Zuni Tales, passim.]
always, explicit most of the time, is the idea of possession
of spirit or soul, though the conception is necessarily vague.
Further testimony is furnished by the peoples who hold that
animals, birds, and the like understand human speech, have languages
of their own, talk, perform the operations of reason, engage
in trade, are subject to passions, yield to coaxing, blandishment
or deception, play tricks on each other and on humans, scheme
for each other's hurt or death, and perform many humanlike actions.[73]
The Melanesians attribute to the snake the power of articulate
speech; and the dog is equally well endowed, if we may listen
to the Blacks of Australia.[74] Africans of the Niger region
are not alone in giving speech and reason to the parrot, and
they know that a hawk takes a tree as a wife.[75] These cases
are curiously duplicated among the Pima Indians, where the dog
used to have the power to speak, and
[73. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 467-483;
cf. the collection of cases in Frazer, Taboo, ii. 169-273,
398-404, of incidents showing treatment of animals as though
possessed of the sentimentalities, etc., of human beings; note
the speech of cattle, etc., in the "Tale of Anpu and Bata,"
Petrie, Egyptian Tales, ii. 48 ff.
74. Codrington, Melanesians, p. 151; Fison and Howitt,
Kamilaroi and Kutnai, p. 218.
75. Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, pp. 252, 253,
299-300.]
an eagle took the form of an old woman and seized and carried
off a girl as a wife. A legendary personage also becomes a snake,
and another named Tonto drinks "medicine" and becomes
an eagle.[76] The folk-lore of India is rich in this sort of
tale. Animals, led by the crafty jackal (which takes the place
of the fox in the Occident), not only talk and lay deep plots,
but ad in all ways like humans. And the same is true of the feathered
tribes. It is of course not strange that the parrot should talk,
but other birds are as well endowed, so the report goes, and,
besides, know how to cure diseases. Wild elephants are worshipped
by the Kadirs of India. The dogs, pigs, and other domestic animals
of the dead at Tubetube, British New Guiana, have spirits which
find their owners in the spirit land.[77]
A reader who knew nothing of the interpretation of the serpent
in Gen. 3 which has been current in Jewish and Christian circles
[76. Fewkes, 28th Report, etc., pp.
44, 45, 48, 52.
77. Cf. Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal, p. 134; Steel and
Temple, Wide-awake Stories, pp. 66-67; Thurston, Omens
and Superstitions, p. 83; Parker, Village Folk Tales of
Ceylon, pp. 113 ff. 122 ff., p 209 ff., 213 ff., et passim;
Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 443 ff.; Williamson,
South Sea Savages, p. 65.]
would see in that deceiver an animal cast in the form of primitive
belief, endowed with cunning and with power of speech--an animal,
and nothing more. The reading which makes of it a form assumed
by the devil for purposes of guile belongs to a much later age
than the story itself. In many lands one may find stories parallel
to this one regarded as an animistic "left-over." The
early Egyptians could tell of a serpent tribe that had reason,
speech, organized society, government, and manners that some
modern nations might copy to their own credit and the comfort
of their neighbours. They had stories that dealt with walking
and winged serpents, such as Eve's beast apparently was before
the curse. And in our own day the Ekoi of West Africa know of
reptiles that once had hands and feet and led a family life.[78]
In Melanesia the snake is (or is associated with) spirit."
On the worship of the serpent much has been collected, and more
is continually coming to light." The complete parity of
this animal
[78. Petrie, Egyptian Tales, i. 81
ff.; Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 374-377.
79. Codrington, Melanesians, p. 189.
80. Cf. the article "Serpent" etc. in The New
Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, x. 363-370; Schlegel, Schlüssel
zur Ewe-Sprache, p. 14; Milligan, Fetish Folk of West Africa,
pp. 233-234; and the two notable volumes of Miss Harrison, Prolegomena,
and Themis, where the dominance of the serpent idea and
its continuance are none the less markedly exhibited in that
this particular phase is not at all the main thesis of her works,
and is therefore incidental and the more striking.]
with man in these respects is illustrated farther by the fact
that the snake may wed with mortals.[81]
[81. Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, p.
91.]
VI
BELIEF IN "FREE SPIRITS"
IT is not to be supposed that life, soul, spirit, possessing
emotional, volitional, and factual potency, was limited in savage
man's conception to the tangible and visible. If the soul of
man was itself invisible, and if soul were a possession of plants,
animals, and other natural objects, yet perceived only by its
operations, why should there not be other souls "loose in
the universe," unseen and unfelt except as they revealed
themselves by their activities or manifestations to the world
of sense? So man seems to have reasoned, and this belief abides
today in the minds of the mass of mankind, even in Christendom.
Spirits, unfixed so to speak, having form and substance, indeed,
but not body, roamed free and unfettered in air, on land, in
the waters. They lurked in nook and cranny, behind bush and tree
and rock; they came in storm and wind; they inhabited the woods,
floated in the atmosphere, swam in the sea and in lake and stream,
parched in the desert, bid in cave or roamed on mountain top.
Wherever mystery is possible, there man imagines non-human spirits
to exist. A suggestion of the enormity of the numbers of spirits
whose existence is conceived is given by the following from the
strongly animistic Shinto faith of Japan in comparatively modern
times.
"Reverently adoring the great god of the two palaces
of Ise (the sun-goddess) in the first place, the 800 myriads
of celestial karma the 800 myriads of ancestral kami, all the
1,500 myriads to whom are consecrated the great and small temples
in all provinces, all islands and all places in the great land
of eight islands, the 1,500 myriads of kami whom they cause to
serve them. . . . I pray with awe that they will deign to correct
the unwitting faults which, heard and seen by them, I have committed,
and, blessing and favouring me according to. the powers which
they severally wield, cause me to follow the divine example,
and to perform good works in the way."[1]
Examples at almost any length might be
[1. Quoted by Carpenter, Comparative Religion,
p. 93, from a morning prayer by Hirata, a Japanese (1776-1843).]
cited from modern works of contemporaries. Only a few instances
will be given here simply to illustrate the principle. Central
Australians believe in the existence of Wullunqua, a dread spirit
which inhabits a deep water hole.[2] And other tribes of that
continent have similar traditions, such as the Narrinyeri, who
know of a like spirit, the Mulgewauke.[3] By the inhabitants
of New Guinea spirits, non-human, are supposed to inhabit any
place with unusual physical charaderistics--waterfall, pool,
queer-shaped rock, or the like.[4] Of the Guiana native Im Thum
says:
"His whole world swarms with beings. He is surrounded
by a host of them, possibly harmful. It is therefore not wonderful
that the Indian fears to be without his fellow., fears even to
move beyond the light of his camp-fire, and when obliged to do
so, carries a fire-brand with him, that he may have a chance
of seeing the beings among whom he moves."[5]
Truly the angelology and demonology of advanced faiths have
a long ancestry.
[2. Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes,
etc., passim.
3. Taplin, Narrinyeri, pp. 48, 91.
4. Williamson, Ways of South Sea Savage, p. 283
5. Among the Indians of Guiana.]
As already suggested, the groundwork for such a faith was
already laid in the observations and deductions regarding man's
soul. If in sleep his spirit could go forth unseen by companions
who were near, in order that it might perform the deeds of the
dream state so real to the savage; if it were true that a faint
were caused by the temporary desertion of its home by the soul;
if at death it could depart without detection by those intent
in their watch over the ailing, and reveal its invisibility by
going forth unseen to a disembodied existence, why should there
not be numerous other spirits - either temporarily or permanently
and by nature bodiless - abroad in the universe? This would be
normal reasoning, and was actual. The belief is so well known,
evidences of it are so easily accessible, that direct demonstration
here is hardly obligatory. As a matter of fact, in parts of our
discussion yet to come, the proof will appear incidentally, so
that to give it here would be but to duplicate what is both implicit
and explicit in testimony on another but related line of investigation.
In a recent paragraph the words "angelology" and
"demonology" were employed, and in their use there
is implicit a fundamental philosophy which has swayed the conceptions,
awakened the hopes and aroused the fears, helped to form the
cults, and controlled the actions of men in all ages and climes
for which direct testimony is adducible. The dualism of substance,
body and spirit, inherent in the notions of animism is paralleled
by a coincident dualism of character. There were good spirits
and bad, white spirits and black. And this character was determined
by their supposed favor or disfavor toward man. There were also
good spirits which by reason of their emotional natures were
capable of showing inimical traits, while the bad might be pacified,
rendered innocuous or even friendly, by the appropriate treatment.
This is, of course, but the reflection of men's interpretation
of their own nature and experiences, the result of their reasoning
about that nature and those experiences. Sometimes enterprises
went awry without any cause to them discoverable; again, good
fortune attended their ventures, and this in spite of what seemed
to them legitimate fears and untoward beginnings. But on the
hypothesis of hosts of invisible beings all about them, good
or ill fortune was fully accounted for by the direction or interference
of these spirits in man's favor or against him. To any event
or happening otherwise unaccountable a cause was assigned in
the action of spirits which worked when, where, and how they
pleased. And as the human being was amenable to gift or praise
or request, so would the spirits yield to similar courses of
treatment. As he was vexed or angered by opposition to his will
or by actual harm, so, he reasoned, the spirits could be enraged
by human doings contrary to their desires. Once more, just as
he might, when angered, be placated by use of the proper means,
so would the spirits be soothed and rendered benign were they
properly approached. As he succumbed or gave way before force
greater than his own or was overcome by craft and cunning, the
spirits too must yield if force majeure could be brought
to bear on them or if they could be outwitted.
VII
"FREE SPIRITS"-THEIR CONSTITUTION AND ACTIVITIES
THE existence and great numbers of spirits which are, so to
speak, "free" in the universe have just been shown
and discussed.[1] We have noted, too, how readily enters here
all that we are accustomed to call miraculous. Only we have constantly
to remember that what we call by that name is to primitive people
in full accordance with nature as they understand it. The very
conception of miracle implies arrival at the thought of a certain
uniformity of nature, invariability of cause and effect outside
of which the unexpected may happen - and does. It now remains
to consider the constitution and activities of the "free"
spirits referred to above. A poetical description, having its
origin in Babylonia, may here be quoted and serve as a starting
point.
[1. Above, pp. 97 ff.]
Great storms sent from heaven, are they,
The owl that hoots in the city, are they,
Of Anu's creation,[2] children born of earth, are they,
The highest walls, the broadest walls, like a flood, they pass,
From house to house they break through,
No door can shut them out,
No bolt can turn them back,
Through the door like a snake, they glide,
Through the hinge like a wind, they blow.[2a]
Indeed their substance is even more subtle than this account
indicates. They can invade a body already possessed by its own
spirit and dominate that body for good or evil, or even drive
out the native spirit and autocratically rule the captured body.
The capture may be temporary or permanent. The words "demoniac"
in English, {éntheos} and; {nymphtholeptos}[3]
in Greek, express the two facts of "possession" for
evil or for good. Similarly
[2. Assyr. lit. "outpouring," i.e.,
of semen.
2a. From cuneiform tablet V, lines 18-35, in the Utukki
Limnuti series (Cuneiform Texts XVI. plate 2); translation
kindly furnished by the Rev. Professor Robert W. Rogers, D.D.,
LL.D., of Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J.
3. Plato, Phædrus, 238, 241.]
the word "ecstasy" (Greek {ékstasis})[4]
sets forth the belief in the temporary departure from the body
of its own spirit, sometimes for communion apart from the body
with other spirits; and another Greek word, {enthysiasmós},
denotes the entrance into the human organism of a superhuman
spirit and the consequent elevation of feeling and surge of emotion.
Though the examples thus far cited register the conceptions of
peoples advanced in culture, like Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians,
they are not the possession exclusively of such; indeed they
are survivals from a cruder age. Primitive peoples low in the
scale of culture entertain them. Such folk think of the spirits
as pervasive and subtle, to whom no doors are closed; as entering
with equal facility portals barred with the grosser materials--wood,
iron, or stone--or with the living flesh.[5]
While thus in a manner insubstantial and ethereal in constitution,
like discarnated human spirits, they have needs, wants, and preferences
to which the material may minister. If the gods in the Babylonian
epic of the
[4. New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, iv. 71-72.
5. Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp. ii ff.]
deluge could smell the savor of the postdiluvian offering
and "hover like flies over the sacrifice,"[6] not less
susceptible to appeals offered by material substance are the
spirits now under consideration. They have the enjoyments and
repulsions of the senses - smell, taste, even grosser physical
passions,[7] and so are propitiable or susceptible of anger.
While free to roam, they have chosen homes and haunts all their
own,[8] though they may become localized in objects of nature,
as in India,[9] where so often a stone is the seat of deity,
and among the Fang and Mpongwe, so that it seems as if nature
is lawless and hostile.[10]
As for disposition, since primitive man measures all things
by himself, only intensifying the idea of power--through the
use of his imagination, where the element of mystery enters--it
would be expected that spirits would be good, evil, or neutral
except when
[6. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, p.
98.
7 Frazer, Scapegoat, pp. 112-113; Gen. 6: 1-4; Tobit
8:1-3; Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 213; Gomes, Sea Dyaks
of Borneo, pp. 194-204; Thomas, Anthropological Report, p.
127.
8. Keller, Madagascar, p. 98.
9. Methodist Recorder (London), July 10, 1913.
10 Milligan, Fetish Folk, p. 279.]
conciliated or offended,[11] that good spirits could be aroused
to wrath by neglect or affront, while evil spirits could be appeased,
mollified, or at least rendered harmless by right measures. Some
of these spirits are portrayed as jealous and envious, particularly
hostile to strangers, and disliking to hear praise of those mortals
or their progeny who inhabit the land where these spirits live.[12]
New Guineans, however proud of wife, children, or possessions,
never praise them but always speak in deprecatory terms. They
also dislike to go into the region of another tribe, even for
medical treatment, lest the spirits there resident be offended
and work them harm.[13] It will be seen at once how these beliefs
affect habits of travel and social intercourse.
The varied names of different kinds of spirits are probably
a legacy from very early times. We may gather something from
our own folk-lore, which mentions fairies and pixies, gnomes,
trolls, fauns, satyrs, and dwarfs, elves, vampires, and goblins,
sirens, mermaids,
[11. Cox, Folk-lore, chap. III.
12 Parker, Village Folk Tales of Ceylon, i. 16, et
passim.
12. Newton, In Far New Guinea, pp. 86, 120.]
and kelpies, nymphs, dryads, and naiads, and all their ilk,
whose existence and habits are better known to nurses and nursery
children than to the unimaginative scientist. While these creatures
are not indeed the free spirits of whom we are speaking, they
illustrate the belief in such spirits. For these familiars of
childhood are no modern creation, they are survivals of pre-Christian
faith, and like the free spirits have all the variety that wild
imagination could conjure.[14]
It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the same fate may
overtake them as could threaten gods themselves in ancient Egypt-they
were not above the hap of death. In Ceylon the Yaka (a sort of
evil spirit) is mortal.[15] It may be that out of this thought
grew some of the notions respecting the mentality of spirits.
We have seen that they are placable and conciliable; they are
also compellable and beguilable--by bluff, magic, or threat or
use of means productive of results pleasant or repugnant to them.[16]
[14 Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 27.
15. Parker, Village Folk Tales, pp. 143, 265, 274.
16. Tobit, 8:1-3; D'Alviella, Hibbert Lectures, pp.
87 ff.; Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43; Furness, Head-hunters,
pp. 16-17; Weeks, Congo Cannibals, pp. 267 ff.; Kloss,
In the Andamans, pp. 230 ff.]
It will at once appear how fruitful this idea is in connection
with shamanism. Sometimes the only control of spirits and salvation
of the people is through shamans.[17] The Wollunqua of Central
Australia, a snake spirit, can be either pacified or coerced
by magical ceremonies into doing no harm to celebrants of certain
rites.[18] The Narrinyeri often have a mock fight in pretense
of avenging a death accredited to sorcery.[19] Some Australians
are particularly assured that these spirits may be outwitted.[20]
The Ceylonese are convinced that a Yaka (the man-eating demon
referred to above).[21] may be bluffed into good behavior. The
Ainu of Japan also regard spirits as beguilable.[22]
If spirits are compellable, submissive to control by mortals
such as medicine men and the like, the way is open for a whole
series of attacks in which not only the wills of the spirits
but those of mortals, friends, and
[17. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia,
i. 150 ff.
18. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 238.
19 Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 21.
20. Curr, Australian Race, i. 87; Howitt, Native
Tribes, pp. 463, 473, 481.
21 Parker, Village Folk Tales, p. 149.
22 Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43.]
enemies combine to the resultant weal or woe of human beings.
Wizardry and sorcery, with their awful fears and dread results,
enter by this as by other doors. And this is by no means always
sheer imposture, as the following shows.
"The sorcerer believes in his own power, and the people
believe in it too. Certainly the New Guinea philosophy of life
is that nothing happens to man without some cause; no man dies
a natural death, all suffering and sickness is due to evil spirits
which people this world, and as, like many of his white brethren,
he is quite prepared to take the good things of life unquestioning,
and only to look for causes when evil comes, there is no place
in his philosophy for good spirits; the good is but the normal
state undisturbed by the machinations of evil spirits, and the
evil spirits are usually set to work by some human agent. Though
it seems that while the sorcerer may use charms, working through
the hair that has been mislaid when the head was shaven, or through
the footprints, he is powerful enough to work at times more directly.
He is probably a man of stronger character than his fellows--like
other trades, it runs in certain families -and the very fact
that he believes in his power, and others believe in it, tends
to make him independent and strong in character. He thrives on
his reputation, and levies blackmail on all and sundry till some
evil day when patience has been exhausted, and an opportunity
offers to put him out of the way. Ordinarily he is safe, for
no one will touch him or interfere with him unless he can be
taken by surprise, and there are always sufferers ready to take
the first chance of doing that. How they used to terrorize the
neighborhood and take toll! One old ruffian, whose reputation
had spread far and wide, could go to villages far from home,
and walk off with anything he fancied, the people sitting mum
not daring to say a word, or hiding and skulking away as he passed
through the village. One of the strongest characters: in a village
miles away from where this villain lived said, 'Give me a guaranty
that I shall not be called to account, and a gun so that I can
shoot him when he is not looking, and I will get rid of him,
but I dare not touch him if his eyes are on me.'"[23] But
apart from action by these beings
[23. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p.
78.]
which is determined by human will, desire, vengeance, and
other passions, man is an object of interest to the spirits themselves,
and they show activity in one way or another, for good or for
ill effect upon his fortunes and his person. It is, however,
for ill that their principal activity is directed, as estimated
by primitives. They work mainly against man and his welfare.
In Ceylon, for instance, where innumerable evil spirits are to
be found, they are charged with every untoward happening, either
as themselves purposing it or as controlled or instigated by
inimical magicians, or even because opportunity offers and their
essential nature prompts to its seizure.[24] They interpenetrate
the bodies of living men and cause illness; they may be expelled
by divine power, and still, notwithstanding that they have done
assault and damage, may demand and be accorded offerings, sacrifices,
and libations.[25] In fact, among rude peoples, diseases are
nearly universally attributed to evil spirits through the medium
of possession.[26] Not seldom control is by a witch, in whose
[24. Parker, Village Folk Tales, p.
16; cf. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 194 ff.
25. Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp. 11 ff.
26. Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43.]
body the spirit of mischief takes up its residence. Thence
she sends it forth on its mission of evil, and thither it returns
when its work is done. As she can thus by proxy effect evil,
so can she cause it to cease.[27] Naturally this notion lingers
on into advanced stages of culture, as is witnessed by the frequent
mention of demoniacs in the New Testament, to say nothing of
the witchcraft delusion which came on down through the Middle
Ages into comparatively modern times.[28] In these advanced stages
it is not unusual for these demons to specialize, so to speak,
in diseases; so that in China, India, and elsewhere there may
be a cholera devil, a dog-god who sends whooping cough, etc.[29]
Infants are particularly liable to attack.[30] The normal result
is that in some regions drugs and simples are little resorted
to in sickness, medicine men and wizards are the main reliance
or the only recourse.[31] These spirits
[27. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 83.
28. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 164 ff.; Thurston,
Omens and Superstitions, pp. 176, 196; Williamson, South
Sea Savage, p. 286.
29. Cf. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, iii. 148 ff., 1181.
30. Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 71.
31. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 183; IAE, vi. 85
ff.]
sometimes work in a way different from possession; for example,
causing fever by enticing the soul from the body.[32] We may
not forget that the madness of frenzy, whether as insanity or
as prophetic mania, is regarded, as we have already had occasion
to notice, as the result of possession.[33]
The damaging activities of these spirits may be directed not
only against the persons, but against the possessions and all
the various operations and pursuits of humans.[34] And such evils
may at times be prevented or remedied by means as weird as the
alleged or supposed disease or hurt. For example, damage by spirits
to a plot of agricultural ground may be prevented by killing,
boiling, and burying a black cat by night under a tree in the
field.[35] All along the line of these conceptions, the promptings
to magical operations are the nearly universal accompaniment.
[32. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 185
ff.
33. Additional cases are cited in Thurston, Omens and Superstitions,
pp. 254, 278, 279, 285.
34. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 245
35. Jahn, Opfergrbräuche, p. 267.]
VIII
LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF PARITY OF BEING
MANY and wide-branched are the results that flow from the
anthropomorphizing by man of other objects in nature, from the
transference to them, in thought, of personality with all its
qualities, and from the conception that unseen and intangible,
yet in effect substantial, beings exist "free" in the
universe. Among the most interesting results are those that issue
as almost a necessary consequence of this estimate of things
interchange of form and mode of being. Indeed, this lies on the
very surface of the conception, although its logical relationship
does not seem to have been pointed out.
If man, stones, trees, plants, animals, spirits, and gods
are all in the same scale of existence, why should they not exchange
forms, undergo metamorphosis? Why should not the soul of a man
enter the body of a being in what we regard as a different scale
of existence and animate it either in play or in earnest, voluntarily
or under stress of superior power exerted by some other superior
in the necessary amount or quality of force, and do this either
temporarily or permanently? What is to hinder, for example, man's
becoming an animal, especially if he does not distinguish between
his own being and that of an animal?[1] Or, on the contrary,
why should not animals become men? And why should not countless
changes take place among other grades of existence? In fact,
according to savage man's account of things, all this does occur.
Body and soul, we have seen, constitute a duality, in which,
in the stage of thought we are examining, the soul is, so to
speak, a free partner, able to take its flight and often to return
and resume its normal activities in its own abode. It is the
"separable" factor, with a life all its own, the seat
of impulse, will, passion, and desire. We have, therefore, now
to develop the fact of the easy passage from what modern man
would regard as one grade of existence to another, either lower
or higher,
[1. See above, p. 8, and cf Rivers, Melanesian
Society, i. 151 ff., where persons in Banks Islands are believed
to be plants, animals, etc., with appropriate taboos.]
or the possession of qualities by one class of beings which
in a more sophisticated stage of culture is considered the exclusive
possession of a different class.
Supernatural or semi-human beings are conceived as having
or assuming the form of birds, animals, serpents, etc., in what
we might call their normal state, but by putting off their covering
of skin, feather, or scale may assume the human form divine.
Among illustrations of this occur with greatest frequency the
mouse, jackal, monkey, dove, and tortoise.[2] Obassi Osaw, one
of the two great beings worshipped by the Etoi of Africa, was
originally a man and a chief.[3] In the Oceanican mythology the
firemaking gods appear to have the form of birds.[4] Maui, the
Polynesian hero, was able to assume the form of animal, bird,
or insect, and Rupe, another being in the same cycle of stories,
changes himself into a bird.[5] Among the Ainus a goddess may
[2. Parker, Village Folk Tales, pp.
308ff.; Frere, Old Deccan Days, pp. 183, 193; Stokes,
Indian Fairy Tales, pp. 41 ff.; Swynnerton, Indian
Nights Entertainment, p. 344; Natesu Sestri, Madana Kama
Raja, pp. 56, 57.
3. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 183, 184.
4. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, passim.
5. Ib., pp. 11, 20, 24, 38, 114, 125-126.]
become a flower, a woman, or a frog.[6] Reference may be made
in passing to the gods of Egypt, with their composite make-up
of bird, reptile, or beast and man. There seems to be good reason
for holding that this composite form is not original, and that
the partly human form is the result of the refining influence
of culture. Originally, it seems, the forms were those of birds,
beasts, etc. Certainly the explanation given that the gods were
once in human form and that, hard pressed by their enemies, they
took the form of beasts in order to deceive or elude their oppressors,
is purely animistic and in accord with the principle under exposition.
The cases where superhuman beings take human form are innumerable,
apart altogether from the usual course of anthropomorphization
of the gods. In the Old Testament the appearances to Adam, Abram,
Lot, Gideon, and Manoah occur to the mind at once.[7] In "Hordedef's
Tale" four female deities and one male god assume human
shape.[8]
This being so, it is not at all wonderful
[6. Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 26, 262-263.
7. Gen. 3:8; 18:2 ff.; 19:1 ff.; Judges 6:12; 13:3, 9, etc.
8. Petrie, Egyptian Tales, i. 33 ff.]
that mating takes place between these different orders and
that offspring partaking of the qualities of both are produced.[9]
Especially do superhuman beings mate with humans, earth- and
heaven-born beings marry. Outside the mythology of classical
Greece detailing the amours of the Olympians of both sexes from
Zeus down, one may recall the union of the "sons of God"
and the daughters of men; the numerous cases in the poems of
Homer, Pindar, and Vergil where the heroes boast a mingled ancestry
partly divine; the many tribes whose eponym is a being semi-divine,
such as the Koyis of India, who trace their origin to the union
of Bhima and a wild woman; and the beautiful story of Ono (which
is typical of several cycles of tales), who greatly longed for
his ideal of feminine beauty. She finally appeared and became
his wife. With the birth of their son there appeared also in
the neighborhood a dog which became intensely hostile to Ono's
wife. One day the animal attacked her with unusual fury; then
in uncontrollable fear she resumed her former shape as a fox,
leaped the fence, and disappeared. In this case the myth has
[9. Rivers, Melanesian Society, i.
25-26.]
a rather uncertain meaning: some construe it as indicating
that a fox had assumed the form of a woman; another and more
probable reading is that we have to do here with a sort of genie
in animal shape; a third interpretation is that the fox shape
was assumed for escape. The second rendering or the first accords
with the hostility of the dog, which recognized his enemy though
in another (human) form.[10]
With the prevalence of such views as these it is not strange
that the origin of children is often sought not in the sexual
act but in some chance affair, and that "miraculous"
conception or even the virgin birth is no stranger in popular
beliefs.[11] It must be remembered, in considering this particularly
errant idea, that nine months elapse between conception and birth,
and a considerable number of weeks between conception and the
knowledge that a new life has begun. The idea is therefore not
surprising to one who realizes how aberrant is savage reasoning
in tracing cause and effect. And when to this added the conservatism
[10. Gen. 6:1-4; Thurston, Omens and Superstitions,
p. 78; Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, p. 340; J. C.
Berry, in Blakeslee, Japan and Japanese-American Relations,
p. 139.
11 Milloué, in Revue de 1'histoire de la religion,
xlix (1904), 34-47.]
of the primitive thinker, the tenacity with which he holds
to notions that have once gained entrance, the fear of letting
go of these notions and of admitting that what has been his faith
is mistaken, we may begin to realize how such beliefs, once entertained,
persist. Thus, in the New Hebrides "women sometimes have
a notion that the origin, the beginning, of one of their children
is a cocoanut, or a breadfruit."[12] Mr. Frazer points out
what is indicated above, that the connection between sexual intercourse
and conception is unknown.[13] To the more sophisticated, indeed,
this error seems not only impossible but literally ridiculous.
Mr. Frazer goes on to show that at the moment when life is first
perceived the mother may be intensely observant of some natural
object, and [through the ideas of interpenetration of spirit
to be dealt with later] she supposes being or power to have passed
from the object, entered her body, and produced the effect she
feels. Consequently "she might imagine that the spirit of
a kangaroo, of grass-seed, of water, or of a gum-tree (or of
any other object) had passed into her, and accordingly that her
child . . .
[12. Codrington, JAI, xviii. 310-311.
13. FR, Sept. 1905.]
was really a kangaroo . . . though to the bodily eye it presented
the outward form of a human being." Mr. Todd has also registered
the fact[14] that conception is ascribed to various objects,
animate and inanimate. Among American Indians rain falling on
a maiden's navel induces conception.[15] And among the Nigerian
peoples a child may come into being through incarnation of a
human spirit or by the entrance into the mother of tree-spirits.[16]
If human beings can arise from sources such as these, it will
not come as a surprise if we find that whole tribes trace descent
from animals or plants, or make alliances with them. This, however,
raises the large question of totemism, which can not be treated
here. Mention is made of the subject in order to avoid the appearance
of overlooking this very important phase or consequence of animistic
thinking. The single example may be noted here of the Etoi of
Africa, who hold the crab to have been grandfather to a tribe.[17]
One of the important results of this mode of thought is the
belief that men, either voluntarily
[14. Todd, Primitive Family, pp. 70ff.
15. Fewkes, American Ethnology, 28th Report, pp. 44,
48, 65, etc.
16. Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 31.
17. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 196.]
or under force majeure exercised by sorcerer or witch,
pass from the human to the brute form of life. Among the concomitants
of the belief in witches existent as late as in the eighteenth
century and so balefully dominant during the Middle Ages, in
Europe, were the notion of were-wolves and the idea that witches
took the forms of cats, bares, or bats. Many are the tales of
deadly destruction wrought by fiendish humans who, to sate a
gluttony for blood or for revenge, transformed themselves into
wolves and performed wolfish deeds. Equally well-known are the
tales, not told as mere fiction but held as truth, of the conversion,
as by Circe in the Odyssey, of men into beasts, or, as in the
Arabian Nights, into stones or other forms of non-human being.
A few cases only will be cited here of the persistence of such
beliefs among primitive races of the present. Particularly in
Africa is this idea widely diffused. The leopard-man is as real
to the people of West Africa as was the were-wolf to the European
peasant of the fifteenth century. This leopard-man assumes at
pleasure the form of the animal from which be takes his name,
preying on strangers or on his own people." The Fangs hold
that under the magic of an enemy they may be changed into monkeys.[19]
In Oceanica Maui transforms an enemy into a dog.[20] Among the
Dyaks a man may be suspected of changing himself into a tiger,
and is immune to ordinary methods of punishment. Only strong
medicine is equal to the task of discipline.[21] In other parts
of Malaysia also men transform themselves into tigers or into
fishes, and a woman becomes an ape.[22] In India it would seem
as if there were hardly any animal shape which may not become
the refuge of man or the means of his working evil deeds.[23]
In other words, as the gods of Egypt were regarded as abandoning
in part their own shape and taking that of animals, birds, or
reptiles, so human beings could put on the forms or grades of
life of lower animals (as we regard them and primitive peoples
did not).[24]
[18. Milligan, Fetish Folk, p. 53;
Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 71, 82, 191-195,
247-254, and chap. VII.
19. Milligan, pp.123-I24.
20. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, p. 80.
21. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 265-278
22. Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 162; Cox, Folk-lore, chap.
II.
23 Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, p. 260, et
passim.
24 Interesting reading on this whole subject of metamorphosis
will be found in Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, chap.
IV.]
One may go still farther and find humans transforming themselves
into inanimate objects. So the Basques have a story of a witch
who determined to drown the crew of a fishing boat, The boat
was to meet three waves, the first and second of which the boat
might ride, but the third, which would be the witch herself,
would overwhelm the boat and its crew. But the cabin boy overheard
the plot and the means of foiling it also came to him, so he
launched a harpoon into the heart of the third wave, which divided
and dashed on the shore, a mass of bloody foam. On the captain's
return, he found his wife dying of her wound.[25]
Sometimes, before power can be obtained to effect these transformations,
either on self or on another, some magical rite or process must
be performed or undergone, or some chance happening must have
been encountered. In the Far East a common belief is that an
animal that has drunk water which has lain for twenty years in
a human skull acquires power to assume the human form at will.[26]
This is alleged to have been the case of a vixen
[25. Vinson, Le Folk-lore du Pays Basque,
p. 20.
26. C. T. Collyer, in Baltimore Christian Advocate,
Oct. 23, 1913.]
in China, who became a woman, the "Cleopatra of the East,"
and this transformation led to the founding of the first kingdom
in Korea.
If the higher ranks of life might be changed into lower grades,
the reverse process was equally possible. It is established that
in Egypt the practice was prevalent which until recent times
was current throughout Africa of sacrificing attendants upon
the death of a chief that their souls might serve his in the
spirit world. But the softening effects of culture in the Nile
land refined away in early historic times this cruel custom.
The problem remained--how provide service for the dead nobles
and chiefs? The difficulty was surmounted by magic. Images of
clay and pottery were created and placed in the tomb, and these,
by utterance of the magic formula, were animated in the spirit
world as attendants of the deceased. These little figures, called
ushabtiu, are found literally by hundreds in the tombs
of Egypt. There is reason to believe that the same principle
was employed in Korea, Japan, China, and Mongolia. There at the
tombs are often found, in clay, wood, and stone, effigies of
attendants and of various animals. The most reasonable explanation
of these, which is borne out by explanations given to the writer
by Koreans, is that these were supposed to be animated in the
spirit world to do the will of the deceased nobles or rulers
at whose tombs they were placed. Confirmation of this is found
in the Nihongi (one of the books of Japan coming nearest in estimation
to that we render to our Scriptures), where the book professes
to give an account of events occurring 2 B.C.-3 A.D. The story
narrates the burial up to the neck of the personal attendants
of a deceased brother of the mikado, this being the method of
execution in such cases. But the laments of the victims so affected
the mikado that when the empress died, clay figures were substituted.
The dating of this event is probably wrong, since at the funeral
of an empress in 247 A.D., sacrifice of attendants was still
in vogue.[27]
[27 Aston, Shinto, pp. 56-58; Underwood,
Religions of Eastern Asia, pp. 89-90.]
IX
DEATH NOT ALWAYS REGARDED AS INEVITABLE
A FACT that has been before us incidentally, though not the
subject of specific remark, is the age-long belief in the continued
existence of the soul. We have noted that the soul is "the
separable factor" in man's duality, "with a life all
its own." It would be normal then next to examine this continuance
of life beyond death, to determine its character. But before
discussing primitive conceptions concerning the dead, their state
and powers, it is important to note that there are hints from
widely separated regions which suggest that once there was a
belief nearly or quite universal that death is not inevitable.
It is likely that in the youth of the race, death was practically
always the result of violence--from man or beast--or of accident.
And it follows from what we have just noticed of the parity of
being and the attribution of life to insensate objects, that
even accidents would not be recognized as such but would be interpreted
as the result of purposive activities. Moreover, evidence is
abundant that, in a somewhat advanced stage of human history,
man was a contemporary of huge and ferocious animals which have
become extinct. While cave deposits reveal that he knew how to
master some of these, on the other hand it must be conceded that
cave men must often have succumbed, if all did not eventually
lose their lives, to the attacks or have come off second best
in the encounters which they themselves brought on. The increase
in the numbers of human beings is always attended by the mastery
and extinction of beasts of prey. In the days when men were few
and beasts were present in numbers now hardly conceivable, the
number of casualties to men either in the bunt or when themselves
hunted must have been great. We have to take into account also
feuds among men in the undisciplined state. When the stage of
culture was low, feuds between tribes and clans, which, be it
remembered, were small in those days, were often waged to extinction.
Within the memory of man the sparseness of population in Australia
has been with high probability of correctness ascribed to the
feuds which for a single reason raged between different tribes.
The mortality from this cause must have been great. And how complete
may have been the slaughter in such cases is seen when we remember
that so late as the time of Samuel a numerous people was devoted
to extinction in the name of religion--in this case religion
being the mask for human animosities.[1] Under circumstances
perhaps more numerous than we can imagine, men, women, and children
were slaughtered to the last individual.
From what has preceded in the way of showing early man's conceptions
of the potency of things about him, what would now be regarded
as accident was by him regarded as the result of purposive action
by the objects which seemed to work disaster. If a limb fell
from a tree in a storm and killed a man, the explanation was
that the tree had cast its weapon in anger, or the wind had,
with intent, flung this missile with deadly aim. Stories have
passed in recent times of African tribes that hewed down and
chopped to bits a tree, a limb from which had caused the death
of one
[1. 1 Sam. 15.]
of their number. Similarly, if a man were drowned by river
or ocean, it was the angry flood or the offended sea which bad
removed from this life the deceased human.
Recalling once more the steadfastness with which man holds
to convictions once entertained, remembering that the new has
always had to fight, and fight hard, for entrance into his mind,
we may regard the instances to be adduced in which the belief
that death is always an ab extra event, to be accounted
for by causes other than "natural," as illustrative
of and probably presumptive of the existence of the same belief
in much wider circles than those in which it now obtains. It
is best accounted for as a "superstition," i.e., as
"something left over from earlier times." To be sure,
in some cases, perhaps in all, the belief has taken on the complexion
of a more advanced culture, it explains the death by "spiritual"
means instead of by mere brute or physical force. This is a way
that superstitions have. They fit themselves to the environment,
mental or physical, which has wrapped itself about them.
From Australia quite concordant testimony from competent observers
is accessible. Thus R. B. Smyth cites the statement of Mr. Daniel
Bunce (curator of the Botanical Gardens at Geelong), a man well
acquainted with the blacks, to the effect that "no tribe
be has ever met with believe in the possibility of a man's dying
a natural death. If a man is taken ill, it is at once assumed
that some member of a hostile tribe has stolen some of his hair.
This is quite enough to cause serious illness. If the man continues
sick and gets worse, it is assumed that the hair has been burned
by his enemy. Such an ad, they say, is sufficient to imperil
his life. If the man dies, it is assumed that the thief has choked
his victim and taken away his kidney fat."
Mr. Smyth continues: "Mr. John Green says that the men
of the Yarrow tribe firmly believe that no one ever dies a natural
death. A man or a woman dies because of the wicked arts practised
by some member of a hostile tribe."[2]
In Appendix 3 to the same work (ii. 289-290) Albert A. C.
Le Souef accounts for the paucity of population in part by the
fad that a death by disease involves the death of others, because
the first case was believed to be
[2. Aborigines of Victoria, i. 110.]
caused by sorcery, and a murdering expedition is at once carried
out for vengeance. (This in turn starts a blood feud, and so
on.)
Taplin remarks of the Narrinyeri: "When a man dies they
conclude at once that sorcery has been the cause of the mournful
event, and that either ngadhungi or millin [two
methods of sorcery] have been practised against him."[3]
Spencer and Gillen testify that "no such thing as natural
death is realized by the native; a man who dies has of necessity
been killed by some other man, or perhaps even by a woman."[4]
Dawson's affirmation is quite concordant: "Natural deaths
are generally--but not always--attributed to the malevolence
and the spells of an enemy belonging to another tribe."[5]
In New Guinea the same belief holds, as witnessed by Newton.
"About Wedau and Wamira the spirits of the dead go eventually
to some place to the eastward of Cape Frere, in a valley in the
mountains called Iola, the approach to the
[1. Narrinyeri, in Native Tribes
of South Australia, p. 19.
2. Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 48.
3. Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 63.]
abode of the spirits being through a hole in the ground. When
the spirit arrives it is questioned at once, 'Where have you
come from?' 'What have you come for?' just as every time you
go into a village every one who meets you asks you (these questions).
The newly arrived one says, 'I have come from Wedau' or 'Wamira,'
as the case may be, or the answer may state more explicitly the
section of the village, and 'Where else should I go except to
my own people?' Then the question is asked, 'Who sent you?' and
for answer the name of some sorcerer or witch is given, the one
responsible for the death."[6]
Indirect testimony is furnished by Neuhass to the same effect
for German New Guinea, whose people separate souls with reference
to post mortem continuance according as they died by the sword
or by magic--the two methods which they recognize of passing
from this life. The Mafulu of this island regard a death otherwise
unaccounted for as due to spirits acting under sorcerers. An
exception is conceived, however, in the case of very old persons,
which seems to show the transition
[6. In Far New Guinea, p. 219.]
to a more advanced knowledge.[7] And in Hood Peninsula, British
New Guinea, death is the result of the activities of spirits
or magicians.[8] Gomes asserts that in Borneo all sickness (and
therefore death not otherwise accounted for) by external means
is caused by spirit possession.[9] Among Melanesians: "It
must . . . be remembered that . . . death is not admitted to
occur without some obvious cause such as a spear thrust. Therefore
when vigorous and active members of the community die, it becomes
necessary to explain their fate, and such deaths are firmly believed
to be produced by sorcery."[10] In far away Africa "nearly
all diseases, bad luck, misfortune, sorrow, and death are caused
by witchcraft, i.e., by some one using a fetish to curse a person."[11]
Among the Indians of Guiana, "Every death, every illness,
is regarded not as the result of natural law, but as the work
of a kenaima (i.e., a man possessed by a spirit for the purpose
of blood revenge, and able to
[7. Williamson, Ways of South Sea Savage,
p. 286.
8. JAI, xxviii (1899), 216 ff.
9. Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 183.
10. Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 779.
11. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 219.]
send his spirit forth to inflict evil). Such a kenaima is
. . . the real or supposed cause of almost every evil, and especially
of every death."[12]
Concordant testimony is given by Brett:[13] "A person
dies--and it is supposed that an enemy has secured the agency
of an evil spirit to compass his death." A sorcerer is employed
to discover the guilty individual, and a relative of the deceased
is charged with the work of vengeance. He is a kenaima, possessed
by the spirit of destruction.
It is the "left-overs" that often reveal to the
discriminating observer the conditions which are implied, which
surrounded the full bloom of what have become survivals. It is
not difficult to imagine, and it is in accord with primitive
psychology to presume, that the few cases here brought together,
which might conceivably be much extended by definite research,
suppose a much larger area over which such ideas were regnant.
[12. Im Thum, Among the Indians of Guiana,
p. 329.
13. Indian Tribes of Guiana, pp. 357 ff.]
X
THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL
WHILE according to the facts adduced in the last chapter it
is clear that a belief has existed that man might, were it not
for accident or the like, continue to live on as a duality in
this present life, the fact of death stared men in the face,
and with equal intensity the belief was held that in death man
did not cease to exist, but that the soul lived on. That the
appearance of the deceased in dreams had no small part in the
foundation of this belief seems almost certain. We have already
seen I that dreams were regarded not as phantasies but as realities,
and so the dead who were seen in the dream state were regarded
as souls of the deceased appearing to the living. And other lines
of evidence no doubt seemed to open to primitive man. At any
rate, the fact of this belief, at least as far back as neolithic
times, is evinced by the
[1. Above, pp. 23 ff.]
burial with the dead of utensils evidently meant for the service
of the deceased in the land where he found himself after death.
This faith is shown also by the acts of devotion or worship to
the departed spirit, and by material provision of food and other
comforts for the soul either at the grave or elsewhere.[2] Similarly
evidential are the means taken to facilitate the soul's exit
by door, window, or roof, even through holes made in the wall
of house or tent; and the same value attaches to the evident
effort to prevent the soul's return by carrying the corpse, to
which it is supposed fondly to cling, by devious ways to its
last resting place. Like conclusions are forced by the feasts
and celebrations on anniversaries of death or burial, which attest
not only affectionate remembrance, but first and principally
belief in the soul's continuance. This belief in the soul's continuance
is perhaps
[1. Graves of Greeks and Romans have been
found where permanent conduits in the grave mounds permitted
the passage of liquids and viands to the corpse--cf. Frazer's
Pausanias, X. 4:7, and the editor's comment on the passage;
and the same is true of graves in Mongolia, though in this case
the evident purpose was not the entry of food but the exit of
the ghost, as the openings are at the side of the tomb--cf.
Geographical Magazine, May, 1913, p. 651.]
the most momentous and the choicest, as well as the oldest,
that animistic races have left to us. The clear beginning of
the doctrine so prized in all religions save Gautama's, viz.,
that concerning the immortality of the soul, is here in its embryonic
stage. We have already noted that one means, perhaps the chief
one, to the acquisition of this idea was the appearance of the
dead in dreams. The deceased, so the conclusion ran, was not
dead, he still existed, and in his own form. It may be remarked,
en passant, that if religion inheres at all in this belief, then
religion is everywhere existent; for no race has yet been discovered
which bad not faith in the continuance of life beyond the grave.
Once more, if religion inheres not in belief but in the practices
to which belief gives rise, then in the care for the well-being
of the soul of one that has passed, so widely prevalent, religion
is no less shown to be universal.
To suppose, however, that the content of the primitive idea
is that of full-fledged immortality or unending existence would
be a serious misunderstanding. The conception of deathlessness
in its absolute sense is probably never present among savages.
Primitive philosophy does not sound so profound depths. Hence,
because "immortality" says more than is contained in
the savage's concepts of future life, the word "continuance"
has been employed to express the notion found among the uncivilized.
On the other hand, one must be on his guard when it is affirmed
that savages have no idea of immortality. In the strict sense
this is true, but only in so far as uncultured peoples have not
reached any conception which at all approaches that of endlessness.
They have no enduring records. Oral tradition, which may easily
become confused and dim, carries them back only a few generations--four
or five, say. So the notion of the soul life may be either indefinite--or
rather, undefined--or may be regarded as limited to a certain
number, greater or less, of lives like that already passed. Indeed,
the life may have degrees, so to speak. Thus the African Etoi
and Bakongo believe that "though ghosts have died once,
they can die a second time, and so become more dead than before."'
Among the Haida a war party is always accompanied by a shaman,
among
[1. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush,
pp. 8, 24, etc.; Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, pp. 223-224,
243-244.]
whose duties is to kill the souls of the enemy.[4] In Fiji
the natives believe that there is a certain Samu Yalo ("killer
of souls") who haunts the path to the realm of the dead,
and when a ghost comes along rushes out to kill it with an ax
unless it succeeds in escaping. Another Fijian monster lies in
wait and kills the souls of bachelors, so that they never reach
heaven. In the same islands a ghost that is troublesome to the
living may have his case settled by his unconditional demise.[5]
That mortals may die again seems reasonable if only it be remembered
that even gods grow old and die, according to "the cultured
Egyptians." "Very aged was Ra, and the saliva ran down
from his mouth and fell upon the earth"--a perfect picture
of senility.[6] Heiti-eibib, a Hottentot hero-god, had the habit
of dying.[7] In Polynesia Maui's wife used also to kill the gods.[8]
[4. Swanton, Jesup North Pacific Expedition,
i. 40-51, cited by Halliday, Greek Divination, p. 95.
5. Williams, Fiji, i. 244 ff.; Wilkes, U.S. Exploring
Expedition, 85.
6. Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, p. 81; cf. Wiedemann,
Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, pp. 54 ff.
7. Hahn, Tsuni-Goam, pp. 56 ff.
8 Westervelt, Legends of Maui, p. 127.]
XI
MODIFICATIONS OF THE IDEA OF CONTINUANCE
THE continuance of the human soul's life is conditioned in
various ways in different regions and stages of culture. Some
tribes assign to souls a definite number of Post-mortem lives,
which number may, however, have stood for indefinite continuance,
being the tradition remaining from an earlier stage when ability
to count above a small aggregate was uncommon. Thus Dyaks allot
to the soul seven lives, after which it is annihilated.[1]Or
continuance may be not the common fate, only that of a select
few. The basis of selection then naturally varies.[2] It may
be that of descent or station in life. Thus only chiefs survive
in Fiji, and among the Tongans of the South Sea Islands.[3] Or
the
[1. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 208.
2. Carpenter, Comparative Religion, p. 232.
3 Mariner, Natives of Tonga Islands, ii. 29 ff.]
mode of death may have something to do with it, as when New
Guineans separate souls according as they died by sword or by
magic--the two causes of death allowed to exist by this people.[4]
Or (and this state of affairs exists, almost certainly, only
in a somewhat advanced stage of culture) ethical standards may
be established, and future life may be conditioned on compliance
with such standards in this life. Such an idea may be found in
a comparatively small area, neighboring regions showing no knowledge
of such a test.' On the other hand, it has happened that while
such standards ostensibly exist, magical practices in effect
reduce the test to its lowest terms or even to the vanishing
point. So with the "Negative Confession" of Egypt.
This is clear from its evident use by practically every or any
person, independent of character, who was by the formula of the
Book of the Dead primed to override or evade obstacles to the
passing of the soul to the happy abode. In parts of Melanesia
the ultimate death of the soul is maintained, its
[4. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii.
149 ff.
6. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 274 ff.
6. HR, March, 1914.]
survival seeming to depend on survival in the memory of posterity.[7]
A different twist is given to the idea of continuance when
the notion takes either of two somewhat closely related forms
of expression, transformation or human reincarnation. Transformation,
or change of mode of existence on earth, we have seen to be a
natural consequence of that "parity of being" which
is the prime characteristic of the animistic manner of thought.
Is there any reason, a priori, why this should not operate when
the soul is discarnate, unfleshed? As a matter of fact, the continuance
of the soul in other forms of existence than the human is a widely
diffused notion. Transmigration is not limited to philosophic
developments like Buddhism, with its Jataka Tales of the 500
births of the Buddha. Indeed, it is practically certain that
the transmigration of philosophic India is one of the noblest
and most fruitful borrowings of the Aryans from the Kolarian
and Dravidian aborigines. When these post-mortem transformations
take place, the continuance may be indefinite or definitely limited.
The Kai of German New Guinea hold that ghosts are
[7. Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 192.]
changed first into some sort of game animals, then into insects,
and then comes "the last death." [8] This suggests
the idea of a progressive diminution of vitality or fading away
into nothingness, and may be a result of observation of the fading
memory of survivors. In Melanesia, where ethical ideas condition
future life, after doing penance, the soul takes the form of
various animals, such as the flying fox.[9] Transformation into
an owl is a frequent notion, as among the Arabs, and in Madagascar
among the Haida.[10] One Cingalese woman (who has been murdered)
becomes successively a turtle, a mango tree, a creeper, and a
blue lotus. Another changes into a cobra.[11] In the Solomon
Islands ghosts are incarnated in various animals, while among
the Melanesians men at death became sharks, alligators, lizards,
birds (the frigate bird par excellence), snakes, and the like.[12]
The reincarnation or appearance of the dead in the
[8. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii.
150 ff.
9. Brown, Melanesians, pp. 192 ff.
10. Doutte, L'Afrique du Nord, p. 361; Folk-lore,
ii. 341; Swanton, North Pacific Expedition, p. 27.
11. Parker, Village Folk Tales of Ceylon, pp. 113 ff.,
132.
12. Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 65; Codrington,
Melanesians, pp. 179 ff.]
form of snakes is both common and ancient; it is, of course,
easily accounted for by the frequency of the animal among graves,
the looseness of the earth and the crevices therein making easy
the formation of their burrows. The reader of Homer and Vergil
will recall the pertinent cases there narrated, while the vases
and other monuments of art abundantly illustrate the belief--although
sometimes the idea is modified by regarding the reptile as the
"genius" of the departed. The naturalness of the idea
is attested by its occurrence in regions as widely separated
as New Guinea and Colombia.[13] Among the Mafulu of New Guinea
the ghost may be transformed into a fungus living on the mountain.[14]
And among the Narrinyeri of Australia rocks may be the form taken
by deceased ancestors.[15]
Belief that the soul is reincarnated in human posterity is
so natural, once the idea
[13. Miss Harrison, Prolegomena and
Themis, passim; Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea,
iii. 515 ff.; Joyce, South American Archeology, p. 11.
14 Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 281.
15 Wood, Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 202. Other cases
in other parts of the world may be found in Declè, Three
Years in Africa, p. 74; Das, Journey to Lhasa, pp.
56, 131 ff., 138, etc.; Keller, Madagascar, p. 85; Folk-lore,
ii. 437; Arctander, Apostle of Alaska, p. 108.]
of transmigration is entertained, that it can not surprise
us to find it widespread. When we remember how feature and gesture
of infant or child may recall those of some deceased member of
the family, one fruitful source of this idea may perhaps be disclosed.
For the notion is not the exclusive possession of the philosophical,
though we have stories from Greece, where it was incorporated
in philosophical creeds, of men who recognized votive offerings
dedicated in a former existence, or find poets like Vergil recounting
the method of return and telling of the antecedent draught from
the waters of Lethe. So well known is the belief that only a
few typical cases need be adduced from primitive examples. Baganda
women fear to pass places where executions have taken place or
spots alleged to be haunted by dangerous ghosts, lest the ghosts
enter them to begin another earthly life.[16] Similarly the Bakongo
of the Congo region hold firmly to the reincarnation of the human
spirit in human form.[17] So usual a happening is this among
the Ibo of Nigeria
[16. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 20) 461
124, et passim; cf pp. 47, 289.
17. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 115.]
that, when a birth takes place, the doctor is called in to
decide which ancestor has come back to earth. Indeed, an ancestor
may there scissate and become incarnate in more than one descendant
in any given generation.[18] The Kayans of Borneo also hold firmly
to the doctrine, as do various tribes of Australian Bushmen.[19]
The same principle of parity of being permits interchange
and transformation, to which we have become now so accustomed,
to take place in another direction. The ghost may be changed
into an evil spirit or demon or equally repulsive form. A Cingalese
spirit which had temporarily left its body returned to find that
body untenantable and addressed his wife in a dream. She supposed
that he had become a Yaka (evil spirit) and was correspondingly
terrified. Of course the wife's explanation to herself of the
dream is excellent evidence of belief in the possibility and
actuality of such transformations.[20] The Melanesian ghosts
may assume the form of compositely-shaped
[18. Thomas, Anthropological Report,
pp. 30-31.
19 Hose and McDougall, Pagan Tribes, ii. 47; Spencer
and Gillen, Native Tribes, pp. I19 ff., 335 ff., and Northern
Tribes, pp. 145 ff., 330 ff., 448 ff.
20. Parker, Village Folk Tales of Ceylon, p. 170.]
demons.[21] The souls of the dead may in some cases become
vampires and feed horribly on the living--indeed this terrible
habit may have been formed before death.[22] See also below (Chap.
XII) for other transformations.
[21. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 258
ff.
22. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 192-193.]
XII
CONDITION OF THE DISCARNATE SOUL
SINCE evidence of the existence of the belief that the soul
lives on is so indubitable, the question arises--what is its
condition? In what state does the discarnate spirit find itself
after final separation from the body? And first, as to what we
may be allowed to call, for want of a better term, its physical
condition.
We have already noted that soul is conceived as having both
form and substance, the latter, so to speak, greatly rarefied.
Moreover, it has been brought to our attention that the most
common idea concerning form is that the soul is a replica of
the body it inhabited. Consistency in primitive thinking is not
to be assumed, as we have seen, nor are logical processes among
primitives quite the same as ours. Yet when a disembodied soul
took up its post-mortem residence in a serpent, for example,
we may not suppose that that soul was still regarded as human
in shape. But so far as the author has discovered, no decisive
evidence exists on this point. The probabilities favor greatly
the supposition that in such cases transformation of the soul
shape was supposed to have taken place. Evidence of the common
idea, retention by the soul of its human shape, has been before
us. We have noted that some tribes mutilate the body of the dead,
thinking that by so doing they inflict like wounds upon the soul
and thus impose incapacity for harm upon the ghost, the double
of the body. The Omahas slit the soles of a murdered man's feet
that his spirit may be unable to return and cause damage to the
people.[1] Mangaeans prefer death in battle--men are then in
their full strength; disease weakens them, and souls have the
nature of the body at death. Barongo believe that souls are young
or old, according to the age at death, and so do the Indians
of Gran Chaco. Naga tribes of Manipur think that ghosts bear
whatever tattoo marks, mutilations, or other blemishes or embellishments
occurred on the body. Some people carry this idea so far as to
prefer
[1. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., p.
215.]
death before decay of natural powers sets in, and so commit
suicide or are buried alive, that the soul may continue to exist
in full vigor.[2]
Having form and substance, the soul has certain physical needs.
It hungers, thirsts, feels cold and heat. The degrees of grossness
of these wants vary greatly. Sometimes the hunger, thirst, and
wants and passions may be appeased by the mere spirit or ghost
of food, drink, etc.; and the ghosts are served by the spirits
or (as our theosophical friends might be imagined as saying)
the astral bodies of dishes, implements, or weapons which are
destroyed (i.e., killed) that their spirits may accompany the
ghost into the spirit land. Indeed, this is by all odds the most
prevalent conception. Sometimes it is the more evanescent or
the more vital elements, such as the blood, which are used by
the ghost, as in the celebrated case of Tiresias in the Odyssey[3].
The cases already cited of food, drink, weapons, utensils, and
the like possessing souls and being offered or placed with the
dead, oftentimes being broken or mutilated so as to "kill"
[2. Cases are cited in Frazer's Dying God,
pp. 9-14.
3 Book XI.]
them, furnish direct testimony to the supposed needs of the
ghost. The hunger felt by the disembodied soul is vividly expressed
by most African tribes, whose belief is that ghosts can and do
eat even human bodies A Ghosts also suffer from cold, hence New
Guineans, and others, make fires at the graves, and even build
huts, so that when the ghosts come up from the body they may
find comfort.'
Ghosts have voices, too, but thin and shadowy like themselves.
They chirp like crickets or utter their words in whistling tones.
So the wizards by ventriloquistic art impose upon the credulous,
and by wheezing utterance produce the effect of communications
from a shadowy being or from the ground. Note the indications
of shamanistic practice in the Prophet Isaiah (8:19- 29:4).
What we may regard as the disposition of the ghost is by most
peoples held to be fixed by the character of the person while
on earth.
[4. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush,
pp. 224-225, 232-233, 238, etc.; ERE, vi. 65 ff. The testimony
is being exhaustively collected in Frazer, Belief in Immortality--see
the Index, under "Food."
5. Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 442 ff.; Neuhass,
Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. S18; Frazer, Belief in Immortality,
i. 150-152.]
Was he cruel, warlike, passionate, generous, revengeful in
the body, so will he be as a discarnate ghost. So, for instance,
the New Guineans hold.[6] Only account must be taken of a very
common notion, that the ghost is endowed with increased power.[7]
One might find many reasons for this common idea. The general
fearsomeness of the unknown and invisible, the fad that the ghost
has joined the terrible host of free spirits, its very remoteness,
combine to add the idea of power. That which is distant in space
or time gains enchantment and enlargement from the imagination,
which is the faculty most employed in this sphere. Australians
credit to their ancestors deeds to themselves impossible, though
they are themselves their ancestors reincarnate.[8] The greed
and liking for possessions which existed on earth are attributed
in some parts to the spirit, and among the Bakongo, for instance,
this desire is satisfied by placing all the deceased's wealth
about the grave.[9] The soul's assumed mobility,
[6. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii.
142 ff.
7. Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 282 ff.
8. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, pp. 489 ff
9. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 278.]
such as was displayed in its power to leave the body during
life and to make investigations at even a considerable distance,
is not lost but rather enhanced. It has become a free agent,
no longer bound by the body's necessities and limitations of
locomotion, at liberty to roam unfettered, to use in the wide
universe its powers--those that remain or are acquired in its
new condition. If it in earthly life could leave the body temporarily
and like the lightning speed hither and thither, now, disfleshed,
its mobility has gained by the change.
Especially is it believed that spirits acquire a larger knowledge.
Not only do they gain a completer survey of the past and the
present, but a knowledge of the future becomes theirs. According
as their dispositions prompt, they become helpers of their survivors
or hostilely active against them.
Particularly interesting in this connection is the relationship
of the ghost and other beings to warning and prediction. Among
the powers of the soul is that of return and manifestation to
survivors. Melanesian, Andaman, and African ghosts, for instance,
reappear to and converse with their people and become a medium
of information.[10] Particularly through dreams do they mediate--a
performance recorded in antiquity and attested by present day
belief over a large area.[11] Indeed, it is through the dream
that approach to human comprehension is most easily made by divine,
superhuman, or discarnate powers, the spirit in this condition
being loosed from fleshly trammels. The human spirit in sleep
is regarded as not bound by quite the same inflexible laws to
the bodily limitations. The employment of the dream as a means
of information or warning at once occurs to the reader--Jacob,
Joseph, Pharaoh, Nebucbadrezzar; clasctical cases will be found
in Pindar, Olympiacs, XIII, 105 and Pausanias, X, xxxiii,
II. It will be remembered that in an earlier section the importance
of the dream as an index to animistic thought was dwelt upon
at some length. One specimen of developed classical and philosophical
thought on this has been summarized from Jamblichus.
[10. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 190
ff.; Klosts, In the Andamans, p. 296; Weeks, Congo
Cannibals, pp. 264-265.
11. Herodotus, IV, 172; Pomponius Mela, I. viii. 8; Mauss,
Origines des pouvoirs magiques, p. 15; Haddon, Anthropological
Essays, p. 179.]
"There is nothing unworthy of belief in what you have
been told concerning sleep and the meaning of dreams. I will
explain it thus. The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher.
In sleep the soul is released from the constraint of the body,
and enters as one emancipated on its divine life of intelligence.
Then as the noble faculty which beholds the objects that truly
are, the objects in the world of intelligence, stirs within and
awakens to its power, who can be surprised that the mind, which
contains within itself the principles of all that happens, should
in this, the state of liberation, discern the future in those
antecedent principles which will make that future what it is
to be? The nobler part of the soul is thus united by abstraction
to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and
foreknowledge of the gods. Recorded examples of this are numerous
and well authenticated; instances too occur every day. Numbers
of sick by sleeping had their cure revealed to them in dreams.
Would not Alexander's army have perished but for a dream in which
Dionysius pointed out the means of safety? Was not the siege
of Aphritis raised through a dream sent by Jupiter Ammon to Lysander?
'The night time of the body is the daytime of the soul.'"[12]
The student of anthropology will at once recognize here the
advanced justification for beliefs which go back very far for
their origins. But even in the advanced stage of thought represented
by Jamblichus there are present elements that are duplicable
today in the most primitive regions.
Several doors open here to alluring bypaths--to inspiration,
prediction, oracles, on the one side, these presuming a favoring:
disposition on the part of the ghost; and, on the other, to necromancy
and the "black art" or black magic, if the ghost or
his control be evil. Melanesians and Africans say that the soul
may return to seize and inspire the unconscious shaman or prophet
to pregnant utterance.[13] We have said "unconscious"--for
it seems practically established that, in the earlier stages
of culture, prediction and the delivery of the oracle took place
only when the medium was in ecstasy. Vergil's description of
the
[12. Theurgia or the Egyptian Mysteries,
Part III, chap. vii.
13. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 218 ff.; Roscue, Baganda,
p. 113.]
raging sybil will recur to the classical student.[14] Plato
says that "inspired and true divination is not attained
to by anyone in his full senses, but only when the power of thought
is fettered by sleep or disease, or some paroxysm of frenzy."[15]
It is well known that the American Indians regarded the simple
or mentally incompetent as peculiarly endowed and in closer touch
with the supernatural than those possessed of all their mental
powers. In the Old Testament there is an unconscious testimony
to the veracity of many parts of the narrative, guaranteed by
psychological conclusions, in the fact that the earlier phases
of prophecy and prediction are described as involving the ecstatic
state or a condition of unconsciousness. Such are the use of
the dream, the case of Balaam, the prophets among whom Saul found
himself, this form of affection being communicable or "catching"--compare
the "dancing mania" of the middle ages-and Elisha,
for whom music was in at least one case a prerequisite to the
delivery of the oracle--the "hand of the Lord " (2
Kings 3:15) being the Old Testament expression for the modern
psychological term
[14. Æneid, V1, 45 ff., 77ff.
15. Timæus, 71.]
"ecstasy" adopted from the Greek. So among perhaps
most primitive peoples, like the Melanesians and Africans referred
to above, warnings from the supernatural and even knowledge of
other matters, as of charms, are supposed to be received under
such conditions.[16]
Ghosts do not figure merely as indicators of coming events
or as guardians against evil fortune. Their larger capacity for
action may make them powerful intercessors with still higher
supernatural beings or spirits, through shamans who control them
or know them intimately.[17] Or their own success in their earthly
vocation makes them interested in survivors who follow their
trade. In Africa the spirit of a dead hunter is powerful to help
in the chase, and is propitiated to that end.[18] In Melanesia
the help of ghosts in securing the right kind of weather, in
performing feats of healing, in success with the fishing net
or line, and in agriculture is obtained by sacrifices
[16. So the Australians: Howitt, Native
Tribes, pp. 435-437. On the facts at large of Carpenter,
Comparative Religion, pp. 181, 182.
17. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 243.
18. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, pp. 181-183.]
and offerings.[19] Indeed, from the inhabitants of Ghosttown
may come some of the good gifts, agricultural, for instance,
which make life worth living.[20] The spirits of the dead may
keep a watchful eye upon survivors, preventing or punishing infractions
of tribal customs that involve offence to themselves, and warning
against repetition by inflicting sickness or failure in various
enterprises.[21] Foundation sacrifice had the purpose of procuring
for the structure the protection of the spirits of the dead.[22]
On the other hand, ghosts may be among the spirits whose malevolence
needs to be guarded against. In fact, among the post mortem
transformations may be that into ill disposed spirits. Usually,
when this is conceived to be the case, the cause is found in
some misfortune in life or death. Among the Ibo, for instance,
a childless woman, a wifeless or moneyless man, or a suicide
may as ghosts attempt to increase the population
[19. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 132.
ff.: Lambert, Murs et superstitions, pp. 24, 26,
218, 224 ff., 293 ff.; Turner, Samoa, pp. 345 ff.
20. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 238-239.
21. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 192, 310.
22, B. D. Eerdmans, in Expositor, Nov. 1913, p. 197.]
of the underworld by attacks upon those left on earth.[23]
Similarly in New Guinea those who die in childbirth, suicides,
and those who have lost their heads become maleficent.[24] The
Omahas hold that ghosts of the murdered return and inflict punishment
by disease, or by causing the wind to blow from hunter to game
and so to spoil his sport.[25] Among Congo cannibals the soul
seen in dreams is a wandering human spirit aiming at evil in
its travels, and the witch doctor may be hired to kill it. The
nostrils of the dead are plugged immediately after death to keep
the spirit in the body as long as possible.[26] If the ghost
is for any reason unwelcome in the nether world and is driven
out, it becomes malicious and aims at mischief, either inflicting
positive ills by sending storms and like disasters or preventing
success in various pursuits.[27] In some cases ghosts are normally
neutral, and their disposition and consequent actions depend
upon the treatment they receive from
[23. Thomas, Anthropological Report,
p. 312
24. Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 212.
25. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, p. 212.
26. Weeks, Congo Cannibals, p. 263-264, 269.]
the living.[28] So that the well-being of survivors depends
on propitiation by gifts and ceremonies or on manifestations
of abiding affection.[29] The duties of classic Greeks and Romans
to their dead--careful and honorable burial, celebration by games
at the funeral or on anniversaries--recur at once to the mind:
and in these and other matters these peoples handed down in memory
at least and often in ritual the doings and beliefs of far away
ancestors. Close parallels to classic customs have been observed
among African, Melanesian, and Polynesian peoples, where not
only is the funeral offering placed on the ground, but dramatic
performances in honor of the dead take place.[30] Among some
races, such as British New Guineans and the Mafulu, ghosts are
always malevolent.[31]
Among the exercises of the enlarged powers
[28. Williamson, South Sea Savage,
pp. 65, 68, 74, 75, 76, 81 ff.; Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 116,
278, 286.
29. Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 19; Curt, Australian
Race, i. 87; Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 461, 463,
473; Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 507, and
Native Tribes, p. 511.
30. Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, p. 18; Brown,
Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 214 ff.; Milligan, Fetish
Folk, pp. 233-236.
31. Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 281 and Mafulu
Mountain People, pp. 243 ff., 266 ff., 297 ff.; JAI,
xxviii (1899), 216 ff.]
attributed to ghosts by quite diverse peoples is one which,
as we shall see later, they possess in common with non-human
spirits. This is the infliction of disease in an access of malignancy.
Such a belief is held by American Indians, South Sea islanders,
Hindus, New Guineans, and many others.[32] They may inflict lockjaw
by a blow, cause death, induce phthisis, and bring pestilence.[33]
Shamans and medicine men may use them to secure revenge or haunt
the living; and this again calls up the need for exorcism.[34]
This gives rise to various devices and taboos, aiming at propitiating
or deceiving the ghosts, such as change of names assigned to
things belonging to the dead, or dropping out of the language
words which contained the name borne in life, this going so far
in some cases as to involve the destruction of huts, plantations,
trees, and other possessions." It is quite in keeping with
the
[32. Folk-lore, ii. 420 ff., 431; Kloss,
In the Andamans, p. 305; Declé, Three years
in Savage Africa, pp. 236, 344.
33. Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, p. 230; Weeks,
Congo Cannibals, p. 266; Roscoe, Baganda, p. 100;
Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 81 ff.; Crooke, Tribes
and Caste, iii. 436.
34. Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 81 ff.; Roscoe,
Baganda, p. 126.
35. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 631 ff.; Cambridge
Anthropological Expedition, v. 250.]
whole conception of things that ghosts should be especially
dangerous at night.[36]
From all this, to anticipate slightly what is yet to come,
fear of discarnate spirits may lead to a cult, a worship, which
is apotropaic, deprecatory, or propitiatory in character. On
the other hand, the sense of favors received or to come gives
the rationale of a cultus which embodies more of gratitude
and pleasure than of fear. With both these varieties of mental
qualities attributed to ghosts, shared by them in common with
non-human powers, it seems to require somewhat of ingenuity and
a miscalculation or misappreciation of native human traits to
force one to derive all worship from fear.[37] Timor fecit
deos is now hardly tenable in its original sense, in view
of abundance of ascertained fads. Most of the animals, especially
those domesticated, display amiable traits, including gratitude.
We can hardly hold, therefore, that man, whether the product
of evolution or of special creation, developed one of his noblest
exercises, that of worship, from a sense of fear alone.
[36. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii.
64, 147.
37. Chalmers and Gill, Work and Adventure, pp. 84 ff.]
XIII
THE HOME OF THE SOUL
WE have seen that to the discarnate spirit is attributed much
of fondness for things to which it had become accustomed in its
earthly life. The idea of preference or liking comes out frequently
in connection with its post-mortem habitat. Of course,
it is to be remembered that the eschatology of primitive peoples
is vague and by no means consistent. Indeed, when it is recalled
that Christian eschatology is still in a confused state, when
orthodox theologians are at odds as to the location of the soul
between death and the judgment, even as to the time of the judgment,
whether immediately after death or at some indefinitely distant
time; when these doctors of the faith disagree as to the conscious
existence or the "sleep" of the soul after death, as
to its removal to heaven or hell on dissolution, and whether
that heaven or hell is final or, only temporary--one can hardly
expect primitive peoples, whose memory for history is short and
their outlook and forecast vague and brief, to have a consecutive
and sharply defined eschatology. Consequently we find variations
innumerable in the conceptions of the soul's location, and a
sort of warfare between the poor ghost's supposed preference
and the desires of survivors.
It is quite normal that the spirit is credited with lingering
affection for the home and the environment that so long harbored
it, and makes the grave, which is, of course, in the immediate
neighborhood, its favorite haunt and the body in the grave still
its home. How persistent this primitive notion is may be verified
in almost any rural community, where few indeed care to pass
God's acre after dark without company. The prehistoric Mycenæans
left in graves a groove by which evidently to pour the offerings
to the ghosts; Egyptian tombs had channels by which ka
or ba could have access to and egress from the embalmed
body. Even in Mongolia these apertures are found in the graves,
though there they are placed at the sides, showing that they
were intended for the spirit's exit and entrance and not to facilitate
the placing of provisions--food and drink.[1] Many primitive
peoples entertain beliefs parallel to those indicated by these
customs. Such are African tribes like the Baganda, certain Australians,
and many others.[2] From this conception may arise the thought
that souls wander around their old haunts and even make them
impossible for dwellings, at least for a time; or they may frequent
places having peculiar topographical features, where their clans
foregather.[3] Sometimes this return is only temporary, limited
to certain hours of the night, as for example, the case of some
African ghosts, who are released between twelve and three in
the morning--remember the ghost of Hamlet's father![4] In other
cases there is alleged to be a time when the ghosts must quit
finally their earthly haunts for a permanent abode elsewhere.
Thus in New Guinea[5] it seems that the spirit does not find
its way at once to its home; but wanders for some
[1. NGM, May 1913, p. 65.
2. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 282 ff.; Howitt, Native
Tribes S. E. Australia, pp. 434, 458-439, 455, 470; Talbot,
In The Shadow of the Bush, p. 232.
3 Taplin, Narrinyeri, pp. 181 ff.; Thomas, Report,
p. 38; Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 76; Spencer and
Gillen, Native Tribes, pp. 123, 126.
4 Talbot, In The Shadow of the Bush, p. 232.]
time about the places it was familiar with during the period
it was connected with the body. It may be possible that the spirit
does not finally leave its own haunts until the death feasts
are finished, or at least that the people believe the spirit
may be about, and likely to injure them, until they think a sufficient
time has elapsed, and a sufficient number of death feasts have
been held, and that then it is safe to close the series, to remove
the tabu, and to give over the mourning."[5]
There is, however, in this conception left open the possibility
of securing a brief visit from them for purposes that are supposed
to serve the living. How easily out of this could develop the
idea and practice of necromancy!
On the other hand one may support with abundant evidence the
thesis that there is a quite general consensus to the effect
that it is unseemly for departed spirits to inhabit the land
where the living pass their earthly existence. It is widely believed
that ghosts have their own land whither living mortals may not
go, whence, also, spirits may not
[1. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 220;
cf Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 149 ff.]
usually return, unless under highly exceptional circumstances.
Still it must not be forgotten that a whole group of festivals
and a host of folk customs, centering in mid-winter for the most
part, have as their basis the idea that ghosts return annually
and must be treated with respect, kindness, and hospitality.
All Souls' Day is the survival in Christian custom of this belief.[6]
To the questions where and what the region of the dead is
many tribes give various answers. Naturally man's wildest flights
of imagination and fancy have played with this theme. Of course,
much depends, in the answer that is given by any particular group
of peoples, upon the geography of the region and the cosmography
of the group. It is most natural, from the usual custom of burial,
that a region beneath the earth should be in the thoughts of
very diverse tribes and nations. There was placed the Babylonian
"Land-of-no-Return," for the most part the Egyptian
home of the dead, the Greek Hades, the resting place of natives
of Hood Peninsula and other places in New Guinea, in Oceanica
[6. For convenient collections of cases, cf. Harrison, Prolegomena,
passim, and Miles, Christmas, iii. pp. 161 ff.]
(Samoa)--to name only a few representative peoples.[7] On
the other hand, it frequently happens that the place of souls
is otherwise located: on a distant mountain, as with some natives
of British New Guinea;[8] or where the sun sets (compare Egyptian
ideas); or on an island far away;[9] or under the sea;[10] or
in the heavens, either in some defintitely designated luminary
or in some indefinite locality (Omahas regard the Milky Way as
the path to this home by which spirits pass in turn to and through
seven spirit worlds).[11] At times the information is quite definite,
as for example in parts of New Guinea.
"About Wedau and Wamira the spirits of the dead go eventually
to some place to the eastward of Cape Frere, in a valley in the
mountains called Iola, the approach to the abode of the spirits
being through a hole in the ground. When the spirit arrives it
is questioned at once, 'Where have you come
[7. JAI, xxviii (1899), 216 ff.; Neuhass,
Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 149 ff.; Westervelt, Legends
of Maui, p. 129.
8. Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 192.
9. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp. 129 ff.; Codrington,
Melanesians, pp. 255 ff.; Frazer, Immortality,
p. 192.
10. Lambert, Murs et superstitions, pp. 13 ff.;
Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 655 ff.; Turner, Samoa, pp.
257-258.
11. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., pp.
588-589.]
from?' 'What have you come for?' just as every time you go
into a village every one you meet asks you, 'Where are you going?'
'What are you after?' The newly arrived one says, 'I have come
from Wedau'or 'Wamira,' as the case may be, or the answer may
state more explicitly the section of the village, and 'Where
else should I go except to my own people?' Then the question
is asked, 'Who sent you?' and for answer the name of some sorcerer
or witch is given, the one responsible for the death. The spirit
is admitted to its new home, where it finds feasting and dancing,
plenty of food, and apparently also some fighting, and should
the spirit be killed, as some seem to think possible, during
such fighting, then it is the end, there is no more life of such."[12]
It would be expected that ideas differ greatly as to the character
of the spirit world. A wide group of unrelated peoples have looked
on the place of the soul as melancholy and mournful, fitting
the soul's unsubstantial character. The saying of Hezekiah, king
of Israel, after he had recovered from a dangerous illness, here
leaps into the mind:
[12. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p.219.]
"For the grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate
thee:
They that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth.
The living, the living, he shall praise thee, As I do this day."[13]
Such were the conceptions of Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks,
and Romans. A noted Greek hero is made to declare that he would
rather be a lowly laborer on earth than have an exalted station
among the dead. Adversely to this, not a few peoples patterned
their ideas of future life on the present world. Such is the
content of the notion in cases already cited[14] where primitive
tribes mutilated foes to prevent the shades from taking revenge
in the other world. And in many other instances the imagination
has compassed only similar conceptions.[15] The Thay of Indo-China
look on the next life as the counterpart of this.[16] The African
Bakongo bury their dead late in the day so that the spirits may
[13. Isa. 38:18-19.
14. Above, pp. 166 ff.
15 Lambert, Murs et superstitions, pp. 13 ff.;
Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 65S ff.; Gomes, Sea Dyaks
of Borneo, p. 208.
16. Anthropos, ii (1907), 619.]
arrive when the ghosts who preceded the present dead are home
from their labor in the fields and may welcome the newcomer.[17]
Other Africans know of ghost towns where the dead live and congregate
as they did while on earth.[18] The Hausa ghosts have a city
of their own, which has at least once been seen by a man who
returned to tell the tale. A traveler saw four caravans crossing
the desert in different directions, and followed one which seemed
to him best. Suddenly he saw the ghost city in front of him,
and in some way became cognizant of its nature. He hurriedly
turned about and escaped. This was almost miraculous, for the
spirits summon travelers from a caravan, and he who follows them
to the ghost city never returns.[19] The ancient Egyptians conceived
the land of the departed and their life as duplicating under
happier conditions life on the Nile; indeed there was a celestial
Nile land, where the social conditions which environed life on
earth continued, even to the institution of slavery and subjection
of the peasant to the noble. And exactly on a par with this state
of expectation
[17. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 270.
18. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, passim.
19. Tremearne, Ban of The Bori, pp. 155-156.]
is the set of ideas regarding the "other side" entertained
by South Sea people.[20] The custom in old Egypt, Japan, and
elsewhere, and in modern Africa, of slaughtering wives, servants,
slaves, and cattle to provide a retinue and a living for the
dead in the spirit world is too well known to need substantiation
here. We have already had before us[21] the curious custom of
providing Ushabtiu in Egypt, and have seen the record of the
institution of a similar custom in Japan, while the explanation
given in China and Korea of the figures around the grave-mounds
in those countries has also been cited. We have to remember in
taking note of these customs in the Far East that the practice
of magic there has for ages been almost as common and as inveterate
as in Egypt.
We may further note that in parts of Fiji and New Guinea the
souls of the departed are supposed to dwell in a great community,
and the puberty ceremonies are by some construed as having reference
to introduction to ancestral spirits in preparation for final
union with them.[22]
[20. Williamson, South Sea Savage,
p. 75.
21. Above, pp. 130 ff.
22. Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 434.]
In some regions the golden age of man is placed beyond the
grave. Some British New Guinea tribes think of the future life
as a paradise, with no old age, sickness, crime, fighting, death,
or evil spirits; where first marriages are reëstablished
and children are born who reach maturity and maintain that condition
with unabated strength and virility; and so it is with other
South Sea islanders.[23]
The means of approach to this final abode varies, of course,
with the grade of civilization, the location of the soul's home,
and many other circumstances usually dependent on local conditions.
If the home is on an island or across a river, a ferry may be
conceived--thus Melanesians reproduce in part the ideas of the
Greeks with their Charon and the Styx.[24] Others conceive the
entrance to be through well-known caves or holes, and exploration
of these by the reckless or foolhardy is discouraged by the belief
that attempts at entrance will be punished by severe earthquakes.[25]
Or a chasm is believed to separate
[23. Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians,
pp. 443 ff.; Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 192; Seligmann,
Melanesians, p. 192.
24. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 255 ff.
25. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 219; Turner, Samoa,
pp. 257-258.]
the two worlds, spanned by a tree trunk, as among American
Indians or some Melanesians (the latter must carry the figure
of a frigate bird to ensure safe passage),[26] or with a higher
development of culture the tree trunk becomes a bridge, the chasm
hell, and the passage the trial of the soul.
While by far the preponderating belief among primitive peoples
is that the dead, especially their ghosts, are to be gotten out
of the way, and while the general feeling is one of fear, in
occasional situations an enduring connection with them is desired,
and especial efforts are made to bring this about. Thus some
peoples in Africa, where nearly all shades of primitive thought
may be discovered, are so anxious to secure this abiding presence
of their dead that they cut off the head of the deceased and
preserve it in the home. This is thought to secure the continuance
of the presence of the favor of the dead patron, as he now becomes
by this means."
[26. Codrington, Melanesians, p. 257
27. Frobenius, Voice of Africa, p. 674.]
XIV
DESCENSUS AVERNI
THE notion of the underworld as a prison place in which the
dead are confined has given rise in many different centers to
the thought of some daring mortal who breaks the law separating
the two worlds, and visits the home of the dead, winning through
by power of love, or sheer bravado and physical might or challenge,
or by favor of the gods. The Descensus Averni is a widespread
myth. Its earliest literary form meets us in pre-Semitic Babylonia
in the story of Tammuz and Ishtar--now so well known that no
extended narrative is here necessary.[1] A fairly close parallel
to the Ishtar episode is found in far-away Japan, where the goddess
Izanami died and her spouse Izanagi descended after her, broke
the taboo concerning preservation of darkness (which is an element
in so many cycles of folklore unconnected with the Descensus),
[1. For the story, see most conveniently Rogers,
Cuneiform Parallels, pp. 121-131.]
and with difficulty escaped to the upper air, pursued by the
revengeful goddess and her minions.[2] The retirement of the
love-goddess Ishtar in Babylonia to the underworld is also paralleled
by that of the sun-goddess in Japan, though it is "the rock-cave
of heaven" in which the latter hides herself, and so brings
darkness, as the absence of Ishtar brings lack of desire, on
earth.[3] Hercules' famous exploit of descending and baling Cerberus,
the snake-haired dog guardian of the shades who would fain return,
to the upper air is in keeping with the hero's hardy and daring
nature. The Babylonians having conceived so early the notion,
it is not to be wondered at that the Mandaeans, who took over
so much of Babylonian custom and mythology, should take over
in the descensus Averni the exploit of Manda-da hayye.[4]
Of course the Vergilian story of Æneas' descent at once
recurs to the mind, as well as that of Vergil's imitator and
disciple Dante.
But the idea is not confined to peoples so far along in culture.
Maui, the culture hero of New Zealand and the South Sea, made
the dread journey to meet his great ancestress -
[2. Aston, Shinto, p. 93.
3 Ib., p. 100.
4. NSH., vii. 147.]
the lure here was merely material, a fish hook and to get
fire.[5] The Etoi, a people of Africa, know of the same venturous
enterprise with the taboo of eating ghost food, which connects
the story in thought, though hardly in origin, with the Greek
myth of the ravished Persephone, and with a story of quite different
purport in Babylonia.[6] Among some New Guinean peoples there
are chosen mortals that make the journey and return in safety.[7]
Omaha Indians regard it as possible for the living, in a swoon,
to visit the dread regions of the dead and return unscathed.[8]
But these are the exceptions, and only heroes and gods, and even
they under specially favoring auspices, like the command, behest,
or permission of the chief god, visit the dead and are able to
reascend from "The Land of No-Return."
[6. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp.
23, 48, 68 ff.
7. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 240, 336.
7. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 655 ff.
8. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., p. 589.]
XV
WORSHIP
HOWEVER worship be defined, little reflection is needed to
discern the basis of its beginnings in what has preceded. Worship
implies in the worshiper fear, reverence, gratitude, veneration,
homage, love, respect, admiration, or a complex of some or all
of these; and in the object worshiped power, worth, or dignity,
or a complex of them. As we moderns know it, and as the world
has known it as far back as written traditions or remains of
various sorts permit investigation, worship involves certain
definite modes of action by worshipers, directed to or at the
object of worship; and these modes of action tend to become stereotyped,
or, to anticipate a little, to crystallize into ritual. And many
reasons lead to the belief that this stereotyping began very
early.
Man's conception of things being anthropopathic, he would
regard them as he did men, and in addition he would treat them,
so far as circumstances and the nature of the case permitted,
much as he did men. Since he thought of them as having senses
to be tickled, appetites to be gratified, mentality to be reckoned
with, temper to be made or kept placid and amicable, and power
to be turned to good account or at least to be prevented from
acting against him, he would deal with them as his experience
and observation had taught him his own kind liked to be treated,
and thus secure his own well-being. It could not have been long
before the social element entered, tradition as to methods of
accomplishing ends soon becoming a determining factor. Man had
already discovered that the individuals of his own species differed
greatly in qualities and power, and that different modes of procedure
were either politic or necessary. Those weaker or less cunning
than himself he could either disregard or render subservient.
Those stronger and more resourceful would evoke fear or win respect,
and to them he would concede what he must. The degree of respect
or fear, expressed in terms of tribute or homage, would depend
upon the conceived or actual disparity between his powers and
those of the others. How short a distance separates respect or
homage from worship becomes evident when one considers the refinement
in theology of the distinction of dulia, hyperdulia,
and latria from each other, or when one notes the difficulty
of distinguishing the results in the objective actions attending
"veneration," "higher veneration," and "worship."[1]
This same standard of action would apply to whatever grade or
order of beings man actually dealt with or conceived himself
as dealing with. As Professor King puts it:
"Granted that the idea of a superior personality once
appears in the religious consciousness, it is easy to see that
the problem of worship itself, and of different types of worship,
is quite a simple one. It seems almost self-evident that the
deity will be approached and treated precisely along the lines
of intercourse within the group of worshipers. He will be bargained
with, or treated with respect, because be is recognized as having
the advantage in power. He will be flattered, offered gifts,
feasted, and treated precisely as would occur in a human society
[1. Cf. NSH., article "Dulia."]
if any member were felt to surpass the rest in some important
type of excellence. In general, the modes of worship will be,
first of all, repetitions of the acts called forth by the object
or situation which has aroused the interest. In what better way
could keepers of flocks conceive of honoring their god and keeping
him interested in men than by the ordinary communal feast, of
recognized importance in maintaining proper social relations
on the human side? The peoples with whom witchcraft is of dominating
importance will necessarily treat their deities after the manner
of treating the human sorcerer."[2]
The expression of animistic thought in this relation is that
what is pleasing to the worshiper will be regarded as pleasing
to the object of devotion; what would effect the purpose in mind
if applied to the subject is considered effectual applied to
the object.[3]
Most likely the impression upon man most nearly (if not quite)
universal made by any given object was that of relative power.
The question that would then arise would be: Is this being favorable
to me or adverse?
[2. King, Development of Religion,
p. 257.
3. Cf. Carpenter, Comparative Religion, p. 14.]
Will it use its power to help or hinder or injure? If the
conception was that the object was propitious, gratitude, warming
in time and with the supposed or real repetition of favors (again
real or supposed) into respect, love, and admiration, would evoke
homage or worship in its essential even though crude elements.
If the object was conceived to be malign in disposition, the
endeavor would naturally follow either to overawe or to propitiate.
It would not take very long to discern here how magic in some
of its aspects could arise. Threat or magic would be employed,
in course of time, to overawe; on the other hand, blandishments
of various sorts would be used to conciliate; or apotropaic performances
might grow up to drive and keep away the power conceived as hostile,
to prevent it from accomplishing ends unwelcome to man. Variety
in treatment must have arisen from the supposition that there
were grades of being and differences of disposition among these
beings. just as some men were more powerful in physique or resourceful
in wiles, so with these other beings with whom man supposed himself
in contact. That different kinds of power were conceived as existing
in the many spirits which man thought he perceived in his world
is in the very forefront of the phenomena we have passed in review.
In what has preceded there is implicit an assumption that
is not difficult to establish. This is that man's relation to
beings other than himself was to a large extent, if not entirely,
egoistic. He was concerned with what contributed to his own well-being
as he understood it. Not overlooked here is the later stage when
gens and tribe have entered with their idea of solidarity, in
which the individual was to a certain extent submerged and so
far extinguished. In this stage, indeed, the actions of the one,
under penalty of his clan's displeasure or worse, were made to
contribute to the weal of the whole, or, at the very least, to
be devoid of harm or danger to it. Prior to this grade of culture--if
psychology tell true its tale--the needs of self alone furnished
the criterion of action, self including doubtless also family.
And when the individual self was merged in the clan self, when
the good of one was the good of all, and vice versa, the
test of egoism, though now a better and larger quantity, still
ruled. Dealings with not-man, as with man, concerned the affairs
of everyday life, were a matter of barter and exchange between
man and the others. Two passages from the Hebrew scriptures here
leap into the mind. Jacob (Gen. 28: 20-22) promises devotion
to God on condition of receiving a certain continuing favor.
The reverse of this picture appears in Deut. 28, where in return
for definite religious performance prosperity is assured the
people by their God. Philostratus makes Apollonius of Tyana declare
that worship and sacrifice and the like are but a quid pro
quo, human in its formulation. Indeed, Apollonius thought
that large offerings made before any benefit was received from
the god were suspicious, arguing guilt in the sacrificer and
an attempt at bribery of the deity.[4] Such a condition as the
understanding between mortal and deity, the driving of bargain
with the god, can be ascertained as occurring all through history.
Only late does altruism appear and thenceforth struggle for expression
against odds.
Our chief concern here is to note the fad most pertinent to
our line of investigation and implicit in the foregoing--that
worship as
[4. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius,
i. x.]
registered by history and observation is most easily accounted
for on an animistic basis. Worship, if our hypothesis be true,
is but the sublimation (at first only slight) of sentiments that
are wholly native to man's nature from the start. The difference
in degree or intensity corresponds to the conceived difference
in certain qualities found in the object. The higher worthfulness
or helpfulness or potency found or conceived in an object commanded
that initial stage of tribute, higher than was yielded to others,
which developed in the course of time--how limited or extended
we cannot tell--into what would now be conceded to be essentially
worship.
Incidentally in the preceding discussion the fact has come
out that man worshiped what we call inanimate objects in nature
(stones, mountains, rivers, seas, the luminaries, the sky, the
earth, and the like); individuals in the vegetable kingdom (the
sacred tree, for example, indigenous in nearly all lands but
necessarily varying in species with the latitude and longitude);
others from the animal kingdom (snakes and monkeys and what not);
imaginary beings good and bad, malign and benign; as well as
living men and the souls of the departed. We trace to animism
the varied cults that have engaged the soul and spirit of man
throughout time and all over the world. Idolatry in all its varieties
and in the numerous connotations of the word needs little other
explanation of its origin. Worship springs out of man's nature
along with his efforts to satisfy his varied appetites of soul
and body, and is formulated on the basis of his real or supposed
experiences. To use a word that sums up luminously the entire
situation, man is incorrigibly theotropic, his thoughts have
ever turned Godward. The element that was lacking was judgment
of the things he chose as objects of service, perception of what
was worthy of adoration, realization of a true standard of values.
It is not our purpose to trace in minutiae the development
of cult. We are concerned here solely with the phenomenology
and implications of animism, not with the unfolding of all that
results. It would indeed be interesting to follow out the complexity
of cult, to show how it came to cover so large a portion of life,
unfolding into exacting ritual, and embracing alike the insignificant
details and the momentous crises of existence. We should find
fascinating the testimonies alike to common psychological trends--as
in the almost universal cult of the serpent, easily interpreted
upon physical grounds--and to racial peculiarities which led
to specific contributions which enriched later humanity, such
as the Greek devotion to the beautiful and the Roman passion
for legal formulation. But this belongs to a different line of
discussion.
We must, however, glance at two elements in the case--conservatism
and the social factor.
By the first is meant that fear to change methods and formulæ
(whether of words or of action) which, however wrongly (because
of man's major fallacy, post hoc propter hoc), were supposed
to have efficacy. For the existence of this there is abundant
testimony. From all quarters to observers of procedure which
to them, in their advanced stage of culture, seems inherently
irrational, who ask: Why do you do this? or, Why do you do it
this way? the almost invariable answer comes, Our fathers taught
us to do it. Often there is attached a further reason, clearly
mythological or else supported by some supposedly conclusive
proof from experience, such as: if we did not, this or that dreadful
thing would happen just as it did to so and so who did it another
way or did not do it at all. In Nias (Malaysia) in case of epidemic
the cause is often found in a desertion of the old ways, and
a renewal of vows to return to the earlier order of things is
believed to remove the trouble.[5] Among the Pueblos the working
of this principle has been observed.
"(Of the two great forces which have lifted humanity
to the present plane of civilization--imitation and invention--the
latter has been almost wholly suppressed by the Pueblos.[6] The
result is exact reproduction in both industry and religion.[7]
And Todd's testimony is given again as follows: "Oral
traditions and the 'customs that are written within the book'
. . .form the social matrix and make up by far the
larger part of that social heredity which is the very stuff of
informal education, and the basis of formal pedagogy."[8]
From a different branch of the American aborigines evidence of
the application
[5. Frazer, Scapegoat, p. 115.
6. Spencer, Education of the Pueblo Child.
7. Todd, The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency,
p. 183.
8. Todd, Primitive Family, p. 178.]
of this principle to ritual is given as follows: "Any
mistake made in singing these (ritual) songs or in reciting the
ritual (of the Omahas) resulted in the early death of the offender."[9]
The continuity of this extreme conservatism can be traced
in the area of ritual down to our own times. Indeed it has become
an axiom among investigators both of religion and of anthropology
and folk-lore that the oldest living remains we have are to be
found in ritual, whether of worship, work, or, strange to say,
play. The Brahmins have enshrined in their writings the necessity
of adhering with the utmost fidelity to the words and ads, and
the very sequence of the same, to the end that the sacrifice
may be effectual. It is a matter of history that Sumerian rituals
which began to be formulated in Babylonia perhaps as early as
the sixth or fifth millennium before Christ were employed for
a thousand or more years after the Sumerian language had ceased
to be spoken, and this in order to gain effectual approach to
the gods. Several branches of the Christian Church still employ
languages long defunct and unintelligible to the majority
[9. FIetcher and La Flesche, Anthropological Report,
etc., p. 575.]
of the worshipers, and this is done for no reason that is
intelligible, or at least plausible, to those not of the communions
referred to. Only a few years ago intense feeling was caused
in Greece over the proposed rendering of the Greek of the New
Testament into modern Greek. In various other ways might be demonstrated
the tendency to a fixity in ways of thinking about things, in
modes of action, and in methods of expression, and all this as
a characteristic native to man in all stages of civilization
and in all spheres of action.
The second element includes the complex results of many minds
working on the same problem. An ever stronger emphasis upon the
formative influence of the social factor in the development of
mankind is laid by modern investigators in anthropology and religion.
One way in which communal life worked was the observation of
details, supposed to be of significance, which might or did escape
the notice of individuals. A gesture in a dance, a chance occurrence
in a ceremony, mere coincidence in some totally unrelated phenomena
such as the presence of a variegated leaf or the simultaneous
note of a bird or leap of an insect--any of these or a thousand
other details marked at the time might come to be considered
essential parts or accompaniments of the performance, whatever
it was, thereafter to be included or simulated whenever the results
were sought again, with the assumption that omission imperilled
those results. Here is one partial explanation of the growing
complexity of ceremonial up to a certain point. It can be seen
at once how conservatism steps in here to preserve the method
of procedure thus arrived at.
But this social factor undoubtedly operated also in a different
way. The ways of seeing and interpreting things differ among
observers. Man is an argumentative animal. Opinions pro
and contra passed, and one consequence must have been
a series of compromises in which weight of opinion or authority
produced finally the formulæ and methods most acceptable
to the community. Here is one door by which probably entered
what we know as progress. The interest of the community, clan,
or tribe, we have seen, operated to restrict and limit individual
choice and initiative. Society did at a certain stage, and perhaps
much earlier than any period of which we have dire(ft evidence,
regard itself as open to reactions from benefit or injury done
to non-human beings through the agency of any one of its members.
This being so, the individual must a(ft with reference to the
welfare of the whole. It is at this point pertinent therefore
to point to the entrance of the ethical as distinct from what
has so long been regarded as the religious. To examine this,
however, would take us away from our theme, as it belongs in
an entirely different field from that we now cultivate.
XVI
RESIDUA OF ANIMISM
FINALLY, we may register--no more than that--a few of the
beliefs and practices which, enduring through ages, were the
direct legacy or proximate product of the animistic stage.
First, of course, is the precious discovery of the existence
of soul in man, an inheritance whose value has been ever more
clearly recognized as the centuries rolled by, until the supreme
expression of that value was given by Jesus of Nazareth: What
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul? The growing perception of the soul's worth is measured
in part by the development of the ideas of heaven and hell as
that soul's reward or punishment. Anticipated bliss or sorrow
was magnified in proportion to the enlarging estimates of the
soul's worth. The Greek idea of a shadowy existence after death
in a featureless place that almost voids the idea of locality
could not abide with a higher (Christian) estimate of soul values.
Even the Egyptians had a nobler realization of those values,
though it was nourished at great loss--it cost them a really
noble conception of the being and nature of the gods.
Second, this conception of the soul thus recognized involves
another noteworthy bequest of animism, the notion of the continued
life of the soul beyond the grave. Primitive races are quite
logical in their deduction of continued existence as an attribute
or quality of soul. It has incidentally been noted in the preceding
pages that whatever was conceived as possessing soul was also
believed to exist beyond the grave. There the hunter, note, was
conceived to pursue shade of deer or whatever animal had been
the gain of his bow or spear in this life. So that it was not
man in himself, apart from soul, that gained immortality--or
whatever proportion of immortality the primitive had acquired
the power to conceive--immortality belonged to soul itself.
If practical universality of belief and of desire for the
thing itself proves a doctrine, no tenet of our faith has surer
basis than this in existence after death. We have already seen
that the idea of continuance, which is the seed out of which
the idea of real immortality germinated, is found among all primitive
peoples. Moreover, all great religions but one have taken the
idea into their bosoms and made it central. The exception is
classic Buddhism. And the vigor and tenacity of the doctrine
of conscious life beyond the grave has been too great for the
later followers of even the Buddha. For later Buddhism too has
its doctrine of heaven and hell in the forms of belief current
for many centuries. Not even the doctrine of karma, in
its most absolute form, could withstand the ardent longing of
man and his invincible faith that he is more than a bundle of
consequences to fall apart and cease to exist as an entity when
once he had persuaded himself that such an effect was possible.
Elsewhere than in Buddhism only sporadic agnostics have ventured
a doubt or a denial of the doctrine. How insistent is the cry
of humanity for the boon of a continued conscious endurance is
evinced by this. In spite of the firm faith of Christians in
immortality, the assurance of it (as it is sometimes expressed),
this longing and this faith compel even them to look with desire
upon results of investigations like those of the Society for
Psychical Research, if perchance scientific demonstration can
be made to confirm what is now the product of belief.
The third legacy of animism is belief in superhuman powers.
Whether we regard this from the standpoint of anthropology or
culture, or from that of ethics or of religion, it is difficult
to estimate, impossible to overestimate, its importance. How
vast a power of restraint this belief has exerted as an inhibition
upon the lower passions of man, and how great an impulse it has
ever been to the growth and unfolding of his higher nature! While
it is probably true that altruism has never in the history of
the race been absent in at least germinal force--remember that
it is not absent in even brute creation--even yet its greatest
force as a determinative factor is manifested only in the highly
cultured. The impression of the existence of higher powers, of
superhuman or supernal forces, was necessary during the disciplinary
or elementary stages of culture to control and to direct to beneficent
ends human thinking and action. Moreover, as has already been
suggested, angelology and demonology are traceable in direct
line to the set of conceptions we have been following in their
manifestations in thought and action.
For these three greatest conceptions entertained by humanity
the race has to thank the stage of culture we have been studying.
Besides the currents represented by the dominant ideas just
particularized other thought channels exist in which flow streams
so strong as to warrant the use of the term "instinctive."
"I'm afraid. to go home in the dark," for instance,
is the voicing of a dread from which few are free. Granted that
in many or most cases this fear is implanted in the young by
tales of bogies or spirits told by injudicious parents or other
associates, the psychologist can but note how readily the idea
is assimilated and how difficult it is, even for the mature scientist
(if he be frank with himself), to rise superior to the fear and
to banish it utterly. The reason is, probably, that the mind
is in this matter super-receptive. The channel has been worn
in the thinking or emotions of hundreds of ancestors, and the
grooves are transmitted. Open the sluice gates to the idea, and
it flows a muddy stream through life.
The savage of the stone age, cowering over his campfire, casting
fearful looks into the jungle all about him, hearing in "the
thousand noises of the night the movements of myriads of spirits
whose existence is to him a reality," transmitted a frightful
heritage of terror to his far-off descendants. Against the effects
of this heritage in the clear light of day and the illumination
of science and knowledge men count themselves victors. But curiously
the shades of night banish self-acquired knowledge, and the unknown
and unseen open the gates of emotion to unspoken and unconfessed
fears. In vain does the victim appeal to his own "common
sense." He knows the "superstition" is "foolish,"
"unscientific." But the subconscious habit of thought,
prenatally transmitted, smothers his knowledge, and, given the
occasion and stimulus, dominates him in spite of himself.
From the standpoint of pedagogics not yet has sufficient allowance
been made for this heritage of fear. Parents, nurses, and companions,
mistakenly and often innocently, sow and cultivate these weeds
in a soil all too well prepared by heritage. And the result is
that instead of a beautiful garden spot of trust and confidence
and belief in the good, a jungle or morass of noxious fears and
dreads mars for many the beauty of life.
Other residua less worthy, for the most part now happily matters
of history, at least in the civilized world, have been hinted
at in the preceding pages. Most of these may be classed under
the head of superstitions, though we are to bear in mind that
these too have, at least some of them, contributed to the advance
of mankind.[1] They include the development and practice of totemism
and taboo, of magic and divination with their nobler brother
prophecy, of mythology and witchcraft, and of sacrifice in the
ritual sense. When we have shown the nature of animism, we have
laid at least one firm platform for the treatment of these, so
far at least as their objective side is concerned. Then, too,
the relative order or the contemporaneity of magic and religion--that
vexed question--may receive illumination in pursuit of the consequences
of the fads here exhibited. But to trace these developments is
another task. Whether such phenomena as those of fetishism are
primary
[1. Cf. Frazer, Psyche's Task; and
NSH., article "Superstition."]
or secondary may also be possible of solution in the light
we have gained; and the varieties of sacrifice fall easily into
order as we start from its foundation in animism as shown in
the facts here passed in review.
XVII
LITERATURE TO WHICH REFERENCE IS MADE IN THIS VOLUME
PERIODICALS AND ABBREVIATIONS USED
BW = Biblical World.
FL = Folk-lore.
FR = Fortnightly Review.
GI = Globus.
ERE = Hastings, Selbie, and Gray, Encyclopedia of Religion
and Ethics.
HR = Homiletic Review.
IA = Indian Antiquary.
IAE = Internationales Archiv für Etbnographie.
JAI = Journal of the Anthropological Institute.
JRP = Journal of Religious Psychology.
NGM = National Geographic Magazine.
NSH = New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia.
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