Volume I Part 17 (1/2)
The Andamanese, long spoken of as ”G.o.dless,” owe much to Mr. Man, an English official, who has made a most careful study of their beliefs.(1) So extraordinary is the contradiction between the relative purity and morality of the RELIGION and the savagery of the myths of the Andamanese, that, in the first edition of this work, I insisted that the ”spiritual G.o.d” of the faith must have been ”borrowed from the same quarter as the stone house” in which he is mythically said to live. But later and wider study, and fresh information from various quarters, have convinced me that the relative purity of Andamanese religion, with its ethical sanction of conduct, may well be, and probably is, a natural unborrowed development. It is easy for MYTH to borrow the notion of a stone house from our recent settlement at Port Blair. But it would not be easy for RELIGION to borrow many new ideas from an alien creed, in a very few years, while the noted ferocity of the islanders towards strangers, and the inaccessibility of their abode, makes earlier borrowing, on a large scale at least, highly improbable. The Andamanese G.o.d, Puluga, is ”like fire” but invisible, unborn and immortal, knowing and punis.h.i.+ng or rewarding, men's deeds, even ”the thoughts of their hearts”. But when once mythical fancy plays round him, and stories are told about him, he is credited with a wife who is an eel or a shrimp, just as Zeus made love as an ant or a cuckoo. Puluga was the maker of men; no particular myth as to how he made them is given. They tried to kill him, after the deluge (of which a grotesque myth is told), but he replied that he was ”as hard as wood”. His legend is in the usual mythical contradiction with the higher elements in his religion.
(1) Journ. Anthrop. Soc., vol. xii. p. 157 et seq.
Leaving the Andaman islanders, but still studying races in the lowest degree of civilisation, we come to the Bushmen of South Africa. This very curious and interesting people, far inferior in material equipment to the Hottentots, is sometimes regarded as a branch of that race.(1) The Hottentots call themselves ”Khoi-khoi,” the Bushmen they style ”Sa”.
The poor Sa lead the life of pariahs, and are hated and chased by all other natives of South Africa. They are hunters and diggers for roots, while the Hottentots, perhaps their kinsmen, are cattle-breeders.(2) Being so ill-nourished, the Bushmen are very small, but st.u.r.dy. They dwell in, or rather wander through, countries which have been touched by some ancient civilisation, as is proved by the mysterious mines and roads of Mashonaland. It is singular that the Bushmen possess a tradition according to which they could once ”make stone things that flew over rivers”. They have remarkable artistic powers, and their drawings of men and animals on the walls of caves are often not inferior to the designs on early Greek vases.(3)
(1) See ”Divine Myths of the Lower Races”.
(2) Hahu, Tsuni Goam, p. 4. See other accounts in Waitz, Anthropologie, ii. 328.
(3) Custom and Myth, where ill.u.s.trations of Bushman art are given, pp.
290-295.
Thus we must regard the Bushmen as possibly degenerated from a higher status, though there is nothing (except perhaps the tradition about bridge-making) to show that it was more exalted than that of their more prosperous neighbours, the Hottentots. The myths of the Bushmen, however, are almost on the lowest known level. A very good and authentic example of Bushman cosmogonic myth was given to Mr. Orpen, chief magistrate of St. John's territory, by Qing, King Nqusha's huntsman.
Qing ”had never seen a white man, but in fighting,” till he became acquainted with Mr. Orpen.(1) The chief force in Bushmen myth is by Dr.
Bleek identified with the mantis, a sort of large gra.s.shopper. Though he seems at least as ”chimerical a beast” as the Aryan creative boar, the ”mighty big hare” of the Algonkins, the large spider who made the world in the opinion of the Gold Coast people, or the eagle of the Australians, yet the insect (if insect he be), like the others, has achieved moral qualities and is addressed in prayer. In his religious aspect he is nothing less than a gra.s.shopper. He is called Cagn. ”Cagn made all things and we pray to him,” said Qing. ”Coti is the wife of Cagn.” Qing did not know where they came from; ”perhaps with the men who brought the sun”. The fact is, Qing ”did not dance that dance,” that is, was not one of the Bushmen initiated into the more esoteric mysteries of Cagn. Till we, too, are initiated, we can know very little of Cagn in his religious aspect. Among the Bushmen, as among the Greeks, there is ”no religious mystery without dancing”. Qing was not very consistent.
He said Cagn gave orders and caused all things to appear and to be made, sun, moon, stars, wind, mountains, animals, and this, of course, is a lofty theory of creation. Elsewhere myth avers that Cagn did not so much create as manufacture the objects in nature. In his early day ”the snakes were also men”. Cagn struck snakes with his staff and turned them into men, as Zeus, in the Aeginetan myth, did with ants. He also turned offending men into baboons. In Bushman myth, little as we really know of it, we see the usual opposition of fable and faith, a kind creator in religion is apparently a magician in myth.
(1) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.
Neighbours of the Bushmen, but more fortunate in their wealth of sheep and cattle, are the Ovaherero. The myths of the Ovaherero, a tribe dwelling in a part of Hereraland ”which had not yet been under the influence of civilisation and Christianity,” have been studied by the Rev. H. Reiderbecke, missionary at Otyozondyupa. The Ovaherero, he says, have a kind of tree Ygdrasil, a tree out of which men are born, and this plays a great part in their myth of creation. The tree, which still exists, though at a great age, is called the Omumborombonga tree. Out of it came, in the beginning, the first man and woman. Oxen stepped forth from it too, but baboons, as Caliban says of the stars, ”came otherwise,” and sheep and goats sprang from a flat rock. Black people are so coloured, according to the Ovaherero, because when the first parents emerged from the tree and slew an ox, the ancestress of the blacks appropriated the black liver of the victim. The Ovakuru Meyuru or ”OLD ONES in heaven,” once let the skies down with a run, but drew them up again (as the G.o.ds of the Satapatha Brahmana drew the sun) when most of mankind had been drowned.(1) The remnant pacified the OLD ONES (as Odysseus did the spirits of the dead) by the sacrifice of a BLACK ewe, a practice still used to appease ghosts by the Ovaherero. The neighbouring Omnambo ascribe the creation of man to Kalunga, who came out of the earth, and made the first three sheep.(2)
(1) An example of a Deluge myth in Africa, where M. Lenormant found none.
(2) South African Folk-Lore Journal, ii. pt. v. p. 95.
Among the Namaquas, an African people on the same level of nomadic culture as the Ovaherero, a divine or heroic early being called Heitsi Eibib had a good deal to do with the origin of things. If he did not exactly make the animals, he impressed on them their characters, and their habits (like those of the serpent in Genesis) are said to have been conferred by a curse, the curse of Heitsi Eibib. A precisely similar notion was found by Avila among the Indians of Huarochiri, whose divine culture-hero imposed, by a curse or a blessing, their character and habits on the beasts.(1) The lion used to live in a nest up a tree till Heitsi Eibib cursed him and bade him walk on the ground. He also cursed the hare, ”and the hare ran away, and is still running”.(2) The name of the first man is given as Eichaknanabiseb (with a mult.i.tude of ”clicks”), and he is said to have met all the animals on a flat rock, and played a game with them for copper beads. The rainbow was made by Gaunab, who is generally a malevolent being, of whom more hereafter.
(1) Fables of Yncas (Hakluyt Society), p. 127.
(2) Tsuni Goam, pp. 66, 67.
Leaving these African races, which, whatever their relative degrees of culture, are physically somewhat contemptible, we reach their northern neighbours, the Zulus. They are among the finest, and certainly among the least religious, of the undeveloped peoples. Their faith is mainly in magic and ghosts, but there are traces of a fading and loftier belief.
The social and political condition of the Zulu is well understood. They are a pastoral, but not a nomadic people, possessing large kraals or towns. They practise agriculture, and they had, till quite recently, a centralised government and a large army, somewhat on the German system.
They appear to have no regular cla.s.s of priests, and supernatural power is owned by the chiefs and the king, and by diviners and sorcerers, who conduct the sacrifices. Their myths are the more interesting because, whether from their natural scepticism, which confuted Bishop Colenso in his orthodox days, or from acquaintance with European ideas, they have begun to doubt the truth of their own traditions.(1) The Zulu theory of the origin of man and of the world commences with the feats of Unkulunkulu, ”the old, old one,” who, in some legends, was the first man, ”and broke off in the beginning”. Like Manabozho among the Indians of North America, and like Wainamoinen among the Finns, Unkulunkulu imparted to men a knowledge of the arts, of marriage, and so forth. His exploits in this direction, however, must be considered in another part of this work. Men in general ”came out of a bed of reeds”.(2) But there is much confusion about this bed of reeds, named ”Uthlanga”. The younger people ask where the bed of reeds was; the old men do not know, and neither did their fathers know. But they stick to it that ”that bed of reeds still exists”. Educated Zulus appear somewhat inclined to take the expression in an allegorical sense, and to understand the reeds either as a kind of protoplasm or as a creator who was mortal. ”He exists no longer. As my grandfather no longer exists, he too no longer exists; he died.” Chiefs who wish to claim high descent trace their pedigree to Uthlanga, as the Homeric kings traced theirs to Zeus. The myths given by Dr. Callaway are very contradictory.