Volume I Part 29 (1/2)
Aristophanes, too, in the Birds (686) talks of men as (Greek text omitted), figures kneaded of clay. Thus there are sufficient traces in Greek tradition of the savage myth that man was made of clay by some superior being, like Pund-jel in the quaint Australian story.
We saw that among various rude races other theories of the origin of man were current. Men were thought to have come out of a hole in the ground or a bed of reeds, and sometimes the very scene of their first appearance was still known and pointed out to the curious. This myth was current among races who regarded themselves as the only people whose origin needed explanation. Other stories represented man as the fruit of a tree, or the child of a rock or stone, or as the descendant of one of the lower animals. Examples of these opinions in Greek legend are now to be given. In the first place, we have a fragment of Pindar, in which the poet enumerates several of the centres from which different Greek tribes believed men to have sprung. ”Hard it is to find out whether Alalkomeneus, first of men, arose on the marsh of Cephissus, or whether the Curetes of Ida first, a stock divine, arose, or if it was the Phrygian Corybantes that the sun earliest saw--men like trees walking;” and Pindar mentions Egyptian and Libyan legends of the same description.(1) The Thebans and the Arcadians held themselves to be ”earth-born”. ”The black earth bore Pelasgus on the high wooded hills,”
says an ancient line of Asius. The Dryopians were an example of a race of men born from ash-trees. The myth of gens virum truncis et duro robore nata, ”born of tree-trunk and the heart of oak,” had pa.s.sed into a proverb even in Homer's time.(2) Lucian mentions(3) the Athenian myth ”that men grew like cabbages out of the earth”. As to Greek myths of the descent of families from animals, these will be examined in the discussion of the legend of Zeus.
(1) Preller, Aus. Auf., p. 158.
(2) Virgil Aen., viii. 315; Odyssey, xix. 163; Iliad, ii. xxii. 120; Juvenal, vi. 11. Cf. also Bouche Leclerq, De Origine Generis Humani.
(3) Philops. iii.
CHAPTER XI. SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS.
The origin of a belief in G.o.d beyond the ken of history and of speculation--Sketch of conjectural theories--Two elements in all beliefs, whether of backward or civilised races--The Mythical and the Religious--These may be coeval, or either may be older than the other--Difficulty of study--The current anthropological theory--Stated objections to the theory--G.o.ds and spirits--Suggestion that savage religion is borrowed from Europeans--Reply to Mr. Tylor's arguments on this head--The morality of savages.
”The question of the origin of a belief in Deity does not come within the scope of a strictly historical inquiry. No man can watch the idea of G.o.d in the making or in the beginning. We are acquainted with no race whose beginning does not lie far back in the unpenetrated past. Even on the hypothesis that the natives of Australia, for example, were discovered in a state of culture more backward than that of other known races, yet the inst.i.tutions and ideas of the Australians must have required for their development an incalculable series of centuries.
The notions of man about the Deity, man's religious sentiments and his mythical narratives, must be taken as we find them. There have been, and are, many theories as to the origin of the conception of a supernatural being or beings, concerned with the fortunes of mankind, and once active in the making of the earth and its inhabitants. There is the hypothesis of an original divine tradition, darkened by the smoke of foolish mortal fancies. There is the hypothesis of an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced to man by the very nature of his knowledge and perceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise a finite and an infinite. There is the hypothesis that G.o.ds were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, seeking in his early speculations for the causes of things, and conscious of his own powers as an active cause, projected his own shadow on the mists of the unknown, and peopled the void with figures of magnified non-natural men, his own parents and protectors, and the makers of many of the things in the world.
”Since the actual truth cannot be determined by observation and experiment, the question as to the first germs of the divine conception must here be left unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and examine apart the two chief elements in the earliest as in the latest ideas of G.o.dhead. Among the lowest and most backward, as among the most advanced races, there coexist the MYTHICAL and the RELIGIOUS elements in belief. The rational factor (or what approves itself to us as the rational factor) is visible in religion; the irrational is prominent in myth. The Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in hours of danger and necessity 'yearns after the G.o.ds,' and has present in his heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element.
The same man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always traces back to the belief in a power that is benign and works for righteousness. Myth, even in Homer or the Rig-Veda, perpetually falls back on the old stock of absurd and immoral divine adventures.(1)
(1) M. Knappert here, in a note to the Dutch translation, denies the lowest mythical element to the Hebrews, as their doc.u.ments have reached us.
”It would be rash, in the present state of knowledge, to p.r.o.nounce that the germ of the serious Homeric sense of the justice and power of the Divinity is earlier or later than the germ of the Homeric stories of G.o.ds disguised as animals, or imprisoned by mortals, or kicked out of Olympus. The rational and irrational aspects of mythology and religion may be of coeval antiquity for all that is certainly known, or either of them, in the dark backward of mortal experience, may have preceded the other. There is probably no religion nor mythology which does not offer both aspects to the student. But it is the part of advancing civilisation to adorn and purify the rational element, and to subordinate and supersede the irrational element, as far as religious conservatism, ritual and priestly dogma will permit.”
Such were the general remarks with which this chapter opened in the original edition of the present work. But reading, reflection and certain additions to the author's knowledge of facts, have made it seem advisable to state, more fully and forcibly than before, that, in his opinion, not only the puzzling element of myth, but the purer element of a religious belief sanctioning morality is derived by civilised people from a remote past of savagery. It is also necessary to draw attention to a singular religious phenomena, a break, or ”fault,” as geologists call it, in the religious strata. While the most backward savages, in certain cases, present the conception of a Being who sanctions ethics, and while that conception recurs at a given stage of civilisation, it appears to fade, or even to disappear in some conditions of barbarism.
Among some barbaric peoples, such as the Zulus, and the Red Indians of French Canada when first observed, as among some Polynesians and some tribes of Western and Central Africa little trace of a supreme being is found, except a name, and that name is even occasionally a matter of ridicule. The highest religious conception has been reached, and is generally known, yet the Being conceived of as creative is utterly neglected, while ghosts, or minor G.o.ds, are served and adored. To this religious phenomenon (if correctly observed) we must attempt to a.s.sign a cause. For this purpose it is necessary to state again what may be called the current or popular anthropological theory of the evolution of G.o.ds.
That theory takes varying shapes. In the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer we find a pure Euhemerism. G.o.ds are but ghosts of dead men, raised to a higher and finally to the highest power. In the somewhat a.n.a.logous but not identical system of Mr. Tylor, man first attains to the idea of spirit by reflection on various physical, psychological and psychical experiences, such as sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, hallucinations, breath and death, and he gradually extends the conception of soul or ghost till all nature is peopled with spirits. Of these spirits one is finally promoted to supremacy, where the conception of a supreme being occurs. In the lowest faiths there is said, on this theory, to be no connection, or very little connection, between religion and morality. To supply a religious sanction of morals is the work of advancing thought.(1)
(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 381. Huxley's Science and Hebrew Tradition, pp.
346,372.
This current hypothesis is, confessedly, ”animistic,” in Mr. Tylor's phrase, or, in Mr. Spencer's terminology, it is ”the ghost theory”. The human soul, says Mr. Tylor, has been the model on which all man's ideas of spiritual beings, from ”the tiniest elf” to ”the heavenly Creator and ruler of the world, the Great Spirit,” have been framed.(1) Thus it has been necessary for Mr. Tylor and for Mr. Spencer to discover first an origin of man's idea of his own soul, and that supposed origin in psychological, physical and psychical experiences is no doubt adequate.
By reflection on these facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached, though the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor may contain points as yet unexplained by Materialism. From these sources are derived all really ”animistic” G.o.ds, all that from the first partake of the nature of hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though in certain cases that hunger may have been transferred, we surmise, by wors.h.i.+ppers to G.o.ds not ORIGINALLY animistic.
(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 109
In answer to this theory of an animistic or ghostly origin of all G.o.ds, it must first be observed that all G.o.ds are not necessarily, it would seem, of animistic origin. Among certain of the lowest savages, although they believe in ghosts, the animistic conception, the spiritual idea, is not attached to the relatively supreme being of their faith. He is merely a powerful BEING, unborn, and not subject to death. The purely metaphysical question ”was he a ghost?” does not seem always to have been asked. Consequently there is no logical reason why man's idea of a Maker should not be prior to man's idea that there are such things as souls, ghosts and spirits. Therefore the animistic theory is not necessary as material for the ”G.o.d-idea”. We cannot, of course, prove that the ”G.o.d-idea” was historically prior to the ”ghost-idea,” for we know no savages who have a G.o.d and yet are ignorant of ghosts. But we can show that the idea of G.o.d may exist, in germ, without explicitly involving the idea of spirit. Thus G.o.ds MAY be prior in evolution to ghosts, and therefore the animistic theory of the origin of G.o.ds in ghosts need not necessarily be accepted.
In the first place, the original evolution of a G.o.d out of a ghost need not be conceded, because in perhaps all known savage theological philosophy the G.o.d, the Maker and Master, is regarded as a being who existed before death entered the world. Everywhere, practically speaking, death is looked on as a comparatively late intruder. He came not only after G.o.d was active, but after men and beasts had populated the world. Scores of myths accounting for this invasion of death have been collected all over the world.(1) Thus the relatively supreme being, or beings, of religion are looked on as prior to Death, therefore, not as ghosts. They are sometimes expressly distinguished as ”original G.o.ds” from other G.o.ds who are secondary, being souls of chiefs. Thus all Tongan G.o.ds are Atua, but all Atua are not ”original G.o.ds”.(2) The word Atua, according to Mr. White, is ”A-tu-a”. ”A” was the name given to the author of the universe, and signifies: ”Am the unlimited in power,” ”The Conception,” ”the Leader,” ”the Beyond All”. ”Tua” means ”Beyond that which is most distant,” ”Behind all matter,” and ”Behind every action”.