Volume I Part 30 (2/2)
Father Le Jeune, S.J., went first among the Algonkins, a missionary pioneer, in 1633, and suffered unspeakable things in his courageous endeavour to win souls in a most recalcitrant flock. He writes (1633): ”As this savage has given me occasion to speak of their G.o.d, I will remark that it is a great error to think that the savages have no knowledge of any deity. I was surprised to hear this in France. I do not know their secrets, but, from the little which I am about to tell, it will be seen that they have such knowledge.
”They say that one exists whom they call Atahocan, who made the whole.
Speaking of G.o.d in a wigwam one day, they asked me 'what is G.o.d?' I told them that it was He who made all things, Heaven and Earth. They then began to cry out to each other, 'Atahocan! Atahocan! it is Atahocan!'”
There could be no better evidence that Atahocan was NOT (as is often said) ”borrowed from the Jesuits”. The Jesuits had only just arrived.
Later (1634) Le Jeune interrogated an old man and a partly Europeanised sorcerer. They replied that nothing was certain; that Atahocan was only spoken of as ”of a thing so remote,” that a.s.surance was impossible. ”In fact, their word Nitatohokan means, 'I fable, I tell an old story'.”
Thus Atahocan, though at once recognised as identical with the Creator of the missionary, was so far from being the latest thing in religious evolution that he had pa.s.sed into a proverb for the ancient and the fabulous. This, of course, is inconsistent with RECENT borrowing. He was neglected for Khichikouai, spirits which inspire seers, and are of some practical use, receiving rewards in offerings of grease, says Le Jeune.(1)
(1) Relations, 1633, 1634.
The obsolescent Atahocan seems to have had no moral activity. But, in America, this indolence of G.o.d is not universal. Mr. Parkman indeed writes: ”In the primitive Indian's conception of a G.o.d, the idea of moral good has no part”.(1) But this is definitely contradicted by Heriot, Strachey, Winslow, already cited, and by Pere Le Jeune. The good attributes of Kiehtan and Ahone were not borrowed from Christianity, were matter of Indian belief before the English arrived. Mr. Parkman writes: ”The moment the Indians began to contemplate the object of his faith, and sought to clothe it with attributes, it became finite, and commonly ridiculous”. It did so, as usual, in MYTHOLOGY, but not in RELIGION. There is nothing ridiculous in what is known of Ahone and Kiehtan. If they had a mythology, and if we knew the myths, doubtless they would be ridiculous enough. The savage mind, turned from belief and awe into the spinning of yarns, instantly yields to humorous fancy. As we know, mediaeval popular Christianity, in imagery, marchen or tales, and art, copiously ill.u.s.trates the same mental phenomenon. Saints, G.o.d, our Lord, and the Virgin, all play ludicrous and immoral parts in Christian folk-tales. This is Mythology, and here is, beyond all cavil, a late corruption of Religion. Here, where we know the history of a creed, Religion is early, and these myths are late. Other examples of American divine ideas might be given, such as the extraordinary hymns in which the Zunis address the Eternal, Ahonawilona. But as the Zuni religion has only been studied in recent years, the hymns would be dismissed as ”borrowed,” though there is nothing Catholic or Christian about them. We have preferred to select examples where borrowing from Christianity is out of the question. The current anthropological theory is thus confronted with American examples of ideas of the divine which cannot have been borrowed, while, if the G.o.ds are said to have been evolved out of ghosts, we reply that, in some cases, they receive no sacrifice, sacrifice being usually a note of ghostly descent. Again, similar G.o.ds, as we show, exist where ghosts of chiefs are not wors.h.i.+pped, and as far as evidence goes never were wors.h.i.+pped, because there is no evidence of the existence at any time of such chiefs. The American highest G.o.ds may then be equally free from the taint of ghostly descent.
(1) Parkman, The Jesuits in North America. p. lxxviii.
There is another more or less moral North American deity whose evolution is rather questionable. Pere Brebeuf (1636), speaking of the Hurons, says that ”they have recourse to Heaven in almost all their necessities,... and I may say that it is, in fact, G.o.d whom they blindly adore, for they imagine that there is an Oki, that is, a demon, in heaven, who regulates the seasons, bridles the winds and the waves of the sea, and helps them in every need. They dread his wrath, and appeal to him as witness to the inviolability of their faith, when they make a promise or treaty of peace with enemies. 'Heaven hear us to-day' is their form of adjuration.”(1)
(1) Relations, 1636, pp. 106, 107.
A spiritual being, whose home is heaven, who rides on the winds, whose wrath is dreaded, who sanctions the oath, is only called ”a demon” by the prejudice of the worthy father who, at the same time, admits that the savages have a conception of G.o.d--and that G.o.d, so conceived, is this demon!
The debatable question is, was the ”demon,” or the actual expanse of sky, first in evolution? That cannot precisely be settled, but in the a.n.a.logous Chinese case of China we find heaven (Tien) and ”Shang-ti, the personal ruling Deity,” corresponding to the Huron ”demon”. Shang-ti, the personal deity, occurs most in the oldest, pre-Confucian sacred doc.u.ments, and, so far, appears to be the earlier conception. The ”demon” in Huron faith may also be earlier than the religious regard paid to his home, the sky.(1) The unborrowed antiquity of a belief in a divine being, creative and sometimes moral, in North America, is thus demonstrated. So far I had written when I accidentally fell in with Mr. Tylor's essay on ”The Limits of Savage Religion”.(2) In that essay, rather to my surprise, Mr. Tylor argues for the borrowing of ”The Great Spirit,” ”The Great Manitou,” from the Jesuits. Now, as to the phrase, ”Great Spirit,” the Jesuits doubtless caused its promulgation, and, where their teaching penetrated, shreds of their doctrine may have adhered to the Indian conception of that divine being. But Mr. Tylor in his essay does not allude to the early evidence, his own, for Oki, Atahocan, Kiehtan, and Torngursak, all undeniably prior to Jesuit influence, and found where Jesuits, later, did not go. As Mr. Tylor offers no reason for disregarding evidence in 1892 which he had republished in a new edition of Primitive Culture in 1891, it is impossible to argue against him in this place. He went on, in the essay cited (1892) to contend that the Australian G.o.d of the Kamilaroi of Victoria, Baiame, is, in name and attributes, of missionary introduction. Happily this hypothesis can be refuted, as we show in the following chapter on Australian G.o.ds.
(1) See Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. 362, and Making of Religion, p. 318; also Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 108,109, and Dr. Legge's Chinese Cla.s.sics, in Sacred Books of the East, vols. iii., xxvii., xxviii.
(2) Journ. of Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxi., 1892.
It would be easy enough to meet the hypothesis of borrowing in the case of the many African tribes who possess something approaching to a rude monotheistic conception. Among these are the d.i.n.kas of the Upper Nile, with their neighbours, whose creed Russegger compares to that of modern Deists in Europe. The d.i.n.ka G.o.d, Dendid, is omnipotent, but so benevolent that he is not addressed in prayer, nor propitiated by sacrifice. Compare the supreme being of the Caribs, beneficent, otiose, unadored.(1) A similar deity, veiled in the instruction of the as yet unpenetrated Mysteries, exists among the Yao of Central Africa.(2) Of the negro race, Waitz says, ”even if we do not call them monotheists, we may still think of them as standing on the boundary of monotheism despite their innumerable rude superst.i.tions”.(3) The Ts.h.i.+ speaking people of the Gold Coast have their unwors.h.i.+pped Nyankupon, a now otiose unadored being, with a magisterial deputy, wors.h.i.+pped with many sacrifices. The case is almost an exact parallel to that of Ahone and Oki in America. THESE were not borrowed, and the author has argued at length against Major Ellis's theory of the borrowing from Christians of Nyankupon.(4)
(1) Rochefort, Les Isles Antilles, p. 415. Tylor, ii. 337.
(2) Macdonald, Africana, 1, 71, 72, 130, 279-301. Scott, Dictionary of the Manganja Language, Making of Religion, pp. 230-238. A contradictory view in Spencer, Ecclesiastical Inst.i.tutions, p. 681.
(3) Anthropologie, ii. 167.
(4) Making of Religion, pp. 243-250.
To conclude this chapter, the study of savage and barbaric religions seems to yield the following facts:--
1. Low savages. No regular chiefs. Great beings, not in receipt of sacrifice, sanctioning morality. Ghosts are not wors.h.i.+pped, though believed in. Polytheism, departmental G.o.ds and G.o.ds of heaven, earth, sky and so forth, have not been developed or are not found.
2. Barbaric races. Aristocratic or monarchic. Ghosts are wors.h.i.+pped and receive sacrifice. Polytheistic G.o.ds are in renown and receive sacrifice. There is usually a supreme Maker who is, in some cases, moral, in others otiose. In only one or two known cases (as in that of the Polynesian Taaroa) is he in receipt of sacrifice.
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