Volume II Part 4 (1/2)

Dr. Hahn remarks, ”Strangely enough the Namaquas also call it |Gaunab, as they call the enemy of Tsui |Goab”.* In Kolb's time, as now, the rites of the Khoi (except, apparently, their wors.h.i.+p at dawn) were performed beside cairns of stones. If we may credit Kolb, the Khoi-Khoi are not only most fanatical adorers of the mantis, but ”pay a religious veneration to their saints and men of renown departed”. Thunberg (1792) noticed cairn-wors.h.i.+p and heard of mantis-wors.h.i.+p. In 1803 Lichtenstein saw cairn-wors.h.i.+p. With the beginning of the present century we find in Apple-yard, Ebner and others Khoi-Khoi names for a G.o.d, which are translated ”Sore-Knee” or ”Wounded-Knee ”.

This t.i.tle is explained as originally the name of a ”doctor or sorcerer”

of repute, ”invoked even after death,” and finally converted into a deity. His enemy is Gaunab, an evil being, and he is wors.h.i.+pped at the cairns, below which he is believed to be buried.** About 1842 Knudsen considered that the Khoi-Khoi believed in a dead medicine-man, Heitsi Eibib, who could make rivers roll back their waves, and then walk over safely, as in the _marchen_ of most peoples. He was also, like Odin, a ”shape-s.h.i.+fter,” and he died several times and came to life again.***

* Page 42; compare pp. 92, 125.

** Alexander, Expedition, i 166; Hahn, op. cit., pp. 69, 50, where Moffat is quoted.

*** Hahn, p. 66.

Thus the numerous graves of Heitsi Eibib are explained by his numerous deaths. In Egypt the numerous graves of Osiris were explained by the story that he was mutilated, and each limb buried in a different place.

Probably both the Hottentot and the Egyptian legend were invented to account for the many wors.h.i.+pped cairns attributed to the same corpse.

We now reach the myths of Heitsi Eibib and Tsui |Goab collected by Dr.

Hahn himself. According to the evidence of Dr. Hahn's own eyes, the working religion of the Khoi-Khoi is ”a firm belief in sorcery and the arts of living medicine-men on the one hand, and, on the other, belief in and adoration of the powers of the dead” (pp. 81, 82, 112, 113). Our author tells us that he met in the wilds a woman of the ”fat” or wealthy cla.s.s going to pray at the grave and to the manes of her own father. ”We Khoi-Khoi always, if we are in trouble, go and pray at the graves of our grandparents and ancestors.” They also sing rude epic verses, accompanied by the dance in honour of men distinguished in the late Namaqua and Damara war. Now it is alleged by Dr. Hahn that prayers are offered at the graves of Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab, as at those of ancestors lately dead, and Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab within living memory were honoured by song and dance, exactly like the braves of the Damara war.

The obvious and natural inference is that Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab were and are regarded by their wors.h.i.+ppers as departed but still helpful ancestral warriors or medicine-men. We need not hold that they ever were actual living men; they may be merely idealised figures of Khoi-Khoi wisdom and valour. Here, as elsewhere, Animism, ghost-wors.h.i.+p, is potent, and, in proportion, theism declines.

Here Dr. Hahn offers a different explanation, founded on etymological conjecture and a philosophy of religion. According to him, the name of Tsui Goab originally meant, not wounded knee, but red dawn. The dawn was wors.h.i.+pped as a symbol or suggestion of the infinite, and only by forgetfulness and false interpretation of the original word did the Khoi-Khoi fall from a kind of pure theosophy to adoration of a presumed dead medicine-man. As Dr. Hahn's ingenious hypothesis has been already examined by us,* it is unnecessary again to discuss the philological basis of his argument.

Dr. Hahn not only heard simple and affecting prayers addressed to Tsui Goab, but learned from native informants that the G.o.d had been a chief, a warrior, wounded in his knee in battle with Gaunab, another chief, and that he had prophetic powers. He still watches the ways of men (p. 62) and punishes guilt. Universal testimony was given to the effect that Heitsi Eibib also had been a chief from the East, a prophet and a warrior. He apportioned, by blessings and curses, their present habits to many of the animals. Like Odin, he was a ”shape-s.h.i.+fter,” possessing the medicine-man's invariable power of taking all manner of forms. He was on one occasion born of a cow, which reminds us of a myth of Indra.

By another account he was born of a virgin who tasted a certain kind of gra.s.s. This legend is of wonderfully wide diffusion among savage and semi-civilised races.**

* Custom and Myth, pp. 197-211.

** Le Fits de la Vierge, H. de Charency, Havre, 1879. A tale of incest by Heitsi Eibib, may be compared with another in Muir's Sanskrit Texts, iv. 39.

The tales about Tsui Goab and Heitsi Eibib are chiefly narratives of combats with animals and with the evil power in a nascent dualism, Gaunab, ”at first a ghost,” according to Hahn (p. 85), or ”certainly n.o.body else but the Night” (pp. 125, 126). Here there is some inconsistency. If we regard the good power, Tsui Goab, as the Red Dawn, we are bound to think the evil power, Gaunab, a name for the Night.

But Dr. Hahn's other hypothesis, that the evil power was originally a malevolent ghost, seems no less plausible. In either case, we have here an example of the constant mythical dualism which gives the comparatively good being his perpetual antagonist--the Loki to his Odin, the crow to his eagle-hawk. In brief, Hottentot myth is pretty plainly a reflection of Hottentot general ideas about ancestor wors.h.i.+p, ghosts, sorcerers and magicians, while, in their _religious_ aspect, Heitsi Eibib or Tsui Goab are guardians of life and of morality, fathers and friends.

A description of barbarous beliefs not less scholarly and careful than that compiled by Dr. Hahn has been published by the Rev. R. H.

Codrington.* Mr. Codrington has studied the myths of the Papuans and other natives of the Melanesian group, especially in the Solomon Islands and Banks Island. These peoples are by no means in the lowest grade of culture; they are traders in their way, builders of canoes and houses, and their society is interpenetrated by a kind of mystic hierarchy, a religious _Camorra_. The Banks Islanders** recognise two sorts of intelligent extra-natural beings--the spirits of the dead and powers which have never been human.

* Journal Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.

** Op. cit., p. 267.

The former are _Tamate_, the latter _Vui_--ghosts and _genii_, we might call them. Vuis are cla.s.sed by Mr. Codrington as ”corporeal” and ”incorporeal,” but he thinks the corporeal Vuis have not _human_ bodies. Among corporeal Vuis the chief are the beings nearest to G.o.ds in Melanesian myths--the half G.o.d, half ”culture-hero,” I Qat, his eleven brothers, and his familiar and a.s.sistant, Marawa. These were members of a race anterior to that of the men of to-day, and they dwelt in Vanua Levu. Though now pa.s.sed away from the eyes of mortals, they are still invoked in prayer. The following appeal by a voyaging Banks Islander resembles the cry of the s.h.i.+pwrecked Odysseus to the friendly river:--

”Qat! Marawa! look down upon us; smooth the sea for us two, that I may go safely on the sea. Beat down for me the crests of the tide-rip; let the tide-rip settle down away from me; beat it down level that it may sink and roll away, and I may come to a quiet landing-place.”

Compare the prayer of Odysseus:--

”'Hear me, O king, whosoever thou art; unto thee am I come as to one to whom prayer is made, while I flee the rebukes of Poseidon from the deep....' So spake he, and the G.o.d straightway stayed his stream and withheld his waves, and made the water smooth before him, and brought him safely to the mouth of the river.”

But for Qat's supernatural power and creative exploits,* ”there would be little indeed to show him other than a man”. He answers almost precisely to Maui, the ”the culture-hero” of New Zealand. Qat's mother either was, or, like Niobe, became a stone.

* See ”Savage Myths of the Origin of Things”.

He was the eldest (unlike Maui) of twelve brothers, among whom were Tongaro the Wise and Tongaro the Fool. The brothers were killed by an evil gluttonous power like Kwai Hemm and put in a food chest. Qat killed the foe and revived his brothers, as the sons of Cronus came forth alive from their father's maw. His great foe--for of course he had a foe--was Qasavara, whom he destroyed by das.h.i.+ng him against the solid firmament of sky. Qasavara is now a stone (like the serpent displayed by Zeus at Aulis*), on which sacrifices are made. Qat's chief friend is Marawa, a spider, or a Vui in the shape of a spider. The divine mythology of the Melanesians, as far as it has been recovered, is meagre. We only see members of a previous race, ”magnified non-natural men,” with a friendly insect working miracles and achieving rather incoherent adventures.