Volume II Part 32 (2/2)
A third objection is that the priests of savage tribes are not unimpeachable authorities. It is pointed out that even Christian clergy have their differences of opinion. Naturally we expect most shades of opinion where there is most knowledge and most liberty, but the liberty of savage heterodoxy is very wide indeed. We might almost say that (as in the mythology of Greece) there is _no_ orthodox mythical doctrine among savages. But, amidst minor diversities, we have found many ideas which are universal both in savage and civilised myths. _Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_. It is on this universal element of faith, not on the discrepancies of local priests, that we must fix our attention. Many a different town in Greece showed the birthplace or tomb of this or that deity. The essential point is that all agreed in declaring that the G.o.d was born or died.
Once more--and this is a point of some importance when we are told that priests differ from each other in their statements--we must remember that these very differences are practically universal in all mythology, even in that of civilised races. Thus, if one savage authority declares that men came originally out of trees, while his fellow-tribesman avers that the human race was created out of clay, and a third witness maintains that his first ancestors emerged from a hole in the ground, and a fourth stands to it that his stock is descended from a swan or a serpent, and a fifth holds that humanity was evolved from other animal forms, these savage statements appear contradictory. But when we find (as we do) precisely the same sort of contradictions everywhere recurring among civilised peoples, in Greece, India, Egypt, as well as in Africa, America and Australia, there seems no longer any reason to distrust the various versions of the myth which are given by various priests or chiefs. Each witness is only telling the legend which he has heard and prefers, and it is precisely the coexistence of all these separate monstrous beliefs which makes the enigma and the attraction of mythology. In short, the discrepancies of savage myths are not an argument against the authenticity of our information on the topic, because the discrepancies themselves are repeated in civilised myth.
_Semper et ubique, et ab omnibus_. To object to the presence of discrepant accounts is to object to mythology for being mythological.
Another objection is derived from the ”unwillingness of savages to talk about religion,” and from the difficulty of understanding them when they do talk of it. This hardly applies when Europeans are initiated into savage Mysteries. We may add a fair example of the difficulty of learning about alien religions. It is given by Garcila.s.so de la Vega, son of an Inca princess, and a companion of Pizarro.*”
* Garcilaaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries, vol, i. 123.
The method that our Spaniards adopted in writing their histories was to ask the Indians in Spanish touching the things they wanted to find out from them. These, from not having a clear knowledge of ancient things, or from bad memories, told them wrong, or mixed up poetical fables with their replies. And the worst of it was that neither party had more than a very imperfect knowledge of the language of the other, so as to understand the inquiry and to reply to it.... In this great confusion, the priest or layman who asked the questions placed the meaning to them which was nearest to the desired answer, or which was most like what the Indian was understood to have said. Thus they interpreted according to their pleasure or prejudice, and wrote things down as truths which the Indians never dreamt of. As an example of these comparisons, Garcila.s.so gives the discovery of the doctrine of the Trinity among the people of Peru. A so-called _Icona_ was found answering to the Father, a Son (_Racab_) and a Holy Spirit (_Estrua_); nor was the Virgin lacking, nor even St. Anne. ”All these things are fictions of the Spaniards.” But no sooner has Garcila.s.so rebuked the Spaniards and their method, than he hastens to ill.u.s.trate by his own example another difficulty that besets us in our search for evidence of myths. He says, as if it were a matter of certain fact, that Tlasolteute, a kind of Priapus, G.o.d of l.u.s.t, and Ometoctilti, G.o.d of drunkenness, and the G.o.d of murder, and the others, ”were the names of _men and women_ whom the natives of that land wors.h.i.+pped as G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses”. Thus Garcila.s.so euhemerises audaciously, as also does Sahagun in his account of Mexican religion. We have no right to a.s.sume that G.o.ds of natural departments (any more than Dionysus and Priapus and Ares) had once been real men and were deified, on evidence like the statement of Garcila.s.sp. He is giving his own euhemeristic guess as if it were matter of fact, and this is a common custom with even the more intelligent of the early missionaries.
Another example of the natural difficulty in studying the myths of savages may be taken from Mr. Sproat's _Scenes of Savage Life_ (1868).
There is an honesty and candour in Mr. Sproat's work which by itself seems to clear this witness, at least, of charges of haste or prejudice.
The religion of savages, says this inquirer, ”is a subject as to which a traveller might easily form erroneous opinions, owing to the practical difficulty, even to one skilled in the language, of ascertaining the true nature of their superst.i.tions. This short chapter is the result of more than four years' inquiry, made unremittingly, under favourable circ.u.mstances. There is a constant temptation, from which the unbia.s.sed observer cannot be quite free, to fill up in one's mind, without proper material, the gap between what is known of the religion of the natives for certain, and the larger less-known portion, which can only be guessed at; and I frequently found that, under this temptation, I was led on to form, in my own mind, a connected whole, designed to coincide with some ingenious theory which I might wish to be true. Generally speaking, it is necessary, I think, to view with suspicion _any very regular account_ given by travellers of the religion of savages.” (Yet we have seen the absence of ”regularity,” the differences of opinion among priests, objected to by Mr. Max Muller as a proof of the untrustworthy nature of our evidence.) ”The real religious notions of savages cannot be separated from the vague and unformed, as well as b.e.s.t.i.a.l and grotesque, mythology with which they are intermixed.
The faint struggling efforts of our natures in so early or so little advanced a stage of moral and intellectual cultivation can produce only a medley of opinions and beliefs, not to be dignified by the epithet religious, which are held loosely by the people themselves, and are neither very easily discovered nor explained.” When we came to civilised mythologies, we found that they also are ”b.e.s.t.i.a.l and grotesque,”
”loosely held,” and a ”medley of opinions and beliefs ”.
Mr. Sproat was ”two years among the Ahts, with his mind constantly directed to the subject of their religious beliefs,” before he could discover that they had any such beliefs at all. Traders a.s.sured him that they had none. He found that the Ahts were ”fond of mystification” and of ”sells”; and, in short, this inquirer, living with the Ahts like an Aht, discounted every sort of circ.u.mstance which could invalidate his statement of their myths.*
* Pp. 203-205.
Now, when we find Mr. Codrington taking the same precautions in Melanesia, and when his account of Melanesian myths reads like a close copy of Mr. Sproat's account of Aht legends, and when both are corroborated by the collections of Bleek, and Hahn, and Gill, and Castren, and Eink, in far distant corners of the world, while the modern testimony of these scholarly men is in harmony with that of the old Jesuit missionaries, and of untaught adventurers who have lived for many years with savages, surely it will be admitted that the difficulty of ascertaining savage opinion has been, to a great extent, overcome. If all the evidence be wrong, the coincidences of the witnesses with each other and of the savage myths they report with the myths of Greeks and Aryans of India will be no less than a miracle.
We have now examined the objections urged against a system founded on the comparative study of savage myths. It cannot be said of us (as it has been said of De Brosses), that ”whatever we find in the voyages of sailors and traders is welcome to us; that we have a theory to defend, and whatever seems to support it is sure to be true”. Our evidence is based, to a very great extent, on the communications of missionaries who are acknowledged to be scholarly and sober men. It is confirmed by other evidence, Catholic, Dissenting, pagan, scientific, and by the reports of illiterate men, unbia.s.sed by science, and little bia.s.sed by religion.
But we have not yet exhausted our evidence, nor had recourse to our ultimate criterion. That evidence, that criterion, is derived from the study of comparative inst.i.tutions, of comparative ritual, of comparative law, and of comparative customs. In the widely diffused rites and inst.i.tutions which express themselves in actual practice we have sure evidence for the ideas on which the customs are founded. For example, if a man pays away his wampum, or his yams, or his arrow-heads to a magician for professional services, it follows that he _does_ believe in magic. If he puts to death a tribesman for the sin of marrying a woman to whom he was only akin by virtue of common descent from the same beast or plant, it seems to follow that he _does_ believe in descent from and kins.h.i.+p with plants and beasts. If he buries food and valuable weapons with his dead, it follows that he _does_, or that his fathers did, believe in the continued life of the dead. At the very least, in all three cases the man is acting on what must once have been actual beliefs, even if the consequent practices be still in force only through custom, after the real faith has dwindled away. Thus the belief, past or present, in certain opinions can be deduced from actual practices, just as we may deduce from our own Coronation Service the fact that oil, anointed on a man's head by a priest, was once believed to have a mysterious efficacy, or the fact that a certain rough block of red sand-stone was once supposed to have some kind of sacredness. Of all these sources of evidence, none is more valuable than the testimony of ritual. A moment's reflection will show that ritual, among any people, wild or civilised, is not a thing easily altered. If we take the savage, _his_ ritual consists mainly of the magical rites by which he hopes to constrain his G.o.ds to answer his prayers, though he may also ”reveal”
to the neophyte ”Our Father”. If we examine the Greeks, we discover the same element in such rites as the Attic Thesmophoria, the torch-dance of Demeter, the rainmaking on the Arcadian Mount Lycaeus, with many other examples. Meanwhile the old heathen ritual survives in Europe as rural folklore, and we can thus display a chain of evidence, from savage magic to Greek ritual, with the folklore of Germany, France, Eussia and Scotland for the link between these and our own time. This is almost our best evidence for the ancient idea about G.o.ds and their service. From the evidence of inst.i.tutions, then, the evidence of reports may be supplemented. ”The direct testimony,” as M. Darmesteter says, ”heureus.e.m.e.nt peut-etre supplee par le temoignage indirect, celui qui porte sur les usages, les coutumes, l'ordre exterieur de la vie,”
everything that shows us religious faith embodied in action. Now these actions, also, are only attested by the reports of travellers, missionaries and historians. But it is comparatively easy to describe correctly what is _done_, much more easy than to discover what is _thought_. Yet it will be found that the direct evidence of inst.i.tutions corroborates the less direct evidence as to thought and opinion. Thus an uncommonly strong texture of testimony is woven by the coincidence of evidence, direct and indirect, ancient and modern, of learned and unlearned men, of Catholics, Protestants, pagans and sceptics. What can be said against that evidence we have heard. We have examined the objections based on ”the influence of public opinion on travellers,”
on ”the absence of recognised authorities among savages,” on the discrepancies of the authorities who are recognised, on the ”unwillingness of savages to talk of their religion,” and on the difficulty of understanding them when they do talk of it.
But after allowing for all these drawbacks (as every anthropologist worthy of the name will, in each case, allow), we have shown that there does remain a body of coincident evidence, of authority, now learned and critical, now uncritical and unlearned, which cannot be set aside as ”extremely untrustworthy”. This authority is accepted in questions of the evolution of art, politics, handicraft; why not in questions of religion? It is usually evidence given by men who did not see its tendency or know its value. A chance word in the Veda shows us that a savage point of marriage etiquette was known to the poet. A sneer of Theophrastus, a denunciation of Ezekiel, an anecdote of Herodotus, reveal to us the practices of contemporary savages as they existed thousands of years ago among races savage or civilised. A traveller's tale of Melville or Mandeville proves to be no mere ”yarn,” but completes the evidence for the existence in Asia or the Marquesas Islands of belief and rites proved to occur in Europe or India.
Such is the nature of the evidence for savage ideas, and for their survivals in civilisation; and the amount of the evidence is best known to him who has to plod through tracts, histories and missionary reports.
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