Part 2 (1/2)

We must now make some attempt to set forth the princ.i.p.al features of the religion of savages. It is an attempt of some difficulty; for savage religion is an immense and bewildering jungle of all manner of extraordinary growths. It is described in detail in large books and if we try to sum it up in a short statement, we may be told that essential features have been omitted. No one set of savages has anything that can be called a system, and different sets of savages are not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to include under the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale of human advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions, in hot climates and in cold, both rude savages and those who are n.o.bler; and these will, of course, have a variety of ideas and needs, and in so far, different religions. After reading such a book as Mr.

Frazer's _Golden Bough_, or turning over the pages of Waitz and Gerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvolker_, one is inclined to regard it as a hopeless task to reduce savage religion to any compact statement.

Mr. Tylor's orderly collections, in his great book _Primitive Culture_, of materials bearing on different features of early religion are a help for which the student cannot be sufficiently thankful. After all, it is not the whole of savage religion that we are responsible for here, but only those parts of it that grew and survived in higher faiths. Remembering what has been said as to the uniformity of savage thought amid its great variety of forms, and looking for those parts of it which have proved to have life in them, rather than for what is merely curious and grotesque, we may venture on our task not without hope. In the present chapter we shall inquire what beings savages wors.h.i.+p as G.o.ds. Of these we shall find that there are several cla.s.ses; and it will be necessary to notice the great discussions which have arisen on the question which of these cla.s.ses of deities was first wors.h.i.+pped by man. The objects wors.h.i.+pped by men in low stages of civilisation may be arranged in four cla.s.ses, viz.--

1. Parts of nature (_a_) great, (_b_) small.

2. Spirits of ancestors and other spirits.

3. Objects supposed to be haunted by spirits (fetish-wors.h.i.+p).

4. A Supreme Being.

1. Nature-wors.h.i.+p.--It is not difficult to realise why early man turned to the great elements of nature as beings who could help him, and whom he ought, therefore, to cultivate. The farther we go back in civilisation, the less protection has man against the weather, the more do his subsistence and his comfort depend on the action of the sun, the winds, the rain. If, according to the habits of early thought, he conceived these beings as living like himself and as guided by feelings and motives similar to his own, he could not fail to wish to open up communication with them. That simple view, that they were living beings with feelings like his own, was enough to go upon. In his anxieties for food or warmth he could not fail to think of the beings who, he had observed, had power to supply him with these comforts, of the rain which he had noticed was able to make food grow, of the sun whose warmth he knew. The thunderstorm was a being who had power to put an end to a long drought; the winds could break the trees, could dry up the wet earth, or could bring rain.

Heaven was over all, and the Earth was the supporter and fertile producer of all; from her all life came. The moon as well as the sun was a friendly power, nay, in some climates, more friendly. Fire was a living being certainly, on whom much depended; and so was the great lake or the ocean. This is what M. Reville calls the great Nature-wors.h.i.+p, in comparison with the minor Nature-wors.h.i.+p to be noticed presently.

We do not now enter on the subject of mythology; that is to say, of the names men very early began to give to the great natural objects of wors.h.i.+p, the characters they ascribed to them, the stories they told about them. That process of myth-making began very early, and is to be found at work in every part of the world. But at first it was simply the natural being itself, conceived as living, that was wors.h.i.+pped, not a spirit or a person thought to dwell in it. Of this, abundant evidence has survived in the great religions. Jupiter is just the sky, the Greek G.o.d Helios is just the sun, and the G.o.ddess Selene the moon. In China heaven itself is wors.h.i.+pped to this day.

The Babylonians wors.h.i.+pped the stars. The Vedic G.o.ds are primarily the elements. From savage life examples of this earliest state of matters can also be quoted, though mythology has nearly everywhere greatly confused it. The Mincopies adore the sun as a beneficent deity, the moon as an inferior G.o.d. To the Natchez the sun is the supreme G.o.d; with some tribes of North America the chief G.o.d is heaven blowing, the sky with a wind in it, what Longfellow calls the ”Great Spirit” or blowing. The Incas invoked together the Creator and the Sun and Thunder. Thunder was one of the great G.o.ds of the Germans. The Samoyede bows to the Sun every morning and every evening and says. ”When thou arisest I also arise; when thou settest I also betake myself to rest.” To the Ojibways Fire is a divine being, to be well entertained, with whom no liberties must be taken. In every land men are to be found who wors.h.i.+p the Earth as a great deity, calling her by her own name and serving her with suitable rites. In the _Prometheus_ of aeschylus the hero addresses his appeal as follows to the beings he regards as G.o.ds of old race who will sympathise with him against the upstart Zeus:--

Ether of Heaven and Winds untired of wing, Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea, Laughing in waves innumerable! O Earth, All-mother!--Yea and on the Sun I call, Whose orb scans all things; look on me and see How I, a G.o.d, am wronged by G.o.ds.

_Lewis Campbell_, line 85 _sq_.

The minor Nature-wors.h.i.+p has to do with rivers and springs, with trees and groves, with crops and fruits, with rocks and stones, and with the lower animals. Here also we must bear in mind the habit of mind of early man, who regarded all things as animated and as like himself. It was not necessary for one who thought in this way to suppose that the spring was haunted by a nymph or the oak inhabited by a dryad, before he felt that the spring or the oak had a claim on him, and brought offerings to secure their friends.h.i.+p. The Nile and the Ganges did not become sacred by having a mythical being added to them as their spirit; they were themselves sacred beings. Every country is studded with names which reveal to the scholar the primeval sanct.i.ty of the spots they belong to; the mountain, the grove, and the individual tree, the rocky gorge, the rock, the gra.s.sy knoll, each was once an object of reverence. Britain is full of sacred wells, which once received prayers and offerings. There is no animal that has not once been wors.h.i.+pped. A marked feature of primitive life also is the wors.h.i.+p of nature not in its particular objects but in its living processes. In a mult.i.tude of curious rites, some of which still survive in local usages, and have only recently been explained, primitive man brought himself into relations with nature in its growth, decay, and resurrection. He sympathised with it and imitated it, and he thus sought to make himself sure of the benefits which he saw bestowed by some power which he apprehended in its processes and believed able to further him.

2. Ancestor-wors.h.i.+p.--A set of beings of a very different kind comes next. If man found in the world which he beheld outside him a number of objects he could make G.o.ds, his domestic experience forced him to consider certain beings of a different kind, of whom the outward world could tell him nothing. The wors.h.i.+p of the dead, of ancestors, is diffused throughout nearly the whole of antiquity, it is practised by most savages. Man at an early stage does not fully realise the meaning of death. He interprets death after the a.n.a.logy of dreams, in which he judges that the spirit leaves the body and traverses distant regions, coming back to the body again when the journey is ended. A vision is to him an instance of the same thing. He sees a friend, who, he afterwards learns, was far from him at the time, and he judges that it was the spirit of his friend which visited him. Thus there arises in his mind the conception of a human spirit which is able to leave the body and dwell at a distance from it. It is called by various names,--the shade, the image, the heart, as perhaps when Elisha says his heart went with Gehazi when he went to meet Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings v. 26), the breath, the soul. When the breath or spirit goes away and stays away (in spite of efforts made to bring it back) the man dies. But the spirit is not dead. It has gone away and is staying somewhere else. The spirit resembles the body in shape, but it is of a thin and light consistence, and is able to move about and to pa.s.s through the smallest openings, to make unpleasant noises, and to cause its presence to be felt in a variety of ways. In the very earliest times, the savage regards the spirit which has left the house as an enemy, and uses a variety of precautions to keep it from coming back to trouble him (vampires, ghosts, _lemures_). Whether from such fear or from more liberal motives, much is done to please the spirits of the departed and to increase their comfort in the abodes to which they have gone. At their burial or cremation all they may be supposed to want where they are going, _i.e._ the things they used on earth, are made to accompany them; food and weapons are placed beside them; servants are killed whose spirits are to wait on them, even a wife, voluntarily or without being asked, gives up her earthly life to accompany her husband. Offerings of food and drink are made to them afterwards, prayers are addressed to them, memorials of them, of various kinds, are preserved in the houses they occupied.

It was the universal belief of the early world that the person continued to exist after the death of the body; and this furnished the materials for a religion which was more widely prevalent in antiquity than the wors.h.i.+p of any G.o.d. In some forms of it, indeed, the spirit appears to have been treated as an enemy, and this wors.h.i.+p might be judged to fall short of religion, which is the cultivation, not the avoidance, of intercourse with higher powers. The savage has no hope from the spirit, and does not seek his intercourse. But in most forms of the belief in the continued life of the departed, other sentiments than fear prevail; natural affection is felt for the lost relative; the ancestor represents the family, to which the individual is called to subordinate and to some extent even to sacrifice himself; the spirit of the dead is the upholder of a family tradition which the living must hold sacred. Even in those cases in which nothing but fear is apparent, these latter sentiments may also be to some extent operative.

3. Fetish-wors.h.i.+p.--The early world has still another kind of deity.

In the case of all those we have considered, the G.o.d stands in some respect above the wors.h.i.+pper; man reverences the sun, spirit, or animal, for some quality in them that is admirable or that gives them a hold over him; they are in some ways beyond him. Among certain sets of savages, however, notably in South Africa, this feature of religion partially disappears, and objects are reverenced not for any intrinsic quality in them that makes them worthy of regard, but because of a spirit which is supposed to be connected with them.

Stones, trees, twigs, pieces of bark, roots, corn, claws of birds, teeth, skin, feathers, articles of human manufacture, any conceivable object, will be held in reverence by the savage and regarded as embodying a spirit. Anything that strikes his fancy as being out of the common he will take up and add to his museum of objects, each of which has in it a hidden power. That power, be it repeated, is not connected with the natural quality of the object, but is due to a spirit which has come to reside in it, and which may very possibly leave it again. Having chosen this deity and set it up for wors.h.i.+p, the man can use it as he thinks fit. He addresses prayers to it and extols its virtues; but should his enterprise not prosper, he will cast his deity aside as useless, and cease to wors.h.i.+p it; he will address it with torrents of abuse, and will even beat it, to make it serve him better. It is a deity at his disposal, to serve in the accomplishment of his desires; the individual keeps G.o.ds of his own to help him in his undertakings.

The name ”fetis.h.i.+sm,” by which this kind of wors.h.i.+p is known, is of Portuguese origin; it is derived from _feitico_, ”made,” ”artificial”

(compare the old English _fetys_, used by Chaucer); and this term, used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion of the period, was applied by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenth century to the deities they saw wors.h.i.+pped by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant of last century, brought the word fetis.h.i.+sm into use as a term for the type of religion of the lowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having been applied by Comte and other writers to the wors.h.i.+p of the heavenly bodies and of the great features of nature. It is best to limit it, as has been done above, to the wors.h.i.+p of such natural objects as are reverenced not for their own power or excellence but because they are supposed to be occupied each by a spirit.

Can this be called religion? In the full sense of the term it cannot.

We should remember that it is not the casual object, but the spirit connected with it that the savage wors.h.i.+ps; but even then we shall be obliged to hold that the fetish wors.h.i.+pper is rather seeking after religion than actually in possession of it.

4. A Supreme Being.--Is it necessary to add another cla.s.s of deity to these three, and to say that besides nature-G.o.ds and spirits early man also wors.h.i.+pped a Supreme Being above all these? In most savage religions there is a princ.i.p.al deity to whom the others are subordinate. But if we carefully examine one by one the supreme G.o.ds of these religions, we shall find reason to doubt whether they really have a common character so as to form a cla.s.s by themselves. Many of them are nature G.o.ds who have outgrown the other deities of that cla.s.s and come to occupy an isolated position. The North American Indians, as we saw, wors.h.i.+p the Great Spirit, the heaven with its breath, to whom sun and moon and other ordinances of nature act as ministers. In many cases heaven is the highest G.o.d. In others again the sun is supreme. Ukko the great G.o.d of the Finns is a heaven- and rain-G.o.d. Perkunas the G.o.d of the Lithuanians is connected with thunder. On the other hand there are instances in which the supreme G.o.d appears to be a different being from the nature-G.o.d. The Samoyedes wors.h.i.+p the sun and moon and the spirits of other parts of nature; but they also believe in a good spirit who is above all. The Supreme Being of the islands of the Pacific bears in New Zealand the name of Tangaroa, and is spoken of in quite metaphysical terms as the uncreated and eternal Creator. Here we may suspect Christian influence. With the Zulus Unkulunkulu the Old-old one might be supposed to be a kind of first cause. But on looking nearer we find he is distinctly a man, the first man, the common ancestor; beyond which idea speculation does not seem to go. Among many North American tribes it is usual to find an animal the chief deity, the hare or the musk-rat or the coyote. It is very common to find in savage beliefs a vague far-off G.o.d who is at the back of all the others, takes little part in the management of things, and receives little wors.h.i.+p. But it is impossible to judge what that being was at an earlier time; he may have been a nature-G.o.d or a spirit who has by degrees grown faint and come to occupy this position. We cannot judge from the supreme beings of savages, such as they are, that the belief in a supreme being was generally diffused in the world[1] in the earliest times, and is not to be derived from any of the processes from which the other G.o.ds arose. We shall see afterwards how natural the tendency is which, where there are several G.o.ds, brings one of them to the front while the others lose importance. For a theory of primitive monotheism the supreme G.o.ds of savages certainly do not furnish sufficient evidence; they do not appear to have sprung all from the same source, but to have advanced from very different quarters to the supreme position, in obedience to that native instinct of man's mind which causes him, even when he believes in many G.o.ds, to make one of them supreme.

[Footnote 1: _Cf._ A. Lang, _The Making of Religion_ (1898); Galloway, _Studies in the Philosophy of Religion_ (1904), p. 123, _sqq._]

Which G.o.ds were First Wors.h.i.+pped?--If then early man formed his G.o.ds from parts of nature and from spirits of departed ancestors or heroes, and even, should the more backward races now existing represent a stage of human life belonging to the early world, from spirits residing in outward objects, which of these is the original root of all the religions of the world? The claim has been made for each of these kinds of religion, that it came first.

1. Fetish-G.o.ds came First.--Till recently the view prevailed that all the religion of the world has sprung out of fetis.h.i.+sm. First the savage took for his G.o.d some casual object, as we have described, then he chose higher objects, trees and mountains, rivers and lakes, and even the sun and stars. The heavens at last became his supreme fetish, and at a higher level, when he had learned about spirits, he would make a spirit his fetish, and so at last come to Monotheism.

This view is attractive because it places the beginning of religion in the lowest known form of it and thus makes for the belief that the course of the world's faith has been upward from the first. But it presents the gravest difficulties; for why should the savage make a G.o.d of a stick or a stone, and attribute to it supernatural powers?

Who told him about a G.o.d, that he should call a stick G.o.d, or about supernatural powers, that he should suppose a stick to work wonders?

There is nothing in the stick to suggest such notions; that he should make G.o.ds in this way, that the belief in wonderful powers should originate in this way, is surely quite incredible. Much more likely is it, surely, that he got the notion of G.o.d from some other quarter and applied it in his own grotesque and degraded way; than that the notion of G.o.d was taken first from such poor forms and applied afterwards to objects better suited to it. Religion and civilisation go hand in hand, and if civilisation can decay (and leading anthropologists declare that the debased tribes of Australia and West Africa show signs of a higher civilisation they have lost) then religion also may decay. A lower race may borrow religious ideas from a higher and adapt them to their own position, _i.e._ degrade them.

And the progress of religion may still have been upwards on the whole, although retrograde movements have taken place in certain races. On these and other grounds it is now held with growing certainty that fetis.h.i.+sm cannot be the original form of religion, and that the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. The races among whom fetis.h.i.+sm is found exhibit a well-known feature of the decadence of religion, namely that the great G.o.d or G.o.ds have grown weak and faint, and smaller G.o.ds and spirits have crowded in to fill up the blank thus caused. Wors.h.i.+p is transferred from the great beings who are the original G.o.ds of the tribe and whom it still professes in a vague way to believe, to numerous smaller beings, and from the good G.o.ds to the bad.

2. Spirits, Human or Quasi-human, came First.--Is the wors.h.i.+p of spirits then the original form of religions. This has been powerfully maintained in this country by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor.