ſoſyº，ſae.
！*****
§ →
ºsiºs，c,…ºve vºces sºves，sae s svar.--s… ••••••••••--------★ → √æ√≠
… »ex • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ••••••• •••••••••••••••••• • •********* • • • • • ** ** ** • • ** *s*ºs »º«; •••• • • • • •
*************taetrºisſae

-----------
W. B. HINSDALE, M. D.,
ANN ARBOR, MICH.
}^,
§ {# / ºv
N
É)
.#[…
;
#
É
É
E;
K
v
s
•w
ºr sº, sº a .ºz. [...
.*.*.*.*.
• ** *
ºf . º
º
#
Froiſi tile Library of
B.
Hinsdale
|





THE AMERICAN LECTURES
ON THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS.
I. Buddhism.—The History and Literature of Bud-
dhism. By T. W. RHys-DAVIDS, LL.D., Ph.D.
II. Primitive Religions.—The Religions of Primitive
Peoples. By D. G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D., Sc.D.,
Professor of Archaeology and Linguistics in the University
of Pennsylvania.
III. Israel.—Jewish Religious Life After the Exile.
By the Rev. T. K. CHEYNE, M.A., D.D., Oriel Pro-
fessor of the Interpretation of the Holy Scriptures in the
University of Oxford, and formerly Fellow of Balliol
College ; Canon of Rochester.
IV. Israel.—Religious Life and Thought among the
Hebrews in Pre-Exilic Days. By Professor KARL BUDDE,
of Strasburg, Germany (1899).
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
A MAEA’/CAAV ZAZCTUA’AºS ON THAE
Aſ/STOA’ Y OF AZAF/L/G/OAVS
SECOND SERIES-1896–1897
RELIGIONS OF PRIMITIVE
PEOPLES
*...*
y $.” f
a .3
...” BY
DANIEL G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D., Sc.D.
Professor of American Archaeology and Linguistics in the
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
SECOWD IMPRESSIOW
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
27 west Twenty-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
gºt finiſherbother press
1898
• * * * *
e &
CopyRIGHT, 1897
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London
ºbø ºnickerbocket pregg, flew lºoth
©
• * e
:
:
i
*~ $.
2-3-4-1. “gº
ANNOUNCEMENT.
N the 24th of December, 1891, fifteen persons
O interested in promoting the historical study
of religions united in issuing a circular-letter, inviting
a conference in the Council Chambers of the Histori-
cal Society of Philadelphia, on the 3oth of the same
month, for the purpose of instituting “popular
courses in the History of Religions, somewhat after
the style of the Hibbert lectures in England, to be
delivered annually by the best scholars of Europe
and this country, in various cities, such as Baltimore,
Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia,
and others.” There participated in this conference
personally or by letter from Philadelphia, Rev. Prof.
E. T. Bartlett, D.D., Rev. George Dana Boardman,
D.D., Prof. D. G. Brinton, M.D., Sc.D., Horace How-
ard Furness, LL.D., Prof. E. J. James, Ph.D., Prof.
Morris Jastrow, Jr., Ph.D., Provost Wm. Pepper,
M.D., LL.D., of the University of Pennsylvania,
Hon. Mayer Sulzberger, Mrs. Cornelius Stevenson,
and Talcott Williams, LL.D. ; from Baltimore, Prest.
D. C. Gilman, LL.D., of the Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, and Prof. Paul Haupt, Ph.D.; from Boston
III
iv Announcement
and Cambridge, Rev. E. E. Hale, D.D., Prof. C. R.
Lanman, Ph.D., Prof. D. G. Lyon, Ph.D., and Prof.
C. H. Toy, LL.D. ; from Brooklyn, Rev. Edward S.
Braislin, D.D., and Prof. Franklin W. Hooper of
the Brooklyn Institute; from Chicago, Prest. W. R.
Harper, Ph.D., of the University of Chicago, and
Rev. Prof. Emil G. Hirsch, Ph.D.; from New York,
Rev. Prof. C. A. Briggs, D.D., LL.D., Rev. Prof.
Francis Brown, D.D., Rev. G. Gottheil, D.D., Prof.
R. J. H. Gottheil, Ph.D., Rev. John P. Peters, Ph.D.,
and Rev. W. Hayes Ward, D.D., LL.D.; from Ithaca,
N. Y., Prest. J. G. Schurman of Cornell University,
and Hon. Andrew D. White, LL.D.
At this conference Prof. Jastrow submitted a plan
for establishing popular lecture courses on the his-
torical study of religions by securing the co-opera-
tion of existing institutions and lecture associations,
such as the Lowell, Brooklyn, and Peabody Insti-
tutes, the University Lecture Association of Phila-
delphia, and some of our colleges and universities.
Each course, according to this plan, was to consist of
from six to eight lectures, and the engagement of
lecturers, choice of subjects, and so forth were to be
in the hands of a committee chosen from the differ-
ent cities, and representing the various institutions
and associations participating. This general scheme
met with the cordial approval of the conference,
Announcement - V
which voted the project both a timely and useful
one, and which appointed Dean Bartlett, Prof. Jas-
trow, and Dr. Peters a committee to elaborate a plan
of Organisation and report at an adjourned meeting.
That meeting was held at the Union Theological
Seminary in New York City, February 6, 1892, and,
as a result, an association was organised for the pur-
pose of encouraging the study of religions. The
terms of association then adopted, with slight modi-
fications introduced later, are as follows:
I.—The object of this Association shall be to pro-
vide courses of lectures on the history of re-
ligions, to be delivered in various cities.
2.—The Association shall be composed of delegates
from institutions agreeing to co-operate, or
from local boards, organised where such co-
operation is not possible.
3.—These Delegates—one from each Institution or
Local Board—shall constitute themselves a
council under the name of the “American
Committee for Lectures on the History of
Religions.”
4.—The Council shall elect out of its number a
President, a Secretary, and a Treasurer.
5.—All matters of local detail shall be left to the
Institutions or Local Boards, under whose
auspices the lectures are to be delivered.
vi Announcement
6.—A course of lectures on some religion, or phase
of religion, from an historical point of view,
or on a subject germane to the study of re-
ligions, shall be delivered annually, or at such
intervals as may be found practicable, in the
different cities represented by this Associa-
tion.
7.—The Council (a) shall be charged with the selec-
tion of the lecturers, (b) shall have charge of
the funds, (c) shall assign the time for the lec-
tures in each city, and perform such other
functions as may be necessary.
8.—Polemical subjects, as well as polemics in the
treatment of subjects, shall be positively ex-
cluded.
9.—The lecturer shall be chosen by the Council at
least ten months before the date fixed for the
course of lectures.
IO.—The lectures shall be delivered in the various
cities between the months of October and
June. g
II.-The copyright of the lectures shall be the
property of the Association.
12.-One half of the lecturer's compensation shall
be paid at the completion of this entire course,
and the second half upon the publication of
the lectures.
Announcement vii
13.—The compensation offered to the lecturer shall
be fixed in each case by the Council.
14.—The lecturer is not to deliver elsewhere any of
the lectures for which he is engaged by the
Committee, except with the sanction of the
Committee.
The Committee appointed to carry out this plan
as now constituted, is as follows: -
Prof. C. H. Toy, of Harvard University, Chairman.
Prof. Morris Jastrow, Jr., of the University of
Pennsylvania, Secretary.
Rev. John P. Peters, D. D., of New York, Treas-
l] I’C1".
Prof. Richard J. H. Gottheil, of Columbia Uni-
versity.
Prof. Paul Haupt, of the Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity.
Prof. F. W. Hooper, of the Brooklyn Institute.
Prof. J. F. Jameson, of Brown University.
Prof. F. K. Sanders, of Yale University.
President J. G. Schurman, of Cornell University.
For its first course the Committee selected as
lecturer Prof. T. W. Rhys Davids, Ph.D. LL.D.,
of London, England, who delivered a course of
lectures in the winter of 1894–95 on The History
and Literature of Buddhism, at the following places,
with the co-operation of the institutions named :
viii Announcement
Baltimore, before the Johns Hopkins University.
Boston, at the Lowell Institute.
Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Institute.
Ithaca, before the Cornell University.
New York, before the Columbia University.
Philadelphia, before the University of Pennsyl-
vania Lecture Association.
Providence, before the Brown University Lecture
Association.
Professor Davids' lectures were published in 1896
by arrangement with Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons,
the publishers to the Committee, as the First Series
of The American Lectures on the History of Re-
ligions. As the second lecturer, the Committee
chose Prof. Daniel G. Brinton, A.M., M.D., LL.D.,
Sc.D., of Philadelphia; and as the subject, “The
Religions of Primitive Peoples.” Dr. Brinton, who
holds the chair of American Archaeology and Lin-
guistics in the University of Pennsylvania, is a lead-
ing authority on the languages and customs of the
American Indians, and on Anthropology in general.
His studies have led him also into the domain of Pre-
historic Archaeology and Comparative Mythology.
As the product of his investigations in the latter
field, he published as early as 1868, The Myths of
The New World, which at once attracted the atten-
tion of scholars, and has passed through several
Announcement ix
editions since. In 1876 he issued an important
contribution to the Science of Religion, under the
title, The Religious Sentiment. In addition to this
he has published a large number of works on
American Languages on Anthropology, and Ar-
chaeology, the most notable of which is the series
Library of Aboriginal American Literature. His
papers, scattered in various scientific periodicals of
this country and Europe, number several hundred.
The lectures delivered by him under the auspices
of the Committee represent the ripe fruit of many
years of study, and will, we feel assured, be wel-
comed as an important contribution to a subject
now attracting much attention.
The lectures were delivered during the winter of
1896–97, at the following places:
Boston, (Lowell Institute).
Brooklyn, (Brooklyn Institute).
Ithaca, (Cornell University).
New Haven, (Yale University).
New York, (New York University).
Philadelphia, (University of Pennsylvania).
Providence, (Brown University Lecture Associ-
ation).
The object of this Association is to provide the
best opportunities for bringing to the knowledge
of the public at large the methods and results of
X Announcement
those distinguished specialists who have devoted
their lives to the study of the religions of other
countries and other ages. It is safe to say that
there is no other subject of modern research which
concerns all classes so nearly as the study of re-
ligions. It is the hope of the Committee to provide
courses at intervals of two years, or oftener, if the
encouragement which the undertaking receives war-
rants it, and the practical difficulties involved in
securing competent lecturers do not make it impos-
sible. -
Arrangements have been made for a course of
lectures during the winter of 1897–98, by the Rev.
T. K. Cheyne, M.A., D.D., Professor of Old Testa-
ment Interpretation at Oriel College, Oxford, and
Canon of Rochester; whose subject will be Re-
ligious Thought and Life among the Hebrews in
Post-Exilic Days, to be followed in 1898–99 by a com-
plementary course on Religious Life and Thought
among the Hebrews in Pre-Exilic Days, by Pro-
fessor Karl Budde, of the University of Strasburg,
Germany.
JoHN P. PETERs, Committee
C. H. TOY, O72
MORRIS JASTROW, J.R., | Publication.
May 1o, 1897.
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I. THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF PRIMITIVE
RELIGIONS.–METHODS AND DEFINITIONS.
PAGE
Ethnology Defined—The Scientific Study of Religions—It is
not Theology—Its Methods : I. The Historic Method ;
2. The Comparative Method ; 3. The Psychologic Method
—Strange Coincidences in Human Thought—Conspicuous
in Primitive Religions—“Primitive ’’ Peoples Defined—
The Savage Mind—Examples—Means of Study: I. Archae-
ology; 2. Language : 3. Folk-Lore; 4. Descriptions of
Travellers—Examples: The Early Aryans, Etruscans,
Semites, Egyptians, American Tribes, Australians, Poly-
nesians, etc. — “Religions " Defined — Compared with
“Superstitions "–No One Belief Essential to Religion—
Atheistic Religions—Fundamental Identity of Religions—
No Tribe Known Devoid of a Religion—How the Opposite
Opinion Arose—Earliest Men probably had No Religion
—No Signs of Religion in Lower Animals—Power of
Religion in Primitive Society—True Source of Religion . I
LECTURE II. THE ORIGIN AND CONTENTS OF PRIM-
ITIVE RELIGIONS.
Former Theories of the Origin of Religions—Inadequacy of these
—Universal Postulate of Religions that Conscious Volition
is the Source of Force—How Mind was Assigned to Nature
—Communion between the Human and the Divine Mind—
Universality of “Inspiration”—Inspiration the Product of
the Sub-Conscious Mind—Known to Science as “Sugges-
xi
xii
Contents
LECTURE III.
tion” — This Explained — Examples— Illustrations from
Language—No Primitive Monotheism—The Special Stimuli
of the Religious Emotions : I. Dreaming and Allied Con-
ditions—Life as a Dream—2. The Apprehension of Life
and Death and the Notion of the Soul—3. The Perception
of Light and Darkness ; Day and Night—The Sky God as
the High God—4. The Observation of Extraordinary Ex-
hibitions of Force—The Thunder God—5. The Impression
of Vastness—Dignity of the Sub-Conscious Intelligence
IN THE WORD.
An Echo Myth—The Power of Words—Their Magical Potency
—The Curse—Power Independent of Meaning—The Name
as an Attribute—The Sacred Names—The Ineffable Name
—“Myrionomous” Gods—“Theophorous” Names—Sug-
gestion and Repetition as Stimulants—I. The Word to the
gods: Prayer—Its Forms, Contents, and Aims—II. The
Word from the gods: The Law and the Prophecy—The
Ceremonial Law, or tabu—Examples—Divination and Pre-
diction—III. The Word concerning the gods: The Myths
—Their Sources chiefly Psychic—Some from Language—
Examples — Transference — Similarities — The Universal
Mythical Cycles : I. The Cosmical Concepts; 2. The
Sacred Numbers ; 3. The Drama of the Universe ; Creation
and Deluge Myths; 4. The Earthly Paradise; 5. The
Conflict of Nature ; 6. The Returning Saviour; 7. The
Journey of the Soul—Conclusion as to these Identities
PAGE
4 I
PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION :
86
LECTURE IV. PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION :
IN THE OBJECT.
Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship only—Identical
with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a Sta-
dium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Ob-
jects: I. The Celestial Bodies—Sun and Moon Worship
—Astrolatry; 2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the Winds),
Contents xiii
PAGE
Water, and the Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones
and Rocks—Thunderbolts—Memorial Stones—Divining
Stones; 4. Trees and Plants—The Tree of Life—The
Sacred Pole and the Cross—The Plant-Soul—The Tree
of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—High Places and
Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird, the Serpent,
etc.; 7. Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Worship of
Beauty; 8. Life and its Transmission—Examples—Genesiac
Cults — The Fatherhood of God—Love as Religion's
Crown e te tº e e te ſº tº ſº . I3O
LECTURE. W. PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION :
IN THE RITE.
The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical Rites—Division
of Rites into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I. Com-
munal Rites: I. The Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The
Festal Function—Joyous Character of Primitive Rites—
Commensality—The “Ceremonial Circuit *—Masks and
Dramas—3. The Sacrifice—Early and Later Forms—4. The
Communion with God—Pagan Eucharists. II. Personal
Rites: I. Relating to Birth—Vows and Baptism—2. Relat-
ing to Naming—The Personal Name—3. Relating to
Puberty—Initiation of Boys and Girls—4. Relating to Mar-
riage—Marriage “ by Capture” and “by Purchase"—5.
Relating to Death—Early Cannibalism—Sepulchral Monu-
ments—Funerary Ceremonies—Modes of Burial—Customs
of Mourning . es ſe ſº & e º e . I72
LECTURE VI. THE LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF
PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS.
Pagan Religions not wholly Bad—Their Lines of Development
as Connected with : I. The Primitive Social Bond—The
Totem, the Priesthood, and the Law ; 2. The Family and
the Position of Woman ; 3. The Growth of Jurisprudence
—The Ordeal, Trial by Battle, Oaths, and the Right of
Sanctuary—Religion is Anarchic ; 4. The Development of
xiv
Contents
Ethics—Dualism of Primitive Ethics—-Opposition of Re-
ligion to Ethics; 5. The Advance in Positive Knowledge—
Religion versus Science ; 6. The Fostering of the Arts—
The Aim for Beauty and Perfection — Colour-Symbolism,
Sculpture, Metre, Music, Oratory, Graphic Methods—Use-
ful Arts, Architecture; 7. The Independent Life of the
Individual—His Freedom and Happiness—Inner Stadia of
Progress: I. From the Object to the Symbol ; 2. From the
Ceremonial Law to the Personal Ideal ; 3. From the Tribal
to the National Conception of Religion—Conclusion .
PAGE
. 2 I4
RELIGIONS OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES
RELIGIONS OF
PRIMITIVE PEOPLES.
LECTURE I.
The Scientific Study of Primitive Religions—
Methods and Definitions.
CoNTENTS :—Ethnology Defined—The Scientific Study of Religions
—It is not Theology—Its Methods: 1. The Historic Method;
2. The Comparative Method ; 3. The Psychologic Method—
Strange Coincidences in Human Thought – Conspicuous in
Primitive Religions—“Primitive” Peoples Defined—The Sav-
age Mind—Examples—Means of Study: I. Archaeology; 2.
Language : 3. Folk-Lore; 4. Descriptions of Travellers—Ex-
amples: The Early Aryans, Etruscans, Semites, Egyptians,
American Tribes, Australians, Polynesians, etc.—“Religions"
Defined—Compared with “Superstitions”—No One Belief Es-
sential to Religion—Atheistic Religions—Fundamental Identity
of Religions—No Tribe Known Devoid of a Religion—How
the Opposite Opinion Arose–Earliest Men probably had No
Religion—No Signs of Religion in Lower Animals—Power of
Religion in Primitive Society—True Source of Religion.
HE youngest in the sisterhood of the sciences
is that which deals with Man. In its widest
scope it is called Anthropology, and as such includes
- I
2 Religions of Primitive Peoples
both the physical and mental life of the species,
from the beginning until now. That branch of it
which especially concerns itself with the develop-
ment of man as indicated by his advance in civili-
sation, is known as Ethnology.
When we analyse the directive forces which have
brought about this advance, and whose study there-
fore makes up Ethnology, they can be reduced to
four, to wit, Language, Laws, Arts, and Religion.
Do not imagine, however, that these are separable,
independent forces. On the contrary, they are in-
separable, constituent elements of an organic unity,
each working through the others, and on the sym-
metrical adjustment of all of them to the needs of a
community depend its prosperity and growth. No
one of them can be omitted or exaggerated without
stunting or distorting the national expansion. This
lesson, taught by all ages and confirmed by every
example, warns us to be cautious in giving preced-
ence to one over the others in any general scheme;
but we can profitably separate one from the others,
and study its origins and influence.
On this occasion I invite your attention to Re-
ligion, and especially as displayed in its earliest and
simplest forms, in the faiths and rites of primitive
peoples. I shall present these to you in accordance
with the principles and methods of Ethnology.
Study of Primitive Religions 3
There is what has been called the “science of re-
ligion.” The expression seems to me a little pre-
Sumptuous—or, at least, premature. We do not yet
speak of a “science of jurisprudence,” although we
have better materials for it than for a science of
religion. I shall content myself, therefore, in calling
what I have to offer a study of early religions ac-
cording to scientific methods.
I need not remind you that such a method is ab-
solutely without bias or partisanship ; that it looks
upon all religions alike as more or less enlightened
expressions of mental traits common to all mankind
in every known age.” It concedes the exclusive pos-
session of truth to none, and still less does it aim to
set up any other standard than past experience by
which to measure the claims of any. It brings no
new canons of faith or doctrine, and lays no other
foundation than that which has been laid even from
the beginning until now.
But just there its immediate utility and practical
bearings are manifested. It seeks to lay bare those
eternal foundations on which the sacred edifices of
religion have ever been and must ever be erected.
It aims to accomplish this by clearing away the incid-
* “Religion,” observes Professor Toy, “must be treated as a pro-
duct of human thought, as a branch of Sociology, subject to all the
laws that control general human progress,”—%udaism and Chris-
tianity, p. I.
4. Religions of Primitive Peoples
ental and adventitious in religions so as to discover
what in them is permanent and universal. Those
sacred ideas and institutions which we find repeated
among all the early peoples of the earth, often de-
veloping in after ages along parallel lines, will form
the special objects of our investigation. The depart-
ures from these universal forms, we shall see, can be
traced to local or temporary causes, they turn on
questions of environment, and serve merely to de-
fine the limits of variability of the ubiquitous princi-
ples of religion as a psychic phenomenon, wherever
we find it.
This is not “theology.” That branch of learning
aims to measure the objective reality, the concrete
truth, of some one or another opinion concerning
God and divine things; while the scientific study
of religions confines itself exclusively to examining
such opinions as phases of human mental activity,
and ascertaining what influence they have exerted
on the development of the species or of some branch
of it. Therefore it is never “polemic.” It neither
attacks nor defends the beliefs which it studies. It
confines itself to examining their character and influ-
ence by the lights of reason and history.
The methods which we employ in this process of
reduction are three in number : I. The Historic
Method ; 2. The Comparative Method; 3. The
Study of Primitive Religions 5
Psychologic Method. A few words will explain
the scope of each of these.
The Historic Method studies the history of beliefs
and the development of worship. It seeks to dis-
cover what influences have been exerted on them by
environment, transmission, heredity, and conquest,
and to bring into full relief what is peculiar to the
tribe or group under consideration, and what is ex-
otic. For in one sense it is true that every nation
and tribe, even every man, has his own religion.
Such ethnic traits merit the closest scrutiny. They
are so marked and constant as to modify profoundly
the history of even the ripest religions. It is quite
true, as has been observed by an historian of Christ-
ianity, that “there is in every people an hereditary
disposition to some particular heresy,” ” that is, to
altering any religion which they accept in accordance
with the special constitution of their own minds.
The Comparative Method notes the similarities
and differences between the religions of different
tribes or groups, and, gradually extending its field to
embrace the whole species, endeavors, by excluding
what is local or temporal, to define those forms of
religious thought and expression which are common
to humanity at large.
* Rev. John M. Neale, History of the Holy Eastern Church, vol.
i., p. 37.
6 Religions of Primitive Peoples
The Psychologic Method takes the results of both
the previous methods and aims to explain them by
referring the local manifestations to the special
mental traits of the tribe or group, and the uni-
versal features to equally universal characteristics
of the human mind.
The last, the Psychologic Method, is the crown
and completion of the quest ; for every advanced
student of religion will subscribe to the declaration
of Professor Granger, that “all mythology and all
history of beliefs must finally turn to psychology
for their satisfactory elucidation.” ” In other words,
the laws of human thought can alone explain its own
products.
And here I must mention a startling discovery, the
most startling, it seems to me, of recent times. It is
that these laws of human thought are frightfully
rigid, are indeed automatic and inflexible. The hu-
man mind seems to be a machine; give it the same
materials, and it will infallibly grind out the same
product. So deeply impressed by this is an eminent
modern writer that he laws it down as “a funda-
mental maxim of ethnology” that, “we do not think;
thinking merely goes on within us.” +
* Granger, The Worship of the Romans, p. vii.
ł A. H. Post, Grundriss der ethnologischen }ºurisprudenz, Bd. i.,
S. 4.
Study of Primitive Religions 7
These strange coincidences find their explanation
in experimental psychology. This science, in its
modern developments, establishes the fact that the
Origin of ideas is due to impressions on the nerves
of sense. The five senses give rise to five classes of
ideas, the most numerous of which are those from
the sense of sight, visual ideas, and those from the
sense of hearing, auditory ideas. The former yield
the conceptions of space, motion, and lustre (colour,
brightness, etc.), the latter that of time. From the
sense of touch arise the “tactual '' impressions,
which yield the ideas of power and might, through
the Sensations of resistance and pressure, pleasure
and pain. From these primary ideas (or percept-
ions), drawn directly from impressions, are derived
Secondary, abstract, and general ideas (apperceptions)
by comparison and association (the laws of Identity,
Diversity, and Similarity).
Under ordinary conditions of human life there are :
many more impressions on the senses which are
everywhere the same or similar, than the reverse.
Hence, the ideas, both primary and secondary (per-
ceptions and apperceptions), drawn from them are
much more likely to resemble than to differ.
The consequence of this is that the same laws of
growth which develop the physical man everywhere
into the traits of the species, act also on his psychi-
8 Religions of Primitive Peoples
cal powers, and not less absolutely, to bring their
products into conformity. -
This is true not only of his logical faculties, but of
his lightest fancies and wildest vagaries. “Man’s
y
imagination,” observes Mr. Hartland, “like every
Other known power, works by fixed laws, the exist-
ence and operation of which it is possible to trace ;
and it works upon the same material,—the external
universe, the mental and moral constitution of man,
and his social relations.” * -
In reference to my particular subject, Professor
Buchmann expressed some years ago what I believe
to be the correct result of modern research in these
words: “It is easy to prove that the striking simi-
larity in primitive religious ideas comes not from
tradition nor from the relationship or historic connect-
ions of early peoples, but from the identity in the
mental construction of the individual man, wherever
he is found.” +
We can scarcely escape a painful shock to discover
that we are bound by such adamantine chains. As
the primitive man could not conceive that inflexible
mechanical laws control the processes of nature, so
are we slow to acknowledge that others, not less
rigid, rule our thoughts and fancies.
* The Science of Fairy Tales, p. 2.
+ Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, Bd, xi., s. 124.
Study of Primitive Religions 9
\
Nowhere, however, is the truth of it more clearly
demonstrated than in primitive religions. Without
a full appreciation of this fact, it is impossible to
comprehend them ; and for the lack of it, much that
has been written upon them is worthless. The as-
tonishing similarity, the absolute identities, which
constantly present themselves in myths and cults
separated by Oceans and continents, have been con-
strued as evidence of common descent or of distant
transmission ; whereas they are the proofs of a funda-
mental unity of the human mind and of its pro-
cesses, “before which,” as a German writer says, “the
differences in individual, national, or even racial
divisions sink into insignificance.” ” Wherever we
turn, in time or in space, to the earliest and simplest
religions of the world, we find them dealing with
nearly the same objective facts in nearly the same
subjective fashion, the differences being due to local
and temporal causes.

`s This cardinal and basic truth of the unity of ac-
tion of man's intelligence, which is established just
as much for the arts, the laws, and the institutions
of men as for their religions, enables me to present
to you broadly the faiths of primitive peoples as one
* J. J. Honegger, Allgemeine Culturgeschichte, Bd. i., s. 332.
“Similar conceptions,” observes Professor Bastian, “repeat them-
selves, under fixed laws, in localities wide apart, in ages far remote.”
–Grundzüge der Æthnologie, p. 73.
H. O. Religions of Primitive Peoples
coherent whole, the product of a common humanity,
a mirror reflecting the deepest thoughts of the whole
species on the mighty questions of religious life and
hope, not the isolated or borrowed opinions of one
or another tribe or people.
Of course, the recognition of this principle does
not diminish the attention to be paid to the ethnic
or local developments of culture and to the borrow-
ing or transference of myths and rites. Wherever
this can be shown to have occurred, it is an adequate
explanation of identities; but in tribes geographic-
ally remote, the presumption is that such identities
are due to the common element of humanity in
the species.
Such similarities are by no means confined to the
primitive forms of religion; but in them they are
more obvious, and their causes are more apparent ;
so for that reason, a study of such primitive forms is
peculiarly remunerative to one who would acquaint
himself with the elements of religion in general. No
one, in fact, can pretend to a thorough knowledge
of the great historic religions of the world who has
not traced their outlines back to the humble faiths
of early tribes from which they emerged.
He must have recourse to them for like reasons
that the biologist, who would learn the morphology
of a mammal, betakes himself to the study of the
Study of Primitive Religions I H
cells and fibres of the simplest living organisms; for
in their uncomplicated forms he can discover the
basic activities which animate the highest structures.
I must define, however, more closely what ethno-
y
logists mean by “primitive peoples’’; because the
word is not used in the sense of “first " or “earli-
5 3
est,” as its derivation would indicate. We know
little, if anything, about the earliest men, and their
religion would make a short chapter. “Primitive"
to the ethnologist means the earliest of a given race
or tribe of whom he has trusty information. It has
reference to a stage of culture, rather than to time.
Peoples who are in a savage or barbarous condition,
with slight knowledge of the arts, lax governments,
and feeble institutions, are spoken of as “primitive,”
although they may be our contemporaries. They
are very far from being the earliest men or resem-
bling them. Hundreds of generations have toiled
to produce even their low stage of culture up through
others, far inferior, of which we can form some idea
by the aid of language and prehistoric archaeology.
They are therefore not degenerates, ruins fallen
from some former high estate, some condition of
pristine nobility. That is an ancient error, now, I
hope, exploded and dismissed from sane teaching.
Even the rudest of savages is a creation of steady,
long-continued advancement from the primeval man.
12 Religions of Primitive Peoples
We have the evidence of what he was, in his imple-
ments and weapons preserved in pre-glacial strata
and in the mud-floors of the caves he inhabited.
These announce to us a law of progressive ad-
vancement for all races, over all the earth, on the
same lines of progress, toward the same goals of
culture, extremely slow at the outset, and unequal
especially in later ages, but vindicating the unity of
the species and the identity of its hopes and aims
everywhere.
You will understand, therefore, that by “primi-
tive peoples,” I mean savage or barbarous tribes,
wherever they are or have been, and that I claim
for them brotherhood with ourselves in all the traits
that go to make up oneness of species. A few hun-
dred years ago the ancestors of the English-speaking
nations were as savage as the savagest, without tem-
ples to their gods, in perpetual and bloody war,
untamed cannibals; add a few thousand years to
the perspective, and man over the whole globe was
in the same condition.
The savage state was the childhood of the race,
and by some the mind of the savage has been
likened to that of the child. But the resemblance
is merely superficial. It rather resembles that of
the uncultivated and ignorant adult among our-
selves. The same inaccurate observation and illogi-
Study of Primitive Religions I 3
cal modes of thought characterise both. These
depend on certain mental traits, which it is well to
define, because they explain most of the absurdities
of primitive religions. -
The first is, that the idea is accepted as true, with-
out the process of logical reasoning or inductive ob-
servation. In other words, what appears true to the
individual is accepted by him as true, without fur-
ther question. His dreams seem real to him ; there-
fore they are real. What the tribe believes, he
believes, no matter what his senses tell him.
When an Australian Black is on a journey and
fears being overtaken by the night, he will place a
lump of clay in the forks of a tree, believing that
thus he can arrest the motion of the sun and pro-
long the day. It is not a religious act, but a piece
of natural science current in the tribe, which no ex-
perience will refute in their minds.”
Just such a notion recurs among the Mandan In-
dians. Captain Clark observed near their villages
upright poles fifteen or twenty feet long with bun-
dles of female clothing tied to them. He asked
what they signified, and one of the old men ex-
plained thus: “If you watch the sun closely, you
will see that he stops for a short time just as he
rises, and again at midday, and as he sets. The
* E. M. Curr, The Australian Race, vol. i., p. 50. Rº
I4. Religions of Primitive Peoples
reason is that he rests a few moments to smoke in
the lodges of three immortal women, and we offer
them this clothing that they may be induced to say
a kind word to him in our behalf. We were told by
our ancestors not to forget this.” ” The fact that
the orb does not stop was of no consequence in the
face of this tradition.
The second trait is the extreme nervous suscepti-
bility of savages. It is much higher than ours, al-
though the contrary is often taught. Their emotions
or feelings control their reasoning powers, and direct
their actions. Neurotic diseases, especially of a con-
tagious character, are very frequent among them,
and they are far more prone than ourselves to yield
to impressions upon their sensory organs. The trav-
eller Castren relates that a sudden blow on the out-
side of a tent of the Samoyeds will sometimes throw
the occupants into spasms; and the missionary Liv-
ingstone draws a touching picture of young slaves
dying of “a broken heart,” when they heard the
song and music of the villagers and could not join
in the revelry.” +
* W. P. Clark, U. S. A., Vndian Sign Zanguage, p. 241.
# This subject is fully discussed by Flügel, Zeit, fºr. Völ/ter?sy-
chologie, Bd. xi.; by Prof. James Sully in his Studies of Childhood;
and by Dr. Friedmann, Centralblatt für Anthropologie, Bd. i. The
last mentioned argues that the mind of the savage has more points of
resemblance to the insane than to the child mind. The higher
emotional susceptibility of savages can be illustrated by abundant
examples.
Study of Primitive Religions I 5
These two traits, therefore, the acceptance of the
idea as subjectively true, and the subordination of
reason to the feelings, are the main features of the
undeveloped mind. They are common in civilised
conditions, but are universal in Savagery.
The question has often been considered whether
the mental powers of the savage are distinctly infe-
rior. This has been answered by taking the children
of Savages when quite young and bringing them up
in civilised surroundings. The verdict is unanimous
that they display as much aptitude for the acquisi-
tion of knowledge, and as much respect for the pre-
cepts of morality, as the average English or German
boy or girl; but with less originality or “initiative.”
I have been in close relations to several full-blood
American Indians, who had been removed from an
aboriginal environment and instructed in this man-
ner; and I could not perceive that they were either
in intellect or sympathies inferior to the usual type
of the American gentleman. One of them notably
had a refined sense of humour, as well as uncommon
acuteness of observation.
The assertion, however, is frequently advanced
that in their savage state they are of the earth
earthy, that their whole time is taken up with the
gratification of sensuous desires, and that they
neither think nor care for speculations of a super-
sensuous or spiritual character.
I6 Religions of Primitive Peoples
The investigation of this point is desirable in a
study of their religions, for upon it depends the de-
cision whether we can assign to their myths and rites
a meaning deeper than that of deception, or passion,
or frivolity.
To reach a decision, I take the most unfavourable
example which can be suggested,—the Australian
Blacks. Considering their number and the extent
of their territory, they were, when discovered, the
most degraded people on the globe. They had
nothing which could be called a government, and
some dialects have no word for chief. None of them
could count the fingers on one hand, for none of the
dialects had any words for numerals beyond three
or four. Mr. Hale, the eminent ethnographer, who
was among them in 1843, says that they evinced
“an almost brutal stupidity,” “downright childish-
ness and imbecility.” ”
Their natural feelings and moral perceptions seem
incredibly blunted. I can best illustrate this by
narrating an incident which happened at a frontier
station, one of many of the same character.
The white family employed a native girl named
Mattie about fifteen years old. She had a baby,
which one day disappeared. On inquiry she stated
*AEthnography and Philology of the United States AExploring
Axpedition, p. IO8.
Study of Primitive Religions 17
that her mother had said that she was too young to
take care of a baby, and had therefore cooked and
eaten it with some of her cronies. Mattie cried in
telling this. Because her baby had been killed P
Oh no ! but because her mother had given her none
of the tidbits, but only the bones to pick | *
Yet even these seemingly hopeless brutes have an
intricate system of kinship and marriage laws, the
most rigid of any known. Marriage with sisters or
first cousins is not only forbidden, “It is not con-
ceived as possible.” The prohibitions about food
are so absolute that the natives would perish of
hunger rather than break them. Some of their re-
ligious ceremonies entail voluntary mutilations of
the most dreadful description. Their mythology is
extensive, and I shall have frequent occasion to
quote it. And so far are they from an obtuse indif-
ference to the future and the past, an accurate ob-
server who lived among them says: “They wonder
among themselves and talk at night about these
things, and the past existence of their race, and how
they came here.” +
Savage tribes are distinctly unlettered. They be-
* The case was not exceptional. Among several tribes it was an
established custom for a mother to kill and eat her first child, as it
was believed to strengthen her for later births. See examples in
Zeitschrift för Völkerpsychologie, Bd. xiv., pp. 460, sq.
+ E. Palmer in }our, Anthrop. Inst., vol. xiii., pp. 294, 399.
2
I 8 Religions of Primitive Peoples
long in a stage of culture where the art of writing, as
we understand it, is unknown. They have no bibles,
no sacred books, by which to teach their religions.
What means have we, therefore, to learn their opin-
ions about holy things?
The question is one which demands an answer, the
more because I shall often refer to the religions of
tribes long since extinct, and whose very names are
forgotten. How do we dare to speak with confi-
dence of what they thought about the gods?
We can do so, and it is one of the marvels of
modern scientific research, quite as admirable as its
more familiar and practical results.
Our sources of information regarding primitive
peoples may be classed under four titles, Archaeology,
Language, Folk-lore, and Ethnographic descriptions.
By the first of these, archaeology, we become ac-
quainted with the objective remains of beliefs long
since extinguished. The temples, idols, and altars
of dead gods reveal to us the attributes assigned to
them by their votaries and the influences they were
believed to exert. We can interpret their symbols,
and from rude carvings re-construct the story of
their divine struggles. Especially, from ancient
sepulchres and the modes of disposal of the dead
which they reveal, can we discern what hopes van-
ished nations held of a life to come.
Study of Primitive Religions I9
In this direction, we are powerfully aided by that
close similarity of mental products in like stages of
culture, to which I have referred, and shall often
refer. By comparing a living tribe with one which
ten thousand years ago was in a similar condition as
shown by its relics, we can with the highest proba-
bility interpret the use and motives of the latter's
remains. -
We are further assisted in such research by the
Critical analysis of the early forms of language, which
is one of the achievements of modern linguistics.
By establishing the identities of names, we can trace
the diffusion of myths, and by tracing such names to
their proper dialect and original meaning, we can
locate geographically and psychologically the origin
of given forms of religions. In fact, the value of
linguistics to the study of religions cannot be over-
estimated. No one is competent to describe the
sacred beliefs of a nation, its myths and adjurations,
unless he has a sufficient knowledge of its tongue to
ascertain the true sense of the terms employed in its
liturgies.
But these so obvious applications are the least
that language can furnish. Its impress on religions
goes much deeper. It was well remarked by the
Chevalier Bunsen that in primitive conditions the
two poles of human life, around which all else cen-
2O Religions of Primitive Peoples
tres, are language and religion, and that each con-
ditions the other, that is, imparts to it special forms
and limits.
For instance, those languages which have gram-
matic gender almost necessarily divide their deities
according to sex *; those in which the passive voice
is absent or feebly developed, will be led to associate
with their deities higher conceptions of activity
than where the passive is a favourite form ; those
which have no substantive verb cannot express God
as pure being, but must associate with Him either
position, action, or suffering.
In the speech of the Algonquin Indians, there is
no grammatic distinction of sex; but there is broad
discrimination between objects which are animate
and those which are inanimate. When the Catholic
missionaries brought to them the rosary, the natives
at first spoke of it as inanimate ; but as their rever-
ence for it grew, it was transferred to the animate
gender, and was thus on its way to a personification.*
The third source of information is that which is
called folk-lore. Its field of research is to collect
the relics and survivals of primitive modes of thought
and expression, beliefs, customs, and notions, in the
* Professor Sayce believes that the Sumerian of ancient Babylonia
was genderless ; and that the local gods were first endowed with sex
on being adopted by the Semites.—Hibbert Lectures, p. 176.
+ Cuoq, Lexigue Algonquine, p. 21, note.
Study of Primitive Religions 2 I
present conditions of culture. It is, therefore, es-
pecially useful in a study like the present, the more
SO on account of the extraordinary permanence and
conservative character of religious sentiments and
ceremonies. Among the peasantry of Europe, the
paganism of the days of Julius Caesar flourishes with
scarcely abated vigour, though it may be under new
names. “The primitive Aryan,” writes Professor
Frazer,” “is not extinct; he is with us to-day.”
And another English writer does not go too far
when he says: “There is not a rite or ceremony
yet practised and revered among us that is not the
lineal descendant of barbaric thought and usage.” +
It is this which gives to folk-lore its extremely
instructive character for the student of early re-
ligion.
The fourth source of information is the descrip-
tion of native religions by travellers. You might
expect this to be the most accurate and therefore
valuable of all the sources; but it is just the reverse.
Omitting the ordinary tourist and globe-trotter, who
is not expected to know anything thoroughly, and
never deceives the expectation, even painstaking
observers, who have lived long with savage tribes,
sometimes mastering their languages, are, for rea-
* 7%e Golden Bough, Preface.
+ Ed. Clodd, Myths and Dreams, p. 168.
22 Religions of Primitive Peoples
sons I shall presently state, constantly at fault about
the native religions. We must always take their
narratives with hesitation, and weigh them against
others by persons of a different nationality and educa-
tion. Indeed, of all elements of native life, this of
religion is the most liable to be misunderstood by
the foreign visitor.
Bearing in mind these various sources of informa-
tion, what tribes, about which we have sufficient
knowledge, could fairly be considered as examples
of primitive conditions 2 -
Beginning with those remotest in time, I believe
we know enough about the early Aryans to claim it
for them. The acute researches of recent scholars,
so admirably summed up in the work of Professor
Schrader, have thrown a flood of light on the domes-
tic, cultural, and religious condition of the pristine
epoch of Aryan society from the side of language;
while the tireless prosecution of prehistoric archae-
ology in Europe has put us into possession of thou-
sands of objects illustrating the religious arts and
usages then in vogue. Classical mythology and
ritual, as well as modern folk-lore, lend further ef-
ficient aid toward reconstructing the modes and
expressions of their sacred thought.
A very ancient people, possibly of Aryan blood,
but more likely, I believe, to have come from North
Study of Primitive Religions 23
Africa and to be of Libyan affinities, were the Etrus-
cans. They were extremely religious, and their theo-
logical opinions deeply coloured the worship of the
Romans. We know the general outlines of their
doctrine of the gods, and its simplicity and grandeur
bespeak our admiration. I shall draw from this vener-
able “Etruscan discipline " from time to time for
illustrations.
Quite as much may be said of the diligence of the
explorers and scholars in the field of Semitic an-
tiquity. We can without room for doubt trace the
stream of Semitic religious thought through the He-
brew Bible and the Assyrian and Babylonian cunei-
form tablets to a possibly non-Semitic source among
the Accadian or Sumerian population, which ten
thousand years ago had already begun to develop
an artistic and agricultural life on the Babylonian
plain. Numerous students have restored the outlines
and motives of this ancient faith, whose forms and
doctrines bind and shape our lives in America
to-day.
Of the possibly still older culture of Egypt, so
much cannot be said. The original creeds of its
religion have been less successfully divined. Like
its early inscriptions, they were erased and overlaid
so often by the caprice or prejudice of successive
dynasties, and so profoundly modified by foreign
24. Religions of Primitive Peoples
influences, that with our present knowledge they
are no longer legible.*
Turning to the religions which have preserved
their primitive forms to modern times, the first place
should be conceded to those of America. Up to
four hundred years ago, all of them, throughout the
continent, had developed from an unknown antiquity
untouched by the teachings of Asian or European
instructors ; for no really sane scholar nowadays be-
lieves either that St. Thomas preached Christianity
in the New World in the first century, or that Buddh-
ist monks in the seventh or any other century car-
ried their tenets into Mexico and Guatemala.
Many of the American tribes, moreover, lived in
the rudest stages of social life, ignorant of agricult-
ure, without fixed abodes, naked or nearly so, in
constant bloody strife, destitute even of tribal gov-
ernment. Here, if anywhere, we should find the
religious sentiment, if it exists at all, in its simplest
elements. *
On the other hand, the first European explorers
found in Peru, Yucatan, and Mexico numerous tribes
* Besides the general works on Egyptian religion, I may note R.
Pietschmann, “Aegypt. Fetischdienst und Götterglaube,” in Zeit-
schrift fir Athnologie, Bd. x., s. I53, sq. He points out that there
was no unity in the ancient cults of Egypt, as the gods were those of
the nomes only. The worship of Osiris did not prevail generally till
after the sixth dynasty (p. I65).
Study of Primitive Religions 25
in almost a civilised condition, builders of huge edi-
fices of carved stones, cultivating the soil, and ac-
quainted with a partly phonetic system of writing.
Their mythology was ample and their ritual elabor-
ate, so that it could scarcely be called primitive in
appearance; but in all these instances, myth and
ritual were so obviously identical in character with
those of the vagrant tribes elsewhere, that we shall
make no mistake in classifying them together.
Equally isolated and surely as rude as the rudest
were the native Australians, the wavy-haired, bearded,
black people who sparsely inhabited that huge island,
two thousand miles wide by two thousand five hun-
dred miles long. Isolated by arid stretches of desert,
the struggle for life was incessant, and there is little
wonder that we find them in an incredibly debased
condition associated with unending war and canni-
balism. For these very reasons, their religious no-
tions deserve our closest scrutiny.
The vast island-world of Polynesia was peopled by
related tribes, usually of limited cultivation, but with
a rich mythology, of which we have many strange
and beautiful fragments. They are primitive in
form and expression, with singular differences as
well as analogies to the beliefs of continental tribes.
Africa, with its countless dusky hordes, offers a less
promising field to the student of the earliest phases
26 Religions of Primitive Peoples
of religion than we might expect. The conditions
of the arts, and the ruins of foreign-built cities unite
with the classic historians to show that in remote
ages the influence of distant nations, from Egypt,
Arabia, and India, on the typical black population
was profound and far-reaching. The white Hamites
of the north crossed the Sahara and extended their
~rms far into the Soudan ; while on the east coast,
the black Hamites and Arabic Ethiopians drove the
aborigines far to the South. Later, Arabic influ-
ences penetrated into the interior, dissolving the
older faiths or discolouring them. Thus, little of
the independent development of religious thought
remains in Africa. Its most primitive features are
probably best preserved in the extreme South,
among the Hottentots, Bushmen, and Zulus.
On the Asian continent, some of the Sibiric tribes
in the north and some of those of Dravidian descent
in the mountains of Hindoostan preserved to a late
day their primitive traits; while the fading rem-
nants of the Veddahs in Ceylon and the black
islanders of Melanesia still continue in the simple
faiths of their ancestors.
These hints will indicate the chief sources from
which I shall draw the material to illustrate the
rudimentary stages of religious thought and act, the
embryonic period, as it were, of those emotions and
Study of Primitive Religions 27
beliefs which to us, in riper forms, are so dear and
so holy.
Here I must define what is meant in these lectures
by “religions.” Most people confine that term to
the historic faiths and cults, calling others “supersti-
tions '' and “paganisms.” Some will not acknow-
ledge that there is any religion whatever except their
own ; all other beliefs are heresies, apostasies, or
heathenisms. Even such an intelligent writer as Sir
John Lubbock expressed doubts in one of his works
whether he ought to apply the word “religions ° to
the worship tendered their deities by savages.
On the other hand, a Protestant will freely de-
nounce the practices of the Roman Church as
“superstitions,” and will claim that they are degen-
erations of religion; while among Protestants, the
Quaker looks upon all external rites as equally
“superstitious.”
No such distinctions can be recognised in eth-
nology. The principle at the basis of all religions
and all superstitions is the same, as I shall show in
the next lecture, and the grossest rites of barbarism
deserve the name of “religion’’ just as much as the
refined ceremonies of Christian churches. The aims
of the worshipper may be selfish and sensuous,
there may be an entire absence of ethical intention,
his rites may be empty formalities and his creed im-
28 Religions of Primitive Peoples
moral, but this will be his religion all the same, and
we should not apply to it any other name.*
There is no one belief or set of beliefs which con-
stitutes a religion. We are apt to suppose that every
creed must teach a belief in a god or gods, in an im-
mortal soul, and in a divine government of the
world. The Parliament of Religions, which lately
met at Chicago, announced, in its preliminary call,
these elements as essential to the idea of religion.
No mistake could be greater. The religion which
to-day counts the largest number of adherents, Buddh-
ism, rejects every one of these items.” The Jewish
doctrine of the Old Testament, the Roman religion
of the time of Julius Caesar, and many others, have
not admitted the existence of a soul, or the con-
tinuance of the individual life after death. Some
believe in souls, but not in gods; while a divine
government is a thought rarely present in Savage
* Some have explained superstition as “degenerate religion”;
others as “religious error”; others (Pfleiderer) as “a pathological
condition of normal belief"; but all such definitions depend on the
view-point. As Roskoff remarks: “The man who is plunged in
superstition is sure to hold it for the only true faith, and is contented
with it so long as he is not troubled with doubts.”—Das Religions-
wesen der Maturvålker, p. 17.
+ See T. Rhys Davids, Indian Buddhism, p. 29 (Hibbert Lect-
ures), and in the first volume of the present series of lectures.
f Death was to the Roman the sommum etermale. Prof. Sayce
remarks of the ancient Chaldeans that they had no definite belief in
an after life.—Aſióðert Lectures, p. 358.
Study of Primitive Religions 29
minds. They do not, as a rule, recognise any such
principle as that of good and evil, or any doctrine of
rewards and punishment hereafter for conduct in the
present life.
There is, in fact, not any one item in any creed
which is accepted by all religions; yet a common
source, a common end in view, and the closest ana-
logy of means to that end, bind all in one, repre-
senting an indefeasible element of human nature,
the lowest containing the potentiality of the highest,
the highest being but the necessary evolution of the
lowest. The same promptings which led the earliest
of men to frame their crude ideas about the super-
sensuous around them have nourished and devel-
oped religions ever since, and keep them alive to-day.
Temples may crumble and creeds decay, but the
spirit remains the same. -
This inherent unity of all religious feeling and ex-
pression was long ago perceived by St. Augustine.
In a well-known passage of his Refractations he
makes the striking remark: “Res ipsa, quae nunc
religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos,
nec defuit ab initio generis humani’’; “That which
is now called the Christian religion existed among
the ancients, and in fact was with the human race
from the beginning.”
This is, essentially, the maxim of modern eth-
3O Religions of Primitive Peoples
nology. The religiosity of man is a part of his
psychical being. In the nature and laws of the
human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions,
and passions, lie the well-springs of all religions,
modern or ancient, Christian or heathen. To these
we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever
errors, falsehoods, bigotry, or cruelty have stained
man's creeds and cults; to them we must credit
whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have hal-
lowed and glorified his long search for the perfect
and the eternal.
If this opinion of the place of religion in ethnology
is correct, we should not expect to find any con-
siderable number of men, in the present epoch of
the race's development, devoid of some form of
worship and belief.
The fact is that there has not been a single tribe,
no matter how rude, known in history or visited by
travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of
religion, under some form.
The contrary of this has been asserted by various
modern writers of weight, for example by Herbert
Spencer and Sir John Lubbock, not from their
own observation, for neither ever saw a savage
tribe, but from the reports of travellers and mis-
sionaries.
I speak advisedly when I say that every assertion
Study of Primitive Religions 3 I
to this effect when tested by careful examination
has proved erroneous.*
What led to such a mistaken opinion is easily
seen. The missionaries would not recognise as re-
ligion the beliefs which were so different from and
inferior to their own. The god of the heathens was
to them no god whatever. When they heard stories
of ghosts, magic, and charms, they spurned these as
old wives' fables, and confidently proclaimed that
the tribe had no religion. Thus it was with those
who first worked in South Africa. They returned
and proclaimed that atheism was “ endemic" among
the tribes of that region. Later observers, acquaint-
ing themselves with the languages of the Blacks,
found an ample mythology and an extensive ritual
of worship.f
Another example may be quoted from a recent
description of the Motu tribe of New Guinea. The
writer, a missionary, denies that they have any reli-
gion whatever; but immediately proceeds to describe
their numerous “superstitious ” rites, their belief in
spirits, their ceremonial law, etc. 1.
* The question has been carefully examined by G. Roskoff in his
work Das Ā’eligions wesen der Æohestem AWaturvå/ker (Leipzig, 1880)
He conclusively refutes the assertions that tribes have been encount
ered without religion.
# Calloway, Zºe/igious System of the Amazulus, p. II.3.
f Rev. W. Y. Turner in }our. Anthrop. Institute, vol. vii., p.
492.
32 Religions of Primitive Peoples
Another and potent cause of error was the unwill-
ingness of the natives to speak to foreigners of the
sacred mysteries. This is not peculiar to them, but
obtains everywhere. In the polite society of our
own cities, it is held to be an infraction of etiquette
to question a person about his religious Opinions and
practices. Greater repugnance would be felt were
it known that the questioner could have no sym-
pathy with one's opinions, and would probably hold
them up to derision and contempt.
Even a stronger deterrent motive closes the mouth
of most savages giving such information. It is fabu,
prohibited under severe penalties, to impart it to any
stranger, or even to another tribesman. The tend-
ency to secrecy, to the esoteric, belongs to all re-
ligions, and especially to those in which the emotions
are predominant, as is the case with primitive cults.
Even with a willing narrator, it is impossible to
acquire a true understanding of a religion without a
knowledge of the language in which its myths and
precepts are couched. Ordinary interpreters are
worse than useless. Captain Bourke tells us that time
and again he was assured by Mexican interpreters
who had lived for years among the Apaches that
this tribe had no religion and no sacred ceremonies.
“These interpreters,” he adds, “had no intention
to deceive ; they were simply unable to disengage
Study of Primitive Religions 33
themselves from their own prejudices; they could
not credit the existence of any such thing as religion
Save and except that taught them at their mother's
knees.” ” If these Spanish-Mexicans, who had
passed half their lives among the natives, denied
them religion, what can we expect the ordinary
traveller to learn in a few weeks' visit P
Religion, therefore, is and has been, so far as
history informs us, universal in the human race.
Can we go farther back in time than history leads
us, and say that it has ever been an element of
humanity ?
The resources at our command to answer this
inquiry lie in prehistoric archaeology and linguistics.
Beyond historic ages, and beyond those referred
to by vague tradition, which we may call semi-
historic, lies the epoch of culture called from its
chief industry the Stone Age, divided into the more
recent or “neolithic" period, and the older or
“palaeolithic” period.
Concerning the former, there can be no doubt
whatever that religion exercised a tremendous in-
fluence on men's minds. We have numberless
sepulchres of peoples then living, mighty mounds
and massive temples, such as Stonehenge and
Karnac; we have them by the tens of thousands,
* Medicine Men of the Apache, pp. 499, 500.
3 gº
2' *
34 Religions of Primitive Peoples
over vast areas, remaining as indubitable proofs that
the chief market of the time of those early sons of
the soil was to worship the gods and prepare for
death. We have their idols, amulets, and mystic
Symbols, their altars and their talismans, so as to
leave no doubt of their deep devotion. No archaeo-
logist questions this.
When we come to palaeolithic man, however,
especially to those ancient tribes who lived in
Western Europe when the great continental glacier
chilled the air of Southern France to an arctic
frigidity, or still earlier, in that pre-glacial summer
when the hippopotamus found a congenial home in
the river Thames, we are not so sure. Among the
many thousands of artificially shaped stone and
bone objects which have been collected from that
horizon, there is not one which we can positively
identify as of religious purport, as a charm, amulet,
fetish, or idol. The rare instances in which the
bones of the men of that age have been preserved
reveal no positive signs of funerary rites.
For these reasons some able archaeologists, such as
Professor G. de Mortillet, have maintained that man,
as he then was, had not yet developed his religious
faculties. The evidence for this, is, indeed, negative,
and fresh discoveries may refute it, but the present
probability is that in the infancy of the race there
Study of Primitive Religions 35
was at least no objective expression of religious
feeling.*
This appears supported by testimony from
another quarter. When we can trace back the
Sacred words of a language to their original roots,
we find that these roots do not have religious associ-
ations, but refer to concrete and sensuous images.
There must have been a time, therefore, when those
who spoke that original dialect employed these
words without any religious meaning attached to
them, and therefore had no religious ideas expressed
in their language, and presumably none defined in
their minds.
I am not sure, however, that this argument is so
valid as some writers claim. Those early men may
have had other religious terms, now lost; and the
current belief among linguists that all radicals had
at first concrete meanings is one I seriously doubt.
Mental processes and feelings are just as real as
actions, and in the aboriginal tongues of America
are expressed by radicals as distinct and as ancient
as any for sensuous perception.
There must, however, have been a time in the
progress of organic forms from some lower to that
highest mammal, Man, when he did not have a re-
*The question is carefuly discussed by Hoernes, Orgeschichte des
Menschen, p. 93, sq., who disputes Mortillet's opinion. The latter is
given in his Préhistorique Antiquité de l'Aſomme, p. 603, sq.
36 Religions of Primitive Peoples
ligious consciousness; for it is doubtful if even the
slightest traces of it can be discerned in the inferior
animals.
Mr. Darwin, indeed, put in a plea that his
favourite dog manifested the same psychical traits
which lead savages to believe in gods or spiritual
agencies *; and lately Professor Pinsero, of Palermo,
has argued that the anthropoid apes cultivate a
worship of serpents, even burying them with con-
siderable ceremony, and placing in their tombs a
provision of insects for their consumption in their
future life +
But these scientific speculations have not found
general acceptance, and even Professor Pinsero him-
self, while conceding religion to the ape, denies it to
prehistoric man of the earlier epochs.
We may conclude, therefore, that the develop-
ment of the religious side of man's nature began at
a very early period in his history as a species, though
probably it was extremely vague or practically absent
in his first stadia; and that it is something distinctly
human, and not shared in any definite form by even
the best developed of the lower animals.
It is the only trait in which he is qualitatively sep-
arated from them. They, too, communicate know-
ledge by sounds; they have governments and arts;
* 7 he Descent of Man, p. 95.
iſ Quoted in Z’ Anthropologie, vol. viii., p. 334.
Study of Primitive Religions 37
but never do we see anywhere among them the notion
of the Divine. This was the spark of Promethean
fire which has guided man along the darksome
and devious ways of his earthly pilgrimage to the
Supremacy he now enjoys.
The Greek fable tells us of the shepherd lad
Endymion, who fed his sheep on Mt. Latmus, and
dreamed of no higher ambition, until in his sleep
the goddess Selene descended from heaven and em-
braced him. Inspired by her divine touch, he waked
to noble aspirations, and went forth to become mon-
arch of Elis and father of a line of kings.
So the human mind groped for dateless ages amid
brutish toils and pleasures, unconscious of grander
aims; until the thought of God, rising to conscious-
ness within the soul, whispered to it of endless
progress and divine ideals, in quest of which it has
sought and will ever continue seeking, with tireless
endeavour and constantly increasing reward.
This question settled, another arises. The re-
ligions thus found everywhere among the rudest
tribes, did they take root and exert a deep influence
on the individual and society, or were they super-
ficially felt, and of slight moment in practical life?
In reference to this I can scarcely be too positive.
No opinion can be more erroneous than the one some-
times advanced that savages are indifferent to their
38 Religions of Primitive Peoples
faiths. On the contrary, the rule, with very few ex-
ceptions, is that religion absorbs nearly the whole
life of a man under primitive conditions. From
birth to death, but especially during adult years, his
daily actions are governed by ceremonial laws of the
severest, often the most irksome and painful char-
acters. He has no independent action or code of
conduct, and is a very slave to the conditions which
such laws create.
This is especially visible in the world-wide customs
of totemic divisions and the tabu, or religious pro-
hibitions. These govern his food and drink, his
marriage and social relations, the disposition of
property, and the choice of his wives. An infraction
of them is out of the question. It means exile or
death. The notions of tolerance, freedom of con-
science, higher law, are non-existent in primitive
communities, except under certain personal condi.
tions which I shall mention in a later lecture.
As has been tersely said by Professor Granger,
“Religion in the ancient world comprised every
social function ”; and the identity of its rules with
those of common life is correctly put by Professor
Thiele in these words: “The idea of a separation
between Church and State is utterly foreign to all
the religions of antiquity.” ”
* Granger, Religion of the Romans, p. 21 ; Thiele, Hist, of the
A.gyptian Religion, Introd.
Study of Primitive Religions 39
What was true in those ancient days is equally SO
in this age among savage peoples. Let us take as an
example the Dyaks of Borneo. A recent observer
describes them as utter slaves to their “supersti-
tions,” that is, to their religion.” “When they lay
out their fields, gather the harvest, go hunting or
fishing, contract a marriage, start on an expedition,
propose a commercial journey, or anything of import-
ance, they always consult the gods, offer sacrifices,
celebrate feasts, study the omens, obtain talismans,
and so on, often thus losing the best opportunity for
the business itself.”
This is equally the case with most savage tribes.
Mr. J. Walter Fewkes informed me that it was a
severe moral shock to the Pueblo Indians to see the
white settlers plant corn without any religious cere-
mony; and a much greater one to perceive that the /
corn grew, flourished, and bore abundant crops
The result did more to shatter their simple faith
than a dozen missionary crusades.
To the simple mind of the primitive man, as to
the Mohammedan to-day, there is no such thing as
an intermediate law, directing phenomena, and
capable of expression in set terms. To him, every
event of nature and of life is an immediate mani-
* Dr. Schwaner, in H. Ling Roth, The AWatives of Sarawak, vol.
ii., App. p. clxii.
4O Religions of Primitive Peoples
festation of the power of God, eine Kraftp.robe
Gozzes.*
Religion, however, does not begin from any ex-
ternal pressure, no matter how strong this may be.
If it has any vitality, if it is anything more than the
barrenest ceremonial, it must start within, from the
soul itself. Thus it did in primordial ages in all
tribes of men.
Therefore in studying its origin and pursuing its
development we must commence with its fonts and
springs in the mind of man, its psychic sources.
These understood, we can proceed to its three chief
expressions, in Words, in Objects, and in Rites.
* H. Grimme, Mohammed, p. 38.
LECTURE II.
The Origin and Contents of Primitive
Religions.
CONTENTS:—Former Theories of the Origin of Religions—Inadequacy
of these—Universal Postulate of Religions that Conscious Voli-
tion is the Source of Force—How Mind was Assigned to Nature
—Communion between the Human and the Divine Mind—Uni-
versality of “Inspiration ”—Inspiration the Product of the Sub-
Conscious Mind—Known to Science as “Suggestion ”—This
Explained—Examples—Illustrations from Language—No Primi-
tive Monotheism—The Special Stimuli of the Religious Emo-
tions : I. Dreaming and Allied Conditions—Life as a Dream—
2. The Apprehension of Life and Death and the Notion of the
Soul–3. The Perception of Light and Darkness ; Day and
Night—The Sky God as the High God—4. The Observation of
Extraordinary Exhibitions of Force—The Thunder God—5. The
Impression of Vastness—Dignity of the Sub-Conscious Intelli-
gence.
N the last lecture we have seen that all tribes of
men, so far as is known, have had religions.
How this happened, what general cause brought
about so universal a fact, has puzzled the brains of
philosophers and theologians. Their explanations
have been as various and as conflicting on this as on
most other subjects.
A goodly number of philosophers, ancient and
4I
42 Religions of Primitive Peoples
modern, have looked upon religion of any kind as a
symptom of a diseased brain. Thus Empedocles, in
the fifth century B.C., declared it to be a sickness of
the mind, and Feuerbach, in the present century, has
characterised it as the most pernicious malady of
humanity. Regarding all forms of religions as delu-
sions, detrimental therefore to sound reason and the
pursuit of truth, they believed the human intellect
could freely employ its powers only when liberated
from such shackles.
Another ancient theory still survives, that which
has its name from Euhemerus, a Sicilian writer
of the time of Alexander the Great. He claimed
that religions arose from the respect and reverence
paid to kings and heroes during their lives, continued
by custom after their deaths. Under the modern
name of “ancestor worship ’’ this has been maintained
by Herbert Spencer and others as the primitive
source of all worship.
Yet another philosophical opinion has been that
religions were due to the craft of rulers and priests,
who, by the aid of superstitious fear, sought to keep
their subjects and votaries in subjection. These
tricksters invented the terrors of another world to
secure their own power and places in this one. This
opinion was a favourite about the time of the French
Revolution and is mirrored in the poems of Shelley,
Origin and Contents 43
who announced it as one of his missions, “to un-
veil the religious frauds by which nations have been
deluded into submission.” ”
The prevailing theory of the great world-religions,
Christianity and Mohammedanism, has been sub-
stantially that of Empedocles. They have regarded
all the religions of the world as cunning fabrications
of the Devil and his imps, snares spread for human
souls; always with one exception however : each
excepts itself. This is the view so grandly expressed
in Milton's Paradise Lost and quite common yet in
civilised lands.
On the other hand, a strong school of Christian
writers, led early in this century by Joseph de Maistre
and Chateaubriand and represented in our tongue by
Archdeacon Trench, have asserted that all faiths, even
the most savage, are fragments and reminiscences,
distorted and broken indeed, of a primitive revelation
vouchsafed by the Almighty to the human race
everywhere at the beginning. These have occupied
themselves in pointing out the analogies of savage
and pagan creeds and rites with those of Christianity,
in proof of their theory.
Not remote from them are the teachers of the
doctrine of the “inner light,” that “light which light-
eth every man who cometh into the world,” disclos-
* In his Preface to 7%e A’evolt of Zslam.
44 Religions of Primitive Peoples
ing unto him the existence of God and the fact of
his soul. They teach, with Wordsworth, that
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home ; ”
and that it is by perversion or wilful blindness that
any man avers ignorance of these primal truths.
The philosophic aspect of this theory has been
presented by the master minds of Kant, Hegel, and
Schelling. Kant identified the idea of God with
the Ideal of Reason, the perfect Intelligence, to-
ward which all minds, even the humblest, must
necessarily strive. Hegel, in a fine passage of his
Philosophy of Religion, urges the study of pagan and
primitive religions with a view to define their real
significance and to discover the grains of truth which
ever lie within them, the reason and the goodness
which give them life.
The modern German ethnographers, such as
Peschel, Ratzel, and Schurtz,” have not ventured to
follow these earlier thinkers of their nation, but
have contented themselves with tracing the origin of
religion to one characteristic of the human intellect,
to wit, the notion of Cause. The relation of cause
and effect, they claim, is so ingrained in the think-
* O. Peschel, Völkerkunde, s. 255; F. Ratzel, AEthnographie,
Bd. i ;-Schurtz, Catechismzzes aer Pö/#erkunde, s. 88.
Origin and Contents 45
ing mind that it inevitably leads all men to assume
causes, such as spiritual agencies, when others are
not visible.
This popular view seems weak ; for not only is
the relation of cause to effect a mere assumption,
and, indeed, rejected by exact science; but it
dodges the very question at issue, which is to ex-
plain why spiritual agencies are imagined as causes
of material effects.
Similar objections lie to deriving primitive re-
ligions from a vague “perception of the Infinite,”
or a sensus numinis, some deus in nobis, “warning
us,” as Virgil says, “by his quick motion.” These are
unclear, unsatisfying expressions, offering no rational
explanation, and full of equivocations.
A favourite theory in all times is that religions
arose from the emotion of fear. It was taught by
the Latin poet Petronius in a famous line, where he
says “Fear first made the gods”; and it has been
strenuously advocated by many modern philosophers
and ethnologists. #
Now if this emotion is alone sufficient to evoke
religious feeling, why, I ask, is that feeling absent in
the craven and timid lower animals? Why is it so
feeble in many a coward P Why has it been so strong
in many a hero?
Moreover, the spirit of many early religions is the
46 Religions of Primitive Peoples
reverse of that of fear. They are, as Dr. Robert-
son Smith correctly said, “predominantly joyous.”
These are proofs enough that this ancient and
popular notion rests on a misconception of facts.
The “fear of God " enters, indeed, into every
religion ; but religion itself did not arise from it.
We must already have a notion of God, before we
can fear Him.
If we are going to apply the scientific method to
the study of religions we must offer an explanation
for their existence which is intelligible, which is
verifiable, and which holds good for all of them,
primitive or developed, those of the remotest ages
and those of to-day. Only thus can the ethnologist
treat them as one element of the history of
Humanity, a property of the species.
This has not been done, so far as I know, up to
the present time. In fact, much of the teaching of
modern anthropology has been calculated to deter
it. The outspoken advocacy of atheism and
materialism by the French School has led its dis-
ciples to consider the effort unprofitable; * and the
acceptance of the doctrine of “Animism '' as a
sufficient explanation of early cults has led to
the neglect, in English-speaking lands, of their pro-
* The eminent anthropologist Broca denied that religiosity is a
distinctive trait of humanity. See further in Hovelacque et Hervé,
Précis d’Anthropologie, pp. 634–636.
Origin and Contents 47
founder analysis. Such a writer, for instance, as
Andrew Lang does not hesitate to teach that, “The
origin of a belief in God is beyond the ken of
history and speculation.” ”
The real explanation of the origin of religion is
simple and universal. Let any man ask himself on
what his own religious belief is founded, and the
answer, if true, will hold good for every member of
the race, past and present. It makes no difference
whether we analyse the superstitions of the rudest
Savages, or the lofty utterances of John the Evangel-
ist, or of Spinoza the “god-intoxicated philo-
sopher ’’; we shall find one and the same postulate
to the faith of all.
This universal postulate, the psychic origin of all
religious thought, is the recognition, or, if you
please, the assumption, that conscious volition is the
ultimate source of all Force. It is the belief that
behind the sensuous, phenomenal world, distinct
from it, giving it form, existence, and activity, lies
the ultimate, invisible, immeasurable power of Mind,
of conscious Will, of Intelligence, analogous in some
way to our own ; and,-mark this essential corollary,
—that man is in communication with it.
What the highest religions thus assume was
likewise the foundation of the earliest and most
* Myth, Ritual, and A’eligion, vol. i., chap. xi.
48 Religions of Primitive Peoples
primitive cults. The one universal trait amid their
endless forms of expression was the unalterable
faith in Mind, in the super-sensuous, as the ultimate
source of all force, all life, all being.
Science and Christianity teach the same, but with
this difference: the progress of observation has
taught us the existence of certain uniform se-
quences which we call “laws of nature,” based solely
on Mind, but representing its processes of realisa-
tion. The savage knew not these. He imagined
every motion in nature was the immediate exhibit-
ion of Will, his own will in his own motions, some
seen or unseen will in other motions. The seen
were of another being like himself; the unseen
were to that extent unknown, and these were his
gods.
I repeat, wherever we find the divine, the spirit-
ual agency, set forth in myth or symbol, creed or
rite, we find it characterised by two traits: it is of
the nature of the human mind, that is, super-
sensuous; and it is the ultimate source of power.
It will be my aim to show the expressions of these
universal postulates of the religious sentiment in
the rudest faiths of the world.
You may ask, by what process of thinking did
primitive man assign mind to nature. The process
is extremely simple, and is illustrated by the action
Origin and Contents 49
of any child. Let one be accidentally hurt by an
empty rocking-chair in motion ; at once, it is angry
at the chair, and is gratified to see it whipped
The child-mind assigns to the object the will and
the sensations of which it is conscious in itself.
This is the simplest explanation it can imagine for
action.
Precisely so is it with the savage man. Wherever
he perceives motion, independent of a living being,
he assumes the presence of a conscious agent, not
visible to his senses. As Professor Sayce remarks
of the early Chaldeans: “To them the spiritual, the ,
27, was that which manifested life, and the test of 4–
the manifestation of life was movement.” ” This is
universally true of primitive faiths.
But this was not enough. To most if not all
primitive men, movement was not the only mani-
festation of life. To them, the immovable, the
rock, the mountain, any inanimate object, was like-
wise a conscious spiritual agency, a thinking being.
This, too, has its explanation in one of the simplest,
most elementary traits of mind, the sense of Person-
ality. To the undeveloped reason, the Other is k-
ever conceived as Another, a Self, and is clothed
with the attributes of the Self, of the thinking Ego.
* Aſióðert Zectures, p. 328, Darwin has a parallel passage, Oe-
scent of Man, p. 95,
4.
5O Religions of Primitive Peoples
This is always the case in the tales of children and
the myths of savage tribes.” -
These are the earliest concepts of the religious
faculty; but they would have been powerless to
seize upon the emotions and to develop the great
religions of the world, had they not been supported
by that which is the corner-stone of every creed on
earth, the corollary I mentioned, to wit, the direct
communion between the human and the divine
mind, between the Man and God.
This is the one trait shared by the highest as well
as the lowcst, it is the one proof of authenticity
which each proclaims for itself. I shall tell you of
religions so crude as to have no temples or altars,
no rites or prayers; but I can tell you of none that
does not teach the belief of the intercommunion of
the spiritual powers and man. Every religion is a
Revelation—in the opinion of its votaries. Those
which are called the “book-religions '' depend main-
ly upon the record of a revelation, while in all primi-
tive faiths inspiration is actual and constant. The
* “Everything, animate or inanimate, which has an independent
being, or can be individualised, possesses a spirit, or, more properly,
a shade (idahi, a shadow, or reflection).” Washington Matthews,
Aºthnog. of the Hidatsa, p. 48. This expresses the general Welt-
anschauung of the savage mind. Let it be remembered that it is
also characteristic of the poetic, or personifying representation of
nature, and thus belongs to the highest artistic expressions of the
human mind as well as to its feeblest utterances,
Origin and Contents 5 I
human soul, regarded in its origin as an emanation of
the Divine, is in its nature omniscient when in mo-
ments of ecstasy it frees itself from its material
envelope.*
When an Australian native is asked if he has ever
seen the great Creator, Baiame, he will reply :
“No, not seen him, but I have felt [or inwardly
perceived] him.” + A Basuto chief replied to the
question whether his people knew of God before
the missionaries came : “We did not know Him,
but we dreamed of Him.”
All shamanism is based on a direct relation to
divinity. The shaman is an inspired prophet and H
healer, and believes as firmly in his inspiration as do
his credulous adherents. From shamanism was devel-
oped in India the practice known as Yoga, charac-
terised by ecstatic seizures, periods of cerebral
exaltation, and alleged divine powers. 1. To the
same origin we must attribute the similar phe-
* This was the universal opinion of classical antiquity. See Payne
Knight, Ancient Art, p. 45. It was also the orthodox theory of the
early Church concerning the redeemed soul. It “will know all
things as God doth. Whatsoever is in Heaven and whatsoever is in
earth, everything will he see with that veritable knowledge which
nothing escapeth.”—Select Works of St. Æphrem the Syrian, trans-
lated by Rev. J. B. Morris, p. 353.
+ Ridley, in }our. Anthrop. Institute, vol. ii., p. 269.
f Mr. A. E. Gough gives reasons for the opinion that the yogin, who
practises the yoga, is a lineal follower of the ancient local shaman.
—Philosophy of the CZanishads, p. 22I.
52 Religions of Primitive Peoples
nomena of “speaking with tongues,” and religious
mania.
I am not speaking of deceptions or illusions.
When I say that all religions depend for their ori-
gin and continuance directly upon inspiration, I
state an historic fact. It may be known under
other names, of credit or discredit, as mysticism,
ecstasy, rhapsody, demoniac possession, the divine
afflatus, the gnosis, or in its latest christening, “cos-
mic consciousness.” “ All are but expressions of a
belief that knowledge arises, words are uttered, or
actions performed, not through conscious ideation
and reflective purpose, but through the promptings
of a power above or beyond the individual mind."
Prophets and shamans, evangelists and Indian medi-
cine-men, all claim, and all claim with honesty, to be
moved by the god within, the deus in nobis, and to
speak the words of the Lord.
* This curious recent development of most ancient experience is
described by Dr. M. Bucke in the work, Zm A^e Walt Whitman.
# The phenomena of “demoniac possession ” are so remarkable,
and so frequent in lower conditions of culture that they have been
defended as the actual influence of evil spirits by intelligent modern
observers (see the work of Rev. Dr. Nevins, ZXemoniac Aºossession in
China, etc.). Bishop Calloway says most of the negro converts in
Natal have such attacks after embracing Christianity (jour. Anthrop.
Society, vol. i., p. 171). Brough Smith describes such attacks among
the Australians. Strong men are suddenly seized with violent con-
vulsions. They dance wildly, scream at the top of their voices, foam
at the mouth, and continue until utterly exhausted. They are homi-
cidal when in this condition, and their companions fear to approach
them (7%e Aborigizes of Victoria, vol. i., p. 466).
Origin and Contents 53
The intensity of purpose, and the suppression of
the reason which everywhere and at all times this
sense of inspiration brings with it, cannot be over-
estimated in their influence on the history of the
race. To them are due all fanaticism, religious
bigotry, and illiberality.
He who has walked with God, who has felt the
pressure of the divine hand, who has been rewarded
with the “beatific vision,” to him all lesser ties are
weak, all knowledge vain. He will say: “It is bet-
ter to know God and be ignorant of all else, than to
know all else and be ignorant of God.” No reason-
ing can convince him of error, for his logic acknow-
ledges not the laws of human thought ; no appeal
will soften his judgments, for he utters not the
decision of a man, but the unalterable edict of the
God.
Unless we can offer a rational explanation for this
universal trait, all religions become inexplicable.
Fortunately the investigations of modern psycho-
logy enable us to present such an explanation. It
teaches us by innumerable examples that by far the
majority of the impressions on our senses leave no
trace in conscious recollection, although they are
stored in the records of the brain ; that what seems
lost to memory, still lingers in its recesses; and that
mental action is constantly going on and reaching
results, wholly without our knowledge.
54 Religions of Primitive Peoples
The psychologist calls this process by the terms
“unconscious cerebration,” or “psychic automat-
ism.” It is the function of the “sub-limital con-
sciousness,” or, for short, the “sub-consciousness.”
Not only is it common, it is constant, and the results
of this unperceived labour of our minds is often far
more valuable than those of our intelligent efforts.
The most complex mechanical inventions, the most
impressive art-work of the world, even the most dif-
ficult mathematical solutions, have been attained
through this unknowing mechanism of mind. They
sccmcd real inspirations, but we may be sure that
the mind through long conscious effort had been
storing the material and laying the foundation for
the perfect edifice which sprang so magically into
existence.
The psychologist has gone farther. Not resting
content with the detection of this automatic mental
machinery, he has studied how it is set a-going, and
is prepared to show that in all its forms it can be
produced at will under favourable conditions. Like
an ancient necromancer, he can inspire and bewitch,
he can exorcise demons and cast out devils.
His power is not occult, for it belongs to science,
and science has no secrets. It is known as “sug-
9
gestion,” and in it lies the sociologic power of all
religions and superstitions whatever, primitive or
Origin and Contents 55
present. It is necessary, therefore, that I devote a
few words to its explanation. -
Suggestion in its simplest form is the indirect
evocation of an idea in the mind as the starting-
point of a process of thought and feeling. The idea
may be impressed by a repetition of the stimulus,
by association with allied ideas, or by sensory con-
tacts. It may be evoked by deliberate effort of our
9
own, which is called “auto-suggestion "; or the im-
pression may be derived from or directed to a num-
ber of individuals, which is termed “collective sug-
gestion.”
Powerful means of suggestion are the monotonous
repetitions of certain words; the fixation of the
sight on a single object; the concentration of the
mind on one thought ; the reduction of the ordi-
nary nutrition ; association with persons already
under its influence ; continuance of the same mo-
tions; prolonged hearing the same note or rhythmic
chord ; silence, darkness, and solitude. These may
be variously combined and brought to bear upon
the mind in such a manner as entirely to alter its
ordinary habits, and seemingly to evoke another
personality.
The rationale by which this is reached is through
developing the automatic and unconscious action of
the mind into a conscious display of its powers.
56 Religions of Primitive Peoples
This may be repulsive or admirable, above or be-
low the normal capacities; but is always correlated
to the individual, and connected with his experiences.
This is the explanation of nearly all the religious
experiences of primitive peoples, as it is of what is
known as “ theopathy ’’ everywhere, and of the
modern forms of theosophy, mesmerism, and hyp-
notism.*
All religious teachings and associations, in the
lowest as well as the highest faiths, aim to cultivate
these mystical feelings by increasing the intensity of
the suggestions which give rise to them, and dimin-
ishing the force of other suggestions which may
interfere.
Even in civilised communities it is extraordinary
with what facility suggestive sense-delusions can be
produced in waking persons. At least ninety out of
every hundred individuals can be persuaded thus to
deceive themselves. The extreme contagiousness
of such delusions, common enough in civilised con-
ditions, is greatly increased in the savage state. In
their lives the phenomena of auto-suggestion are
strikingly frequent. Among the African Zulus any
adult can cast himself or herself into the hypnotic
* The most complete study of this subject in connection with the
development of religions is the work of Dr. Otto Stoll, Suggestion
und Hypnotismus in der Völkerpsychologie (Leipzig, 1894).
Origin and Contents 57
state, and by this obtain what they consider second
sight, “the power to see where lost objects are, and
how absent friends are occupied.” When asked to
explain this state of mind, they can only say that it
is one “in which a man is awake, but sees things
which he would not see, if he were not in this state’”;
which reminds us of the remarkable doctrine of the
Sanscrit Upanishads—“There is no limit to the
knowing of the Self that knows.” + Among many
Australian tribes, among the Kamschatkans, and
among the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, as well as
many other peoples, the mysterious power of the
shamans or medicine men is shared by all adults in a
greater or less degree. . -
These are at the bottom of the scale. One degree
higher, and we find the priesthood a separate class,
usually of both sexes, but chosen by natural select-
ion from those members of the community who by
temperament or cultivation possess in the highest
degree this tendency to mystical power. This
* Bishop Calloway, in }our. Anthrop. Institute, i., p. I'77; and in
his Religious System of the Amazulu, p. 232. The Bushmen explain
it as “a kind of beating of the flesh,” which tells them the future,
and where lost things may be found. They add : “Those who are
stupid do not understand this teaching.”—Bleek, Bushman. Folé-lore,
p. I7.
ł A. E. Gough, Philosophy of the Upanishads, p. 243.
# Klemm, Allgemeine Culturgeschichte, Bd. ii., s. 337; A. M.
Curr, The Australian A'ace, vol. i., p. 48.
58 Religions of Primitive Peoples
is generally indicated by the clearness and char-
acter of the dreams and visions which appear at
the time he or she enters adult life. These are con-
sidered to be direct inspirations from the spirit
world, either from the souls of the dead, or the
powers other than those which control the destiny of
Iſla ſl.
These inspired seers represent the priesthood of
every primitive religion. They cultivate and pre-
serve it, and in them the missionaries of higher
faiths have ever found their most resolute foes and
successful opponents. The reason is, as I have said,
that the shaman has himself been face to face with
God, has heard His voice, and felt His presence.
His faith therefore is real, and cannot be shaken by
any argument. He may indeed, and he generally
does, assist his public performances with some trick-
ery, some thaumaturgy; but that this is merely
superadded for effect is proved by the general cus.
tom that when one such adept is ill or in straits he
will solicit the aid of another. *
Among his associates he is looked upon as set
apart from other men by the divinity which chooses
him for its agent, or dwells within him. In the
Polynesian islands this is forcibly expressed in the
* Curr notes this among the Australians, ubi supra, vol. i., p. 48;
and it is general among American Indians.
Origin and Contents 59
terms applied to the native priests, pia, atua, “god
boxes,” receptacles of divinity; and amama, “open
mouths,” for through them the god speaks, not their
own selves.”
The presence of divinity is recognised and felt
only in unusual mental states, in moments of ecstasy
or trance, in periods of rapture, intoxication, or
frenzy. Hence in all early and many late religions
abnormal and pathological mental seizures are re-
garded as cases of inspiration, or else of demoniac
possession. In the Quichua language of Peru the
word huaca is their most general term for the divine,
y
but huaca runa, “ divine man,” means one who is
crazy i ; and in Greek, the word mania was used for
both madness and prophetic inspiration.
We thus see that in this mental state we find the
psychic development of the primitive idea of the
divine, the notion of God. It is not, as has some-
times been claimed, the sudden result of a single
feeling ; it is a complex conception, from a multi-
tude of obscurely felt impressions and emotions. It
is neither an intuition nor an induction ; it is neither
an inference from observation, nor the conclusion
of a logical process. A study of its aspect in Savage
life shows that it arises from the perception of the
* W. W. Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, p. 35.
+ Middendorf, Keshua Wörterbuch, s. v.
6O Religions of Primitive Peoples
latent activity of the sub-consciousness, from the
Strange sense of activity, will, and power which, un-
der favourable conditions of concentration (suggest-
ion), it imparts to the more or less conscious Self.
This influence is at first vague, impersonal, unde-
fined, but is gradually differentiated and personified.
Furthermore, it is constantly strengthened and sus-
tained by the agency of that cultivated suggestion I
have described, which is intended to bring the indi-
vidual into contact with unknown activities. Thus
the idea of the superhuman is developed from the
unconscious human powers of Mind.
Conclusive evidence of this is offered by language.
From the abundant material at hand let us choose
three examples, widely separated, one from the Dako-
tan stock of North American Indians, one from the
ancient Peruvians, and one from the South Sea
Islanders.
The hidden and mysterious power of the universe
is expressed in the Dakotan dialects by the word
wakan. This term expresses infinite will ; it is, as
Miss Fletcher tells us, “the deification of that pecu-
liar quality or power of which man is conscious
within himself as directing his own acts or willing a
course to bring about certain results.” From the
word zwaczm, will, are derived the terms for what we
call “telepathy,” a belief in which is nigh universal
Origin and Contents 6 I
in primitive cults; for intelligence or mentality; and
for the sacred dance.*
While the meaning of zvakam in Dakota is well
defined, its derivation is uncertain. It is singular
that precisely the same word with the same meaning
reappears in the Quichua and Aymara languages of
the interior of Peru. It is there applied to every-
thing which is extraordinary or immense, out of the
course of nature, and especially to everything sacred
or divine. It was not a deity, but expressed the
deific power believed to be present in men, animals,
or things. †
The identity of the two words is probably no mere
coincidence, nor is the one borrowed from the other.
In Quichua wakan expresses the sound characteristic
of any animal, as al/co zºlakan, the dog howls, hual/pa
zwakam the cock crows, and this in turn is derived
from the interjection of surprise or astonishment or
admiration, hua. It was that which was employed
in the sacred invocations.
Strange as it may seem, the English word “God”
is traced by Aryan scholars through the Gothic guth
to the Sanscrit verb hua to call upon, to invoke (past
participle, hutha), the same primitive interjection in
* Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, 1896. Sect. H.
+ On the meaning of huaca see von Tschudi, Beiträge zur Kennt.
des alten Peru, p. I56; Bertonio, Vocaä. de la Zengua Aymara, s. v.
62 Religions of Primitive Peoples
verbal form ; and the holy name of the Hebrews,
Yahve, is now believed to be that of the Chaldean
god of the earth, waters, and fertility, in whose name
Ed., Ya, or Yah, we recognize a cognate interjection
or refrain, the same which, shouted in the orgiastic
rites, gave the name, Bacchus or Iachus.’
Turning to the island world of the Pacific we find
through its countless groups of sunny isles the im-
personal Divine expressed by one general term, mana.
The natives believed in the agency of departed souls
and also of spirits of independent origin (vui); but
the supernatural power through which both acted on
nature or events was this mana. If a man prospered
in his affairs and gained influence in the tribe, it was
not by his own efforts, but because he had mana;
precisely as pious persons among ourselves attribute
their prosperity and that of their worthy neighbors
to the favour of the Lord. The original meaning of
*The probable identity of Heb. Zah with Chald. Zah is acknow-
ledged by Pinches, Sayce, and other eminent Assyriologists (see an
article by the former, in the Proc. of the Victorian Institute for 1895).
That the Greek Iachus is from the Chaldeo-Syrian (as his myth claims,
referring to him as “The Assyrian stranger,” etc., L. Dyer ZThe
God's in Greece, p. 165) was maintained by Herodotus, Macrobius, and
Plutarch, among the ancients, and by various modern authors. It
can be shown, however, that Yah as a name of God was derived from
a sacred interjection or cry of the same phonetic value, which recurs
repeatedly in the cults of America, Polynesia, and Australia. This
is also true of hua or wa, the radical of the English “God.” They
are both what have been called “universal ’’ radicals.
Origin and Contents 63
mana appears to be “that which is within one,” and,
later, the intelligence on mind, whence power or
might, as the expressions of Will applied to the
concept of universal life and motion.*
These words, I repeat, do not convey any idea of
personality. They are not evidences of a primitive
monotheism, as has often been claimed. They, and
all like them, are vague, indefinite terms for the
supernatural, that which was inexplicable by the
limited knowledge of the most ignorant of our
species. #
The media of suggestion act primarily through the
emotions, and in the religious suggestion those emo-
tions especially are concerned which give rise to
thoughts concerning the super-sensuous and the
manifestation of power.
But none of these emotions in itself, neither fear,
* Codrington in jour. Anthrop. Inst., vol. x., p. 279 ; Fornander,
7%e Polynesian AEace, vol. iii., pp. 225–7. In some dialects mana has
the special meanings, omen ; the thunder; the breath ; the belly (i.e.,
the interior), etc. Hale gives the definition “power” as common to
all dialects (Polynesian Zexicon, s. v.). Fornander notes the similar-
ity to Sanscrit, mana, manu, mind, thought.
+ I have dwelt on the absence of monotheism among the American
tribes in Myths of the AVew World, p. 75. Dr. Washington Matthews,
a most competent, authority, expresses the universally correct view,
when, speaking of Mahopa, the divine conception of the Hidatsa In-
dians, he says: “It refers to an influence or power above all things,
but not attaching to it any ideas of personality,”—Ethnography of the
Aidatsa Zºdians, p. 48.
64 Religions of Primitive Peoples
hope, awe, wonder, nor any other, has the power to
evoke the notion of the supernatural. It arises from
those deeper intellectual traits which are peculiarly
human.
Yet it is true that such emotions are potent
stimuli to those forms of suggestion which lead up
to the religious feelings; they are part of them, and
what arouses and incites those, develops and strength-
ens these ; and they thus have their place as sug-
gestive accessories.
To the savage, all nature testifies to the presence
of the mysterious power which is behind its forms
and motions. He sees the Divine everywhere. But
from this multitude of impressions which excited
him to religious thought we may separate a limited
number as beyond others potent and universal.
These are special stimuli to the religious emotions.
They are five in number :
I. Dreaming and allied conditions.
2. The apprehension of Life and Death, from
which arises the notion of the Soul.
3. The perception of Light and Darkness.
4. The observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions
of Force.
5. The impression of Vastness.
I. A line of Lucretius asserts that “the dreams of
men peopled the heaven with gods.” We have a
Origin and Contents 65
right to reply that if dreams alone give us the gods,
why are they absent from the lives of dogs, who are
vivid dreamers ?
Certain it is, however, that among all savage tribes
dreams are regarded as a part of the experience of
life. To primitive man, they are real: he sees and
hears in them as he does in his waking hours; he
does not distinguish between the subjective creation
of his brain cells and objective existence.
In what they differ from daily life, they are divine.
They reveal the future and summon the absent.
The Kamschatkans, we are told, gather together
every morning to narrate their dreams and to guess
at their interpretation. Of the Eskimos it is stated
that their daily lives “are to a great extent guided
by their dreams.” The Bororo of Brazil take a
dream so literally that a whole village will de-
camp and seek a distant site, if one dreams of the
approach of an enemy.*
The physiological character of dreams easily ex-
plains the superstitious attention they have received
in all ages and nations. The absence of external im-
pressions during sleep favours the rise of unconscious
* Klemm, Culturgeschichte, Bd. ii., s. 338; L. M. Turner, The
Hudson Bay Eskimos, p. 272 ; von den Steinen, Die Maturvålker
Zentral-Brasiliens, p. 340. Among the Australians, both men and
women become “doctors” or shamans by dreaming.—Curr, The
Australian Äace, vol., ii., p. 74.
5
66 Religions of Primitive Peoples
mental action into consciousness. In them memory
is often more active than while waking; our person-
ality seems doubled, because it has no longer the will
to react against the throngs of varied impressions
which arise. The emotions in sleep are excitable, and
both fear and joy are often more intense than when
awake. Add to this that many persons, especially
those of nervous temperament, are subject to pecu-
liarly vivid illusions during the moments between
waking and sleeping, which seem to belong as much
to the former as to the latter conditions,” and we
have reasons enough for the part they play in primi-
tive religions.
There are reasons for believing that the dreams of
ruder races are more vivid than our own, more like
pictures and realities. They certainly do not draw
the line so sharply between the sights and sounds of
sleeping and waking as we do. With wide-open
eyes they see spectres and apparitions, such as are
not unknown, but are ever growing scarcer, in
civilised lands. These waking visions are assidu-
Ously cultivated, and become, as I have already said,
the chief bond between man and divinity. i
* These are called “hypnogogic hallucinations.” They have been
studied by Maury, Annales Medico-psychologiques, tome xi., p. 252,
$47.
+ This point is discussed by Professor Granger, Worship of the
A’omans, pp. 28, Sg.
† Bishop Calloway describes the regimen adopted to become in-
Origin and Contents 67
Not only by fasting, solitude, and intense ex-
pectation centred on the expected revelation, is it
brought into reality, but in nearly every savage tribe
we find a knowledge of narcotic plants which were
employed to induce strange and vivid hallucinations
or dreams. The negroes of the Niger had their
“fetish water,” the Creek Indians of Florida their
“black drink,” for this purpose. In many parts of
the United States the natives smoked stramonium,
the Mexican tribes swallowed the peyotl and the
snake-plant, the tribes of California and the Sam-
oyeds of Siberia had found a poisonous toadstool;
—all to bring about communion with the Divine and
to induce ecstatic visions.” Whatever the means
employed, their aim was everywhere the same, and
was directed primarily and essentially towards the
excitation of the religious emotions, towards secur-
ing a revelation of the will of the gods.
Thus it came that the whole of life, waking and
sleeping, assumed a dreamy, unreal character. The
traveller Spix says of the forest tribes of Brazil
that they never seem fully awake; and a Pawnee
spired among the Zulus, in jour. Anthrop. Soc., vol. i., p. 175.
Among the Dyaks of Borneo the ceremony is called nampok, and its
conditions are : I. To be alone ; 2. To pass the night on a mountain
top ; 3. To offer a sacrifice and call for the god. Ling Roth,
AVatives of Sarawak, vol. i., p. 185.
* I have treated this question at some length in my Myths of the
AVew World, p. 314, and AVagatalism, p. 7, sq.
68 Religions of Primitive Peoples
war song begins by an appeal to the gods to decide
if this life itself is aught but a dream.*
The ancient Mexicans had developed the doctrine
that this life is a dream and that death is the awaken-
ing, the passing into a living condition. They spoke
of dying as the appearance of the dawn, and the
approach of light. This is closely akin to that
doctrine of măyá, or the unreality of the duality of
the subject and object, which “is the very life of the
primitive [East] Indian philosophy.” +
The influence which such a view must have
exerted on the religious thought of a nation is
manifest.
2. The question has been discussed by some
philosophers whether the idea of Life is anterior in
the human mind to that of Death. Had they
studied the beliefs of primitive peoples, their doubts
would have disappeared. The savage knows not
death as a natural occurrence. His language has no
word meaning “to die,” but only “to be killed.”
Disease is an unseen shaft, or the work of a malign-
ant sorcerer. To him, all things live and live
forever. Each bird, each bush, each rock has its
* I have given a translation of it in Essays of an Americanist, p.
293.
ł A. E. Gough, Philosophy of the Upanishads, p. 237. The
Mexican adjurations referred to are given by Sahagun, Historia de
AVueza España, lib. x., cap. 29.
Origin and Contents 69
own vital principle. By reason of the consciousness
of his own living Self, he imputes life to all around
him, but in a higher degree and of some rarer
quality to those existences which he holds as his
deities. His god is supremely a living god, the
source of Life, its creator, preserver, and sustainer.
If we seek the recondite meaning hidden behind
the two words which throughout Polynesia expressed
in its most general sense the concept of the Divine,
io, and azua, we discover that it is in both “the
central cause or essentiality of Life.” ” So among
the Indians of Michoacan the epithet of the chief
goddess of their cult was, “The Sustainer of Life”;
the highest divinity of the Aztecs was Tonacatecutli,
“God of Our Life"; and in the Muskoghean tribes
His name was “The Master of Life.”
So full, I say, was the mind of primitive man with
the vision of universal and immortal life, that to him
there was no such thing as death. The fact, indeed,
remained. The tree was shrivelled by the lightning,
the brute fell by the arrow, man himself gasped his
last breath and lay an inert mass. The loved child,
the warrior hero, passed out of sight to the unseen
beyond.
But not forever! No | They hovered around the
* W. W. Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, pp. 28, 34.
The concrete meaning of both words is pith, kernel, core, centre, etc.
7o Religions of Primitive Peoples
familiar spot, they visited the living in dreams, their
voices were heard in the rustling leaves and the
falling waters. Not only men, but all things lived
again. In the mythology of the Vitians there is a
heaven even for cocoanuts! To the Kamschat-
kans the smallest flies have souls which are
immortal.”
This is the doctrine of souls, the source of those
innumerable beliefs and rites which are centred
around the sepulchre, so solemn, so profoundly
significant, that many writers have maintained that
“religion began, when the living thought seriously
of the dead ''; that “all religions have crystallised
around the tomb ''; and that in the propitiation of
departed souls, in the worship of the spirits of
ancestors, and in the preparation in this life for
another beyond the grave, the whole aim and
essence of religion are embraced. †
I have already said that this is a hasty assertion,
for there are religions which recognise a soul scarcely
or at all; but they are not of a primitive character.
* Hale, Æthnography of the U.S. Axploring Æxpedition, p. 55;
Rlemm, Cultzergeschichte, Bd. ii., s. 315; after Stoll. The Algon-
kian myth relates that the hero-god Nanabojou could converse with
the spirits of all things, with trees, flowers, butterflies, the thunder,
etc. (Clark, Zndian Sign Zanguage, p. II.3).
+ Elysée Reclus, Ze Primitif d’Australie, p. 232.
# The Greeks had but vague notions of an after life, and Professor
Schrader remarks: “The cult of the dead has no place in the
Origin and Contents 71
In the latter, some such belief is universally shown
either by the treatment of the corpse, or the modes
of mourning for the dead, or by myths concerning
the life and actions of the departed.
It is generally held that the soul is multiple, two,
three, or four being assigned to a person. One or
more of these may perish with the body, or shortly
afterwards; but one at least survives indefinitely,
and concerns itself with the doings of those it has
left behind in life. Its powers for good and evil are
increased by its translation to another sphere of
existence; and to secure its assistance, or at least its
neutrality, is the aim of that cult of the departed
Souls and of the spirits of ancestors which is so
widely defined in primitive conditions.
They are not identical, and we find in many tribes
much attention paid to conciliating the souls of the
dead where ancestor worship is unknown. In fact,
the former is the older and more general observance.
The aim is to get rid of the soul, to put it to rest or
send it on its journey to a better land, otherwise it
will annoy the survivors.”
Homeric world.” Prehist. Antigs. of the Aryan Peoples, p. 424.
The “indigetes dii’’ of the Romans were rather heroes than
divinities, though Arnobius, Adv. Genies, lib. i., cap. 64, asserts that
they were worshipped.
* The most satisfactory recent study on the worship of ancestors
and of the dead, is that by Dr. S. R. Steinmetz in his Błhnologische
Studienz zur erstem Entwicklung der Strafe, Bd. i., ss. I4I-287
(Leiden, 1894).
72 Religions of Primitive Peoples
In many primitive tribes, therefore, there is little
fear of death. The soul leaves the body in sleep to
wander over the earth, and the only difference of
death is that it does not return in time. More than
this, the soul of the living can visit the realms of the
dead. The Comanches knew of men who had spent
two days looking at the white tents of the encamp-
ment of souls far west under the setting sun; and
the Zuñi mothers who had lost their little darlings
are reconciled by being cast into a deep sleep, during
which they go and see them in the mystic world be-
yond. So also believe the Australians and number-
less other tribes.*
We need not look for any definiteness of statement
as to what the soul is. In many tribes the word for
it is akin to that for breath, as in our own express-
ion, “the breath of life.” Frequently it is identified
with the shadow, as among the Zulus of Africa, and
the Eskimos, Algonquins, and Quiches of America.
Others, as the Mincopies (Andaman Islands), think
they see it in the reflection of the body in still water
* Clark, Zndian Sign Zanguage, pp. I2 I, I65, Igg, 207, etc.;
Howitt in jour. Anthrop. Znstitute, vol. xiii., p. 186. If one
wakes a sleeper suddenly, he may die, as his vagrant soul may not
get back in time. Von den Steinen, AWaturvâlâer Zentral-Brasiliens,
p. 510. In all these primitive views the real soul is regarded as
merely a tenant of the body (not a function or the result of
functions), as it is to-day in the popular religions of civilised
lands.
Origin and Contents 73
or a mirror. The Australians assert that it is a mist,
fog, or smoke, etc.
These ideas are, of course, material. They impute
to the soul similar wants to that of the corporeal
man. It desires a dwelling, needs food, takes visible
forms, and the like ; but also it is endowed with
faculties transcending those it possessed in the flesh,
and these may be directed to the benefit or the in-
jury of the survivors. Therefore its wants should
be gratified, and its temper conciliated by offerings
and appropriate funeral rites.”
3. I turn now to a perception of the primitive
man, a contrast of impressions on his senses, more
potent, I believe, than even the immeasurable one
of Life and Death. It is Light and Darkness. This
universal, ever recurring change in nature controlled
all his actions, and reacted as a powerful stimulus
on his religious emotions. I could almost be willing
* The fear of ghosts in civilised countries is the survival of a wide-
spread, ancient belief in the malevolence of souls. I have found no
instance of this more striking than among the Finns. They believed
that the souls of the dead lie in wait for the living, in order to kill
and eat them, especially their hearts and lungs, so that the slain
could not live again. The ghosts did not spare their nearest rela-
tives, and the story is told of an old man, who warned his beloved
young wife not to follow his corpse to the grave, or his ghost would
eat her. She disobeyed, and saved herself only by pronouncing the
name of God. Cong. Internat, d’Archéologie de Moscow, Tom. ii.,
p. 316. In about one third of known savage tribes, the ghosts are
considered kind and friendly to the survivors. See Steinmetz's
analysis in his Antwick/ung der Strafe, Bd. i., S. I42, 34.
74 Religions of Primitive Peoples
to subscribe to the expression of a German writer
that “the adoration of Light was the foundation of
all religion.”’’ The rude litanies of paganism all
over the world seem to join in the solemn chant of
the Evangelist—“God is Light, and in Him is no
darkness at all.”
We may begin with the Australian Blacks, who
averred the supreme divinity lives in Żeladi, eternal
brightness, up above the sky. His name is Baiame,
3 3
meaning “the maker’’ or “the cutter out,” as one
cuts out patterns from a skin. He sees and knows
all things.t
Through most of Polynesia, the chief deity was
Ka-ne, which means sunlight, the opposite of dark-
ness, and is allied to the verb Áanea, to see. An-
other name for Ka-ne is Tangaloa, the lord of light.
The colour red is sacred to him, he was portrayed
with long blond hair, and children who had light
hair or were albinos were deemed his progeny.
When the fair-skinned Europeans first landed on the
islands they were called the “children of Tangaloa.”f
* Friedrich Freihold, Die Zebensgeschichte der Menschheit, Bd. i.,
S. 35.
+ Baiame is from the verb &hai. Şour. Anthrop. Institute, vol.
viii., p. 242. The “Nurali” of the Murray River tribes is also an
embodiment of light. B. B. Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i.,
p. 423.
f Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 13; Fornander, Z'he Polynesian &ace,
vol. iii., p. I53.
Origin and Contents 75
Sometimes the myths represent Tangaloa as the
son of Vatea (Avatea, Wakea), “noon" or “noon.
5 y
day.” He was father of gods and man, half man,
half fish, to typify land and water, and it was said
of him that his right eye was the sun, his left the
moon. So far removed was he that no worship was
ever paid him, and no representation made of him.*
If we turn to the extremely savage inhabitants
of the Andaman Islands, a remnant of the ancient,
almost pygmy, black race of Southern Asia, we find
that their supreme being is Puluga, the creator of
all things, who was never born and will never die.
He is invisible, but of the nature of light; he lives
in the sky, and placed there the sun and moon. He
is omniscient, but only while it is day, when he can
see. i.
As the red rays of the morning and evening light
caused in Polynesia all things red to be sacred to
Tangaloa, so among the Hottentots of South Africa
their supreme being was named Tsuni Goab, the
red light of the Dawn, who in mythology stood in
opposition to Gaunah, the Dark Sky. j.
This worship of light has several constant associa-
tions in religious thought which find expression in
the myth and cult.
* Gill, ubi supra, pp. 3, I7, 44.
# E. W. Man, in Şour. Anthrop. Institute, vol. xii., p. 166.
# Th. Hahn, Tsuni |Goam, pp. I24, 126.
76 Religions of Primitive Peoples
In nature, light is a potent stimulus of organic
growth, and this fact, obscurely apprehended by the
primitive mind, led to the equivalence of Light and
Life. Light as the vital principle recurs in most
mythologies. As we obtain light artificially from
fire, whose general warmth also is akin to that of
the living as contrasted to the dead body, the soul
or living element was allied to flame. In ancient
German mythology the soul was called a torch or
taper (J. Grimm), and in the beliefs of the Polyne-
sians and American Indians the ghosts of the dead
usually appear as luminous masses.* All will re-
member the words of Othello—
“Put out the light, and then, put out the light !”
A second association of light was with the sky, in
day the home of the bright sun, at night where glit-
ter a thousand points of brilliancy.
In most mythologies the sky is supposed to be a
solid, shining arch or dome which covers the earth
like a roof. Upon it, out of sight to mortal eyes,
live the gods. It constitutes the “Hill of Heaven,”
the celestial mountain upon which are the homes of
the divine beings. So it is oft likened to some
known terrestial elevation, as in Greek mythology,
* Clark, Zndian Sign Language, p. 186; }our. Anthrop. Institute,
vol. X., p. 285.
Origin and Contents 77
Mt. Olympus, and in that of India, Mt. Meru. Such
sacred hills are mentioned by most of the American
tribes. * In Polynesian myth it was “the blue
mountain, the land of the divine water,” a fluid of
such vital virtue that were even a dead man sprin-
kled with it he would come to life. On the island
of Mangaia a certain hill was pointed out which in
old times propped up the sky, t
The Tehuelches of Patagonia relate that the
Creator first moulded men and all animals on the
“Hill of God " and then set them loose to people
the earth. The natives of Southern Borneo assign
to their supreme divinity Atala a home in the high-
est heaven, on the shore of the “celestial lake,
moved by the Moon and surrounding the Sun.”
Homi, the high heaven, is the deity of the Hotten-
tots, who pours the rains, blows the wind, and sends
heat and cold on earth. .
Thus it is that everywhere the Sky God is also the
High God. This blending of the ideas of life and
light with the sky led to another and obvious asso-
ciation which has left its mark on every religion,
primitive or developed. The sky is, in direction,
* Myths of the New World, pp. 97, 165, etc.
+ Fornander, Polynesian Race, vol. i., p. 78; Gill, Myths and
Songs, p. 18.
f Musters, Among the Patagonians, ch. v.; Ling Roth, AVatives of
Sarawak, vol. ii., App., p. clxx.; Hahn, 7'suni | Goam, p. 37.
78 Religions of Primitive Peoples
above us. The god of the sky is therefore the god
on high. He is the one who dwells above, our lord
in the heaven.
This he is in all mythologies. Among the Indians
of the plains he is (or, It is) “the great medicine
above,” and in the sign language, to indicate this, when
the sign is made for “medicine" (mystery) the
finger is pointed to the zenith.” The Puluga of the
Andamanese “lives in the sky.” Tangaloa is ad-
dressed as “He above in the heavens'; the Finnish
Ukko is also called “The Navel of the Sky,” and
so on. †
Examples are innumerable. But what need of
collecting them P Do we not ourselves constantly
use the adjective the Supreme Being, for God, which
means simply the highest being? And did not the
founder of our religion forbid his followers to swear
by the sky, giving as the reason that it was the
throne of God, who sitteth upon it ºf
This idea runs through the whole of his teachings.
In the Gospel of Matthew the same term, ovoavlos,
or, év rois owpavois as a descriptive term of divinity,
* Clark, Indian Sign Zanguage, p. 189.
+ Castren observes : “Es hat innerhalb der weitgestreckten Grän-
zen Asiens kaum ein einziges Volk gegeben, welches nicht den Him-
mel werehrt hätte.”—Finnische Mythologie, p. 14. He might as well
have said, “the habitable globe '' instead of Asia only.
# Matthew, v, , 34.
Origin and Contents 79
is applied not less than eighty-eight times; and in the
first clause of the Lord's Prayer, it is to “Our Father
in the Skies,” that the invocation is addressed.
Strange that this very word oipavds, in Sanscrit
Uaruna, is that which, in the primitive religion of
the Aryan peoples, was applied to the most exalted
of their gods, to him “whose realm is above us,”
“the very strong,” “the shining one,” “the king of
sky and earth,” “creator of all, the earth-enveloping
sky.” +
What more striking evidence do we wish of the
indissoluble unity of religious thought, no matter
what its stage of development, in all centuries and
all races 2
In the Polynesian mythology, Tangaloa, the bright
daylight, has as his brother, Rongo, the god of dark-
ness and night. Tangaloa is fair-haired and light in
hue, Rongo is black in hair and skin. Tangaloa is
beneficent, the dispenser of good, and inventor of
the arts of peace; Rongo is the fomenter of strife,
the god of war and author of bloodshed. In ac-
cordance with these, all the gods were classed in two
orders, “dwellers in day,” and “dwellers in night.” +
The contrast which is here presented prevails
throughout early cults. The night, when man, de-
* Hopkins, A’eligions of Zndia, pp. 62, seq.
+ Gill, zebº supra, pp. IO-14; Sir George Grey, Polynesian Myth-
ology, ch, i.
80 Religions of Primitive Peoples
prived of light and sight, becomes the prey of
stealthy beasts, was everywhere considered the time
when the unseen powers of destruction are let loose
and the malevolent agencies of the spirit-world run
riot.
This is one of the most primitive of religious be-
liefs and is discovered in the rudest tribes. The
Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego say that the invisible
spirits go about at night; the Australian tribes every-
where manifested a deep dread of the darkness, not
like the unconscious shuddering of a child on enter-
ing a dark room, but because they believed spirits
walked in the gloom seeking whom they could de-
vour. It is then, said they, that Cuchi (Kootche)
goes forth, either in the form of a snake or some
nocturnal bird. He it is who causes sickness among
men. The thunder is the growl of his anger, the
whirlwinds his breath, and the aurora australis the
fitful light of his camp fire.”
Associated with the gloom of night, was the dark-
ness of the storm, which in many mythologies is con-
trasted with the sunshine in some divine struggle.
Endless are the tales and rites which bear upon this
contest in early religions. Indeed, according to
some, they are the chief staple of all mythologies.”
* B. Brough Smith, Aborigenes of Victoria, vol. i., p. 457,
+ Notably by Prof. F. L. W. Schwartz in his numerous works, and
in his contributions to the Zeitschrift fir Ethno/ogie, etc.
Origin and Contents 8 I
4. I have already mentioned that the idea of
Power is one of the first to be connected with deity.
The god is one who can do more than man. Espe-
cially any sudden and striking display of force, either
in the material or immaterial world, stimulates the
religious sense. The historian Buckle claimed that
the inhabitants of countries subject to earthquakes
are peculiarly superstitious. In myths and names,
the hurricane of the tropics, the storm-winds of higher
latitudes, indeed all sudden and tremendous out-
breaks of natural violence, are regarded as exhibi-
tions of divine Power.
Notably is this the case with the thunder storm.
That manifestation of tremendous power has excited
the religious feelings of all races. Moreover, the
highly charged electrical atmosphere exerts a special
influence on the nervous system, predisposing it to
emotional outbreaks. The roll and reverberation of
the thunder, the zigzag flash and destructive blow of
the lightning and the roar of the tempest, combine
to present the phenomenon as a manifest display of
supernatural power. Hence in innumerable tribes
the thunder god was identified with, or was the peer
of, the highest in the Pantheon.* The same is true
* The Hebrew name Jahve (Jehovah) is derived by some from the
verb “to thunder.” In the Vedas, Parjanja, the Thunderer, is a
conspicuous figure. Mumpal, the Thunder, say the Australians,
created all things. (A’eise der Fregatte Avovara, Anthrop. Theil, s.
6
82 Religions of Primitive Peoples
of potent and coercive mental traits. Their possess-
ors are regarded as partaking of the deific being to
a greater extent than others, or even actually divine.
It is not merely that they excite the emotion of
fear. That is a shallow interpretation of the psychic
process. Underlying it is the deeper suggestion of
energy, of action, of the spiritual mastery of material
existence. This is as real, though not so clear, in the
mind of the savage as in that of the philosopher.
This is also seen in the names and titles applied to
the concept of Divinity by all nations. They speak
of God “ All-mighty,” the “Omnipotent Ruler’”;
and ever the attribute of indefinite power belongs
to the great gods.
In early religions the manifestations of power are
personified as single deities. We thus find in native
American myths the figures of Huracan, the hurri-
cane; Huemac, the Strong Hand, god of earthquakes,
and numberless thunder, lightning, and storm gods.
5. It has been remarked by a German historian
that the richest development of early poetry has
been found among tribes dwelling by the ocean or
among mountains; and another writer has claimed
that the most rapid development of religions has
ix.) Among the Bechuanas, “When it thunders, every one trembles,
and each asks the other, ‘Is there anyone among us who has devoured
the wealth of others ?’” (Calloway, Relig. System of the Amazulu,
p. II.7). Any number of other examples could be added.
Origin and Contents 83
*.
taken place where the broad expanses of deserts or
seas have stimulated the mind to contemplation of
spacial magnitude on earth and in the sky. *
The languages of primitive peoples bear traces of
this. In the Aztec tongue any wide level prairie is
called žeot/a//7, godland ; and the ocean, Žeoatl, god-
water; among the Peruvians the term huaca, holy,
is synonymous with “vast ’’ or “immense.” With
the Polynesians taula, the ocean space, is the home
of the gods and where the souls go at death. The
traveller Castren once stood on the shore of the
Arctic Ocean with a Samoyed. Turning to the na-
tive, he asked, “where is Num ?” (their chief god).
“There,” instantly replied the Samoyed, waving his
hand toward where “loomed the dark broad sea.” +
In many cults this idea is attempted expression
by assigning to deities hugeness of size. The colos-
sal stone images of Easter Island, the huge statues
of the Maoris, are endeavours to present it to the
SenSeS.
In more developed faiths the same tendency pre-
vails. The Buddhists rival each other in construct-
ing enormous statues of Sakya Muni ; in the Sanscrit
Upanishads, Aditi, who represents the endless visible
expanse, is termed “mother and father of all gods
* Klemm, Culturgeschichte, Bd. i., s. 64; Honegger, Cultur-
geschichte, Bd. i., s. 332.
+ Castren, Finnische Mythologie, p. 17.
84 Religions of Primitive Peoples
and men, the substance of whatever has been or
shall be born "*; and according to some Mahom-
medan writers, God is so great that it is 72,000 days'
journey between his eyes |
Such are some of the potent stimuli which stir the
depths of man's psychical nature, awakening in him
the belief in unknown powers far beyond his ability
to measure or to cope with. Not from any conscious
act of intelligence, not from any process of voluntary
reasoning, is that belief born, but from the unknown,
the unplumbed abyss of the sub-conscious mind.
Let not this be considered as something degrading
to the religious conceptions themselves. Though
all are drawn from out the human spirit itself, and
are nowise the direct revelations their believers think
them, yet who dare measure the height and the
depth of the sub-conscious intelligence P. It draws
its knowledge from sources which elude scientific re-
search, from the strange powers which we perceive
in insects and other lower animals, almost, but not
wholly, obliterated in the human line of organic de-
scent; and from others, now merely nascent or em-
bryonic, new senses, destined in some far off aeon to
endow our posterity with faculties as wondrous to us
as would be sight to the sightless.
* Gough, Philosophy of the Upanishads, p. 17.
Origin and Contents 85
More than this: the teachings of the severest
Science tell us that Matter is, in its last analysis,
Motion, and that motion is nought else than Mind *;
and who dare deny that in their unconscious func-
tions our minds may catch some overtones, as it
were, from the harmonies of the Universal Intellig-
ence thus demonstrated by inductive research, and
vibrate in unison therewith ?
*I refer especially to the results of the physical investigations of
Helmholtz, and to their logical application to mental science, by
George J. Romanes, in his Mind and Motion ; to the position of
Prof. Paulsen in his Introduction to Philosophy , and to such lines
of thought as are presented in Professor Dolbear's Matter, Æther, and
Motion.
LECTURE III.
Primitive Religious Expression: in the Word.
CoNTENTs —An Echo Myth—The Power of Words—Their Magical
Potency—The Curse—Power Independent of Meaning—The
Name as an Attribute—The Sacred Names—The Ineffable
Name—“Myrionomous” Gods—“Theophorous” Names—Sug-
gestion and Repetition as Stimulants—I. The Word to the gods:
Prayer—Its Forms, Contents, and Aims—II. The Word from
the gods: The Law and the Prophecy—The Ceremonial Law, or
tabu—Examples—Divination and Prediction—III. The Word
concerning the gods: The Myths—Their Sources chiefly Psychic
—Some from Language—Examples—Transference—Similarities
—The Universal Mythical Cycles : I. The Cosmical Concepts;
2. The Sacred Numbers ; 3. The Drama of the Universe ; Cre-
ation and Deluge Myths; 4. The Earthly Paradise ; 5. The
Conflict of Nature; 6. The Returning Saviour; 7. The Jour-
ney of the Soul—Conclusion as to these Identities.
HERE is a pleasant myth told by the inhabit-
ants of the island of Mangaia in the South
Pacific. When the Creator of all things had ordered
the solid land to rise from the primeval waters, he
walked abroad to survey his work. “It is good,”
said he aloud to himself. “Good,” answered an
echo from a neighbouring hill. “What!” exclaimed
the Creator. “Is some one here already ? Am not
I first P” “I first,” answered the echo. Therefore
86
Primitive Religious Expression 87
the Mangaians assert that earliest of all existences
is the bodiless Voice.” It is their way of saying,
“In the beginning was the Word.”
Not only may we call it the first, it is also the
mightiest of the unseen agencies which mould man
and his destinies.
“Power over men,” remarks Count Tolstoj in one
of his essays, “lies not in material force, but in
thought and its clear expression.” Disraeli, that
subtlest of diplomats, once said, “We govern men
with—words.”
No idea can be clearly conveyed to another unless
there is a word to express it. Inward thought and
outward utterance are the correlated conditions of
intelligent advancement. The spoken word evokes
in the mind of the hearer the picture, the emotion,
the reasoning, which is occupying our own. A thou-
sand minds are brought instantly to bear on the
same thought by the words in the mouth of one. I
cannot place too high the instant and magical effect
of the word.
Not only does it convey a new thought to the
mind, but it is itself the begetter of thought. It is a
* Related in Gill's Myths and Songs of the South Pacific. M. van
Ende, in his Histoire AWaturelle de la Croyance, p. 83, sq., has some
suggestive remarks on sound as regarded by primitive nations as a
mark of life. Hence, their myths of brooks, trees, etc., as conscious
beings.
88 Religions of Primitive Peoples
seed sown, which grows and branches, bearing flower
and fruit, beauteous and everlasting, or noxious and
destructive.
Through the faculty of speech, social life becomes
possible; on it depends the sweet interchange of
souls; by it we are led to think in unison ; through
it we share the meditations of the philosopher, and
the inspired visions of the poet and the prophet.
If there is any way in which the spirits of the sky
and air, the hosts of the Divine, can touch and
teach our souls, it must be chiefly through the
spoken word.
Every religion of the world bears witness to this.
There is no other element in them in which all join
with like unanimity. From the rudest to the ripest
they echo the verse of the evangelist philosopher
when he wrote: “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God.”
The highest teachings of them all are expressed in
the formula : “And the word of the Lord came
saying—”
We may go back to the earliest forms of the
ancient Egyptian religion, and we find the doctrine
that the man who had learned and could pronounce
the divine words revealed through the god Thoth
(Thought, Mind), by their utterance would be ele-
Primitive Religious Expression 89
vated to the god, and be blended with him, as one
and inseparable. “The primary idea concerning the
ritual formulas was assimilation to God, brought
about by the power of the words themselves.” ”
Probably in all primitive faiths the word is regarded
as a magical power in itself. In Egypt it was be-
lieved that by words the most powerful of the gods
could be made obedient to the will of man. By
them, as exorcisms or incantations everywhere, de-
mons could be loosed or bound, and spirits sum-
moned from the vasty deep. The stock in trade of
the Indian medicine-man is principally his store of
exorcisms, and among the Goras of North-Western
India any one can become a priest who will learn the
formulas which compel the demons. *
Our word “charm "comes from the Latin carmen,
the sacred rhythmic formula, such as Virgil averred
could by its occult power drag the moon from the
sky.
“Carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam.”
There were such songs scarcely less potent among
* Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 96.
# E. F. Dalton, Æthnology of Bengal, p. 60. “Nothing more
colors Hindu life,” writes Mr. Walhouse, “than the belief in the
efficacy of mantras—forms of prayer or powerful words, by which
all the relations of life may be influenced, and even the gods may be
bound.”—jour. Anthrop, Inst., vol. xiv., p. 189.
90 Religions of Primitive Peoples
the Australian Blacks, which could summon the rain
in dry seasons or cause it to cease in floods.”
No demon, however malevolent, can resist, in their
belief, the power of the right word. The natives of
New South Wales say that an evil spirit in the shape
of a dwarf with monstrous head roams the woods at
night and devours those whom he meets. But if the
man utters the word “Boonbolong,” the dwarf passes
on his way and does not harm him.
When Jesus was in Capernaum, and at his com-
mand an unclean spirit had gone out of a man pos-
sessed, the multitude said one to the other, ris
eart ovtog Moyog, “What is this Word, by the au-
thority and might of which this man casts out
devils?” (Luke iv., 36.) They believed he used
some cabalistic formula of exorcism which con-
strained the demons to obey his will.
Nowhere did the Word display its terrible effect
more fearfully than in the curse or imprecation. In
ancient Assyria, writes Professor Sayce, “The power
of the mamit, or curse, was such that the gods them-
selves could not transgress it.” + Not only did it
unloose the demons of destruction, but it constrained
* Curr, Z'he Australian AEace, vol. i., p. 48.
+ Report of Com. of AV. South Wales to the Columbian Exposition,
p. 7.
# Sayce, Hiðbert Lectures, p. 309.
Primitive Religious Expression 9 I
the gods against their will, changing them from pro-
tectors to enemies. *
Amid savage tribes, in undoubted and repeated
instances, the curse kills as certainly as a knife.
Among the western Indians of our country, when a
medicine-man “gathers his medicine,” that is, rises
to the full height of inspired volition, and utters a
withering curse on his antagonist, commanding him
to die, the latter knows all hope is lost. Sometimes
he drops dead on the spot, or at best lingers through
a few days of misery. The Australians believe that
the curse of a potent magician will kill at the dis-
tance of a hundred miles. Í
Not only is the word thus mighty in the unseen
world, but it is itself the very efflux and medium of
the divine power itself.
Thus in the drama of creation recorded in the first
chapter of Genesis we read: “And God said, “Light,
y
be,’ and light was "; and in the corresponding myth
of the Quiche Indians of Central America, the maker
of the world calls forth, Ü/eu / Earth ! and at the
word the solid land grew forth. §
Sir George Grey relates a story that in New Zea-
* Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 63.
# Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 318.
# The appropriate rite thus to destroy an enemy is described by
Curr, Z'he Australian AEace, vol. ii., p. 6Io.
3 Popol Vuh, le Liz're Sacré des Quiches, p. Io.
92 Religions of Primitive Peoples
land there was a huge, carved wooden head, which
could speak, and by the dreadful might of its words
slew all who approached it. But when by superior
magic its voice was reduced to a whisper, its power
was gone and it was destroyed. *
It is to be noted that the magical influence of the
word is independent of its meaning. It is distinctly
not the idea, image, or truth which it conveys to
which is ascribed its efficacy. On the contrary, the
most potent of all words are those which have
no meaning at all or of which the sense has been
lost.
This is constantly seen in the formulas of Savage
tribes. They preserve archaisms of language no
longer understood by those who utter them, and in
other instances they are obviously made up of
syllables strung together without regard to intelligi-
bility.
The same fact is abundantly shown in the caba-
listic jargon of classical and mediaeval diviners, and
in the charms drawn from contemporary folklore.
Indeed, the famous cabalist, Pico de Mirandola,
asserts that a word without meaning has most in-
fluence over the demons.
Not only one or a few words may be thus unintel-
ligible, but long communications may be in articu-
late sounds conveying no thought whatever. This
* Polynesian Mythology, p. 284.
Primitive Religious Expression 93
is the “gift of tongues,” the power to speak in
unknown languages.
It is common in savage life. Many of the im-
portant chants at the sacred ceremonies are mere
iterations of meaningless syllables. The idea would
seem to be that what men cannot understand, the
gods do; or else, that it is the god expressing him-
self through human organs but in a speech unknown
to human ears. Bishop Calloway says that the
charm Songs of the Zulus are often quite unintel-
ligible to themselves *; and this is one of many
examples.
Of all words, the most sacred is the Name. In
primitive thought, the personal name of an indi-
vidual is not merely an attribute, it is an integral
part of his Self, his Ego. The Eskimos say that a
man consists of three parts, his body, his soul, and
his name, and of these the last mentioned alone
achieves immortality. This seems very advanced.
Most of our ambitious men appear to think more of
rendering their names than their souls worthy of im-
mortality. Very generally, the name was associated
with the personal guardian spirit, derived from it
or indicating it, and hence received a ceremonial
sanctity. i.
*A’eligious System of the Amazulu, p. 413.
+ The expression in the Algonkin tongue for a person of the same
name is mind owiazvina, “He is another myself” (Cuoq, Zexigue
A/gongzºne, p. II.3).
94. Religions of Primitive Peoples
As being a part of oneself, injury or contumely
heaped upon a name reacted upon the individual
who bore it, and even life could be destroyed in this
IY) 211116.1".
For this reason, throughout America the natives
rarely disclosed their real appellations, but were
designated by nicknames. In Australia some tribes
were so cautious that the young men on entering
adult life renounced the names by which they had
been known and assumed no other ; while a woman
preserved indeed her appellation, but no one except
her husband was entitled to pronounce it. * The
Dyaks take the prudent precaution, after an at-
tack of illness, to change their names; so that the
demon who sent the sickness may not recognise
them, and continue his malevolent pursuit.
In Polynesia, where the name was not thus con-
cealed, it could be applied, according to the cere-
monial law, only to the person, although it was
generally a common noun. Hence arose the curious
custom called tepi, All words which formed part
of the name of the chieftain, and all syllables of
other words which had a similar sound were dropped
from the language and others substituted for them
during his lifetime. Thus, forty or fifty of the most
* Curr, uči supra, p. 246.
+ Ling Roth, AVatives of Sarawak, vol. i., p. 288.
Primitive Religious Expression 95
common terms of the language would drop out of
use at once, and as many more be materially changed
in Sound, to the great annoyance of missionaries and
visitors. *
The Kamschatkans were so particular that they
would not name the bear or wolf, for these animals
understood the language of men, and would be
offended at such familiarity | ||
Even if it does not hear, the power for good or
evil which a being has, can, in primitive opinion,
be communicated through its name. For that
reason the priest known as the flamen dia/is among
the Romans would not only avoid touching a dog
or bear, but he would not pronounce their names,
lest he should be contaminated And to this day a
Mohammedan, if he pronounces the word for “hog,”
will spit, that his mouth may not be defiled by the
name of the unclean beast.
Even more universal was the avoidance of the
names of the dead. This prevailed throughout
Africa, Australia, Tasmania, Polynesia, and Amer-
ica. The reason was, that the name was held to be
a part of the spirit of the departed, and to pronounce
it would disturb the rest of the grave, and probably
* H. Hale, Æthnography of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, p.
288.
# Klemm, Culturgeschächte, Bd. ii., p. 329.
96 Religions of Primitive Peoples
indeed bring the perturbed spirit to the circle of
auditors. *
If such was the case with the names of men and
beasts, how sacred must be the names of the gods !
This is an extraordinary feature, common to the
rudest superstitions of savage and the most devel-
oped faiths of civilised lands, and it has for its basis
the conception of the name as a real attribute, a
part of the Self. -
“In all the religions of ancient Asia,” writes
Lenormant, “the mysterious Name was considered
a real and divine being, who had a personal exist-
ence and exclusive power over both nature and the
world of spirits.” +
In the name dwelt the essential power of the
deity. An Egyptian magical formula, placed in
the mouth of a god, reads:
“I am the elect of millions of years.
Were my name spoken on the bank of a river, it would
be consumed ;
* This subject has been discussed by Andree, Ethnographische
Parallelen, pp. 165–184, and other writers. On the “name soul”
among the American Indians I have collected material in Myths of
the AVew World, p. 277, sq. Most American and Australian tribes
would not name the dead. On the other hand, in the robust religion
of the ancient Germans, the names of the loved departed and of great
chiefs were shouted out at the banquets, and a horn drained to their
minni, affectionate memory. J. Grimm, Zeutonic Mythology, vol.
i., p. 59.
+ Chaldean Magic, p. IO4.
Primitive Religious Expression 97
Were it uttered on earth, fire would burst from the
ground.” ”
The knowledge of this name by another enabled
him to exert a power over the god himself. That
by naming a demon, he can be forced to appear, was
a cardinal principle of ancient magic. “The list of
divine names possessed by the Roman pontiffs in
their indigitamenta was their most efficacious magical
instrument, laying at their mercy all the forces of the
spirit world.” +
For this reason, the gods of ancient Egypt sedu-
lously concealed their names, and we cannot doubt
that it was the fear of some such subjection of their
deity through the malicious use of his name, which
led the early Jews to conceal it so well that it is now
lost. It was the same with the Semitic Arabians.
Instead of the true divine name, they substituted
Allah, the Mighty One, so that now the original is
conjectural or unknown.
This extends to the rudest tribes. The African
traveller Holub says that the actual name of the
god of the Marutse and allied tribes along the Zam-
besi river is Njambe; but to avoid revealing this,
they employ the term Molemo, “He above.”
Among the south-eastern Australian tribes their
* The original is in the Turin papyrus.
ł Granger, Worship of the Womans, p. 277.
7
98 Religions of Primitive Peoples
leading deity is Turramulun (the One-legged), who
lives in the sky. His name is never revealed to
women, nor to youths before their initiation to
manhood. *
The Choctaw Indians regarded the name of their
highest divinity as self-existing, essential, and un-
speakable. Therefore, when it was necessary to
refer to him, they adopted a circumlocution, for,
says their historian, “according to their fixed stand-
ard of speech, had they made any nearer approach
to the beloved Name, it would have been reckoned
a profanation.” +
How completely this notion has survived among
ourselves is shown by the second clause of that
prayer on which we have all been brought up, “Hal-
lowed be Thy Name.” But how few who repeat it
reflect that the name referred to, whatever it was,
is now through long concealment totally lost !
Thus we see that the doctrine of “the ineffable
Name '' is the common property of Savage and cul-
tured faiths.
From the misuse of the name to compel the obed-
ience of the god, or to injure his dignity and worth,
came the idea of profanity, sternly forbidden by the
early Jewish law, “Take not the name of the Lord
* Howitt, in jour. Anthrop. Inst., xiii., p. 192.
† James Adair, Hist. of the AVorth Am. Indians, p. 54.
Primitive Religious Expression 99
in vain"—and by many other faiths of a primitive
aspect.
Quite consistently with this idea of real existence
in names, the god who had many names had just as
many powers or faculties. For that reason, the
prominent gods of ancient Egypt, especially Isis,
were called upon by so numerous epithets that the
Greeks spoke of them as “myrionomous,” ten-thou-
Sand-named. In later Babylonian times all the
names of the fifty great gods were ascribed to Ea,
by which process they were themselves absorbed
into his being. “When they lost their names, they
lost their personality as well.” ” To the Moham-
medan the “One hundred names of God "repeated
in the Koran express the multitude of His powers.
The same tendency is visible in the native religions
of America. The Mexicans applied many names to
the same divinity, and in the Popol Vuh, the sacred
book of the Quiches, the chief deity is called by a
variety of titles, some sounding strange to us, as
“the opossum-hunter,” the “green snake,” the
“calebash,” all of symbolic sense.
In the South Seas, the name of a god, adopted by
a chief, identified him in the opinion of the people
* Prof. Sayce in Aſióðert Zectures, p. 305.
+ Sahagun, Historia de Mueza Fspaña, lib. i., passim ; Popol Vuh,
cap. i.; Stoll, Zähnographie der Æep. Guatemala, p. II 8.
IOO Religions of Primitive Peoples
with the god and secured for him the reverence and
adoration ascribed to his divine namesake. *
This idea is that which in many early and later
faiths led to what are called the “theophorous” or
god-bearing names, where the individual is called by
the proper name of a saint or god. They were espe-
cially frequent in early Semitic religions, and are
customary among Catholics to-day. ||
We find their origin in the custom, very general
among the American Indians, for the person to take
the name of the spirit who appears to him during
the vigils and fasts which attend the ceremonies of
initiation to manhood. By assuming the name of
the divinity, the two natures or essences are believed
to be united. This was precisely also the opinion of
the early Christians, as we see in the expression of
St. Ephrem, a Syrian saint of the fourth century:
“Merciful was the Lord in that He clad on Our
Names. His Names make us great ; our Names
make Him small.” +
If we seek the explanation of this strange power
* Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, p. 6.
+ Comp. W. Robertson Smith, Ā’eligion of the Semites, p. 41.
f Select Works of St. Æphrem, p. 122. (Trans, by the Rev. J. B.
Morris.) The name of Jesus was regarded by the early church as
magical in itself. Arnobius says of him, ‘‘whose Name, when heard,
puts to flight evil spirits, imposes silence on soothsayers, prevents
men from consulting the augurs, and frustrates the efforts of magic-
ians.”—Adversus Gemäes, lib. i., cap. 46.
Primitive Religious Expression IoI
attributed to words and names, often apart from
their signification, we shall find it in their extreme
activity as agents of mental suggestion. They are
intense psychic stimulants, stirring the soul to its
depths. The Word is by odds the most effective of
all agencies to bring about altered and abnormal
mental conditions either in the individual or in the
mass. Through it, judiciously applied, the pro-
foundest hypnotic trance, or the wildest, maniacal
nervous seizures can be produced at will. *
The repetition of a word greatly heightens its sug-
gestive influence and promotes the exclusion from
the mind of all other concepts and associations than
its own. In many languages, a word repeated is
equivalent to the superlative degree, and in every
tongue the repetition has a similar effect, as in the
phrase: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”
No words in this relation are more efficient than
names. Consider what our own lives would be if
we had to change our names every year, how it
would seem to obliterate our personality, how it
would dissipate all dreams of posthumous glory and
renown. Our consciousness of Self would suffer
diminution, and the keenest interest of our lives
would be lost. Our name is really and truly a part
of ourselves, and he who would rob us of it would
* See Stoll, Suggestion und Hypnotismus, p. I4, seq.
I O2 Religions of Primitive Peoples
leave us poor indeed. Why is every point of view
carved with the names of obscure tourists, why does
it give us pleasure to note our names among the
hundreds at some grand function, but that we think
it more desirable to live “as naked nominations,
without desert or noble deeds,” as Sir Thomas Browne
said, than to pass away and leave not that little
which the Roman poet considered the least,-nominis
almöra, “the shadow of a name.”
For the practical purposes of life the name confers
or creates the personality. This fact exerted a pro-
found influence in the earliest development of re-
ligion. The vague sense of spiritual power first
became centred in the idea of an individual, of a
personal god, when it received a name.
The primitive words of barbaric tongues used to
signifying the divine have not the connotation of in-
dividuality. Wakan, mahopa, manito, teotl, huaca,
Åu, are such words from American languages, not
one of which conveys the concept of personality.
That concept was first gained when some single ex-
pression of spiritual power was differentiated and
named.*
The essential religious element in the Word is its
*The pétara of the Borneans is at times used as a personal name of
the chief divine being, at others in the vague sense of “duty” or
‘‘supernatural.” Ling Roth, AVatives of Sarawak, vol. i., 179. Ana-
logous instances have already been mentioned.
Primitive Religious Expression Iog
power to bring man into relation to the gods. This
is possible in three directions,—we may address them ;
they may address us; or we may talk about them.
These furnish the three forms of sacred expression in
speech : I. The word to the gods,-Prayer; 2. The
word from the gods,-Revelation ; and 3. The word
about the gods,-the Myth. We will consider each
of these.
I. THE WORD TO THE GODS.—I. The Word to the
gods is Prayer. It is a very prominent and nigh uni-
versal element in primitive religions. The injunction
“Pray always” is nowhere else so nearly carried out.
Captain Clark, an officer of our army with the widest
experience of Indian life, writes: “It seems a start-
ling assertion, but it is, I think, true, that there are
no people who pray more than Indians. Both super-
stition and custom keep always in their minds the
necessity for placating the anger of the invisible and
omnipotent power, and for supplicating the active
exercise of his faculties in their behalf.” ”
In fact, Prayer may be said to be the life of the
faith of savage tribes, and it is so recognised by
themselves. According to the legends of the Maoris
of New Zealand, when they first migrated to that
island from Hawaii, they did not bring with them
their ancestral gods, but took care to carry along the
* Zndian Sign Zanguage, p. 309.
104 Religions of Primitive Peoples
potent prayers which the gods cannot but hear and
grant. *
Some writers have claimed that certain tribes have
been found without any notion of an appeal to un-
seen agencies, and have quoted as instances the
Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, and the Mincopies of
the Andaman Islands. But closer examination
proves that the priests of the Yahgans call upon a
mysterious being, Aiapakal,t and other invisible ex-
istences, and the Mincopies are acknowledged to
have prayers at the present time.
The earliest hymns and prayers do not, as a rule,
contain definite requests, but are general appeals to
the god to be present, to partake of the feast which
is spread, or to join the dance and to continue his
good offices toward those who call upon him. Such
are the hymns of the Rig Veda, and those of ancient
Mexico, which I have collected and published. †
They are like the evocatio deorum of the Romans.
The three forms of “the Word to the gods,” or
Prayer, are those of thanksgiving, by praise or lau-
dation; of petition for assistance or protection ; and
*Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology, p. 164. -
+ Hyades et Deniker, Mission Scientiftge au Cap Horn, p. 376.
Earlier voyagers write : “They certainly have ideas of a spiritual ex-
istence.”—AWarrative of the Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle,
vol. ii., p. I79.
† Ancient Mahuatl Poetry (Philadelphia, 1890); Rig Veda Ameri-
canus Philadelphia, 1890).
Primitive Religious Expression 105
of penitence or contrition for neglect of duty. All
these are common in the most primitive faiths. In
all of them you will find the deity appealed to as
great, mighty, a lord, a king, terror-inspiring, loving
his followers, and by hundreds of such epithets of
amplification and flattery. He is addressed endear-
ingly as father or grandfather; not at all implying
a physical relationship, as some modern writers have
erroneously stated; but with reference to the loving
care he is supposed to extend to his worshippers.
As we might expect, most of the petitions in
primitive prayers are for material benefits. The
burden of most of them is well expressed by one in
the Rig Veda: “O God, prosper us in getting and
in keeping !” They ask for increase of goods,
abundant food, success in war, and fine weather.
Yet among the rudest there are signs of an appre-
ciation of something higher. A prayer of the
Khonds, a Dravidian tribe of Northern India, reads:
“O Lord, we know not what is good for us. Thou
knowest what it is. For it we pray.”
It is strange to find among the Navahoes, a rude
hunting tribe of our western territories, an intense
longing for the beautiful. One of their prayers
runs: “O Lord on high, whose youth is immortal,
ruler above, I have made you the offering, preserve
my body and members, preserve it in beauty, make
106 Religions of Primitive Peoples
all things beautiful, let all be completed in
beauty.” ”
At other times the prayer is for moral control, as
in this of a Sioux Indian : “O my grandfather, the
Earth, I ask that thou givest me a long life and
strength of body. When I go to war, let me cap-
ture many horses and kill many enemies. But in
peace, let not anger enter my heart.” +
Penitential prayers are uttered when one has
broken the ceremonial law or tabu, and in general,
when misfortune and defeat seem to indicate that
the gods are irritated at some insult offered them,
though the worshipper may not be clear what it is.
“O merciful Lord,” says an Aztec prayer, “let
this chastisement with which thou hast visited us
give us freedom from evil and follies.”f
In many prayers we find formulas preserved which
are no longer understood ; and very frequently the
power of the prayer is believed to be increased by
repeating it a number of times. The prayer choruses
of nearly all savage tribes offer endless examples of
this. The notion of increased force by repetition, a
notion founded on the augmented suggestive power
of the Word through its iteration, to which I have
* Dr. W. Matthews, The Mountain Chant of the Wavahoes, p. 465.
+ Clark, Indian Sign Language, p. 309.
f Sahagun, Hist. de Mueva España, lib. vi. Other examples are
given by this writer.
Primitive Religious Expression Io?
already referred, is so common that it was especially
noted and condemned by Jesus as of no spiritual
value.
This form of prayer, indeed, degenerated into a
mere magical formula, as we see was the case with the
apostolic benediction of the Christian church during
the middle ages, which became a charm in use by
necromancers and sorcerers.
In its sublimest essence, however, prayer has been
recognised as something far beyond any form of
suppliancy. It is, as an Orthodox authority says,
“the habitual state of a being who constantly lives
in relation to God, and cultivates a constant ex-
change with Him.” ” So understood, it is even
more than inspiration ; it is a communion of spiritual
life, a dwelling in God. This is the precise mental
condition of many of the mystics and devotees of
primitive religions. They are with the god, the
god with and in them.
II. THE WORD FROM THE GODS.—If the mere
name of the god was thus mighty and thus ven-
erated, how much more the words he himself
uttered ' The “Word of God,” as understood by
the worshippers, is the kernel and core of every
faith on earth. Every religion is, to its votaries, a
revelation. None is so material, none so primitive,
* Encyclopédie des Sciences Keligieuses, s. v. Prière.
108 Religions of Primitive Peoples
as to claim any other foundation than the expressed
will of divinity. None is so devoid of ritual as
to lack some means of ascertaining this will.
The word from the gods is clothed under two
forms, the Law and the Prophets, in other terms,
Precept and Prediction. In every religion, from the
most primitive to the highest, we find these two
modes of divine utterance.
In the earliest phases of religion, the law is essen-
tially prohibitory. It is in the form of the negative,
“Thou shalt not—.” Ethnologists have adopted
for this a word from Polynesian dialects, tabu, or
tapu, akin to tapa, to name, * that which was
solemnly named or announced being sacred, and
hence forbidden to the profanum vulgus.
The tabu extends its veto into every department
of primitive life. It forbids the use of certain articles
of food or raiment; it hallows the sacred areas; it lays
restrictions on marriage, and thus originates what
is known as the totemic bond; it denounces various
actions, often the most trivial and innocent, and
thus lays the foundation for the ceremonial law.
* Other forms are tapui, to make sacred ; tabui, to keep from ;
taðuaži, to bless. Here, as elsewhere, there is a synonomy be-
tween “sacred” or “holy” and “accursed,” because it is accursed
to defile that which is holy. Another, and less probable, derivation
is given by Frazer, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, s. v. “Taboo.”
He is perfectly right, however, in saying that the original form of the
taðze is due, not to its civil, but to its religious element.
Primitive Religious Expression Io9
The penalty for the infraction of the tabu includes
all that flows from the anger of the gods, reaching
to death itself. A few examples, from the very
rudest religions, will serve to illustrate this.
The Kamschatkans in the beginning of the last
century were very low in the scale of humanity and
curiously pessimistic. They had a hero-god, Kutka,
their mythic progenitor, of whom they told many
Strange and disgusting stories. They cursed him
oftener than they blessed him, and refused to be-
lieve that anything good could come from the gods.
But to escape the ill-will of these malevolent beings
they practised various ceremonies and refrained
from Sundry actions calculated to displease those
capricious spirits. Thus, one must not cook fish
and flesh in the same pot, or he would be punished
with Sores; he must not step in the tracks of a bear,
or he would be visited with a skin disease; he must
not scrape the snow from his shoes with a knife, or
there would be violent storms; and so on, through a
long law of prohibitions. *
The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands have no
forms of worship, they have no invocations to the
gods, their language, indeed, has no original word
for “prayer.” They believe firmly, however, in the
* Klemm, Culturgeschächte, vol. ii., pp. 368, sq., after Steller, who
visited Kamschatka about I740.
I Lo Religions of Primitive Peoples
existence of numerous spirits, not the souls of the
deceased, but self-created and undying, who will in-
jure them if they commit certain transgressions, such
as to cook turtle or fish by burning a particular kind
of wood; to roast a pig instead of boiling it, and
so on. *
The Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego have been often,
though erroneously, quoted as a tribe devoid of re-
ligion. Their ceremonial law was rigid. The hairs
that fell from the head must be burned, or the
individual would fall ill; the name of the dead must
not be mentioned, or the ghost would return and
plague them ; the young ducklings must not be
killed, or bad weather would follow.}
The tabu in Polynesia, whence it derives its name,
was carried to an incredible degree of stringency.
The dread of its violation was so vivid, that in itself
it was often the cause of the death of the offender.f
The second form of the “Word from God’’ was
when it was uttered as a prophecy, a prediction of
the future. In this form it appears throughout the
world under the innumerable aspects of divination,
as oracles, prophetic utterances, forecasts of time
to come, second-sight, clairvoyance, and the like.
* Man, in }our. Anthrop. Society, vol. xii., pp. I59, 173.
+ Authorities above quoted, and Darwin, ZXescent of Mazz, p. 95.
f For abundant examples of the tabu in various nations see Frazer's
article in the Æncyc. Britannica above referred to.
Primitive Religious Expression I I I
The essence of every religious rite may be said to
be divinatory, inasmuch as its final aim is either to
learn or to modify the Will of God, and thus to in-
fluence the future of the individual or society by
extra-natural agencies.
There is nothing in this derogatory to religion as
an element of mind. The constant effort of the
reason is to banish the idea of chance from the uni-
verse; and he who regards the Will of God as a law
of the universe does exclude chance from its events
just in proportion as he learns that Will and acts in
conformity to it.
Prediction in primitive religions is by two widely
different methods, Divination and Prophecy.
The diviner, relying on his own sense and reason-
ing powers, foretells the future by observation of
certain trains of events which he believes reveal the
intentions of the gods; the prophet is one inspired
by the divine mind itself to speak its own words and
to convey directly the thoughts and wishes of deity.
This distinction is visible in early religions. Any
one can learn the “signs" and “omens' which will
be auspicious or inauspicious for his undertakings;
though, of course, to read their full significance one
must have made special studies in the art of augury.
To become an inspired prophet requires a much more
serious preparation, and some form of communion
direct with the gods must be established.
I 12 Religions of Primitive Peoples
III.--THE WORD CONCERNING THE GODS. A
brilliant French writer (E. Scherer) has said: “It
was the Word that made the gods,” “Le mot, c'est
!"artisan des idoles.” He but expressed in a pointed
apothegm what the profound German mythologist
Kuhn stated in more formal terms when he wrote:
“The foundation of mythology is to be looked for
in the domain of language.”
What, indeed, does the term “myth" itself mean?
It is merely the Greek for “a word,” something spo-
ken, and in this general sense it is used by Homer.
Later, its connotation became restricted to what was
spoken concerning the gods, the narratives of their
doings, the descriptions of their abodes and attributes.
Men began to frame such tales the moment they
consciously recognised the existence of such unseen
agencies. They were founded on visions, dreams,
and those vague mental states which, as I have
shown, fill up so large a part of Savage life. They
were not intentional fictions, by any means, for the
criteria between the real and unreal fade away in
those psychic conditions, and the faintest hold on
actuality is enough to guarantee an indefinitely
complex fancy.
It was a strange error by one of the most earnest
students of primitive religions, the Reverend W.
Robertson Smith, when he advocated his theory
Primitive Religious Expression I 13
that the myth was derived from the ritual, not the
ritual from the myth.* Had he studied the actual
religious condition of the rudest tribes, he would
have found them with scarcely any ritual but a most
abundant mythology; and he would have discovered
that where the myth was taken from the ritual, it is
when the latter has lost its original meaning, and
Some other is devised to explain it.
As examples of such notions, I may take the
Bushmen of South Africa. They enjoy the general
reputation of being the lowest of the human race.
They have no temples, no altars, no ritual; yet the
missionary Bleek collected among them thousands
of tales concerning their gods in their relations to
men and animals. i.
The Andamanese are alleged to have no forms of
worship whatever; but they have many myths about
the mighty Puluga, self-created and immortal, about
the Origin of fire, and the transactions of the invis-
ible spirits.
It would be easy to give many other examples,
but it is enough to refute such an opinion by refer-
ring to the vast body of myths in all religious peoples
which have no reference to ritual whatever.
* A'eligion of the Semites, p. 18.
# Filling in manuscript, he says, seventy-seven quarto volumes,
and far from exhausting the supply Bushman Folk-lore, p. 6.
(Londºn, 1875.)
I 14 Religions of Primitive Peoples
The sources of mythology are psychic. They are
not to be traced to the external world, whether
ritual or natural. Myths are not figurative explana-
tions of natural phenomena, they are not vague
memories of ancestors and departed heroes, they are
not philosophic speculations or poetic fancies. They
are distinctly religious in origin, and, when genuine,
are the fruit of that insight into the divine, that
“beatific vision,” on which I have laid such emphasis
as the real and only foundation of all religions what-
SO €V €1.
They receive their form and expression through
spoken language, and are, therefore, intimately as-
sociated with, often dependent upon its sounds, and
laws. In how many ways this may influence them I
may briefly mention.
Primitive language is predominantly concrete.
The connotations of its terms are mainly objective.
By this necessity arose the materialisation of the
spiritual thought. It had to be expressed under
external imagery.
Primitive languages are usually intensely individ-
ualising and specific. There is scarcely a native
tongue in America in which one could say “ hand ”;
one must always add a pronoun indicating whose
hand is meant, “my, thy, his,” hand.
The generic distinctions in such tongues are often
Primitive Religious Expression I 15
far reaching and real, not purely formal, as with us
A word in the masculine or feminine gender is
understood to mean that the object to which it re-
fers is positively male or female. Many other dis-
tinctions are thus conveyed, as what is animate and
inanimate, noble or vulgar, etc.
The result of these distinctions in such languages
as the Aryan and Semitic was that the gods perforce
were arranged sexually as male and female, and this
persists to-day even in our English tongue.
Many myths arose directly from words, through
casual similarities between them which were at-
tributed to some divine cause. This is the theory so
well known by the advocacy of Professor Max Müller,
who is charged, unfairly I believe, with having called
mythology a “ disease of language.” He, Professor
Kuhn, and others lay great and just stress on the
influence of “paronomy,” that is, similarity in the
Sound of words, as the starting-point of myths.
They have adduced endless examples from the
classical tongues, but I shall content myself with two
from wholly primitive sources.
I have just referred to the Andamanese as at the
bottom of religious growth, but with an abundant
mythology. In their tongue it happens that the
word garub means “night '' and also a species of
caterpillar. It is probably a mere coincidence of
II 6 Religions of Primitive Peoples
sound. But they saw in it much more. Night to
them is a depressing period, and it would not have
been created by the supreme Puluga without just
cause. Evidently the double meaning of the word
garuff indicated this. And as the wise men proceed
On that universally sound opinion that when there is
a row there is a woman in it, they perceive that some
woman must have wantonly killed a garub, a cater-
pillar, in order that Puluga should have sent garuff,
the night, as a punishment. And this is the sum of a
long mythical story.*
Another example is from a far distant area, from
among the Carrier Indians of British America.
The arctic fox which they hunt has a sharp yelp
which sounds Āhaih. Their word for “light” is
yekāhaih. Evidently the fox was the animal
who first called for the light and, by the magical
power of the word, obtained it. Through what
difficulties he accomplished this is told in a long
and curious myth obtained from them by Father
Morice.
In the development of myths it was, indeed, often
the case that those concerning one deity could be told
of another—singularly incongruous as it often was,
or that the divine attributes primarily assigned to a
* Man, ubi supra, p. 172.
f Morice, 7% ans. A'oy. Soc. Canada, I892, p. I25.
Primitive Religious Expression I 17
deity and drawn from its character could be trans-
ferred to a human type, as when those of a flower
were placed on the god. *
It is equally an error to suppose that myths were
at first mere stories and received their religious char-
acter later. The true myth has a religious aim from
the outset, and is not the product of an idle fancy.
Those who have taught otherwise have been mis-
led by a superficial acquaintance with the psychology
of savage tribes. Mythology comes from religion,
not religion from mythology.
The savage understands perfectly the difference
between a sacred and a secular story, between a nar-
rative of the doings of the gods handed down from
his ancestors, and the creation of the idle fancy
brought forth to amuse a circle of listeners.
I have already referred to the strange similarity in
the myths of Savage nations far asunder in space
and kinship. The explanation of this is not to be
found in borrowing or in recollections from a com-
mon, remote unity; but in the laws of the human
mind. The same myths are found all over the
world, with the same symbolism and imagery, woven
into cycles dealing with the same great questions of
* This branch of the subject has been fully discussed by Keary,
Outlines of Prim. Belief, Preface and chapter i. ; and Frazer, Zhe
Golden Aozºgh, passim.
II 8 Religions of Primitive Peoples
human thought. This is because they arise from
identical psychic sources, and find expression under
Obligatory forms, depending on the relations of man
to his environment, and on the unity of mental pro-
cess throughout the race.
It is not possible for me at the present time to
enter far into the vast temple of mythology. I must
content myself with selecting a few of the most
prominent mythical cycles, aiming by these to show
how they form the ground-plan and substructure of
the whole edifice of mythical narrative.
I will select seven which are the most prominent,
those relating to : I. the Cosmical Concepts; 2. the
Sacred Numbers; 3. the Drama of the Universe;
4. the Earthly Paradise; 5. the Conflict of Nature;
6. the Returning Saviour; and 7, the Journey of
the Soul.
1. The Cosmical Concepts.--Wherever man is placed
on the earth, he is guided in his movements by space
and direction. These are among the earliest notions
he derives from the impressions on his senses. His
anatomical conformation, the anterior and posterior
planes of his body and his right and left sides, lead
him to a fourfold division of space, as before him
and behind him, to one side or the other. He con-
ceives the earth, therefore, as a plain with four
quarters, the chief directions as four, to wit, the car-
Primitive Religious Expression I 19
dinal points, and the winds as four principal currents
from these points. The sky is to him a solid cover-
ing, supported at each of its four corners by a tree, a
pillar, or a giant, and is itself divided into four courts
or regions like the earth.
These were his cosmical concepts, his primal ideas
of the universe, and they entered deeply into his life,
his acts, and his beliefs. He founded his social or-
ganisation on them, he pitched his tents or built his
cities on their model, he oriented his edifices to
simulate them, and framed his myths to explain and
perpetuate them.
We find these concepts practically universal. The
symbolic figures which represent them are scratched
in the soil at the Bora, or initiation ceremonies of
the Australians; they are etched into the pots and
jars we dig up in the mounds of the Mississippi val-
ley; they are painted in strange figures on the
manuscripts of the Mayas and Mexicans; they re-
appear in the mysterious symbols of the Svastika
and the Chinese Ta-Ki; they underlie the founda-
tion stones of Egyptian pyramids, and recur in the
lowest strata of Babylonian ziggarats.”
2. The Sacred AWumbers.-The cosmical concepts
were closely connected with the sacred numbers.
* See Myths of the AVew World, chap. iii.; also, an article on
symbolism in ancient American art, by Prof. Putnam and Mr. Wil-
loughby in Proc. Am. Ass. Adv. Science, vol. xliv., p. 302.
12o Religions of Primitive Peoples
Wherever we turn in myth and rite, in symbolism or
sacred art, we find certain numbers which have a
hallowed priority in religious thought. These num-
bers are pre-eminently the three and the four, and
those derived from them. They are distinctly anti-
thetic in character, arising from contrasting psychical
sources, which I will briefly explain.
The number four derives its sacredness in myth-
ology from the cosmical concepts just mentioned.
It was, therefore, connected with the objective and
phenomenal world, and had a material and concrete
Origin and applications.
The number three, on the other hand, was sur-
rounded with the halo of sanctity from the opera-
tions of the mind itself. These, the processes of
thinking, are carried on by a triple or rather triune
action of the intelligence, which logicians express in
the three fundamental “laws of thought,” and in the
trilogy of the syllogism. These ever-present laws of
thinking impress themselves on the mind and mental
acts whether they are recognised or not, and all the
more absolutely in that involuntary action in which,
as “sub-limital consciousness” or “psychic automat-
ism,” I have revealed to you the true source of the
conception of the Divine.i.
ł I have presented this subject with greater detail in an article
“On the Origin of Sacred Numbers” in the American Anthropologist,
April, 1894. The contrast of symbolism of the three and the four
Primitive Religious Expression 121
How natural, then, that we should find in so many
primitive faiths the belief in the triplicate nature of
divinity, should find myths, idols, rites, so devised as
to reflect and inculcate this Such is the case, and
it is easy to quote examples, whether we turn to the
Indians of America or the Indians of Hindostan,
whether we touch on the triads of ancient Egypt or
those of the Druids, whether we recall the three
Norns of Teutonic myth or the three Fates of the
Hellenes. As a writer, who has made the subject
his special branch, observes: “It is impossible to
study any single system of worship throughout the
world, without being struck with the peculiar per-
sistence of the triple number in regard to Divinity.” ”
The exception to this would naturally be where
the concept of the number itself was too feeble to
is familiar to students. Such a popular text-book as Keil's Manual
of Bióſical Archaeology states that four was the predominating num-
ber in the temples, altars, and rites of the ancient world, it being,
“according to an idea common to all antiquity, the symbol of the
cosmos”; while the three was “the mark of the Divine Being in His
various manifestations” (pp. I27, 128).
* Westcott, Symbolism of AWumbers, p. 7. I have given sev-
eral examples of triple or triune deities in America in Myths of the
AWew World, pp. 84, 187, 188. From other fields I may note the
triad Kane, Ku, and Lono of Hawaii (Fornander, Polynesian Race,
vol. i., p. 61); that on the Marquesas objectively represented by
three sticks tied together (Dr. Tautain, in Z'Anthropologie, tom.
vii., p. 544); the triad of Tangaloa, Creator, Maui, Sustainer, and
Tiki, Revealer, elsewhere in Polynesia (Hale, Æthnog, and A'hilol.,
p. 24).
I 2.2 Religions of Primitive Peoples
impress itself upon the myth. There are tribes who
cannot count four, whose languages have no word
for any number beyond two, and yet who are by no
means deficient either in mythologies or practical
arts.” Among these, we should look in vain for the
sacredness of numbers.
3. The Drama of the Universe. —I have already
quoted the saying of the wise men of ancient India,
“There is no limit to the knowing of the Self that
knows.” He who through meditation and prayer
has become one with God, knows what God knows.
Thus it is that in the rudest tribes we find the story
of the beginning of things clearly told as coming
from the inspired knowledge of the seers.
This story has many points of similarity, wherever
we find it, not owing, I hasten again to say, to any
unity of origin in place, but due to the higher unity
of the mind of man, and the necessary results of its
activity.
Look in what continent we please, we shall find
the myth of a Creation or of a primeval construction,
of a Deluge or a destruction, and of an expected
Restoration. We shall find that man has ever looked
on this present world as a passing scene in the shift-
ing panorama of time, to be ended by some cataclysm
* Numerous examples are collected in L. L. Conant, The AVumber
Concept, chap. ii.
Primitive Religious Expression I 23
and to be followed by some period of millennial
glory.
Whenever we have a fairly complete body of the
mythology of a primitive stock, we discover the
same scenario of the vast drama of the universe,
varying abundantly in detail and local colour, but
true to the grandiose lines of its composition.
It is instructive to analyse its various elements
and trace them to their psychic sources. Let us begin
with the modes of action of the creative power itself.
This mysterious power is known to man under
three forms.
The simplest is that of the moulder or manufact-
urer, as the potter makes his pots, the shoemaker
his shoes. This is the conception which underlies
many myths of the Creator, as is shown by the
names he bears. Thus the Australians called him
Baiame, “the cutter-out,” as one cuts out a sandal
from a skin, or a figure from bark. The Maya In-
dians used the term Patol, from the verb paſſ, to
mould, as a potter his clay, Bitol, which has the
same meaning, and Tzacol, the builder, as of a
house.” With the Dyaks of Borneo, the Creator
is Tupa, the forger, as one forges a spear-blade + ;
and so on.
* In the Quiche and Tzental dialects.
+ From the verb tumpa, to forge, Ling Roth, Matizes of Sarawak,
vol. i., p. 165.
124 Religions of Primitive Peoples
The second form is that of creation in the sense
of generation, and this is a constant simile in the
myths, with reference to the process both in the
vegetable and animal kingdoms.
The Creator is often referred to as the Father, the
parent, more or less literally, of all that is. He has
many such titles in the myths of America and Poly-
nesia. In bisexual myths he is associated with
some universal mother as the genetrix.
The third form is more recondite and loftier. In
an earlier lecture I have emphasised how man is
conscious within himself of the Will as an ultimate
source of power. This he clearly recognised in his
primitive conditions, and to its exertion repeatedly
in his myths did he attribute the origin of things.
They were self-evolved in the thought of the primal
Being, or, as the native American expression is, they
were “created by thought.”
We find this in the rudest tribes of North Amer-
ica; and among the sedentary Zufiis of New Mexico,
it is said of their demiurge Awonawilona that at the
beginning “he conceived within himself and thought
outward in space,” in order to bring nature into
existence. We see the connection in the Vitian
dialect of Polynesian, in which mania is “to think”;
mana, a miracle, and the power to perform one.
According to the myths of Hawaii, it was “by an
Primitive Religious Expression 125
act of the will” that their triple-natured Creator
“broke up the night " (Po), and from its fragments
evoked into being the world of light and life.”
Whatever the mode of creation, it was felt that it
did not tell the whole story. The conceptions of
time and space are in their essence limitless, and any
creation must have been within them. Thus in
Polynesian myth, Po represents not a dateless chaos
but the debris of some former state of things; and
in Algonquin legend the primeval ocean had en-
gulfed some older world.t
This psychic molimen, ceaselessly acting, led in
more developed mythologies to some defined fancies
of these earlier periods of cosmic existence and thus
to the myths of the Ages of the World or the Epochs
of Nature. These are clearly outlined among the
Mexicans, Mayas, Peruvians, and other tribes of the
* The Tinné of British America have the word AWayéweri, he who
creates by thought (Petitot, Zes Dené Dindjie, p. 63); the Algon-
quian Kitché Manito created the world “ by an act of his will”
(Schoolcraft, Onedia, p. 34.2). For the Zuñians, see Cushing, Zuñi
Creation Myths, p. 379 ; for the Polynesians, Hale, Ethnography of
the U. S. Exploring Expedition, p. 399, and Fornander, Z'he Poly-
nesian AEace, vol. i., p. 62.
There is no distinction between these opinions and that of the
Christian church, so beautifully expressed by St. Ephrem the Syrian:
“At the nod of His will, noiseless and gentle, out of nothing He
created all.” (Select Works, Translated by Rev. J. B. Morris, p.
I85.)
+ Fornander, The Polynesian Race, vol. i., p. 67 ; Æel, de la AVouv.
France, I634, p. 13.
126 Religions of Primitive Peoples
New World and among many on the Eastern Hemi-
sphere. The Aztecs count them as four, each fol-
lowed by a formidable catastrophe, nearly or quite
destroying all that lived.
The last of these destructions was generally
blended with the notion of the emergence of the
solid land from the primeval waters; and this is
the origin of the Deluge Myth, the story of the Uni-
versal Flood, which we find in so many primitive
peoples. It has excited especial attention, and by
writers has been explained as the remembrance of
some local overflow, or the recollection of the He-
brew tradition. Its real origin, purely psychic and
derived from the myth of the Epochs of Nature, I
explained thirty years ago in discussing its preva-
lence among American tribes.”
4. The Earthly Paradise.—Associated with this
cycle is the myth of the terrestrial Paradise, watered
by its four rivers, and enclosing the tree of life, the
happy abode of early man. The four rivers are the
celestial streams from the four corners of the earth,
watering the tree as the emblem of life. Thus we
find it among the American Indians, the Sioux and
*In Myths of the New World, ch. vii. (first ed., 1868). Numer-
ous writers, Klee, Andree, Lucas, etc., have treated the deluge myth
with fulness. It is found even among the Mincopies of the Anda-
man Islands (Man, z. s.) and is quite common throughout Polynesia
(Fornander, z. s., vol. i., pp. 88, sq.). Various Australian tribes
record it in detail, Smyth, Z'he Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i., p. 430.
Primitive Religious Expression 127
the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Polynesians, the ancient
Aryans and Semites, etc.” Its origin is purely
psychic, and though we can easily understand how
the writer of the Book of Genesis sought to identify
these mythical streams with some known to him, it
is strangely out of date for scholars of to-day to
follow his footsteps in that vain quest.f
5. The Conflict of Nature.—Another great cycle
of psychic myths arose from the conflict of nature as
apprehended by the primitive mind. Everywhere it
seems to be raging around us. The hourly struggle
of light with darkness; of day with night; of sun-
shine with storm ; of summer with winter; of youth
with age, of health with disease; of life with death;
of all that makes toward good with all that makes
toward evil—this endless battle of two principles un-
derlies all movement and is forever stirring the soul
to throw itself into the fray.
In a thousand forms this eternal combat was por-
trayed in myths, all pregnant with one meaning,
bodying it forth in varied symbol and expression.
The world-wide stories of the conflict of the first two
* Fornander (u. s., vol. i., p. 79, sg.) discusses it in Polynesia.
Their “tree of life '’ was a sacred “tabooed ” bread-fruit tree. For
America, see Myths of the AVezy World, pp. IO3-106.
+ For this reason the works of Delitsch, Haupt, etc., on the
question, Wo Zag das Paradies 3, are much less to the point than if
their writers had studied the comparative mythology of the subject.
128 Religions of Primitive Peoples
brothers, of men with gods, of giants with heroes, of
the deities among themselves, arose from this per-
ception of the unceasing interaction of natural forces,
imagined as a war between conscious existences.
6. The Keturning Saviour.—Out of this imagined
turmoil and slaughter grew the wonderful mythical
cycles concerning the Deliverer and Saviour. He
would come from afar, out of the morning light or
the distant sky, or he would be born of a virgin and
the son of a god. He would lead his people to hap-
piness and power, crushing by his might the enemies
who afflicted them, whether on earth or among the
envious gods. Blond - bearded and light - haired,
even among Polynesians and Americans, we cannot
err in seeing in this majestic figure the personified
idea of Light, transferred from the plane of physical
phenomena into that of psychical anticipation.*
7. The journey of the Soul.-Lastly, I mention
the cycle which describes the journey of the soul
after death. The extraordinary similarity which I
and others have pointed out between the opinions
on this subject among Egyptians, Greeks, ancient
Celts, and North American Indians, is not to be
* This mythical cycle, as it arose among the native tribes of Amer-
ica, was made by me the special subject of a volume, American Aſero-
Myths (pp. 25I, Philadelphia, I882).
# See my F'ssays of an Americanisł, pp. 135–147; }. Grimm, 7'eze-
tomic Mythology, vol. ii., p. 832 ; Schrader and Jevons, Prehistoric
Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, p. 424.
Primitive Religious Expression 129
explained by any theory of inter-communication,
nor “by chance,” as some have argued, but by fixed
psychic laws, working over the same material under
similar conditions.
The soul passes toward the west, crosses a sea or
river to the abode of the departed, and meets every-
where nearly the same obstacles, to be overcome by
proper preparations and mortuary ceremonies. I
need not rehearse the details. They can be com-
pared elsewhere. But their substantial identity
confirms in an emphatic manner the thesis I am
advocating, that in these universal mythical cycles
we are dealing not with fragments of some one set
of fancies borrowed from a common source, but
with independent creations of the human intellect,
framed under laws common to it everywhere, and
which tend always to produce fruits generically
everywhere the same.
9
LECTURE IV.
Primitive Religious Expression : In the
Object.
CoNTENTS:—Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship only—
|
Identical with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a
Stadium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Objects:
I. The Celestial Bodies—Sun and Moon Worship—Astrolatry;
2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the Winds), Water, and the
Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones and Rocks—Thunder-
bolts—Memorial Stones—Divining Stones; 4. Trees and Plants
—The Tree of Life—The Sacred Pole and the Cross—The
Plant-Soul—The Tree of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—
High Places and Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird,
the Serpent, etc.; 7. Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Wor-
ship of Beauty; 8. Life and its Transmission—Examples—
Genesiac Cults—The Fatherhood of God—Love as Religion's
Crown.
F we analyse the concepts which occupy our
minds, we shall find that most of them are
derived from the sense of sight ; they are what
psychologists call “visual ideas.” To these alone
We
owe the notions of space, size, form, colour, bright-
ness, and motion.
By filling the brain with such images, sight be-
comes a mental stimulus of the highest order, and
as we find it exerting its influence in other directions,
I3O
Primitive Religious Expression 13 I
So in the development of the religious sense it has
always held a conspicuous place. It has led to the
objective expression of that sense under visible
forms, in images, pictures, sacred structures, sym-
bolic colours and shapes, and natural substances.
This expression, universal in primitive conditions,
is called fetishism, polytheism, and idolatry, the
worship of stocks and stones. But I wish to im-
press upon you that nowhere in the world did man
ever worship a stock or a stone, as such. Every
fetish, be it a rag-baby or a pebble from the road-
side, is adored, not as itself, but as possessing some
mysterious, transcendental power, by which it can
influence the future. In some obscure way it is the
medium or agent of that supernatural Will, the
recognition of which is at the basis of every
religion.
The relation of the fetish to the spiritual power
behind it, though everywhere recognised, was not
easy to define. The Melanesians believe that the
souls of the dead act through bones; while the
independent spirits (vul) choose stones as their
mediums; and they say that these objects are, as
it were, limbs or members of these incorporeal
powers.”
That the fetish itself is something else than the
* Codrington in }our. Anthrop. Soc., vol. x., p. 285.
132 Religions of Primitive Peoples
mere object, and is certainly not identified with it
(as writers have often asserted), is evident from the
words and actions of fetish worshippers. A South
African negro offered food to a tree in the presence
of an European traveller. The latter observed that
a tree cannot eat. “Oh,” replied the negro, “tree
not fetish. Fetish spirit; not seen; live in tree.”.”
If a fetish does not bring good luck, it is thrown
away, burned, or broken, as having lost its virtue,
ceased to be the abode of power. One of efficacy,
on the other hand, will bring a good price, and such
are often sold and bought. Among the Papuans of
New Guinea the fetishes are small wooden dolls
dressed in coloured rags. They are believed to be
the media through which the ancestral spirits oper-
ate. But if a man has bad luck, he will beat, or
break, or cast away, as of no account, such an
impotent object. H
These and scores of other examples which could
be adduced disprove the assertion that man, even in
his lowest phases of religious life, ever worshipped
an object as an object. Even then, his intellectual
insight penetrated to the recognition of something
higher than phenomena in the world about him. As
has been well said by a German writer, what is really
* Waitz, Anthropologie der AWaturvø/ker, Bd. ii., p. 188.
+ Von Hasselt, in Zeitschrift für Athnologie, Bd. viii., p. 196.
Primitive Religious Expression 133
worshipped in the object anywhere is not itself but
“a transcendental ar,” within and beyond it.”
It has been abundantly shown that amid the tribes
of the West Coast of Africa, to whose gods the term
fetish, feitiço, was first applied by the Portuguese,
the recognition and worship of tribal and national
divinities and even of a Supreme Being, ruler and
creator of the world, are clearly displayed.”
The house of cards therefore, erected by Auguste
Comte, to represent the religious progress of the race,
the first floor of which was fetishism, the second
polytheism, and the third monotheism, falls help-
lessly to the ground.
There is no real distinction between fetishism and
idolatry, unless we choose to say that the latter refers
to the worship of objects artificially shaped ; but
many fetishes are so likewise.
Nor can we say, with Professor Rialle, that fetish-
ism confounds the unseen agent with the thing itself,
while the idolatry of developed polytheism regards
the agent as something exterior to the object, an in-
dependent existence. i. For not only does fetishism
* J. G. Pfleiderer, Die Genesis des Mythus der Zndogermanischen
Völker, p. 48.
# References in Pietschmann, Zeitschrift für AEthnologie, Bd. x., p.
159, who points out that fetishism should be, as a term, confined to
the cult and not applied to the content of a religion.
# Rialle, Za Mythologie Comparée, ch, i.
I 34 Religions of Primitive Peoples
recognise the power of the supernatural outside of
all objects, but the idols of polytheism are unquest-
ionably just as holy, just as much limbs of the gods,
as the dolls of the Melanesians.
We cannot even take fetishism as a special form
of the cult or external worship; for it goes hand in
hand with every phase of objective religion. It is
quite as prevalent now, in proportion to the general
strength of the religious sentiment, as it ever was,
and is visible in the sacredness which all sects of the
highest religions attach to certain objects and places.
When the Christian touches the bone of a saint that
he may be healed of an infirmity, or when he speaks
of his church edifice as “the house of God,” or when
he packs in his trunk a Bible “for luck's sake,” he is
as much a fetish worshipper as the negro caboceer
who collects around him a thousand pieces of rubbish
because he thinks they have brought him good for-
tune.*
Modern folk-lore is full of fetishism, and it is a
development of the religious sentiment which flour-
ishes in all times and climes. Amulets, charms, lucky
* Prof. Granger remarks that “the influence of the fetish is inter-
preted as a kind of life of which the fetish is the seat.”— Worship of
the A'omans, p. 20I. Bastian defines it as “an incorporation of a
subjective emotional state,” and his disciple Achelis recognises that
it is not a stadium of religious development. See his Moderne Völker-
Áunde, p. 366.
Primitive Religious Expression I 35
stones, everything that we now call by the familiar
term of mascot, partakes of the nature of a fetish.
Through some fancied potency, not to be found
gamong its physical qualities, it is believed to bring us
good fortune.
Nor is it a distinctive character of fetish worship,
as has been maintained by some, that in it compul-
sion or constraint is endeavoured to be exercised on
the gods to force them to be favourable and exert
their power in aid of the supplicant. The earliest
prayers are not of this character, as I showed in my
last lecture; and, on the other hand, the notion of
constraining the gods extended widely in higher re-
ligions and, indeed, probably in a metaphysical sense,
was taught by the founder of Christianity himself,
as in the parable of the unjust judge.
As there is nothing deeper than an external dis-
tinction between fetishism and idolatry, so there is
no special form of religious thought which expresses
itself as what has been called by Dr. Tylor, “anim-
ism,” the belief that inanimate objects are animated
and possess Souls or spirits. This opinion, which in
one guise or another, is common to all religions and
many philosophies, is merely a secondary phenom-
enon of the religious sentiment, and not a trait
characteristic of primitive faiths. The idea of the
World-Soul, manifesting itself individually in every
136 Religions of Primitive Peoples
form of matter from the star to the clod, is as truly
the belief of the Sioux Indian or the Fijian canni-
bal, as it was of Spinoza or Giordano Bruno.”
This vague and universal divine potency extends
through all nature, organic and inorganic, expressing
itself in personality wherever separateness, Oneness,
is visible. Not merely did animals and trees share
in the World-soul, but every object whatever. With
the American Indians, the commonest sticks and
stones, even the household vessel fashioned out of
clay, or the hollowed stone on which the maize was
pounded, had its spiritual essence, which might
speak, act, and require to be venerated. The
Vitian Islanders held that each cocoanut had its
own spirit, and Occasionally many cocoanuts as-
sembled for a jollification, at which times the joyous
cracking of their sides kept the natives awake! :
But no error would be greater than to confound
this with a veneration of such objects in themselves.
To the mind of the savage, whatever displayed
movement, emitted sound or odour, or by its de-
* The insufficiency of animism as a theory of primitive religions
has been previously urged by Van Ende, Histoire AVature/le de la
Croyance, p. 21. Like fetishism and shamanism, animism should
be regarded, not as a form or stadium of religion, but, to use Cas-
tren’s excellent expression, “nur ein Moment in der Götterlehre.”
Ainmische Mythologie, Einleitung.
+ Dorsey, Siouan Cults, p. 433; the Poffo/ Vuh,fassàm.
† Hale, Æthnog, and Philol, of the CW. S. Exploring Æxpd., p. 55.
Primitive Religious Expression 137
fined limits and form indicated unity, was to him
a manifestation in personality of that impersonal,
spiritual Power of which he felt himself but one of
the expressions. All other expressions shared his
powers, and did not, in essence, differ from him.
The brute, the plant, the stone, the wandering orbs
of night, the howling wind, the crackling fire, the
towering hill, all were his fellow-creatures, inspired
by the same life as himself, drawing it from the same
universal font of life.
It is not without reason, therefore, that the unde-
veloped religious longings ask for something con-
crete to represent divinity. Through its visible and
audible traits the power of the Unseen Ruler is
brought sharply to the consciousness. We sympa-
thise even with the poor Oraons of Bengal, who,
seeing nothing nobler to embody the divine, place a
ploughshare on their altar as the object of adora-
tion.*
Although in the limitless field of his religious
insight everything in nature was to him a manifesta-
tion of divinity, primitive man everywhere indicated
a preference for certain objects and groups of ob-
jects, evidently led to single them out on account of
the strength or frequency of the appeals they make
to his senses of sight and hearing.
* E. T. Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal, p. 258.
138 Religions of Primitive Peoples
With the utmost brevity I will enumerate the
most important of these groups, and endeavour at
the same time to point out why they were every-
where selected to convey conceptions of the nature
and attributes of God.
1. The Celestial Bodies.—The first group that I
shall mention is that of the Celestial Bodies, the
Sun, Moon, and Stars. The traits which connected
them with the ideas of the divine are almost too
obvious to require mention. They are bringers of
light and warmth, they define the momentous
change of day and night, their motions usher in the
seasons and mark the progress of time. They are
remote, aloft, inscrutable, dwellers in a realm which
man may distantly perceive but never enter.
So much has been written of solar myths and
star worship that every reader is aware of their practi-
cal universality among early nations. It is probable
that the division of our week into seven days arose
either from the dedication of one to each of the
seven greatest luminaries or to a division of the
moon's apparent course into four parts. Judicial
astrology, which is not yet wholly dead, always
maintained that the nativities were decided by the
position of the stars.
All such survivals carry us back to primitive re-
ligions in which the astral bodies were prominent
Primitive Religious Expression 139
figures in the cult. Many writers have maintained
that the American Indians from north to South were
always and mainly sun-worshippers. Though this is
too hasty a statement, everyone will acknowledge
that the sun is ever a conspicuous figure in their
myths and rites. So it is among the Polynesians
and Africans, and so we find it in the early forms of
Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian belief.
It is at first sight strange that in many mythologies
the moon plays a more important rôle than the sun.
But if we reflect that the night is the time when
spirits walk abroad ; when sounds strike the ear with
mysterious notes; when nocturnal birds and beasts
stir the senses with strange cries; when, on the other
hand, the cooling zephyrs and soft moonlight bring
sweet ease, and the gentle dews refresh the parched
leaves; then we can understand-why, both in modern
folk-lore” and in primitive myths, the moon and the
stars are often far more conspicuous than the flam-
ing sun. The night, in fact, draws the veil from the
spiritual world ; as has been said so beautifully by
Shelley:
“As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her.”
* See remarks of W. W. Newell in his introduction to Fanny D.
Bergen, Current Superstitions (Mems. Amer. Folk-lore Society,
vol. iv.).
140 Religions of Primitive Peoples
A few examples will illustrate this: The Dieyeris
of Australia believe that man and all other beings
were created by the moon. In many American
languages the moon is regarded as male and the Sun
is referred to as “his companion.” The Ipurinas, a
Brazilian tribe, address the orb as “Our Father,”
and imagine him a little old man who was their
ancestor and still watches over their prosperity. In
like manner the eastern Eskimos say that their
ancestors came from the moon to the earth. With
the rude tribes of southern Borneo it is stated that
the veneration of the moon forms the chief basis of
their worship and myths.”
I can but refer to the lesser luminaries of the night.
The stars have at all times been associated with
religious meditations. The various constellations are
familiar to most primitive peoples and are personified
under living forms. Widely in South America and
Polynesia the Pleiades enjoyed an especial homage,
as marking the advent of the seasons and as con-
* Klemm, Culturgeschichte, Bd. ii., s. 316 ; Ling Roth, Matives
of Sarawak, vol. ii., App., p. cxcviii.; Brinton, Myths of the AVew
World, p. 154; Curr, Zhe Australian Race, vol. ii., p. 48. The
moon was sacred to Tina, the chief god of the Etruscans. Müller,
APie Etruséer, Bd. ii., p. 43. Né didā, better known as Dido, has
been identified with the moon as the leading deity of the Cartha-
ginians and Phoenicians. Otto Meltzer, Geschichte der Áarthager,
Bd. i., S. 128. Danu, the goddess who presided over the Irish pan-
theon, the tuatha de Zanann, was the moon (from daom, to rise).
Primitive Religious Expression 141
nected with the production of vegetable life. In
Peru they were styled the gods of rains; and the
natives of the Gulf of California venerated them to
that degree that even to look at them heedlessly was
deemed calamitous ; while some Australians held
that it was from them that fire first descended to the
world.” In such remote districts as Australia and
Greenland the Milky-way was regarded as the path
by which the souls ascended to their homes in the
sky. In the one land the Aurora Australis, in the
other the Aurora Borealis, was looked upon as the
dance of the gods across the star-lit vault. Indeed,
the study of the stellar bodies and the definition of
their periodical appearance date directly to the ven-
eration they excited in religious minds.
2. The Four Elements.-The simple theory that
the world is composed of four elements, fire, water,
air, and earth, is one which presents itself so
naturally to primitive thought that traces of it can
be seen in most mythologies which have passed be-
yond the rudimentary forms.
Each of these elements has its own group of re-
ligious associations, and they present themselves
with that uniformity which we find so universal in
religious expression, to be explained, as I have so
* Montesinos, Ancien Perou, p. 17 ; Venegas, Hist of California,
p. IO; ; Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i., p. 459.
I42 Religions of Primitive Peoples
often said, by the identity everywhere of the psychic
sources of religion.
Perhaps the earliest of all the elements to receive
this adoration was fire. With its discovery man first
entered into human social life. Everywhere and in
all peoples it has been in a manner sacred. With
the Kafirs every religious ceremony must be per-
formed in front of a fire.” In the Rig Veda the
crackling of the blazing twigs is regarded as the
speech of the gods, just as it is to-day in Borneo.
The institutions of the sacred fire and the perpetual
fire recur in every continent, and we have but to
enter a church of the Roman communion on the
morning of Holy Saturday to witness the impressive
ceremonies with which the creation of the “new
fire" is to this day celebrated in our midst. The
custom of passing an infant “through the fire”
was as much practised by the Aztecs in Mexico as
by the Moloch worshippers of Syria. The Peru-
vians held that divine inspiration was to be obtained
by sacrifices to the god of fire; and those of Guat-
emala adored it as their greatest and oldest deity. .
In all these and in a hundred other examples
which I might cite, the main thought is that in fire
* Brincker in Globus, Bd. lxviii., p. 97.
+ Martin de Leon, Camino del Cielo, fol. IOI.
f Montesinos, Ancien Perou, pp. I4–16; Ximenes, Origen de los
Indios de Guatemala, p. I57.
Primitive Religious Expression 143
and its products—warmth, heat, light, flame—lies
the essential principle of life; and the worship of
Life was the central, positive conception in primitive
ceremonies.
The air to early man is recognised in motion as
the winds; and these, in his myths and rites, occupy
a Conspicuous position. Conceived as four, blowing
more or less directly from the four corners of the
earth-plane, they are the rain-bringers, the gods of
the seasons and the year, controlling the products of
the harvest and hence the happiness and life of
man. The outlines of the story are the same
whether we listen to the Maoris of New Zealand,
who tell us of Tawhiri-matea, god of the winds,
who divided his progeny into four broods and sent
One to each quarter of the compass; to the Eskimos,
who narrate just the same of Sillam Innua, owner
of the winds, and his four sons; or to a score of
like myths which I could quote from American
storyland.”
The house of the winds, where they are imagined
to be stored, a mythical notion which Professor
Schwartz has shown to be so wide-spread in the Old
World, recurs with scarcely less frequency in the
New World.
*Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology, p. 5; Egede, Machrichten
zon Grönland, s. I37.
+ Zeitschrift für AEthnologie, Bd. ix. The Eskimo called it Sillam
Fifane, winds-house, Egede, u. s.
I44. Religions of Primitive Peoples
Water, as moisture, the dew, the fertilising
showers, the green bordered streams and lakes, was
ever connected with vegetable life and its symbols.
In most cosmogonies the land rose from the bosom
of Some primal sea ; in most primitive geographies
the solid earth is surrounded by the mighty ocean-
stream which stretches out to the uttermost space.
“All of us,” said the Aztecs, “are children of
water.” Hence the spring, the stream, the lake, was
ever regarded as a beneficent being, who should
rightly call for the adoration of the true in soul.
Tlaloc, god of rains, and the many-named gods of
the heavenly vase in which the rains were stored on
high, were conspicuous figures in the American
pantheon. *
Virgil speaks of “Oceanus, pater rerum ”; and in
the Finnish epic, the Kalewala, it reads: “Three
infants came forth from the same womb ; water the
oldest, fire the youngest, and iron between them.” +
Water also entered into numberless rites of puri-
fication, of penitence, and sanctification. † Baptism
* The urn or vase was, in classical antiquity, the emblem of the
fecundating waters (Guigniaut, Æe/igions de Z'Antiquité, tom. i., p.
509). Vases full of water were interred with the dead in Peru to
symbolise the life beyond. Meyen, Die Oreinwohner zon Aeru, p.
29.
# A alezwała, Runa iv.
f Probably for this reason the ceremonial law of the Bushmen,
especially that relating to puberty and marriage, enjoins “to avoid
the wrath of the Water.” Bleek, Bushman Folk-lore, p. 18.
Primitive Religious Expression 145
by sprinkling or immersion belongs to the most
ancient sacred rites ; and the use of the fluid in
divination, lustration, and libation was world-wide.
The most venerable god of Chaldean mythology
W2LS Ea, lord of the earth and “the waters under the
earth.” He was the deity in whose gift were the
harvest, the germination of seeds, the fertility of the
soil. Extending the idea to embrace all life, the
Aztecs worshipped the earth as Tonantzin, Our Be-
loved Mother, and the Peruvians as Mama Cocha,
Mother Earth. From her womb, said they, do all
that live proceed, and to her silent breast will all
again return. Far below her opaque surface is the
realm which the sun lights at night, the abode of
happy souls, said the Aztecs, ruled by the clement
Quetzalcoatl, who there abides until the time fixed
for his return to men.
From beneath the earth, repeat a hundred mytho-
logies, did the first of men emerge seeking the light
above but losing the joy below. So that in such
distant points as Kamtschatka and the Andaman
Islands we meet the same prophetic myth that at
the end of the world the present earth will be turned
upside down, and its then inhabitants will rejoice in
the perennial warmth and light of the happier under-
world.*
* Compare Klemm, Culturgeschichte, Bd. ii., s. 315 (after Steller),
with Man, in Żour, Anthrop, Soc., vol. xii., p. 163.
IQ -
I46 Religions of Primitive Peoples
Intimately associated with the worship of the
four elements, and also with the myths of the
cosmical concepts, we trace through primitive re-
ligions the Sacredness and symbolism of colours.
Everywhere, in all cults, they are connected with
certain trains of religious thoughts, certain express-
ions of religious emotions, though by no means
always the same. But I can only refer, in passing,
to this extended subject, which has not yet received
the psychologic analysis which its importance
demands.”
3. Stones and Rocks.—When we turn from these
universal elements, which we can readily conceive
portrayed with some commensurate greatness the
idea of the Supernatural, to such a gross and material
object as a stone, a common stone or rock, it is at
first difficult to understand its wide-spread acceptance
as a symbol of the divine. But if we reflect on its
hardness and durability, on its colour and lustre, and
on the strange shapes in which it is found, we can see
why it was so chosen.
In the early Semitic records we often read of
Beth-el, the House of God. This was usually no-
* The specific effect of certain colours on the sub-consciousness, and
thus on the religious emotions, is practically recognised in sacred art;
but so far as I know this has not been made a subject of study by the
experimental psychologist. Allowance must always be made for
association of ideas; as when the Mozambique negroes paint the
images of their bad spirits white, on account of their hatred of
Europeans !
Primitive Religious Expression 147
thing but an amorphous stone, which the god was
supposed to inhabit. The holy Kaaba of Mahomet-
anism is no doubt such an one, a rough, black piece
of rock. The sacred image of Diana of the Ephesi-
ans was nothing more, and the Latin father Arnobius
tells us that the image of earth, the Great Mother,
brought to Rome from Phrygia with sumptuous
pomp, was merely “a small black stone, rough and
unhewn.” ”
To this instance, where the stone represents the
Earth as the common mother, we find many exact
parallels in savage faiths. In the Tahitian myths,
Papa, Rock, was the name of the wife of the first
man, mother of the race of men, and under this
form she was adored. The Zulus considered cer-
tain stones as sacred, because from one such, which
split in two, their ancestors emerged. Their neigh-
bours, the Basutos, entertain the same notion of a
spheroidal granite boulder in their country, and their
worship of it consists in dancing around it and spit-
ting at it. The Indians of Colombia asserted that
all men were once stones, and all will again become
such. : Those of Guatemala were wont to place a
Small polished stone in the mouth of the dying to
* Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, lib. vii., cap. 49.
† Fornander, The Polynesian Race, ze. s. ; Hale, Æthmog, and
Philol., p. 25.
# Calloway, A’elig. System of the Amazulus, p. 34; Hahn, Tsumi
//Goam, p. 91 ; Garcia, Origen de los Indios, lib, iv., cap. 26.
I48 Religions of Primitive Peoples
receive the Soul, and thus supply it with a perma-
nent abode.
The most common of mascots is a “lucky stone,”
and this goes back to the time when such was the
favourite material for household fetishes. To this
day the Canaras of India believe that the Bhutas, or
familiar spirits, inhabit rough stones, and in Mela-
nesia similar stones are held to be the abode of the
vui or demonic intelligences.*
Another source of the sacredness of stones was
their identification as “thunderbolts.” Certain ones
were believed to be the missiles hurled from the sky
by the Thunder God in the lightning flash; though
the Peruvians had the prettier belief that, as the
product of the heavenly fire, they must retain its
ardency, and therefore used them as love charms. H
Flint, which when struck with a bit of pyrites emits
a spark, and meteoric stones were especially recog-
nised by these marks as of celestial origin.
Such a flint stone, say the legends of the Nahuas,
in the beginning of the world fell from heaven to
earth; as it broke to pieces each fragment rose to
life as a demi-god. All men, added the Mexicans,
came originally from such stones. :
* }our. Anthrop. /ns/., vols. v., p. 412, x., p. 280.
+ They were called huacangui. Montesinos, Mems. Hist, sur
lºancien Perou, p. 16I.
f Garcia, Origen de los Indios, lib. iv., cap. 26; Torquemada,
Monarquía Zºdiazza, lib. vi., cap. 4I.
Primitive Religious Expression 149
Yet another origin of god-stones was the custom
of erecting them as monuments of the dead. We
can see this in its simplicity in Southern Polynesia.
When a chief dies, a coral slab about three feet long
is placed erect over his grave—a tombstone, in other
words. This is decked with flowers and garlands,
food is offered it, and invocations pronounced before
it, precisely as to a divinity. This is because the
spirit of the departed chief is believed to dwell
within it.*
It was equally sacred when the stone was a mere
cenotaph erected in memory of a departed chief or
Saint. Such are found in all lands and in all cults.
They are the menhirs of the Celts, and the grave-
stones of the Koders of India, often painted in
strong colours. *
Certain stones, especially those we call “precious,”
the gems, have physical traits of transparency, lustre,
and colour, which have ever made them prized, and
led to the belief that they exercise peculiar powers
on the mind.
Throughout Asia and America the varieties of
jade or nephrite, a greenish, semi-translucent mineral,
has had a wide-spread reputation for sacred meaning
and magical potency. The chalchiuhite of the Mexi-
* Hale, Æthnog, and Philoſ. of the U. S. Explor. Axped., p. 97.
† Hopkins, AEeligions of Zndia, p. 97.
I 5O Religions of Primitive Peoples
cans, small green stones, believed to control the
weather and representative of the goddess of the
waters and the rains, were of this material.
By attentively gazing into the transparency of a
quartz crystal, the Maya shaman of Yucatan still
believes that he will see in its depths, unfolded by
the god whose dwelling it is, the picture of the
future and the decrees of fate.
4. Trees and Plants.-Primitive man was arboreal.
A hollow tree was his home, its branches his place
of refuge, its fruit his sustenance. Naturally the
tree became associated with his earliest religious
thoughts. It represented his protecting deity. He
would not willingly injure it. When the Mandans
cut a pole for their tents, they swath it in bandages
so that its pain may be allayed. The Hidatsas
would not cut down a large cottonwood tree, be-
cause it guarded their tribe. The Algonquins
decked an old oak with offerings suspended to its
branches, for the same reason.”
Trees from their dripping foliage, and because
their shade was associated with the grey of a cloudy
day, were believed to make the rains and thus to
refresh the fields and fertilise the seeds of the vege-
table world. The step was easily taken to extend
* Clark, Indian Sign Zanguage, p. 24I ; Matthews, Ethnog. of the
Aidatsa, p. 48, etc.
Primitive Religious Expression 151
this to all germs, animal as well as vegetable. Thus
the tree came to symbolise the source of Life, and
to represent both the clouds and rains and the
fatherhood of men and brutes. It could cause
flocks to multiply and the barren womb to conceive.”
Among the Mexicans, the tree was invoked as
Tota, “Our Father,” and was spoken of as god of
the waters and the green foliage. Some particular
species was chosen as the totem of various American
gentes, and in the earliest legends of Greece and
Persia sundry famous families traced their descent
from a tree.
These ideas led to the mythical association of the
tree with the origin of life, and with various object-
ive expressions of this in the cult.
In most American stories where we hear of the
first of men emerging from the under-world, it is by
climbing a tree. This tree also supports the sky,
and is so represented in the native books of the
Mayas and Nahuas. The Yurucares of Bolivia re-
late that their god Tiri, when he would people the
earth with men, cleft a tree, and from the opening
came forth the various tribes of the world. It
* See Frazer, 7%e Golden Aough, passim.
+ See, for illustrative examples, my Primer of Mayan Hiero-
glyphics, p. 49, etc.; and comp. Keary, Outlines of Primitive Belief,
p. 63, sq.
# A. d’Orbigny, L’Homme Américain, tome ii., p. 365.
152 Religions of Primitive Peoples
When the tree was not worshipped as itself, but
under a symbolic form, this was usually as the sacred
pole or the cross.
The sacred pole was found widely among the
American Indians. It was planted in the centre of
their villages, or, if the tribe was nomadic, it was car-
ried about in an ark or wrapping and set up in a tent
by itself in their encampment. It typified the com-
& C
munal life of the tribe and represented the “mys-
tery tree,” which was intimately associated in their
legendary origin.”
In early art the cross as a sacred design is often
derived from the conventional figure of a tree, and
symbolises the force of life, the four winds, the rain,
and the waters. This is notably the case in Mexico
and Central America, where we have abundant tes-
timony that this is the origin and meaning of the
cross-symbol so frequent on their monuments.
The sacred tree is a conspicuous figure in the
earliest bas-reliefs of the Chaldeans. It is often
represented in a cruciform shape, and frequently a
winged seraph is holding up to it a pine cone, the
fruit of the sacred cedar, either as an emblem of fer-
tility, or, more likely, as an aspergillum, with which
* Dorsey, Siouan Cults, pp. 390, 455 ; Alice C. Fletcher in Proc.
Amer. Assoc. Adv. Science, I895 and 1896; Brinton, Myths of AVew
World, pp. II8, II9, and AVagztalism, pp. 42, 47, 48.
Primitive Religious Expression 153
to bedev it from the holy water, which is carried in
a bucket in the other hand.*
That a tree is a “thing of life” it is hard for us
even yet to doubt, and we can scarcely avoid being
attracted by Fechner's pleasing theories of a “plant-
soul.” + The sound of the wind in the leaves, rising
from the softest of mystic whispers to the roaring of
the wild blast, seems to proceed from some mind or
spirit. The Australians say that these are the voices
of the ghosts of the dead, communing one with an-
other, or warning the living of what is to come.
They and other tribes also believe that it is through
understanding this mysterious language that the
“ doctors,” or shamans, communicate with the world
of spirits and derive their supernatural knowledge.:
Hence we can easily see arose the myth of “the tree
of knowledge,” which we find in the earliest Semitic
annals and monuments. It belonged to the same
species as the oracular Oak of Zeus at Dodona, and
the laurel of Apollo at Delphi, from the whispers of
whose leaves the sibyls interpreted the sayings of
the gods.
* As suggested by E. Bonavia, Flora of the Assyrian Monuments
(1894). This is a more likely interpretation than that of Dr. Tylor,
that the conical object is the inflorescence of the male date palm ; as
it is in some bas-reliefs shown presented toward a city gate, a per-
Son, etc. -
# Fechner, Mama, oder das Seelenleben der Pflanze.
f Curr, ZThe Australian AEace, vol. ii., p. 199; Palmer in }our.
Anthrop. Inst., vol. xiii., p. 292.
I 54 Religions of Primitive Peoples
Not only was a tree the earliest house of man, it
was also his first temple. That very word “temple”
bears witness to the fact, for it is from the Greek
réſuevos, a sacred grove set apart as a place of wor-
ship. The aspiring lines of Gothic cathedrals simu-
late the trunks of slender and majestic trees carrying
the eye and the soul aloft, and by their overreaching
limbs shutting out the glare of day, thus leading
the mind to holy meditation. Tacitus describes the
Germans as building no temples, but worshipping
their mysterious divinity, secretum il/ud, in the gloom
of the forest.
5. Places and Sites.—Early man stays close to the
soil. It is proved, by the distribution of the oldest
stone implements, that primitive tribes were not gen-
erally migratory, and had little intercourse with their
neighbours. Hence the more closely did they study
their immediate surroundings; and a spot which was
marked by some peculiar feature was soon associated
with their all-permeating religious notions, and was
deemed sacred.
These features can usually be easily recognised.
A spring, well, or fountain, where from dry earth, or
out of the rock, pours forth the crystal fluid on
which depends the life of man and brute and plant,
was everywhere a holy spot. The brook which
flowed from it, chattering its endless tale among the
Primitive Religious Expression 155
pebbles, was scarcely less so. It was directly said
and oft repeated by the Greeks that the manteia,
the holy inspiration, was imparted at the fountain of
Parnassus or at the Pierian spring. The Moxos of
Bolivia claim descent from the stream on which their
villages are situated, a more than figurative express-
ion of their dependence on it for food and drink.”
y
The sacred character of “high places,” such as
hills, mountains, or elevated plateaux, is intimately
connected with the universal belief in “the Father
in Heaven,” the sky as the home and the throne of
the greatest divinities. I have already referred to
the terrestrial “Hills of Heaven,” located, as a rule,
within the tribal area.
A high hill or mountain, regarded by itself as a
personality, would justly be looked upon as of ex-
traordinary might, and invoked as a potent aid in
the undertakings of life. In the invocations of the
Quiches of Central America, who live in the midst
of lofty peaks, over one hundred of them are named
and implored for aid. The “Heart of the Hills” is
the title which the ancient Mexicans applied to one
of their greatest gods.
* A. d’Orbigny, Z'Aomme Américain, tom. i., p. 240.
# A careful discussion of “Höhencultus,” by Baron von Andrian,
may be found in the Bericht der Deutschen Anthrop. Gesellschaft,
August, 1889. He believes the earliest form to have been that of
the individualised height; later, that of its cosmic relations.
156 Religions of Primitive Peoples
A third and important trait which gave them
sacredness is the strength of the echo which is re-
turned from their narrow gorges or precipitous sides.
Mountain worship is very generally oracular in char-
acter. Classical and familiar examples of this are
the Pythoness and the Roman Sibyl.
Mountain caves are natural temples, and as the
cave, like the hollow tree, is a ready-built house for
the wandering savage, so it is also marvellously
adapted to his ends as a shrine. Throughout Mexico
and Central America we find the caves chosen as the
temples of the mightiest deities and the depositories
of the holiest relics.”
The sacredness of some spots arose from their
adaptation to certain rites, religious or magical.
Thus, for the haruspices to practise their specialty
in divination, they must choose a spot where they
could watch the flight of birds. The sacrifices to
the god of heaven should be under the open sky,
and the Mayas of Yucatan believed that when the
sun was in the zenith and the sacred fire was kindled
beneath it, the ineffable Deity descended in the form
of a bright plumaged ara and partook of the offering.
Places of this kind were of course laid under tabu,
and thus reserved for their sacred uses only. Some-
* On the Mexican cave-god, Oztoteotl, see my Wagualism, pp.
38–41.
Primitive Religious Expression 157
times they were enclosed, but often the community
was sufficiently informed about them to make this
unnecessary.
The fame of these sacred places and the powers of
the gods who dwelt within them extended widely
even in very primitive conditions. This gave rise to
the custom of pilgrimages, quite as familiar to the
American Indians before Columbus as to the Europe-
ans of the Middle Ages. There were famous holy
places on the island of Cozumel and in Colombia
and Peru, to which pious palmers wended their way
over many hundred miles of weary journeying.
The local divinity naturally drew his colouring
and his main attributes from the spot itself, and
those in turn gave a similar local physiognomy to
his rites and functions. We have thus a kind of
geographical character impressed on early religions,
which their later developments retained long after
they had been severed from their first meanings and
had drifted to other climes and alien races.
6. The Zower Animals.-The primitive mind did
not recognise any deep distinction between the lower
animals and man. The savage knew that the beast
was his superior in many points, in craft and strength,
in fleetness and intuition, and he regarded it with
respect. To him, the brute had a soul not inferior
to his own, and a language which the wise among
158 Religions of Primitive Peoples
men might on Occasion learn. The strange powers
and mysterious faculties they often possess were to
him inexplicable by any other doctrine than that
they were divine; therefore, with wide unanimity, he
placed certain species of animals nearer to God than
is man himself, or even identified them with the
manifestations of the Highest.
None was in this respect a greater favourite than
the bird. Its soaring flight, its strange or sweet
notes, the marked hues of its plumage, combined to
render it a fit emblem of power and beauty.
The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to Singa-
lang Burong, the god of birds; and birds as the
ancestors of the totemic family are extremely com-
mon among the American Indians. The Eskimos
say that they have the faculty of soul or life beyond
all other creatures, and in most primitive tribes
they have been regarded as the messengers of
the divine and the special purveyors of the vital
principle.
According to the myths of the Polynesians, the
gods in the old times used to speak to man through
the carols of the feathered songsters; and every-
where, to be able to understand the language of
birds was equivalent to being able to converse with
the gods.
The chief god of the Murray River Australians
Primitive Religious Expression 159
was Nourali. He was immortal, self-created, and the
creator of all. The form under which they conceived
him was that of a bird, a crow or eagle. Among
nearly all the tribes of the North-west Coast and the
adjacent interior of British America, the creation of
the world is attributed to a raven, Yetl, who is per-
Sonated in the dark thunder-cloud.
South of them, in the wide-spread Algonquin stock,
this “thunder-bird '' is a conspicuous figure in art and
myth ; and we could pursue our way quite to the
extreme south of the continent, and everywhere
among the aboriginal tribes we should discover similar
sacred associations connected with the birds.
They are universal in religions, and those which
we meet in Christian art, the eagle, the dove, etc.,
carry with them significations allied to those they
bear in earlier and primitive symbolism.”
Closely connected with these ideas was the rever-
ence of the egg as the symbol of the origin of life.
Plutarch tells us that in the Bacchic mysteries the
egg represented matter in its germinal condition, that
is, the potentiality of life; and this meaning we have
retained with the symbol in our customs relating to
Easter eggs on the morning of the Resurrection.
The derivation from the observation of the bird
brooding on its nest is obvious, and no wonder there-
* Walcott, Sacred Archaeology, pp. 233, 236, etc.
I 6O Religions of Primitive Peoples
fore that the symbol with allied myths and rites ex-
tends through all religions.
In the creation legend of the Yaros, a Dravida
tribe of Northern India, the goddess Nustoo, who
created the world, came into life from a self-evolved
egg, and dwelt on the petals of a water-lily until she
had formed and moulded the land for her abode.
The Dyaks of Borneo relate that after the Supreme
Being had created the world, the god Ranying de-
scended to the new earth and formed there seven
eggs, which contained the germs of man and woman,
all animals and plants.”
This example, of the bird, which I have given in
some detail, will illustrate the cult of an animal form.
It by no means stands alone in its universality. Per-
haps even more striking is the so-called “serpent-
worship,” which has occupied the attention of so
many writers. The adoration of the serpent-symbol
is wonderfully wide-spread. Scarcely a native tribe
can be named in regions where this animal is known,
which does not pay it some sort of reverence. Some
writers have traced the sentiment back to the anthro-
poid progenitor of man, supposed to dwell in tropical
forests abounding in venomous snakes. But into this
extensive question I cannot enter.
* Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal, p. 59; Ling Roth, Matives of
Sarazvak, vol. ii., App., p. clxx.
Primitive Religious Expression 161
The symbolic value of most animal deities can be
traced to some peculiar trait of the species. Thus
the lizard, very prominent in the religions of Poly-
nesia, Australia, and South Africa, derived its signi-
ficance from the nocturnal habits of some species and
the diurnal habits of others.” In America, the frog
was the symbol of water, over a vast area; and that
it has precisely the same meaning in Australia, will
cause no astonishment when we recall its amphibious
nature. The fish, as the emblem of life, familiar in
Christian symbolism, dates back to earliest Chaldean
times, when Oannes, a form of the god Ea, appeared
as half fish and half man, and is a parallel of the fish-
god who sows the seed of man in the flood myths of
both the Brahmans and the Mexicans. It is but an-
other expression of the recognition of water as the
source or condition of life.
The totemic animals, or “eponymous ancestors,”
of the clans or gentes among the American Indians,
are not to be taken literally. They were not under-
stood as animals of the sort we see to-day, but as
mythical, ancient beings, of Supernatural attributes,
who clothed themselves in those forms for their own
purposes.
7. Man.—That when the brute was at times in-
* M. d’Estrey, in Z'Anthropologie, tom. iii., pp. 712, sq., has
made an interesting study of the lizard symbol in Polynesia, to which
much could be added from other fields of primitive life.
II
I 62 Religions of Primitive Peoples
vested with the aureole of the Divine, man himself
should at times partake of its glory, need be ex-
pected. But here let an important distinction be
drawn. Never as mazz was he clothed in the attrib-
utes of Deity, but just in so far as he was deemed
to be more than man. The Latin saying, deus homini
deus, never was true anywhere in its literal sense.
Anthropism never existed in any religion. Man or
the likeness of man was never worshipped by reason
of any human attribute, but solely for those believed
to be more than human, Superhuman.
The tribes of Polynesia did adore their chieftains;
the ancient Egyptians and many another people did
pay their rulers divine honour, and rank them among
the gods; but always because they considered them
partakers of the divine nature, sharers in that which
is ever beyond mere humanity.*
This profound distinction between the human and
the humanised divine was sought to be expressed by
most tribes by fashioning the images of the gods in
vaguely human shapes, but with non-human ele-
* As Keary well says: “The essence of primitive belief lies
not in any likeness to humanity, but in differences from it.” Out-
/imes of Prim. Belief, p. 26. The Neo-Platonic doctrine of “eman-
ation " led to the belief that a man might become so filled with the
divine essence as to become divine himself. This was the claim of
Simon the Magician, who “became confessedly a god to his silly
followers,” says Hippolytus in his Acefutation of all Aſeresies, bk. vi.,
Cap. I3.
Primitive Religious Expression 163
ments. Diana with her hundred breasts, Brahma
with his dozens of arms, Janus with his double face,
and scores of other instances will at once rise in the
memory. Enormous size, impossible features, ac-
cessories such as wings, tails, multiple heads and
limbs, indicate not, as some would have it, a de-
praved artistic taste, but the effort of the pious
carver to express in his work the non-human and
Superhuman character of the being he sets before
the adoring eyes of the votaries.
It was only in a few gifted and glorious natures,
notably the ancient Greels, that the true distinction
rose to full consciousness in the artistic soul—that
in their corporeal forms the gods differ from men
in their superior and matchless beauty, in their per-
fect symmetry and noble proportions. They recog-
nised that there is something in beauty itself, which,
in its highest expression, partakes truly and really of
the divine, and leads man to the contemplation of
laws beyond those of nature or of life, laws which are
the expression of the deep harmonies of the universe.
This was the triumph of anthropomorphism. Pur-
suing the merely objective, the merely animal, it was
led by the unseen hand which guides man to his
destiny into the path which conducted far beyond
what the senses can teach, into the realm of the ideal
and the eternal, to
164 Religions of Primitive Peoples
“the measures and the forms,
Which the abstract intelligence supplies,
Whose kingdom is where Time and Space are not.”
Such are some of the numberless objects with
which primitive man associated his idea of the
Divine. The nature of this association must not be
misunderstood. I repeat what I have already said,
that it was not an identification of the spiritual with
the material. The object was hallowed, not from
anything in itself, but as the medium of invisible
power.
8. Life and its Transmission.—What Professor
Otfried Müller has so well said of the oldest forms
of the Greek and Etruscan religions holds true in all
primitive faiths: “To them, divinity seemed a world
of Life, blossoming forth from an impenetrable
depth into definite forms and individual express-
ions.” ” All gods and holy objects were merely
vehicles through which Life and Power poured into
the world from the inexhaustible and impersonal
source of both.
I will illustrate this first from the very ancient
religion of the Etruscans and then point out suf-
ficient analogies in modern Savage tribes.
That venerable people, whose massive cities built
before Rome was founded still survive, held that
* Die Etrusker, Bd. ii., s. III.
Primitive Religious Expression 165
there was a single source of all existence, animate
and inanimate. Its immediate agents were the mys-
terious “veiled gods,” whose number was unknown
and whose names were never uttered. They were
the channels of the divine Will, through which it
passed to the twelve highest known gods, called the
Consentes or Companions, and these transmitted it
through those innumerable spirits, whom the Latins
called Genii, to its realisation in objective existence.
The word genius means a producer or begetter;
but not in any literal sense, for not only every man
and animate being had such a genius, but also every
plant, every city, every place, every inanimate object,
had one also. Clearly, therefore, the word refers to
an act of the creative power in the abstract or spiritual
sense. The genii were the proximate causes of ex-
istence, but they were themselves “emanations from
the great gods,” and these in turn were merely the
channels of the inexhaustible source of all life
beyond.
This was the doctrine of the Etruscans and also
of the Greeks. I may compare it with the belief of
one of the most brutish of barbarian hordes, the
Itelmen of Kamtschatka.
Beyond all visible things, say they, is the ultimate
Power, Dusdachtschish, invisible, remote. No wor-
ship and no offerings are tendered him other than
166 Religions of Primitive Peoples
that certain pillars are erected and decked with
flowers and garlands in his honour. Their Jupiter
is Kutka. It was said of him that he had married
all creatures and was the common father of all. It
was he who made land and water in their present
forms and invented all arts. To him the visible
world owed its existence, though not its Origin.
Many discreditable stories were told of him, and he
is as much cursed for the evils of life as praised for
its advantages. It is he who finds souls for all
existences, and preserves their spirits when the body
decays.
We must not be blinded to the true significance
of such myths by the often material, coarse, and
vulgar images under which they are presented. In-
deed, if they are properly comprehended, we may
explain and redeem from obloquy much in the
heathen legends which Arnobius * and other fathers
of the Church denounced with bitter and vehement
imprecation. We should consider whether they are
not naïve symbols, chosen, with a crude innocence of
evil, to convey objectively the idea of the eternally
renewed life of nature.
This reflection will explain to us the true signi-
* Speaking of Jupiter, this fiery preacher exclaims: “Nor is there
any kind of baseness in which you do not associate his name with
passionate lusts.”—Adversus Genates, lib. v., cap. 22.
Primitive Religious Expression 167
ficance of those objects from ancient and savage cults
which are preserved in the locked rooms of museums,
in their secret drawers and curtained cases. They are
too apt to be construed as proofs of impurity and
degradation. Such an interpretation would be sadly
at variance with the fact.
There were, indeed, and often, licentious rites,
deliberate indecencies, practised under the cloak of
religion by unscrupulous rulers and debased priests.
These were alienations and prostitutions of religion.
In the genuine and primitive faiths, the symbols of
the reproduction and transmission of life were fre-
quent and public, and were not associated with
thoughts or acts of debauchery. They were visible
emblems of that Spirit of Life which, beyond all else,
was the unifying instinct of religious expression.
This instinct led man everywhere to call upon God
as Father, as parent of whatever is, “Pan-genitor,”
as he is styled in the Orphic hymns. In every race,
in all ages, have men's prayers ascended to “Our
Father who art in heaven.”
Were we to listen to the rude Australian, we
should hear him invoking Papang, “Father’”; or
Mamin-gata, or Mungan-maur, “Our Father,” in
his various dialects. Among the Aztecs of Mexico,
it would be 7 o-za, “Our Father ’’; with the Ameri-
can tribes of the north, “grand-father,” or “great
168 Religions of Primitive Peoples
father’”; in the Brahmānas of India, Piła, “Father ”;
with the Greeks and Romans, Dios Pater, - “the
heavenly Father’”; and with the northern Vikings,
Odin A//father.”
But a vital distinction has been claimed to exist
between such terms and that fatherhood of God
which we have been taught to acknowledge. “In
y
heathen religions,” asserts an eminent writer, “the
fatherhood of the gods is physical fatherhood only ”;
and this is repeated by many Christian theologians
and commentators.
It is easy to refute this assertion. It would not
have been made but for religious partisanship.
Ethnologists are well aware that the word for
“Father ” in primitive life is much more frequently
a term of respect, applied to elders, than necessarily
denotive of kinship. The father, Pita, of the Brah-
mānas is at once the Creator, Preserver, and De-
stroyer of all things, and far remote from physical
parentage t; neither in American nor Australian
myths is “the Father above" identified as the
ancestor of the gens ; among the Zulus, the best
instructed missionaries report that Unkululu, the
* Howitt, in jour. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xiii., pp. I92, 194; vol. xiv.,
p. 313. - -
+ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 4I ; Herzog und
Plitt, Real-Ancyclopädie fºr Prot. Theologie, s. v. Gebet, etc.
† Hopkins, Religions of India, p. 4I2.
Primitive Religious Expression 169
“Father ” of their creeds, was not meant literally so,
but only as “the means of helping the race into
being ”*; and this is the general sense of the term
in every instance which I have analysed.
As some sort of a crude effort to express this
comprehensibly, we find that frequently in primitive
myths and art the god, regarded as the creator, is
shown or spoken of as “androgynous,”—that is, of
both sexes at once. He is addressed as “father-
mother,” or “mother-father,”—bi-sexual rather than
non-sexual in nature. f Such expressions are of con-
stant occurrence, and some of the most objectiona-
ble portions of the ritual and of idolatrous art arose
from the effort to translate this mystical character-
istic into objective forms.
Yet it remains true that the sexual antithesis,
that which mythologists call the worship of “the
reciprocal principles of nature,” is interwoven with
the fibre of nearly all religions, primitive or devel-
* Calloway, Religious System of the Amazulu, p. 34.
# As examples, I may name Unkululu, among the Zulus (Callo-
way, A’elºg. System of the Amazulu, pp. 40, 43); Singbonga, of the
Munga-Kohls (Jellinghaus, in Zeit, fir Ethnologie, Bd. iii., p. 330);
the Hunahpu of the Quiches (Popol Vuh, p. 1); the Ahsonnuth of
the Navahoes (8th Rep. Bur. Afthmol., p. 275); etc. I have dis-
cussed the psychic origin of androgynous deities in The Religious
Sentiment, pp. 66, sqq. It was also strong in the early Christian
Church, Origen and others of the fathers teaching that the Holy
Ghost was the feminine principle in God (C. J. Wood, Survivals in
Christianity, p. 63).
17O Religions of Primitive Peoples
oped. Under one form or another, it is the impulse
which ever appeals most potently to the human
heart.
The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the
other, the passion of Love, exceeds all others in
the power it exerts on the individual life. This
it is, which in some of its forms, rude or refined, is
at the root of half the expressions of the religious
sentiment. We may trace it from crude and coarse
beginnings in the genesiac cults of primitive peo-
ples, through ever nobler and more delicate express-
ions, up through the celibate sacrifices of both
sexes, spouses of God,” until in its complete expans-
ion it reaches the perfect agape, where the union of
the human with the divine in the life eternal, here
on earth, or beyond, one and the same, is believed
to have been reached. †
This, the loftiest of all the religious mystical
ideals is but the result of a gradual evolution from
* These were frequent in quite primitive faiths. Some of the
priests of ancient Mexico, for example, wholly extirpated the geni-
talia, –Davila Padilla, Aſist. de la Prov. de Mexico, lib. ii., cap. 88.
Comp. Charlevoix, journal Historique, p. 350.
# I have pointed out that in various American dialects, as the
Chipeway and Cree, the Maya, Quichua, etc., there are words of
native origin, which were used to convey the notion of the love of
the gods in pure and high senses. See the article on “The Concept-
ion of Love in American Languages,” in AEssays of an Americanist,
pp. 416, 421, 428, etc.
Primitive Religious Expression 171
those low beginnings which I have mentioned as
perceptible in most primitive religions.
It is the ripened manifestation of that profound
psychical truth, so incomparably expressed in the
lines of the philosopher-poet, Coleridge :
“All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.”
LECTURE. V.
Primitive Religious Expression : In the Rite.
CONTENTS:—The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical Rites—
Division of Rites into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I.
Communal Rites: I. The Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The
Festal Function—Joyous Character of Primitive Rites—Com-
mensality—The “Ceremonial Circuit”—Masks and Dramas–
3. The Sacrifice—Early and Later Forms—4. The Communion
with God—Pagan Eucharists. II. Personal Rites : I. Relating
to Birth—Vows and Baptism—2. Relating to Naming—The
Personal Name—3. Relating to Puberty—Initiation of Boys
and Girls—4. Relating to Marriage—Marriage “by Capture"
and “by Purchase”—5. Relating to Death—Early Cannibalism
—Sepulchral Monuments—Funerary Ceremonies — Modes of
Burial—Customs of Mourning.
W W 7 E have seen how the religious sentiment
finds expression in the Word and in the
Object. It remains to consider it as revealed in the
Act. This is known as the Rite or the Ritual. It
is a combination of forms and ceremonies collect-
ively known as Worship.
So important is it that one eminent German
authority has declared the ritual to be “the source
of all religions” ”; and Dr. W. Robertson Smith,
* Otto Gruppe, quoted by Schrader.
I72
Primitive Religious Expression 173
also a profound student of the subject, has main-
tained that “in the study of ancient religions we
must begin, not with the myth, but with the ritual”;
because, he adds, “in almost every case the myth
was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from
the myth.””
If I do not follow these authorities, it is because
my own studies have led me to a different opinion
from theirs. I believe that every rite is originally
based on a myth. In later days the myth was often
obscured or lost, and another coined to explain the
rite; and this second growth is what has misled the
authors I have quoted.
The evidence which has convinced me is, that in
truly primitive condition the rite is constantly a
mimicry of the supposed doings of the god; or it is
a means of summoning him according to accepted
statements; or it is a method of communing with the
Divine, plainly drawn from the facts of suggestion
and sub-conscious mentality. Occasionally it is a
magical procedure to constrain the deities; but this
is rare in primitive conditions.#
The mimicry or imitative origin of rites is well
* Religion of the Semites, p. 18.
# The idea of mimicry survived long, and indeed still exists, in what
is called “sympathetic magic”; when, for instance, to produce
blindness in an enemy, an image is made of him and its eyes trans-
fixed with thorns. Compare Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 12.
174 Religions of Primitive Peoples
illustrated in that in use for “rain-making,” one of
the commonest of all. In periods of drought, “The
Indian rain-maker mounts to the roof of his hut, and
rattling vigorously a dry gourd containing pebbles
to represent the thunder, scatters water through a
reed on the ground beneath, as he imagines up
above in the clouds do the spirits of the storm.” “
The Australian rite is analogous. The women of
the tribe erect a hut of leaves and branches, in which
are placed some stones. The men enter, and while
some scatter bird's down in the air, others scarify
their arms and let the blood drop upon the stones.
These are then placed high up in trees, and the hut
demolished. The symbolism is, that the hut repre-
sents the firmament; the down, the light cirrus
clouds which precede the storm ; the stones, the
heavy rain-clouds; the dropping blood, the ferti-
lising rain. This is again an imitation of their
myth of the making of rain by the celestial powers.
Very many rites are of this character. Others
again are of the nature of an invitation to the
divinity, based on beliefs and narratives of his sup-
posed actions or customs. The Mayas of Yucatan,
for instance, had a deity doubtless of solar character,
who bore the name, “The Eye of the Day.” The
* Myths of the New World, p. 17.
t Curr, Z'he Australian Race, vol. ii., pp. 66, 67.
Primitive Religious Expression 175
myth stated that his form was that of a bird of
brilliant plumage, and that he was nearest the earth
at high noon about the summer solstice. At that
time, therefore, they constructed an altar in an open
spot, built upon it a fire and placed the sacred offer-
ings. The people then witnessed the gorgeous
parrot, the sacred ara, descend through the air to
take the offerings, who was none other than the god
himself, responding to the invitation. *
The magical class of rites was common in the
Orient. To this day in China it is believed that if a
military camp be laid out in a particular form, and
under the proper auspicious conditions, not only is
it impregnable by foes, but neither gods nor demons
can prevail against it. Many later rituals are thus
magical, or have magical elements in them by the
aid of which the celebrant claims to control the
powers divine.
The Mexican Nagualist, or priest, for instance,
after he has performed his magical rites and spoken
the words of power, does not hesitate to shout :
“Lo ! I myself am here ! I am most furious ! I
make the loudest noise ! I respect no one ! Even
sticks and stones tremble before me ! What god or
mighty demon dares face me P” + Here, through
* Cogolludo, Historia de Yucatam, lib. iv., cap. viii.
† Brinton, AWagualism, p. 53.
176 Religions of Primitive Peoples
the power of the rite, the celebrant has become as
one of the gods themselves.
These examples further serve to illustrate a funda-
mental distinction in rites themselves. It has been
well expressed by a German writer, Dr. Freihold,
who has said that their tendencies point toward one
of two aims, either to bring down the god to men,
to have “God with us”; or, to elevate the man to
God, to clothe him with supernatural powers. The
one culminates in the epiphany, the other in the
apotheosis. The writer quoted believes that this
special culmination of one or the other of these
tendencies is largely a matter of race, that it is an
ethnic trait, and explains much otherwise obscure
in the historical development of religions.”
Without entering into this interesting but too ex-
tensive inquiry, I will remark that these two tenden-
cies run closely parallel to the division of rites which
I shall adopt, a division based on a comparison of
the large numbers which I have classified in the study
of primitive religions.
This division is also twofold. It embraces, first,
all those rites which are primarily intended for the
benefit of the community; and, second, all those
primarily intended for the benefit of the individual.
* Freihold, Die Zebensgeschichte der Menschheit, p. 134. His ex-
pressions are : I. Das Menschenwerden des Göttlichen ; and, 2. Die
Vergötterung des Menschen.
Primitive Religious Expression 177
The former I shall call communal, the latter, personal
rites.
It is the more necessary that I shall insist on this
distinction because it has been overlooked and even
denied by some eminent scholars. Dr. Robertson
Smith, for example, with whom I have been before
compelled to disagree, refused to recognise personal
worship in primitive conditions. He wrote thus:
“It was the community and not the individual who
was sure of the help of its deity.” The individual,
he adds, was obliged to have recourse to merely
magical measures for his own protection.*
This statement is contradicted by nearly every
primitive religion known to me; and it can be ex-
plained only by the concentration of the writer's
mind on a faith so peculiar as that of the ancient
Hebrews. #
I. THE COMMUNAL RITES, those for the benefit of
the community, be it large or small, may be classed
under four forms: I, the assemblage ; 2, the festal
function ; 3, the sacrifice ; and 4, the communion
with the Divine.
* Religion of the Semites, p. 263. This statement will also be con-
sidered in the sixth lecture of this series. -
+ Indeed, among the Patagonian Indians, according to a competent
observer, there are no fixed religious ceremonies whatever, except
those of a personal character, referring to births, marriages, deaths,
etc.—George C. Musters, Among the Patagonians, chap. v.
I2
178 Religions of Primitive Peoples
1. The Assemblage.—Of these the assemblage
should first be considered, as it is the necessary
condition of all communal worship. The ecclesia,
the meeting, the gathering together, the congrega-
tion, has a far higher importance than for the mere
purpose of unity in an outward function. It is the
means by which that most potent agent in religious
life, collective suggestion, is brought to bear upon the
mind. It has been instinctively recognised by every
religion, and especially by mystical teachers, as an
indispensable element in the dissemination of doc-
trine.
Strange, indeed, is the influence on the individual
of “the crowd,” when it is animated by deep feel-
ing, by positive belief, by intense activity It is
difficult even for the calmest mind not to be thrilled
with the contagious impulses of an assemblage tossed
on the waves of wild religious emotion. Its vertigin-
ous passion whirls those who yield to it out of
themselves, beyond their senses, into some lofty,
hyper-sensuous state, where reason totters and real-
ity fades. We have but to watch an active “re-
vival,” or the hysterical outbursts of an old-fashioned
“camp-meeting,” to be convinced of this.
These effects are hastened and strengthened by
the Liturgy, the responsive songs and chants, the
music, the dancing hand in hand, the touch of flesh,
Primitive Religious Expression 179
and the intoxication of breath with breath,<--all that
the theologians class as the anaphora, the going back
and forth of mind and mind, through the varied
forms of sensuous expression.*
All this is perfectly familiar to primitive religions.
Among the rude tribes of our Western plains, the
Dakotas and Chipeways for instance, thousands will
gather at the annual festivals to unite in common
worship and ceremonies. The first missionaries to
Mexico report it a common sight to see six or seven
thousand natives moving as one man in the swaying
figures of the sacred dances; and it were easy to
multiply examples. Everywhere was the religious
value of worship in common recognised.
2. The Festa! Function.—I have already referred to
the fact that although the fear of demons and ghosts
prevailed generally in early faiths, their prevailing
character was by no means always gloomy.
In early conditions the public religious ceremonies
have an atmosphere of joyousness about them.
They are thanksgivings and merrymakings, such as
still exist among us in pale survivals in our harvest
homes, Christmas festivities, and Easter-tide amuse-
ments. In ancient Greek and Roman rites this is
* The anaphora, remarks the Rev. John M. Neale, in his History
of the Holy Eastern Church, vol. ii., chap. i., has always been “by
far the most important part” of the Christian liturgies. It recurs in
nearly all primitive worship.
180 Religions of Primitive Peoples
still more visible. “Worship the gods with a joyous
heart,” prescribes Cicero; and true to the precept,
the Romans included among their acts of worship
such cheering adjuncts as theatrical performances,
horse races, games, and dancing girls. No sign of
mourning was permitted, no word of lamentation
was allowed, and a serene mood, a joyous counten-
ance and bright garments were enjoined, that the
gaiety of the occasion might not suffer diminution.*
There was nothing in this peculiar to the Romans.
The same is well known to be true of the Greeks;
Jacob Grimm is our authority that the religious rites
of the ancient Germans were as a rule cheerful, and
those which were most cheerful were “the earliest
and the commonest ''; while Robertson Smith testi-
fies to the effect that the early Semitic ceremonies
were likewise gay and festal, passing at times into a
truly orgiastic character.f
Probably most of us will feel some surprise when
this trait of early and heathen religions is pressed
upon our attention. We have been accustomed to
hear of their dark and cruel mysteries, their immola-
tions and holocausts, their cries of anguish and
blood-stained altars, until we have imagined that light-
* Granger, Worship of the Romans, pp. 272, 303, etc.
+ Grimm, 7'eutonic Mythology, vol. i., p. 42 ; Robertson Smith,
A'eligion of the Semites, p. 260 ; Payne Knight, Ancient Art, p. 50.
Primitive Religious Expression 181
hearted gaiety was even farther from their teachings
than it is from our own faith, whose cardinal princi-
ple is the holiness of suffering and self-abnegation.
Nothing could be wider from the truth. Probably
the first of all public rites of worship was one of joy-
ousness, to wit, the invitation to the god to be
present and partake of the repast. To spread a
meal and ask the deity to share it, that which is
called commensa/ity, belongs to the most archaic of
ceremonies. Captain Clark tells us of the Western
Indians that “feasts form an essential part of every
ceremony.” There is a certain solemnity observed
about them, even when not strictly religious in char-
acter. The first mouthful is offered to the gods, and
“Something in the manner of a grace” is usual when
the person begins and finishes his meal.”
It was but a step from this to purely religious
banquets, festal commemorations for thanksgiving,
in acknowledgment of benefits received. They
were derived from the older practice of asking the
god to share the common meal, not, as some have
argued, from the later custom of offering food before
the idols. Such solemn banquets occur where idols
are unknown, or form a minor element in religious
expression. Sacrificial banquets assume a different
phase, to which I shall presently refer.
* /ndiazz Sign Zanguage, pp. I67–70.
182 Religions of Primitive Peoples
Next in antiquity to the commensality of God
with man, was the sacred procession, that which is
known as the “ceremonial circuit.”
Jacob Grimm informs us that the ancient Germans
were accustomed at certain seasons to carry the im-
ages of the gods, Holda, Bertha, and others, or the
sacred symbols, the plough, the ship, etc., around
the borders or marches of the tribal territory, over
which they were held to exercise especial protection.
Thus they bestowed the active beneficence of their
personal presence on these confines. This divine
progress was accompanied with shouts and songs
and joyous acclamations.”
To this day in central France, when the seed is
sown in the spring and the husbandman has trusted
his labour and his grain to the uncertain season, the
image of Our Lady of Mercy is solemnly carried
through the prepared fields, with song and prayer,
that her blessing may rest upon them, and the grain
return a hundred-fold.
Far away from France and Germany, up in the
chilly valleys of the Peruvian Andes, when the nat-
ives used to fear, for their crops, killing frost or
withering drought, the sacred huaca, the divine
guardian of the village, was brought forth and car-
ried in solemn procession around the fields, and its
* Zeutonic Mythology, vol. i., p. 42.
Primitive Religious Expression 183
intercession beseeched in moving cries and with
abundant gifts.”
Numberless other examples of this universal rite
might be mentioned, a rite the shadow of which still
falls among us in the processional and recessional of
high Protestant churches. Among primitive peoples
and in the folk-lore of modern nations, it develops
into the forms which are known as “the sinistral
and dextral circuits,” depending on whether the pro-
cession is from right to left or the reverse, connected
doubtless with the motion of the celestial bodies,
and with the reverse of that motion, each appro-
priate to certain forms of worship. Throughout the
American tribes this is always a point of the greatest
importance, and constantly appears, not merely in
their religious exercises, but in their social customs,
their arts, and their habits of life. H
I mentioned that the old Romans used to consider
theatrical entertainments a proper part of a religious
ceremony. They were not alone in that. In fact, the
opinion was so universal that students of literary ori-
gins are agreed that the beginning of the drama, both
comedy and tragedy, was in sacred scenic representa-
tions of the supposed doings of the gods. We may
recognise the earliest form of the drama in the masked
* Von Tschudi, Beiträge zur Kentniss des Altem Peru, p. 156.
# See Myths of the AVew World, pp. II2, sq.
184 Religions of Primitive Peoples
actors of the American Indian medicine dances,
They usually take the part of some lower animal,
comic or serious, the face concealed either with a
part of its hide, or with a wooden mask, on which is
painted some semblance or symbol of the animal.
The language of the actor is appropriate to his rôle,
and often involves curious modifications of the cus-
tomary tongue, to suit the creature he represents.”
Long before the discovery of America by Colum-
bus the native tribes of Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru
had developed from this source a dramatic literature,
which, like that of the early Greek classic period,
had thrown off its first, purely religious garb, and
had developed into an independent art, devoted
equally to Melpomene and Thalia, the tragic and the
comic muses.
These latter, of which a few specimens survive, were
exotic plants compared to the indigenous growth of
the American sacred dramas. So essential, indeed
had these become to the native notions of worship
of any sort, that the Christian missionaries were fain
to compromise the situation, and permit them to re-
main, merely changing the names of the heathen
gods to those of Christian saints, and modifying
where necessary the wording of the older text and
its heathen scenario.
* See Richard Andree's remarks on “die Masken im Kultus,” in
his Aºthnographische Parallelem, AVeue Folge, p. Io9, sq.
Primitive Religious Expression 185
The extreme of these festal rejoicings is seen in
the orgiastic ceremonies so widely prevalent in early
cults, the Bacchanalia, the Saturnalia, the “Witches'
Sabbath " of the Middle Ages, and the like. They
are nowise peculiar to primitive religions, although
in them they hold a more conspicuous place. With-
in a year, the “angel-dancers ” of Hoboken, New
Jersey, have reproduced them in their true original
colours, and they are always ready to crop out under
the influence of the proper stimuli to the religious
emotions.
In their earliest forms, they are far from deserving
the odium which attached to them later. The
Bacchantes of Greece were, at first, not a rout of
dissolute women, but an inspired train of devout
virgins and chaste matrons. No man was permitted
in the ranks under pain of death. This was true
also in Rome, in the Orient, and in many tribes of
America. It was a later and an evil innovation
which sanctioned the unrestrained mingling of the
sexes in these wild processions of intoxicated fanatics.
Their intoxication was, however, with the divine
spirit, not the purple grape-juice. They were, as the
Greeks said, “theoleptic,” possessed or infuriated
with the maddening joy of the gods, drunk with the
celestial ambrosia.
To our cold observation, they were in hysterical

j
f
\t
i
zºº * .
#. ; :
V\tº
; º; ;
f
6. *.
186 Religions of Primitive Peoples
mania, with minds disordered by religious excite-
ment, worked up to a high contagious pitch through
collective suggestion, following crazily the disordered
fancies of their sub-conscious selves, mistaking them
for the inspiration of divine emanations. -
3. The Sacrifice.—Rn the custom of offering to the
divine visitant a portion of the food and drink, we
discover the origin of sacrifice. The word has
acquired Sad associations, seen in our common ex-
pression “to make a sacrifice,” which signifies some
painful self-surrender.
This was foreign to its original meaning. The
sacrifice at first was a free-will offering, a pleasing
and grateful recognition of the kindness of the deity.
The first-fruits, the young kid, the earliest ear of
corn to mature, were offered to the beneficent being
who had sent them for the good of man. It was the
willing acknowledgment we pay to a kind friend.
The earliest species of sacrifice is in the nature of a
thank-offering. They were of the class which has
been termed “honorific,” and were little more than
“meals offered to the deity.” ”
I may illustrate it from a custom of the Papuans
of New Guinea. They believe, being ancestral
worshippers, that the good things of life are mainly
owing to the continuing solicitude of their departed
* Jacob Grimm, 7eutonic Mythology, vol. i., p. 48, sq.
Primitive Religious Expression 187
progenitors. Therefore, to testify their gratitude,
Once in several years they dig up the skulls of those
deceased relations, paint them with chalk, decorate
them with feathers and flowers, and placing them on
a scaffold, offer to them food and trinkets.”
There is nothing of fear in this rite, and nothing
fearful, for it is made the occasion of a merry
festival.
Soon, however, in the development of the cult it
was perceived that loss and affliction abounded and
increased ; the gods grew careless of their votaries,
or angry with them. They must be pacified and
propitiated. Hence arose the second form of sac-
rifices, those which are called “conciliatory" or
“piacular.” + They were atoning in significance,
mystic in their symbolism, expiatory in their aims.
The gods were displeased at what man had done
or had left undone, and they must be reconciled by
humility and Self-abnegation.
In this the primitive worshipper acted towards
his deity just as he would toward an earthly superior
whose displeasure he had incurred. There was no
new sentiment or line of action introduced. The rite
of sacrifice in any of its phases offers nothing apart
from the general motives of mankind.
* A. B. Meyer, in Globus, Bd. lxvii., p. 334.
# The terms “honorific” and “piacular” were, I believe, first
suggested by Dr. W. Robertson Smith. They are very appropriate.
188 Religions of Primitive Peoples
The most common reason for early sacrifice was
to expiate breaches of the ceremonial law. Whether
this occurred intentionally or not of purpose, it was
deemed requisite to make amends by some painful
act, to pacify the demonic power behind the law.
Naturally, the greater the self-denial displayed in
the offering, the higher its merit and the more effica-
cious its character. The ancient Germans laid it
down that in time of famine beasts should first be
slain and offered to the gods. Did these bring no
relief, then men must be slaughtered; and if still
there was no aid from on high, then the chieftain of
the tribe himself must mount the altar *; for the
nobler and dearer the victim, the more pleased were
the gods !
The same doctrine prevailed practically through
most primitive religions, and was carried to a like
extent. Painful mutilations of oneself, the lopping
of a finger, scarification, driving thorns through the
tongue or the flesh elsewhere, burning with hot
Coals, Scourging, and supporting crushing weights:
these are but a few of the many terrible sufferings
which the individual inflicted on himself.
Thus steeled to pain in his own person, he knew
no limit to its infliction on others. The tortures of
captives or of slaves dedicated to the gods, common
* Holtzmann, ZXeutsche //y//iologie, p. 232.
Primitive Religious Expression 189
(D
in American religions, formed part of the religious
value of the ceremony. Not merely captives and
slaves, but those of his own household and blood,
his nearest and his dearest, must the true worshipper
be prepared to surrender, were it his first-born son
or the wife of his bosom. It was not heartlessness
or cruelty which prompted him, but obedience to
that law of the supernatural, which ever claims for
itself Supremacy over all laws and all passions of the
natural man.
Traces of human sacrifice are discovered in the
early history of even the noblest religions, and the
rite extended so widely that scarce a cult can be
named in which it did not exist.
What rendered them the more general was the
underlying belief that, let the sacrifice be sufficiently
exalted, the gods could not resist it. They were con-
strained by its magical power, and whatever was
desired could be extorted from them, with or
without their volition. So to this day teach the
Hindu priests, and so believed the ancient Romans
and various primitive nations.
4. The Communion with God.-The idea of atone-
ment in the piacular sacrifice is in reality that of
being one with the god, that of entering into union or
communion with him. This, indeed, lies largely at
the base of all the forms of ritualistic worship. Its
190 Religions of Primitive Peoples
purpose, more or less clearly avowed, is to bring into
spiritual unison the worshipper and the worshipped.
A few examples from American rites will illustrate
this.
The natives of Nicaragua at the time of maize
gathering were accustomed to sacrifice a man to
the gods of the harvest. Around the altar were
strewn grains of corn. Over these the worshippers
stood and with flint knives let blood from the most
sensitive parts of their bodies, the drops falling on
the grains. These were then eaten as holy food,
part of the sacrifice.*
Something very similar obtained in Peru. At the
time of the vernal equinox, all strangers were bidden
to leave the sacred city of Cuzco, where the Inca re-
sided. A human victim was immolated, and the spot-
less “Virgins of the Sun" were deputed to mingle his
blood with meal and bake it into small cakes. These
were distributed among the people and eaten, and one
was sent to every holy shrine and temple in the king-
dom. f Precisely such a rite prevailed among the an-
cient Germans. At the harvest supper the spirit of
the corn, represented latterly under the form of an
animal but in earlier days as a child, was slain and
eaten by those who had aided in the harvest. It
* Oviedo, Historia de las Indias, lib. x., cap. xi.
+ Balboa, Histoire du Perou, pp. I25–7.
Primitive Religious Expression 191
was the literal and corporeal union of man and the
the god. *
Still clearer was the similar ceremony of the Aztecs.
A youth was chosen and named for the god. For
months his every wish was gratified. Then he was slain
on the altar and his fresh blood was mixed with dough
which was divided among the worshippers and eaten.
Thus they became partakers of the Divine Nature.
The fearful similarity of this ceremony both in its
form and in its intention to that of the Christian
Eucharist could not escape the notice of the Spanish
missionaries. They attributed it to the malicious
suggestions of the Devil, thus parodying in cruel
and debased traits the sacred mysteries of the Church.
But the psychologist sees in them all the same in-
herent tendency, the same yearning of the feeble
human soul to reach out towards and make itself a
part of the Divine Mind.
II. THE PERSONAL RITES, those for the benefit
of the individual, will next occupy us.
I have already observed that while the tribe or
gens in primitive conditions worships in common one
or several divinities, most of the religious acts of the
individual are directed toward a deity whom he may
claim as his own special guardian and friend. This
* Frazer, 7%e Golden Bough, vol. ii., p. 31.
+ Sahagun, Historia de la AVueva Zspaña, lib. i.
I 92 Religions of Primitive Peoples
is his tutelary god, his personal Óatugov, his “mys-
tagogue,” who will not merely look after the welfare
of his human ward, but introduce him into the higher
and occult knowledge and power.
This personal deity reveals himself at birth, or may
await some later year or incident of life to manifest
his name and nature. He may be the spirit of some
ancestor or great chieftain or mighty shaman; or he
may belong to those deities who never assume mortal
habiliments. The teachers of early faiths differed on
these points; but nearly all agreed that to each per-
son some such guardian angel or genius was assigned.
From these spirits the personal names were fre-
quently received, and, lest these should be misused,
they were usually kept secret.
These beliefs are too wide-spread to require sup-
port from examples. Probably every American
tribe shared them. They are familiar in classic
Greece and Rome. The Finns and the ancient Celtic
peoples possessed them in marked forms; and they
survive in the tutelary Saints of the Roman Church.
Principally to these the adults paid their devotions
and offered their vows for what concerned their per-
sonal welfare; and many of the rites which I am
about to describe, derive their meaning from their
connection with this belief. I shall classify them
as relating: I, to birth ; 2, to naming; 3, to puberty;
Primitive Religious Expression 193
4, to marriage; and 5, to death and the disposal of
the corpse.
1. Rites Relating to Birth.-Although the immedi-
ate act of childbirth may not cause the Savage
mother severe suffering, the appearance of a new
human being in the world is not considered of light
importance. In her description of the Pueblo
Indians of New Mexico, Mrs. Stevenson remarks
that some “ of their most sacred and exclusive
rites are connected with childbirth,” and her full
and accurate account of them reveals in a strong
light how solemn the event was considered.*
In many tribes the child was considered bound to
its father by some mysterious tie closer than con-
nected it with its mother. Among the Northern
Indians, the father will not bridle a horse or perform
sundry other acts for a fixed period after the birth
of his child, for if he did it would die | | In
the rites of Mexico and South America, this refrain-
ing from certain labours passed into the strange
custom of the couvade. This was, that upon the
birth of the child, the father took to his bed and re-
mained there for a number of days. Did he neglect
this, it was believed that the child would die or have
bad luck. For the same reason he had to be ex-
* Mrs. M. C. Stevenson, in Am. Rep. Bureau of Ethnology, vol.
xi., p. I32.
# Dorsey, Siouan Cults, p. 511.
13
194 Religions of Primitive Peoples
tremely careful of his own health and guarded in his
actions during his wife's pregnancy, or otherwise the
unborn babe would suffer. *
Not less strange are the wide-spread rites and
opinions connected with the umbilical cord. As it
united the unborn infant to the life of the mother, it
was generally held to retain that power in a mysti-
cal sense. Among the American Indians, it was a
frequent custom to carry it to a distance and bury it,
and it became the duty of the individual, in his later
life, to visit alone from time to time that spot, and
perform certain ceremonies.|
Thus the religious life of a person began with his
birth. Not infrequently at that time his tutelary
divinity was ascertained by the priests and assigned
him, as among the Mayas, and the Africans of the
Congo River. With the latter, it was also custom-
ary to lay upon the new-born babe a series of
“vows,” or resolutions touching his conduct in life.
These were impressed on the mother, who adopted
it as a sacred duty to bring up her child in obedience
to them. A similar habit prevailed in the Anda-
man Islands and elsewhere. ::
*A. d’Orbigny, L’Homme Américain, tom. i., p. 237.
# Examples in my Mative Calendar of Central America, p. 18.
It was a favourite amulet among the Crees (Mackenzie, Hist. of the
Fur Trade, p. 86).
f Achelis, Moderne Völkerkunde, p. 370 ; Man, in }our. Anthrop.
Inst., vol. xii., p. I72.
Primitive Religious Expression 195
With these vows was often associated the rite of
baptism, by sprinkling or by immersion in water.
Even among the rude Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego
we find that the child, when born, was promptly
dipped in water, not for sanitary but for religious
1 €3 SO11S.
The ancient inhabitants of Teneriffe considered it
necessary to have a child formally asperged by a
priestess before acknowledging it as a member of the
family,” and some such rite was prevalent in many
tribes. It was in one sense an initiation, as it was
with the neophytes of the mysteries of Mithras, who,
according to Tertullian, were baptised upon entering
the novitiate. In another, it would seem to have
been a purification from inherited sin, in which sense
it was practised by the Nahuas of Mexico and the
Quichuas of Peru. With the Mayas of Yucatan, it
was in common usage and was known by the
significant name, “the second birth.” +
2. Relating to the Name.—The Name, as we have
already seen, was looked upon as a part of the person,
one of his forms or modes of life. Very generally,
* Charlevoix, Hist. de la AVouvelle France, ch. vi. Sprinkling the
new-born child as a religious ceremony prevailed in New Zealand and
throughout Polynesia. (Fornander, The Polynesian A'ace, vol. i.,
p. 236.)
+ Cogolludo, Historia de Yucatan, lib. iv., cap. vi. The same
belief prevailed in some African tribes; see Achelis, Moderne
Völkerkunde, p. 393.
I96 Religions of Primitive Peoples
its selection was a matter of religious moment, and
accompanied with solemn ceremonies. A person
might have many names, but there was one which
was taken from or referred to his or her tutelary
spirit, and this was holy and not to be lightly used.
Among the Nahuas this was generally announced
by the priest on the seventh day after birth, but as
it would be profane to speak it constantly, another
was employed for ordinary conversation. The
Algonquin children, says one who lived among them
long, are taught by their mothers not to divulge
their real names, lest by so doing they should offend
the personal god who has taken them under his pro-
tection.*
When a babe, among the Seminoles of Florida,
was about a fortnight old, the mother took it in her
arms and walked three times around the public square
of the village, calling aloud the name given it; but
this name was not that by which it was later known ;
and “they were always averse to telling it.” + With
some tribes, as the Choctaws, the idea of profanity
existed only if the person himself spoke his name:
so that, “it is impossible to get it from him unless
he has an acquaintance present, whom he will request
to tell it for him.” + Analogous customs abound in
* H. R. Schoolcraft, Omeota, pp., 331, 456.
+ Notices of Æast Florida by a Recent Traveller, p. 79.
f Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, vol., ii., p. 271.
Primitive Religious Expression 197
early religions and many of them survive in modern
folk-lore.*
In some instances the American Indian would ex-
change his name for that of a friend, or extend to him
his name; a rare and high sign of amity, as it signi-
fied that the receiver was thus placed under the
guardianship of the same tutelar deity. This cus-
tom extended widely throughout the island world of
the Pacific and among many primitive peoples. It
has often been noted, but its peculiarly religious
meaning has generally been misunderstood. -
That certain names are auspicious and others in-
auspicious is a belief that belongs everywhere to man-
kind in the primitive stage of thought. But it is
curious to note that while generally the auspicious
names are those of sweet sound and favourable sense,
in Tonkin, Siam, and some other regions ugly and
unpleasant names are preferred, because these will
frighten away the evil spirits.”
3. Rites Relating to Puberty.—On the momentous
crisis in the personal life when the boy enters into
manhood and the girl becomes a woman, in nearly
all primitive tribes a solemn rite is prescribed, the
object of which is to prepare the child for the duties
of the wider life, which it is about to begin.
* Examples in E. S. Hartland's Science of Fairy 7ales, p. 309.
+ R. Andree, Æthnographische Parallelen, p. 177.
I98 Religions of Primitive Peoples
No better example for such a ceremony could be
selected than that which prevails among the southern
tribes of Australia. It is their principal public act of
worship. The name by which it is known is the
Bora,” a word derived from the belt or girdle which
the men wear, and which is at that time conferred
on the youth. Its celebration involves extensive
preparations and occupies a number of days. The
youths are submitted to severe tests and sometimes
to dreadful mutilations. They are taught the holy
names and sacred traditions; and when they have
satisfied their elders of their endurance and fidelity,
they are admitted to the manhood of the tribe.
The Bora is a distinctly religious ceremony. It is
said to have been instituted by their chief god
Turamulun himself, and remains under his spiritual
charge. Its rites “involve the idea of a dedication
to supernatural powers,” and the figure of the god,
moulded in high relief on the earth in the costume
and attitude of the sacred dance, is intended to
represent his personal presence. The aim is the
education of the individual to fill his place properly
in the tribal life; and one of the most intelligent of
English observers expresses his conviction that
* The Bora has been often described, by no one better than Mr.
A. W. Howitt in jour, Anthrop. Inst., vol. vii., p. 242, sq., and vol.
xiv., p. 306, S4.
Primitive Religious Expression 199
“every rule of conduct under which the novice is
placed is directly intended to some end beneficent
to the community or believed to be.”
Throughout most of America, a similar initiation
was required of the youth before he was entitled to
the privileges of manhood. It was frequently ac-
companied by the most painful tests of his courage
and endurance. His naked back was lacerated with
rods, his strength was tried by prolonged hunger,
thongs were inserted into his flesh and torn out by
the bystanders. .
More frequently the boy was sent alone into the
woods, and there, exposed to inclement weather,
cold, hunger and thirst, self-torture and meditation,
awaited the divine revelation which entitled him to
call himself a man
“Could it be possible,” exclaims an intelligent
traveller, “to hear anything stranger, more wonder-
ful, than these stories of unheard-of castigations and
torments to which boys of thirteen or fourteen sub-
ject themselves, merely for the sake of an idea, a
dream, the fulfilment of a religious duty P More
surprising is it that not merely some extraordinary
youth is capable of this, but that every young Indian,
without exception, displays such heroism.” ”
The same rule applied to the girl. As it became
* J. G. Kohl, Kitchi Gami, p. 228.
2OO Religions of Primitive Peoples
evident that the period had arrived in her life-history
when she was capable of the sacred duties of mother-
hood, she either retired into the forest, there to
commune alone with her guardian spirit, or, as among
the Sioux Indians, the fact was made known to the
village, and a solemn feast announced by her parents.
At this, some venerable priest addressed the guests,
“calling attention to the sacred and mysterious
manner in which nature had announced the fact
that she was ready to embrace the duties of matri-
mony | * *
In these ceremonies, which may be said to belong
to primitive religions in all times, we recognise again
the one idea which more than any other permeated
all their myths and rites, the idea of Life. It was
because the boy and girl, passing to riper years, in-
dicated the acquisition of the power to perpetuate
and transmit Life, that at this age it was held neces.
sary for them to mark the epoch by rites of the most
sacred import.
4. Rites Relating to Marriage.—If the notion of
life was thus the inspiration of the rites of puberty,
still more potently did it control those relating to
marriage.
* Captain Clark, Indian Sign Zanguage, p. 254. D’Orbigny de-
scribes the bloody ordeals through which girls in South American
tribes were obliged to pass. Z'Aomme Américain, tom. i., pp. 193,
237.
Primitive Religious Expression 201
Much has been written by special students con-
Cerning the forms of primitive marriage, and much
of what has been written is theory only, not sup-
ported by actual and intimate knowledge of facts.
The assertion is common in works of the kind
that the earliest form of marriage was no marriage
at all,—mere promiscuity,+and that, later, a modi-
fied form of the same, known as “communal" mar-
riage, prevailed. Not a single example of either of
these has been known in history or in ethnology,
and it is a gratuitous hypothesis only that either ever
prevailed in a permanent community.
What we first discern is the family, generally
centred around the mother, and tracing descent
through the maternal ancestors only. This is the
“matriarchal” as distinguished from the “patriarchal”
system, the latter being that in which the father is
the centre and head of the family, and the genealogy
is traced in his line. Both these forms, however,
have existed, so far as we know, in wholly primitive
conditions. The selection of one or the other was a
matter of local accident or incident.
The primitive family, held together by one or other
of these ties of blood-relationship, was a close corpor-
ation. It might adopt outsiders, but after admission
they were considered of the same blood and lineage.
Its property was in common, its laws were laid on all,
2O2 Religions of Primitive Peoples
its very gods were its own. Especially, the rules
relating to marriage were prescribed with rigid form-
ality.
The general practice was that the youth must seek
his bride from another recognised family (gens or
totem) of the tribe. To choose her from his own
immediate family was a crime of such deep dye that
even an Australian savage “could not consider such
a thing possible"; although, in later conditions, this
artificial barrier was often weakened.*
In matriarchal systems, the husband usually went
to live with the gens of the wife, but did not become
a member of it. He was looked upon as a stranger
and an interloper. Among some Australian and
American tribes, he never spoke directly to his wife's
mother, or even looked at her. His children did not
acknowledge him as a blood-relation, and when he
grew old and useless, he had to look to his own
family, not to his own offspring, for his maintenance.
The origin of these strange usages was strictly
religious. They have been analysed as they existed
in many nations by one of the ablest of German eth-
nologists, and their source has been shown to be that
the gods of the one gens never willingly accept the
introduction of a stranger into the household except
* Curr, The Australian Race, vol. i., pp. 45–50; Palmer, in jour.
Anthrop. Znst., vol. xiii., p. 3OI.
Primitive Religious Expression 203
by the regular formulas of adoption, which would
prevent marriage; hence, the husband is, and ever
remains, a foreigner and an interloper in the matri-
archal household. His wife's god is not his god, nor
are her people his people.”
The actual ceremony of marriage itself often in-
dicates this. Much has been said by writers on
ethnology of “marriage by capture,” and it is often
asserted to be that most usual among primitive peo-
ples, and to continue in survivals in higher conditions
of culture.
There is, indeed, very frequently a ceremony which
presents the appearance of violently seizing and carry-
ing away by main force the bride-elect. But it is not
to be understood as the reminiscence of a time when
the man went forth and snatched a girl from some
neighbouring tribe to become his slave and his wife.
I doubt if in the true totemic marriage, considered
as distinct from concubinage, any such method was
practised. It is not so to-day, even among the Aus-
tralian Blacks. If they steal a woman, they first in-
quire as to her kinship, and if she belongs to a class
into which her captor cannot marry, according to the
laws of his clan, he sets her free. t
The so-called “marriage by capture " was either a
* See Post, in Globus, B. lxvii, s. 274.
+ Palmer, te&t stºra, p. 3OI.
gº
2O4. Religions of Primitive Peoples
recognised tribute to maidenly coyness, by which her
real or feigned resistance was to be overcome in a
manner creditable to herself, a sentiment constantly
witnessed in the lower animals as well as in modern
life; or it was a method of conciliating her house-
hold gods, the deities of the gens, by giving the ap-
pearance of constraint and succumbing to force on
the part of the girl. Some of the northern tribes of
America carried these notions to the extent of a pre-
tended concealment of the marriage long after it had
been performed. The husband was obliged to enter
the home of his wife by night and secretly. To ap-
proach it in daytime or to be seen in her company
would have been a grave impropriety. *
The second primitive form of marriage is by pur-
chase. This also is far less usual than many writers
have assumed. There is indeed, very commonly, as
in civilised society, an exchange of goods along with
or previous to the marital ceremony. But with us it
is not regarded as a purchase and sale when an
American girl's father gives his daughter and a mil-
lion to a foreign nobleman in exchange for the title
conferred on the bride. It may in reality be a mere
commercial transaction, but in theory it is not so.
Just as little is the “marriage by purchase” among
most of the aboriginal tribes, where we find it in
* Lafitau, Maeurs des Sauzages Américains, lib. ii, ch. vi.
Primitive Religious Expression 205
vogue. The exchange of goods is often a form of
compensation to the household gods for the privilege
of remaining a member of the clan, or for the per-
mission to enter its ranks as an authorised resident.
Of course, women were bought and sold as any
other commodity; they were part of the booty of
victors, and were dispensed as gifts, or kept for
enjoyment. But when we confine ourselves to the
examination of the strictly totemic marriage we find
even among the wildest tribes that it was generally
founded in mutual liking, that it was contracted un-
der the sanction of the recognised family laws, and
that its ritual was that of a religious ceremony.”
The poor Bushmen, even, believe that the laws re-
lating to marriage are of divine origin, enacted by
the sacred ant-eater, and that their infraction will be
severely punished. †
The gifts which accompanied the rite were in the
nature of offerings. Ceremonies of lustration and
purification, in which the sacred elements, fire and
water, took a prominent part, were general, and the
* Musters asserts this positively of the Tehuelche and other tribes
(Among the Patagonians, chap. v.); Captain Clark, whose long ex-
perience among our Western tribes constituted him an authority of the
first rank, takes pains to correct the notion that among the natizes
wives are bought, although they are by white men (Indian Sign
Zazºgºtage, pp. 245–6). It would be easy to multiply references to
the same effect.
+ Bleek, Bushman Folk-lore, p. 13.
2O6 Religions of Primitive Peoples
relationship established was in its essence one of
religious significance, and not one of mere secular
import.
5. Re/ating to Death.-An attractive writer, Pro-
fessor Frank Granger, remarks in a recent volume:
“The first attitude of primitive man to his dead seems
to have been one of almost unmixed terror.” ”
Would that we could give primitive man so much
credit ! But we cannot. The evidence is mountain-
high that in the earliest and rudest period of human
history the corpse inspired so little terror that it was
nearly always eaten by the surviving friends ! t
We can look back clearly through the corridors of
time to that stage of development when death and
the dead inspired no more terror or aversion in man
than they do to-day among the carnivorous brutes.
Throughout the whole of the palaeolithic period of
culture we discover extremely faint traces of any
mode of sepulture, any respect for the dead.
The oldest cemeteries or funeral monuments of
any sort date from the neolithic period. Then the
full meaning of Death seems to have broken sud-
denly on man, and his whole life became little more
than a meditatio mortis, a preparation for the world
* Worship of the Romans, p. 67.
# This has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt by Dr. S. K.
Steinmetz in a remarkable study of “Endo-cannibalismus,” in the
Archiv für Anthropolgie, 1896.
Primitive Religious Expression 207
beyond the tomb. What Professor Granger says of
the ancient Romans applies to very many primitive
tribes: “In the belief of the Romans, the right to
live was not estimated more highly than the right
to receive proper burial.” ”
The funeral or mortuary ceremonies, which are
often so elaborate, and so punctiliously performed in
Savage tribes, have a twofold purpose. They are
equally for the benefit of the individual and for that
of the community. If they are neglected or inade-
quately conducted, the restless spirit of the departed
cannot reach the realm of joyous peace, and there-
fore he returns to lurk about his former home and to
plague the survivors for their carelessness.
It was therefore to lay the ghost, to avoid the
anger of the disembodied spirit, that the living in-
stituted and performed the burial ceremonies; while
it became to the interest of the individual to provide
for it that those rites should be carried out which
would conduct his own soul to the abode of the
blessed.
These were as various as were the myths of the
after-world and the fancies as to the number and
destiny of the persºnal Souls.
* Granger, 24% supra, p. 37. The word “burial" in ethnology is
used to denote all modes of disposal of the corpse. This is etymo-
logically correct. See Yarrow, Mortuary Customs of the AVorth
American Andians, p. 5.
2O8 Religions of Primitive Peoples
Most common of them all was some sort of funeral
feast. The disagreeable suggestion is close, that
this was a survival of the habit of eating the corpse
itself. Up to a very recent date that habit prevailed
among the Bolivian Indians; and so desirable an
end was it esteemed that the traveller D'Orbigny
tells of an old man he met there whose only regret
at embracing Christianity was that his body would
be eaten by worms instead of by his relations !
The later theory, however, was that then the soul
itself was supplied with food. It partook spiritually
of the viands and thus, well fortified for its long
journey, departed in good humour with those it
left behind. The same notion led to the world-wide
custom of providing it with many articles by placing
them in the tomb or burning them on the funeral
pyre. This extended not only to weapons, utensils,
ornaments, and clothing, but not infrequently to
companions. On the coast of Peru the wives of a
man were burned alive with his dead body, and
among the Natchez they were knocked on the head
and interred under the same mounds.” I have seen
* Navarrete, Viages, tom. iii., p. 4OI ; Dumont, Mems. Hist, sur
la Louisiane, tom. i., p. 178 ; Gumilla, Aſist, del Orinoco, p. 201.
Coréal says, the widows esteemed it a privilege to be buried with the
corpse and disputed among themselves for the honour, Vožages, tom.
ii., pp. 93, 94. The Taenzas had the same customs as the Natchez,
Tonty, Mémoire, in French, Hist. Colls, of Zouisiana, p. 6I.
Primitive Religious Expression 209
the mummy of a woman from the Cliff Dwellers of
Arizona, holding in her arms the body of her babe
which had been strangled with a cord, still tightly
stretched around its little neck. Plainly the sympa-
thetic survivors had reflected how lonely the poor
mother would be in the next world without her babe,
and had determined that its soul should accompany
hers. Elsewhere, slaves or companions in arms were
slain or slew themselves that they might accompany
Some famous chieftain to his long home.
In these funeral rites the disposal of the corpse
depended upon ethnic traits, ancestral usage, or the
instructions of the priests.
Perhaps the earliest was simple exposure. The
body was left in the forest for the beasts and birds
to consume, as among the Caddo Indians and others;
or it was sunk in the waters that the fish should per-
form the same office; the usual object being to ob-
tain the bones with the least trouble. The oldest of
all burials yet discovered, those in the caves in the
south of France, were of this character, simple “se-
position ” as it is called. The body was merely laid
in a posture of repose on the cave floor, with the
weapons and ornaments it had used during life.”
Next in point of time doubtless came inhumation,
* Arthur J. Evans. in Proc. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Science, 1896, Sect.
H.
I4
2 IO Religions of Primitive Peoples
the interment of the body in the ground or covering
it, laid on the surface, with stones and earth, the
burial mound. Homeric Greeks, American Indians,
and tribes of all continents practised this method in
different ages, and the barrows or tumuli thus erected
remain in thousands to this day to attest the religious
earnestness of those early peoples. The vast monu-
ments which at times they constructed for their dead,
the pyramids, dolmens, and teocalli, have never since
been equalled in magnitude or cubical contents.
Another and significant funeral rite of high an-
tiquity is that of cremation or incineration. It was
symbolic in character, the body being given to the
flames in order that the spirit, by their purifying
agency, should promptly be set free and united with
the gods. This method also prevailed extensively
among the American race, and was quite in conson-
ance with their opinions of the after-life. “It is
the one passion of his superstition,” writes Mr.
Powers of the Californian Indian, “to think of the
soul of his departed friend as set free, and purified
by the flames; not bound to the mouldering body,
but borne up on the soft clouds of the smoke toward
the beautiful sun.” ”
* Stephen Powers, Indians of California, pp. 181, 207. The Tas-
manians and Fuegians, probably the lowest of known tribes, burned
their dead. Hyades et Deniker, Mission Scientifique, p. 379; Fen-
ton, Æstory of Zasmania, p. 95. Some tribes gave as a reason for
Primitive Religious Expression 21 I
Other peoples entertained the opinion that the
body as it is, in all its parts, must be preserved in
order that it might be again habitable for the soul,
when this ethereal essence should return to earth
from its celestial wanderings. Therefore, with ut-
most care they sought for means to preserve the
fleshly tenement. In Virginia, in some parts of
South America, on the Madeira Islands, the aborigi-
nal population dried the corpse over a slow fire into
a condition that resisted decay; while elsewhere, the
nitrous soil of caves offered a natural means of em-
balming. The Alaskan and Peruvian mummies, like
those of ancient Egypt, were artificially prepared
and swathed in numerous cerecloths. In all, the
same faith in the literal resurrection of the flesh was
the prevailing motive.
More generally, the belief was held that the soul
remained attached in some way to the bones. These
were carefully cleaned and either preserved in the
house, or stored in Ossuaries. Frequently they were
kept as amulets or mascots, in the notion that the
friendly spirit which animated the living person
would continue to hover around his skeleton or skull,
and exert its amicable power. The Peruvians held
that the bones of their deceased priests were oracu-
burning their dead that otherwise bears and wolves would eat the
corpse, and the soul would be obliged to take on their forms.-Pres.
Message and 4c. Zocs., 1851, pt. iii., p. 506.
212 Religions of Primitive Peoples
lar, speaking good counsel, and the missionaries were
obliged to break them into small fragments to dispel
this superstition *; though they themselves contin-
ued to hold it heretical to doubt the efficacy of the
bones of the saints' A tribe on the Orinoco was
wont to beat the bones of their dead into powder
and mix it with their cassava bread, holding that
thus their friends and parents lived again in the
bodies of the eaters
After cremation, the ashes were left upon the altar,
and the whole covered with earth ; or they were
preserved in urns with the fragments of the bones;
or, as with a tribe of the Amazon, they were cast
upon the waters of the great river and floated down
to the limitless ocean.
Thus closed the last scene in the existence of the
primitive man. From birth to death he had been
surrounded and governed by the ceremonies of his
religion; and on his passage out of this life, he con-
fidently looked to another in which he should find a
compensation and a consolation for the woes of his
present condition.
Following these funerary functions came the cus-
toms of mourning. They were often excessively
protracted and severe, involving self-mutilation, as
* Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, /timerario fara Parrocos de Zn-
dios, p. 185 (Madrid, I77I).
Primitive Religious Expression 213
the lopping of a finger or an ear, scarification, flagel-
lation, fasting, and cutting the hair. These were
shared by the friends and relatives of the deceased,
and at the death of some famous chief “the whole
tribe will prostrate themselves to their woe.”
The psychic explanation of these demonstrations
is not wholly clear. By some they have been inter-
preted as a commutation for cannibalism, and by
Others as an excuse for not accompanying the corpse
into the other world. One writer says: “Barbarism,
abandoned to sorrow, finds physical suffering a relief
from mental agony.” ” On the other hand, a recent
student of the subject claims that in these rites we
perceive “the oldest evidence of active conscience in
the human race; the individual laid hands on him-
self in order to restore the moral equilibrium.” +
Need we go farther than to see in them merely ex-
aggerated forms of the same emotional outbursts
which lead nervous temperaments everywhere to
wring the hands and tear the hair in moments of
violent grief?
* Clark, Indian Sign Language, p. 263.
+ K. T. Preuss, in the Bastian Festschrift.
LECTURE VI.
The Lines of Development of Primitive
Religions.
CONTENTS:—Pagan Religions not wholly Bad—Their Lines of De-
|
velopment as Connected with : I. The Primitive Social Bond—
The Totem, the Priesthood, and the Law ; 2. The Family and
the Position of Woman ; 3. The Growth of Jurisprudence—The
Ordeal, Trial by Battle, Oaths, and the Right of Sanctuary—
Religion is Anarchic ; 4. The Development of Ethics—Dual-
ism of Primitive Ethics—-Opposition of Religion to Ethics; 5.
The Advance in Positive Knowledge—Religion zersus Science;
6. The Fostering of the Arts—The Aim for Beauty and Perfect-
ion — Colour-Symbolism, Sculpture, Metre, Music, Oratory,
Graphic Methods—Useful Arts, Architecture ; 7. The Inde-
pendent Life of the Individual—His Freedom and Happiness
—Inner Stadia of Progress : I. From the Object to the Sym-
bol ; 2. From the Ceremonial Law to the Personal Ideal ; 3.
From the Tribal to the National Conception of Religion—Con-
clusion.
T has always been, and is now, the prevailing be-
lief in Christendom that pagan or heathen
religions cannot exert and never have exerted any
good influence on their votaries.
This opinion has also been defended by some mod-
ern and eminent authorities in the science of ethno-
logy, as, for example, the late Professor Waitz.”
* Anthropologie des Waturvålker, Bd. i., p. 459.
2I4
The Lines of Development 2 I 5
It is a favourite teaching in missionary societies and
in works of travellers who are keen observers of the
shortcomings of others' faiths.
I have never been able to share such a view. The
lowest religions seem to have in them the elements
which exist in the ripest and the noblest ; and these
elements work for good wherever they exist. How-
ever rude the form of belief in agencies above those
of the material world, in a higher law than that con-
fessedly of solely human enactment, and in a stand-
ard of duty prescribed by something loftier than
immediate advantage, such a belief must prompt
the individual, anywhere, to a salutary self-discipline
which will steadily raise him above his merely animal
instincts, and imbue him with nobler conceptions of
the aims of life.
When he feels himself under the protection of
some unseen, but ever near, beneficent power, his
emotions of gratitude and love will be stimulated ;
and when he recognises in the ceremonial law a di-
vine prescription for his own welfare and that of his
tribe, he will cheerfully submit to the rigours of its
discipline.
The various lines of development which were thus
marked out and pursued through the influence of
early religious thought, and which reacted to de-
velop it, deserve to be pointed out in detail, since
216 Religions of Primitive Peoples
they have so generally been overlooked or misun-
derstood.
For convenience of presentation they may be ex-
amined under seven headings, as they were connected
with : I. The primitive social bond; 2. The family
and the position of woman ; 3. The growth of juris-
prudence; 4. The development of ethics; 5. The
advance in positive knowledge; 6. The fostering of
the arts; and 7. The independent life of the indi-
vidual.
These are the main elements of ethnology; and as
they progressed to higher forms and finer specialisa-
tions, partly through the influence of religion, they
in turn reflected back to it their brighter lustre, and
the symmetrical growth of a richer culture was thus
secured.
I. The first to be named should be the construc-
tion of the primitive society. This was essentially
religious. I have already emphasised how completely
the savage is bound up in his faith, how it enters into
nigh every act and thought of his daily life. This
may be illustrated by its part in four very early and
widely existing forms of social ties—the totem, the
sacred society, the priesthood, and the ceremonial
law. -
The totemic bond I have previously explained.
It existed in many American and Australian tribes
The Lines of Development 217
and relics of it can be discerned in the early peoples
of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Its constitution was
avowedly religious. The supposed or “ eponymous"
ancestor of the totem was a mythical existence, a
sort of deity. He was known only through a revela-
tion, either in visions, or, through the assertions of
the elders of the clan, in which latter case the myth
was the origin of the relationship. Theoretically, all
members of the totem were kinfolk, “ of one blood,”
and the numerous rites connected with the letting of
blood were generally to symbolise this teaching.”
In various tribes, as among the Sioux and in Poly-
nesia, the totem did not prevail. Its place was taken
by Societies, sacred in character, the members of
which were bound closely together by some super-
natural tie. As our Indians say, all the members
“had the same medicine.” The relation these so-
cieties bear to the tribe is not dissimilar to that else-
where held by totems. -
In nearly all primitive peoples the priesthood ex-
erts a powerful influence in preserving the unity of
the tribe, in presenting an immovable opposition to
external control. This is well known to the Christian
* The application of the blood, observes Professor Granger, “bound
together in some way those who were present at the rite ” (Worship
of the Romans, p. 210). This subject is fully discussed by Dr. H. C.
Trumbull in his works, The Blood Covenant, and The Threshold
Covenant,
218 Religions of Primitive Peoples
missionaries and bitterly resented by them. These
shamans and “medicine-men " are the most per-
sistent opponents of civilisation and Christianity;
but it must be remembered that the same conserva-
tism on their part has for centuries been the chief
preventive of tribal dissolution and decay. While
we regret that they should resist what is good, we
must recognise the value of their services to their
people in the past.*
The ceremonial law belongs, as I have elsewhere
said, to the primary forms of religion. It is in full
force, as among the Mincopies and Yahgans, where
it is difficult to perceive any other form of religious
expression. It is deemed by all to be divine in
Origin, imparted in dreams or visions by super-
natural visitors, transcending therefore all human
enactments. It defines the proper conduct of the
individual, and prescribes what is allowed and what
is forbidden to him. Obedience to it is constantly
inculcated under the threat of the severest penalties.
These are the main forces which moulded the
earliest human societies known to us, and may be
said to have first created society itself. They are all
* Castren, in the Introduction to his Finnische Mythologie, has
some excellent remarks on the beneficial effects of shamanism. It
is an effort to free the human mind from the shackles of blind natural
forces; it recognises the dependence of the subjective on an objective
will, etc.
The Lines of Development 2 IQ
distinctly religious, and their consideration obliges
us to acknowledge the correctness of the statement
of a distinguished Italian, Professor Tito Vignoli,
“There is no society, however rude and primitive, in
which all the relations, both of the individual and of
the Society itself, are not visibly based on super-
stitions and mythical beliefs.” ”
2. Earlier, perhaps, than any definite social organi-
sation was the family bond which united together
those of one kinship. This rested upon marriage,
the religious character of which in even the rudest
tribes I dwelt upon in the last lecture. I then ex-
plained the matriarchal system prevalent in so many
Savage peoples. Necessarily, this exalted the pos-
ition of woman, by conferring upon her the titular
position of head of the house, and often the actual
ownership of the family property.
It is a general truth in Sociology that we may
gauge the tendencies of a given Society towards pro-
gressive growth by the position it assigns to woman,
by the amount of freedom it gives her, and by the
respect it pays to her peculiar faculties. Religions
which, like Mohammedanism, reduce her to a very
subordinate place in life, wholly secondary to that of
the male, have worked detrimentally to the advance-
ment of the peoples who have adopted them.
* Myth and Science, p. 41.
22O Religions of Primitive Peoples
In Some Savage tribes, the woman is a mere chat-
tel or slave, denied actual participation in religious
rites. But that is by no means the case with all.
Among the Hottentots, for example, who were,
when first discovered, a people of respectable cult-
ure, a man can take no higher oath than to swear
by his eldest sister; and such is the respect incul-
cated through his religion, that he never speaks to
her unless she addresses him first.*
The more delicate nervous organisation of women
adapts them peculiarly to the perception of those
sub-conscious states which are the psychic sources
of inspiration and revelation. Very widely, there-
fore, in primitive religions they occupied the position
of seeresses and priestesses, and were reverenced in
accordance therewith. Among the Dyaks of Borneo,
in former days, all the recognised priestly class were
women. Their bodies were supposed to be the
chosen residence of the Sangsangs, beautiful beings,
friendly to men. These inspired women, called
Bilians or Borich, were subject to theoleptic fits, in
which they gave advice, foretold the future, recited
rhythmic songs, etc. They were under no restraint
of conduct, as what they did, it was held, was the
prompting of the god. So firm was their influence
that, when, in modern days, the men also became
*Hahn, 7'suni | Goam, p. 21.
The Lines of Development 22 I
priests, they were obliged to wear the garb of
women.”
The Siamese also entertain this opinion. Their
gods speak through the mouth of some chosen
woman. When she feels the visit of the spirit to
be near, she arrays herself in a handsome red silk
garment, and as the deity enters her, she discourses
of the other world, tells where lost objects are to be
found, and the like. The assembled company wor-
ship her, or rather the god in her. On recovering
from her theopneustic trance, she professes entire
unconsciousness of what has taken place.
The American Indians very generally concede to
their women an exalted rank in their religious mys-
teries. The Algonquins had quite as famous “medi-
cine-women’’ as medicine-men, and the same was
true generally. Mr. Cushing tells me that there is
only one person among the Zuñis who is a member
of all the sacred societies and thus knows the secrets
of all, and that person is a woman.
When Votan, the legendary hero of the Tzentals
of Chiapas, left them for his long journey, he placed
his sacred apparatus and his magical scrolls in a
cave under the charge of a high priestess, who was
to appoint her successor of the same sex until his
* Ling Roth, AWatèzes of Sarazva/#, vol. i., pp. 259, 271, 282 ; vol.
ii., App., p. clxxv.
ł Walthouse, in jour, Anthrop. Inst., vol. v., p. 415.
222 Religions of Primitive Peoples
return. The secret was faithfully kept and the suc-
cessors appointed for more than a hundred and fifty
years after their conversion to Christianity; until, in
I692, on the occasion of the visit of the Bishop to
the hamlet where the priestess lived, she disclosed
the story, and the holy relics were burned.*
Twenty years later, as if to avenge this, the Tzen-
tals revolted in a body, their leader being an in-
spired prophetess of their tribe, a girl of twenty, fired
with enthusiasm to drive the Spaniards from
the land and restore the worship of the ancient
gods. f.
It is quite usual to find in early religions many
rites, such as dances and sacrifices, which women
alone carry out, and to which it is tabu for any man
to be admitted. This naturally arises in those cults
where the deities are divided sexually into male and
female. Such in their origin were the Bacchanals of
ancient Greece, participated in at first by women and
girls only, celebrated in devotion to the productive
powers of nature, which were held to belong more
especially to the female sex. + The “wise women "
* Nuñez de la Vega, Constituciones ZXiocesanas de Chiapas, fol. 9.
# The locally famous Maria Candelaria. At the head of fifteen
thousand warriors, she defied the Spanish army for nearly a year, and,
though defeated, was never captured. Her story is scantily recorded
by Vicente Pineda, in his Historia de las Subſevaciones Indigenas en
el Estado de Chiapas, pp. 38–70.
f Otfried Müller, Die Etruséer, Bd. ii., ss. 77, 78.
The Lines of Development 223
of many primitive faiths formed a close caste by
themselves, no male being admitted, in imitation of
their mythological prototypes in the heavens. The
“witches” of the Middle Ages were lineal successors
of the Teutonic priestesses, who took as their model
the “swan-maidens" or “wish-women’’ of Odin.”
Another form of early institutions was that of the
societies of virgins, such as that which from primi-
tive Italic times kept alive the holy fire of Vesta,
goddess of the hearth and home. Extensive asso-
ciations of a similar nature were found by the Euro-
pean explorers in Mexico, Yucatan, Peru, and
elsewhere.
A curious teaching of several wide-spread cults
was that women alone were endowed with immor-
tality. Such was the opinion of the natives of
the Marquesas Islands, and in Samoa the myth re-
lated that the god Supa (paralysis) ordained in the
council of creation that the life of a man should be
like a torch, which, when blown out, cannot be again
lighted by blowing ; but that a woman's soul should
live always. H
No one can doubt that in thus assigning a high
and often the highest place in the religious mysteries
* Compare Keary, Outlines of Primitive Belief, p. 60 ; and Maury,
Za Magie et Astrologie, p. 386, sq.
+ Geo. Turner, Samoa, p. 9 ; Dr. Tautain, in Z'Anthropologie,
tome vii., p. 548.
224 Religions of Primitive Peoples
to woman, many primitive religions surrounded her
with a sacredness which was constantly recognised,
and thus aided in the improvement of her social re-
lations. The value of virtue and purity was in-
creased, mere animal desires were subjected to
religious restraint, and the relations of sex came
increasingly to be regarded as instituted by divine
wisdom for special purposes.
3. Although the specifications of the ceremonial
law were often capricious and absurd, and some-
times positively hurtful, yet it developed the habit
of obedience and the respect for authority. In this
manner it potently aided the evolution of jurispru-
dence—that is, of those rules of conduct which
grow out of the habit of men living together and
which are necessary to preserve amicable relations.
These had their origin in other than religious con-
siderations, but when once consciously recognised
as beneficial, the religion of the tribe generally
adopted them, claimed their creation, and threw
around them the garb of its own protective power.
Religion then actively aided in the fulfilment of
purely social duties, as these were understood by
the tribe.
In primitive conditions, all laws are God's laws.
As we would say, there is no separation of the civil
and criminal from the canon law. To the Moham-
The Lines of Development 225
medan, the Koran is the source of all jurisprudence.
This is a survival from early thought.
From this it followed that the punishment of crime
and the decisions between litigants were, properly,
judgments of God. This universal opinion is re-
flected in a number of traits in jurisprudence, some
of which are still in vogue in civilised lands. The
most noteworthy are the ordeal, trial by battle,
oaths, and the privilege of sanctuary.
Ordeals were universal. They all rested on the
belief that the gods would rescue the innocent man
from danger. He might be required to hold red-hot
iron in his hands; he might be plunged long under
water; Swallow poison ; or in any other way expose
himself to pain or death ; if he were unjustly accused,
the invisible powers would protect him.*
The trial by battle involved the same opinion. “If
the Lord is on my side, why should I fear?” is the
confident belief at the basis of every such test of
skill and strength.
* On the ordeal, see Post, Ethnologisches }ºurisprudenz, Bd. ii., ss.
459, sq., 479; Waitz, Anthropologie der AWatarzółęer, Bă. i., s. 461.
The assertion by some writers that the ordeal was not known to the
American Indians is incorrect. For example, Captain Clark recounts
those to test the virtue of women who have been accused. Indian
Sign Language, pp. 45, 208.
#See S. K. Steinmetz on “Der Zweikampf als Ordal” in his Eth-
mologische Studien zur ersten Æntwicklung der Strafe, Bd. ii., S.
76, sg.
I5
226 Religions of Primitive Peoples
These forms of decision have disappeared, but the
Oath remains as vigorous as ever in our law courts.
It is, however, as has been pointed out by the able
ethnologist and lawyer, Dr. Post, originally and in
spirit nothing else than an ordeal. The false wit-
ness, the perjurer, is believed to expose himself to
the wrath of God and to suffer the consequences in
this or another life.*
The rite of sanctuary was distinctly religious. The
criminal among the Hebrews, who could escape to
the temple and cling to the horns of the altar, must
not be seized by the officers of justice. The Chero-
kee Indians, like the Israelites, had “cities of re-
fuge,” which they called “white towns.” With the
Acagohemem, a Californian tribe, the temples were
so purifying that the evil-doer, were he guilty even
of murder, who could reach them before he was
caught, was cleansed of his sin and absolved ever
after from any punishment for it.t
In these vital relations we see how religion entered
deeply into civil life, and became a guide and di-
rector of its most essential procedures. Its develop-
ment grew with its responsibilities and with the
intimacy it cultivated with practical affairs.
The codes of statutes instituted by ancient legis-
* Post, ubi supra, Bd. ii., S. 478.
# Adair, Hist, of the AV. American Indians, p. 158; Boscana, Acc.
of the Indians of California, p. 262.
The Lines of Development 227
lators, usually personified under some one famous
name, as Moses, Manu, Menes, or the like, obtained
general adoption through the belief that they eman-
ated directly from divinity, and were part of the
ceremonial law. Under favour of this disguise, they
worked for the good of those who followed them,
and gained a credence which would not have been
conceded to them, had it been thought that they
were of human manufacture.
Toward merely human law the religious sentiment
is in its nature and derivation in frequent opposition.
It claims a nobler lineage and a higher title. In
theory, the Church must always be above the State,
as God is superior to man. Religion, when vital and
active, is ever revolutionary and anarchic. It ever
aims at substituting divine for human ordinances.
This has been from earliest times its constant tend-
ency. It has been a potent dissolvent of states and
governments and of such older religious expressions
as have become humanised by usage and formality.
In this manner it has been the most powerful of
all levers in stimulating the human mind to active
enterprise and the use of all its faculties. Man owes
less to his conscious than to his sub-conscious intelli-
gence, and of this religion has been the chief inter-
preter.
4. The severest blows have been dealt at primitive
228 Religions of Primitive Peoples
or pagan religions on account of the inferiority of
their ethics. It has often been asserted that they do
not cultivate the moral faculties and benevolent emo-
tions, but stifle and pervert them. They are, there-
fore, considered to be distinctly evil in tendency.
This important criticism cannot be disposed of by
a mere denial. There is no doubt that the ethics of
barbarism is not that of a high civilisation. But if
we understand the necessary conditions of tribal life
in the unending conflicts of the savage state, we can
see that the highest moral code would find no place
there. -
All tribal religions preach a dualism of ethics, one
for the members of the tribe, who are bound together
by ties of kinship and by union to preserve exist-
ence; and the other, for the rest of the world. To
the former are due aid, kindness, justice, truth and
fair dealing; to the latter, enmity, hatred, injury,
falsehood, and deceit. The latter is just as much a
duty as the former, and is just as positively enjoined
by both religion and tribal law. *
The state of barbarism is one of perpetual war, in
which each petty tribe is striving to conquer, rob, and
* This is presented admirably and at length by M. Kulisher in an
article “Der Dualismus der Ethik bei den primitiven Völkern,” in
the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Bd. xvii, pp. 205, sqq. He also sees
clearly enough that the same principle, masked and denied though it
be, reigns to-day. The “categorical imperative” of Kant, is as far
from realisation as is “the golden rule.”
The Lines of Development 229
destroy its neighbours. The Patagonians and Aus-
tralians wander about their sterile lands in small
bands, naked and shelterless, owning nothing but the
barest necessities. But whenever two of these bands
approach each other, it is the signal for a murderous
struggle, in order to obtain possession of the wretched
rags and trumperies of the opponent.
For this reason, the development of ethics must be
studied on inclusive lines, as to what extent they
were cultivated between members of the same social
unit, the totem or the tribe. The duty of kindness
to others extended to a very limited distance, but,
within that area, may have been, and generally was,
punctually observed. The devotion of members of
the same gens to each other, even to the sacrifice of
life, has been often noted among savages. The
duties involved by this connection were frequently
Onerous and dangerous, as in the common custom of
blood revenge, where a man, at the imminent peril
and often at the loss of his own life, felt constrained
to slay the murderer of a fellow-clansman.
The character of the early gods was, as a rule, non-
ethical. They were generally neither wholly good
nor wholly bad. They were more or less friendly
toward men, but rarely constantly either beneficent
or malignant. They were too human for that.”
* There were, of course, some hobgoblins always ready to eat up
or injure man ; but not for any moral or ethical reason. “They
230 Religions of Primitive Peoples
Hence the religions which were founded upon such
Conceptions were not in their prescriptions of con-
duct chiefly ethical, but rather ceremonial. Moral
conduct was of less importance than the performance
of the rites, the recitation of the formulas, and the
respect for the tabu.”
I may go farther, and say that in all religions, in
the essence of religion itself, there lies concealed a
certain contempt for the merely ethical, as compared
with the mystical, in life. That which is wholly re-
ligious in thought and emotion is conscious of another,
and, it claims, a loftier origin than that which is
moral only, based as the latter is, on solely social
considerations. I have heard from the pulpits of our
own land very gloomy predictions of the fate of the
“merely moral man.” +
5. That which we call “modern progress” is due
afflict men, not out of anger or to punish sin, but because it is their
nature to do so, " as Dalton says of the devils of the Oraons. Eth-
mology of Bengal, p. 256.
* This explains what Dr. Robertson Smith, in his Religion of the
Semites, p. I40, says is so difficult to grasp,-that the primitive idea
of holiness is apart from personal character, and even shameful
wretches could lay claim to it. Entirely parallel instances are found
in the history of Christian heresies, as the Anomians and Anabaptists,
who were so holy that they could commit no sin, and hence allowed
themselves the wildest licence.
# It is in this sense that Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote: “Wahre
Tugend ist unverträglich mit auf Autorität geglaubter Religion.”
(Gesammelte Werke, Bd. vii., p. 72.) This is a cardinal principle in
studying the history of ethics.
The Lines of Development 23 I
to the increase of positive knowledge, the enlarge-
ment of the domain of objective truth. To this,
religion in its early stages made important contribu-
tions. The motions of the celestial bodies were
studied at first for ceremonial reasons only. They
fixed the sacred year and the periods for festivals
and sacrifices. Out of this grew astronomy, the
civil calendar, and other departments of infantile
science.
The rudiments of mathematics were discovered
and developed chiefly by the priestly class, and at
first for hieratic purposes; and the same is true of
the elements of botanical and zoölogical knowledge.
The practice of medicine owes some of its most use-
ful resources to the observations of the “medicine-
men " or shamans of savage tribes.
While this much and more may justly be stated
concerning the contributions of Religion to Science,
there can be no question of the irreconcilable conflict
between the two. They arise in totally different
tracts of the human mind, Science from the con-
scious, Religion from the sub- or unconscious intelli-
gence. Therefore, there is no common measure
between them.
Science proclaims that man is born to know,
not to believe, and that truth, to be such, must
be verifiable. Religion proclaims that faith is su-
232 Religions of Primitive Peoples
perior to knowledge, and that the truth which is
intuitive is and must be higher than that which de-
pends on observation. Science acknowledges that
it can reach no certain conclusions; its final decis-
ions are always followed by a mark of interrogation.
Religion despises such hesitancy, and proceeds in
perfect confidence of possessing the central and eter-
nal verity. Science looks upon the ultimate knowa-
ble laws of the universe as mechanical, religion as
spiritual or demonologic.
These differences have always existed, and have,
in the main, resulted in placing religions at all times
in antagonism to universal ethics, to general rules of
conduct, and to objective knowledge. Everywhere,
the religious portion of the community have enter-
tained a secret or open contempt for “worldly learn-
ing ”; everywhere they have proclaimed that the
knowledge of God is superior to the knowledge of
his works; and that obedience to his law is of more
import than the love of humanity.
We may turn to the American Indians, the tribes
of Siberia or the Dyaks of Borneo, and we shall find
that the ordinary “doctor” who cured by a know-
ledge of herbs, of nursing, and of simple mechanical
means, was far less esteemed than the shaman who
depended not on special knowledge but on the pos-
session of mysterious powers which gave him control
The Lines of Development 233
over demons *; or we may take that Protestant sect
of the Reformation, who opposed anyone learning
the alphabet, lest he should waste his time on vain
human knowledge tº ; or a thousand other examples;
and the contrast is always the same.
The conclusion, therefore, is that early religion
did assist the development of the race along these
lines, but only incidentally and, as it were, unwit-
tingly; while it was, at heart, unfriendly to them.
6. It is otherwise when we turn to Art, especially
esthetic Art. Its aim is the realisation, the expres-
sion in the object, of the idea of the Beautiful. This
idea does not belong to the conscious intelligence.
It cannot be expressed in the formulas of positive
knowledge. The esthetic, like the religious, emo-
tions, send their roots far down into the opaque
structure of the sub-conscious intelligence, and hence
the two are natural associates. What Professor Bain
says of Art may be extended to Religion : “Nature
is not its standard, nor is [objective] truth its chief
end.” +
It has been seriously questioned whether the idea
* Ling Roth, Watives of Sarawak, vol. i., p. 271 ; Hoffman, Secret
Societies of the Ojibway, passim.
# They were called the Abecedarians, because they distrusted even
the ABC. Some learned scholars actually threw away their books
and joined them.
f Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, p. 607.
234 Religions of Primitive Peoples
of the beautiful existed among primitive peoples,
apart from a desire for mere gaudy colouring or
striking display. No one would doubt its universal
presence could he but free his judgment from his
own canons of the beautiful, and accept those which
prevail in the savage tribe he is studying. Darwin,
in his work on the Descent of Man, collected evi-
dence from the rudest hordes of all continents to
prove that all were passionate admirers of beauty, as
measured by their own criteria; and he reached also
the important conclusion that their completest ex-
pression of it was to be found in their religious art.
“In every nation,” he says, “sufficiently advanced
to have made effigies of their gods, or of their dei-
fied rulers, the sculptors no doubt have endeavoured
to express their highest idea of beauty.” ”
We should also remember that the same great
teacher says: “It is certainly not true that there is in
the human mind any universal standard of beauty; ”
and this is so, both of the human form and of those
expressions of the beautiful which appeal to the ear
and the touch. The music and the metre of one
race generally displease another; and there is no
one norm by which the superiority of either can be
absolutely ascertained.
In their own way, however, Art and Religion have
* Z'he Descent of Man, p. 581.
The Lines of Development 235
this in common, that they make a study of Perfec-
tion, and aim to embody it in actuality; whereas
Science or positive knowledge confines itself to
reality, which is ever imperfect.
Perfection is, however, an unconditioned mode of
existence, not measurable by our senses, and hence
outside the domain of inductive research. The ten-
dency of organic forms and cosmic motions is al-
ways toward it, but they always fall short of it.* We
are aware of it only through the longings of our sub-
conscious minds, not through the laws of our reason-
ing intelligence. Yet so intense is our conviction,
not only that it is true, but that final truth lies in it
alone, that it has ever been and will ever be the
highest and strongest motive of human action.
Beginning with those arts which are avowedly the
expression of beauty in line, colour, or form, it is
easy to show how they were fostered by the religious
sense. The inscribed shells and tablets from the
mounds of the Mississippi Valley present complex
and symmetrical drawings, clearly intended for some
mythical being or supernatural personage.
Among the Salishan Indians of British Columbia,
when a girl reaches maturity she must go alone to
* As Wilhelm von Humboldt remarked : ‘‘Das Streben der Natur
ist auf etwas Unbeschränktes gerichtet.” The meaning of this pro-
found observation is ably discussed by Steinthal, Die sprachphilo-
sophischen Werke W. von Humboldt's, p. 178.
236 Religions of Primitive Peoples
the hills and undergo a long period of retirement.
At its close, she records her experiences by drawing
a number of rude figures in red paint on a boulder,
indicating the rites she has performed and the visions
she has had.” Such rock-writing, or petroglyphs,
nearly always of religious import, are found in
every continent, and offer the beginnings of the
art of drawing.
It is possible that the oldest known examples,
scratched with a flint on the bones of reindeers
dug up in the caves of southern France, may repre-
sent the totems or deified heroes of the clan. Cer-
tain it is that a class of symbolic figures, which recur
the world over, often dating from remote ages, such
as the crescent, the cross, the Svastika, the triskeles,
the circle, and the square, were of religious intention,
and conveyed mystic knowledge or supernatural pro-
tection in the opinion of those who drew them.
The early cultivation of painting in religious art
arose chiefly from the symbolism of colours, to which
I previously made a passing allusion. Its origin was
in the effect which certain hues have upon the mind,
either specifically or from association. Colour-sym-
bolism, indeed, forms a prominent feature in nearly
every primitive religion. The import of the differ-
ent colours varies, but not to the degree which ex-
* Bull. A mer. Museum Maž. History, vol, viii., p. 227.
The Lines of Development 237
cludes some general tendencies. The white and the
blue are usually of cheerful and peaceful signification,
the black and the red are ominous of strife and
darkness. In many tribes the yellow bore the deep-
est religious meaning. The Mayas of Yucatan as-
signed it to the dawn and the east; and when the
Aztecs gathered around the dying bed of one they
loved, and raised their voices in the pean which was
to waft the soul to its higher life beyond the grave,
they sang: “Already does the dawn appear, the light
advances. Already do the birds of yellow plumage
tune their songs to greet thee.”
These symbolic colours are those with which the
early temples were tinted and the rude images of
the gods stained. They were rarely harmonious,
but they were effective, and appealed to the people
for whom they were intended. Their preparation
and their technical employment were improved, and,
as the art advanced, it reacted on the religion, direct-
ing its conceptions of divinity into higher walks and
toward nobler ideals.
Art in line and colour is of vast antiquity, proba-
bly preceding that in shape or form, carving or
Sculpture. But this, too, we find was fairly under-
stood by the cave-dwellers of France and Switzerland
at a time when the great glacier still covered a good
part of the European continent, and there is scarcely
238 Religions of Primitive Peoples
a Savage tribe to-day that does not make some rude
attempts at carving the images of its deities.
A natural object which has a chance resemblance
to a man or beast is chosen as a fetish, and the
worshipper by chipping or rubbing increases slightly
the likeness. This is the infancy of the sculptor's
art, and it is usually for a religious purpose that it is
exercised. Soon it is developed, and in stone, or
bone, or wood, in baked clay, or rags, or leaves, we
find thousands of effigies in use to represent the
tutelary deities and the other denizens of the super-
natural world.
So prominent was the early progress of religious
art in this direction that it gave the name to early
religion itself. It was distinctly “idolatry,” or
3 *
“image worship,” the objective expression over-
whelming the inward sentiment.
Its excess in this direction led to reactions and
protests as long ago as the dawn of history. “Thou
shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the
likeness of anything,” was a command taken SO
literally that it has swept away ever since in some
of the Semitic peoples all interest in plastic or pict-
orial art, whether sacred or secular. It was be-
lieved that the contemplation of a divinity not
represented by any visible object would maintain
and develop a higher conception than if portrayed
The Lines of Development 239
under tangible form, no matter how beautiful or
how symbolic.
This opinion would not and did not exclude the
cultivation of the beautiful under non-sensuous
forms, such as appeal to the ear rather than to the
eye. I refer to metre and music, to oratory and
literary composition.
From some cause which it might be difficult to
explain satisfactorily the natural expression of re-
ligious emotion in language is universally metrical.
The rites of every barbarous tribe are conducted in
or accompanied by rude chants or songs, which both
stimulate the religious feelings and give appropriate
vent to them. Many of these chants are mere re-
petitions of phrases, or refrains, destitute of mean-
ing, but they answer the purpose, and are the germs
from which, in appropriate surroundings, have been
developed the great poems of the race, the inspir-
ations of its immortal bards.
Hundreds of examples of these primitive religious
chants have been collected of recent years, when,
for the first time, their ethnologic importance has
been understood. They present a striking similarity,
whether from the Polynesian Islands, the desert-
dwellers of Australia, or the Navahoes and Sioux of
our own reservations. Many of them are scarcely
more than inarticulate cries, but even these have a
240 Religions of Primitive Peoples
certain likeness, containing the same class of vowels,
and often leading, through this physiological cor-
relation of sound to emotion, to similar words in the
religious language of far-distant peoples.
Everywhere we find these metrical outbursts con-
trolled by the sense of rhythmical repetition ; and it
was to accentuate this that instruments of music
were first invented. Their rudest forms may be
seen in the two flat sticks which the Australians use
to beat time for their singing in their corroborees, or
festal ceremonies; or in the hollow log, pounded by
a club, which some Central American tribes still
employ. All the native American musical instru-
ments appear to have been first invented for aiding
the ritual ; and tradition assigns with probability
the same origin for most of those in the Old World.
Uniform rhythmic motion is a powerful means of
intensifying collective suggestion ; and its action is
the more potent the more we yield our minds to the
control of their unconscious activities, the realm in
which the religious sentiment is supreme.
In the initiation ceremonies of the Australians—
called the Bora—the youth are obliged to listen to
long speeches from the old men, containing instruct-
ions in conduct and the ancestral religious beliefs.
Such customs as this, and in one or another form
they are universal in primitive religions—led to the
The Lines of Development 241
development of the art of Oratory. It was culti-
vated assiduously in primitive conditions. We have
several volumes largely filled with the prolix addresses
of the Aztec priests and priestesses on various Solemn
occasions, as birth, entering adult life, marriage, etc.”
To learn these long formulas by heart was one of
the duties, and not an easy one, of the neophytes.
In most tribes they are couched in forms apart
from those of daily use, the words being unusual,
with full vowels and sonorous terminations. Some
of these peculiarities survive in the “pulpit elo-
quence" of our own day, testifying to the influence
of religious thought on the development of the modes
of dignified expression.
It was in this connection and under this inspir-
ation that man invented the greatest boon which
humanity has ever enjoyed,—a system of writing, a
means of recording and preserving facts and ideas.
Our present alphabet is traced lineally back to the
sacred picture-writing of ancient Egypt; and the
less efficient method employed by the natives of
Mexico and Central America originated in devices
to preserve the liturgic songs and religious formulas.
For generations, in both areas, its chief cultivation
and extension lay with the priestly class: although
* They were preserved in the original tongue by the first mission-
aries, Sahagun, Olmos, Bautista, etc., and have, in part, been pub-
lished.
16
242 Religions of Primitive Peoples
its final application to the uses of daily life was due
to merchants rather than to scholars.
This discovery made possible such a treasure as a
literature; and that we find its beginnings and old-
est memorials chiefly of religious contents is ample
testimony to this incalculable debt we owe to the
religious sentiment. The papyri of Egypt, the
codices of Central America, the Sanscrit Rig Veda,
and the Persian Vendidad testify to the diligence
with which the ancient worshippers sought to pre-
serve the sacred chants and formulas.
We discern the same anxiety among rude sav-
ages to pass down in their integrity the liturgies of
their worship; and in the “meday sticks" of the
Chipeways and the curiously incised wooden tablets
of Easter Island, we have the beginnings of written
literature, always the purpose being religious in
character.
It is unnecessary to dwell in detail upon the foster-
ing influence of early religion on the useful arts. In
their numerous applications to the ritual and the ob-
jective expression of the religious sentiment, they
were constantly stimulated by it and by the reward
it was ever prepared to offer, both in this world and
that to come.
But one art of utility was so pre-eminently religious
in its source that it merits especial comment, that
The Lines of Development 243
is, building or architecture. Nearly all the great
monuments of the ancient world, most of the im-
portant structures of primitive tribes everywhere,
have in them something religious in aim, or are
avowedly so. We know little or nothing of the
builders of the mysterious “megalithic monuments,”
the dolmens and cromlechs which to the number of
thousands rise on the soil of France and England ;
but their arrangement and character leave no doubt
that they were for some religious purpose. So the
mighty piles which excite our astonishment in the
valley of the Nile or the Euphrates, or on the high-
lands of Mexico, or in the tropical forests of Yucatan,
reveal the same inspiration.
In his altars and temples, in his shrines and funerary
monuments, his fanes and cathedrals, man has at all
times expended his efforts and his means with a pro-
digality lavished on no other edifices. The orders of
architecture arose from his desire to erect dwellings
worthy of the god who should inhabit them. No
beauty of line, no majesty of proportion, no abund-
ance of decoration, was too great to secure this pur-
pose. Such surroundings in time imparted dignity
and permanence to the cult, and embellished the re-
ligious sentiment through noble artistic associations.
7. Let us now turn from these considerations of a
general nature to the more pointed one, whether
244 Religions of Primitive Peoples
primitive religions exerted an improving influence
On the independent life of the individual; for that is
the test to which all institutions should finally be
brought. -
The savage is not the type of a free man, although
in popular estimation he is generally so considered.
He is, in fact, tyrannically fettered by traditional
laws and tribal customs. He is merged in his clan
or gens, against whose rules, often most painful and
arbritrary, he dares take no step. As an individual,
he cannot escape from their invisible chains.”
His only avenue to permitted freedom is through
the higher law of his personal religion. If he pleads
that his own tutelary spirit has ordered him to an
act contrary to custom, or that his own magical
powers enable him to defy established usage, his
disregard of it will be condoned.
In savage life, the inspired and the insane are
always ranked in the same category as above the
law. Among the Kamschatkans, if a man declares
that his personal divinity has in a dream commanded
him to unite with some woman of the tribe, it is her
duty to obey, no matter what her position or re-
lationship.f -
* This is further set forth in Rostock, Das Religions wesen der
zohesteve AWałurzółęer, p. I45, sq.; and Curr, The Australian Race,
vol. i., pp. 51-54.
ł Klemm, Culturgeschichte, Bd. ii., s. 309.
The Lines of Development 245
Although at times this freedom was doubtless
abused, it secured for the individual a degree of
personal liberty which he could have attained in no
Other manner. By recognising a law for the single
conscience above that of either ancestral usage or
popular religion, it paved the way to the develop-
ment of the individual, free from all restraints other
than his clear judgment would lay upon himself.
He who possessed the hidden knowledge, the
esoteric gnosis, was by that knowledge released from
bondage to his fellow-men. As the poet Chapman
So well says:
“There is no danger to a man who knows
What life and death is ; there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge : neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.”
This sense of superiority to all surroundings is
disclosed everywhere in mystic religions. A Hindu
prophetess was a few years ago imprisoned by the
English civic judge for violation of the local laws
and disturbing the peace. Her only statement in
defence was: “Years ago, when a girl, I met in the
jungle, face to face, the god Siva. He entered into
my bosom. He abides in me now. My blessing is
his blessing ; my curse his curse.” “ The Malay,
*Walthouse, in }our. Anthrop. Soc., vol. xiv., p. 189.
246 Religions of Primitive Peoples
when he “runs amuck,” regards himself exonerated
from all restraint, moral or social; and that custom
and belief are not confined to his race.*
It was held among the ancients that those who
are “born of God,” that is, inspired by the divine
afflatus, are not only above human law, but “are
not subject even to the decrees of Fate.” +
The ceremonial law, so powerful in primitive con-
dition, must have exerted a beneficial influence on
the training of the individual. Its severe restric-
tions, its minute and ceaseless regulations of his life,
taught him self-control and self-sacrifice. His first
duty was not to himself but to the other members
of his clan or totem. Obedience and systematic
restraint were useful lessons inculcated on him from
earliest childhood. The Congo Negro, the Andaman
Islander, the American Indian, for whom his spons-
ors had taken vows at his birth, grew up to consider
the fulfilment of these the chief end of his life.
Their violation would entail disaster and disgrace
not merely on himself but on his people. His re-
ligious education, therefore, cultivated in him some
* The amož of the Malays, the mali-mali of the Tagalese, etc., is
a maniacal religious psychosis in which the subject will rush violently
through a street, killing or wounding any one he meets. See Dr.
Rasch's discussion of it in Centralblatt für Anthropologie, vol. i., p.
54, who considers it a “suggestive influence.” Similar examples are
common among American Indians.
# Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, bk. ii., cap. 62.
The Lines of Development 247
of the finest qualities of perfected manhood, self-
abnegation and altruism ; for, as Professor Granger
well says, “The primitive idea of holiness implies
as its chief element, relation to the communal life.” “
If, therefore, with some writers, we must concede
that in primitive conditions the individual was ever
conceived with reference to the gens or community,
on the other hand, we must recognise the potency
of the religious element occasionally to separate him
from others as one of “the elect”; to train him in
self-realisation and self-government; and to cherish
in his mind the germs of a free personality.
More difficult is the decision of the question
whether primitive religions increased the happiness
of the individual.
I have mentioned more than once the generally
joyous character of many of them, as seen in their
rituals. But it would be a grave error not to dwell
also upon the dread of evil spirits which is so con-
spicuous a part of most, and which keeps their vo-
taries in a state of perpetual anxiety. Nor can the
self-sacrifice I have referred to increase the cheerful-
* Worship of the Romans, p. 211. This was, of course, but one
side of it, though usually the most important.
+ Professor Lazarus observes: “In der Religion zeigt sich der ganze
Mensch" (Zeitschrift fºr Vôléerpsychologie, Bd. i., S. 47). That is,
that the individual in no other condition of mind realises and reveals
his ful] personality so completely as in that which is created by the
religious sentiment.
248 Religions of Primitive Peoples
ness of life, associated as it often is with painful
mutilations, with prolonged fasting, and exposure
to cold and heat. The cruelty of the ceremonies
is often shocking, the edicts of the religious code
merciless.
To compensate this, “the fearful looking forward
to the wrath to come,” the fertile source of mental
misery in advanced faiths, scarcely exists in those of
primitive conditions. Death itself is thus deprived
of its greatest terror, and the indifference with which
it is met by most savages is matter of common note
among travellers.
Nor does there exist in primitive conditions that
fertile source of human misery, religious bigotry or
intolerance, with its fatal train of persecutions, tor-
ture, and suspicion. The bloodiest sacrifices of
heathendom have never entailed such personal un-
happiness as the gloomy fanaticism of some forms
of Christianity.
All these several lines of development are, it will
be noted, external to religion itself. They modify it,
and are modified by it. But there are other changes,
wrought within the religious sense itself, which we
must now consider.
Religions, like all other institutions, are subject
to growth and decay, evolution and retrogression,
development and death.
The Lines of Development 249
The vast majority of primitive faiths have dis-
appeared totally, leaving no trace behind except the
nameless images of their gods, or not even these.
They were obliterated by conquest, or merged and
lost in other forms of belief, or degenerated and petri-
fied until they died a natural death.
Others grew and extended, vitalised by new
thoughts, appropriate to the new environment, or
were carried far and wide by victorious rulers or en-
thusiastic votaries. It is generally true, as Professor
Toy has observed, that, in early conditions, the life
of a religion depends on the life of the tribe or state
which has adopted it, and that “the larger the com-
munity, the more persistent and vigorous its religion
Will be.” &
But the secret of success lay within rather than
without; the particular faith must pass through cer-
tain internal transformations in Order to fit it for the
wider field opened to it. The chief of these stadia
of progress may be described as a transference of re-
ligious thought: I. From the object to the symbol;
2. From the ceremonial law to the personal ideal;
and 3. From the tribal to the national conception of
religion.
I. The rudest phases of religion connect the ideas
of the Divine with particular external objects, a tree,
* }udaism and Christianity, pp. 5-7.
25O Religions of Primitive Peoples
a rock, a special place, around which grow up a series
of local myths and usages. Such ideas, to develop,
must break away from these connections with con-
Crete and localised relations. They must become
generalised, and the symbol be substituted for the
object.
Instead of a particular tree, for instance, the sign
of the tree, the cross or the pole (asherim), will be
adopted. This represents not the original object
but the personified activity, the spirit or god which
was supposed earlier to inhabit the given object or
spot.
Thus the mind is freed from its bondage to a purely
material, geographically single, perception, and the
first step is taken toward universal or world-ideas
of divinity. In metaphysical terms, it is a passage
from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular
to the general, from the real to the ideal; a line of
progress which must necessarily be followed by man's
intelligence in order to develop his especially human
attributes.
2. The second important step was that which sub-
stituted for the bare and cold prescriptions of the
ceremonial law the ideal of personal perfection.
The beginnings of this are visible even in the lowest
faiths, as we see in their veneration of those who,
they considered, had fulfilled most completely their
The Lines of Development 25 I
notions of duty. Such persons were held to have
descended from the gods, or were inspired by them.
It is true these early ideals are of little more than
physical strength and mental cunning ; but their
attributes gradually expanded to include corporeal
beauty, intellectual power, and ethical grandeur.
We thus arrive, still in primitive conditions, to
such personal ideals as Quetzalcoatl among the
Aztecs, of whom it was said in their legends that he
was of majestic presence, chaste in life, averse to
war, wise and generous in actions, and delighting in
the cultivation of the arts of peace ; or as we see
among the Peruvians, in their culture hero Tonapa,
of whose teachings a Catholic writer of the sixteenth
century says: “So closely did they resemble the pre-
cepts of Jesus, that nothing was lacking in them but
His name and that of His Father.””
When these ideals were not distinctly men, but
were partially or wholly divine, nevertheless the con-
templation of an existence whose chief aim was to
do good to those who complied with his instructions,
to protect those who fled to him, and to grant the
petitions of those who prayed to him, was both a
comforting and ennobling conception.
3. Professor Thiele in his work on the ancient
* The literature relating to these august characters in American
legendary literature is presented in my American Hero-Myths, pas-
sim ; also, Myths of the AVezy World, pp. 336, 337.
252 Religions of Primitive Peoples
Egyptian religion makes the wise observation : “The
revolution brought about by religious universalism
is the greatest and most complete which the history
of the world can show.” ”
It is true that no primitive religion aimed at uni-
versalism or even deemed it desirable or possible.
The gods of the gens or tribe belonged to that com-
munity, were its own exclusively, and stood in antag-
onism to all other gods. There was no notion of
proselytising or missionary work, no desire to extend
the worship of the tribal god beyond the limits of
the tribe.
This exclusiveness was broken down by the inter-
communication of tribes, their confederations and
conquests, which forced the religious conceptions to
take broader views. The priests and philosophers
began to recognise in the deities of other nations
types of their own, as we see in Greek and Roman
writers. This gradually led to the comprehensive
speculations of the world-religions, in which all men
are considered to stand equally before God, and all
entitled to the same share of His grace.
The early stages of these transitions are easily
recognised in primitive faiths. The adoption of
foreign gods appears early. When a tribe met with
frequent reverses, it began to distrust the power of
* Ancient Egyptian Åeligion, Introduction.
The Lines of Development 253
its own deities, and apply to those of its conquerors
for aid. The custom of exogamy introduced divinities
of other gentes. Personal and communal wants led
to pilgrimages to the famous oracles and fanes of
distant religions, and the votaries in returning
brought with them the memory and the cult of
alien gods. In many such ways the barriers of the
tribal faith were gradually broken down.
We may expect to find faint traits or none of the
purely abstract stage of religion in the cults of sav-
age tribes. Yet they are not absolutely lacking.
This abstract stage is when the Idea, no longer
merged in the Ideal, stands by itself as the recog-
nised guide of conscious effort. The conception of
infinity or perfection is not then conceived in rela-
tion to a being or personality. It will still act as
the loftiest motive of action, the deepest source of
spiritual joy.
Thus understood and recognised, it will not be a
cold product of the reason, but the warm and potent
efflux of the heart, of the impulses, and the emotions.
In him who rises to this height, the sympathy for
and the active love of the good and the true will be
all the stronger, because he will see that man must
hope only from man, from diligent self-perfecting ;
254 Religions of Primitive Peoples
but may thus hope confidently from the best there
is in man.
Toward this end, though unseen and unacknowl-
edged, were all religions of primitive peoples uncon-
sciously directing and impelling the human mind.
Long has been the path, many the false routes fol-
lowed, far away is still the goal; but ever firmer in
faith, and clearer in purpose, man will in due time
and fit season be established in this, the last and
innermost mystery of his religious nature.
THE END,
INDEX OF AUTHORITIES.
Achelis, Th., 134, Ig4, 195
Adair, J., 98, 226
Andree, R., 96, I26, 184, IQ7
Andrian, von, I55
Arnobius, 7I, IOO, I47, I66, 246
Augustine, St., 29
Bain, A., 233
Balboa, M. C., Igo
Bastian, A., 9, I34
Bautista, J., 24.I
Bergen, Fanny D., 139
Bertonio, L., 67
Bleek, W. H., 57, II3, 144, 205
Bonavia, E., I52
Boscana, Y. de, 226
Bourke, J. G., 32
Brincker, H., I42
Broca, P., 46
Bruno, G., 136
Buchman, Prof., 8 -
Bucke, M., 52
Buckle, 81
Calloway, Bishop, 31, 52, 57, 66,
82, 93, I47, I69
Castren, A., I4, 78, 83, 218
Chapman, J., 245
Charlevoix, P., I70, Ig5
Cicero, M. T., 18O
Clark, W. P., I4, 70, 72, 76, IO3,
I8I, 2O5, 2I3
Clodd, E., 21
Codrington, R. H., 63, 131
Cogolludo, P., I75, IQ5
Coleridge, S. T., 171
Comte, A., I33
Conant, L. L., I22
Coréal, F., 208
Cuoq, M., 20, 93
Curr, E. M., I3, 57, 58, 65, 90,
I4O, I?4
Cushing, F. H., I25, 22I
Dalton, E. F., 89, 137, 16O, 230
TJarwin, Ch., 36, 49, IIO, 234
Davis, T. Rhys, 28
Disraeli, B., 87
Dolbear, Prof., 85
Dorsey, J. O., I36, 152, IQ3
Dyer, L., 62
Egede, P., I43
Ende, Van, M., 87, 136
Ephrem, Saint, 5 I, IOO, I25
d'Estrey, M., 161
Evans, Arthur J., 209
Fechner, I53
Fenton, 2IO
Fewkes, J. W., 39
Fletcher, Alice, 60, I52
Flügel, Dr., I4
Fornander, A., 63, 77, I26
Frazer, J. G., 2I, IO8, II?, 151,
I9 I
Freihold, F., 74, I?5
Friedmann, Dr., I4
Garcia, G. de, I48
Gill, W. W., 59, 69, 74, 77, 87,
IOO
Gough, A. E., 5I, 57, 68, 84
Granger, F., 6, 38, 66, 97, I34,
I80, 206, 2I 7, 247
Gregg, Capt., Igó
256
Index of Authorities
Grey, George, 79, 91, IO4
Grimm, J., 76, 96, I28, 18O, I82,
I86
Grimme, H., 40
Gruppe, Otto, I72
Guigniaut, I44
Gumilla, P., 208
Hahn, Th., 75, 77, 220
Hale, Horatio, I6, 63, 70, 95,
I2 I, I25, I36, I49
Hartland, E. L., 8, 197
Hasselt, von, I 32
Helmholtz, Prof., 85
Hervé, G., 46
Herzog and Plitt, 168
Hippolytus, I62
Hoernes, M., 35
Hoffman, W., 233
Holtzmann, I88
Holub, H., 97
Honegger, J. J., 9, 83
Hovelacque, A., 46
Hopkins, E. W., 79, I49, 168
Howitt, A. B., 72, 98, I68, Ig8
Humboldt, W. von, 23O, 235
Hyades, Dr., IO4
Jellinghaus, I69
Kalewala, the, I44
Kant, I., 228
Keary, C. F., II 7, I5I, I62, 223
Reil, Prof., I21
Klemm, K., 57, 65, 95, IO9
Knight, P., 5 I, I80
Kohl, J. G., IQ9
Koran, the, 99, 225
Kuhn, Prof., II2, II5
Kulischer, M., 228
Lafitau, P., 204
Lang, A., 47
Lazarus, Prof., 247
Lenormant, F., 89, 91, 96, I73
Leon, Martin de, I42
Lubbock, Sir John, 27, 30
Mackenzie, A., IQ4
Maistre, J. de, 43
Man, E. W., 75, IIo, I26, I45
Matthews, W., 50, 63, IO6, 150
Maury, A., 66, 223
Meltzer, Otto, I4o
Meyen, H., I44
Meyer, A. B., 187
Middendorf, Dr., 59
Mirandola, P. de, 92
Montenegro, A. de la P., 212
Montesinos, F., I4I, I48
Morice, P., II6
Morris, J. B., 51, IOO
Mortillet, G. de, 34, 35
Müller, F. Max, I 15
Müller, O., I40, I64, 222
Musters, G. C., 77, 177, 205
Navarrete, M., 208
Neale, J. M., 5, 179
Nevins, Dr., 52
Newell, W. W., 139
Olmos, A. de, 24I
d'Orbigny, A., I5 I, I55, 200
Oviedo, F., Igo
Padilla, D., 17o
Palmer, E., I7, I53, 202
Paulsen, F., 85
Peschel, O., 44
Petitot, E., 125
Pfleiderer, J. G., 28, 133
Pietschmann, R., 24, 133
Pinches, 62
Pineda, V., 222
Pinsero, Prof., 36
Popol Vuh, the, 91, 99, I36,
I69
Post, A. H., 6, 203, 225, 226
Powers, Stephen, 2Io
Preuss, K. T., 2I3
Putnam, F. W., II9
Rasch, Dr., 246
Ratzel, F., 44
Reclus, E., 70
Rialle, G. de, I33
Ridley, W., 51
Index of Authorities
257
Romanes, G. J., 85
Roskoff, G., 28, 31, 244
Roth, H. Ling, 39, 67, 77, 94,
IO2, I40, I60
Sahagun, B., 68, 99, Io9, 191
Sayce, Professor, 20, 49, 90, 99
Scherer, E., II2
Schoolcraft, H. H., 125, 196
Schrader, Prof., 22, 28, 7o, I28
Schurtz, H., 44
Schwaner, Dr., 39
Schwartz, F. L. W., 80
Shelley, P. B., 42, 139
Smith, W. Robertson, 46, II 2,
I68, I72, 177, I80, I87, 230
Smyth, B. B., 52, 74, 80
Spencer, Herbert, 30, 42
Spinoza, B., 47, I36
Steinen, K. von den, 65, 72
Steinmetz, S. R., 7 I, 73, 206,
225
Steinthal, H., 235
Stevenson, Maria C., Ig3
Stoll, Otto, 56, 99, IOI
Sully, James, I4
Tautain, Dr., I2 I
Thiele, C. P., 38, 251
Tolstoi, Count, 87
Tonty, S. de, 208
Torquemada, P., 148
Toy, C. H., 3, 249
Trumbull, H. C., 21.7
Tschudi, J. von, 61, 183
Turner, George, 223
Turner, L. M., 65
Turner, W. Y., 31
Tyler, E. B., 135, I53
Vega, N. de la, 222
Vignoli, T., 2I9
Venegas, M., I4I
Waitz, Th., I32, 213, 225
Walcott, I59
Walthouse, J.. 89, 22I, 245
Westcott, S., I21
Willoughby, C. C., II9
Wood, C. J., 169
Ximenes, F., I42
Yarrow, H. C.,, 207
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
Abecedarians, sect of, 233
Accadians, the, 23
Aditi, a Sanscrit Diety, 83
African tribes, 26
Ages of the World, the, 125
Aiapakal, deity of the Yahgans,
IO4
Air, worship of, I43
Algonkian myths, 70, 72, I5O
Alphabet, origin of, 24I
Amazulus, the, 57, I69
American culture indigenous, 24
Amok, the, of Malays, 246
Anaphora, influence of the, I 79
Ancestor-worship, 42, 70, 7I
Andaman Islanders, beliefs of,
72, 75, II3, II5, see Min-
copies.
Androgynous deities, I 69
Animism as a religious theory,
46, I35
Anthropism, I62
Anthropology, defined, I
Apache Indians, the, 32, 33
Archaeology, what it teaches, 18
Architecture, religious, 243
Art and religion, 233
Aryans, the early, 22
Asherim, the sacred pole, 250
Atala, deity in Eorneo, 77
Atheism, in Buddhism, 28
‘‘ ‘‘ among Africans, 3I
Aurora Australis and Borealis,
I4.I
Australians, native, I3, 16, 17,
25, 51, 52, 65, 72, I26, I40,
I53, I58, I67, I74, IQ8
Automatism of the human mind,
6
“Auto-suggestion,” 55
Avatea, see Vatea
Awonawilona, god of the Zuñis,
I24.
Aztec prayers, IO6
Aztecs, the, I26, I44, I45, I67,
I9I, 24O
Babylonia, ancient, 20, 23
Bacchanalia, the, 185, 222
Baiame, an Australian deity, 74
Baptism, rite of, I44, 145
Basutos, their knowledge of God,
5 I
Battle, trial by, 225
“Beatific vision,” the, 53, II4
Beauty, the ideal of, 234
Bechuanas, beliefs of, 82
Beth-el, in Semitic myth, 146
Bilians, inspired women, 220
Bird as a sacred animal, I58
Birth, rites relating to, IQ3
Bi-sexual deities, I69
Bitol, a deity of the Mayas, 123
Black drink of Creek Indians,
7
Bones, beliefs respecting, 131,
2 II
“Book-religions,” 50
Boonbolong, a magic word, 90
Bora, the Australian, II9, IQ8,
24O
Borneo, natives of, see Dyaks
Bororos, the, 65
Brazil, native tribes of, 65, 67,
I40
Brutes, devoid of religious senti-
ment, 36 : worship of, I57
Buddhism, alleged in America,24
259
26O
Index of Subjects
Buddhism, atheistic in creed, 28
Burial, modes of, 207
Bushmen, the, 57, II3, I44, 205
Cabalistic doctrines, 92
Canaras, a Dravidian tribe, I48
Cannibalism, I'7, Igo, 206, 208
Carrier Indians, myths of, II6
Cause, the notion of, 44, 45
Caves as holy places, I56
Ceremonial circuit, the, 182
Chaldean mythology, I45, I52,
I6I
Charm-songs, 89, 93
Child mind compared to Savage
mind, 14
Chinese magical rites, 175
Choctaws, myths of, 98, IQ6
Colours, symbolism of, I46, 236
Comanche Indians, the, 72
Commensality in rites, 181
Communal rites, I77; marriage,
2O I
Comparative method, the, 5
Cosmic consciousness, 52
Cosmical concepts, the, II8
Couvade, the, explained, Ig3
Creation, the, how understood,
I23 sq.
Creek Indians, the, 67
Cross, symbolism of the, I52
Crowd, influence of, I78
Cuchi, an Australian deity, 80
Dakotas, religious views of the,
O
Danu, an Irish Goddess, I4o
Dawn, myths of the, 75
I)ead, cult of the, 70, 71
Death, rites relating to, 206
T}eluge, myth of the, I22, 126
Demoniac possession, 52
Diana, the Ephesian, 147
Dido, a moon goddess, I4O
Dieyeris, an Australian tribe,
I4O
Divination, methods of, III
Drama, of the Universe, I22 ;
religious, origin of, I83 sq.
Dravidian tribes, the, 26, IoS
Dreams and dreaming, 64 sqq.
DuSdachtschish, a Kamtschatkan
god, I65
Dyaks, the, of Borneo, 39, 67,
I23, I58, 220
Ea, a Babylonian deity, 99, I45,
I6I
Earth, worship of the, 145
Easter Island, images in, 83
Echo in myths, 86
Egg as a religious symbol, I59
Egypt, early religions of, 23, 24
Elements, worship of the, 141
Emanation, the doctrine of, I62,
I65
Endymion, fable of, 37
Epochs of Nature, the, 125
Eponymous ancestors, I61
Eskimos, the, 65, 72, I58
Ethics and religion, 228 sq.
Ethiopians, the, 26
Ethnology defined, 2
Etruscans the, 23, 142
Eucharist, heathen analogies to,
IQI
Euhemerus, doctrines of, 42
Evocatio deorum, the, IO4
Family, the primitive, 20I, 219
Fatherhood of God, the, 124,
I67
Fear in religion, 45, 46
Fetishism explained, 131 sq.
Fetish water of Africans, 67
Finns, beliefs of the, 73, 192
Fire, worship of, I42
Fish in sacred art, I6I
Flint stone in myths, I49
Folk-lore, value of, 20
Four as sacred number, I2O
Freedom, limited in savage
tribes, 244
Frog as a sacred animal, I61
“Genius,” explained, 165
Ghosts, the fear of, 73 ; beliefs
about, 76
Index of Subjects
26I
Gnosis, the esoteric, 245
“God,” derivation of, 61, 62
God-stones, I49
Goras, customs of, 89
Hamites, the, 26
Happiness and religion, 247
Hidatsa Indians, the, 63, I5O
High places sacred, I55
Hills sacred, 77, I55
Hill of God, 77, I55
Hill of Heaven, the, 76, I55
Historic method, the, 5
Holiness, primitive idea of, IoS,
23O
Homi, deity of Hottentots, 77
Aſua, a sacred interjection, 61
Huaca in Peru, IO2, I82
Huemac, an Aztec deity, 82
Human sacrifices, I89 sq.
Huracan, an American deity,
82
Hypnogogic hallucinations, 66
‘‘Ideal of Reason,” the, 44
Idolatry in early religion, 238
Illogical reasoning of Savages,
I3
Incineration of dead, 2IO
“Indigetes dii,” the Roman, 71
Andigitamenta, of Romans, 97
Infinite, the perception of the,
45
Inhumation of dead, 209
“Inner light,” the, 43
Insanity, of Savage mind, I4
Ipurinas, a Brazilian tribe, I4O
Isis, the many-named, 99
Itelmen, a Kamtschatkan tribe,
I65
Jade, in myths, I49
Joyous character of early rites,
I79 © g
Jupiter, his base traits, 166
Kaaba, a stone, I47
Kamtschatkans, the, 57, 65, IO9,
I65, 244
Ka-ne, a Polynesian deity, 74
Khonds, a Dravidian tribe, IoS
Knowledge, tree of, 153
Koders, a Dravidian tribe, I49
Ku, a Polynesian deity, I.21
Kutka, god of the Kamtschat-
kans, IO9, I66
Language and myth, II4 sq.
Law, the ceremonial, 218, 224
Life and Death, ideas of, 68
$47.
Life, as a divine attribute, 68 ;
and its transmission, I64, 200
Light, the adoration of, 74 sq.
Linguistics, the study of, IQ, 35,
II 5 ; influence on religious
ideas, 2O, II 5
Liturgy, power of the, 178
Lizard, the, as a symbol, I6I
Lono, a Polynesian deity, I21
Love as a root of religion, I70
Love charms, I48
Magic, sympathetic, I73
Magical rites, I75
Mahopa, a name of divinity, 63
Mamit, the curse, go
Man worshipped as a god, I6I
Mana in Polynesian dialects,
62
Mandan Indians, I3, 150
Mangaians, myths of, 77, 86
Manito of Algonquins, IO2, 125
Mantras, power of, 89
Maoris, the, 83, IO3, I43
Maria Candelaria a heroine, 222
Marriage, rites relating to, 200,
2IQ
Masks, religious use of, 184
“Master of Life,” the, 69
Máyá, the doctrine of, 68
Mayas, the tribe of, I23, 125,
I5 I, I56, I74, IQ9 ; Shamans,
I5O
Meday sticks, 242
Medicine-men,
women, 22I -
Melanesians, beliefs of, 131, 148
Indian, 52 ;
262
Index of Subjects
Menhirs, of Celts, 149
Mexicans, ancient, I25, I48, I49,
I5I, I55, I79
Mexico, ancient, 24
Michoacan, Indians of, 69
Milky way, worship of, 141
Mincopies, beliefs of the, 72,
IO9, II5, I26 ; see Anda-
Iſla, IlêS6
Molemo, an African deity, 97
Moon-worship, I 39 sq.
Motu, a tribe, 31
Mourning, customs of, 212
Moxos, an American tribe, I55
Mummies, why made, 2II
Mumpal, an Australian deity,
8I
Music in religion, 240
Mysticism, religious, source of,
56
Mythical cycles, the Universal,
II.8
Myths, meaning of, II2 sq.
Nagualism, references to, 67,
I56, I'75 -
Nahuas, myths of the, I48, I51,
I95, IQ6
Name, the sacred, 93 sq.
Name-soul, the, 96
Names, rites relating to, Ig5
Names of the dead avoided, 95
Nanabojou, a hero-god, 70
Natal, natives of, 52
Nature, conflict of, I27
Navahoes, a prayer of the, IO5;
deity of the, 169
Navel of the Sky, the, 78
Neolithic period, the, 33
Nervous susceptibility of savages,
I4
Nicaraguans, customs of, Igo
Njambe, god of the Marutse, 97
Norns of Teutonic mythology,
I2 I
Num, god of the Samoyeds, 83
Numbers, the sacred, II9
Nurali, an Australian deity, 74,
I59
Oannes, a Chaldean god, 16I
Oaths are ordeals, 226
One-legged god, the, 98
Oraons, cult of the, I37, 230
Ordeals in religions, 225
Origin of religion, theories about,
4I $47.
Osiris, worship of, 24
Oztoteotl, a Mexican god, 156
Palaeolithic man, 34
Papa, Rock, a god of the Ta-
hitians, I 47
Papuans, customs of, I86
Paradise, the earthly, 126
Parjanja, deity in the Vedas, 81
Parliament of Religions, the, 28
Pañagonians, I77
Patol, a deity of the Mayas, 123
Pawnee war song, 67
Perfection the aim of Religion,
235
Personality, the Sense of, 49
Personal rites, IQI
Peru, culture of, 24
Peruvians, myths and rites of,
I4I, I42, I48, Igo, 25 I
Petara, sacred name in Borneo,
IO2
Peyotl, an intoxicant, 67
Pilgrimages in primitive re-
ligions, I57, 253
Pita, Father, the Brahmanic, I68
Places, worship of, I54
Plant-soul, the, I53
Pleiades, worship of the, I4o
Po in Polynesian Myths, I25
Pole, the sacred, I52, 250
Polynesians, the, 25, 58, 59, I2I,
I 24, I27, I40, I49, I58, IQ5
Prayer in primitive faiths, Io9
S47.
“Primitive” peoples defined, II
Prophecy explained, IIo
Psychic automatism, 54
Psychologic Method, the, 6
Psychology, experimental, 7
Puberty, rites relating to, Ig7
Pueblo Indians, the, 39
Index of Subjects
263
Puluga, god of the Mincopies,
75, 78, II.3, II6
Quetzalcoatl, a hero-god, I45,
25I
Quiche Indians, the, 72, I55, I69
Rain-making, rites of, I'74
Reciprocal principle, worship of,
I69
Revelation, universality of, 50
Ritual in Religion, 172 sq.
Rongo, a Polynesian deity, 79
Sacrifice as a rite, 186 sq.
Samoyeds, beliefs of, I4, 67, 83
Sanctuary, rite of, 226
Sangsangs of Borneo, 22O
Saviour, myths of the, 128
Science and religion, 231
“Science of religion” premature,
3
Selene, the goddess, 37
Semiades, customs of, Igó
Semites, primitive, 23
Seposition of dead, 209
Serpent-worship, I60
Sex in deities, 20
Shamanism, Origin of, 5 I, 57;
nature of, I 36, 218
Shamans, their occult powers,
65, 232
Sibiric tribes, the, 26
Sioux Indians, prayer of, IO6
Sky, the notions concerning, 76
Sky-god, the, 78
Song in religion, 239
Soul, journey of the, 128
Souls, the doctrine of, 28, 70 sq.;
beliefs concerning, 76
Star-worship, I40
Stone Age, the, 33
Stonehenge, monuments of, 33
Stones, worship of, 146
“Sub-limital consciousness,” the,
54
“Suggestion ” explained, 54 sq.
Sumerians, gods of, 20, 23
Sun-worship, I38 sq.
Supa, a Samoan god, 223
Superstition, a form of religion,
27
Svastika, the, II9, 236
Swan-maidens, the, 223
Tabu, the, 32, 38, IO8, I56, 222,
23O
Tahitians, myths of the, 147
Tangaloa, a Polynesian deity,
74, 75, 78, 99
Tehuelches, myth of, 77
Tepi, the custom of, 94
Teutonic rites, I82, 188, 190,
223
Theoleptic worshippers, 185
Theology, its aim, 4
“Theopathy” explained, 56
Theophorous names, IOO
Thought, creation by, I24
Three as sacred number, I2O
Thunder in mythology, 80, 81
Tina, an Etruscan god, I40
Tinne, an American tribe, 125
Tonantzin, an Aztec deity, I45
Tongues, the gift of, 93
Tota, a Mexican deity, I51, 167
Totemic animals, the, I6I ; bond,
the, 216
Tree of knowledge, the, I53
Trees, worship of, I50 sq.
Trinities of heathen religions,
I2 I
Tsuni |Goab, a deity of the Hot-
tentots, 75
Tupa, a deity of the Dyaks, I23
Turramulun, an Australian god,
98
Tutelary personal deities, IQ2
Tzentals, customs of, 22I, 222
Ukko, deity of Finns, 78
Umbilical cord, rites respecting,
I94.
Unconscious cerebration, 54
Unity of human intelligence, 9
Unkululu, deity of the Zulus,
I68
264
Index of Subjects
Upanishads, teachings of the,
57, 83
Varuna, Sanscrit deity, 79
Vase, symbolism of the, I44
Vatea, a Polynesian deity, 75
Veddahs, the, 26
“Veiled gods” of Etruscans, 165
Vesta, the goddess, 223
Virgins of the Sun, Igo
Visual ideas, I3O
Votan, hero-god of the Tzentals,
22 I
Vows taken at birth, IQ3
Wakan, in Dakota, 60, 61 ; in
Quichua, 61
Waking visions, 66
Water, worship of, I44
Will as the source of Force, 47
347.
Winds, worship of the, I43
Witches' Sabbath, the, 185
Woman, her position in Religion,
2 IQ
Word, the, in religion, 88 sq.
World-soul, belief in a, I36
Writing, religious origin of, 241
Yah, a sacred interjection, 62
Yahgans, the, 57, 80, IO4, IIo,
I95
Yahve, derivations of, 62, 81
Yetl, a sacred bird, I 59
Yoga philosophy, the, 51
Yucatan, culture of, 24, I50
Yurucares, tribe of, I5I
Zi, Chaldean term for spirits, 49
Zulus, the, their beliefs, 26, 56,
67, I47, I68
Zuñi Indians, the, 72, I24, I25,
22I
LIST OF WORKS
DANIEL G. BRINTON,
A.M., M.D., LL.D., Sc.D.
The Floridian Peninsula. (1859.)
The Myths of the New World. (1868 and 1876).
The Religious Sentiment : A Contribution to the Science
of Religion. (1876.)
American Hero-Myths. (1882.)
Aboriginal American Authors. (1883.)
A Grammar of the Choctaw Language. (1870.)
A Grammar of the Cakchiquel Language. (1884.)
The Philosophic Grammar of American Languages. (1885.)
General Anthropology and Ethnology. (1886.)
General Prehistoric Archaeology. (1887.)
A Lenapé-English Dictionary. Edited. (1888.)
Library of Aboriginal American Literature. Eight volumes.
(1882 to 1890.)
I. Chronicles of the Mayas. By D. G. Brinton.
II. The Iroquois Book of Rites. By Horatio Hale.
III. Comedy-Ballet of Gueguence. By D. G. Brinton.
IV. A Migration-Legend of the Creeks. By A. S.
Gatschet.
V. The Lenapé and their Legends. By D. G. Brinton.
VI. Annals of the Cakchiquels. By D. G. Brinton.
VII. Ancient Nahuatl Poetry. By D. G. Brinton.
VIII. Sacred Chants of the Ancient Mexicans. By D. G.
Brinton.
Races and Peoples: Lectures on Ethnography.
Essays of an Americanist. (1890.)
The American Race: The Native Tribes of America. (1891.
Studies in South American Languages. (1892.)
The Pursuit of Happiness. (1893.)
The Nº. calenda: of Central America and Mexico.
Iö93.
Nagualism : A Study in Native American Folk-Lore and
History. (1894.)
A Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphics. (1895.)
Report º º: Columbian Historical Exposition at Madrid.
Iö95.
HISTORY AND RELIGION
J.
JBubbbism; its bistory amo Literature. By T.
W. RHYS-DAVIDS, LL.D., PH.D., chairman of the
Pali Text Society; Secretary and Librarian of the
Royal Asiatic Society; Professor of Pali and Bud-
dhist Literature at University College, London. 8vo.
$1.5o
“As a clear and concise exposition of the subject, Prof. Rhys-
David's book is unsurpassed. . . . The clearness and condén-
sation of the work are remarkable, and it is doubtful if any exposition
of the Buddhist doctrines has ever been made in English so satisfactory
as this. . . . The book is an admirable handbook of Buddhism,
written from a point of view at once scholarly and unprejudiced,
and will take a creditable place among books of its class.”—Pioneer
Aress, St. Paul.
TReligion 3 of lyrimitive ||Yeoples. By DANIEL
G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D., D.Sc., Professor
of Archaeology and Linguistics in the University of
Pennsylvania. 8vo . º o º o $1.5o
It sometimes happens in these days that there falls into the hands
of a reviewer a book which from very admiration of its scope and
research he finds it difficult to speak of except in words of praise.
Such a book, under the above title, comes from the pen of Prof.
Daniel G. Brinton. . . . No book has yet appeared which
brings the religious thought of all races and times within closer range
of the modern reader ; and to the reader who revels in tracing the
psychic history of man, no book can be more welcome. The most
sacred thought of ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece, America, of the
Relt and the Teuton, are brought together, showing, their inherent
kinship.”—Boston Transcript.
3ewish Religious Life Eifter the Exile. By the
Rev. T. K. CHEYNE, M.A., D.D., Oriel Professor of
the Interpretation of the Holy Scripture in the
University of Oxford, and formerly Fellow of
Balliol College ; Canon of Rochester. I2mo, $1.5o
(Ibe Crogø in Crabition, bistory, amo Elrt. By
the Rev. WILLIAM WOOD SEYMOUR. With Over 200
illustrations. Royal 8vo . e e nett $7.5o
The author has brought together a mass of curious and interesting
traditions concerning the Cross. He also shows the influence of the
Cross upon history, and its place in Pagan and Christian art.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, NEw York AND LONDON.
|| 0
UNIVERSITY 9015 ||
OF MICHIGAN
DO NOT REMOVE
OR
MUTILATE CARDS

&#żĒĢšº
***** • ** , ， ， ， ， ， ， ， ， '.
ſaeſº， º