AMERICAN LECTURES ON THE
HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

SECOND SERIES—1896-1897

RELIGIONS OF PRIMITIVE
PEOPLES

BY
DANIEL G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D., Sc.D.
Professor of American Archæology and Linguistics in the
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

FOURTH IMPRESSION

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press

Copyright, 1897
by
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

ANNOUNCEMENT.

On the 24th of December, 1891, fifteen persons interested in promoting the historical study of religions united in issuing a circular-letter, inviting a conference in the Council Chambers of the Historical Society of Philadelphia, on the 30th 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 Howard 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 University, and Prof. Paul Haupt, Ph.D.; from Boston 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 historical study of religions by securing the co-operation of existing institutions and lecture associations, such as the Lowell, Brooklyn, and Peabody Institutes, the University Lecture Association of Philadelphia, 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 different cities, and representing the various institutions and associations participating. This general scheme met with the cordial approval of the conference, which voted the project both a timely and useful one, and which appointed Dean Bartlett, Prof. Jastrow, 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 purpose of encouraging the study of religions. The terms of association then adopted, with slight modifications introduced later, are as follows:

1.—The object of this Association shall be to provide courses of lectures on the history of religions, 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.

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 religions, shall be delivered annually, or at such intervals as may be found practicable, in the different cities represented by this Association.

7.—The Council (a) shall be charged with the selection of the lecturers, (b) shall have charge of the funds, (c) shall assign the time for the lectures 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 excluded.

9.—The lecturer shall be chosen by the Council at least ten months before the date fixed for the course of lectures.

10.—The lectures shall be delivered in the various cities between the months of October and June.

11.—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.

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, Treasurer.

Prof. Richard J. H. Gottheil, of Columbia University.

Prof. Paul Haupt, of the Johns Hopkins University.

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:

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 Pennsylvania 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 Religions. 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 Archæology and Linguistics in the University of Pennsylvania, is a leading 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 Prehistoric Archæology 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 attention of scholars, and has passed through several 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 Archæology, 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 welcomed 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 Association).

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 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 religions. It is the hope of the Committee to provide courses at intervals of two years, or oftener, if the encouragement which the undertaking receives warrants it, and the practical difficulties involved in securing competent lecturers do not make it impossible.

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 Testament Interpretation at Oriel College, Oxford, and Canon of Rochester; whose subject will be Religious Thought and Life among the Hebrews in Post-Exilic Days, to be followed in 1898-99 by a complementary course on Religious Life and Thought among the Hebrews in Pre-Exilic Days, by Professor Karl Budde, of the University of Strasburg, Germany.

John P. Peters,
C. H. Toy,
Morris Jastrow, Jr.

Committee on Publication.

May 10, 1897.

CONTENTS.

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 Savage Mind—Examples—Means of Study: 1. Archæology; 2. Language; 3. Folk-Lore; 4. Descriptions of Travellers—Examples: The Early Aryans, Etruscans, Semites, Egyptians, American Tribes, Australians, Polynesians, 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.

The 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 both the physical and mental life of the species, from the beginning until now. That branch of it which especially concerns itself with the development of man as indicated by his advance in civilisation, is known as Ethnology.

When we analyse the directive forces which have brought about this advance, and whose study therefore 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 inseparable, constituent elements of an organic unity, each working through the others, and on the symmetrical 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 precedence 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 Religion, 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.

There is what has been called the “science of religion.” The expression seems to me a little presumptuous—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 according to scientific methods.

I need not remind you that such a method is absolutely 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.[1] It concedes the exclusive possession 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 incidental 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 developing in after ages along parallel lines, will form the special objects of our investigation. The departures 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 define the limits of variability of the ubiquitous principles 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 influence by the lights of reason and history.

The methods which we employ in this process of reduction are three in number: 1. The Historic Method; 2. The Comparative Method; 3. The 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 discover 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 exotic. 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 Christianity, that “there is in every people an hereditary disposition to some particular heresy,”[2] 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.

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 universal 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.”[3] 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 human 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 lays it down as “a fundamental maxim of ethnology” that, “we do not think; thinking merely goes on within us.”[4]

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 perceptions), 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 (perceptions 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 psychical 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 imagination,” observes Mr. Hartland, “like every other known power, works by fixed laws, the existence 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.”[5]

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 similarity in primitive religious ideas comes not from tradition nor from the relationship or historic connections of early peoples, but from the identity in the mental construction of the individual man, wherever he is found.”[6]

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.

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 astonishing similarity, the absolute identities, which constantly present themselves in myths and cults separated by oceans and continents, have been construed as evidence of common descent or of distant transmission; whereas they are the proofs of a fundamental unity of the human mind and of its processes, “before which,” as a German writer says, “the differences in individual, national, or even racial divisions sink into insignificance.”[7] 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.

This cardinal and basic truth of the unity of action 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 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 borrowing or transference of myths and rites. Wherever this can be shown to have occurred, it is an adequate explanation of identities; but in tribes geographically 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 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 ethnologists mean by “primitive peoples”; because the word is not used in the sense of “first” or “earliest,” 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 resembling 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 archæology.

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. We have the evidence of what he was, in his implements 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 advancement 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 “primitive 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 hundred years ago the ancestors of the English-speaking nations were as savage as the savagest, without temples 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 ourselves. The same inaccurate observation and illogical 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, without the process of logical reasoning or inductive observation. In other words, what appears true to the individual is accepted by him as true, without further question. His dreams seem real to him; therefore 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 prolong the day. It is not a religious act, but a piece of natural science current in the tribe, which no experience will refute in their minds.[8]

Just such a notion recurs among the Mandan Indians. Captain Clark observed near their villages upright poles fifteen or twenty feet long with bundles of female clothing tied to them. He asked what they signified, and one of the old men explained 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 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.”[9] 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 susceptibility of savages. It is much higher than ours, although the contrary is often taught. Their emotions or feelings control their reasoning powers, and direct their actions. Neurotic diseases, especially of a contagious character, are very frequent among them, and they are far more prone than ourselves to yield to impressions upon their sensory organs. The traveller Castren relates that a sudden blow on the outside of a tent of the Samoyeds will sometimes throw the occupants into spasms; and the missionary Livingstone 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.[10]

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 inferior. 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 acquisition of knowledge, and as much respect for the precepts 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 manner; 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.

The investigation of this point is desirable in a study of their religions, for upon it depends the decision 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 childishness and imbecility.”[11]

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 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? Oh no! but because her mother had given her none of the tidbits, but only the bones to pick![12]

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 conceived as possible.” The prohibitions about food are so absolute that the natives would perish of hunger rather than break them. Some of their religious 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 indifference to the future and the past, an accurate observer 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.”[13]

Savage tribes are distinctly unlettered. They belong 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 opinions 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 confidence 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, Archæology, Language, Folk-lore, and Ethnographic descriptions.

By the first of these, archæology, we become acquainted 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 vanished nations held of a life to come.

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 probability 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 overestimated. 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 centres, are language and religion, and that each conditions the other, that is, imparts to it special forms and limits.

For instance, those languages which have grammatic gender almost necessarily divide their deities according to sex[14]; 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 reverence for it grew, it was transferred to the animate gender, and was thus on its way to a personification.[15]

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 present conditions of culture. It is, therefore, especially 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 Cæsar flourishes with scarcely abated vigour, though it may be under new names. “The primitive Aryan,” writes Professor Frazer,[16] “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.”[17] It is this which gives to folk-lore its extremely instructive character for the student of early religion.

The fourth source of information is the description 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 reasons 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 education. 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 information, what tribes, about which we have sufficient knowledge, could fairly be considered as examples of primitive conditions?

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 domestic, cultural, and religious condition of the pristine epoch of Aryan society from the side of language; while the tireless prosecution of prehistoric archæology in Europe has put us into possession of thousands of objects illustrating the religious arts and usages then in vogue. Classical mythology and ritual, as well as modern folk-lore, lend further efficient 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 Africa and to be of Libyan affinities, were the Etruscans. They were extremely religious, and their theological 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 venerable “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 antiquity. We can without room for doubt trace the stream of Semitic religious thought through the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform 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 influences, that with our present knowledge they are no longer legible.[18]

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 believes either that St. Thomas preached Christianity in the New World in the first century, or that Buddhist monks in the seventh or any other century carried their tenets into Mexico and Guatemala.

Many of the American tribes, moreover, lived in the rudest stages of social life, ignorant of agriculture, without fixed abodes, naked or nearly so, in constant bloody strife, destitute even of tribal government. 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 in almost a civilised condition, builders of huge edifices of carved stones, cultivating the soil, and acquainted with a partly phonetic system of writing. Their mythology was ample and their ritual elaborate, 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 hundred 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 cannibalism. For these very reasons, their religious notions 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 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 arms far into the Soudan; while on the east coast, the black Hamites and Arabic Ethiopians drove the aborigines far to the South. Later, Arabic influences 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 remnants 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 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 “superstitions” and “paganisms.” Some will not acknowledge 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 denounce the practices of the Roman Church as “superstitions,” and will claim that they are degenerations of religion; while among Protestants, the Quaker looks upon all external rites as equally “superstitious.”

No such distinctions can be recognised in ethnology. 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 immoral, but this will be his religion all the same, and we should not apply to it any other name.[19]

There is no one belief or set of beliefs which constitutes a religion. We are apt to suppose that every creed must teach a belief in a god or gods, in an immortal 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, Buddhism, rejects every one of these items.[20] The Jewish doctrine of the Old Testament, the Roman religion of the time of Julius Cæsar, and many others, have not admitted the existence of a soul, or the continuance of the individual life after death.[21] Some believe in souls, but not in gods; while a divine government is a thought rarely present in savage 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 analogy of means to that end, bind all in one, representing 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 developed 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 expression was long ago perceived by St. Augustine. In a well-known passage of his Retractations he makes the striking remark: “Res ipsa, quæ 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 ethnology. 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 hallowed 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 considerable 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 missionaries.

I speak advisedly when I say that every assertion to this effect when tested by careful examination has proved erroneous.[22]

What led to such a mistaken opinion is easily seen. The missionaries would not recognise as religion 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, acquainting themselves with the languages of the Blacks, found an ample mythology and an extensive ritual of worship.[23]

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 religion whatever; but immediately proceeds to describe their numerous “superstitious” rites, their belief in spirits, their ceremonial law, etc.![24]

Another and potent cause of error was the unwillingness 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 sympathy 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 tabu, prohibited under severe penalties, to impart it to any stranger, or even to another tribesman. The tendency to secrecy, to the esoteric, belongs to all religions, 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 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.”[25] 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?

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 archæology 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 “palæolithic” period.

Concerning the former, there can be no doubt whatever that religion exercised a tremendous influence 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, 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 archæologist questions this.

When we come to palæolithic 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 archæologists, 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 was at least no objective expression of religious feeling.[26]

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 associations, 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 religious 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[27]; and lately Professor Pinsero, of Palermo, has argued that the anthropoid apes cultivate a worship of serpents, even burying them with considerable ceremony, and placing in their tombs a provision of insects for their consumption in their future life![28]

But these scientific speculations have not found general acceptance, and even Professor Pinsero himself, while conceding religion to the ape, denies it to prehistoric man of the earlier epochs.

We may conclude, therefore, that the development 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 separated from them. They, too, communicate knowledge by sounds; they have governments and arts; 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 embraced him. Inspired by her divine touch, he waked to noble aspirations, and went forth to become monarch 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 consciousness 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 religions thus found everywhere among the rudest tribes, did they take root and exert a deep influence on the individual and society, or were they superficially 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 sometimes advanced that savages are indifferent to their faiths. On the contrary, the rule, with very few exceptions, 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 characters. 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 prohibitions. 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 conscience, higher law, are non-existent in primitive communities, except under certain personal conditions 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.”[29]

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 “superstitions,” that is, to their religion.[30] “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 importance, 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 ceremony; 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 manifestation of the power of God, eine Kraftprobe Gottes.[31]

Religion, however, does not begin from any external 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.

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 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 “Suggestion”—This Explained—Examples—Illustrations from Language—No Primitive Monotheism—The Special Stimuli of the Religious Emotions: 1. 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 Intelligence.

In 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 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 delusions, 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, who announced it as one of his missions, “to unveil the religious frauds by which nations have been deluded into submission.”[32]

The prevailing theory of the great world-religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism, has been substantially 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 lighteth every man who cometh into the world,” disclosing 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, toward 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,[33] 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 thinking 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 explain why spiritual agencies are imagined as causes of material effects.

Similar objections lie to deriving primitive religions 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? Why has it been so strong in many a hero?

Moreover, the spirit of many early religions is the reverse of that of fear. They are, as Dr. Robertson 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 disciples to consider the effort unprofitable;[34] 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 profounder 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.”[35]

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 Evangelist, or of Spinoza the “god-intoxicated philosopher”; 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 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 sequences which we call “laws of nature,” based solely on Mind, but representing its processes of realisation. The savage knew not these. He imagined every motion in nature was the immediate exhibition 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 spiritual 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 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 Zi, was that which manifested life, and the test of the manifestation of life was movement.”[36] This is universally true of primitive faiths.

But this was not enough. To most if not all primitive men, movement was not the only manifestation of life. To them, the immovable, the rock, the mountain, any inanimate object, was likewise 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 Personality. To the undeveloped reason, the Other is ever conceived as Another, a Self, and is clothed with the attributes of the Self, of the thinking Ego. This is always the case in the tales of children and the myths of savage tribes.[37]

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 lowest, 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 mainly upon the record of a revelation, while in all primitive faiths inspiration is actual and constant. The human soul, regarded in its origin as an emanation of the Divine, is in its nature omniscient when in moments of ecstasy it frees itself from its material envelope.[38]

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.”[39] 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 healer, and believes as firmly in his inspiration as do his credulous adherents. From shamanism was developed in India the practice known as Yoga, characterised by ecstatic seizures, periods of cerebral exaltation, and alleged divine powers.[40] To the same origin we must attribute the similar phenomena of “speaking with tongues,” and religious mania.

I am not speaking of deceptions or illusions. When I say that all religions depend for their origin 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, “cosmic consciousness.”[41] 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.[42] Prophets and shamans, evangelists and Indian medicine-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.

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 overestimated 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 better to know God and be ignorant of all else, than to know all else and be ignorant of God.” No reasoning can convince him of error, for his logic acknowledges 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 psychology 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.

The psychologist calls this process by the terms “unconscious cerebration,” or “psychic automatism.” It is the function of the “sub-limital consciousness,” 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 difficult mathematical solutions, have been attained through this unknowing mechanism of mind. They seemed 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 “suggestion,” and in it lies the sociologic power of all religions and superstitions whatever, primitive or 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 contacts. It may be evoked by deliberate effort of our own, which is called “auto-suggestion”; or the impression may be derived from or directed to a number of individuals, which is termed “collective suggestion.”

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 ordinary nutrition; association with persons already under its influence; continuance of the same motions; 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. This may be repulsive or admirable, above or below 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 hypnotism.[43]

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 diminishing 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 conditions, 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 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”[44]; which reminds us of the remarkable doctrine of the Sanscrit Upanishads—“There is no limit to the knowing of the Self that knows.”[45] 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.[46]

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 selection from those members of the community who by temperament or cultivation possess in the highest degree this tendency to mystical power. This is generally indicated by the clearness and character of the dreams and visions which appear at the time he or she enters adult life. These are considered 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 man.

These inspired seers represent the priesthood of every primitive religion. They cultivate and preserve 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 trickery, some thaumaturgy; but that this is merely superadded for effect is proved by the general custom that when one such adept is ill or in straits he will solicit the aid of another.[47]

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 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.[48]

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 regarded 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, but huaca runa, “divine man,” means one who is crazy[49]; 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 sometimes been claimed, the sudden result of a single feeling; it is a complex conception, from a multitude 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 latent activity of the sub-consciousness, from the strange sense of activity, will, and power which, under favourable conditions of concentration (suggestion), it imparts to the more or less conscious Self. This influence is at first vague, impersonal, undefined, but is gradually differentiated and personified. Furthermore, it is constantly strengthened and sustained by the agency of that cultivated suggestion I have described, which is intended to bring the individual 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 Dakotan 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 peculiar 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 wacin, will, are derived the terms for what we call “telepathy,” a belief in which is nigh universal in primitive cults; for intelligence or mentality; and for the sacred dance.[50]

While the meaning of wakan 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 everything 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.[51]

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 allco wakan, the dog howls, huallpa wakan 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 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 Eā, Ya, or Yah, we recognize a cognate interjection or refrain, the same which, shouted in the orgiastic rites, gave the name, Bacchus or Iachus.[52]

Turning to the island world of the Pacific we find through its countless groups of sunny isles the impersonal 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 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.[53]

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.[54]

The media of suggestion act primarily through the emotions, and in the religious suggestion those emotions 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, 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 strengthens these; and they thus have their place as suggestive 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:

1. 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.

1. A line of Lucretius asserts that “the dreams of men peopled the heaven with gods.” We have a 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 decamp and seek a distant site, if one dreams of the approach of an enemy.[55]

The physiological character of dreams easily explains the superstitious attention they have received in all ages and nations. The absence of external impressions during sleep favours the rise of unconscious mental action into consciousness. In them memory is often more active than while waking; our personality 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 peculiarly vivid illusions during the moments between waking and sleeping, which seem to belong as much to the former as to the latter conditions,[56] and we have reasons enough for the part they play in primitive religions.

There are reasons for believing that the dreams of ruder races are more vivid than our own, more like pictures and realities.[57] 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 assiduously cultivated, and become, as I have already said, the chief bond between man and divinity.[58]

Not only by fasting, solitude, and intense expectation 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 Samoyeds of Siberia had found a poisonous toadstool;—all to bring about communion with the Divine and to induce ecstatic visions.[59] Whatever the means employed, their aim was everywhere the same, and was directed primarily and essentially towards the excitation of the religious emotions, towards securing 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 war song begins by an appeal to the gods to decide if this life itself is aught but a dream.[60]

The ancient Mexicans had developed the doctrine that this life is a dream and that death is the awakening, 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 mâyâ, or the unreality of the duality of the subject and object, which “is the very life of the primitive [East] Indian philosophy.”[61]

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 malignant sorcerer. To him, all things live and live forever. Each bird, each bush, each rock has its 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 atua, we discover that it is in both “the central cause or essentiality of Life.”[62] 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 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 Kamschatkans the smallest flies have souls which are immortal.[63]

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.[64]

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.[65] 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.[66]

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 encampment 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 beyond. So also believe the Australians and numberless other tribes.[67]

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 expression, “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 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 injury of the survivors. Therefore its wants should be gratified, and its temper conciliated by offerings and appropriate funeral rites.[68]

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 to subscribe to the expression of a German writer that “the adoration of Light was the foundation of all religion.”[69] 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 keladi, eternal brightness, up above the sky. His name is Baiame, meaning “the maker” or “the cutter out,” as one cuts out patterns from a skin. He sees and knows all things.[70]

Through most of Polynesia, the chief deity was Ka-ne, which means sunlight, the opposite of darkness, and is allied to the verb kanea, to see. Another 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.”[71]

Sometimes the myths represent Tangaloa as the son of Vatea (Avatea, Wakea), “noon” or “noon-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.[72]

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.[73]

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.[74]

This worship of light has several constant associations in religious thought which find expression in the myth and cult.

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 Polynesians and American Indians the ghosts of the dead usually appear as luminous masses.[75] All will remember 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 glitter a thousand points of brilliancy.