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Magic and Religion

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Title: Magic and Religion

Author: Andrew Lang


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAGIC AND RELIGION ***
MAGIC AND RELIGION

BY

ANDREW LANG

AUTHOR OF

'MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION' 'CUSTOM AND MYTH' ETC


LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

NEW YORK AND BOMBAY

1901




PREFACE


Recent years have brought rich additions to the materials for the
study of early religion, ritual, magic, and myth. In proportion to the
abundance of information has been the growth of theory and hypothesis.
The first essay in this collection, 'Science and Superstition,' points
out the danger of allowing too ingenious and imaginative hypotheses to
lead captive our science.

As, like others, I have not long since advanced a provisional theory
of my own, the second and third essays are designed to strengthen my
position. The theory is that perhaps the earliest traceable form of
religion was relatively high, and that it was inevitably lowered in
tone during the process of social evolution. Obviously this opinion may
be attacked from two sides. It may be said that the loftier religious
ideas of the lowest savages are borrowed from Christianity or Islam.
This I understand to be the theory of Mr. E. B. Tylor. It is with much
diffidence that I venture, at present, to disagree with so eminent and
sagacious an authority, while awaiting the publication of Mr. Tylor's
Aberdeen Gifford Lectures. My reply to his hypothesis, so far as it has
been published by him, will be found in the second essay, 'The Theory
of Loan-Gods.' Secondly, my position may be attacked by disabling the
evidence for the existence of the higher elements in the religion of
low savages. Mr. Frazer, in the second edition of his 'Golden Bough,'
has advanced an hypothesis of the origin of religion, wherein the
evidence for the higher factors is not taken into account. Probably
he may consider the subject in a later work, to which he alludes in
his Preface. 'Should I live to complete the works for which I have
collected and am collecting materials, I dare to think that they will
clear me of any suspicion of treating the early history of religion
from a single narrow point of view.'[1]

Meanwhile, however, Mr. Frazer has advanced a theory of the origin of
religion wherein evidence which I think deserving of attention receives
no recognition. I hope, therefore, that it is not premature to state
the evidence, or some of it, which I do in the third essay, 'Magic and
Religion.'

Fourth comes a long criticism of Mr. Frazer's many hypotheses, which
are combined into his theory of the origin, or partial origin, of the
belief in the divine character of Christ. This argument demands very
minute, and, I fear, tedious examination. I fear still more that my
labour has not, after all, been sufficiently minute and accurate. It
seems to be almost impossible to understand clearly and represent
fairly ideas with which one does not agree. If I have failed in these
respects it is unconsciously, and I shall gratefully accept criticism
enabling me to recognise and correct errors.

Fifthly, I examine, in 'The Ghastly Priest,' Mr. Frazer's theory of
the Golden Bough of Virgil as connected with the fugitive slave who
was 'King of the Wood' near Aricia. I offer a conjecture as to the
origin of his curious position, which seems to me simpler, and not less
probable, than Mr. Frazer's hypothesis that this outcast 'lived and
died as an incarnation of the supreme Aryan god, whose life was in
the mistletoe or golden bough.' But my conjecture is only a guess at a
problem which, I think, we have not the means of solving.

There follow an essay, 'South African Religion,' and another on the old
puzzle of the 'Cup and Ring' marks on rocks and cists and other objects
all over the world.

Next I consider the subject of 'Taboos,' with especial reference to
the theory of Mr. F. B. Jevons. An essay follows on the singular rite
of the Fire Walk, with the alleged immunity of the performers. This
curious topic I have treated before, but now add fresh evidence.

Of these essays the second, in part, appeared in the 'Nineteenth
Century,' and most of 'The Ghastly Priest' was published in 'The
Fortnightly Review,' while 'Cup and Ring' first saw the light in
'The Contemporary Review.' My thanks are due to the Editors of those
periodicals for permission to republish. The essay on the 'Fire Walk'
was in the 'Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,' though
the topic does not appear to be 'psychical.' All the other papers are
new, and three Appendices on points of detail are added.

The design on the cover is drawn by Mr. Donnelly, the discoverer of the
Dunbuie and Dumbuck sites and relics, from an Australian design, in
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's 'Native Tribes of Central Australia.'

For permission to reproduce this drawing I have to thank the kindness
of Messrs. Macmillan & Co. The designs of feet, on the back of the
volume (a subject found in Australia), and the 'Jew's harp' ornament
(common to Scotland and Hindustan), are also by Mr. Donnelly, from
Scottish rock carvings.


[1] _Golden Bough_, i. xvii, 1900.




Corrigenda and Addenda


Page 4, lines 24, 25, _for_ story _read_ storey, _for_ stories _read_
storeys.

Page 13, line 7, compare p. 297, the second paragraph, as to Motagon
and Bishop Salvado.

Page 17, line 24, _for_ 1871 _read_ 1873.

Page 44. To the names of writers who support the idea of an Australian
religion should be added that of Dr. John Mathew, in _Eaglehawk and
Crow,_ p. 147 (1899), 'I was once of opinion that notions about a
divinity had been derived from the whites and transmitted among the
blacks hither and thither, but I am now convinced that this idea was
here before European occupation.' But (pp. 130, 131) Dr. Mathew gives
his reasons for thinking importation from Indian mythology possible.
But as they rest on his decipherment of certain marks, which may be
meant for characters, in Sir George Grey's copy of an Australian
wall-painting, the evidence is weak. (Grey, _North-west and Western
Australia_, i. 201 _et seq_.). Supposing the characters to be Sumatran,
it would be necessary to show that the people of Sumatra do represent
their otiose deity as in the painting copied by Grey.

Page 58, line 6, _for_ rights _read_ rites.

Page 75, note 1, _for_ Primitive Culture, i. 379, 1871, _read_
Primitive Culture, i. 419, 1873.

Page 112, note 1. 'But so there were in 1000 A.D.' I have been informed
that there was no special fear of the end of the world in 1000 A.D. M.
Cumont gives good reasons for holding that the martyrdom of St. Dasius
in 303 was on record between 362 and 411 (_Man_, May 1901, No. 53).

Page 120. 'Ctesias flourished rather earlier than Berosus, who is
about 200 B.C.;' _for_ 200 _read_ 260. Ctesias was a contemporary of
Herodotus.

[All necessary corrections have been made.--M. D.]




CONTENTS


    I. SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION
   II. THE THEORY OF LOAN-GODS; OR BORROWED RELIGION
  III. MAGIC AND RELIGION
   IV. THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
    V. THE APPROACHES TO MR. FRAZER'S THEORY
           I. THE EVOLUTION OF GODS
          II. THE ALLEGED MORTALITY OF GODS
         III. RELIGIOUS REGICIDE
          IV. ANNUAL RELIGIOUS REGICIDE
           V. THE SATURNALIA
          VI. THE GREEK CRONIA
         VII. THE SACÆA
   VI. ATTEMPTS TO PROVE THE SACÆAN CRIMINAL DIVINE
           I. SACRIFICE BY HANGING. DOES IT EXIST?
          II. STAGES IN MR. FRAZER'S THEORY
         III. A POSSIBLE RECONCILIATION
          IV. THE SACÆA SUDDENLY CHANGES ITS DATE
           V. VARIOUS THEORIES OF THE VICTIM
  VII. ZAKMUK, SACÆA, AND PURIM
           I. HISTORICAL DIFFICULTY
          II. PERSIANS ARE NOT BABYLONIANS
         III. ORIGIN OF PURIM
          IV. IS PURIM PRE-EXILIAN OR POST-EXILIAN
           V. THEORY OF A HUMAN VICTIM AT PURIM
          VI. CONTRADICTORY CONJECTURE
         VII. A NEW THEORY OF THE VICTIM
        VIII. NEW GERMAN THEORY OF PURIM
          IX. ANOTHER NEW THEORY. HUMAN AND THE VICTIM
  VIII. MORDECAI, ESTHER, VASHTI, AND HAMAN
           I. ESTHER LOVED BY MORDECAI
          II. THE PERSIAN BUFFOON
         III. A HELPFUL THEORY OF MY OWN

    IX. WHY WAS THE MOCK-KING OF THE SACÆA WHIPPED AND HANGED?
           I. PERIODS OF LICENCE
          II. THE DIVINE SCAPEGOAT
         III. MORE PERIODS OF LICENCE
          IV. THE SACÆA AS A PERIOD OF LICENCE
     X. CALVARY
    XI. THE GHASTLY PRIEST
   XII. SOUTH AFRICAN RELIGION
  XIII. CUP AND RING: AN OLD PROBLEM SOLVED
   XIV. FIRST-FRUITS AND TABOOS
    XV. WALKING THROUGH FIRE

     APPENDICES

     A. MR. TYLOR'S THEORY OF BORROWING
     B. THE MARTYRDOM OF DASIUS
     C. THE RIDE OF THE BEARDLESS ONE

     INDEX




I

_SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION_


We all know what we mean by science; science is 'organised common
sense.' Her aim is the acquisition of reasoned and orderly knowledge.
Presented with a collection of verified facts, it is the part of
science to reduce them to order, and to account for their existence in
accordance with her recognised theory of things. If the facts cannot
be fitted into the theory, it must be expanded or altered; for we must
admit that, if the facts are verified, there is need for change and
expansion in the theory. The 'colligation' of facts demands hypotheses,
and these may not, at the moment of their construction, be verifiable.
The deflections of a planet from its apparently normal course may be
accounted for by the hypothesis of the attraction of another heavenly
body not yet discovered. The hypothesis is legitimate, for such bodies
are known to exist, and to produce such effects. When the body is
discovered, the hypothesis becomes a certainty. On the other hand,
the hypothesis that some capricious and conscious agency pushed the
planet into deflections would be illegitimate, for the existence of
such a freakish agency is not demonstrated. Our hypotheses then must be
consistent with our actual knowledge of nature and of human nature,
and our conjectured causes must be adequate to the production of the
effects. Thus, science gradually acquires and organises new regions of
knowledge.

Superstition is a word of much less definite meaning. When we call a
man 'superstitious,' we usually mean that evidence which satisfies
him does not satisfy us. We see examples daily of the dependence of
belief on bias. One man believes a story about cruelties committed by
our adversaries; another, disbelieving the tale, credits a narrative
about the misconduct of our own party. Probably the evidence in neither
case would satisfy the historian, or be accepted by a jury. A man in a
tavern tells another how the Boers, retreating from a position, buried
their own wounded. 'I don't believe that,' says the other. 'Then you
are a pro-Boer.'

The sceptic reasoned from his general knowledge of human nature. The
believer reasoned from his own prejudiced and mythopœic conception of
people whom he disliked. If the question had been one of religion the
believer might be called superstitious; the sceptic might be called
scientific, if he was ready to yield his doubts to the evidence of
capable observers of the alleged fact.

Superstition, like science, has her hypotheses, and, like science,
she reasons from experience. But her experience is usually fantastic,
unreal, or if real capable of explanation by causes other than those
alleged by superstition. A man comes in at night, and says he has seen
a ghost in white. That is merely his hypothesis; the existence of
ghosts in white is not demonstrated. You accompany him to the scene
of the experience, and prove to him that he has seen a post, not a
ghost. His experience was real, but was misinterpreted by dint of an
hypothesis resting on no demonstrated fact of knowledge.

The hypotheses of superstition are familiar. Thus, an event has
happened: say you have lost your button-hook. You presently hear of a
death in your family. Ever afterwards you go anxiously about when you
have lost a button-hook. You are confusing a casual sequence of facts
with a causal connection of facts. Sequence in time is mistaken for
sequence of what we commonly style cause and effect. In the same way,
superstition cherishes the hypothesis that like affects like. Thus, the
sun is round, and a ball of clay is round. Therefore, if an Australian
native wishes to delay the course of the round sun in the heavens,
he fixes a round ball of clay on the bough of a tree; or so books on
anthropology tell us. Acting on the hypothesis that like affects like,
a man makes a clay or waxen image of an enemy, and sticks it full of
pins or thorns. He expects his enemy to suffer agony in consequence,
and so powerful is 'suggestion' that, if the enemy knows about the
image, he sometimes falls ill and dies. This experience corroborates
the superstitious hypothesis, and so the experiment with the image is
of world-wide diffusion. Everything is done, or attempted, on these
lines by superstition. Men imitate the killing of foes or game, and
expect, as a result, to kill them in war or in the chase. They mimic
the gathering of clouds and the fall of rain, and expect rain to fall
in consequence. They imitate the evolution of an edible grub from the
larva, and expect grubs to multiply; and so on.

All this is quite rational, if you grant the hypotheses of
superstition. Her practices are magic. We are later to discuss a theory
that men had magic before they had religion, and only invented gods
because they found that magic did not work. Still later they invented
science, which is only magic with a legitimate hypothesis, using real,
not fanciful, experience. In the long run magic and religion are to die
out, perhaps, and science is to have the whole field to herself.

This may be a glorious though a remote prospect. But surely it is
above all things needful that our science should be scientific. She
must not blink facts, merely because they do not fit into her scheme
or hypothesis of the nature of things, or of religion. She really
must give as much prominence to the evidence which contradicts as to
that which supports her theory in each instance. Not only must she
not shut her eyes to this evidence, but she must diligently search
for it, must seek for what Bacon calls _instantice contradictorim_,
since, if these exist, the theory which ignores them is useless. If she
advances an hypothesis, it must not be contradictory of the whole mass
of human experience. If science finds that her hypothesis contradicts
experience, she must seek for an hypothesis which is in accordance
with experience, and, if that cannot be found, she must wait till it
is found. Again, science must not pile one unverified hypothesis upon
another unverified hypothesis till her edifice rivals the Tower of
Babel. She must not make a conjecture on p. 35, and on p. 210 treat
the conjecture as a fact. Because, if one story in the card-castle is
destroyed by being proved impossible, all the other stories will 'come
tumbling after.' It seems hardly necessary, but it is not superfluous,
to add that, in her castle of hypotheses, one must not contradict,
and therefore destroy, another. We must not be asked to believe that
an event occurred at one date, and also that it occurred at another;
or that an institution was both borrowed by a people at one period,
and was also possessed, unborrowed, by the same people, at an earlier
period. We cannot permit science to assure us that a certain fact was
well known, and that the knowledge produced important consequences;
while we are no less solemnly told that the fact was wholly unknown,
whence it would seem that the results alleged to spring from the
knowledge could not be produced.

This kind of reasoning, with its inferring of inferences from other
inferences, themselves inferred from conjectures as to the existence
of facts of which no proof is adduced, must be called superstitious
rather than scientific. The results may be interesting, but they are
the reverse of science.

It is perhaps chiefly in the nascent science of the anthropological
study of institutions, and above all of religion, that this kind of
reasoning prevails. The topic attracts ingenious and curious minds.
System after system has been constructed, unstinted in material,
elegant in aspect, has been launched, and has been wrecked, or been
drifted by the careless winds to the forlorn shore where Bryant's
ark, with all its crew, divine or human, lies in decay. No mortal
student believes in the arkite system of Bryant, though his ark, on the
match-boxes of Messrs. Bryant and May, perhaps denotes loyalty to the
ancestral idea.

The world of modern readers has watched sun myths, and dawn myths, and
storm myths, and wind myths come in and go out: _autant en emporte
le vent._ Totems and taboos succeeded, and we are bewildered by the
contending theories of the origins of taboos and totems. Deities of
vegetation now are all in all, and may it be far from us to say that
any one from Ouranos to Pan, from the Persian King to the horses of
Virbius, is not a spirit of vegetable life. Yet perhaps the deity has
higher aspects and nobler functions than the pursuit of his 'vapid
vegetable loves;' and these deserve occasional attention.

The result, however, of scurrying hypotheses and hasty generalisations
is that the nascent science of religious origins is received with
distrust. We may review the brief history of the modern science.

Some twenty years ago, when the 'Principles of Sociology,' by Mr.
Herbert Spencer, was first published, the book was reviewed, in 'Mind,'
by the author of 'Primitive Culture.' That work, again, was published
in 1871. In 1890 appeared the 'Golden Bough,' by Mr. J. G. Frazer, and
the second edition of the book, with changes and much new matter, was
given to the world in 1900.

Here, then, we have a whole generation, a space of thirty years,
during which English philosophers or scholars have been studying the
science of the Origins of Religion. In the latest edition of the
'Golden Bough,' Mr. Frazer has even penetrated into the remote region
where man neither had, nor wanted, any religion at all. We naturally
ask ourselves to what point we have arrived after the labours of a
generation. Twenty years ago, when reviewing Mr. Spencer, Mr. Tylor
said that a time of great public excitement as to these topics was
at hand. The clamour and contest aroused by Mr. Darwin's theory of
the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man would be outdone by the
coming war over the question of the Evolution of Religion. But there
has been no general excitement; there has been little display of public
interest in these questions. They have been left to 'the curious' and
'the learned,' classes not absolutely identical. Mr. Frazer, indeed,
assures us that the comparative study of human beliefs and institutions
is 'fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened
curiosity, and of furnishing materials for the researches of the
learned.'[1]

But enlightened curiosity seems to be easily satisfied, and only very
few of the learned concern themselves with these researches, which Mr.
Tylor expected to be so generally exciting.

A member of the University of Oxford informed me that the study of
beliefs, and of anthropology in general, is almost entirely neglected
by the undergraduates, and when I asked him 'Why?' he replied 'There is
no money in it.' Another said that anthropology 'had no evidence.' In
the language of the economists there is no supply provided at Oxford
because there is no demand. Classics, philology, history, physical
science, and even literature, are studied, because 'there is money
in them,' not much money indeed, but a competence, if the student is
successful. For the study of the evolution of beliefs there is no
demand, or very little. Yet, says Mr. Frazer, 'well handled, it may
become a powerful instrument to expedite progress, if it lays bare
certain weak spots in the foundations on which modern society is
built.' We all desire progress (in the right direction), we all pine to
lay bare weak spots, and yet we do not seem to be concerned about the
services which might be done for progress by the study of the evolution
of religion. 'It is indeed a melancholy and, in some respects,
thankless task,' says Mr. Frazer, 'to strike at the foundations of
beliefs in which, as in a strong tower, the hopes and aspirations of
humanity through long ages have sought a refuge from the storm and
stress of life.' 'Thankless,' indeed, these operations are. 'Yet sooner
or later,' Mr. Frazer adds, 'it is inevitable that the battery of the
comparative method should-breach these venerable walls, mantled over
with the ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender and
sacred associations. At present we are only dragging the guns into
position; they have hardly yet begun to speak.'

Mr. Frazer is too modest: he has dragged into position a work of
immense learning and eloquent style in three siege guns, we may say,
three volumes of the largest calibre, and they have spoken about
500,000 words. No man, to continue the metaphor, is better supplied
than he with the ammunition of learning, with the knowledge of facts
of every kind. Yet the venerable walls,--with their pleasing growth
of ivy, mosses, wild flowers, and other mural vegetation, do not, to
myself, seem in the least degree impaired by the artillery, and I try
to show cause for my opinion.

Why is this, and why is the portion of the public which lives within or
without the venerable walls mainly indifferent?

Several sufficient reasons might be given. In the first place many
people have, or think they have, so many other grounds for disbelief,
that additional grounds, provided by the comparative method, are
regarded rather as a luxury than as supplying a felt want. Again,
but very few persons have leisure, or inclination, or power of mind
enough to follow an elaborate argument through fifteen hundred pages,
not to speak of other works on the same theme. Once more, only a
minute minority are capable of testing and weighing the evidence, and
criticising the tangled hypotheses on which the argument rests, or in
which it is involved.

But there is another and perhaps a sounder argument for indifference.
The learned are aware that the evidence for all these speculations is
not of the nature to which they are accustomed, either in historical
or scientific studies. More and more the age insists on strictness in
appreciating evidence, and on economy in conjecture. But the study of
the evolution of myth and belief has always been, and still is, marked
by an extraordinary use, or abuse, of conjecture. The 'perhapses,' the
'we may supposes,' the 'we must infers' are countless.

As in too much of the so-called 'Higher Criticism' hypothesis is piled,
by many anthropologists, upon hypothesis, guess upon guess, while, if
only one guess is wrong, the main argument falls to pieces. Moreover,
it is the easiest thing, in certain cases, to explain the alleged facts
by a counter hypothesis, not a complex hypothesis, but at least as
plausible as the many combined conjectures of the castle architects,
though perhaps as far from the truth, and as incapable of verification.
Of these statements examples shall be given in the course of this book.

We are all, we who work at these topics, engaged in science, the
science of man, or rather we are painfully labouring to lay the
foundations of that science. We are all trying I to expedite progress.
But our science cannot expedite progress if our science is not
scientific. We must, therefore, however pedantic our process may seem,
keep insisting on the rejection of all evidence which is not valid,
on the sparing use of conjecture, and on the futility of piling up
hypothesis upon unproved hypothesis. To me it seems, as I have already
said, that a legitimate hypothesis must 'colligate the facts,' that it
must do so more successfully than any counter hypothesis, and that it
must, for every link in its chain, have evidence which will stand the
tests of criticism.

But the chief cause of indifference is the character of our evidence.
We can find anything we want to find people say--not only 'the man
in the street' but the learned say--among reports of the doings of
savage and barbarous races. We find what we want, and to what we do
not want we are often blind. For example, nothing in savage religion
is better vouched for than the belief in a being whom narrators of
every sort call 'a Creator who holds all in his power.' I take the
first instance of this kind that comes to hand in opening Mr. Tylor's
'Primitive Culture.' The being is he whom the natives of Canada 'call
"Andouagni," without, however, having any form or method of prayer to
him.' The date of this evidence is 1558. It is obvious that Andouagni
(to take one case out of a multitude) was not invented in the despair
of magic. Mysticism has been called the despair of philosophy, and Mr.
Frazer, as we shall see, regards religion as the despair of magic. By
his theory man, originally without religion, and trusting in magic,
found by experience that magic could not really control the weather and
the food supply. Man therefore dreamed that 'there were other beings,
like himself, but far stronger,' who, unseen, controlled what his
magic could not control. 'To these mighty beings ... man now addressed
himself ... beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good
things....'[2]

But nobody beseeched Andouagni to do anything. The Canadians had 'no
method or form of prayer to him.'[3] Therefore Andouagni was not
invented because magic failed, and therefore this great power was
dreamed of, and his mercy was beseeched with prayers for good things.
That was not the process by which Andouagni was evolved, because nobody
prayed to him in 1558, nor have we reason to believe that any one ever
did.

From every part of the globe, but chiefly from among very low savage
and barbaric races, the existence of beings powerful as Andouagni,
but, like him, not addressed in prayer, or but seldom so addressed, is
reported by travellers of many ages, races, creeds, and professions.
The existence of the belief in such beings, often not approached
by prayer or sacrifice, is fatal to several modern theories of the
origin and evolution of religion. But these facts, resting on the
best evidence which anthropology can offer, and corroborated by the
undesigned coincidence of testimony from every quarter, are not what
most students in this science want to find. Therefore these facts have
been ignored or hastily slurred over, or the beliefs are ascribed to
European or Islamite influence. Yet, first, Christians or Islamites,
with the god they introduced would introduce prayer to him, and prayer,
in many cases, there is none. Next, in the case of Andouagni, what
missionary influence could exist in Canada before 1558? Thirdly, if
missionaries, amateur or professional, there were in Canada before
1558 they would be Catholics, and would introduce, not a Creator never
addressed in prayer, but crosses, beads, the Madonna, the Saints, and
such Catholic rites as would leave material traces.

In spite of all these obvious considerations, I am unacquainted with
any book on this phase of savage religion, and scarcely know any
book, except Mr. Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' in which the facts are
prominently stated.

The evidence for the facts, let me repeat, is of the best character
that anthropology can supply, for it rests on testimony undesignedly
coincident, given from most parts of the world by men of every kind
of education, creed, and bias. Contradictory evidence, the denial
of the existence of the beliefs, is also abundant: to such eternal
contradictions of testimony anthropology must make up her mind. We can
only test and examine, in each instance, the bias of the witness, if
he has a bias, and his opportunities of acquiring knowledge. If the
belief does exist, it can seldom attest itself, or never, by material
objects, such as idols, altars, sacrifices, and the sound of prayers,
for a being like Andouagni is not prayed to or propitiated: one proof
that he is not of Christian introduction. We have thus little but the
reports of Europeans intimately acquainted with the peoples, savage or
barbaric, and, if possible, with their language, to serve as a proof
of the existence of the savage belief in a supreme being, a maker or
creator of things.

This fact warns us to be cautious, but occasionally we have such
evidence as is supplied by Europeans initiated into the mysteries of
savage religion. Our best proof, however, of the existence of this
exalted, usually neglected belief, is the coincidence of testimony,
from that of the companions of Columbus, and the earliest traders
visiting America, to that of Mr. A. W. Howitt, a _mystes_ of the
Australian Eleusinia, or of the latest travellers among the Fangs, the
remote Masai, and other scarcely 'contaminated' races.[4]

If we can raise, at least, a case for consideration in favour of
this non-utilitarian belief in a deity not approached with prayer or
sacrifice, we also raise a presumption against the theory that gods
were invented, in the despair of magic, as powers out of whom something
useful could be got: powers with good things in their gift, things
which men were ceasing to believe that they could obtain by their own
magical machinery. The strong primal gods, unvexed by prayer, were not
invented as recipients of prayer.

To ignore this chapter of early religion, to dismiss it as a tissue of
borrowed ideas--though its existence is attested by the first Europeans
on the spot, and its originality is vouched for by the very absence of
prayer, and by observers like Mr. A. W. Howitt, Miss Kingsley, and Sir
A. B. Ellis, who proposed, but withdrew, a theory of 'loan-gods'--is
not scientific.

My own early readings in early religion did not bring rue acquainted
with this chapter in the book of beliefs. When I first noticed an
example of it, in the reports of the Benedictine Mission at Nursia, in
Australia, I conceived, that some mistake had been made in 1845, by the
missionary who sent in the report.[5] But later, when I began to notice
the coincidence of testimony from many quarters, in many ages, then I
could not conceal from myself that this chapter must be read. It is in
conflict with our prevalent theories of the development of gods out of
worshipped ancestral spirits: for the maker of things, not approached
in prayer as a rule, is said to exist where ancestral spirits are not
reported to be worshipped. But science (in other fields) specially
studies exceptional cases, and contradictory instances, and all that
seems out of accord with her theory. In this case science has glanced
at what goes contrary to her theory, and has explained it by bias
in the reporters, by error in the reporters, and by the theory of
borrowing. But such coincidence in misreporting is a dangerous thing
for anthropology to admit, as it damages her evidence in general.
Again, the theory of borrowing seems to be contradicted by the early
dates of many reports, made prior to the arrival of missionaries, and
by the secrecy in which the beliefs are often veiled by the savages; as
also by the absence of prayer to the most potent being.

We are all naturally apt to insist on and be pre-possessed in favour of
an idea which has come to ourselves unexpectedly, and has appeared to
be corroborated by wider research, and, perhaps, above all, which runs
contrary to the current of scientific opinion. We make a pet of the
relatively new idea; let it be the origin of mythology in 'a disease of
language;' or the vast religious importance of totems; or our theory
of the origin of totemism; or the tremendous part played in religion
by gods of plants. We insist on the idea too exclusively; we find it
where it is not--in fact, we are very human, very unscientific, very
apt to become one-idea'd. It is even more natural that we should be
regarded in this light by our brethren (_est-il embêtant avec son Etre
Suprême_!), whose own systems will be imperilled if our favourite idea
can be established.

I risk this interpretation when I keep maintaining--what--that the
chapter of otiose or unworshipped superior beings in the 'Early
History of Religion' deserves perusal. Not to cut its pages, to go on
making systems as if it did not exist, is, I venture to think, less
than scientific, and borders on the superstitious. For to build and
defend a theory, without looking closely to whatever may imperil it,
is precisely the fault of the superstitious Khond, who used to manure
his field with a thumb, or a collop from the flank of a human victim,
and did not try sowing a field without a collop of man's flesh, to
see what the comparative crops would be. Or science of this kind is
like Don Quixote, who, having cleft his helmet with one experimental
sword-stroke, repaired it, but did not test it again.

Like other martyrs of science, I must expect to be thought importunate,
tedious, a fellow of one idea, and that idea wrong. To resent this
would show great want of humour, and a plentiful lack of knowledge of
human nature. Meanwhile, I am about to permit myself to criticise some
recent hypotheses in the field of religious origins, in the interests
of anthropology, not of orthodoxy.


[1] _Golden Bough_, i. xxi., 1900.

[2] _G. B_. i. 77.

[3] Tylor, _Prim. Cult_. ii. 309, citing Thevet, _Singularitez de la
France Antarctique_, Paris, 1558, ch. 77.

[4] _Journal of Anthropological Institute_, Oct.-Dec. 1900 and N.S.
II., Nos. 1, 2, p. 85.

[5] Max Müller, _Hibbert Lectures,_ p. 16.




II.

_THE THEORY OF LOAN-GODS; OR BORROWED RELIGION_


The study of the origins of religion is impeded by the impossibility
of obtaining historical evidence on the subject. If we examine the
religious beliefs of extant races, the lowest in material culture, the
best representatives of palæolithic man, we are still a long way from
the beginnings of human speculation and belief. Man must have begun to
speculate about the origins of things as soon as he was a reasoning
animal. If we look at the isolated and backward tribe of Central
Australia, the Arunta, we have the advantage of perhaps the best and
most thoroughly scientific study ever made of such a race, the book by
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.[1]

Here we watch a people so 'primitive' that they are said to be utterly
ignorant of the natural results, in the way of progeny, of the union
of the sexes. Yet, on the same authority, this tribe has evolved an
elaborate, and, granting the premises, a scientific and adequate theory
of the evolution of our species, and the nature of life. An original
stock of spirits is constantly reincarnated; spiritual pedigrees are
preserved by records in the shape of oval decorated stones, and it
seems that a man or woman of to-day may be identified as an incarnation
of a soul, whose adventures, in earlier incarnations, can be traced
back to the Alcheringa, or mythical heroic age of the people. Their
marriage laws are already in advance of those of their neighbours, the
Urabunna, and their only magistracy, of a limited and constitutional
kind, descends in the male line.

Thus the Arunta are socially in advance of the Pictish royal family
in Scotland, whose crown descended in the female line, no king being
succeeded by his son. Manifestly the religious or non-religious ideas
of such a people, unclothed, houseless, ignorant of metals and of
agriculture, and without domesticated animals though they are, must
be ideas with a long history behind them. The Arunta philosophy is a
peculiar philosophy, worked out by thoughtful men, and elaborated so
artfully that there seems neither room for a god, nor for the idea of
a future life, except the life of successive reincarnations. It is
therefore impossible for us to argue that mankind in general began its
speculative career with the singular and apparently godless philosophy
of the Arunta. Their working science is sympathetic magic; to the Great
Spirit, with a trace of belief in whom they are credited, they are not
said to pray; and he seems to be either an invention of the seniors,
for the purpose of keeping the juniors and women in order, or a being
originally of higher character, belief in whom has died out among the
adults. To him we return in another essay.

As historical information about the early or late evolution of the idea
of a superior (not to say supreme) being is thus unattainable, thinkers
both ancient and modern have derived the idea of God from that of
ghost. The conception of a powerful spirit of a dead father, worshipped
by his children, is supposed to have been gradually raised to the power
of a god. Against this theory I have elsewhere urged that superior
beings are found among races who do not worship ancestral spirits;
and again that these superior beings are not envisaged as spirits, but
rather as supernormal magnified men, of unbounded power (an idea often
contradicted in savage as in Greek mythology) and of limitless duration.

The reply to me takes the form of ignoring, or disabling the evidence,
or of asserting that these superior beings are 'loan-gods,' borrowed
by savages from Europeans or Islamites. It is to the second theory,
that these savage superior beings are disguised borrowings from
missionaries, explorers, traders, or squatters, that I now address
myself.[2] These beings certainly cause difficulties to the philosophy
which derives gods, in the last resort, from ghosts.

It is probable that these difficulties have for some time been present
to the mind of Mr. E. B. Tylor (one may drop academic titles in
speaking of so celebrated a scholar). When Mr. Tylor publishes the
Gifford Lectures which he delivered some years ago at Aberdeen, we
shall know his mature mind about this problem. Meanwhile he has shown
that the difficulty, the god where no god should be, is haunting his
reflections. For example, his latest edition of his 'Primitive Culture'
(1891) contains, as we shall show, interesting modifications of what he
wrote in the second edition (1871).

There are three ways in which friends of the current theory that gods
are grown-up ghosts may attempt to escape from their quandary. (1)
The low races with the high gods are _degenerate_, and their deity is
a survival from a loftier stage of lost culture. Mr. Tylor, however,
of course, knows too much to regard the Australians, in the stone
age, as degenerate. (2) The evidence is bad or (Fr. Müller) is that
of prejudiced missionaries. But Mr. Tylor knows that some of the
evidence is excellent, and, at its best, does not repose on missionary
testimony. (3) The high gods of the low races are borrowed from
missionary teaching. This is the line adopted by Mr. Tylor.

I recently pointed out, in 'The Making of Religion' (1898), the many
difficulties which beset the current theory. I was therefore alarmed on
rinding that Mr. Tylor had mined the soil under my own hypothesis. His
theory of borrowing (which would blow mine sky-high if it exploded) is
expounded by Mr. Tylor in an essay, 'The Limits of Savage Religion,'
published in the 'Journal of the Anthropological Institute' (vol. xxi.,
1892). I propose to examine Mr. Tylor's work, and to show that his own
witnesses demonstrate the unborrowed and original character of the gods
in question.

Mr. Tylor first opposes the loose popular notion that all over North
America the Indians believed in a being named _Kitchi Manitou_,
or 'Great Spirit,' a notion which I do not defend. He says: 'The
historical evidence is that the Great Spirit belongs, not to the
untutored, but to the tutored mind of the savage, and is preserved for
us in the records of the tutors themselves, the Jesuit missionaries of
Canada.'[3] Now as to the _word_ 'Manitou' spirit, Mr. Tylor quotes Le
Jeune (1633): 'By this word "Manitou," I think they understand what
we call an angel, or some powerful being.'[4] Again: 'The Montagnets
give the name "Manitou" to everything, whether good or bad, superior
to man. Therefore, when we speak of God, they sometimes call Him "The
Good Manitou," while when we speak of the Devil, they call him "The
Bad Manitou."'[5] When then, ninety years later, in 1724, Père Lafitau
dilates on 'The Great Spirit,' 'The Great Manitou,' we are to see that
in ninety years the term which the Indians used for _our_ God--their
translation of _le bon dieu_--has taken root, become acclimatised,
and flourished. Lafitau, according to Mr. Tylor, has also raised the
Huron word for spirit, _oki_, to Okki, with a capital O, which he calls
_Le Grand Esprit_. The elevation is solely due to Lafitau and other
Christian teachers. If all this were granted, all this is far indeed
from proving that the idea of a beneficent Creator was borrowed by
the Indians from the Jesuits between 1633 and 1724. Mr. Tylor's own
book, 'Primitive Culture,' enables us to correct that opinion. Here
he quotes Captain Smith, from an edition of the 'History of Virginia'
of 1632. Smith began to colonise Virginia in 1607. He says (edition
of 1632): 'Their chief god they worship is the Devil. Him they call
Okee (Okki), and serve him more of fear than love.' Mr. Tylor cites
this as a statement by 'a half-educated and whole-prejudiced European'
about 'savage deities, which, from his point of view, seem of a wholly
diabolic nature.' 'The word oki,' Mr. Tylor goes on, 'apparently means
"that which is above," and was, in fact, a general name for spirit or
deity.'[6]

The chief deity of the Virginians then (in 1607, before missionaries
came), with his temples and images, was a being whose name apparently
meant 'that which is above.' Moreover, Father Brebeuf (1636) describes
an oki in the heavens who rules the seasons, is dreaded, and sanctions
treaties.

Consequently Lafitau did not, in 1724, first make oki, a spirit, into
Okki, a god. That had been done in Virginia before any missionaries
arrived, by the natives themselves, long before 1607. For this we have,
and Mr. Tylor has cited, the evidence of Smith, before Jesuits arrived.
What is yet more to the purpose, William Strachey, a successor of
Smith, writing in 1611-12, tells us that Okeus (as he spells the word)
was only a magisterial deputy of 'the great God (the priests tell them)
who governs all the world, and makes the sun to shine, creatyng the
sun and moone his companions,... [him] they call Ahone. The good and
peaceable God requires no such duties [as are paid to Okeus], nor needs
to be sacrificed to, for he intendeth all good unto them.' He has no
image.[7] Strachey remarks that the native priests vigorously resisted
Christianity. They certainly borrowed neither Okeus nor Ahone, the
beneficent Creator who is without sacrifice, from Jesuits who had not
yet arrived.

Do we need more evidence? If so, here it is. Speaking of New England in
1622, Winslow writes about the god Kiehtan as a being of ancient credit
among the natives. He 'made all the other gods; he dwells far westerly
above the heavens, whither all good men go when they die.' Thus Mr.
Tylor himself (_loc. cit_.) summarises Winslow, and quotes: 'They
never saw Kiehtan, _but they hold it a great charge and dutie that one
age teach another._ And to him they make feasts, and cry and sing for
plentie, and victorie, or anything that is good.'

Thus Kiehtan, in 1622, was not only a relatively supreme god, but also
a god of ancient standing. Borrowing from missionaries was therefore
impossible.

Mr. Tylor then added, in 1871: 'Brinton's etymology is plausible, that
this Kiehtan is simply the Great Spirit (Kittanitowit, Great Living
Spirit, an Algonquin word compounded of Kitta = great, manitou =
spirit, termination, wit, indicating life).'

But all this etymology Mr. Tylor omitted in his edition of 1891,
probably no longer thinking it plausible.

He did, however, say in 1891 (ii. 342): 'Another famous native American
name for the Supreme Deity is Oki.'

Not content with Okeus, capital O and all, before the arrival of
missionaries; not content with Kiehtan, whose etymology (in 1871)
'apparently' means 'Great Spirit,' before the arrival of Jesuits in New
England, Mr. Tylor, in 'Primitive Culture,' adds to these deities 'the
Greenlanders' Torngarsuk, or Great Spirit (his name is an augmentative
of "torngak," "spirit" [in 1891 "demon"]),' before the arrival of
missionaries! For, says Mr. Tylor, 'he seems no figure derived from the
religion of Scandinavian colonists, ancient or modern.... He so clearly
held his place as supreme deity in the native mind that, as Cranz the
missionary alleges, many Greenlanders, hearing of God and His Almighty
power, were apt to fall on the idea that it was their Torngarsuk who
was meant.'[8]

Now, in 1891, Mr. Tylor dropped out 'he seems no figure derived from
the religion of Scandinavian colonists, ancient or modern;' and he
added that Torngarsuk was later identified, not with our God, but
with our Devil: a foible characteristic, I may say--as Mr. Tylor
said concerning Captain Smith and Oki--of 'a half-educated and
whole-prejudiced European.' For the Algonquin Indians Mr. Tylor cited
Father Le Jeune (1633): 'When the missionary talked to them of an
almighty creator of heaven and earth, they began to say to one another
Atahocan, Atahocan.' But his name had fallen into contempt and a verb,
_Nitatahocan_, meant 'I tell an old fanciful story.' In 1558 Thevet
credits the Canadian Indians with belief in 'a creator' Andouagni, not
approached with prayers. None of these beings can have been borrowed
from Europeans. It will presently be seen that between 1871 and 1892
Mr. Tylor became sceptical as to the records of a Great Spirit in
America. But he retained Oki in the sense of Supreme Deity.

Here, then, from Virginia to Greenland, Mr. Tylor presented in 1871
evidence for a being of supreme power, called bynames which, perhaps,
mean 'Great Spirit.' In his essay of 1892 he does not refer to his
earlier work and his evidence there for a Great Spirit, nor tell us
why he has changed his mind. He now attributes the Great Spirit to
missionary influence. We naturally ask in what respect he has found
the early evidence on which he previously relied lacking in value.
Mr. Tylor, in 'Primitive Culture,'[9] gives a yet earlier reference
than the others for a Virginian Creator. He cites Heriot (an author of
1586). Again: 'They believe in one who made all things, but pay him no
honour,' writes Père L'Allemant in 1626, in a region where 'il n'y ait
point eu de religieux.'

In 1871 Mr. Tylor said: 'It has even been thought that the whole
doctrine of the Great Spirit was borrowed by the savages from
missionaries and colonists. But this view will not bear examination.
After due allowance made for mis-rendering of savage answers and
importation of white men's thoughts, it can hardly be judged that
a divine being, whose characteristics are so unlike what European
intercourse would have suggested, and who is heard of by such
early explorers among such distant tribes, could be a deity of
foreign origin.'[10] In 1891 'this view will not bear examination'
is deleted--why?--and the deity, we are told, 'could _hardly_ be
altogether of foreign origin.' He could not be, when found by the
first European discoverers, and, had the creed been borrowed, prayer to
the being would have been borrowed with it.

Now, in his essay of 1892, Mr. Tylor never, I think, alludes to his own
evidence of 1873, or even of 1891, in favour of a Red Indian creator,
evidence earlier than the Jesuits (1558, 1586, 1612-16, 1622, and of
Le Jeune, 1633). In the essay of 1892 that authentic evidence 'of such
early explorers among such distant tribes' to a savage conception
of the Creator is not cited. The coincidence of testimony is the
strongest possible evidence to the nature and unborrowed character of
the being. Such coincidence is, in fact, Mr. Tylor's own touchstone
of trustworthy testimony. Yet in 1892 the Jesuits receive the whole
credit of introducing the idea. It would be interesting to know why the
early evidence has suddenly become untrustworthy. The essay of 1892
ought, of course, to be regarded as only a sketch. Yet we are anxious
to learn the reasons which made Mr. Tylor leave his evidence out of
sight, though republished by him only the year before he put forth his
tractate in favour of borrowing from Jesuits. I turn to another point
on which I cannot accept Mr. Tylor's arguments.

In his essay of 1892 Mr. Tylor dates the Mandan Deluge legend as not
before 1700. Why? Because Catlin (in 1830-1840) found iron instruments
used ritually in the native Mystery Play of the Flood. They were
supposed to represent the tools employed in making the vessel wherein
'the only man' escaped drowning. But the Mandans did not get iron
tools before 1700. The Indians, however, we reply, had canoes before
they had iron tools, and, in modern times, might naturally employ iron
instead of flint instruments (discarded) in the Mystery Play. They
might do this, in spite of the marked preference for stone tools in
ritual. Perhaps they had none. It must here be observed that Catlin
does not use the word 'ark' (as Mr. Tylor does) for the vessel of 'the
only man.' Catlin always says 'the big canoe.' Even if we admit (which
we do not) that the Mandans necessarily borrowed their Deluge legend
from whites, it does not follow, as Mr. Tylor argues, that because
the 'Great Spirit' appears in the Deluge legend, he 'cannot claim
greater antiquity' than 1700. In the first place, as, in Mr. Tylor's
earlier statement, Canadians, Algonquins, Virginians, Massachusetts,
and Greenlanders had a Great Spirit before Christian influences
began, the Mandans may have been equally fortunate. Nor does it seem
safe to argue, like Mr. Tylor, that if the Great Spirit figures in a
(hypothetically) borrowed myth, therefore the conception of a Great
Spirit was necessarily borrowed at the same time. That more recent
myths are constantly being attached to a pre-existing god or hero is
a recognised fact in mythology. Nor can mythologists argue (1) that
Biblical myth is a modified survival of savage myth, and (2) that such
natural and obvious savage myths as the kneading of man out of clay,
the origin of death ('the Fall'), and the tradition of the Deluge
are necessarily borrowed by savages from the Bible. This is, indeed,
to argue in a vicious circle. Again, was the Australian and American
myth of a race of wise birds, earlier than man, borrowed from the
famous chorus in the 'Birds' of Aristophanes? Is the Arunta theory of
evolution borrowed from Darwin, or their theory of reincarnation from
Buddhism? Borrowing of ideas seems only to be in favour when savage
ideas resemble more or less those of Christianity.

Mr. Tylor remarks that Prince Maximilian, who knew Mandanese better
than Catlin, found among them no 'Great Manitou'--so called. But he
did find a Creator whose name means 'Lord of Earth.' Was He borrowed
from the whites? Finally, on this point, would savages who remained so
utterly un-Christian as the Mandans, adopt from missionaries just one
myth--the Deluge--and make that the central feature in their national
ritual? Indeed this seems very improbable conduct! Nothing is more
conservative than ritual: that is notorious.

We do not follow Mr. Tylor into South America. If our case is proved,
by his own not repudiated authorities, for North America, that suffices
us. We turn to Australia.

Let us first take the typical Australian case of Baiame, Pei-a-mei, or
Baiamai, at present alleged by Mr. Howitt and others to be the moral
creative being of many tribes,[11] and served, without sacrifice, in
their mysteries. Mr. Tylor first finds him mentioned as a creator by
Mr. Horace Hale, whose book is of 1840.[12] 'Next, in 1850, Baiame
was spoken of by a native to some German Moravian missionaries as a
being who, according to their 'sorcerers or doctors,' made all things,
but was easy to anger, and was to be appeased by dances. Thus he was
accepted by the most notoriously conservative class, the class most
jealous of missionary influence, the sorcerers. Omitting for the moment
a later description of Baiame as seen by a black devotee in a vision,
we turn to Mr. Tylor's theory of the origin of this god. Mr. Ridley
(who began his missionary career in Victoria in 1854) gives a pleasing
account of Baiame as a creator, with a paradise for the good. According
to Mr. Ridley, 'Baiame' is discovered by Mr. Greenway to be derived
from _baia_, 'to make,' and he concludes that 'for ages unknown' the
blacks have called God 'the Maker.'[13]

Mr. Tylor now asks, 'Was Baiame,' who is, he avers, 'near 1840 so
prominent a divine figure among the Australians, known to them at all a
few years earlier?' He decides that before 1840 Baiame was 'unknown to
well-informed (white) observers.' This, of course, would not prove that
Baiame was unknown to the blacks. As for the observers, who are three
in number, one, Buckley the convict, in spite of his thirty-two years
with the blacks, is of no real value. We cannot trust a man who lied
so freely as to say that in Australia he 'speared salmon'! and often
saw the fabled monster, the Bunyip.[14] Buckley could not read, and his
book was made up by a Mr. Morgan out of 'rough notes and memoranda ...
and by conversation.' If, then, as Buckley says, 'they have no notion
of a Supreme Being' (p. 57), we may discount that; Buckley's idea of
such a being was probably too elevated. Moreover he never mentions the
confessedly ancient native mysteries, in one of which among certain
tribes the being is revealed.[15] Mr. Tylor's next well-informed
observer before 1840, Mr. Backhouse, a Quaker, takes his facts straight
from the third witness, Mr. Threlkeld; he admits it for some of them,
and it is true, in this matter, of all of them.[16] Buckley being
out of court, and Backhouse being a mere copy of Mr. Threlkeld, what
has Mr. Threlkeld to say? What follows is curious. Mr. Threlkeld
(1834-1857) does not name Baiame, but speaks of a big supernatural
black man, called Koin, who carries wizards up to the sky, inspires
sorcerers, walks about with a fire-stick, and so on.[17] To honour him
boys' front teeth are knocked out in the initiatory stages.

As soon as I read this passage I perceived that Mr. Threlkeld was
amalgamating such a goblin as the Kurnai call 'Brewin' with the high
God of the Mysteries. In 1881, when Mr. Howitt, with Mr. Fison, wrote
'Kamilaroi and Kurnai,' he knew no higher being among that tribe than
the goblin Brewin. But, being initiated later, Mr. Howitt discovered
that the God of the Mysteries is Mungan-ngaur = 'Our Father' (this
shows the slight value of negative evidence). Women know about Brewin,
the goblin master of sorcerers, but the knowledge of Mungan-ngaur is
hidden from them under awful penalties.[18] Not only I, but Mr. Horace
Hale (1840), came to this opinion: that Koin is a goblin, Baiame a god,
as we shall see. In the same way, where Baiame is supreme, Daramulun is
sometimes a goblin or fiend.

Mr. Threlkeld very properly did not use the name of the fiend Koin as
equivalent to 'God' in his translation of the Gospel of St. Luke into
the native tongue (1831-1834). He there used for God Eloi, and no doubt
did the same in his teaching; he also tried the word _Jeliovaka-birun._
Neither word has taken with the blacks; neither word occurs in their
traditions. The word, though forced on them, has not been accepted by
them. That looks ill for the theory of borrowing.

Here, then, of Mr. Tylor's three negative witnesses, who, before 1840,
knew not Baiame, Mr. Threlkeld alone is of value. As Mr. Hale says, Mr.
Threlkeld was (1826-1857) the first worker at the dialects of those
Baiame-worshipping tribes, the Kamilaroi of the Wellington Valley,
in Victoria. But whence did Mr. Hale get what Mr. Tylor cites, his
knowledge in 1840 of Baiame? He, an American _savant_ on an exploring
expedition, could not well find out esoteric native secrets. I shall
prove that Mr. Hale got his knowledge of Baiame from Mr. Tylor's
own negative witness, Mr. Threlkeld. Mr. Hale says that 'when the
missionaries first came to Wellington,' Baiame was worshipped with
songs. 'There was a native famous for the composition of these songs
or hymns, which, according to Mr. Threlkeld, were passed on,' &c. Mr.
Hale thus declares (Mr. Tylor probably overlooked the remark) that
when the missionaries first came to Wellington (where Baiame is the
Creator) they found Baiame there before them![19] Then, why did Mr.
Threlkeld not name Baiame? I think because Mr. Hale says that Baiame's
name and sacred dance were brought in by natives from a distance,
and (when he is writing) had fallen into disuse.[20] Had, then, a
missionary before 1840 evolved Baiame from Kamilaroi _baia_, 'to make'
(for that is Mr. Tylor's theory of the origin of the word 'Baiame'),
and taught the name to distant natives as a word for his own God; and
had these proselytising distant dancing natives brought Baiame's name
and dance to Wellington? Are missionaries dancing masters? They would
teach prayer and kneeling, or give rosaries; dances are no part of
our religion. To demonstrate missionary influence here we must find
a missionary, not Mr. Threlkeld, who was studying and working on the
Kamilaroi tongue before 1840. There was no such missionary. Finally,
Mr. Hale runs counter to Mr. Tylor's theory of borrowing from whites,
though Mr. Tylor does not quote his remark. The ideas of Baiame may
'possibly' be derived from Europeans, 'though,' says Mr. Hale, 'the
great unwillingness which the natives always evince to adopt any custom
or opinion from them militates against such a supposition.' So strong
is this reluctance to borrow ideas from the whites, that the blacks of
the centre have not even borrowed the idea that children are a result
of the intercourse of the sexes! Here, then, in part of the district
studied by Mr. Threlkeld in 1826-1857, an American _savant_ (who
certainly received the facts from Mr. Threlkeld) testifies to Baiame
as recently brought from a distance by natives, but as prior to the
arrival of missionaries, and most unlikely to have been borrowed.

Whence, then, came Baiame? Mr. Tylor thinks the evidence 'points rather
to Baiame being the missionary translation of the word "creator,"
used in missionary lesson books for God.' But by 1840, when Baiame
is confessedly 'so prominent a divine figure,' Mr. Threlkeld's were
the only translations and grammatical tracts in the Kamilaroi tongue.
Now Mr. Threlkeld did not translate 'creator' (or anything else) by
'Baiame;' he used 'Eloi' and 'Jehovah-ka,' and the natives would have
neither of these words. Where is Mr. Tylor's reason, then, for holding
that before 1840 (for it must be prior to that date if it is going to
help his argument) any missionary ever rendered creator by 'Baiame'?
He has just argued that no 'observer' then knew the name Baiame, so no
observer could have introduced a name Baiame which he did not know; yet
there was the name; Mr. Hale found it there. Mr. Tylor's argument seems
to be that Mr. Ridley in 1866, and again in 1877, printed extracts,
in which occurs Baiame=God, from the 'Missionary Primers prepared for
the Kamilaroi.' We might have expected Mr. Tylor at least to give the
dates of the 'Missionary Primers' that, _ex hypothesi_, introduced
Baiame before 1840. He gives no dates, and the primers are of 1856
and are written by Mr. Ridley, who cites them.[21] Thus they must be
posterior to the Baiame of 1840, and Baiame was prior to missionaries
at Wellington, at the time when Mr. Tylor first notes his appearance.
Thus, by Mr. Tylor's own evidence, Baiame is not shown to be a
missionary importation; the reverse.

As to Australia, it is not denied by Mr. Tylor that practically all
over the continent the blacks possess religious mysteries of confessed
antiquity. It is not denied that the institution of these mysteries
is now, in many cases, attributed by the blacks to a moral creative
being, whose home is in or above the heavens. It is not denied that his
name now usually means, in different dialects, Maker (Baiame), Master
(Biamban), and Father (Papang, and many other words). It is not denied
that the doctrine of this being is _now_ concealed from children and
women, and revealed to lads at the _Bora_, or initiatory mystery.[22]
But, on the other hand (as I understand Mr. Tylor), while initiatory
rites are old (they certainly existed when Dampier touched at the
Australian coast in 1688-1689), the names of their institutor (Father,
Maker), his moral excellencies (?), and his creative attributes, are
all due to missionary influence. The original founder of the Bora, in
pre-missionary days, would only be a dead 'head-man' or leader, now
religiously regarded.

To this we first demur. It is not shown--it is denied by Waitz, and
it is not even alleged by Mr. Herbert Spencer--that the Australians
'steadily propitiate' or sacrifice at all to any ghosts of dead
men. How can they? The name of the dead is tabooed, and even where
there is in one instance an eponymous human patronymic of a tribe,
that patronymic alters in every generation. Now, among such a
ghost-worshipping people as the Zulus, the most recently dead father
gets most worship. In Australia, where even the recent ghosts are
unadored, is it likely that some remote ghost is remembered as founder
of the ancient mysteries? This is beyond our belief, though the opinion
is, or at least was, that of Mr. Howitt. The mere institution of female
kin among some of these tribes (though paternity is recognised) makes
against an ancient worship of a male ancestor where even now ancestors
are unworshipped.

As to the aspect of this god, Baiame, Mr. Tylor presently cites a
story told to Mr. Howitt by a native, of how with his father he once
penetrated in the spirit to Baiame's home, and found him to be 'a very
great old man with a long beard,' and with crystal pillars growing out
of his shoulders which support a supernal sky. His 'people,' birds and
beasts, were around him. Mr. Tylor says: 'These details are, it will
have been noticed, in some respects of very native character, while in
others recalling conventional Christian ideas of the Almighty.'

The 'Christian' idea is, naturally, that of the old man of Blake and
Michael Angelo--Hartley Coleridge's 'old man with the beard.' Is it
likely that the savages had seen any such representations? Again, is
the idea of Baiame as an old man not natural to a race where respect of
age is regularly inculcated in the mysteries and prevails in practice?
'Among the Kamilaroi about Bundurra, Turramulan [another name for this
or a lower god] is represented [at the mysteries] by an old man learned
in all the laws.'[23]...

As early as 1798 Collins found that the native word for 'father' in
New South Wales was applied by the blacks as a title of reverence to
the Governor of the nascent colony.[24] It is used now in many native
tribes as the name of their Supreme Being, and Mr. Tylor thinks it of
missionary origin. Manifestly, this idea of age and paternity in a
worshipped being is congenial to the natives, is illustrated in their
laws and customs, need not be borrowed, and is rather inevitable. The
vision of Baiame, we may add, was narrated to Mr. Howitt by a native
fellow-initiate. To lie, in such cases, is 'an unheard-of thing,'
says Mr. Howitt. The vision was a result of the world-wide practice
of crystal gazing. The seer's father handed to him a crystal. 'When
I looked at it,' says the narrator, all manner of visions appeared,
including that of Baiame.[25]

It is manifest, we think, that when the natives attach the attributes
of fatherhood and antiquity to Baiame, they need not be borrowing from
Christian art notions so natural, nay, so inevitable, in their own
stage of society. Though in many cases reckoning kinship through women,
they quite undeniably recognise paternity in fact. Thus the paternal
title had no need to be borrowed as a word of reverence. It was so used
before missionaries came.

Mr. Howitt, who is deeply initiated, writes: 'Beyond the vaulted sky
lies the mysterious home of that great and powerful being who is
Bunjil, Baiame, or Taramulan in different tribal languages, but who
in all is known by a name the equivalent of the only one used by the
Kurnai, which is Mangun-ngaur, Our Father.'[26]

Now, not to multiply evidence which is provided by other observers as
to Central Australia (not so central as the Arunta country) and the
North, Mr. Tylor is confronted with this problem: Have all the tribes
who regard a powerful being, Baiame or another, as founder of their
ancient mysteries, borrowed his name and attributes, since 1840 or
so, from whites with whom they were constantly in hostile relations?
Is it probable that, having hypothetically picked up from Christians
the notion of a moral Father in heaven, their 'priests' and initiators
instantly disseminated that idea over most of the continent, and
introduced it into their most secret and most conservative ceremonies?
Would they be likely to restrict so novel a piece of European
information to the men? Mr. Dawson, in his 'Aborigines of Australia'
(p. 51), writes: 'The recent custom of providing food for it (a
corpse) is derided by intelligent old aborigines as "white fellows'
gammon"!' Thus do they estimate novelties! Yet in Mr. Tylor's theory
it is the most conservative class of all, the medicine-men and learned
elders--everywhere rivals and opponents of Christian doctrine--who
pick up the European idea of a good, powerful father or master, borrow
a missionary name for him (we have shown that the name, Baiame, is
not of missionary origin), and introduce him in precisely the secret
heart of the mysteries. This knowledge is hidden, under terrible
penalties, from women and children: to what purpose? Do missionaries
teach only the old rams of the flock, and neglect the ewes and lambs?
Obviously the women and children must know any secret of divine names
and attributes imparted by missionaries. Again, it is not probable
that having recently borrowed a new idea from the whites the blacks
would elaborately hide it from its authors, the Europeans. So well is
it hidden that, till he was formally initiated, Mr. Howitt had no
suspicion of its existence.[27]

Mr. Tylor may rest in his hypothesis of borrowing, but for the reasons
assigned we think it impossible in our, and his, selected North
American cases, and inconceivable as an explanation of the Australian
phenomena.

Finally, Mr. Tylor candidly adduces a case in which Mr. Dawson, taking
great and acknowledged trouble to collect evidence, learned from the
blacks that they had believed in a benevolent being, Pirnmeheal,
'whose voice is the thunder,' 'before they knew of the existence of
Europeans,' who 'have given them a dread of Pirnmeheal.'[28] We add Mr.
Howitt's testimony to a supreme being ruling 'from Omeo to Shoalhaven
River, from the coast to Yass Gundagai,' concerning whom 'old men
strenuously maintained that it was so before the white men came,' they
themselves, now aged, having only learned the secret when they were
initiated 'and made men' at about the age of fourteen.[29] In the
same essay of 1885[30] Mr. Howitt tells of a native whose grandfather
initiated him as to an all-seeing personality, Bunjil, 'up there,' who
would mark his conduct. 'This was said before the white men came to
Melbourne' (1835). Bunjil, said William Beiruk, a black, was called
'our father' 'before white men came to Melbourne.'

I might give other evidence in favour of the unborrowed character of
Australian belief in some such being as Baiame. Thus Mrs. Langloh
Parker, the careful collector of 'Australian Legendary Tales,'[31] was
herself interested in the question. She approached the subject as a
disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who allows hardly a germ of religion
to the Australians. On hearing what she did hear, as to Baiame, from
the tribesmen, she asked one of them whether the idea was not borrowed
from Europeans. The old warrior answered that if it were so the young
men would know most about Baiame. But they know nothing, apparently
because the old rites of initiation have fallen into disuse. Nor are
they much more familiar with Christian doctrine. This black man had
logic in him. Mrs. Langloh Parker came, contrary to her prepossessions,
to the same opinion as our best authority, Mr. Howitt, that the
Australian belief is unborrowed.

This lady, who has taken very great pains in criticising and collecting
her evidence, kindly sent me an essays of Mr. Manning's from 'The
Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales,' vol. xvi. p. 159,
1883. Mr. Manning was an early settler in the north border of the
southern colony. About 1832 he was in Europe, and met Goethe, whose
undiminished curiosity, he being then about eighty-five, induced him
to bid Mr. Manning examine Australian beliefs. He did, but lost his
notes, made in 1845-1848. In these notes, which he later recovered,
Mr. Manning used Christian terminology, instead of making a verbatim
report. Struck by the certainly singular savage idea of a son (begotten
in some cases, in others a kind of 'emanation') of the superior being,
he employed theological phrases. The son, in his story, sprang from
a liquid like blood, which Boyma (Baiame) placed in a vessel within
a crystal oven. The myth of such a birth, as Mr. Hartland remarks,
is familiar to Zulus and Red Indians.[32] It is therefore not likely
to be of European origin. But Mr. Manning's evidence, despite its
terminology, so far agrees with Mrs. Langloh Parker's account of the
extant Baiame belief as to 'make a case for further inquiry;' so Mr.
Hartland concedes. I ask for no more.[33] Thus Mr. Manning has Ballima,
Mrs. Langloh Parker has Bullimah, for a kind of floral paradise of
souls, very beautifully described in the lady's 'More Australian
Legendary Tales.'

Both authorities mention prayers for the dead; Mrs. Langloh Parker
quotes what Mr. Hartland calls 'very interesting funeral rites and
prayers for the dead.' He adds: 'We want to be assured whether these
are usual, by means of an accurate description of the customary
ceremonies, and that she does not give us.' I shall make inquiry; but
what does it matter whether the rites, in the overthrow of native
manners, are now usual or not? Baiame is unknown to the new generation,
as we have seen. Prayers to him, then, cannot be usual. The point is
that Mr. Manning in 1845, and Mrs. Langloh Parker in 1898, both mention
the prayers for the dead, certainly not borrowed from Protestants.
There is a similar account, only that of an unnamed runaway convict
who lived with the black fellows in North-Western Australia.[34] By a
mythical contradiction, the soul of the hero Eerin, prayed for in Mrs.
Langloh Parker's tale, now inhabits a little bird.

Another curious point needs to be considered by the advocates of the
theory of borrowing. Mr. Hartland offers some deserved censures on Mr.
Manning's terminology in his report of Australian religion (1845-1848).
Mr. Manning says: 'They believe in the existence of a Son of God, equal
with him in omniscience, and but slightly inferior to his Father in
any attribute. Him they call "Grogoragally." His divine office is to
watch over all the actions of mankind, and to bring to life the dead
to appear before the judgment seat of his Father, who alone pronounces
the awful judgment of eternal happiness in heaven (Ballima) or eternal
misery in "Oorooma" (hell), which is the place of everlasting fire
(gumby). The Son ... acts as mediator for their souls to the great God,
to whom the good and bad actions of all are known.' As Mr. Hartland
truly says, 'this is not an accurate scientific account.' Even Mr.
Manning's 'capital letters' are censured.

Probably the native theologian really said something like this: 'Boyma'
(Baiame) big man; very budgery man. Him sit on big glass stone. Him son
Grogoragally can see everything and go everywhere. See budgery man,
like him; see bad man, plenty too much devil devil. Likes budgery man;
no likes bad man: he growl too much. Budgery man die, Grogoragally tell
Boyma; Boyma say, 'Take him Ballima way, plenty budgery place.' Bad
man die; Boyma say, 'Take him Oorooma way, plenty too hot, him growl
there.' Grogoragally plenty strong, him not so strong as Boyma.

This, or something like this, would be the actual statement of the
dusky theologian. It is easily rendered into Mr. Manning's terminology;
but at the same time the native, in his rude _lingua franca_, or pidgin
English, could hardly do justice to his creed. It _was_ his creed;
Mr. Hartland himself recognises the original character of the native
version of the Supernatural Birth.[35]

Here are certainly 'Biblical analogies,' as Mr. Tylor recognises, but
they are as certainly unborrowed.

Now let us fancy that a traveller, not a Greek scholar, is storm-driven
to a hitherto unknown island. He finds a race of heathen white men.
He describes their religion. 'Despite their polytheism, they have
certainly been visited by Christian missionaries, or are descended
from a Christian colony. They believe in a supreme being whom they call
Zeus. He has a son named Apollon or Phœbus Apollon, who is all-knowing
and all-seeing. He acts as a kind of mediator between Zeus and men, to
whom, as one of the native hymns says, he "delivers the counsels of
the Father, and his unerring will." This Apollo is consulted through
an hysterical woman, who lives in a cave. After being convulsed, like
other savage mediums, she speaks in a kind of verse. Her advice is
often obscure and ambiguous, but generally of a moral tendency.

'This son of Zeus is believed to be the only god who really knows the
future and the will of his father. There is another son, Hermes, one of
whose duties is to conduct the souls of the dead into the presence of
their judge, who is not Zeus, but another god.

'There is also a son of Apollo, whom I take to be only a kind of double
of that god; he sometimes appears to his worshippers as a serpent: his
name is Asclepius.

'This reminds us of what Winslow writes about the Red Indians of New
England. They have a supreme being, Kiehtan, whose son, Hobamok,
appears in their assemblies as a serpent. Ridley has the same story
about the blacks of Australia. I infer, then, that the natives of this
island have inherited or been taught some elements of Christianity, as
in the case of Apollo, the mediator between Zeus and men; and Hermes,
the Guide of Souls as they call him, _psychopompos_ in their language.
But they have mixed up all this with degrading superstitions.'

Of course our traveller has arrived among Greeks, and quotes the
Homeric hymn to Apollo. But the Greeks, being prior to Christianity,
did not borrow from it, as our traveller supposes. On the other hand,
the Greek beliefs which he describes resemble Australian and American
beliefs more closely than Australian and American beliefs resemble
the creed taught by missionaries. Yet neither Mr. Tylor nor any
other friend of the borrowing theory asserts that the Australians or
Americans borrowed their tenets from Greece.

The truth seems to be that where a supreme being is regarded as too
remote and impassive, he is naturally supplied with a deputy. Ahone has
Oki, Kiehtan has Hobamok, Boyma has Grogoragally, Baiame has Tundun,
or in places Daramulun; Nyankupon, in West Africa, has Bobowissi.
Sometimes, as in the Australian Noorele's case, these active deputies
are sons of the supreme being. No borrowing is needed to explain ideas
so natural to early men, believing in a supreme being remote and
retired, little concerned with mundane affairs, and acting through a
deputy or deputies. In other cases, as of the Finnish Num, or the Zulu
Unkulunkulu, or the Algonquin Atahocan, the being is quite neglected in
favour of spirits who receive sacrifices of meat or grease. Human minds
work on similar lines, without borrowing, which is only alleged in the
case of Christianity to account for the beliefs which do not fit the
'ghost theory' of modern speculators.

The essential point of Mr. Manning's report, injured as it is by his
impossible terminology, is the extreme secrecy maintained on these
points by his savage informants. They used to believe that the world
would perish if the women heard of their dogmas. Thus a man said to
Mr. Howitt (whose competence as a witness is indisputable): 'If a
woman were to hear these things, or hear what we tell the boys, I
would kill her.'[36] One of Mr. Manning's witnesses slunk 'into a
wooden fireplace,' whence he whispered his beliefs. He had previously
examined doors and windows in search of listeners. A man who reported
these creeds would, if they became divulged among the women, be obliged
to kill his wife.

If the religious ideas were borrowed from missionaries, the women would
know them as well as the men. They would not be reserved for initiates
at the mysteries, through which Mr. Howitt derived his most esoteric
knowledge of creeds, whereof, in 1881, he was absolutely ignorant.[37]

If the beliefs were of missionary origin, the young men, not the old
men, would know most about Baiame. For similar beliefs in North-West
Central Queensland I may cite Mr. Both.[38] The being Mulkari is
described by Mr. Both as I a benevolent, omnipresent, supernatural
being; anything incomprehensible.' 'Mulkari is the supernatural power
who makes everything which the blacks cannot otherwise account for;
he is a good, beneficent person, and never kills any one.' His home
is in the skies. He was also a medicine-man, has the usual low myths
about him, and invented magic. So writes Dr. Both, who knows the local
Pitta Pitta language--and is not a missionary. Dr. Both is pursuing
his researches, and his remarks are only cited provisionally, awaiting
confirmation.

Sometimes European observers do not see the trend of their own reports.
In 1845 Mr. Eyre described 'the origin of creation 'as narrated to him
by Australian blacks on the Murring River. A being, Noorele, with three
unbegotten sons, lives up among the clouds. He is 'all powerful and
of benevolent nature. He made the earth, trees, water, &c. He receives
the souls (_ladko_ = shades, _umbra_) of the natives, who join him in
the skies and will never die again.' Yet Mr. Eyre adds: 'A Deity, a
Great First Cause, can hardly be said to be acknowledged.'[39] What is
Noorele if not a 'Great First Cause'?

Among some tribes Bunjil, merely a title of authority, meaning master,
lord, headman, is a name of the superior being. Abundance of the
mythology of Bunjil, often ludicrous or degrading, the being showing as
a supernormal medicine-man, may be found in Mr. Brough Smyth's great
collections.[40] But no evidence can be better than that of native
poetry, which proves a higher aspect of Bunjil.

A Woiworung bard of old made a song which moved an aged singer to
tears by 'the melancholy which the words conveyed to him.' It was an
'inspired' song, for the natives, like ourselves, would think Tennyson
inspired and Tupper not so. Usually 'the spirits' inspire singers; this
song was inspired by Bunjil himself, who '"rushes down" into the heart
of the singer,' just as Apollo did of old. It is a dirge of the native
race:

    We go all!
    The bones of all
    Are shining white.
    In this Dulur land!
    The rushing noise
    Of Bunjil, our Father,
    Sings in my breast,
    This breast of mine![41]

The missionaries do not inspire these songs. They put them down. 'The
white man,' says Mr. Howitt, 'knows little or nothing of the black
fellows' songs.' One of Mr. Manning's informants (1845) was angry when
asked for the Hymn to Baiame (Boyma). He said that Mr. Manning knew too
much already.

I have dwelt specially on Australia, because there, as the natives do
not worship ancestral spirits (the names of the dead are tabooed),
their superior being cannot have been evolved out of ghost worship.
I have expressly avoided the evidence of missionaries, except the
early Jesuits, because missionaries are believed by some writers to
be biassed on this point, though, in fact, on other points they are
copiously cited by anthropologists. As Mr. Tylor finds the saintly
and often martyred Jesuits of 1620-1660 worth quoting, I have
therefore admitted Father Le Jeune's testimony to the existence of
Atahocan before their arrival in America, with Father Brebeuf's Oki,
or 'un Oki,' whose anger is feared and who sanctions treaties. It
is impossible to me to understand how the savages could borrow from
Europeans the beliefs which the Europeans found extant when they
arrived. I have not touched the case of Africa. In 'The Making of
Religion' (pp. 222-228), I argued against Sir A. B. Ellis's elaborate
theory of borrowing a god, in the case of the Tshi-speaking races. I
did not know that this exact writer had repudiated his theory, which
was also rejected by Miss Mary Kingsley.

As to Australia, in face of the evidence (which settled Mr. Howitt's
doubts as to the borrowing of these ideas) can any one bring a native
of age and credit who has said that Baiame, under any name, was
borrowed from the whites? Mr. Palmer is 'perfectly satisfied' that
'none of these ideas were derived from the whites.' He is speaking
of the tribes of the Gulf of Carpentaria, far away indeed from
Victoria and New South Wales. There is no greater authority among
anthropologists than Waitz, and Waitz rejects the hypothesis that the
higher Australian religious beliefs were borrowed from Christians.[42]

To sum up, we have proved, by evidence of 1558, 1586, 1612-16, and
1633, that a sort of supreme creative being was known in North America
before any missionary influence reached the regions where he prevailed.
As to the Australian god Baiame, we have shown out of the mouth of Mr.
Tylor's own witness, Mr. Hale, that Baiame preceded the missionaries
in the region where literary evidence of his creed first occurs. We
have given Mr. Hale's opinion as to the improbability of borrowing.
We have left it to Mr. Tylor to find the missionary who, before 1840,
translated 'Creator' by the Kamilaroi word 'Baiame' while showing the
difficulty--I think the impossibility--of discovering any Kamilaroi
philologist before Mr. Threlkeld. And Mr. Threlkeld certainly did not
introduce Baiame! We have proved that, contrary to Mr. Tylor's theory
of what a missionary can do, Mr. Threlkeld could not introduce his
own names for God, Eloi and Jehovah-ka, into Kamilaroi practice. We
note the improbability that highly conservative medicine-men would
unanimously thrust a European idea into their ancient mysteries.
We have observed that by the nature of Mr. Tylor's theory, the
hypothetically borrowed divine names and attributes must (if taken over
from missionaries) have been well known to the women and children from
whom they are concealed under dreadful penalties. We have demonstrated
the worthlessness of negative evidence by proving that the facts were
discovered, on initiation, by a student (Mr. Howitt), confessedly in
the first rank, though he, during many years, had been ignorant of
their existence. We show that the ideas of age and paternity, in an
object of reverence, are natural and habitual to Australian natives,
and stood in no need of being borrowed. We suggest that the absence
of prayer to a powerful being is fatal to the theory of borrowing. We
show that direct native evidence utterly denies the borrowing of divine
names and attributes, and strenuously asserts that before Europeans
came to Melbourne (1835) they were revealed in the secret doctrine of
ancient initiatory rites. This evidence again removed the doubts which
Mr. Howitt had entertained on the point, and Mr. Palmer and Mr. Dawson
agree with Mr. Howitt, Mr. Ridley, Mr. Günther, and Mr. Greenway, all
experts, all studying the blacks on the spot. In the study, Waitz is of
the same opinion. Australian religion is unborrowed.

It is rare, in anthropological speculations, to light on a topic in
which verifiable dates occur. The dates of the arrivals of missionaries
and other Europeans, the dates of Mr. Hale's book, of Mr. Threlkeld's
books, of Mr. Ridley's primer, are definite facts, not conjectures in
the air. While this array of facts remains undemolished, science cannot
logically argue that the superior beings of low savage belief are
borrowed from Christian teachers and travellers. That idea is disproved
also by the esoteric and hidden nature of the beliefs, and by the
usual, though not universal, absence of prayer. The absence of prayer
again, and of sacrifice, proves that gods not bribed or implored were
not invented as powerful givers of good things, because good things
were found not to be procurable by magic.

This condition of belief is not what a European, whatever his bias,
expects to find. He does not import this kind of ideas. If they are all
misreports, due to misunderstandings in America and Australia from 1558
to 1898, what is the value of anthropological evidence? It ought to be
needless to add that when good observers like Miss Kingsley find traces
of Jesuit or other missionary teaching in regions, as Africa or Canada,
where Jesuits actually taught in the past, I accept their decision.[43]
My arguments against the theory of borrowing apply chiefly to cases
where the beliefs reported were found already extant by the first white
observers, to tribes where missionaries like Mr. Threlkeld could not
introduce their names for deity, and to tribes which jealously conceal
their theology from the whites.



[1] _Natives of Central Australia_, London, 1899.

[2] With a case of ignoring the evidence I deal in the following essay,
_Magic and Religion_.

[3] _Op. cit_. p. 284.

[4] Le Jeune, _Relations_, 1633, p. 17.

[5] _Ibid_., 1637, p. 49.

[6] _Prim. Cult_. ii. 310.

[7] _Historic of Travaile into Virginia_. By William Strachey, Gent, (a
companion of Captain Smith). Hakluyt Society. Date _circ_.1612-1616.
See _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. xx-xxxix, 1899.

[8] _Prim. Cult_. ii. p. 308.

[9] _Prim. Cult_. ii. pp. 309, 310 (1873 and 1891).

[10] _Prim. Cult_. ii. p. 308.

[11] Howitt, _Journal of Anthropological Institute_, 1884, 1885.

[12] _United States Exploring Expedition. Ethnology and Philology_ p.
110.

[13] Ridley, _Kamilaroi Vocabularies_, p. 17 (1875). Also in an earlier
Grammar, 1866.

[14] _The Life and Adventures of William Buckley_, 1852, pp. 40-48.

[15] Howitt, _J. A. I_., 1885. The Kurnai tribe.

[16] Backhouse, _Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies_,
1843, p. 555. Compare Threlkeld, _An Australian Language_, 1892, p. 47.
This is a reprint of Mr. Threlkeld's early works of 1831-1857.

[17] _Op. cit_. p. 47.

[18] _Journal Anthrop. Inst_., 1885.

[19] He was supposed to live on an island, on fish which came at his
call, probably a childlike answer to a tedious questioner.

[20] _Exploring Expedition of U. S_., 1846, p. 110.

[21] _Gurre Kamilaroi, or Kamilaroi Sayings_. Sydney, 1856. It is a
scarce little book, with illustrations and Bible stories.

[22] Howitt, _Journal Anthrop. Institute, ut supra._

[23] Greenway, _J. A. I_. vii. p. 243.

[24] Collins, _Account of the Colony of New South Wales_, 1798, vol.
ii. p. 544.

[25] _J. A. I._. xvi. pp. 49, 50.

[26] _Op. cit_., 1885, p. 54.

[27] For concealment from women and children, see Howitt, _J. A. I_.
xiii. p. 192.

[28] Dawson, _Aborigines of Australia_, p. 49.

[29] _J. A. I_. xiii. 1885, p. 142.

[30] _Op. cit_. p. 194.

[31] Two volumes. Nutt.

[32] _Legend of Perseus_, i. 97.

[33] _Folk Lore_, March 1899, p. 55.

[34] Ridley, _J. A. I._, 1872, p. 282.

[35] _Folk Lore_, March 1899, pp. 52, 53.

[36] _J. A. I_. vol. xiv. p. 310.

[37] See his and Mr. Fison's _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, 1881.

[38] _North-West Central Queensland Aborigines_, pp. 14, 36, 116, 153,
158, 165.

[39] Eyre, vol. ii. pp. 355-357.

[40] _Aborigines of Victoria._

[41] Arranged in lines from the literal translation, preserving the
native idiom. Howitt, _J. A. I_. vol. xvi. pp. 330, 331.

[42] _Anthropologie_, vi. p. 798.




III

_MAGIC AND RELIGION_


'The sin of witchcraft is as the sin of rebellion.' The idea which
inspires this text probably is that a person who seeks to obtain his
ends by witchcraft is rebelling against the deity or deities through
whom alone these ends should be sought. Witchcraft is also an insult
and injury to the official priests, who regard the witch as the surgeon
regards the bone-setter, or as the geologist regards the 'dowser' or
water-finder who uses the divining-rod.

Magic or witchcraft falls into two main classes. The former is magic of
the sort used by people who think that things accidentally like each
other influence each other. You find a stone shaped like a yam, and you
sow it in the yam plot You find a stone like a duck, and expect to have
good duck-shooting while you carry the stone about in a bag. In the
same way the part influences the whole; you burn some of a man's hair,
and so he catches a fever. Imitation works in the same manner; you
imitate the emergence of grubs from the larvæ, and you expect grubs to
emerge.

All magic of this kind is wrought by material objects, sticks, stones,
hair, and so forth, which sometimes have been 'charmed' by songs
chanted over them. Among the Arunta of Central Australia, in many
respects a backward people, we do hear of an 'evil spirit' influencing
the material object which has been charmed.[1] We also hear of spirits
which instruct men in medical magic. But, as a rule, the magic is
materialistic. It really does produce effects, by suggestion: a man
dies and a woman is won, if they know that magic is being worked to
kill or woo.

The second sort of magic acts by spells which constrain spirits or
gods to do the will of the magician. This magic involves itself in
religion when the magical ceremonies are, so to speak, only symbolic
prayers expressed in a kind of sign-language. But if the idea is to
put constraint by spells on a god or spirit, then the intention is
magical and rebellious. Though the official priest of a savage god may
use magic in his appeal to that deity, he is not a wizard. It is the
unofficial practitioner who is a witch, just as the unqualified medical
practitioner is a quack. In the same way if a minister of the kirk
was clairvoyant or second-sighted that was a proof of godliness and
inspiration. But if a lay parishioner was second-sighted, he or she was
in danger of the stake as a witch or wizard.

These, briefly stated, are the points of contrast and points of contact
between magic and religion. The question has recently been raised by
Mr. Frazer, in the new edition of his 'Golden Bough,' whether magic
has not everywhere preceded religion. Have men not attempted to secure
weather and everything else to their desire by magic, before they
invented gods, and prayed to them for what magic, as they learned by
experience, failed to provide'?

This question cannot be historically determined. If we find a race
which has magic but no religion, we cannot be certain that it did not
once possess a religion of which it has despaired. I once knew a man
who, as a child, suffered from toothache. He prayed for relief: it did
not come. He at once, about the age of eight, abandoned religion. What
a child may do, in the way of despair of religion, a childlike race may
do. Therefore, if we find a race with magic but without religion, we
cannot scientifically say that the race has never possessed a religion.
Thus the relative priority of religion or magic cannot be ascertained
historically.

Again, all depends on our definition of religion, if we are to pursue
a speculation rather airy and unbottomed on facts. Mr. Frazer defines
religion as 'a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man
which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of
human life.'[2] I But clearly this definition does not include all
that we usually mean by religion. If men believe in a potent being who
originally made or manufactured the nature of things or most things
(I am warned not to use the word 'creator'), that is an idea so far
religious that it satisfies, by the figment of a supernatural agent,
the speculative faculty. Clearly the belief in such a being is a germ
whence may spring the ideas of duty towards, and an affection for, the
being. Nobody can deny that these are religious ideas, though they do
not appeal in Mr. Frazer's definition. The believers in such a being,
even if they never ask him for anything, cannot be called irreligious.
At a period of his life when Coleridge never prayed, he would have been
much and not unjustly annoyed if Mr. Frazer had called him irreligious.
A man may believe in God, and yet trust him too utterly to address him
in petitions for earthly goods and gear. 'Thy Will be Done' may be his
only prayer; yet he does not lack religion. He only lacks it in the
sense of Mr. Frazer's definition.

If that definition is granted, Mr. Frazer is prepared to produce a
backward race, houseless, without agriculture, metals, domestic
animals, and without religion in Mr. Frazer's sense. They have magic,
but they have no religion, says Mr. Frazer, who presently informs us
that 1 the first-born child of every woman was eaten by the tribe as
part of a religious ceremony.'[3] So they have a religion, and a bloody
religion it is.

That people is the Australian, among whom, 'while magic is universally
practised, religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of
the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown.'[4] 'Nobody dreams of
propitiating gods or spirits by prayer or sacrifice.'

We are presently to see that Mr. Frazer gives facts which contradict
his own statement. But first I must cite all that he says about
Australian religion. 'In the south-eastern parts of Australia, where
the conditions of life in respect of climate, water, and vegetation
are more favourable than elsewhere, some faint beginnings of religion
appear in the shape of a slight regard for the comfort of departed
friends. Thus some Victorian tribes are said to have kindled fires
near the bodies of their dead in order to warm the ghost, but "the
recent custom of providing food for it is derided by the intelligent
old aborigines as 'white fellows' gammon."'[5] Some tribes in this
south-eastern region are further reported to believe in a supreme
spirit, who is regarded sometimes as a benevolent, but more frequently
as a malevolent, being.[6] Brewin, the supreme being of the Kurnai,
was at first identified by two intelligent members of the tribe with
Jesus Christ, but on further reflection they thought he must be the
devil.[7] But whether viewed as gods or devils it does not seem that
these spirits were ever worshipped.[8] It is worth observing that
in the same districts which thus exhibit the germs of religion, the
organisation of society and the family has also made the greatest
advance. The cause is probably the same in both cases--namely, a
more plentiful supply of food due to the greater fertility of the
soil.[9] On the other hand, in the parched and barren regions of
Central Australia, where magic attains its highest importance, religion
seems to be entirely wanting.[10] The traces of a higher faith in
Australia, where they occur, are probably sometimes due to European
influence. 'I am strongly of opinion,' says one who knew the aborigines
well, 'that those who have written to show that the blacks had some
knowledge of God, practised prayer, and believed in places of reward
and punishment beyond the grave, have been imposed upon, and that
until they had learned something of Christianity from missionaries
and others the blacks had no beliefs or practices of the sort. Having
heard the missionaries, however, they were not slow to invent what I
may call kindred statements with aboriginal accessories with a view
to please and surprise the whites.'[11] Sometimes, too, the reported
belief of the natives in a great or good spirit may rest merely on a
misunderstanding. Mr. Lorimer Fison informs me (in a letter dated June
3, 1899) that a German missionary, Mr. Siebert, resident in the Dieri
tribe of Central Australia, has ascertained that their Mura Mura, which
Mr. Gason explained to be the Good Spirit,[12] is nothing more or less
than the ancestors in the 'dream times.' There are male and female
Mura Mura--husbands, wives, and children--just as among the Dieri at
the present day. Mr. Fison adds: 'The more I learn about savage tribes,
the more I am convinced that among them the ancestors grow into gods.'

This is all that Mr. Frazer has here to say about the religious belief
of the Australians. He has found, in 'the museum of the past,' a people
with abundance of magic, yet with no religion, or not enough to affect
his theory that religion was everywhere second in order of time to
magic. I am very content to meet him on Australian ground. There we
find abundance of testimony to the existence of a belief speculative,
moral, and emotional, but not practical. The beings of this belief
are not propitiated by sacrifice, and very seldom by prayer, but
they are makers, friends, and judges. Mr. Tylor accepts (I think)
the evidence for the beliefs as at present found, but presumes many
of their characteristics to be of European importation. Against that
theory I have argued in the preceding essay, giving historical dates.
Mr. Frazer omits and ignores the evidence for the beliefs. He denies
to the Australians more than 'some faint beginnings of religion,' and
puts down 'traces of a higher faith' as 'probably sometimes due' (and
perhaps it sometimes is) 'to European influence.' For this theory Mr.
Curr is cited: 'Having heard the missionaries, they were not slow to
invent what I call kindred statements with aboriginal accessories, with
a view to please and surprise the whites.'[13]

To please and surprise the whites the natives concealed their
adaptations of Christian ideas in the mysteries, to which white men
are very seldom, or were very seldom, admitted! Is this likely? I
believe that the exclusive rule is now relaxed where the natives
are practically paid to exhibit.[14] One Bora was under European
patronage, and the old men and children were fed on European supplies.
But when Mr. Howitt was initiated by the Kurnai, and so first learned
the secret of their religion,' the old men.... desired to be satisfied
that I had in very deed been fully initiated by the Brajerak black
fellows in their Kuringal.' He therefore retired to a lonely spot,
'far from the possibility of a woman's presence,' and exhibited the
token of his previous initiation by the Murrings. Hitherto 'long as
the Kurnai had known me, these special secrets of the tribe had been
kept carefully from me by all but two,' one of whom was now dead. The
inmost secret was the belief in Mungan-ngaur, 'the Great Father of
the tribe, who was once on earth, and now lives in the sky, [he] is
rather the beneficent father, and the kindly though severe headman of
the whole tribe, than the malevolent wizard, such as are other of the
supernatural beings believed in by the Australian blacks.'[15]

Mr. Frazer cites Mr. Howitt thus: 'Some tribes in this south-eastern
region are further reported to believe in a supreme spirit, who is
regarded sometimes as a benevolent but more frequently as a malevolent
being.'[16] What has become of Mr. Howitt's evidence _after_ initiation
by the Kurnai, evidence published in 1885? How can the blacks invent
beliefs to please the whites when they only reveal them to Mr. Howitt,
after he has produced a bull roarer as a token of initiation? Mr.
Frazer then writes: 'Brewin, the supreme being of the Kurnai, was
at first identified by two intelligent members of the tribe with
Jesus Christ, but on further reflection they thought he must be the
devil.' This is cited from a work of 1881, Messrs. Fison and Howitt's
'Kamilaroi and Kurnai' (p. 255). It must have escaped even Mr. Frazer's
erudition that Mr. Howitt says: 'When I wrote of Brewin in my paper
on "Some Australian Beliefs" I was not aware of the doctrines as to
Mungan-ngaur. These the Kurnai carefully concealed from me until I
learned them at the Jeraeil, or mysteries.'[17]

Had Mr. Frazer observed this remark of Mr. Howitt's, he could not
have cited, without comment or correction, Mr. Howitt's earlier and
confessedly erroneous opinion that 'Brewin' is 'the supreme being of
the Kurnai.'[18] To Mr. Howitt's correction in 1885 of his mistake of
1881 Mr. Frazer, as far as I observe, makes no allusion.

Mr. Frazer must either have overlooked all the evidence for an
Australian belief ruinous to his theory of the origin of religion
(ruinous if Australia represents the earliest known stages of
religion), or he must have reasons, not produced, for thinking all that
evidence too worthless to deserve confutation or even mention. We are
anxious to know his reasons, for, on other matters, he freely quotes
our witnesses. Yet I cannot think Mr. Frazer consistently so severe as
to Australian evidence. He has a picturesque theory that the origin of
the Passover was a rite in which masked men ran about through Hebrew
towns in the night, butchering all the first born of Israel.[19] No
people, we exclaim, ever did such a thing! In proof of the existence of
the custom Mr. Frazer adduces an Australian parallel: 'In some tribes
of New South Wales the first-born child of every woman was eaten by
the tribe as part of a religious ceremony.'[20] Mr. Frazer's authority
is a communication by Mr. John Moore Davis, and was published in 1878,
twenty-three years ago, by Mr. Brough Smyth. Here is what Mr. Davis
says: 'In parts of N. S. W., such as Bathurst, Goulburn, the Lachlan,
or Macquarie, it was customary _long ago_ for the first-born of every
lubra to be eaten by the tribe, as part of a religious ceremony, and I
recollect a black fellow who had, in compliance with the custom, been
thrown when an infant on the fire, but was rescued and brought up by
some stock-keepers who happened accidentally to be passing at the time.
The marks of the burns were distinctly visible on the man when I saw
him....'

The evidence is what the Society for Psychical Research calls 'remote.'
In 1878 the event was already 'long ago.' The testimony is from we know
not how remote a hand. The black sufferer, as a baby at the time, could
not remember the facts. The stock-keepers who were present are not
named, nor do we even know whether Mr. Davis was informed by them, or
heard their story at third or fourth hand. We do not know whether they
correctly interpreted the alleged sacrifice, in a religious ceremony
(by a people said to be almost or quite irreligious), of all the
first-born children of women. Mr. Frazer has circulated inquiries as to
Australian customs, and has published the results in the 'Journal of
the Anthropological Institute.'[21] He does not appeal to the answers
in corroboration of Mr. Davis's remarkable story.[22]

Imbued with the superstition of psychical research, I once investigated
the famous Australian tale of Fisher's ghost (1826). I sent for
the Court archives (the ghost led to a trial for murder), and I
received these and a contemporary plan of the scene of the murder
and the apparition. These documents left me doubtful about the
ghost of Fisher.[23] May I not say that similar researches and good
corroborative evidence are needed before we accept a settler's tale
of an Australian _sacrifice_, 'long ago,' as confirming a theory of
a Hebrew _yearly massacre_ of all the first-born? Moreover, if Mr.
Moore's evidence is good as to a sacrifice, why is the latest evidence
of Mr. Howitt and all my other witnesses as to Australian religion not
worth mentioning? Why is it so bad that Mr. Frazer goes back to Mr.
Howitt's evidence of 1881, before he knew the secret, and is silent
about Mr. Howitt's evidence of 1885?

We may quote Sir Alfred Lyall: 'One effect of the accumulation of
materials has been to encourage speculative generalisations, because it
has provided a repertory out of which one may make arbitrary selection
of examples and precedents to suit any theory.' Has Mr. Frazer escaped
this error?

I cannot think that he has escaped, and the error is fatal. He cites
Mr. Howitt, Mr. Palmer, Mr. Oldfield, Mr. Dawson, and Mr. Cameron (whom
I am about to quote), all of whom speak to a native religion of the
kind for which I contend. Their witness is enough for him in other
matters, but as to this matter these witnesses, for some reason, are
absolutely ignored. I myself have omitted the affirmative evidence
of Mr. Oldfield and Mr. Foelsche as to religion, because I think
it contaminated, although in part corroborated. But my witnesses,
all cited for other points by Mr. Frazer, are not even mentioned on
the point where, if their reports be correct, they seem rather to
invalidate his central theory--that religion was invented in the
despair of magic.

As to that despair, it does not exist. The religions of Babylon,
Greece, and Egypt lived side by side with superabundant magic. The
Australians, when their magic fails, merely say that some other black
fellow is working stronger counter-magic.[24]

However, that is a different question. The question at present is, Why
does Mr. Frazer not cite and confute the evidence of witnesses, whom
he quotes on other points, evidence fatal to his theory? Why does he
ignore it? Among so many witnesses, distrustful of facts that surprise
them, anxious to explain by borrowing, all cannot be biassed. If they
were, why is not the testimony of witnesses with the opposite bias also
discredited or ignored? Why is it welcomed? Mr. Frazer prefers the
opinion of Mr. Siebert, a German missionary, that the Dieri propitiate
ancestral spirits, to the opinion of Mr. Gason, that the being of
their belief is a good spirit who made them. I do not know which of
these gentlemen is right; possibly both views are held by different
native informants. But Mr. Siebert's ancestral spirits come through
Mr. Fison, who says: 'The more I learn about savage tribes, the more I
am convinced that among them ancestors grow into Gods '--so natural a
process where the names of the dead are tabooed!

    'Oh no, we never mention them,
    Their names are never heard.'

So they grow into gods! Mr. Fison is a Spencerian; so, for all that I
know, may Mr. Siebert be. If so, both have a theory and a bias, yet
they are cited. It is only witnesses who hold that the Australians,
certainly not, as a rule, ancestor worshippers, believe in a kind of
god, who are not deemed worthy of mention on this point, though quite
trustworthy on other points.

I cannot understand this method. The historian has a theory. He
searches for contradictory facts. The chemist or biologist does not
fail to mention facts hostile to his theory.

We are not asking Mr. Frazer to accept the testimony of Mr. Howitt,
Mr. Cameron, Mr. Ridley, Mr. Greenway, Mr. Gason, Mr. Hale, Archdeacon
Günther, the Benedictines of Nursia, Mr. Dawson, Mr. Eyre, Mr. Roth,
Mrs. Langloh Parker; or to accept the opinion of Waitz, Mr. Howitt,
and others as to unborrowed Australian religion. Their testimony may
be erroneous; when it is proved erroneous I shall abandon it. But
perhaps anthropologists may be allowed to be curious as to the reasons
for which this and similar testimony is ignored. The reason cannot be
that there is contradictory evidence, for some observers deny magic to
the tribes whom they know.[25] Yet Mr. Frazer has no doubt as to the
prevalence of magic, though one of his witnesses, Mr. Foelsche, gives
no magic, but gives religion. 'Whether viewed as gods or devils,' Mr.
Frazer says of South-East Australian beings, 'it does not seem that
these spirits were ever worshipped.' He has ignored the evidence that
they are worshipped (if the rights of the Bora are worship), but, if
they are not worshipped, so much the worse for his theory. Gods, in
his theory, were invented just to be worshipped. 'To these mighty
beings.... man now addressed himself.... beseeching them of their mercy
to furnish him with all good things....'[26]

As against the correctness of my witnesses I only know the mass of
evidence by white observers who have detected no religion among these
savages. But I do not necessarily accept the negative evidence, because
the beliefs are reported, by the affirmative witnesses, to be guarded
with the utmost secrecy.[27] It is not every inquirer who has the power
of eliciting beliefs which, for many reasons, are jealously guarded.
Many Englishmen or Lowlanders are unable to extract legends of fairies,
ghosts, and second-sight from Gaelic Highlanders. On the other hand,
they are kind enough to communicate to me plenty of their folk-lore.
'The Urkus were very shy and frightened when asked about their
religion,' says Mr. Pope Hennessy in his 'Notes on the Jukos and other
Tribes of the Middle Benæ' (1898).[28]

Thus I prefer the affirmative evidence of Europeans who have won the
confidence of the Australians, and have been initiated, to the denials
of observers less fortunate. As for their theory that the religious
practices, if they exist, are borrowed from Christians, I have stated
my case in the preceding essay. There could be no stronger evidence
than the absence of prayer that the Australian religion is not borrowed.

This argument ought especially to appeal to Mr. Frazer. His definition
of religion is that of Euthyphro, in the Platonic Dialogue of that name.

      _Socrates_. Sacrificing is giving to the Gods, and piety
      is asking from them?

      _Euthyphro_. Yes, Socrates.

      _Socrates_. Upon this view, then, piety is a science of
      asking and giving?

      _Euthyphro_. You understand me capitally, Socrates.

Mr. Frazer agrees with Euthyphro. But if we find that the most backward
race known to us believes in a power, yet propitiates him neither by
prayer nor sacrifice, and if we find, as we do, that in many more
advanced races in Africa and America it is precisely the highest power
which is left impropriated, then we really cannot argue that gods were
first invented as powers who could give good things, on receipt of
other good things, sacrifice and prayer.

Sir Alfred Lyall here agrees with Mr. Frazer. 'The foundation of
natural religion is.... the principle of _Do ut des_' ('I give that
you may give'), 'and the most ingenious researches into the evolution
of primitive ideas will hardly take us beyond or behind it.'[29] My
'researches' do not pretend to be I ingenious.' It is a mere question
of facts. Have Mr. Howitt's tribes the idea of a power, a very great
power, which is interested in conduct, sanctions conduct, but is not
asked for material benefits? Have, or had, all the American and African
peoples whom I have cited a highest power often unconciliated? If
so, why did they invent these beings? Certainly not to play with them
at the game of _Do ut des_. Yet that game was the origin of religion,
according to Sir Alfred and Mr. Frazer. The facts must be mentioned,
must be disproved, before the theory of _Do ut des_ can be established.

Even if we accepted the theory of Euthyphro and of Mr. Frazer it is
beset by difficulties. Religion is the despair of magic, says the
theory. Magic is found by the higher minds to be a failure. Rain is not
produced, nor sunshine, nor food, as a result of magic. Consequently
invisible powers, 'like himself, but far stronger,' are invented by
man. They are immortal, and are asked to take man's immortal spirit
home to them.[30] Yet they are mortal themselves.[31] They are so
dependent on man, these beings which are far stronger, that man
actually has to sacrifice his kings to them annually to keep these
far stronger beings in vigour.[32] I am willing to suppose, with Mr.
Frazer, a very gradual process of evolution in religious thought. Man
began by thinking his own magic all powerful. He found that a failure,
'and came to rest, as in a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a
new system of faith and practice.... a substitute, however precarious,
for that' (magical) 'sovereignty over nature which he had reluctantly
abdicated.' To be sure he had not abdicated, Greek and Babylonic magic
are especially notorious. But let us fancy that man at large but
gradually reached the conception of powers far higher than himself.
They were very limited powers at first: they helped him, but he had to
help them, to the extent, sometimes, of killing his kings annually to
keep them in health. This is Mr. Frazer's position.[33] But if our
Australian evidence is correct, this theory is baseless. That is why
our evidence cannot be neglected.

It is another difficulty that the more man ought to be finding out the
fallacy of magic, the less does he find it out. Mr. Frazer chooses the
Arunta of Central Australia as a people wholly without religion, but
universally magicians. I have frequently read the account of Arunta
magic by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, but I never found that it included
a belief like this: 'A man god.... draws his extraordinary power from a
certain sympathy with nature.' He is defined not as an incarnation of
a god 'of an order different from and superior to man,' but as only a
superior sorcerer where most men are sorcerers. 'He is not merely the
receptacle of a divine spirit.' We have just been told that he is not
the receptacle of a divine spirit at all, and we shall take it to be
so. 'His whole being, body and soul, is so attuned to the harmony of
the world, that a touch of his hand or a turn of his head may send a
thrill vibrating through the universal framework of things.[34]....'

But you will look in vain for this portentous belief among the Arunta,
who, not having found out the fallacy of magic, have not invented
beings superior to man. For this sorcerer of the very highest magic
you have to go to the civilisation of Japan, or to the peoples on the
Congo, much more civilised than the Arunta.[35]These peoples, by Mr.
Frazer's theory, had experience and intelligence enough to find out the
fallacy of magic, and had gods in great plenty. But they have carried
the belief in magic, in a magician much superior to his neighbours, to
a pitch infinitely beyond the Arunta. Yet the Arunta have no gods with
whom to draw comparisons invidious and unfavourable to magicians; they
have, it is said, no gods at all.

Just as magic thus reaches its highest power, according to Mr. Frazer,
where there is most religious competition (while the reverse should
be the case by his theory), so religion flourishes most in Australia,
exactly where, by Mr. Frazer's theory, the circumstances are most
unfavourable to religion and most favourable to magic. Magic, by the
hypothesis, must prosper most, its fallacy must be latest discovered,
it must latest give place to religion, where it appears to be most
successful, and _vice versâ_. Yet Mr. Frazer assures us that in
Australia magic flourishes alone, where every circumstance demonstrates
its failure; and religion begins to blossom precisely where magic must
seem to its devotees a relative success.

Before examining this apparent inconsistency, let us note Mr. Frazer's
inadvertent proof that his irreligious Australians are religious. One
part of the business of magic is to produce rain in season, sun in
season, and consequently an abundant food supply.[36] The Dieri of
Central Australia need especially excellent magic. 'In a dry season
their lot is a hard one.' Having no religion, they ought, of course, to
work by mere materialistic magic, like the Arunta.[37] But they, oddly
enough, 'call upon the spirits of their remote ancestors, which they
call Mura Mura, to grant them power to make a heavy rain,' and then
men inspired by the Mura Mura work magic, or pray in sign-language,
as you please.[38] Now the Mura Mura, the rain-givers, by evidence
which Mr. Frazer himself has published, is 'a Good Spirit,' not a set
of remote ancestral spirits. The witness is Mr. Gason, 'than whom'
(says Mr. Frazer's authority, Dr. Stirling) 'no man living has been
more among blacks or knows more of their ways.' If on this excellent
evidence the Australian Dieri call for rain to a good spirit, then they
have religion, which Mr. Frazer denies. But if Mr. Siebert, a German
missionary, is right (and Mr. Frazer, as we saw, prefers his view to
that of Mr. Gason), then the Mura Mura are only ancestral spirits.

Yet to demand the aid of remote ancestral spirits by prayer is
religion. In fact Mr. Frazer had said of the powerful beings of the
Southern Australians 'it does not seem that these spirits are ever
worshipped.'[39] But prayer is worship, and the Dieri pray, whether
to a good spirit or to ancestral spirits, potent over the sky, and
dwelling therein. If this is not religion, by Mr. Frazer's own
definition, namely 'a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior
to man, which are believed to direct and control the course of nature,'
what is religion?[40] Yet in Australia 'nobody dreams of propitiating
gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice,' says our author.[41] None
the less they 'call upon the spirits of their remote ancestors, which
they call Mura Mura, to grant them power to make a heavy rain.' After
ceremonies magical, or more prayers in sign-language, the Mura Mura
'at once cause clouds to appear in the sky.'[42] They see the signs
which their worshippers are making. Here then we have prayer to 'powers
superior to man' (whether to the Good Spirit or to ancestral spirits),
and that, on evidence collected by Mr. Frazer, occurs in a country
where, fourteen pages earlier, he had assured us that 'nobody thinks
of propitiating gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice.' Sacrifice,
happily, there is none; the Dieri have not degenerated to sacrificing
human victims like the Greeks.

The scene is Central Australia, where 'the pitiless sun beats down
for months together out of a blue and cloudless sky on the parched
and gaping earth.' Consequently rain-making magic must perpetually
prove a failure. Therefore, I presume, the Dieri have been driven
into religion by discovering the fallacy of magic. This would be a
logical argument, but Mr. Frazer's argument is the converse of what I
suggest and contradicts his theory. He dubiously grants the existence
of possible faint 'germs of religion' 'in the south-eastern parts of
Australia, where the conditions of life in respect of climate, water,
and vegetation are more favourable than elsewhere.... It is worth
observing that in the same regions which thus exhibit the germs of
religion, the organisation of society and the family has also made the
greatest advance. The cause is probably the same in both cases--namely,
a more plentiful supply of food due to the greater fertility of the
soil.'[43] Now, according to Mr. Frazer's whole argument, the confessed
failure of magic is the origin of religion.[44] But in Central
Australia, where magic notoriously fails most conspicuously to supply
water and vegetation, magic flourishes to the entire exclusion of
religion, except among the Dieri. On the other hand, in South-Eastern
Australia, where magic, if practised, is abundantly rewarded by more
water and more vegetation, there these proofs of the success of magic
are 'probably the cause' of the germs of religion. But, by Mr. Frazer's
hypothesis, what must be the apparent success of magic in securing 'a
more plentiful supply of food' ought to encourage the belief in magic,
and prevent religion from even germinating. On the other hand, the
successful result of magic (for to what else can a people of sorcerers
attribute the better food supply?) has been 'probably the cause' of the
first germs of religion. How can these things be?

All this time one tribe of Central Australia, the Arunta, remains
resolutely godless 'in spite of all temptations to join denominations'
of a religious character. For the Arunta live in the worst country, the
most rainless, and therefore their magic is most manifestly a failure.
Yet, unlike the natives of South-Eastern Australia (where magic is
most successful), the Arunta cling to magic, and have developed no
religion. If so, as of all rain-making magic theirs is about the
most unsuccessful, they must be very stupid, or they would detect
the failure, and fly to religion, 'a quiet haven after a tempestuous
voyage.' The Arunta are very far from stupid; they have the most
complete and adequate of savage metaphysics. If, then, they have not
approached superior powers, in face of the failure of their magic, it
may be that they have tried and discarded religion. 'Religion for the
women and the children, magic for men' appears to be the Arunta motto:
not so very uncivilised! This I suggest because Mr. Frazer tells us
that at the initiatory rites of the Arunta 'the women and children
believe that the roaring noise' of the wooden slat, tied to a string
and swung about, is 'the voice of the great spirit Twanyirika.'[45] A
great spirit (above all if spelled with capital letters) is rather a
religious conception. 'This spirit, the women are told, lives in wild
and inaccessible regions.... Both uninitiated youths and women are
taught to believe in the existence of Twanyirika.' So write Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen, our only sources.[46]

A brief note is all that these inquirers give in their copious book to
the great spirit. 'This belief,' they say, 'is fundamentally the same
as that found in all Australian tribes.' Now in the tribes reported
on by Mr. Howitt, the spirit whose voice is the sound of the slat or
bull roarer called the _tundun_, and by other names, is the son or
other deputy of Baiame, or some such powerful good being, Mungan-ngaur,
Pirnmeheal, Bunjil, Noorele, or by whatever style he may be called. One
of his duties is to superintend the Bora, or mysteries of the tribes.
The Wiraijuri believe that their type of Twanyirika was destroyed,
for misconduct, by his superior, Baiame. This sinful great spirit was
called Daramulun, but in other tribes Daramulun is apparently the
superior, and goes on existing. He is, says Mr. Howitt, 'the Great
Master,' 'the Father,' the sky dweller, the institutor of society, the
power whose voice 'calls to the rain to fall and make the grass green.'
He is the moral being for whom 'the boys are made so that Daramulun
likes them'--a process involving cries of _nga_ ('good'), so says Mr.
Howitt. His attributes and powers (where he is supreme) 'are precisely
those of Baiame,' who, by Mr. Ridley and many others, is spoken of as
a maker, if I may not say creator. It was in 1854, two years before
publishing his 'Gurre Kamilaroi' (in which 'Baiame' was used for
'God'), that Mr. Ridley asked a Kamilaroi man, 'Do you know Baiame?'
He said, _Kamil zaia zummi Baiame, zaia winuzgulda_ ('I have not seen
Baiame; I have heard, or perceived him. They hear him in the thunder').
Among this tribe Daramulun was not the superior; he was 'author of
disease and medical skill, of mischief and wisdom also; he appears in
the form of a serpent at their assemblies,' like Asclepius and the
American Hobamok.[47] Though Mr. Ridley is a missionary, I venture to
cite him, because his evidence goes back nearly fifty years, to a time
when the blacks had less contact with Europeans. Moreover, Mr. Ridley
is corroborated by Mr. Howitt and other laymen, while Mr. Frazer even
prefers the evidence of a German missionary to that of Mr. Gason, a
lay Englishman of the greatest experience. Mr. Howitt finds, among the
Kurnai, Tundun as the patron of the mysteries and the bull roarer, like
Twanyirika. In Mr. Manning's tribe[48] the same _rôle_ is taken by
Moodgeegally, under the control of Boyma.

We have thus five or six parallels to the Twanyirika of the godless
Arunta, and all are subordinate to a higher power. If then, as Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen tell us, the belief in the Arunta Twanyirika, the
great spirit, 'is fundamentally the same as that found in all the
Australian tribes,' Twanyirika ought to have a much more powerful
benevolent superior. In that case the Arunta would

    Incline to think there is a god,
      Or something very like one,

as Clough says. If so, as they do not propitiate him, they did not
conceive him as a partner in the game of _Do ut des_. But our only
witnesses, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, are extremely reticent about
Twanyirika. Nothing is said about his having a superior, and I assume
that he has none. It seems to follow that he is a mere Mumbo Jumbo, or
bogle, devised by the men to keep the women and children in order.

But in South-Eastern Australia (if I may trust Mr. Howitt's evidence,
to which Mr. Frazer does not here allude) the counterpart of Twanyirika
is a mere servant of a much higher being, everywhere called by
names meaning 'our father.' Therefore either 'our father' Baiame,
Mungan-ngaur, and the rest, have been developed out of a sportive
bugbear like Twanyirika, or Twanyirika (if he really has no superior)
is a rudimentary survival of a belief like that in Mungan-ngaur, and
his subordinate, Tundun. In the former case Twanyirika, a germ of the
more advanced religion of South-Eastern Australia, was not invented
as a power behind nature, who might be useful if propitiated, as in
Mr. Frazer's theory. In the latter case the Arunta do not represent
man prior to religion (as Mr. Frazer holds), but man who has cast off
religion. But Mr. Frazer does not seem to notice this dilemma.

The evidence for what most people call 'religion' among the Australian
natives is so far from scanty that one finds it when looking for
other matters, as I am going to show. True, in the following report
the religion does not answer to Mr. Frazer's definition, no powerful
being is here said to be conciliated or propitiated: he is only said
to exist and favour morality. But Mr. Frazer's definition, if pressed,
produces the effect of arguing in a vicious circle. His theory asserts
that powerful beings are only invented by man, in view of man's tardy
discovery that his own magic is powerless. The invented beings are then
propitiated, for selfish ends, and that, by the definition, is religion.

If we produce, as we do, evidence that the belief in powerful beings
has been evolved, and yet that these beings are certainly not
propitiated by sacrifice, and seldom if ever by prayer, that they are
only won by conduct, and by rites not involving sacrifice, Mr. Frazer
can reply, 'Perhaps; but by my definition that kind of belief is not
religion.' Then what is it? 'What else can you call it?' Its existence,
if proved, is fatal to Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of religion
in the despair of magic, because the faithful of the belief of which
I speak do not usually implore the god to do for them what magic has
failed to do. Their belief satisfies their speculative and moral needs:
it does not exist to supply their temporal wants. Yet it is none the
less, but much the more, a religion on that account, except by Mr.
Frazer's definition. If religion is to be defined as he defines it,
'a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man,' and so
on, religion can only have arisen as it does in his theory, setting
aside a supernormal revelation. But if we do not deny the name of
religion to the speculative belief in a power superior to man, and to
the moral belief that he lends a supernormal sanction to conduct, and
to the emotional belief that he loves his children, then the belief is
religion, but something other than religion as defined by Mr. Frazer.
Nobody will deny the name of religion to such a belief. Mr. Frazer
says: 'I would ask those who dissent from my conclusions to make sure
that they mean the same thing by religion that I do; for otherwise the
difference between us may be more apparent than real.'[49]

I mean by religion what Mr. Frazer means--and more. The conciliation
of higher powers by prayer and sacrifice is religion, but it need not
be the whole of religion. The belief in a higher power who sanctions
conduct, and is a father and a loving one to mankind, is also religion;
few, if any, will dispute the fact. But this belief, if unaccompanied,
as in Australia, by prayer and sacrifice, cannot be accounted for on
Mr. Frazer's theory: that religion was invented, for worldly ends,
after the recognised failure of magic, which aimed at the same ends
fruitlessly. It is only by limiting his definition of religion, as he
does, that he can establish his theory of the origin of religion. It
is only by omitting mention of the evidence for what nobody else can
deny to be religion, that he can secure his theory.

I return to my additional evidence for Australian religion. As will be
seen, it does not come within Mr. Frazer's definition, but will anybody
deny that the belief is religious? The evidence is that of Mr. A. L. P.
Cameron,[50] and contains a brief comparative glossary of words used
by different tribes of New South Wales to indicate the same objects.
Mr. Cameron had been interested in the black fellows since 1868 at
least, when their numbers were much larger than at present. He had
seen gatherings of from 800 to 1,000. The tribes chiefly in question
dwelt along the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers, and do not include the
Kamilaroi, the Kurnai, and Coast Murring of whom Mr. Howitt speaks.

As to religion, ghosts of the dead are believed to visit the earth,
and to be frequently seen. The blacks 'will often resort to peculiar
devices to avoid mentioning the names of the dead,' a practice hostile
to the development of ancestor worship. No ghost of a man can grow into
a god if his name is tabooed and therefore forgotten. 'The people of
all these tribes appear to have a belief in a Deity, and in a future
state of some kind.' The Wathi Wathi call this being Tha-tha-pali; the
Ta-ta-thi call him Tulong. Mr. Cameron could not obtain translations
of these names, any more than we know the meaning of the names Apollo
or Artemis. The being 'is regarded as a powerful spirit, or perhaps a
supreme supernatural being. They say that he came from the far north,
and now lives in the sky. He told each tribe what language they were to
speak. He made men, women, and dogs, and the latter used to talk, but
he took the power of speech from them. The Ta-ta-thi do not care to
speak much of Tulong, and say that he does not often come to the earth.
Although it seems that in many of the Australian tribes there is only a
very dim idea as to the attributes of the Supreme Being and of a future
state, yet in the Ta-ta-thi and its allied tribes there is certainly a
belief not only in a future state of existence, but also in a system of
rewards and punishments. My Ta-ta-thi informant stated that one of the
doctors ascended long ago through the sky, and there saw a place where
wicked men were roasted.'

Mr. Cameron, of course, had the strongest suspicions of a 'place' so
ostensibly Christian. To this we return.[51]

These tribes practise the Bora rites or initiatory mysteries. If women
witness them 'the penalty is death. The penalty for revealing the
secrets is probably the same.' Mr. Cameron, unlike Mr. Howitt, has
not been initiated, and does not know the full secret. The presiding
being (like the Twanyirika of the Arunta) is called Thuremlin, who, I
conjecture, is Daramulun in his subordinate capacity. 'Their belief
in the power of Thuremlin is undoubted, whereas the Arunta adults do
not appear to believe in Twanyirika, a mere bugbear of the women and
children. The bull roarer is Kalari, or among the Ta-ta-thi Kalk [or
Kallak]--that is to say, "word."' Concerning the instruction given
to the boys, and described by Mr. Howitt, Mr. Cameron, not being
initiated, gives no information.

As to the future life, Mr. Cameron received his account from a
tribesman named Makogo, 'an intelligent member of the Wathi Wathi
tribe.' The belief was that current 'before his people came into
contact with Europeans, and Makogo expressed an opinion that, whether
right or wrong, they would have been better off now had their beliefs
never been disturbed.' Probably Makogo was right. The beliefs were in a
future state of reward or punishment. European contact does not import
but destroy the native form of this creed.

The Wathi Wathi belief answers in character to the creeds expressed
in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Fijian hymns, the famous Orphic
gold talisman of Petilia, the Red Indian belief published by Kohl,
and to many other examples.[52] The Way of Souls, as in these ancient
or savage beliefs, is beset by dangers and temptations, to which the
Egyptian Book of the Dead is a guide-book. If any one desires to
maintain that this Australian idea, held before contact with Europeans,
and now to some extent abandoned after that contact, is of Christian
origin (we know this argument), he must suppose that the Wathi Wathi
adapted the idea from our old 'Lyke Wake Dirge:'

    When Brig o' Dread is over and past,
      Every night and all,
    To Whinny Muir thou comest at last,
      And Christ receive thy saul.

A weak point there is. The soul of the Wathi Wathi, after death, is met
by another soul, 'who directs him to the road for good men.'

But the natives had no roads, the opponent will reply. They have trade
routes and markets, however, and barter of articles made in special
localities goes on across hundreds of miles of country.[53] Let us
allow that the Wathi Wathi may know a clean path or track from a dirty
one.

The soul meets a dirty and a clean path. The good soul, being
instructed, chooses the dirty path: the other path is kept clean by bad
spirits 'in order to induce the unthinking to follow it,' as Bunyan's
Mr. Ignorance unwarily chose a by-path into hell. The soul next meets a
woman who tries to seduce him. He escapes her lures, and comes to two
women who try to trip him by whirling a rope. One of them is blind,
and the soul evades her. Next comes a deep narrow gap, in which flames
rise and fall. The good soul watches the fall of the flames, and leaps
across; there is no Brig o' Dread. Bed Indian souls cross by a log
which nearly spans the abyss. Two old women meet the good soul, and
take him 'to the Deity, Tha-Tha-Puli.' He tests the soul's strength and
skill by making him throw a nulla-nulla. 'When the Wathi Wathi see a
shooting star, they believe it to be the passage of such a nulla-nulla
through space, and say: "Tha-Tha-Puli is trying the strength of some
new spirit." The soul of a bad man, if it escapes the traps set for
it, is sure to fall into the hell of fire. Many of the natives have
had their beliefs modified by contact with the whites,' and I 'feel
doubtful,' says Mr. Cameron, 'whether the pit of fire was not of this
kind, and questioned my informant very closely on the subject, but he
assured me that there was no doubt whatever that the above was the
exact belief before the settlement of the country by the white men.'

It is the standing reply of believers in the borrowing theory that a
native, cross-examined, will always agree with whatever the European
inquirer wishes him to say. The natives examined by Mr. Cameron, Mrs.
Langloh Parker, Mr. Howitt, Mr. Manning, and others were exceptions.
They would not allow that their beliefs were borrowed.

This particular form of native belief is exactly analogous to that
of ancient Egypt, of Greece, of Fiji, and so on: not to the doctrine
of our missionaries. The believers in borrowing must therefore say
that the Wathi Wathi stole heaven, hell, and the ways thither from
missionaries, and adapted them, accidentally coinciding with Egyptians,
Greeks, Red Indians, Fijians, Aztecs, and the rest, as to a gulf to
be crossed, and temptations on the way to the abode of the powerful
being and the souls of the good. The native proverbial explanation
of a shooting star establishes, as historical fact, their belief in
Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good spirits. Mr. Frazer has six pages
on beliefs about shooting stars.[54] One case is to our point. The
Yerrunthally of Queensland think that the souls of the dead climb to
a place among the stars by a rope; when they let the rope fall, it
'appeared to people on earth as a shooting star.'[55]

Now if the evidence of Mr. Palmer, in the 'Journal of the
Anthropological Institute,' is good evidence for this Australian
belief, why is the evidence of Mr. Howitt and Mr. Cameron, in the
same serial, to an unborrowed Australian religion (in this case with
Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good souls) unworthy even of mention?

We fall back on Sir Alfred Lyall: 'I think that one effect of
the accumulation of materials has been to encourage speculative
generalisation, because it has provided a repertory out of which one
may make arbitrary selection of examples and precedents to suit any
theory.'[56] Here I have the pleasure of agreeing with this great
authority. Mr. Frazer has chosen Australia as the home of magic, as a
land where magic is, but religion has not yet been evolved. As I have
shown, in this and the preceding paper, there is abundance of evidence
for an unborrowed Australian religion. I shall abandon the evidence
so soon as it is confuted, but I cannot reject it while the witnesses
are treated as good on many other points, but are unmentioned just
when their testimony, if true, seems inconsistent with a theory of the
priority of magic to religion.

By the concurring testimony of a crowd of observers,' writes Mr. Tylor,
'it is known that the natives of Australia were at their discovery,
and have ever since remained, a race with minds saturated with the
most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities.'[57] What can a young
student commencing anthropologist think, when he compares Mr. Tylor's
'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers' of Australian religion
with Mr. Frazer's remark that there are 'some faint beginnings of
religion' in Southern Australia, but that 'traces of a higher faith,
where they occur, are probably sometimes due to European influence,'
though the people, Mr. Tylor says, were in all things so 'saturated
with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities'--'at their
discovery'? There is no use in building a theory of the origin of
religion on the case of Australia till we are at least told about the
'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers.' That Mr. Frazer has
some reason for disregarding the testimonies which I have cited, that
he must have grounds for doubting their validity, I feel assured. But
the grounds for the doubt are not apparent, and to state them would
make Mr. Frazer's abstention intelligible.


[1] Spencer and Gillen, p. 549.

[2] _G. B_. i. p. 63.

[3] _G. B_. ii. p. 51.

[4] _G. B_. i. p. 71.

[5] J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, pp. 50, _sq_.

[6] A. W. Howitt in _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiii.
(1884), 191.

[7] Fison and A. W. Howitt, _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 255.

[8] See A. W. Hewitt in _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_,
xiii. (1884), p. 459.

[9] See A. W. Howitt in _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_,
xviii. (1889), pp. 32, _sq_. Religion is not mentioned here.

[10] See Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia._

[11] E. M. Curr, _The Australian Race_, i. 45.

[12] _Native Tribes of South Australia_, p. 260.

[13] E. M. Curr, _The Australian Race_, i. 45.

[14] Cf. Mr. Matthews and Mr. Crawley, _J. A. I_. xxiv. 413.

[15] _J. A. I_. xiv. 1885, p. 521.

[16] _G. B_. i. 72, note; _J. A. I_. xiii. p. 191 (1884).

[17] _J. A. I_., 1885, p. 321, note 2.

[18] _G. B_. i. 72, note 1. In the first edition of _Myth, Ritual, and
Religion_ I quoted Mr. Howitt's evidence of 1881. In the second edition
I naturally cited his later testimony.

[19] _G. B_. ii. 49, 50.

[20] _G. B_. ii. 51, citing Brough Smyth's _Aborigines of Victoria_,
ii. 311.

[21] November 1894, pp. 158-198.

[22] _G. B_. ii. 51-53.

[23] For 'Fisher's Ghost' see _Blackwood's Magazine_, August 1897, p.
78 _et seq._

[24] _J. A. I_. xv. 4.

[25] To be true to my own principles, I note a few points in Mr.
Frazer's Australian evidence, published by him in _J. A. I_., November
1894.

Mr. Gason, an excellent witness, says that the Dieri think some souls
turn into old trees or rocks, or 'as breath ascend to the heavens,'
to 'Purriewillpanina.' The Dieri believe the Mooramoora created them
and will look after their spirits (_op. cit_. p. 175). Mr. Frazer,
however, calls the Mura Mura 'remote ancestral spirits,' who would have
a difficulty, one thinks, in creating the Dieri. The names of the dead
may not be mentioned (p. 176).

The station master at Powell's Creek denies that magic 'exists in any
shape or form.' There are no religious dances, no belief in a future
life (p. 180). Mr. Lindsay Crawford says 'nothing is known of the
nature of souls.' For the last ten years this gentleman 'had held no
communication with the natives at all, except with the rifle.' Perhaps
his negative evidence is not very valuable, as he does not appear to
have won the friendly confidence of the blacks. Mr. Matthews says:
'Many tribes believe future existence is regulated by due observances
at burial according to the rites of the tribe' (p. 190). Mr. Foelsche,
described by Dr. Stirling as 'a most intelligent and _accurate_
observer, who knows the natives well,' contributes a belief in a
benevolent creator, with a demiurge who made the blacks. He inhabits
Teelahdlah, among the stars. 'He never dies.' He is 'a very good man,'
not a 'spirit.' A subterranean being 'can read and write, and keeps a
book' of men's actions. This is so manifestly due to European influence
that I have not cited Mr. Foelsche's evidence. Mr. Foelsche 'knows of
no magic or witchcraft being practised' (p. 197). The blacks believe
that after death their souls 'go up'; they then point skywards (p. 198).

[26] _G.B._ i. 72 note i. 77.

[27] See 'The Theory of Loan Gods.'

[28] _J. A. I_. January to June, 1900, No. 31, p. 27.

[29] _Asiatic Studies_, ii. 172.

[30] _G. B_. i. 77.

[31] _G. B_. ii. 1.

[32] _G. B_. ii. 1-59, and _passim_, almost.

[33] _G. B_. i. 78, 79.

[34] _G. B_. i. 81.

[35] _G. B_. ii. 8; i. 232, 233.

[36] _G. B_. i. 81-114.

[37] _G. B_. i. 88, 89.

[38] _G. B_. i. 86.

[39] _G. B_. i. 72, note 1.

[40] _G. B_., i. 86, 87.

[41] _G. B_. i. 72.

[42] _G. B_. i. 87.

[43] _G. B_. i. 72, note.

[44] _G. B_. ii. 75-80. The hypothesis is offered with all due
diffidence.

[45] _G. B._ iii. 424.

[46] _Natives of Central Australia_, p. 246, note 1.

[47] _J. A. I_., 1872, pp. 268, 269. Lang's _Queensland_, pp. 444, 445.
Winslow, in Arber's _Captain Smith_, p. 768.

[48] See 'The Theory of Loan-Gods,' _supra_.

[49] _G. B_. i. xvii.

[50] _J. A. I._, 1885, pp. 344-370.

[51] Parenthetically, I may remark that many beliefs as to the future
state originate in, or are confirmed by, visions of 'doctors' who
visit the Hades or Paradise of a tribe, and by reports of men given
up for dead, who recover and narrate their experiences. The case of
Montezuma's aunt is familiar to readers of Mr. Prescott's _Conquest of
Mexico_. The new religion of the Sioux is based on a similar vision.
Anthropologists have given slight attention to these circumstances.

[52] See my _Modern Mythology_, and introduction to my _Homeric Hymns_.

[53] Roth, _North-West Queensland Central Aborigines_, p. 132. Spencer
and Gillen, 575.

[55] _G. B_. ii. 21. E. Palmer, _J. A. I_. xiii. p. 292.

[56] _Asiatic Studies_, i. ix.

[57] _Primitive Culture_, i. 379, 1871.




IV

_THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH_


Among the many recent theories concerning the origin of religion,
certainly the most impressive is Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the
origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ. Unlike several modern
speculations, Mr. Frazer's is based on an extraordinary mass of
erudition. We are not put off with vague and unvouched-for statements,
or with familiar facts extracted from the collections of Mr. Tylor,
Lord Avebury, and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Frazer does not collect
knowledge, as his Babylonian kings are supposed by him to have been
sacrificed--by proxy. No writer is so erudite, and few are so exact in
their references. While venturing to differ from Mr. Frazer, I must
often, as it were, make use of his own ammunition in this war. Let me
say sincerely that I am not pitting my knowledge or industry against
his. I rather represent the student who has an interest in these
subjects, and peruses 'The Golden Bough,' not as 'the general reader'
does, but with some care, and with some verification of the citations
and sources.

It is first necessary to state, as briefly as possible, Mr. Frazer's
hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the Divinity of our Lord,
or, at least, as to what he thinks a very powerful factor in the
evolution of that creed.

The Babylonians, he holds, and their Persian conquerors were wont
yearly, at a vernal feast, to dress a condemned criminal in the royal
robes, to enthrone him, to obey him, to grant him access to the ladies
of the royal harem, and then, at the end of five days, to strip, whip,
and hang him. The reason why they acted thus, Mr. Frazer guesses, was
that the condemned man acted as proxy for the divine King of Babylon,
who, in an age less civilised, had been sacrificed annually: so Mr.
Frazer conjectures. The King was thus sacrificed as a being of divine
or magical nature, a man-god, and the object, according to Mr. Frazer,
was to keep providing the god or magical influence resident in him with
a series of fresh human vehicles. It appears, or may appear, to be Mr.
Frazer's opinion, though the point is stated rather casually and late
in the long argument, that the King himself was believed to incarnate
a known and recognised god of vegetation, a personal principle of
vegetable life. The King's proxy, therefore, the condemned criminal, is
sacrificed (by hanging) in a character at once royal (as representing
the King) and divine (since the King incarnates a god). All this
occurs, by one of the theories advanced, at about the time of year in
which our Easter falls, at a feast called Zakmuk in Babylonian, in
Persian (by the theory) Sacæa: a period of hard drinking and singular
licence.

The Jews, by the theory, or by one of the theories, had probably no
such feast or custom before they were carried into exile in Babylonia.
But from the Babylonians and Persians Mr. Frazer holds that they
probably borrowed the festival, which they styled Purim, and also
borrowed the custom (historically unheard of among them) of crowning,
stripping, flogging, and hanging a mock-king, a condemned criminal,
in March. It does not appear that this man, in Judæa, was allowed
to invade the harem, for example, of Herod, as in the case of the
Persian royal harem. The Jews also are conjectured to have borrowed a
practice, presumed by Mr. Frazer to have perhaps prevailed at Babylon,
of keeping a pair of condemned criminals. One of them was hanged; the
other was set free for the year. The first died as an incarnation of
the god of vegetable life. The second, set free, represented in a
pseudo-resurrection the first, and also represented, I understand, the
revival of the god of vegetable life. The first man was called Haman,
probably in origin Humman, a deity of the vanquished foes of Babylon,
the Elamites. The second man, in Hebrew Mordecai, probably represented
Merodach, or Marduk, the supreme god of the victorious Babylonians.
Each man had a female consort, probably in Babylon a sacred harlot:
Haman had Vashti, probably an Elamite goddess; Mordecai had Esther,
doubtless Ishtar, the Venus of the Babylonian creed. These ladies do
not occur in any account of the Babylonian or Persian feasts, nor in
the Gospels: their existence is a conjecture.

The victims, as descending from the Babylonian and Persian criminals,
who stood both for the king and also, at least in some parts of the
theory, for a god of vegetation, were conceived of as divine. Since
Christ, by what looks like a chapter of accidents, was put to death as
one of these mock-kings, He inherited their recognised divinity, and
His mission, which had been mainly that of a moral lecturer, at once
was surrounded by a halo of divinity.

Such, in brief, if I follow Mr. Frazer, is the contention, which, I
must repeat, is presented as the combination of many hypotheses into a
single theory, offered for criticism.

To myself, after studying Mr. Frazer's theory with such care as it
deserves, an hypothesis of its evolution presents itself. Before
writing the first edition of 'The Golden Bough' (1890), Mr. Frazer
had become acquainted with a statement which Dio Chrysostom, a Greek
rhetorician of the first century, puts into the mouth of Diogenes the
Cynic, in an imaginary dialogue with Alexander the Great. In this essay
Diogenes is made to tell Alexander about the Persian custom of yearly
dressing up a condemned criminal in royal robes, at the feast called
Sacæa, allowing him to live 'like a king' for five days, giving him the
_entrée_ of the royal harem, and then stripping, scourging, and hanging
or crucifying him. The resemblance of Dio's words to the account of the
Mockery of Christ is very remarkable.

Mr. Frazer tells us that he saw this resemblance in 1890, but could
not explain it. In 1897 he became acquainted with a legend, written in
Greek, of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, a Roman Christian soldier, in
Mœsia (303 A.D.). According to this legend, Dasius was drawn by lot
as the yearly victim who, the story says, was made to represent King
Saturnus, for a month of military revelry, and then was sacrificed, or
obliged to slay himself, beside Saturn's altar, at the close of the
Saturnalia. Dasius declined the part, and was put to death.

Here, then, in Mœsia, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius, was
a mock-king, personating a god, sacrificed to a god, and therefore
himself, it may be, regarded as divine. At the other extreme, in
Jerusalem, was Christ, who, after mock royal honours, was scourged,
crucified, and acquired a halo of divinity. The middle term was the
criminal, who, in the character of a mock-king, was stripped, scourged,
and hanged in the Persian feast. There was no trace in Persia of
sacrifice, of a victim in the technical sense, or of any halo of
divinity. But Mr. Frazer was familiar with barbaric kings who are or
were put to death, to save them from dying naturally, or after a
fixed term of years. In his opinion they are killed to provide the
god whom they incarnate with a fresh vehicle. Combining all these
facts, and strongly drawn by the resemblance of Dio's anecdote to the
narratives of the Crucifixion, Mr. Frazer adopted the argument that
the criminal executed at the Sacæa, in Babylon, had once been, like
the Saturn sufferer in Mœsia, a divine victim, not at first hanged,
but sacrificed yearly, to redeem the life of the Persian king, who in
earlier ages must himself have been a yearly sacrifice. The divinity
inherited by the criminal from that divine King was transmitted by a
succession of executed malefactors to the victim of Calvary.

The ingenuity of the idea is undeniable. But it appears to me that the
author's mind was throughout unconsciously drawn to the Crucifixion.
This attraction became a 'mental prepossession.' In a recent work,
'Fact and Fable in Psychology' (Boston, U.S., 1900), Professor Jastrow
has illustrated 'mental prepossession' by a common and trivial
experience. A beginner in the art of bicycling is unconsciously drawn
into collision with every obstacle on the road which his conscious self
is doing its best to avoid.

In the same way, I fancy, our author's mind was led straight to an
explanation of the halo of divinity round the Cross, instead of to
what was needed first, an explanation of the Persian custom, isolated,
and examined only in the light of its attendant circumstances, as
described in our very scanty information. Had our author examined the
circumstances of the Persian custom with an intellect unattracted by
the hope of throwing new light on the Crucifixion, and uninfluenced
by a tendency to find gods of vegetation almost every where, he would
have found, I think, that they admit of being accounted for in a simple
manner, granting that our information is true. There was, as far as we
are informed, no sacrifice at the Sacæa, and in that Persian festival
nothing religious. The religious element has to be imported by aid of
remote inference, daring conjecture, and even, I venture to say, some
disregard of documentary history.

The consequence, as I shall try to show, is that the theory has, in
the Regent Moray's words, 'to pass over the bellies' of innumerable
obstacles, by aid of a series of conjectures increasing in difficulty.
Thus the reader's powers of acquiescence are strained afresh at the
introduction of each new trial of his faith. If one stage out of so
many stages of remote inference and bold presumption is unstable, the
whole edifice falls to the ground. Meanwhile we shall have to offer
a simple explanation of the circumstances of the Sacæan victim, only
in a single instance demanding the use of one of Mr. Frazer's own
conjectures, itself a legitimate hypothesis. The remainder of this
essay is concerned with an examination of the difficulties of his
theory, and of the 'bridges of hypothesis,' by which the 'yawning
chasms' are to be crossed.




V

_THE APPROACHES TO MR. FRAZER'S THEORY_


I. THE EVOLUTION OF GODS


Rites so remarkable as those of the pair of criminals, supposed to have
played their parts in Babylon and Jerusalem, each with his female mate,
are not historically known, but are part of Mr. Frazer's theory, and
have analogies in folklore. Institutions so unparalleled as a whole,
in our knowledge of human religion, cannot have been evolved except
through a long series of grades of development. Mr. Frazer traces these
grades throughout the 1,500 pages of his book. There are, in accordance
with the method, large sections of the work devoted to illustrative
examples of matters which do not bear directly on the main stream
of the argument, and these are apt, by the very abundance of their
erudition, to distract attention from the central hypothesis. To that I
try to adhere through its numerous ramifications.

To account, then, for these hypothetical rites of the double pairs
of divinised human beings, we are to suppose that, before attaining
the earliest germs of religion, men were addicted to magic, a theory
which we have already examined in the essay 'Magic and Religion.' They
believed that by imitating the cosmic processes, they could control or
assist them. Thus the Arunta of Central Australia have magical rites,
by which they assist the development of larvæ into grubs, increase and
improve the breed and reproductive energies of kangaroos, foster the
growth of edible tubers, and bring down rain. These rites are harmless,
and involve no sacrifices, human or animal, for the Arunta, we are
to believe, have no god to accept offerings.[1] But as men advanced
from almost the lowest savagery, they gradually attained to higher
material culture, developing the hitherto unknown arts of agriculture,
developing also religion, in the despair of magic, developing gods, and
evolving social and political rank, with kings at the head of society.
In disgust with their old original magic (by which they had supposed
that they controlled cosmic forces and animal and vegetable life), they
invented gods and spirits who, as they fancied, did really exercise
cosmic control. These gods they propitiated by prayer and sacrifice.
But though it was in the despair of magic that men invented gods and
religion, yet, as men will, they continued to exercise the magic of
which they despaired. They persisted, like the godless Arunta, in
imitating the processes of nature, in the belief (which, after all,
they had not abandoned) that such imitation magically aided the efforts
of nature or of the gods of nature.

Men now evolved three species of god, from one or other of which
descends the godhead of the Persian criminal, whipped and hanged, and
the Divinity of Christ. First, there were gods 'of an order different
from and superior to man.' Second, there were men in whom these
superior gods became incarnate. Third, there were men who were merely
better magicians than their neighbours, 'sensitives' who trembled at
a touch of nature, and at whose touch nature trembled.[2] It is not,
in thought, difficult to draw a firm line between these two kinds of
man-gods, though magic and religion overlap and shade into each other.
The distinction of the two types, the man incarnating god, and the
sorcerer with no god to incarnate, is absolutely essential, and must
be kept firmly in mind. Mr. Frazer says 'In what follows I shall not
insist on it,' on this essential distinction.[3] Essential it is: for
the second sort, the magical sort, of man-god, may, by Mr. Frazer's
theory, be prior to all religion. He is only a high kind of sorcerer,
'a dealer in magic and spells.' The other kind of man-god comes in
after magic is despaired of and gods are invented. I shall insist on
the distinction.

The growth of society was advancing and developing at the same time
as religion and agriculture. The original sorcerer or medicine-man,
or magic-worker, through his influence on his neighbours, was apt
to acquire leadership, and to accumulate property, as, indeed, I
myself remarked long ago in an essay on the 'Origin of Rank.'[4] In
Mr. Frazer's theory these magic-men finally develop into both kings
or chiefs and man-gods. I have observed that there is often a lay or
secular king or chief, a war-leader, beside them. His position, if it
becomes hereditary, is apt to end in leaving the man-god-king on one
side in a partly magical, partly religious, but not secular kingship,
whence it may evolve into a priesthood, carrying the royal title. The
man is more or less a man-god, more or less a priest, more or less a
controller of cosmic processes, but is still a titular king. Of course
all sorts of varieties occur in these institutions. The general result
is the divinity of kings, and their responsibility for the luck of the
state, and for the weather and crops. If the luck, the weather, and
the crops are bad, the public asks 'Who is to be punished for this?'
Under a constitution such as our own, the public notoriously makes the
Government responsible for the luck; a general election dismisses the
representatives of the party in power. But, four hundred years ago,
and previously, executions took the place of mere loss of office: the
heads of the Boyds, of Morton, or of Gowrie fell when these nobles lost
office.

In the earlier society with which we are dealing, the king, as
responsible for the weather and crops, is sometimes punished in
bad times. The Banjars 'beat the king till the weather changes,'
elsewhere the king is imprisoned, or, in a more constitutional manner,
merely deposed.[5] There are traces of actually killing the unlucky
and responsible monarch. In Sweden he is said, in a time of public
distress, to have been not only killed, but sacrificed to Odin. This is
not, however, an historical statement.


II. THE ALLEGED MORTALITY OF GODS


There were other magico-religious reasons for killing kings. Mr.
Frazer writes:[6] 'Lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man
naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like himself.'

Here is, I venture to think, a notable fault in the argument. Early
men, contrary to Mr. Frazer's account, suppose themselves to be
_naturally_ immortal. The myths of perhaps all races tell of a time
when death had not yet entered the world. Man was born deathless. Death
came in by an accident, or in consequence of an error, or an infraction
of a divine command. To this effect we have Zulu, Australian, Maori,
Melanesian, Central African, Vedic Aryan, Kamschadal, and countless
other myths; not to speak of the first chapters of Genesis.[7] 'In the
thought of immortality' early man is cradled. His divine beings are
usually regarded as prior to and unaffected by the coming of death,
which invades men, but not these beings, or not most of them.

Indeed, some low savages have not yet persuaded themselves that death
is natural. 'Amongst the Central Australian natives,' say Spencer and
Gillen, 'there is no such thing as belief in natural death; however
old or decrepit a man or woman may be when this takes place, it is at
once supposed that it has been brought about by the magic influence of
some enemy,' and it is avenged on the enemy, as in the blood-feud.[8]
These Australians in Mr. Frazer's opinion (though not in mine) are
'primitive.'

Thus, far from lacking the idea of eternal duration of life, 'primitive
man' has no other idea. Not that he formulates his idea in such a term
as 'eternal.' Mariner says, indeed, concerning the Tongan supreme being
Ta-li-y-Tooboo, 'Of his origin they had no idea, rather supposing him
to be eternal.' But, in Tongan, the metaphysical idea of eternity is
only expressed in the meaning of the god's name, 'wait-there-Tooboo.'
This god occasionally inspires the How, or elective king, but the How
was never sacrificed to provide the god with a sturdier incarnation,
a process which Mr. Frazer's theory of the Divinity of Christ demands
as customary. Being 'eternal' Tá-li-y-Tooboo was independent of a human
vehicle.[9]

These facts must be remembered, for it is indispensable to Mr. Frazer's
theory to prove that the immortals are believed, to a sufficient
extent, to be mortal. Hence the supposed need of killing divine kings,
their vehicles. Primitive man, according to Mr. Frazer, thinks his gods
mortal. But primitive man by his initial hypothesis had no gods at all.
Mr. Frazer clearly means that when man was no longer primitive, he
conceived the gods to be mortal like himself. I have elsewhere given
many examples of the opposite belief among races of many grades of
culture, from the Australian blacks to the immortal gods of Homer.[10]
The point will be found to be important later, and I must firmly
express my opinion that, so long as people believe their gods to be
alive, and testify that belief by prayers, hymns, and sacrifices, it
is impossible to argue from a few local, and contradictory, and easily
explicable myths, that these peoples believe their gods to be dead, or
in danger of dying. Here, I think, the common sense of students will
agree with me.

However, as this general and pervading belief in the mortality of the
gods is absolutely essential to Mr. Frazer's argument, perhaps the
point had better be settled. As examples of belief in the fact that the
god is dead, we have the Greenlanders.[11]

The Greenlanders believed that a wind could kill their most powerful
god, and that he would certainly die if he touched a dog. Mr. Tylor,
on the other hand, tells us that to I the summerland' of the Greenland
deity, 'beneath the sea, Greenland souls hope to descend at death.'
Let us trust that 'No Dogs are Admitted.' This Greenland divine being,
Torngarsuk, I so clearly held his place as supreme deity in the native
mind that,' as Cranz the missionary relates, 'many Greenlanders hearing
of God and His almighty power were apt to fall on the idea that it was
their Torngarsuk who was meant.' The Greenland deity was unborrowed;
he 'seems no figure derived from the religion of Scandinavian
colonists, ancient or modern.'[12]

From Cranz's evidence (and much more might be cited) the most powerful
god of the Greenlanders was not dead, nor likely to die, in spite of
the apprehensions of certain Greenlanders, communicated to a person not
named by Mr. Frazer, but quoted in a work of 1806.[13] At the best the
Greenland evidence is contradictory; all Greenlanders did not agree
with Mr. Frazer's Greenland authority. Nor was the Accuser of the
Brethren currently believed to be deceased, when the ancient folk-song
assures us that

    Some say the Deil's deid,
      The Deil's deid, the Deil's deid,
    Some say the Deil's deid,
      And buried in Kirkcaldy:
    Some say he's risen again,
      Risen again, risen again,
    Some say he's risen again,
      To dance the Hieland Laddie.

'Risen again' he was, and did dance the Hieland Laddie at Gledsmuir
and Falkirk. The 'Volkslied' scientifically represents the conflict of
opinion as unsettled, despite the testimony of the grave of Satan at
the lang toun of Kirkcaldy; like the grave of Zeus in Crete.

Mr. Frazer, then, ought not, I think, to assume a general belief in
the mortality of Greenland gods in face of contradictory but uncited
evidence.

1. A North American Indian told Colonel Dodge that 'the Great Spirit
that made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have
lived so long as this.'[14] Now this was the _ipse dixit_ and personal
inference of a vague modern 'North American Indian,' living in an age
which, as Mr. Frazer remarks, must 'breach those venerable walls' of
belief. To prove his case, Mr. Frazer needs to find examples of the
opinion that the 'Great Spirit' was believed to be dead (if he grants
that there ever existed an American belief in a Great Spirit) among the
American Indians as first studied by Europeans. I have elsewhere argued
that the supreme being of most barbaric races is regarded as otiose,
inactive, and so may come to be a mere name and by-word, like the
Huron Atahocan,[15] 'who made everything,' and the Unkulunkulu of the
Zulus, who has been so thrust into the background by the competition of
ancestral spirits that his very existence is doubted. 'In process of
time we have come to worship the spirits only, because we know not what
to say about Unkulunkulu.' 'We seek out for ourselves the spirits that
we may not always be thinking about Unkulunkulu.'[16] In the same way,
throughout the beliefs of barbaric races, the competition of friendly
and helpful spirits pushes back such beings as the Australian Baiame
and Mungan-ngaur, who exist where sacrifice to ancestral spirits has
not yet been developed; and the Canadian Andouagni of 1558.[17] Thus
a modern North American Indian may infer, and may tell Colonel Dodge,
that the creator is dead, because he is not in receipt of sacrifice or
prayer. But the cult of such high beings, where it existed and still
exists, in North America, the cult of Ti-ra-wá with whom the Pawnees
expect to live after death, of the Blackfoot Ná-pi of Ahone, Okeus,
Kiehtan, and the rest, proves belief in gods who are alive, and who are
not said to be in any danger of death.

2. A tribe of Philippine Islanders told the Spanish conquerors that
the grave of the Creator was on the top of Mount Cabunian. So the
Philippine Islanders did believe in a Creator. The grave may have been
the result of the usual neglect of the supreme being already explained,
or may have meant no more than the grave of Zeus in Crete, while Zeus
was being worshipped all over the Greek world.

3. Heitsi Eibib, of the Hottentots, had a number of graves, accounted
for by the theory of successive lives and deaths. But so had Tammuz and
Adonis yearly lives and deaths, yet the god was _en permanence_.

The graves of Greek gods maybe due to Euhemerism, a theory much more
ancient than Euhemerus. People who worship ancestral spirits sometimes
argue, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, that the gods were once spirits of
living men, and show the men's graves as proofs; 'the bricks are
alive to testify to it.' But that the Greeks regarded their gods as
mortal cannot be seriously argued, while they are always styled 'the
immortals' in contrast to mortal men; and while Apollo (who had a
grave) daily inspired the Pythia. Her death did not hurt Apollo. She
was not sacrificed for the benefit of Apollo. The grave of Zeus 'was
shown to visitors in Crete as late as about the beginning of our era.'
But was it shown as early as the time of Homer? Euhemerus was prior to
our era.

4. The Egyptian gods were kings over death and the dead, with tombs and
mummies in every province. But they were also deathless rulers of the
world and of men.

'If Ra rises in the heavens it is by the will of Osiris; if he sets it
is at the sight of his glory.' 'King of eternity, great god ... whoso
knoweth humility and reckoneth deeds of righteousness, thereby knows he
Osiris.'[18]

This is a living god, and Seb and Nut can scarcely die. Despite myth
and ritual the gods of Egypt lived till they 'fled from the folding
star of Bethlehem.'

5. As to the legend of 'great Pan is dead,' in the reign of Tiberius,
Mr. Frazer mentions a theory that not Pan, but Adonis or Tammuz was
dead; he was always dying. The story is pretty, but is not evidence.

6. About 1064 A.D. there was a Turkish story of the death of the King
of the Jinn. The Jinn are not gods but fairies, and we have heard of
fairy funerals.

7. Concerning 'the high gods of Babylon' it is especially needful
for Mr. Frazer to prove that they were believed to be mortal and
in danger of death, for Dr. Jastrow denies that they are mortal.
'The privilege of the gods' is 'immortality.'[19] But Mr. Frazer's
hypothesis derives the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ from the
opinion that he represented, in death, a long line of victims to a
barbarous superstition.[20] And that superstition was, in Mr. Frazer's
conjecture, that a substitute died for the King of Babylon, and that
the King of Babylon died to reinforce the vitality of a mortal god of
Babylon, whose life required a fresh human incarnation annually.

To prove the Babylonian belief in the mortality of the deities, Mr.
Frazer writes: 'The high gods of Babylon also, though they appeared
to their worshippers only in dreams and visions, were conceived to
be human in their bodily shape, human in their passions, and human
in their fate; for like men they were born into the world, and like
men they loved and fought and even died.'[21] How many of them died?
If they were dead in religious belief, how did they manage to attend
'the great assembly of the gods which, as we have seen, formed a chief
feature of the feast of Zakmuk, and was held annually in the temple of
Marduk at Babylon?'[22] Did Marduk die? If so, why is he addressed as

    O merciful one who lovest to give life to the dead!
    Marduk, King of heaven and earth,
    The spell affording life is thine,
    The breath of life is thine.
    Thou restorest the dead to life, thou bringest things
        to completeness (?)[23]

Supposing, again, that the King was really sacrificed to keep a god in
good condition--why only one sacrifice? There were at least scores of
gods, all of them, if I understand Mr. Frazer, in the same precarious
condition of health. They appear, he might argue, to have been
especially subject to hepatic diseases.

    O supreme mistress of heaven, may thy liver be pacified,

says a hymn to Ishtar.[24]

Of course every one sees that 'thy liver' is only a phrase for 'thy
wrath;' the liver (as in our phrases 'pluck' and 'lily-livered')
being taken for the seat of the 'pluck' of men. It is manifest that
the Babylonian gods are not dead but living, otherwise they could
not attend the yearly divine assembly, nor could they be addressed
in prayer. Moreover, if they could only be kept alive by yearly
sacrificing their human vehicles, great holocausts of human vehicles
would have been needed every year: one man for one god, and their name
was legion.

Once more, if men believed that gods could die, unless kept alive by
sacrifices of their human vehicles, we must say of the Greeks that they

                did not strive
     Officiously to keep alive

their deities. Had the Greeks known that this was in their power to
do, then Apollo, Dionysus, Cronos, Zeus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares had
not died. Yet die they did, if the graves of each of these mortals
prove the prevailing belief in their decease.[25] Mankind, according
to Mr. Frazer, believed in 'mighty beings,' 'who breathed into man's
nostrils and made him live.' He implored them 'to bring his immortal
spirit ... to some happier world ... where he might rest with them,'
and so on.[26] Yet, 'lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive
man naturally supposed the gods to be mortal like himself.' Mr. Frazer
has, we see, also told us that they did not believe their gods to be
mortal. Probably, then, the belief in their immortality was a late
stage in a gradual process.[27] Yet it had not prevailed when the grave
of Zeus was shown 'about the beginning of our era.'[28] Man, then,
believed that he could keep one out of the crowd of gods alive (though
he implored them to keep _him_ alive) by sacrificing his rightful king
once a year, thereby overthrowing dynasty after dynasty, and upsetting
the whole organisation of the state. All this we must steadfastly
believe, before we can accept Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the
Nicene Creed. It is a large preliminary demand.

The gods keep on being 'immortals,' and this we must insist on, in
view of Mr. Frazer's theory that man-gods who are slain are slain to
keep alive the god who is incarnate in them, of which he does not
give one example. His instances of beliefs that the high gods are dead
notoriously contradict the prevalent belief that they are deathless.
And the prevalent belief regulates religion.

However, man-gods certainly die, and some South Sea Islanders--by a
scientific experiment--demonstrated that Captain Cook was no god,
because he died when stabbed, which a genuine god would not have
done. This, of course, proves that these benighted heathen knew the
difference between an immortal god and a deathly man as well as did
Anchises in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite.


III. RELIGIOUS REGICIDE


Peoples who think that all the luck depends on their king-man-god (the
second sort, the superior sorcerer, with no god in him) hold, we are
to believe, that his luck and cosmic influence wane with his waning
forces. Therefore they kill him, and get a more vigorous recipient of
his _soul_ (not of a god) and of his luck.[29] Of king-killing for
this reason Mr. Eraser gives, I think, one adequate example. Of the
transmission of the soul of the slain divinity to his successor he 'has
no direct proof,' though souls of incarnating gods are transmitted
after natural deaths.[30]

Now this is a very important part of the long-drawn argument which is
to suggest that Christ died as a mock-king, who also represented a god.
First, we have seen that there are two kinds of man-god. In one kind a
real god, 'of an order different from and superior to man,' is supposed
to become incarnate. The other kind of man-god is only a superior
'sensitive' and sorcerer.[31]

Now Jesus, by Mr. Frazer's theory, died as representative of a god,
therefore as one of the first two kinds of man-gods. But Mr. Frazer
does not here, as I said, produce one solitary example of a man-god
proved to be of the first class--a king in whom an acknowledged god
is incarnate--being slain to prevent his inspiring god from waning
with the man's waning energies.[32] Many examples of that practice
are needed by the argument. I repeat that not one example is produced
in this place. Mr. Frazer's entire argument depends on his announced
failure to 'insist on' the distinction between two sorts of man-gods
which he himself has drawn.[33] So I keep on insisting.

Again, it can hardly be said that any examples are produced of a king
of the second sort (a man-god who is really no god at all, but a
'sensitive,' sorcerer, or magic-man) being slain to preserve the vigour
of his magic. The examples to be cited all but universally give no
proof of the idea of preserving man's _magical_ vigour from the decay
of old age.

The cases given, as a rule, are mere instances of superannuation. It
is possible (would that it were easy) to pension off aged professors
in the Scottish Universities. But to pension off a king merely means a
series of civil wars. The early middle ages 'tonsured' weak kings. How
tempting to represent this dedication of them to God as a mitigation of
sacrifice! Kings, in fact, among some barbaric races, are slain merely
by way of superannuation. Nay, the practice is not confined to kings.
It is usual among elderly subjects.[34]

Let us take Mr. Frazer's examples.[35]

1. A Congo people believe that the world would perish if their chitome,
or pontiff, died a natural death. So he was clubbed or strangled by
his successor. But what god is incarnate in the chitome? None is
mentioned.[36] The king himself 'is regarded as a god in earth, and all
powerful in heaven.'

2. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods, but were
ordered to die by the priests, on the authority of an alleged oracle
of the gods, 'whenever the priests chose.' That they first showed any
signs of decay 'we may conjecture.'[37] We have no evidence except that
the priests put an end to the king 'whenever they chose.' And, far
from alleging the king's decay or bad crops as the regular recognised
reason, they alleged a special oracle of the gods.

3. When the King of Unyoro, in Central Africa, is old, or very ill, his
_wives_ kill him (an obvious reason readily occurs: it is the wives,
not a god, who need a more spirited person), alleging an old prophecy
that the throne will pass from the dynasty if the king dies a natural
death. But it is not here shown that this king is a man-god of either
species; and the prophecy does not concern injury to a god, or to
magical _rapport_.[38]

4. The King of Kibanga, on the upper Congo, is killed by sorcerers
when he 'seems near his end.' So are old dogs and cats and horses in
this country, and peasants are even thought to provide euthanasia for
kinsfolk 'near their end.' If the King of Kibanga is a man-god, Mr.
Frazer does not say so.

5. If wounded in war the King of Gingero is killed by his comrades or
kinsfolk, even if he be reluctant. The reason alleged is 'that he may
not die by the hands of his enemies.' Did Saul, Brutus, and many other
warriors who refuse to survive wounds and defeat die as man-gods? Is
the King of Gingero a man-god?

6. Chaka, King of the Zulus, used hair-dye, having a great aversion to
grey hairs. The Zulus, a warlike people, would not elect, or accept, a
greyhaired king, and, though I know no instance of slaying a Zulu king
because he was old, Mr. Isaacs (1836) says that grey hair is 'always
followed by the death of the monarch.' Even if an historical example
were given, a warlike race merely superannuates a disabled war-leader
in the only safe way.

7. At last we reach a king-man-god in Sofala, who, according to Dos
Santos, was the only god of the Caffres, and was implored to give good
weather.[39] A modern Zulu told Dr. Callaway that 'when people say
the heaven is the chief's they do not believe what they say.'[40] The
Sofalese, or rather their neighbours, were perhaps more credulous; and
it appears to have been a custom or law among them that a blemished
king should kill himself, though a reforming prince denounced this as
insanity, and altered the law. We are told that the king-god of the
Sofalese was under this law, and a neighbouring king (who is nowhere
said to have been a man-god) was. But what god, if any, was incarnate
in this man-god, if he _was_ a man-god, like his neighbour?[41]

8. The Spartans were warned by an oracle against a lame king, as the
Mackenzies were warned by the Brahan seer against a set of physically
blemished lairds. The seer's prophecy was fulfilled.[42] We do not hear
that the Spartans Killed any lame king.

9. The King of the Eyeos is warned to kill himself, warned by a gift
of parrot's eggs, 'when the people have conceived an opinion of his
ill-government.' His wives strangle him, and his son succeeds, or did
so before 1774, when the King refused to die at the request of his
ministers. To make a case, it must be shown that the king was a man-god
of one or other variety. He is, in fact, merely king while popular,
'holding the reins of government no longer than whilst he merits the
approval of his people.'

10. The old Prussians were governed by a king called God's Mouth. 'If
he wanted to leave a good name behind,' when weak and ill he burned
himself to death, in front of a holy oak.

11. In Quilacare, in Southern India, the king cut himself to pieces,
before an idol, after a twelve years' reign. We are not told that he
was an incarnation of the god, if any, incorporated in, or represented
by, the idol.

12. The King of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, used to cut his
throat in public after a twelve years' reign. About 1680-1700 this
was commuted. If any man could cut his way through 30,000 or 40,000
guardsmen, to kill the king, he succeeded. Three men tried, but numbers
over-powered them. Other examples are given in which every regicide
might become king, if he could, like Macbeth. It was held, at Passier,
that God would not allow the king to be killed if he did not richly
deserve it. These kings are not said to incarnate gods.

13. Ibn Batuta once saw a man throw a rope into the air, and climb up
it. Another man followed and cut the first to pieces, which fell on
the ground, were reunited, and no harm done. This veracious traveller
also saw a man, at Java, kill himself for love of the Sultan, thereby
securing liberal pensions for his family, as his father and grandfather
had done before him. 'We may conjecture that formerly the Sultans of
Java, like the Kings of Quilacare and Calicut, were bound to cut their
own throats at the end of a fixed term of years,'[43] but that they
deputed the duty to one certain family. We _may_ conjecture, but,
considering the lack of evidence, and the stories that Ibn Batuta
freely tells, I doubt! Ibn, at the Court of Delhi, saw cups and dishes
I at a wish appear, and at a wish retire.' Did the Sultan of Java
incarnate a god?

14. This case is so extremely involved and hypothetical (it concerns
Sparta, where I never heard that the king was a man-god) that the
reader must be referred to the original.[44]

Meanwhile the list of instances is numerically respectable. But are
the instances to the point? Do they prove a practice of killing a
royal man-god, for the purpose of helping a god incarnate in him, or
even of preventing his magical power (or _mana_, in New Zealand) from
waning? They rather prove regicide as a form of superannuation, or as
the result of the machinations of priests, or of public discontent.
Above all, they do not demonstrate that the king is ever killed as an
incarnation of a deity who needs a sturdier person to be incarnate in.

So recalcitrant is the evidence, that of all Mr. Frazer's kings who are
here said to be gods, or to incarnate gods, not one is here said to be
put to death by his worshippers.[45] And of all his kings who are here
said to be put to death, not one is here said to incarnate a god.[46]
Such are the initial difficulties of the theory: to which we may add
that elderly men are notoriously killed by many savages just because
they are elderly, whether they are kings or commoners.

Mr. Frazer's point is that Christ died in 'a halo of divinity,'
visible 'wherever men had heard the old, old story of the dying and
rising god.'[47] But, apart from other objections already urged, Mr.
Frazer's present instances do not contain one example of a 'dying and
rising god,' stated to be represented by a living man who is therefore
killed; even if there are one or two cases of a slain king who is a
medicine-man, sorcerer, or cosmic sensitive. Thus the argument fails
from the first. Christ is to be reckoned divine as representing a king
who was killed as an incarnation of a god. But of regicide for this
reason no proof is afforded, as far as I can see.


IV. ANNUAL RELIGIOUS REGICIDE


Next we arrive at an absolutely necessary hypothesis, which I find it
difficult to accept. 'In some places it appears that the people could
not trust the king to remain in full mental and bodily vigour for more
than a year; hence at the end of a year's reign he was put to death,
and a new king appointed to reign in his turn a year, and suffer death
at the end of it.... When the time drew near for the king to be put
to death (in Babylon this appears to have been at the end of a single
year's reign), he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary
king reigned and suffered in his stead.'[48]

Later we read of 'the time when the real king used to redeem his own
life by deputing his son to reign for a short time and die in his
stead.'[49]

The hypothesis is, then, that at Babylon the king used to be sacrificed
once a year. Later he appointed a son, or some other member of the
royal family, or some one else, to die for him, while, last of all, a
criminal was chosen.

Is not this a startling hypothesis? Yet on it the whole argument
about the Divinity of Christ depends. Mr. Frazer overestimates human
ambition. We wonder that Moray, Lennox, and Morton pined to be Regents
of Scotland. Yet at least they had a faint chance of escaping death
within the year. But the kings of Babylon had no chance: they were
sacrificed annually. Mr. Frazer asks us to suppose that any men of
royal race, anywhere, men free and noble, not captives, not condemned
criminals, would accept a crown, followed, in 365 days, by a death of
fire! A child knows that no men have ever acted in this way. Even if
they were so incredibly unlike all other human beings as to choose a
year's royalty, followed by burning to death, how was the succession
regulated? Even the primitive Arunta, naked savages in Central
Australia, have a kind of magistrate, merely a convener, called the
Alatunja, 'the head man of a local totemic group.' He is an hereditary
official, inheriting in the male line.[50] Does any one believe that a
poor black man would accept the Alatunjaship if he knew he was to be
roasted, and so die, at the end of a year? Now the Babylonians (or
rather the Persians) were infinitely more civilised than the Arunta.
Their kings were hereditary kings. How, then, would Mr. Frazer's system
work? The king is sacrificed; his eldest son succeeds; is sacrificed
next year; they soon work through the royal family. Thus, in Scotland,
Darnley is sacrificed (1567). Next year you sacrifice the baby, James
VI. Next year you begin on the Hamiltons. Chatelherault lasts a year:
then Arran, then Lord John, then Lord Claude. Beginning in 1567 you
work out that result in 1572. Then you start on the Lennox Stewarts.
You have Lennox offered up in 1573, his son Charles in 1574, and by
the end of the century you have exhausted the female and illegitimate
branches of the royal family. You can only sacrifice males, and these
must be adults, for each sacrificed man, by Mr. Frazer's theory, has to
consort before his death with a lady, probably 'a sacred harlot.'[51]

Mr. Frazer perhaps will say 'these Babylonian kings were polygamous,
and had large families of sons.' But think of the situation! When the
king comes to providing a son as a substitute, to reign for a few days
and be sacrificed in his stead, he may be a young king, just married.
Even if he could count on a male baby, or a score of them, annually,
they would be of no use: they could not consort with the sacred harlot,
which is indispensable.[52] So, after the young king is sacrificed,
we are in a quandary. We must overlook primogeniture, and begin
sacrificing the king's brothers; they will not last long; we fall back
on the cousins. Soon we need a new dynasty. Now no government could be
carried on in the circumstances imagined by Mr. Frazer. The country
would not stand it. No individual king would ever accept the crown.
Human beings never had such a preposterous institution. But, if they
had not, Mr. Frazer's whole theory of the Crucifixion is baseless, for
it all hangs on the yearly sacrifice of the divine king in Babylon.
Where there is no historical evidence of annual regicide, we must
appeal to our general knowledge of human nature. The reply is that
the thing is impossible. Moreover, that sacrifice is wholly without
evidence.

The only reason for believing that the kings of the great Babylonian
Empire, or even the kings of Babylon when it may have been a small
autonomous town, were sacrificed once a year, is the faint testimony
existing to show that once a year at a Persian feast a mock-king was
hanged. To account for that _hanging_ Mr. Frazer has to invent the
hypothesis that real kings, in olden times, were annually _sacrificed_.
The only corroboration of actual fact is in the savage instances of
king killing, _not_ annual, which we have explained as, in most cases,
a rude form of superannuation; in no case as certainly the deliverance
of a recognised god incarnate in the king There are also instances
in folklore of yearly mock executions of a king of the May, or the
like, and a dubious case in Lower Mœsia. These do not prove annual
sacrifices of actual kings in the past, if they prove any sacrifice
at all. In these circumstances, I venture to hold, science requires
us, if we must explain the alleged yearly hanging of a mock-king at
Babylon, to look for a theory, an hypothesis, which does not contradict
all that we know of human nature. For all of human nature that we
know is contradicted by the fancy that the kings of Babylon were
once sacrificed annually. I shall later produce a theory which, at
least, does not run counter to the very nature of man, and so far is
legitimate and scientific.

Mr. Frazer says that his theory 'will hardly appear extravagant or
improbable' when we remember that, in Ngoio, the chief who puts on the
cap of royalty one day is, by the rule, killed the next day.[53] So
nobody puts on the cap. And nobody would have put on the Babylonian
crown under the condition of being roasted to death at the end of the
year.

If the theory were correct, the king incarnating a god would be slain
yearly. But he would not like that, and would procure a substitute,
who would yearly be slain (_a_) as a proxy of the king, or (_b_) as
the god of vegetation, incarnate in the king, or as both. Yet, I
repeat, not a single instance has been given of a king who is slain for
magico-religious reasons, and who is also the incarnation of any god
whatever. The slain kings in the instances produced were, as a rule,
superannuated because they were old, or got rid of because they were
unpopular, or because a clerical cabal desired their destruction, or
for some other reason: at most, and rarely, because they were outworn
'sensitives.' We know scores of cases of god-possessed men, but none
are killed because they are god-possessed.

The argument has thus made no approach to Mr. Frazer's theory of the
origin of the belief in the divine character of Christ and of his
doctrine.

At this point Mr. Frazer's theory turns from god-mankings slain to
preserve their _mana_, or cosmic _rapport_, to persons who suffer for
these kings. Not one single historical proof that there ever was such
a custom is adduced. All is a matter of inference and conjecture.
There is, we saw, a region Ngoio, in Congo, where the throne is
perpetually vacant, because whoever occupied it was killed the day
after coronation day--no substitute is suggested, and no one sits in
the Siege Perilous.[54] There are cases of 'temporary kings,' as King
February, for three days in Cambodia--the temporary king being of a
cadet branch of the royal family. He is not killed. In Siam a temporary
king for three days conducted a _quête,_ or jocular pillaging, like our
Robin Hood in Scotland. This is an example of the _Period of Licence_
when law is in abeyance, and the importance of this period we shall
later prove. The mock-king also ploughed nine furrows, and stood later
with his right foot on his left knee. He did the same thing on a later
occasion, and omens were drawn from his steadiness; he was supposed,
if firm, to conquer evil spirits, and had another _quête_. In Upper
Egypt a king of unreason for three days holds mock tribunals, then is
condemned, and his 'shell' is burned; probably, as I shall show, to
mean that 'the gambol has been shown' and is over.[55] There are two
or three similar cases, and Mr. Frazer suggests that the mock-king is
invested with the 'divine or magical functions' of the real king. But
the local Pacha, on the Nile, has no such functions, and his august
representative wears 'a tall fool's cap.' None are put to death: the
Upper Egyptian case alone and dimly, if at all, suggests the proxy
supposed (as in Ibn Batuta's tale interpreted by Mr. Frazer) to die for
the king.

Next we approach instances of sons of kings who are sacrificed, but
these are cases of sin offerings (as when the King of Moab sacrificed
his son on the wall), and, even if the lads were substitutes for
their royal fathers, there is no presumption raised that the fathers
were habitually killed year by year, to keep their cosmic _rapport_
unimpaired, or to release the god incarnate within them, a custom of
which I find no example at all.

One instance of what he conjectures to be a proxy sacrifice for a king
Mr. Frazer finds in a festival at Babylon called the Sacæa.[56] To this
we return in due order. We must first examine cases of similar customs,
or inferred customs, in Greece and Borne.

Meanwhile we hope to have shown that Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin
of the belief in the Divinity of Christ already rests on three scarcely
legitimate hypotheses. First, there is the hypothesis that kings were
slain to release a known deity, incarnate in them, and to provide a
better human vehicle. Of this rite no instances were given. Next, there
is the hypothesis that the King of Babylon was annually sacrificed, and
succeeded by a new king, who was sacrificed at the end of the year.
Historical evidence does not exist, and the supposed custom is beyond
belief. Thirdly, we are to believe in proxies or substitutes who die
annually for the king. Of this practice no actual example is adduced.

Here, perhaps, the reader may be invited to ask himself whether he
believes that there ever was, anywhere, a custom of yearly killing the
king, the head of the state. If he cannot believe this, in the entire
lack of proof, he may admire the faith which can move this mountain
in the interests of Mr. Frazer's conclusions. For my part I may say
that I was so hypnotised, after first reading through the long roll of
Mr. Frazer's 'sad stories of the deaths of kings,' that I could only
murmur 'But there is no historical evidence for the yearly Babylonian,
or rather Persian, regicides.' Then I woke out of the hypnotic trance;
I shook off the drowsy spell of suggestion, and exclaimed 'The king is
killed _annually_!' Next, I asked myself whether mortal men would take
the crown, and how the arrangement would work, and, alas! it was my
belief in Mr. Frazer's theory that was shattered.

But the 'general reader,' perusing an argument of 1,400 pages, may
fall under the hypnotic spell of numerous 'cases,' though none are to
the point, and may accept an hypothesis, however violently opposed
to his knowledge of human nature. To that test we are, in a case
like this, compelled to appeal, however little we may value 'common
sense' in other fields of speculation. Ours is the field of normal
human nature, motive, and action, in which every man may be a judge.
I cannot but think that the author of the theory would have been
stopped by considerations so obvious and obstacles so insuperable.
But first he had the remote analogy of the Aztec war-prisoner who
personated a god, and to a god was sacrificed. That example is of no
real service: the man was a captive and could not help himself; he was
not King of Anahuac. Moreover, he was sacrificed: he was not put to a
death of special shame. Again, there was the Saturnian victim, if we
believe the legend about to be narrated. But he too was sacrificed:
he was not stripped, scourged, and hanged. Our author, however, was
fascinated by the Cross at the end of the long vista of the argument.
In place, therefore, of seeking, or at least in place of finding, a
simple explanation of the Persian custom, or leaving it unexplained,
he accepted the impossibility of the annual regicide at Babylon, and
was launched into a new wilderness of conjectures and inferences to
explain the absence, in the Persian case, of sacrifice and religion,
the presence of a merrymaking and a hanging.


V. THE SATURNALIA


We are next to look for an historical case of the yearly sacrifice,
not of a king, but of a mock-king. The argument thus carries us to
the Roman feast of the Saturnalia. This festival (in late times held
in December, 16-23) so closely resembled our Christmas in jollity,
that Pliny (like some of us) used to withdraw to the most retired
room in his Laurentine villa to escape the noise. Mr. Frazer does not
remark the circumstance, but in Rome before the Empire, or earlier,
the Saturnalia seem to have been a feast of one day only. 'Among our
ancestors,' says Macrobius, 'the Saturnalia were completed in a single
day,' though he does not seem very certain of his fact. Livy says:
'The Saturnalia were instituted as a festal day.'[57] After the time
of Caligula, the Saturnalia endured for five days, 'precisely like the
feast of the Sacæa at Babylon,' of which we are fated to hear a great
deal.[58]

It would thus appear that the Saturnalia were originally a feast of
one day, later lengthened to five days, and again to seven days. By
the time of writers like Lucian and Martial the feast continued for
a week, and Lucian represents Cronos (Saturn) as a jolly old king of
unreason.[59] The rich helped the poor, people made presents to each
other, 'a Christmas carol philosophy,' as Dickens calls it, prevailed.
The masters served the slaves at table; all was licence and riot. Wax
candles were given as presents (_cerea_), like those on our Christmas
trees. These _cerea_, according to Macrobius, were thought by some
antiquaries to be substitutes for human sacrifices. Originally, it was
said, the Pelasgi, before migrating to Italy, received an oracle from
Dodona:

    Τῷ πατρί πέμπετε Φῶτα

'Send a man to the Father,' that is, to the god Cronos or, in Italy,
Saturn. But, by a pun on the Greek _Φῶτα_, they were induced to
substitute lights, the wax candles.[60]

Now it is a really astonishing thing that, if actual human sacrifices
were offered after our era, at the Saturnalia, no Roman antiquary
(and there were plenty of antiquaries) should mention the fact, while
discussing the theory that _cerea_ were commutations of sacrifice. If,
now and then, under the Empire a survival or recrudescence of human
sacrifice was heard of in a rural district, the antiquaries would catch
at it greedily, as a proof that wax tapers really were commutations
of human sacrifice, which some doubted. That rural recrudescences do
occur we know from the recent case of burning an Irish peasant woman to
death, to deliver her from a fairy.[61]

Mr. Frazer, however, believes that survivals of human sacrifices at the
Saturn

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