CHAPTER XV.
ANIMISM (continued).
Spirits regarded as personal causes of Phenomena of the World—Pervading Spirits as good and evil Demons affecting man—Spirits manifest in Dreams and Visions: Nightmares; Incubi and Succubi; Vampires; Visionary Demons—Demons of darkness repelled by fire—Demons otherwise manifest: seen by animals; detected by footprints—Spirits conceived and treated as material—Guardian and Familiar Spirits—Nature-Spirits; historical course of the doctrine—Spirits of Volcanoes, Whirlpools, Rocks—Water-Worship: Spirits of Wells, Streams, Lakes, &c.—Tree-Worship: Spirits embodied in or inhabiting Trees; Spirits of Groves and Forests—Animal-Worship: Animals worshipped, directly, or as incarnations or representatives of Deities; Totem-Worship; Serpent-Worship—Species-Deities; their relation to Archetypal Ideas.
We have now to enter on the final topic of the investigation of Animism, by completing the classified survey of spiritual beings in general, from the myriad souls, elves, fairies, genii, conceived as filling their multifarious offices in man’s life and the world’s, up to the deities who reign, few and mighty, over the spiritual hierarchy. In spite of endless diversity of detail, the general principles of this investigation seem comparatively easy of access to the enquirer, if he will use the two keys which the foregoing studies supply: first, that spiritual beings are modelled by man on his primary conception of his own human soul, and second, that their purpose is to explain nature on the primitive childlike theory that it is truly and throughout ‘Animated Nature.’ If, as the poet says, ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,’ then rude tribes of ancient men had within them this source of happiness, that they could explain to their own content the causes of things. For to them spiritual beings, elves and gnomes, ghosts and manes, demons and deities, were the living personal causes of universal life. ‘The first men found everything easy, the mysteries of nature were not so hidden from them as from us,’ said Jacob Böhme the mystic. True, we may well answer, if these primitive men believed in that animistic philosophy of nature which even now survives in the savage mind. They could ascribe to kind or hostile spirits all good and evil of their own lives, and all striking operations of nature; they lived in familiar intercourse with the living and powerful souls of their dead ancestors, with the spirits of the stream and grove, plain and mountain, they knew well the living mighty Sun pouring his beams of light and heat upon them, the living mighty Sea dashing her fierce billows on the shore, the great personal Heaven and Earth protecting and producing all things. For as the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by the influence of other spirits. And thus Animism, starting as a philosophy of human life, extended and expanded itself till it became a philosophy of nature at large.
To the minds of the lower races it seems that all nature is possessed, pervaded, crowded, with spiritual beings. In seeking by a few types to give an idea of this conception of pervading Spirits in its savage and barbaric stage, it is not indeed possible to draw an absolute line of separation between spirits occupied in affecting for good and ill the life of Man, and spirits specially concerned in carrying on the operations of Nature. In fact these two classes of spiritual beings blend into one another as inextricably as do the original animistic doctrines they are based on. As, however, the spirits considered directly to affect the life and fortune of Man lie closest to the centre of the animistic scheme, it is well to give them precedence. The description and function of these beings extend upwards from among the rudest human tribes. Milligan writes of the Tasmanians: ‘They were polytheists; that is, they believed in guardian angels or spirits, and in a plurality of powerful but generally evil-disposed beings, inhabiting crevices and caverns of rocky mountains, and making temporary abode in hollow trees and solitary valleys; of these a few were supposed to be of great power, while to the majority were imputed much of the nature and attributes of the goblins and elves of our native land.’[388] Oldfield writes of the aborigines of Australia, ‘The number of supernatural beings, feared if not loved, that they acknowledge, is exceedingly great; for not only are the heavens peopled with such, but the whole face of the country swarms with them; every thicket, most watering-places, and all rocky places abound with evil spirits. In like manner, every natural phenomenon is believed to be the work of demons, none of which seem of a benign nature, one and all apparently striving to do all imaginable mischief to the poor black fellow.’[389] It must be indeed an unhappy race among whom such a demonology could shape itself, and it is a relief to find that other people of low culture, while recognizing the same spiritual world swarming about them, do not hold its main attribute to be spite against themselves. Among the Algonquin Indians of North America, Schoolcraft finds the very groundwork of their religion in the belief ‘that the whole visible and invisible creation is animated with various orders of malignant or benign spirits, who preside over the daily affairs and over the final destinies of men.’[390] Among the Khonds of Orissa, Macpherson describes the greater gods and tribal manes, and below these the order of minor and local deities: ‘They are the tutelary gods of every spot on earth, having power over the functions of nature which operate there, and over everything relating to human life in it. Their number is unlimited. They fill all nature, in which no power or object, from the sea to the clods of the field, is without its deity. They are the guardians of hills, groves, streams, fountains, paths, and hamlets, and are cognizant of every human action, want, and interest in the locality, where they preside.’[391] Describing the animistic mythology of the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe, Castrén has said that every land, mountain, rock, river, brook, spring, tree, or whatsoever it may be, has a spirit for an inhabitant; the spirits of the trees and stones, of the lakes and brooks, hear with pleasure the wild man’s pious prayers and accept his offerings.[392] Such are the conceptions of the Guinea negro, who finds the abodes of his good and evil spirits in great rocks, hollow trees, mountains, deep rivers, dense groves, echoing caverns, and who passing silently by these sacred places leaves some offering, if it be but a leaf or a shell picked up on the beach.[393] Such are examples which not unfairly picture the belief of the lower races in a world of spirits on earth, and such descriptions apply to the state of men’s minds along the course of civilization.
The doctrine of ancient philosophers such as Philo[394] and Iamblichus,[395] of spiritual beings swarming through the atmosphere we breathe, was carried on and developed in special directions in the discussions concerning the nature and functions of the world-pervading host of angels and devils, in the writings of the early Christian Fathers.[396] Theologians of modern centuries have for the most part seen reason to reduce within comparatively narrow limits the action ascribed to external spiritual beings on mankind; yet there are some who retain to the full the angelology and demonology of Origen and Tertullian. These two views may be well contrasted by setting side by side the judgments of two ecclesiastics of the Roman Church, as to the belief in pervading demons prevalent in uncivilized countries. The celebrated commentator, Dom Calmet, lays down in the most explicit terms the doctrine of angels and demons, as a matter of dogmatic theology. But he is less inclined to receive unquestioned the narratives of particular manifestations in the mediæval and modern world. He mentions indeed the testimony of Louis Vivez, that in the newly discovered countries of America, nothing is more common than to see spirits which appear at noon-day, not only in the country but in towns and villages, speaking, commanding, sometimes even striking men; and the account by Olaus Magnus of the spectres or spirits seen in Sweden and Norway, Finland and Lapland, which do wonderful things, some even serving men as domestics and driving the cattle out to pasture. But what Calmet remarks on these stories, is that the greater ignorance prevails in a country, the more superstition reigns there.[397] It seems that in our own day, however, the tendency is to encourage less sceptical views. Monsignor Gaume’s book on ‘Holy Water,’ which not long since received the special and formal approval of Pius IX., appears ‘at an epoch when the millions of evil angels which surround us are more enterprising than ever;’ and here Olaus Magnus’ story of the demons infesting Northern Europe is not only cited but corroborated.[398] On the whole, the survey of the doctrine of pervading spirits through all the grades of culture is a remarkable display of intellectual continuity. Most justly does Ellis the missionary, depicting the South Sea Islanders’ world crowded with its innumerable pervading spirits, point out the closeness of correspondence here between doctrines of the savage and the civilized animist, expressed as both may be in Milton’s familiar lines:—
As with souls, so with other spirits, man’s most distinct and direct intercourse is had where they become actually present to his senses in dreams and visions. The belief that such phantoms are real and personal spirits, suggested and maintained as it is by the direct evidence of the senses of sight, touch, and hearing, is naturally an opinion usual in savage philosophy, and indeed elsewhere, long and obstinately resisting the attacks of the later scientific doctrine. The demon Koin strives to throttle the dreaming Australian;[400] the evil ‘na’ crouches on the stomach of the Karen;[401] the North American Indian, gorged with feasting, is visited by nocturnal spirits;[402] the Caribs, subject to hideous dreams, often woke declaring that the demon Maboya had beaten them in their sleep, and they could still feel the pain.[403] These demons are the very elves and nightmares that to this day in benighted districts of Europe ride and throttle the snoring peasant, and whose names, not forgotten among the educated, have only made the transition from belief to jest.[404] A not less distinct product of the savage animistic theory of dreams as real visits from personal spiritual beings, lasted on without a shift or break into the belief of mediæval Christendom. This is the doctrine of the incubi and succubi, those male and female nocturnal demons which consort sexually with men and women. We may set out with their descriptions among the islanders of the Antilles, where they are the ghosts of the dead, vanishing when clutched;[405] in New Zealand, where ancestral deities ‘form attachments with females and pay them repeated visits,’ while in the Samoan Islands such intercourse of mischievious inferior gods caused ‘many supernatural conceptions;’[406] and in Lapland, where details of this last extreme class have also been placed on record.[407] From these lower grades of culture the idea may be followed onward. Formal rites are specified in the Hindu Tantra, which enable a man to obtain a companion-nymph by worshipping her and repeating her name by night in a cemetery.[408] Augustine, in an instructive passage, states the popular notions of the visits of incubi, vouched for, he tells us, by testimony of such quantity and quality that it may seem impudence to deny it; yet he is careful not to commit himself to a positive belief in such spirits.[409] Later theologians were less cautious, and grave argumentation on nocturnal intercourse with incubi and succubi was carried on till, at the height of mediæval civilization, it is found accepted in full belief by ecclesiastics and lawyers. Nor is it to be counted as an ugly but harmless superstition, when for example it is set forth in the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII. in 1484, as an accepted accusation against ‘many persons of both sexes, forgetful of their own salvation, and falling away from the Catholic faith.’ The practical outcome of this belief is known to students who have traced the consequence of the Papal Bull in the legal manual of the witchcraft tribunals, drawn up by the three appointed Inquisitors, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum; and have followed the results of this again into those dreadful records which relate in their bald matter-of-fact phraseology the confessions of the crime of diabolic intercourse, wrung from the wretched victims worked on by threat and persuasion in the intervals of the rack, till enough evidence was accumulated for clear judgment, and sentence of the stake.[410] I need not dwell on the mingled obscenity and horror of these details, which here only have their bearing on the history of animism. But it will aid the ethnographer to understand the relation of modern to savage philosophy, if he will read Richard Burton’s seriously believing account in the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ where he concludes with acquiescence in a declaration lately made by Lipsius, that on the showing of daily narratives and judicial sentences, in no age had these lecherous demons appeared in such numbers as in his own time—and this was about A.D. 1600.[411]
In connexion with the nightmare and the incubus, another variety of nocturnal demon requires notice, the vampire. Inasmuch as certain patients are seen becoming day by day, without apparent cause, thin, weak, and bloodless, savage animism is called upon to produce a satisfactory explanation, and does so in the doctrine that there exist certain demons which eat out the souls or hearts or suck the blood of their victims. The Polynesians said that it was the departed souls (tii) which quitted the graves and grave-idols to creep by night into the houses, and devour the heart and entrails of the sleepers, and these died.[412] The Karens tell of the ‘kephu,’ which is a wizard’s stomach going forth in the shape of a head and entrails, to devour the souls of men, and they die.[413] The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula have their ‘hantu penyadin;’ he is a water-demon, with a dog’s head and an alligator’s mouth, who sucks blood from men’s thumbs and great toes, and they die.[414] It is in Slavonia and Hungary that the demon blood-suckers have their principal abode, and to this district belongs their special name of vampire, Polish upior, Russian upir. There is a whole literature of hideous vampire-stories, which the student will find elaborately discussed in Calmet. The shortest way of treating the belief is to refer it directly to the principles of savage animism. We shall see that most of its details fall into their places at once, and that vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts of wasting disease. As to their nature and physical action, there are two principal theories, but both keep close to the original animistic idea of spiritual beings, and consider these demons to be human souls. The first theory is that the soul of a living man, often a sorcerer, leaves its proper body asleep and goes forth, perhaps in the visible form of a straw or fluff of down, slips through keyholes and attacks its sleeping victim. If the sleeper should wake in time to clutch this tiny soul-embodiment, he may through it have his revenge by maltreating or destroying its bodily owner. Some say these ‘mury’ come by night to men, sit upon their breasts and suck their blood, while others think it is only children’s blood they suck, they being to grown people mere nightmares. Here we have the actual phenomenon of nightmare, adapted to a particular purpose. The second theory is that the soul of a dead man goes out from its buried corpse and sucks the blood of living men. The victim becomes thin, languid, and bloodless, falls into a rapid decline and dies. Here again is actual experience, but a new fancy is developed to complete the idea. The corpse thus supplied by its returning soul with blood, is imagined to remain unnaturally fresh and supple and ruddy; and accordingly the means of detecting a vampire is to open his grave, where the reanimated corpse may be found to bleed when cut, and even to move and shriek. One way to lay a vampire is to stake down the corpse (as with suicides and with the same intention); but the more effectual plan is to behead and burn it. This is the substance of the doctrine of vampires. Still, as one order of demons is apt to blend into others, the vampire-legends are much mixed with other animistic folklore. Vampires appear in the character of the poltergeist or knocker, as causing those disturbances in houses which modern spiritualism refers in like manner to souls of the departed. Such was the ghost of a certain surly peasant who came out of his grave in the island of Mycone in 1700, after he had been buried but two days; he came into the houses, upset the furniture, put the lamps out, and carried on his tricks till the whole population went wild with terror. Tournefort happened to be there and was present at the exhumation; his account is curious evidence of the way an excited mob could persuade themselves, without the least foundation of fact, that the body was warm and its blood red. Again, the blood-sucker is very generally described under the Slavonic names of werewolf (wilkodlak, brukolaka, &c.); the descriptions of the two creatures are inextricably mixed up, and a man whose eyebrows meet, as if his soul were taking flight like a butterfly, to enter some other body, may be marked by this sign either as a werewolf or a vampire. A modern account of vampirism in Bulgaria well illustrates the nature of spirits as conceived in such beliefs as these. A sorcerer armed with a saint’s picture will hunt a vampire into a bottle containing some of the filthy food that the demon loves; as soon as he is fairly inside he is corked down, the bottle is thrown into the fire, and the vampire disappears for ever.[415]
As to the savage visionary and the phantoms he beholds, the Greenlander preparing for the profession of sorcerer may stand as type, when, rapt in contemplation in his desert solitude, emaciated by fasting and disordered by fits, he sees before him scenes with figures of men and animals, which he believes to be spirits. Thus it is interesting to read the descriptions by Zulu converts of the dreadful creatures which they see in moments of intense religious exaltation, the snake with great eyes and very fearful, the leopard creeping stealthily, the enemy approaching with his long assagai in his hand—these coming one after another to the place where the man has gone to pray in secret, and striving to frighten him from his knees.[416] Thus the visionary temptations of the Hindu ascetic and the mediæval saint are happening in our own day, though their place is now rather in the medical handbook than in the record of miracle. Like the disease-demons and the oracle-demons, these spiritual groups have their origin not in fancy, but in real phenomena interpreted on animistic principles.
In the dark especially, harmful spirits swarm. Round native Australian encampments, Sir George Grey used to see the bush dotted with little moving points of fire; these were the firesticks carried by the old women sent to look after the young ones, but who dared not quit the firelight without a brand to protect them from the evil spirits.[417] So South American Indians would carry brands or torches for fear of evil demons when they ventured into the dark.[418] Tribes of the Malay Peninsula light fires near a mother at childbirth, to scare away the evil spirits.[419] Such notions extend to higher levels of civilization. In Southern India, where for fear of pervading spirits only pressing need will induce a man to go abroad after sundown, the unlucky wight who has to venture into the dark will carry a fire-brand to keep off the spectral foes. Even in broad daylight, the Hindu lights lamps to keep off the demons,[420] a ceremony which is to be noticed again at a Chinese wedding.[421] In Europe, the details of the use of fire to drive off demons and witches are minute and explicit. The ancient Norse colonists in Iceland carried fire round the lands they intended to occupy, to expel the evil spirits. Such ideas have brought into existence a whole group of Scandinavian customs, still remembered in the country, but dying out in practice. Till a child is baptized, the fire must never be let out, lest the trolls should be able to steal the infant; a live coal must be cast after the mother as she goes to be churched, to prevent the trolls from carrying her off bodily or bewitching her; a live coal is to be thrown after a troll-wife or witch as she quits a house, and so forth.[422] Into modern times, the people of the Hebrides continued to protect the mother and child from evil spirits, by carrying fire round them.[423] In modern Bulgaria, on the Feast of St. Demetrius, lighted candles are placed in the stables and the wood-shed, to prevent evil spirits from entering into the domestic animals.[424] Nor did this ancient idea remain a mere lingering notion of peasant folklore. Its adoption by the Church is obvious in the ceremonial benediction of candles in the Roman Ritual: ‘Ut quibuscumque locis accensæ, sive positæ fuerint, discedant principes tenebrarum, et contremiscant, et fugiant pavidi cum omnibus ministris suis ab habitationibus illis, &c.’ The metrical translation of Naogeorgus shows perfectly the retention of primitive animistic ideas in the middle ages:—
Animals stare and startle when we see no cause; is it that they see spirits invisible to man? Thus the Greenlander says that the seals and wildfowl are scared by spectres, which no human eye but the sorcerer’s can behold;[426] and thus the Khonds hold that their flitting ethereal gods, invisible to man, are seen by beasts.[427] The thought holds no small place in the folklore of the world. Telemachos could not discern Athene standing near him, for not to all do the gods visibly appear; but Odysseus saw her, and the dogs, and they did not bark, but with low whine slunk across the dwelling to the further side.[428] So in old Scandinavia, the dogs could see Hela the death-goddess move unseen by men;[429] so Jew and Moslem, hearing the dogs howl, know that they have seen the Angel of Death come on his awful errand;[430] while the beliefs that animals see spirits, and that a dog’s melancholy howl means death somewhere near, are still familiar to our own popular superstition.
Another means by which men may detect the presence of invisible spirits, is to adopt the thief-catcher’s well-known device of strewing ashes. According to the ideas of a certain stage of animism, a spirit is considered substantial enough to leave a footprint. The following instances relate sometimes to souls, sometimes to other beings. The Philippine islanders expected the dead to return on the third day to his dwelling, wherefore they set a vessel of water for him to wash himself clean from the grave-mould, and strewed ashes to see footprints.[431] A more elaborate rite forms part of the funeral customs of the Hos of North-East India. On the evening of a death, the near relatives perform the ceremony of calling the dead. Boiled rice and a pot of water are placed in an inner room, and ashes sprinkled from thence to the threshold. Two relatives go to the place where the body was burnt, and walk round it beating ploughshares and chanting a plaintive dirge to call the spirit home; while two others watch the rice and water to see if they are disturbed, and look for the spirit-footsteps in the ashes. If a sign appears, it is received with shivering horror and weeping, the mourners outside coming in to join. Till the survivors are thus satisfied of the spirit’s return, the rite must be repeated.[432] In Yucatan there is mention of the custom of leaving a child alone at night in a place strewn with ashes; if the footprint of an animal were found next morning, this animal was the guardian deity of the child.[433] Beside this may be placed the Aztec ceremony at the second festival of the Sun-god Tezcatlipoca, when they sprinkled maize-flour before his sanctuary, and his high-priest watched till he beheld the divine footprints, and then shouted to announce, ‘Our great god is come.’[434] Among such rites in the Old World, the Talmud contains a salient instance; there are a great multitude of devils, it is said; and he who will be aware of them let him take sifted ashes and strew them by his bed, and in the early morning he shall see as it were marks of cocks’ feet.[435] This is an idea that has widely spread in the modern world, as where in German folklore the little ‘earth-men’ make footprints like a duck’s or goose’s in the strewn ashes. Other marks, too, betoken the passage of spirit-visitors;[436] and as for ghosts, our own superstition is among the most striking of the series. On St. Mark’s Eve, ashes are to be sifted over the hearth, and the footprints will be seen of any one who is to die within the year; many a mischievous wight has made a superstitious family miserable by slily coming down stairs and marking the print of some one’s shoe.[437] Such details as these may justify us in thinking that the lower races are apt to ascribe to spirits in general that kind of ethereal materiality which we have seen they attribute to souls. Explicit statements on the subject are scarce till we reach the level of early Christian theology. The ideas of Tertullian and Origen, as to the thin yet not immaterial substance of angels and demons, probably represent the conceptions of primitive animism far more clearly than the doctrine which Calmet lays down with the weight of theological dogma, that angels, demons, and disembodied souls are pure immaterial spirit; but that when by divine permission spirits appear, act, speak, walk, eat, they must produce tangible bodies by either condensing the air, or substituting other terrestrial solid bodies capable of performing these functions.[438]
No wonder that men should attack such material beings by material means, and even sometimes try to rid themselves by a general clearance from the legion of ethereal beings hovering around them. As the Australians annually drive from their midst the accumulated ghosts of the last year’s dead, so the Gold Coast negroes from time to time turn out with clubs and torches to drive the evil spirits from their towns; rushing about and beating the air with frantic howling, they drive the demons into the woods, and then come home and sleep more easily, and for a while afterwards enjoy better health.[439] When a baby was born in a Kalmuk horde, the neighbours would rush about crying and brandishing cudgels about the tents, to drive off the harmful spirits who might hurt mother and child.[440] Keeping up a closely allied idea in modern Europe, the Bohemians at Pentecost, and the Tyrolese on Walpurgisnacht, hunt the witches, invisible and imaginary, out of house and stall.[441]
Closely allied to the doctrine of souls, and almost rivalling it in the permanence with which it has held its place through all the grades of animism, is the doctrine of patron, guardian, or familiar spirits. These are beings specially attached to individual men, soul-like in their nature, and sometimes considered as actually being human souls. These beings have, like all others of the spiritual world as originally conceived, their reason and purpose. The special functions which they perform are twofold. First, while man’s own proper soul serves him for the ordinary purposes of life and thought, there are times when powers and impressions out of the course of the mind’s normal action, and words that seem spoken to him by a voice from without, messages of mysterious knowledge, of counsel or warning, seem to indicate the intervention of as it were a second superior soul, a familiar demon. And as enthusiasts, seers, sorcerers, are the men whose minds most often show such conditions, so to these classes more than to others the informing and controlling patron-spirits are attached. Second, while the common expected events of daily life pass unnoticed as in the regular course of things, such events as seem to fall out with especial reference to an individual, demand an intervening agent; and thus the decisions, discoveries, and deliverances, which civilized men variously ascribe to their own judgment, to luck, and to special interposition of Providence, are accounted for in the lower culture by the action of the patron-spirit or guardian-genius. Not to crowd examples from all the districts of animism to which this doctrine belongs, let us follow it by a few illustrations from the lower grades of savagery upward. Among the Watchandis of Australia, it is held that when a warrior slays his first man, the spirit of the dead enters the slayer’s body and becomes his ‘woorie’ or warning spirit; taking up its abode near his liver, it informs him by a scratching or tickling sensation of the approach of danger.[442] In Tasmania, Dr. Milligan heard a native ascribe his deliverance from an accident to the preserving care of his deceased father’s spirit, his guardian angel.[443] That the most important act of the North American Indian’s religion is to obtain his individual patron genius or deity, is well known. Among the Esquimaux, the sorcerer qualifies for his profession by getting a ‘torngak’ or spirit which will henceforth be his familiar demon, and this spirit may be the soul of a deceased parent.[444] In Chili, as to guardian spirits, it has been remarked that every Araucanian imagines he has one in his service; ‘I keep my amchi-malghen (guardian nymph) still,’ being a common expression when they succeed in any undertaking.[445] The Caribs display the doctrine well in both its general and special forms. On the one hand, there is a guardian deity for each man, which accompanies his soul to the next life; on the other hand, each sorcerer has his familiar demon, which he evokes in mysterious darkness by chants and tobacco-smoke; and when several sorcerers call up their familiars together, the consequence is apt to be a quarrel among the demons, and a fight.[446] In Africa, the negro has his guardian spirit—how far identified with what Europeans call soul or conscience, it may be hard to determine; but he certainly looks upon it as a being separate from himself, for he summons it by sorcery, builds a little fetish-hut for it by the wayside, rewards and propitiates it by libations of liquor and bits of food.[447] In Asia, the Mongols, each with his patron genius,[448] and the Laos sorcerers who can send their familiar spirits into others’ bodies to cause disease,[449] are examples equally to the purpose.
Among the Aryan nations of Northern Europe,[450] the old doctrine of man’s guardian spirit may be traced, and in classic Greece and Rome it renews with philosophic eloquence and cultured custom the ideas of the Australian and the African. The thought of the spiritual guide and protector of the individual man is happily defined by Menander, who calls the attendant genius, which each man has from the hour of birth, the good mystagogue (i.e. the novice’s guide to the mysteries) of this life.
The divine warning voice which Sokrates used to hear, is a salient example of the mental impressions leading to the belief in guardian spirits.[451] In the Roman world, the doctrine came to be accepted as a philosophy of human life. Each man had his ‘genius natalis,’ associated with him from birth to death, influencing his action and his fate, standing represented by its proper image as a lar among the household gods; and at weddings and joyous times, and especially on the anniversary of the birthday when genius and man began their united career, worship was paid with song and dance to the divine image, adorned with garlands, and propitiated with incense and libations of wine. The demon or genius was, as it were, the man’s companion soul, a second spiritual ego. The Egyptian astrologer warned Antonius to keep far from the young Octavius, ‘for thy demon,’ said he, ‘is in fear of his;’ and truly in after years that genius of Augustus had become an imperial deity, by whom Romans swore solemn oaths, not to be broken.[452] The doctrine which could thus personify the character and fate of the individual man, proved capable of a yet further development. Converting into animistic entities the inmost operations of the human mind, a dualistic philosophy conceived as attached to every mortal a good and an evil genius, whose efforts through life drew him backward and forward toward virtue and vice, happiness and misery. It was the kakodaimōn of Brutus which appeared to him by night in his tent: ‘I am thy evil genius,’ it said, ‘we meet again at Philippi.’[453]
As we study the shapes which the attendant spirits of the individual man assumed in early and mediæval Christendom, it is plain that the good and evil angels contending for man from birth to death, the guardian angel watching and protecting him, the familiar spirit giving occult knowledge or serving with magic art, continue in principle, and even in detail, the philosophy of earlier culture. Such beings even take visible form. St. Francisca had a familiar angel, not merely that domestic one that is given as a guardian to every man, but this was as it were a boy of nine years old, with a face more splendid than the sun, clad in a little white tunic; it was in after years that there came to her a second angel, with a column of splendour rising to the sky, and three golden palm-branches in his hands. Or such attendant beings, though invisible, make their presence evident by their actions, as in Calmet’s account of that Cistercian monk whose familiar genius waited on him, and used to get his chamber ready when he was coming back from the country, so that people knew when to expect him home.[454] There is a pleasant quaintness in Luther’s remark concerning guardian angels, that a prince must have a greater, stronger, wiser angel than a count, and a count than a common man.[455] Bishop Bull, in one of his vigorous sermons, thus sums up a learned argument: ‘I cannot but judge it highly probable, that every faithful person at least hath his particular good Genius or Angel, appointed by God over him, as the Guardian and Guide of his Life.’ But he will not insist on the belief, provided that the general ministry of angels be accepted.[456] Swedenborg will go beyond this. ‘Every man,’ he says, ‘is attended by an associate spirit; for without such an associate, a man would be incapable of thinking analytically, rationally, and spiritually.’[457] Yet in the modern educated world at large, this group of beliefs has passed into the stage of survival. The conception of the good and evil genius contending for man through life, indeed, perhaps never had much beyond the idealistic meaning which art and poetry still give it. The traveller in France may hear in our own day the peasant’s salutation, ‘Bonjour à vous et à votre compagnie!’ (i.e. your guardian angel).[458] But at the birthday festivals of English children, how few are even aware of the historical sequence, plain as it is, from the rites of the classic natal genius and the mediæval natal saint! Among us, the doctrine of guardian angels is to be found in commentaries, and may be sometimes mentioned in the pulpit; but the once distant conception of a present guardian spirit, acting on each individual man and interfering with circumstances on his behalf, has all but lost its old reality. The familiar demon which gave occult knowledge and did wicked work for the magician, and sucked blood from miserable hags by witch-teats, was two centuries ago as real to the popular mind as the alembic or the black cat with which it was associated. Now, it has been cast down to the limbo of unhallowed superstitions.
To turn from Man to Nature. General mention has been made already of the local spirits which belong to mountain and rock and valley, to well and stream and lake, in brief to those natural objects and places which in early ages aroused the savage mind to mythological ideas, such as modern poets in their altered intellectual atmosphere strive to reproduce. In discussing these imaginary beings, it is above all things needful to bring our minds into sympathy with the lower philosophy. Here we must seek to realize to the utmost the definition of the Nature-Spirits, to understand with what distinct and full conviction savage philosophy believes in their reality, to discern how, as living causes, they can fill their places and do their daily work in the natural philosophy of primæval man. Seeing how the Iroquois at their festivals could thank the invisible aids or good spirits, and with them the trees, shrubs, and plants, the springs and streams, the fire and wind, the sun, moon, and stars—in a word, every object that ministered to their wants—we may judge what real personality they attached to the myriad spirits which gave animated life to the world around them.[459] The Gold Coast negro’s generic name for a fetish-spirit is ‘wong;’ these aerial beings dwell in temple-huts and consume sacrifices, enter into and inspire their priests, cause health and sickness among men, and execute the behests of the mighty Heaven-god. But part or all of them are connected with material objects, and the negro can say, ‘In this river, or tree, or amulet, there is a wong.’ But he more usually says, ‘This river, or tree, or amulet is a wong.’ Thus among the wongs of the land are rivers, lakes, and springs, districts of land, termite-hills, trees, crocodiles, apes, snakes, elephants, birds.[460] In a word, his conceptions of animating souls and presiding spirits as efficient causes of all nature are two groups of ideas which we may well find it hard to distinguish, for the sufficient reason that they are but varying developments of the same fundamental animism.
In the doctrine of nature-spirits among nations which have reached a higher grade of culture, are found at once traces of such primitive thought, and of its change under new intellectual conditions. Knowing the thoughts of rude Turanian tribes of Siberia as to pervading spirits of nature, we are prepared to look for remodelled ideas of the same class among a nation whose religion shows plain traces of evolution from the low Turanian stage. The archaic system of manes-worship and nature-worship, which survives as the state religion of China, fully recognizes the worship of the numberless spirits which pervade the universe. The belief in their personality is vouched for by the sacrifices offered to them. ‘One must sacrifice to the spirits,’ says Confucius, ‘as though they were present at the sacrifice.’ At the same time, spirits were conceived as embodied in material objects. Confucius says, again: ‘The action of the spirits, how perfect is it! Thou perceivest it, and yet seest it not! Incorporated or immembered in things, they cannot quit them. They cause men, clean and pure and better clothed, to bring them sacrifice. Many, many, are there of them, as the broad sea, as though they were above and right and left.’ Here are traces of such a primitive doctrine of personal and embodied nature-spirits as is still at home in the religion of rude Siberian hordes. But it was natural that Chinese philosophers should find means of refining into mere ideality these ruder animistic creations. Spirit (shin), they tell us, is the fine or tender part in all the ten thousand things; all that is extraordinary or supernatural is called spirit; the unsearchable of the male and female principles is called spirit; he who knows the way of passing away and coming to be, he knows the working of spirit.[461]
The classic Greeks had inherited from their barbaric ancestors a doctrine of the universe essentially similar to that of the North American Indian, the West African, and the Siberian. We know, more intimately than the heathen religion of our own land, the ancient Greek scheme of nature-spirits impelling and directing by their personal power and will the functions of the universe, the ancient Greek religion of nature, developed by imagination, adorned by poetry, and consecrated by faith. History records for our instruction, how out of the midst of this splendid and honoured creed there were evolved the germs of the new philosophy. Led by minuter insight and stricter reason, thoughtful Greeks began the piecemeal supersession of the archaic scheme, and set in movement the transformation of animistic into physical science, which thence pervaded the whole cultured world. Such, in brief, is the history of the doctrine of nature-spirits from first to last. Let us endeavour, by classifying some of its principal special groups, to understand its place in the history of the human intellect.
What causes volcanos? The Australians account for volcanic rocks by the tradition that the sulky underground ‘ingna’ or demons made great fires and threw up red-hot stones.[462] The Kamchadals say that just as they themselves warm up their winter-houses, so the ‘kamuli’ or mountain-spirits heat up the mountains in which they dwell, and fling the brands out of the chimney.[463] The Nicaraguans offered human sacrifices to Masaya or Popogatepec (Smoking-Mountain), by throwing the bodies into the crater. It seems as though it were a controlling deity, not the mountain itself, that they worshipped; for one reads of the chiefs going to the crater, whence a hideous old naked woman came out and gave them counsel and oracle; at the edge were placed earthen vessels of food to please her, or to appease her when there was a storm or earthquake.[464] Thus animism provided a theory of volcanoes, and so it was likewise with whirlpools and rocks. In the Vei country in West Africa, there is a dangerous rock on the Mafa river, which is never passed without offering a tribute to the spirit of the flood—a leaf of tobacco, a handful of rice, or a drink of rum.[465] An early missionary account of a rock-demon worshipped by the Huron Indians will show with what absolute personality savages can conceive such a being. In the hollow of a certain sacred rock, it is related, dwells an ‘oki’ or spirit who can give success to travellers, wherefore they put tobacco into one of the cracks, and pray thus: ‘Demon who dwellest in this place, behold tobacco I present to thee; help us, keep us from shipwreck, defend us against our enemies, and vouchsafe that when we have made a good trade, we may return safe and sound to our village.’ Father Marquette relates how, travelling on a river in the then little known region of North America, he was told of a dreadful place to which the canoe was just drawing near, where dwells a demon waiting to devour such as dare to approach; this terrific manitu proved on arrival to be some high rocks in the bend of the river, against which the current runs violently.[466] Thus the missionary found in living belief among the savage Indians the very thought which had so long before passed into the classic tale of Skylla and Charybdis.
In those moments of the civilized man’s life when he casts off hard dull science, and returns to childhood’s fancy, the world-old book of animated nature is open to him anew. Then the well-worn thoughts come back fresh to him, of the stream’s life that is so like his own; once more he can see the rill leap down the hillside like a child, to wander playing among the flowers; or can follow it as, grown to a river, it rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in sluggish strength to carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all that water does, the poet’s fancy can discern its personality of life. It gives fish to the fisher, and crops to the husbandman; it swells in fury and lays waste the land; it grips the bather with chill and cramp, and holds with inexorable grasp its drowning victim:[467]