Higher Deities of Polytheism—Human characteristics applied to Deity—Lords of Spiritual Hierarchy—Polytheism: its course of development in lower and higher Culture—Principles of its investigation; classification of Deities according to central conceptions of their significance and function—Heaven-god—Rain-god—Thunder-god—Wind gods—Earth-god—Water-god—Sea-god—Fire-god—Sun-god—Moon-god.

Surveying the religions of the world and studying the descriptions of deity among race after race, we may recur to old polemical terms in order to define a dominant idea of theology at large. Man so habitually ascribes to his deities human shape, human passions, human nature, that we may declare him an Anthropomorphite, an Anthropopathite, and (to complete the series) an Anthropophysite. In this state of religious thought, prevailing as it does through so immense a range among mankind, one of the strongest confirmations may be found of the theory here advanced concerning the development of Animism. This theory that the conception of the human soul is the very ‘fons et origo’ of the conceptions of spirit and deity in general, has been already vouched for by the fact of human souls being held to pass into the characters of good and evil demons, and to ascend to the rank of deities. But beyond this, as we consider the nature of the great gods of the nations, in whom the vastest functions of the universe are vested, it will still be apparent that these mighty deities are modelled on human souls, that in great measure their feeling and sympathy, their character and habit, their will and action, even their material and form, display throughout their adaptations, exaggerations and distortions, characteristics shaped upon those of the human spirit. The key to investigation of the Dii Majorum Gentium of the world is the reflex of humanity, and as we behold their figures in their proper districts of theology, memory ever brings back the Psalmist’s words, ‘Thou thoughtest I was altogether as thyself.’

The higher deities of Polytheism have their places in the general animistic system of mankind. Among nation after nation it is still clear how, man being the type of deity, human society and government became the model on which divine society and government were shaped. As chiefs and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser spirits. They differ from the souls and minor spiritual beings which we have as yet chiefly considered, but the difference is rather of rank than of nature. They are personal spirits, reigning over personal spirits. Above the disembodied souls and manes, the local genii of rocks and fountains and trees, the host of good and evil demons, and the rest of the spiritual commonality, stand these mightier deities, whose influence is less confined to local or individual interests, and who, as it pleases them, can act directly within their vast domain, or control and operate through the lower beings of their kind, their servants, agents, or mediators. The great gods of Polytheism, numerous and elaborately defined in the theology of the cultured world, do not however make their earliest appearance there. In the religions of the lower races their principal types were already cast, and thenceforward, for many an age of progressing or relapsing culture, it became the work of poet and priest, legend-monger and historian, theologian and philosopher, to develop and renew, to degrade and abolish, the mighty lords of the Pantheon.

With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric system of religion is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe. In the lists, it is true, there are set down great deities, good or evil, who probably came in from modern Christian missionary teaching, or otherwise by contact with foreign religions. It is often difficult to distinguish from these the true local gods, animistic figures of native meaning and origin. Among the following polytheistic systems, examples may be found of such combinations, with the complex theological problems they suggest. Among the Australians, above the swarming souls, nature-spirits, demons, there stand out mythic figures of higher divinity; Nguk-wonga, the Spirit of the Waters; Biam, who gives ceremonial songs and causes disease, and is perhaps the same as Baiame the creator; Nambajandi and Warrugura, lords of heaven and the nether world.^[593] In South America, if we look into the theology of the Manaos (whose name is well known in the famous legend of El Dorado and the golden city of Manoa), we see Mauari and Saraua, who may be called the Good and Evil Spirit, and beside the latter the two Gamainhas, Spirits of the Waters and the Forest.^[594] In North America the description of a solemn Algonquin sacrifice introduces a list of twelve dominant manitus or gods; first the Great Manitu in heaven, then the Sun, Moon, Earth, Fire, Water, the House-god, the Indian corn, and the four Winds or Cardinal Points.^[595] The Polynesian’s crowd of manes, and the lower ranks of deities of earth, sea, and air, stand below the great gods of Peace and War, Oro and Tane the national deities of Tahiti and Huahine, Raitubu the Sky-producer, Hina who aided in the work of forming the world, her father Taaroa, the uncreate Creator who dwells in Heaven.^[596] Among the Land Dayaks of Borneo, the commonalty of spirits consists of the souls of the departed, and of such beings as dwell in the noble old forests on the tops of lofty hills, or such as hover about villages and devour the stores of rice; above these are Tapa, creator and preserver of man, and Iang, who taught the Dayaks their religion, Jirong, whose function is the birth and death of men, and Tenabi, who made, and still causes to flourish, the earth and all things therein save the human race.^[597] In West Africa, an example may be taken from the theology of the Slave Coast, a systematic scheme of all nature as moved and quickened by spirits, kindly or hostile to mankind. These spirits dwell in field and wood, mountain and valley; they live in air and water; multitudes of them have been human souls, such ghosts hover about the graves and near the living, and have influence with the under-gods, whom they worship; among these ‘edrõ’ are the patron-deities of men and families and tribes; through these subordinate beings works the highest god, Mawu. The missionary who describes this negro hierarchy quite simply sees in it Satan and his Angels.^[598] In Asia, the Samoyed’s little spirits that are bound to his little fetishes, and the little elves of wood and stream, have greater beings above them, the Forest-Spirit, the River-Spirit, the Sun and Moon, the Evil Spirit and the Good Spirit above all.^[599] The countless host of the local gods of the Khonds pervade the world, rule the functions of nature, and control the life of men, and these have their chiefs; above them rank the deified souls of men who have become tutelary gods of tribes; above these are the six great gods, the Rain-god, the goddess of Firstfruits, the god of Increase, the god of Hunting, the iron god of War, the god of Boundaries, with which group stands also the Judge of the Dead, and above all other gods, the Sun-god and Creator Boora Pennu, and his wife the mighty Earth-goddess, Tari Pennu.^[600] The Spanish conquerors found in Mexico a complex and systematic hierarchy of spiritual beings; numberless were the little deities who had their worship in house and lane, grove and temple, and from these the worshipper could pass to gods of flowers or of pulque, of hunters and goldsmiths, and then to the great deities of the nation and the world, the figures which the mythologist knows so well, Centeotl the Earth-goddess, Tlaloc the Water-god, Huitzilopochtli the War-god, Mictlanteuctli the Lord of Hades, Tonatiuh and Metztli the Sun and Moon.^[601] Thus, starting from the theology of savage tribes, the student arrives at the polytheistic hierarchies of the Aryan nations. In ancient Greece, the cloud-compelling Heaven-god reigns over such deities as the god of War and the goddess of Love, the Sun-god and the Moon-goddess, the Fire-god and the ruler of the Under-world, the Winds and Rivers, the nymphs of wood and well and forest.^[602] In modern India, Brahma-Vishnu-Siva reign pre-eminent over a series of divinities, heterogeneous and often obscure in nature, but among whom stand out in clear meaning and purpose such figures as Indra of Heaven and Sûrya of the Sun, Agni of the Fire, Pavana of the Winds and Varuna of the Waters, Yama lord of the Under-world, Kâma god of Love and Kârttikeya of War, Panchânana who gives epilepsy and Manasâ who preserves from snake-bites, the divine Rivers, and below these the ranks of nymphs, elves, demons, ministering spirits, of heaven and earth—Gandharvas, Apsaras, Siddhas, Asuras, Bhûtas, Râkshasas.^[603]

The systematic comparison of polytheistic religions has been of late years worked with admirable results. These have been due to the adoption of comparatively exact methods, as where the ancient Aryan deities of the Veda have been brought into connexion with those of the Homeric poems, in some cases as clearly as where we Englishmen can study in the Scandinavian Edda the old gods of our own race, whose names stand in local names on the map of England, and serve as counters to reckon our days of the week. Yet it need scarcely be said that to compare in full detail the deities even of closely connected nations, and à fortiori those of tribes not united in language and history, is still a difficult and unsatisfactory task. The old-fashioned identifications of the gods and heroes of different nations admitted most illusory evidence. Some had little more ground than similar-sounding names, as when the Hindu Brahma and Prajâpati were discovered to be the Hebrew Abraham and Japhet, and when even Sir William Jones identified Woden with Buddha. With not much more stringency, it is still often taken as matter of course that the Keltic Beal, whose bealtines correspond with a whole class of bonfire-customs among several branches of the Aryan race, is the Bel or the Baal of the Semitic cultus. Unfortunately, classical scholarship at the Renaissance started the subject on an unsound footing, by accepting the Greek deities with the mystified shapes and perverted names they had assumed in Latin literature. That there was a partial soundness in such comparisons, as in identifying Zeus and Jupiter, Hestia and Vesta, made the plan all the more misleading when Kronos came to figure as Saturn, Poseidon as Neptune, Athene as Minerva. To judge by example of the possible results of comparative theology worked on such principles, Thoth being identified with Hermes, Hermes with Mercury, and Mercury with Woden, there comes to pass the absurd transition from the Egyptian ibis-headed divine scribe of the gods, to the Teutonic heaven-dwelling driver of the raging tempest. It is not in this loose fashion that the mental processes are to be sought out, which led nations to arrange so similarly and yet so diversely their array of deities.

A twofold perplexity besets the soberest investigator on this ground, caused by the modification of deities by development at home and adoption from abroad. Even among the lower races, gods of long traditional legend and worship acquire a mixed and complex personality. The mythologist who seeks to ascertain the precise definition of the Red Indian Michabu in his various characters of Heaven-god and Water-god, Creator of the Earth and first ancestor of Man, or who examines the personality of the Polynesian Maui in his relation to Sun, lord of Heaven or Hades, first Man, and South Sea Island hero, will sympathize with the Semitic or Aryan student bewildered among the heterogeneous attributes of Baal and Astarte, Herakles and Athene. Sir William Jones scarcely overstated the perplexity of the problem in the following remarkable forecast delivered more than a century ago, in the first anniversary discourse before the Asiatic Society of Bengal, at a time when glimpses of the relation of the Hindu to the Greek Pantheon were opening into a new broad view of comparative theology in his mind. ‘We must not be surprised,’ he says, ‘at finding, on a close examination, that the characters of all the Pagan deities, male and female, melt into each other and at last into one or two; for it seems a well-founded opinion, that the whole crowd of gods and goddesses in ancient Rome, and modern Váránes [Benares] mean only the powers of nature, and principally those of the Sun, expressed in a variety of ways and by a multitude of fanciful names.’ As to the travelling of gods from country to country, and the changes they are apt to suffer on the road, we may judge by examples of what has happened within our knowledge. It is not merely that one nation borrows a god from another with its proper figure and attributes and rites, as where in Rome the worshipper of the Sun might take his choice whether he would adore in the temple of the Greek Apollo, the Egyptian Osiris, the Persian Mithra, or the Syrian Elagabalus. The intercourse of races can produce quainter results than this. Any Orientalist will appreciate the wonderful hotchpot of Hindu and Arabic language and religion in the following details, noted down among rude tribes of the Malay Peninsula. We hear of Jin Bumi the Earth-god (Arabic jin = demon, Sanskrit bhûmi = earth); incense is burnt to Jewajewa (Sanskrit dewa = god) who intercedes with Pirman the supreme invisible deity above the sky (Brahma?); the Moslem Allah Táala, with his wife Nabi Mahamad (Prophet Mohammed), appear in the Hinduized characters of creator and destroyer of all things; and while the spirits worshipped in stones are called by the Hindu term of ‘dewa’ or deity, Moslem conversion has so far influenced the mind of the stone-worshipper, that he will give to his sacred boulder the title of a Prophet Mohammed.^[604] If we would have examples nearer home, we may trace the evil demon Aeshma Daeva of the ancient Persian religion becoming the Asmodeus of the book of Tobit, afterwards to find a place in the devilry of the middle ages, and to end his career as the Diable Boiteux of Le Sage. Even the Aztec war-god Huitzilopochtli may be found figuring as the demon Vizlipuzli in the popular drama of Doctor Faustus.

In ethnographic comparisons of the religions of mankind, unless there is evidence of direct relation between gods belonging to two peoples, the safe and reasonable principle is to limit the identification of deities to the attributes they have in common. Thus it is proper to compare the Dendid of the White Nile with the Aryan Indra, in so far as both are Heaven-gods and Rain-gods; the Aztec Tonatiuh with the Greek Apollo, in so far as both are Sun-gods; the Australian Baiame with the Scandinavian Thor, in so far as both are Thunder-gods. The present purpose of displaying Polytheism as a department of Animism does not require that elaborate comparison of systems which would be in place in a manual of the religions of the world. The great gods may be scientifically ranged and treated according to their fundamental ideas, the strongly-marked and intelligible conceptions which, under names often obscure and personalities often mixed and mystified, they stand to represent. It is enough to show the similarity of principle on which the theologic mind of the lower races shaped those old familiar types of deity, with which our first acquaintance was gained in the pantheon of classic mythology. It will be observed that not all, but the principal figures, belong to strict Nature-worship. These may be here first surveyed. They are Heaven and Earth, Rain and Thunder, Water and Sea, Fire and Sun and Moon, worshipped either directly for themselves, or as animated by their special deities, or these deities are more fully set apart and adored in anthropomorphic shape—a group of conceptions distinctly and throughout based on the principles of savage fetishism. True, the great Nature-gods are huge in strength and far-reaching in influence, but this is because the natural objects they belong to are immense in size or range of action, pre-eminent and predominant among lesser fetishes, though still fetishes themselves.

In the religion of the North American Indians, the Heaven-god displays perfectly the gradual blending of the material sky itself with its personal deity. In the early times of French colonization, Father Brebeuf mentions the Hurons addressing themselves to the earth, rivers, lakes, and dangerous rocks, but above all to heaven, believing that it is all animated, and some powerful demon dwells therein. He describes them as speaking directly to heaven by its personal name ‘Aronhiaté!’ Thus when they throw tobacco into the fire as sacrifice, if it is Heaven they address, they say ‘Aronhiaté! (Heaven!) behold my sacrifice, have pity on me, aid me!’ They have recourse to Heaven in almost all their necessities, and respect this great body above all creatures, remarking in it particularly something divine. They imagine in the sky an ‘oki,’ i.e. demon or power, which rules the seasons of the year and controls the winds and waves. They dread its anger, calling it to witness when they make some important promise or treaty, saying, Heaven hears what we do this day, and fearing chastisement should their word be broken. One of their renowned sorcerers said, Heaven will be angry if men mock him; when they cry every day to Heaven, Aronhiaté! yet give him nothing, he will avenge himself. Etymology again suggests the divine sky as the inner meaning of the Iroquois supreme deity, Taronhiawagon the ‘sky-comer’ or ‘sky-holder,’ who had his festival about the winter solstice, who brought the ancestral race out of the mountain, taught them hunting, marriage, and religion, gave them corn and beans, squashes and potatoes and tobacco, and guided them on their migrations as they spread over the land. Among the North American tribes, not only does the conception of the personal divine Heaven thus seem the fundamental idea of the Heaven-god, but it may expand under Christian influence into a yet more general thought of divinity in the Great Spirit in Heaven.^[605] In South Africa, the Zulus speak of the Heaven as a person, ascribing to it the power of exercising a will, and they also speak of a Lord of Heaven, whose wrath they deprecate during a thunderstorm. In the native legends of the Zulu princess in the country of the Half-Men, the captive maiden expostulates personally with the Sky, for only acting in an ordinary way, and not in the way she wishes, to destroy her enemies:—

Thereupon the clouds gather tumultuously; the princess sings again and it thunders terribly, and the Heaven kills the Half-Men round about her, but she is left unharmed.^[606] West Africa is another district where the Heaven-god reigns, in whose attributes may be traced the transition from the direct conception of the personal sky to that of the supreme creative deity. Thus in Bonny, one word serves for god, heaven, cloud; and in Aquapim, Yankupong is at once the highest god and the weather. Of this latter deity, the Nyankupon of the Oji nation, it is remarked by Riis, ‘The idea of him as a supreme spirit is obscure and uncertain, and often confounded with the visible heavens or sky, the upper world (sorro) which lies beyond human reach; and hence the same word is used also for heavens, sky, and even for rain and thunder.’^[607] The same transition from the divine sky to its anthropomorphic deity shows out in the theology of the Tatar tribes. The rude Samoyed’s mind scarcely if at all separates the visible personal Heaven from the divinity united with it under one and the same name, Num. Among the more cultured Finns, the cosmic attributes of the Heaven-god, Ukko the Old One, display the same original nature; he is the ancient of Heaven, the father of Heaven, the bearer of the Firmament, the god of the Air, the dweller on the Clouds, the Cloud-driver, the shepherd of the Cloud-lambs.^[608] So far as the evidence of language, and document, and ceremony, can preserve the record of remotely ancient thought, China shows in the highest deity of the state religion a like theologic development. Tien, Heaven, is in personal shape the Shang-ti or Upper Emperor, the Lord of the Universe. The Chinese books may idealize this supreme divinity; they may say that his command is fate, that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked, that he loves and protects the people beneath him, that he manifests himself through events, that he is a spirit full of insight, penetrating, fearful, majestic. Yet they cannot refine him so utterly away into an abstract celestial deity, but that language and history still recognize him as what he was in the beginning, Tien, Heaven.^[609]

With such evidence perfectly accords the history of the Heaven-god among our Indo-European race. This being, adored in ancient Aryan religion, was—

The evidence of language to this effect has been set forth with extreme clearness by Professor Max Müller. In the first stage, the Sanskrit Dyu (Dyaus), the bright sky, is taken in a sense so direct that it expresses the idea of day, and the storms are spoken of as going about in it; while Greek and Latin rival this distinctness in such terms as ἔνδιος, ‘in the open air,’ εὔδιος, ‘well-skyed, calm,’ sub divo, ‘in the open air,’ sub Jove frigido, ‘under the cold sky,’ and that graphic description by Ennius of the bright firmament, Jove whom all invoke:—

In the second stage, Dyaus pitar, Heaven-father, stands in the Veda as consort of Prithivî mâtar, Earth-mother, ranked high or highest among the bright gods. To the Greek he is Ζεὺς πατήρ, the Heaven-father, Zeus the All-seer, the Cloud-compeller, King of Gods and Men. As Max Müller writes: ‘There was nothing that could be told of the sky that was not in some form or other ascribed to Zeus. It was Zeus who rained, who thundered, who snowed, who hailed, who sent the lightning, who gathered the clouds, who let loose the winds, who held the rainbow. It is Zeus who orders the days and nights, the months, seasons, and years. It is he who watches over the fields, who sends rich harvests, and who tends the flocks. Like the sky, Zeus dwells on the highest mountains; like the sky, Zeus embraces the earth; like the sky, Zeus is eternal, unchanging, the highest god. For good and for evil, Zeus the sky and Zeus the god are wedded together in the Greek mind, language triumphing over thought, tradition over religion.’ The same Aryan Heaven-father is Jupiter, in that original name and nature which he bore in Rome long before they arrayed him in the borrowed garments of Greek myth, and adapted him to the ideas of classic philosophy.^[610] Thus, in nation after nation, took place the great religious development by which the Father-Heaven became the Father in Heaven.

The Rain-god is most often the Heaven-god exercising a special function, though sometimes taking a more distinctly individual form, or blending in characteristics with a general Water-god. In East Central Africa, the spirit of an old chief dwelling on a cloudy mountain-top may receive the worship of his votaries and send down the refreshing showers in answer to their prayers; among the Damaras the highest deity is Omakuru the Rain-giver, who dwells in the far North; while to the negro of West Africa the Heaven-god is the rain-giver, and may pass in name into the rain itself.^[611] Pachacamac, the Peruvian world-creator, has set the Rain-goddess to pour waters over the land, and send down hail and snow.^[612] The Aztec Tlaloc was no doubt originally a Heaven-god, for he holds the thunder and lightning, but he has taken especially the attributes of Water-god and Rain-god; and so in Nicaragua the Rain-god Quiateot (Aztec quiahuitl = rain, teotl = god) to whom children were sacrificed to bring rain, shows his larger celestial nature by being also sender of thunder and lightning.^[613] The Rain-god of the Khonds is Pidzu Pennu, whom the priests and elders propitiate with eggs and arrack and rice and a sheep, and invoke with quaintly pathetic prayers. They tell him how, if he will not give water, the land must remain unploughed, the seed will rot in the ground, they and their children and cattle will die of want, the deer and the wild hog will seek other haunts, and then of what avail will it be for the Rain-god to relent, how little any gift of water will avail, when there shall be left neither man, nor cattle, nor seed; so let him, resting on the sky, pour waters down upon them through his sieve, till the deer are drowned out of the forest and take refuge in the houses, till the soil of the mountains is washed into the valleys, till the cooking-pots burst with the force of the swelling rice, till the beasts gather so plentifully in the green and favoured land, that men’s axes shall be blunted with cutting up the game.^[614] With perfect meteorological fitness, the Kol tribes of Bengal consider their great deity Marang Buru, Great Mountain, to be the Rain-god. Marang Buru, one of the most conspicuous hills of the plateau near Lodmah in Chota-Nagpur, is the deity himself or his dwelling. Before the rains come on, the women climb the hill, led by the wives of the pahans, with girls drumming, to carry offerings of milk and bel-leaves, which are put on the flat rock at the top. Then the wives of the pahans kneel with loosened hair and invoke the deity, beseeching him to give the crops seasonable rain. They shake their heads violently as they reiterate this prayer, till they work themselves into a frenzy, and the movement becomes involuntary. They go on thus wildly gesticulating, till a cloud is seen; then they rise, take the drums, and dance the kurrun on the rock, till Marang Buru’s response to their prayer is heard in the distant rumbling of thunder, and they go home rejoicing. They must go fasting to the mount, and stay there till there is ‘a sound of abundance of rain,’ when they get them down to eat and drink. It is said that the rain always comes before evening, but the old women appear to choose their own moment for beginning the fast.^[615] It was to Ukko the Heaven-god, that in old days the Finn turned with such prayers:—

Quite like this were the classic conceptions of Ζεὺς ὑέτιος Jupiter Pluvius. They are typified in the famous Athenian prayer recorded by Marcus Aurelius, ‘Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the plough-lands of the Athenians, and the plains!’^[617] and in Petronius Arbiter’s complaint of the irreligion of his times, that now no one thinks heaven is heaven, no one keeps a fast, no one cares a hair for Jove, but all men with closed eyes reckon up their goods. Afore-time the ladies walked up the hill in their stoles with bare feet and loosened hair and pure minds, and entreated Jove for water; then all at once it rained bucketsfull, then or never, and they all went home wet as drowned rats.^[618] In later ages, when drought parched the fields of the mediæval husbandman, he transferred to other patrons the functions of the Rain-god, and with procession and litany sought help from St. Peter or St. James, or, with more of mythological consistency, from the Queen of Heaven. As for ourselves, we have lived to see the time when men shrink from addressing even to Supreme Deity the old customary rain-prayers, for the rainfall is passing from the region of the supernatural, to join the tides and seasons in the realm of physical science.

The place of the Thunder-god in polytheistic religion is similar to that of the Rain-god, in many cases even to entire coincidence. But his character is rather of wrath than of beneficence, a character which we have half lost the power to realize, since the agonizing terror of the thunderstorm which appals savage minds has dwindled away in ours, now that we behold in it not the manifestation of divine wrath, but the restoration of electric equilibrium. North American tribes, as the Mandans, heard in the thunder and saw in the lightning the clapping wings and flashing eyes of that awful heaven-bird which belongs to, or even is, the Great Manitu himself.^[619] The Dacotas could show at a place called Thunder-tracks, near the source of the St. Peter’s River, the footprints of the thunder-bird five and twenty miles apart. It is to be noticed that these Sioux, among their varied fancies about thunder-birds and the like, give unusually well a key to the great thunderbolt-myth which recurs in so many lands. They consider the lightning entering the ground to scatter there in all directions thunderbolt-stones, which are flints, &c., their reason for this notion being the very rational one, that these siliceous stones actually produce a flash when struck.^[620] In an account of certain Carib deities, who were men and are now stars, occurs the name of Savacou, who was changed into a great bird; he is captain of the hurricane and thunder, he blows fire through a tube and that is lightning, he gives the great rain. Rochefort describes the effect of a thunderstorm on the partly Europeanized Caribs of the West Indies two centuries ago. When they perceive its approach, he says, they quickly betake themselves to their cabins, and range themselves in the kitchen on their little seats near the fire; hiding their faces and leaning their heads in their hands and on their knees, they fall to weeping and lamenting in their jargon ‘Maboya mouche fache contre Caraïbe,’ i.e., Maboya (the evil demon) is very angry with the Caribs. This they say also when there comes a hurricane, not leaving off this dismal exercise till it is over, and there is no end to their astonishment that the Christians on these occasions manifest no such affliction and fear.^[621] The Tupi tribes of Brazil are an example of a race among whom the Thunder or the Thunderer, Tupan, flapping his celestial wings and flashing with celestial light, was developed into the very representative of highest deity, whose name still stands among their Christian descendants as the equivalent of God.^[622] In Peru, a mighty and far-worshipped deity was Catequil the Thunder-god, child of the Heaven-god, he who set free the Indian race from out of the ground by turning it up with his golden spade, he who in thunder-flash and clap hurls from his sling the small round smooth thunderstones, treasured in the villages as fire-fetishes and charms to kindle the flames of love. How distinct in personality and high in rank was the Thunder and Lightning (Chuqui yllayllapa) in the religion of the Incas, may be judged from his huaca or fetish-idol standing on the bench beside the idols of the Creator and the Sun at the great Solar festival in Cuzco, when the beasts to be sacrificed were led round them, and the priests prayed thus: ‘O Creator, and Sun, and Thunder, be for ever young! do not grow old. Let all things be at peace! let the people multiply, and their food, and let all other things continue to increase.’^[623]

In Africa, we may contrast the Zulu, who perceives in thunder and lightning the direct action of Heaven or Heaven’s lord, with the Yoruba, who assigns them not to Olorun the Lord of Heaven, but to a lower deity, Shango the Thunder-god, whom they call also Dzakuta the Stone-caster, for it is he who (as among so many other peoples who have forgotten their Stone Age) flings down from heaven the stone hatchets which are found in the ground, and preserved as sacred objects.^[624] In the religion of the Kamchadals, Billukai, the hem of whose garment is the rainbow, dwells in the clouds with many spirits, and sends thunder and lightning and rain.^[625] Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus the Thunderer is Ilya, in whose name mythologists trace a Christian tradition of Elijah, whose fiery chariot seems indeed to have been elsewhere identified with that of the Thunder-god, while the highest peak of Ægina, once the seat of Pan-hellenic Zeus, is now called Mount St. Elias. Among certain Moslem schismatics, it is even the historical Ali, cousin of Mohammed, who is enthroned in the clouds, where the thunder is his voice, and the lightning the lash wherewith he smites the wicked.^[626] Among the Turanian or Tatar race, the European branch shows most distinctly the figure of the Thunder-god. To the Lapps, Tiermes appears to have been the Heaven-god, especially conceived as Aija the Thunder-god; of old they thought the Thunder (Aija) to be a living being, hovering in the air and hearkening to the talk of men, smiting such as spoke of him in an unseemly way; or, as some said, the Thunder-god is the foe of sorcerers, whom he drives from heaven and smites, and then it is that men hear in thunder-peals the hurtling of his arrows, as he speeds them from his bow, the Rainbow. In Finnish poetry, likewise, Ukko the Heaven-god is portrayed with such attributes. The Runes call him Thunderer, he speaks through the clouds, his fiery shirt is the lurid storm-cloud, men talk of his stones and his hammer, he flashes his fiery sword and it lightens, or he draws his mighty rainbow, Ukko’s bow, to shoot his fiery copper arrows, wherewith men would invoke him to smite their enemies. Or when it is dark in his heavenly house he strikes fire, and that is lightning. To this day the Finlanders call a thunderstorm an ‘ukko,’ or an ‘ukkonen,’ that is, ‘a little ukko,’ and when it lightens they say, ‘There is Ukko striking fire!’^[627]

What is the Aryan conception of the Thunder-god, but a poetic elaboration of thoughts inherited from the savage state through which the primitive Aryans had passed? The Hindu Thunder-god is the Heaven-god Indra, Indra’s bow is the rainbow, Indra hurls the thunderbolts, he smites his enemies, he smites the dragon-clouds, and the rain pours down on earth, and the sun shines forth again. The Veda is full of Indra’s glories: ‘Now will I sing the feats of Indra, which he of the thunderbolt did of old. He smote Ahi, then he poured forth the waters; he divided the rivers of the mountains. He smote Ahi by the mountain; Tvashtar forged for him the glorious bolt.’—‘Whet, O strong Indra, the heavy strong red weapon against the enemies!’—‘May the axe (the thunderbolt) appear with the light; may the red one blaze forth bright with splendour!’—‘When Indra hurls again and again his thunderbolt, then they believe in the brilliant god.’ Nor is Indra merely a great god in the ancient Vedic pantheon, he is the very patron-deity of the invading Aryan race in India, to whose help they look in their conflicts with the dark-skinned tribes of the land. ‘Destroying the Dasyus, Indra protected the Aryan colour’—‘Indra protected in battle the Aryan worshipper, he subdued the lawless for Manu, he conquered the black skin.’^[628] This Hindu Indra is the offspring of Dyaus the Heaven. But in the Greek religion, Zeus is himself Zeus Kerauneios, the wielder of the thunderbolt, and thunders from the cloud-capped tops of Ida or Olympos. In like manner the Jupiter Capitolinus of Rome is himself Jupiter Tonans:

Thus, also, it was in accurate language that the old Slavonic nations were described as adoring Jupiter Tonans as their highest god. He was the cloud-dwelling Heaven-god, his weapon the thunder-bolt, the lightning-flash, his name Perun the Smiter (Perkun, Perkunas). In the Lithuanian district, the thunder itself is Perkun; in past times the peasant would cry when he heard the thunder peal ‘Dewe Perkune apsaugog mus!—God Perkun spare us!’ and to this day he says, ‘Perkunas gravja!—Perkun is thundering!’ or ‘Wezzajs barrahs!—the Old One growls!’^[630] The old German and Scandinavian theology made Thunder, Donar, Thor, a special deity to rule the clouds and rain, and hurl his crushing hammer through the air. He reigned high in the Saxon heaven, till the days came when the Christian convert had to renounce him in solemn form, ‘ec forsacho Thunare!—I forsake Thunder!’ Now, his survival is for the most part in mere verbal form, in the etymology of such names as Donnersberg, Thorwaldsen, Thursday.^[631]

In the polytheism of the lower as of the higher races, the Wind-gods are no unknown figures. The Winds themselves, and especially the Four Winds in their four regions, take name and shape as personal divinities, while some deity of wider range, a Wind-god, Storm-god, Air-god, or the mighty Heaven-god himself, may stand as compeller or controller of breeze and gale and tempest. We have already taken as examples from the Algonquin mythology of North America the four winds whose native legends have been versified in ‘Hiawatha;’ Mudjekeewis the West Wind, Father of the Winds of Heaven, and his children, Wabun the East Wind, the morning-bringer, the lazy Shawondasse the South Wind, the wild and cruel North Wind, the fierce Kabibonokka. Viewed in their religious aspect, these mighty beings correspond with four of the great manitus sacrificed to among the Delawares, the West, South, East, and North; while the Iroquois acknowledged a deity of larger grasp, Gäoh, the Spirit of the Winds, who holds them prisoned in the mountains in the Home of the Winds.^[632] The Polynesian Wind-gods are thus described by Ellis: ‘The chief of these were Veromatautoru and Tairibu, brother and sister to the children of Taaroa, their dwelling was near the great rock, which was the foundation of the world. Hurricanes, tempests, and all destructive winds, were supposed to be confined within them, and were employed by them to punish such as neglected the worship of the gods. In stormy weather their compassion was sought by the tempest-driven mariner at sea, or the friends of such on shore. Liberal presents, it was supposed, would at any time purchase a calm. If the first failed, subsequent ones were certain of success. The same means were resorted to for procuring a storm, but with less certainty. Whenever the inhabitants of one island heard of invasion from those of another, they immediately carried large offerings to these deities, and besought them to destroy by tempest the hostile fleet whenever it might put to sea. Some of the most intelligent people still think evil spirits had formerly great power over the winds, as they say there have been no such fearful storms since they abolished idolatry, as there were before.’ Or, again, the great deity Maui adds a new complication to his enigmatic solar-celestial character by appearing as a Wind-God. In Tahiti he was identified with the East Wind; in New Zealand he holds all the winds but the west in his hands, or he imprisons them with great stones rolled to the mouths of their caves, save the West Wind which he cannot catch or prison, so that it almost always blows.^[633] To the Kamchadal, it is Billukai the Heaven-god who comes down and drives his sledge on earth, and men see his traces in the wind-drifted snow.^[634] To the Finn, while there are traces of subordinate Wind-gods in his mythology, the great ruler of wind and storm is Ukko the Heaven-god;^[635] while the Esth looked rather to Tuule-ema, Wind’s Mother, and when the gale shrieks he will still say ‘Wind’s mother wails, who knows what mothers shall wail next.’^[636] Such instances from Allophylian mythology^[637] show types which are found developed in full vigour by the Aryan races. In the Vedic hymns, the Storm Gods, the Maruts, borne along with the fury of the boisterous winds, with the rain-clouds distribute showers over the earth, make darkness during the day, rend the trees and devour the forests like wild elephants.^[638] No effort of the Red Indian’s personifying fancy in the tales of the dancing Pauppuk-keewis the Whirlwind, or that fierce and shifty hero, Manabozho the North-West Wind, can more than match the description in the Iliad, of Achilles calling on Boreas and Zephyros with libations and vows of sacrifice, to blow into a blaze the funeral pyre of Patroklos—