Polytheism comprises a class of Great Deities, ruling the course of Nature and the life of Man—Childbirth-god—Agriculture-god—War-god—God of the Dead—First Man as Divine Ancestor—Dualism; its rudimentary and unethical nature among low races; its development through the course of culture—Good and Evil Deity—Doctrine of Divine Supremacy, distinct from, while tending towards, the doctrine of Monotheism—Idea of a Highest or Supreme Deity evolved in various forms; its place as completion of the Polytheistic system and outcome of the Animistic philosophy; its continuance and development among higher nations—General survey of Animism as a Philosophy of Religion—Recapitulation of the theory advanced as to its development through successive stages of culture; its primary phases best represented among the lower races, while survivals of these among the higher races mark the transition from savage through barbaric to civilized faiths—Transition of Animism in the History of Religion; its earlier and later stages as a Philosophy of the Universe; its later stages as the principle of a Moral Institution.
Polytheism acknowledges, beside great fetish-deities like Heaven and Earth, Sun and Moon, another class of great gods whose importance lies not in visible presence, but in the performance of certain great offices in the course of Nature and the life of Man. The lower races can furnish themselves with such deities, either by giving the recognized gods special duties to perform, or by attributing these functions to beings invented in divine personality for the purpose. The creation of such divinities is however carried to a much greater extent in the complex systems of the higher polytheism. For a compact group of examples showing to what different ideas men will resort for a deity to answer a special end, let us take the deity presiding over Childbirth. In the West Indies, a special divinity occupied with this function took rank as one of the great indigenous fetish-gods;[743] in the Samoan group, the household god of the father’s or mother’s family was appealed to;[744] in Peru the Moon takes to this office,[745] and the same natural idea recurs in Mexico;[746] in Esthonian religion the productive Earth-mother appropriately becomes patroness of human birth;[747] in the classic theology of Greece and Italy, the divine spouse of the Heaven-king, Hera,[748] Juno,[749] favours and protects on earth marriage and the birth of children; and to conclude the list, the Chinese work out the problem from the manes-worshipper’s point of view, for the goddess whom they call ‘Mother’ and propitiate with many a ceremony and sacrifice to save and prosper their children, is held to have been in human life a skilful midwife.[750]
The deity of Agriculture may be a cosmic being affecting the weather and the soil, or a mythic giver of plants and teacher of their cultivation and use. Thus among the Iroquois, Heno the Thunder, who rides through the heavens on the clouds, who splits the forest-trees with the thunderbolt-stones he hurls at his enemies, who gathers the clouds and pours out the warm rains, was fitly chosen as patron of husbandry, invoked at seed-time and harvest, and called Grandfather by his children the Indians.[751] It is interesting to notice again on the southern continent the working out of this idea in the Tupan of Brazilian tribes; Thunder and Lightning, it is recorded, they call Tupan, considering themselves to owe to him their hoes and the profitable art of tillage, and therefore acknowledging him as a deity.[752] Among the Guarani race, Tamoi the Ancient of Heaven had no less rightful claim, in his character of heaven-god, to be venerated as the divine teacher of agriculture to his people.[753] In Mexico, Centeotl the Grain-goddess received homage and offerings at her two great festivals, and took care of the growth and keeping of the corn.[754] In Polynesia, we hear in the Society Islands of Ofanu the god of husbandry, in the Tonga Islands of Alo Alo the fanner, god of wind and weather, bearing office as god of harvest, and receiving his offering of yams when he had ripened them.[755] A picturesque figure from barbaric Asia is Pheebee Yau, the Ceres of the Karens, who sits on a stump and watches the growing and ripening com, to fill the granaries of the frugal and industrious.[756] The Khonds worship at the same shrine, a stone or tree near the village, both Būrbi Pennu the goddess of new vegetation, and Pidzu Pennu the rain-god.[757] Among Finns and Esths it is the Earth-mother who appropriately undertakes the task of bringing forth the fruits.[758] And so among the Greeks it is the same being, Dēmētēr the Earth-mother, who performs this function, while the Roman Ceres who is confused with her is rather, as in Mexico, a goddess of grain and fruit.[759]
The War-god is another being wanted among the lower races, and formed or adapted accordingly. Areskove the Iroquois War-god seems to be himself the great celestial deity; for his pleasant food they slaughtered human victims, that he might give them victory over their enemies; as a pleasant sight for him they tortured the war-captives; on him the war-chief called in solemn council, and the warriors, shouting his name, rushed into the battle he was surveying from on high. Canadian Indians before the fight would look toward the sun, or addressed the Great Spirit as god of war; Floridan Indians prayed to the Sun before their wars.[760] Araucanians of Chili entreated Pillan the Thunder-god that he would scatter their enemies, and thanked him amidst their cups after a victory.[761] The very name of Mexico seems derived from Mexitli, the national War-god, identical or identified with the hideous gory Huitzilopochtli. Not to attempt a general solution of the enigmatic nature of this inextricable compound parthenogenetic deity, we may notice the association of his principal festival with the winter-solstice, when his paste idol was shot through with an arrow, and being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten, wherefore the ceremony was called the teoqualo or ‘god-eating.’ This and other details tend to show Huitzilopochtli as originally a nature-deity, whose life and death were connected with the year’s, while his functions of War-god may be of later addition.[762] Polynesia is a region where quite an assortment of war-gods may be collected. Such, to take but one example, was Tairi, war-god of King Kamehameha of the Sandwich Islands, whose hideous image, covered with red feathers, shark-toothed, mother-of-pearl-eyed, with helmet-crest of human hair, was carried into battle by his special priest, distorting his own face into hideous grins, and uttering terrific yells which were considered to proceed from the god.[763] Two examples from Asia may show what different original conceptions may serve to shape such deities as these upon. The Khond War-god, who entered into all weapons, so that from instruments of peace they became weapons of war, who gave edge to the axe and point to the arrow, is the very personified spirit of tribal war, his token is the relic of iron and the iron weapons buried in his sacred grove which stands near each group of hamlets, and his name is Loha Pennu or Iron-god.[764] The Chinese War-god, Kuang Tä, on the other hand, is an ancient military ghost; he was a distinguished officer, as well as a ‘faithful and honest courtier,’ who flourished during the wars of the Han dynasty, and emperors since then have delighted to honour him by adding to his usual title more and more honorary distinctions.[765] Looking at these selections from the army of War-gods of the different regions of the world, we may well leave their classic analogues, Arēs and Mars, as beings whose warlike function we recognize, but not so easily their original nature.[766]
It would be easy, going through the religious systems of Polynesia and Mexico, Greece and Rome, India and China, to give the names and offices of a long list of divinities, patrons of hunting and fishing, carpentering and weaving, and so forth. But studying here rather the continuity of polytheistic ideas than the analysis of polytheistic divinities, it is needless to proceed farther in the comparison of these deities of special function, as recognized to some extent in the lower civilization, before their elaborate development became one of the great features of the higher.
The great polytheistic deities we have been examining, concerned as they are with the earthly course of nature and human life, are gods of the living. But even in savage levels man began to feel an intellectual need of a God of the Dead, to reign over the souls of men in the next life, and this necessity has been supplied in various ways. Of the deities set up as lords of Deadman’s Land, some are beings whose original meaning is obscure. Some are distinctly nature-deities appointed to this office, often for local reasons, as happening to belong to the regions where the dead take up their abode. Some, again, are as distinctly the deified souls of men. The two first classes may be briefly instanced together in America, where the light-side and shadow-side (as Dr. J. G. Müller well calls them) of the conception of a future life are broadly contrasted in the definitions of the Lord of the Dead. Among the Northern Indians this may be Tarenyawagon the Heaven-God, identified with the Great Spirit, who receives good warriors in his happy hunting-grounds, or his grandmother, the Death-goddess Atahentsic.[767] In Brazil, the Under-world-god, who places good warriors and sorcerers in Paradise, contrasts with Aygnan the evil deity who takes base and cowardly Tupi souls,[768] much as the Mexican Tlaloc, Water-god and lord of the earthly paradise, contrasts with Mictlanteuctli, ruler of the dismal dead-land in the shades below.[769] In Peru there has been placed on record a belief that the departed spirits went to be with the Creator and Teacher of the World—‘Bring us too near to thee ... that we may be fortunate, being near to thee, O Uira-cocha!’ There are also statements as to an under-world of shades, the land of the demon Supay.[770] Accounts of this class must often be suspected of giving ideas mis-stated under European influence, or actually adopted from Europeans, but there is in some a look of untouched genuineness. Thus in Polynesia, the idea of a Devil borrowed from colonists or missionaries may be suspected in such a figure as the evil deity Wiro, chief of Reigna, the New Zealander’s western world of departed souls. But few conceptions of deity are more quaintly original than that of the Samoan deity Saveasiuleo, at once ruler of destinies of war and other affairs of men and chief of the subterranean Bulotū, with the human upper half of his body reclining in his great house in company with the spirits of departed chiefs, while his tail or extremity stretches far away into the sea, in the shape of an eel or serpent. Under a name corresponding dialectically (Siuleo = Hikuleo), this composite being reappears in the kindred myths of the neighbouring group, the Tonga Islands. The Tongan Hikuleo has his home in the spirit-land of Bulotū, here conceived as out in the far western sea. Here we are told the use of his tail. His body goes away on journeys, but his tail remains watching in Bulotū, and thus he is aware of what goes on in more places than one. Hikuleo used to carry off the first-born sons of Tongan chiefs, to people his island of the blest, and he so thinned the ranks of the living that at last the other gods were moved to compassion. Tangaloa and Maui seized Hikuleo, passed a strong chain round him, and fastened one end to heaven and the other to earth. Another god of the dead, of well-marked native type, is the Rarotongan Tiki, an ancestral deity as in New Zealand, to whose long house, a place of unceasing joys, the dead are to find their way.[771] Among Turanian tribes, there are Samoyeds who believe in a deity called ‘A,’ dwelling in impenetrable darkness, sending disease and death to men and reindeer, and ruling over a crowd of spirits which are manes of the dead. Tatars tell of the nine Irle-Chans, who in their gloomy subterranean kingdom not only rule over souls of the dead, but have at their command a multitude of ministering spirits, visible and invisible. In the gloomy under-world of the Finns reigns Mana or Tuoni, a being whose nature is worked out by personification from the dismal dead-land or death itself.[772] Much the same may be said of the Greek Aidēs, Hades, and the Scandinavian Hel, whose names, perhaps not so much by confusion as with a sense of their latent significance, have become identified in language with the doleful abodes over which a personifying fancy set them to preside.[773] As appropriately, though working out a different idea, the ancient Egyptians conceived their great solar deity to rule in the regions of his western under-world—Osiris is Lord of the Dead in Amenti.[774]
In the world’s assembly of great gods, an important place must be filled up by the manes-worshipper in logical development of his special system. The theory of family manes, carried back to tribal gods, leads to the recognition of superior deities of the nature of Divine Ancestor or First Man, and it is of course reasonable that such a being, if recognized, should sometimes fill the place of lord of the dead, whose ancestral chief he is. There is an anecdote among the Mandans told by Prince Maximilian von Wied, which brings into view conceptions lying in the deepest recesses of savage religion, the idea of the divine first ancestor, the mythic connexion of the sun’s death and descent into the under-world, with the like fate of man and the nature of the spiritual intercourse between man’s own soul and his deity. The First Man, it is said, promised the Mandans to be their helper in time of need, and then departed into the West. It came to pass that the Mandans were attacked by foes. One Mandan would send a bird to the great ancestor to ask for help, but no bird could fly so far. Another thought a look would reach him, but the hills walled him in. Then said a third, thought must be the safest way to reach the First Man. He wrapped himself in his buffalo-robe, fell down, and spoke, ‘I think—I have thought—I come back.’ Throwing off the fur, he was bathed in sweat. The divine helper he had called on in his distress appeared.[775] There is instructive variety in the ways in which the lower American races work out the conception of the divine forefather. The Mingo tribes revere and make offerings to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a powerful deity under the Master of Life, or even as identified with him; some Mississippi Indians said that the First Man ascended into heaven, and thunders there; among the Dog-ribs, he was creator of sun and moon;[776] Tamoi, the grandfather and ancient of heaven of the Guaranis, was their first ancestor, who dwelt among them and taught them to till the soil, and rose to heaven in the east, promising to succour them on earth, and at death to carry them from the sacred tree into a new life where they should all meet again, and have much hunting.[777]
Polynesia, again, has thoroughly worked the theory of divine ancestors into the native system of multiform and blending nature-deities. Men are sprung from the divine Maui, whom Europeans have therefore called the ‘Adam of New Zealand,’ or from the Rarotongan Tiki, who seems his equivalent (Mauitiki), and who again is the Tii of the Society Islands; it is, however, the son of Tii who precisely represents a Polynesian Adam, for his name is Taata, i.e., Man, and he is the ancestor of the human race. There is perhaps also reason to identify Maui and the First Man with Akea, first King of Hawaii, who at his earthly death descended to rule over his dark subterranean kingdom, where his subjects are the dead who recline under the spreading kou-trees, and drink of the infernal rivers, and feed on lizards and butterflies.[778] In the mythology of Kamchatka, the relation between the Creator and the First Man is one not of identity but of parentage. Among the sons of Kutka the Creator is Haetsh the First Man, who dwelt on earth, and died, and descended into Hades to be chief of the under-world; there he receives the dead and new-risen Kamchadals, to continue a life like that of earth in his pleasant subterranean land where mildness and plenty prevail, as they did in the regions above in the old days when the Creator was still on earth.[779] Among all the lower races who have reasoned out this divine ancestor, none excel those consistent manes-worshippers, the Zulus. Their worship of the manes of the dead has not only made the clan-ancestors of a few generations back into tribal deities (Unkulunkulu), but beyond these, too far off and too little known for actual worship, yet recognized as the original race-deity and identified with the Creator, stands the First Man, he who ‘broke off in the beginning,’ the Old-Old-One, the great Unkulunkulu. While the Zulu’s most intense religious emotions are turned to the ghosts of the departed, while he sacrifices his beloved oxen and prays with agonising entreaty to his grandfather, and carries his tribal worship back to those ancestral deities whose praise-giving names are still remembered, the First Man is beyond the reach of such rites. ‘At first we saw that we were made by Unkulunkulu. But when we were ill we did not worship him, nor ask anything of him. We worshipped those whom we had seen with our eyes, their death and their life among us.... Unkulunkulu had no longer a son who could worship him; there was no going back to the beginning, for people increased, and were scattered abroad, and each house had its own connections; there was no one who said, “For my part I am of the house of Unkulunkulu.”’ Nay more, the Zulus who would not dare to affront an ‘idhlozi,’ a common ghost, that might be angry and kill them, have come to make open mock of the name of the great first ancestor. When the grown-up people wish to talk privately or eat something by themselves, it is the regular thing to send the children out to call at the top of their voices for Unkulunkulu. ‘The name of Unkulunkulu has no respect paid to it among black men; for his house no longer exists. It is now like the name of a very old crone, who has no power to do even a little thing for herself, but sits continually where she sat in the morning till the sun sets. And the children make sport of her, for she cannot catch them and flog them, but only talk with her mouth. Just so is the name of Unkulunkulu when all the children are told to go and call him. He is now a means of making sport of children.’[780]
In Aryan religion, the divinities just described give us analogues for the Hindu Yama, throughout his threefold nature as First Man, as solar God of Hades, as Judge of the Dead. Professor Max Müller thus suggests his origin, which may indeed be inferred from his being called the child of Vivasvat, himself the Sun: ‘The sun, conceived as setting or dying every day, was the first who had trodden the path of life from East to West—the first mortal—the first to show us the way when our course is run, and our sun sets in the far West. Thither the fathers followed Yama; there they sit with him rejoicing, and thither we too shall go when his messengers (day and night) have found us out.... Yama is said to have crossed the rapid waters, to have shown the way to many, to have first known the path on which our fathers crossed over.’ It is a perfectly consistent myth-formation, that the solar Yama should become the first of mortals who died and discovered the way to the other world, who guides other men thither and assembles them in a home which is secured to them for ever. As representative of death, Yama had even in early Aryan times his aspects of terror, and in later Indian theology he becomes not only the Lord but the awful Judge of the Dead, whom some modern Hindus are said to worship alone of all the gods, alleging that their future state is to be determined only by Yama, and that they have nothing therefore to hope or fear from any beside him. In these days, Hindu and Parsi in Bombay are learning from scholars in Europe the ancient connexion of their long antagonistic faiths, and have to hear that Yama son of Visavat sitting on his awful judgment-seat of the dead, to reward the good and punish the wicked with hideous tortures, and Yima son of Vivanhâo who in primæval days reigned over his happy deathless kingdom of good Zarathustrian men, are but two figures developed in the course of ages out of one and the same Aryan nature-myth.[781] Within the limits of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theology, the First Man scarcely occupies more than a place of precedence among the human race in Hades or in Heaven, not the high office of Lord of the Dead. Yet that tendency to deify an ideal ancestor, which we observe to act so strongly on lower races, has taken effect also here. The Rabbinical Adam is a gigantic being reaching from earth to heaven, for the definition of whose stature Rabbi Eliezer cites Deuteronomy iv. 32, ‘God made man (Adam) upon the earth, and from one end of heaven to the other.’[782] It is one of the familiar episodes of the Koran, how the angels were bidden to bow down before Adam, the regent of Allah upon earth, and how Eblis (Diabolus) swelling with pride, refused the act of adoration.[783] Among the Gnostic sect of the Valentinians, Adam the primal man in whom the Deity had revealed himself, stood as earthly representative of the Demiurge, and was even counted among the Æons.[784]
The figures of the great deities of Polytheism, thus traced in outline according to the determining idea on which each is shaped, seem to show that conceptions originating under rude and primitive conditions of human thought and passing thence into the range of higher culture, may suffer in the course of ages the most various fates, to be expanded, elaborated, transformed, or abandoned. Yet the philosophy of modern ages still to a remarkable degree follows the primitive courses of savage thought, even as the highways of our land so often follow the unchanging tracks of barbaric roads. Let us endeavour timidly and circumspectly to trace onward from savage times the courses of vast and pregnant generalization which tend towards the two greatest of the world’s schemes of religious doctrine, the systems of Dualism and Monotheism.
Rudimentary forms of Dualism, the antagonism of a Good and Evil Deity, are well known among the lower races of mankind. The investigation of these savage and barbaric doctrines, however, is a task demanding peculiar caution. The Europeans in contact with these rude tribes since their discovery, themselves for the most part holding strongly dualistic forms of Christianity, to the extent of practically subjecting the world to the contending influences of armies of good and evil spirits under the antagonistic control of God and Devil, were liable on the one hand to mistake and exaggerate savage ideas in this direction, so that their records of native religion can only be accepted with reserve, while on the other hand there is no doubt that dualistic ideas have been largely introduced and developed among the savages themselves, under this same European influence. For instance, among the natives of Australia, we hear of the great deity Nambajandi who dwells in his heavenly paradise, where the happy shades of black men feast and dance and sing for evermore; over against him stands the great evil being Warrūgūra, who dwells in the nethermost regions, who causes the great calamities which befall mankind, and whom the natives represent with horns and tail, although no horned beast is indigenous in the land.[785] There may be more or less native substratum in all this, but the hints borrowed from popular Christian ideas are unmistakeable. Thus also, among the North American Indians, the native religion was modified under the influence of ideas borrowed from the white men, and there arose a full dualistic scheme, of which Loskiel, a Moravian missionary conversant especially with Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, gives the following suggestive particulars, dating from 1794. ‘They (the Indians) first received in modern times through the Europeans the idea of the Devil, the Prince of Darkness. They consider him as a very mighty spirit, who can only do evil, and therefore call him the Evil One. Thus they now believe in a great good and a great evil spirit; to the one they ascribe all good, and to the other all evil. About thirty years ago, a remarkable change took place in the religious opinions of the Indians. Some preachers of their own nation pretended to have received revelations from above, to have travelled into heaven, and conversed with God. They gave different accounts of their journey to heaven, but all agreed in this, that no one could arrive there without great danger; for the road runs close by the gates of hell. There the Devil lies in ambush, and snatches at every one who is going to God. Now those who have passed by this dangerous place unhurt, come first to the Son of God, and from him to God himself, from whom they pretend to have received a commandment, to instruct the Indians in the way to heaven. By them the Indians were informed that heaven was the dwelling of God, and hell that of the Devil. Some of these preachers had not indeed reached the dwelling of God, but professed to have approached near enough to hear the cocks in heaven crow, or to see the smoke of the chimneys in heaven, &c., &c.’[786]
Such unequivocal proofs that savage tribes can adopt and work into the midst of their native beliefs the European doctrine of the Good and Evil Spirit, must induce us to criticize keenly all recorded accounts of the religion of uncultured tribes, lest we should mistake the confused reflexion of Christendom for the indigenous theology of Australia or Canada. It is the more needful to bring this state of things into the clearest light, in order that the religion of the lower tribes may be placed in its proper relation to the religion of the higher nations. Genuine savage faiths do in fact bring to our view what seem to be rudimentary forms of ideas which underlie dualistic theological schemes among higher nations. It is certain that even among rude savage hordes, native thought has already turned toward the deep problem of good and evil. Their crude though earnest speculation has already tried to solve the great mystery which still resists the efforts of moralists and theologians. But as in general the animistic doctrine of the lower races is not yet an ethical institution, but a philosophy of man and nature, so savage dualism is not yet a theory of abstract moral principles, but a theory of pleasure or pain, profit or loss, affecting the individual man, his family, or at the utmost stretch, his people. This narrow and rudimentary distinction between good and evil was not unfairly stated by the savage who explained that if anybody took away his wife, that would be bad, but if he himself took someone’s else’s, that would be good. Now by the savage or barbarian mind, the spiritual beings which by their personal action account for the events of life and the operations of nature, are apt to be regarded as kindly or hostile, sometimes or always, like the human beings on whose type they are so obviously modelled. In such a case, we may well judge by the safe analogy of disembodied human souls, and it appears that these are habitually regarded as sometimes friends and sometimes foes of the living. Nothing could be more conclusive in this respect than an account of the three days’ battle between two factions of Zulu ghosts for the life of a man and wife whom the one spiritual party desired to destroy and the other to save; the defending spirits prevailed, dug up the bewitched charm-bags which had been buried to cause sympathetic disease, and flung these objects into the midst of the assembly of the people watching in silence, just as the spirits now fling real flowers at a table-rapping séance.[787] For spirits less closely belonging to the definition of ghosts, may be taken Rochefort’s remarks in the 17th century as to the two sorts of spirits, good and bad, recognized by the Caribs of the West Indies. This writer declares that their good spirits or divinities are in fact so many demons who seduce them and keep them enchained in their damnable servitude; but nevertheless, he says, the people themselves do distinguish them from their evil spirits.[788] Nor can we pronounce this distinction of theirs unreasonable, learning from other authorities that it was the office of some of these spirits to attend men as familiar genii, and of others to inflict diseases. After the numerous details which have incidentally been cited in the present volumes, it will be needless to offer farther proof that spiritual beings are really conceived by savages and barbarians as ranged in antagonistic ranks as good and evil, i.e., friendly and hostile to themselves. The interesting enquiry on which it is here desirable to collect evidence, is this: how far are the doctrines of the higher nations anticipated in principle among the lower tribes, in the assignment of the conduct of the universe to two mighty hostile beings, in whom the contending powers of good and evil are personified, the Good Deity and the Evil Deity, each the head and ruler of a spiritual host like-minded? The true answer seems to be that savage belief displays to us the primitive conceptions which, when developed in systematic form and attached to ethical meaning, take their place in religious systems of which the Zoroastrian is the type.
First, when in district after district two special deities with special native names are contrasted in native religion as the Good and Evil Deity, it is in some cases easier to explain these beings as native at least in origin, than to suppose that foreign intercourse should have exerted the consistent and far-reaching influence needed to introduce them. Second, when the deities in question are actually polytheistic gods, such as Sun, Moon, Heaven, Earth, considered as of good or evil, i.e., favourable or unfavourable aspect, this looks like native development, not innovation derived from a foreign religion ignoring such divinities. Third, when it is held that the Good Deity is remote and otiose, but the Evil Deity present and active, and worship is therefore directed especially to the propitiation of the hostile principle, we have here a conception which appears native in the lower culture, rather than derived from the higher culture to which it is unfamiliar and even hateful. Now Dualism, as prevailing among the lower races, will be seen in a considerable degree to assert its originality by satisfying one or more of these conditions.
There have been recorded among the Indians of North America a group of mythic beliefs, which display the fundamental idea of dualism in the very act of germinating in savage religion. Yet the examination of these myths leads us first to destructive criticism of a picturesque but not ancient member of the series. An ethnologist, asked to point out the most striking savage dualistic legend of the world, would be likely to name the celebrated Iroquois myth of the Twin Brethren. The current version of this legend is that set down in 1825 by the Christian chief of the Tuscaroras, David Cusick, as the belief of his people. Among the ancients, he relates, there were two worlds, the lower world in darkness and possessed by monsters, the upper world inhabited by mankind. A woman near her travail sank from this upper region to the dark world below. She alighted on a Tortoise, prepared to receive her with a little earth on his back, which Tortoise became an island. The celestial mother bore twin sons into the dark world, and died. The tortoise increased to a great island, and the twins grew up. One was of gentle disposition, and was called Enigorio, the Good Mind, the other was of insolent character, and was named Enigonhahetgea, the Bad Mind. The Good Mind, not contented to remain in darkness, wished to create a great light; the Bad Mind desired that the world should remain in its natural state. The Good Mind took his dead mother’s head and made it the sun, and of a remnant of her body he made the moon. These were to give light to the day and to the night. Also he created many spots of light, now stars: these were to regulate the days, nights, seasons, years. Where the light came upon the dark world, the monsters were displeased, and hid themselves in the depths, lest man should find them. The Good Mind continued the creation, formed many creeks and rivers on the Great Island, created small and great beasts to inhabit the forests, and fishes to inhabit the waters. When he had made the universe, he doubted concerning beings to possess the Great Island. He formed two images of the dust of the ground in his own likeness, male and female, and by breathing into their nostrils gave them living souls, and named them Ea-gwe-howe, that is ‘real people;’ and he gave the Great Island all the animals of game for their maintenance; he appointed thunder to water the earth by frequent rains; the island became fruitful, and vegetation afforded to the animals subsistence. The Bad Mind went throughout the island and made high mountains and waterfalls and great steeps, and created reptiles injurious to mankind; but the Good Mind restored the island to its former condition. The Bad Mind made two clay images in the form of man, but while he was giving them existence they became apes; and so on. The Good Mind accomplished the works of creation, notwithstanding the imaginations of the Bad Mind were continually evil; thus he attempted to enclose all the animals of game in the earth away from mankind, but his brother set them free, and traces of them were made on the rocks near the cave where they were shut in. At last the brethren came to single combat for the mastery of the universe. The Good Mind falsely persuaded the Bad Mind that whipping with flags would destroy his own life, but he himself used the deer-horns, the instrument of death. After a two days’ fight, the Good Mind slew his brother and crushed him in the earth; and the last words of the Bad Mind were that he would have equal power over men’s souls after death, then he sank down to eternal doom and became the Evil Spirit. The Good Mind visited the people, and then retired from the earth.[789]
This is a graphic tale. Its versions of the cosmic myth of the World-Tortoise, and its apparent philosophical myth of fossil footprints, have much mythological interest. But its Biblical copying extends to the very phraseology, and only partial genuineness can be allowed to its main theme. Dr. Brinton has shown from early American writers how much dualistic fancy has sprung up since the times of first intercourse between natives and white men. When this legend is compared with the earlier version given by Father Brebeuf, missionary to the Hurons in 1636, we find its whole complexion altered; the moral dualism vanishes; the names of Good and Bad Mind do not appear; it is the story of Ioskeha the White One, with his brother Tawiscara the Dark One, and we at once perceive that Christian influence in the course of two centuries had given the tale a meaning foreign to its real intent. Yet to go back to the earliest sources and examine this myth of the White One and the Dark One, proves it to be itself a perfect example of the rise of primitive dualism in the savage mind. Father Brebeuf’s story is as follows: Aataentsic the Moon fell from heaven on earth, and bore two sons, Taouiscaron and Iouskeha, who being grown up quarrelled; judge, he says, if there be not in this a touch of the death of Abel. They came to combat, but with very different weapons. Iouskeha had a stag-horn, Taouiscaron contented himself with some wild-rose berries, persuading himself that as soon as he should thus smite his brother, he would fall dead at his feet; but it fell out quite otherwise than he had promised himself, and Iouskeha struck him so heavy a blow in the side that the blood gushed forth in streams. The poor wretch fled, and from his blood which fell upon the land came the flints which the savages still call Taouiscara, from the victim’s name. From this we see it to be true that the original myth of the two brothers, the White One and the Dark One, had no moral element. It seems mere nature-myth, the contest between Day and Night, for the Hurons knew that Iouskeha was the Sun, even as his mother or grandmother Aataentsic was the Moon. Yet in the contrast between these two, the Huron mind had already come to the rudimentary contrast of the Good and Evil Deity. Iouskeha the Sun, it is expressly said, seemed to the Indians their benefactor; their kettle would not boil were it not for him; it was he who learnt from the Tortoise the art of making fire; without him they would have no luck in hunting; it is he who makes the corn to grow. Iouskeha the Sun takes care for the living and all things concerning life, and therefore, says the missionary, they say he is good. But Aataentsic the Moon, the creatress of earth and man, makes men die and has charge of their departed souls, and they say she is evil. The Sun and Moon dwell together in their cabin at the end of the earth, and thither it was that the Indians made the mythic journey of which various episodes have been more than once cited here; true to their respective characters, the Sun receives the travellers kindly and saves them from the harm the beauteous but hurtful Moon would have done them. Another missionary of still earlier time identifies Iouskeha with the supreme deity Atahocan: ‘Iouskeha,’ he says, ‘is good and gives growth and fair weather; his grandmother Eatahentsic is wicked and spoils.’[790] Thus in early Iroquois legend, the Sun and Moon, as god and goddess of Day and Night, had already acquired the characters of the great friend and enemy of man, the Good and Evil Deity. And as to the related cosmic legend of Day and Night, contrasted in the persons of the two brothers, the White One and the Dark One, though this was originally pure unethic nature-myth, yet it naturally took the same direction among the half-Europeanized Indians of later times, becoming a moral myth of Good and Evil. The idea comes to full maturity in the modern shaping of Iroquois religion, where the good and great deity Häwenneyu the Ruler has opposed to him a rival deity keeping the same name as in the myth, Hänegoategeh the Evil-minded. We have thus before us the profoundly interesting fact, that the rude North American Indians have more than once begun the same mythologic transition which in ancient Asia shaped the contrast of light and darkness into the contrast of righteousness and wickedness, by following out the same thought which still in the European mind arrays in the hostile forms of Light and Darkness the contending powers of Good and Evil.
Judging by such evidence, at once of the rudimentary dualism springing up in savage animism, and of the tendency of this to amalgamate with similar thought brought in by foreign intercourse, it is possible to account for many systems of the dualistic class found in the native religions of America. While the evidence may lead us to agree with Waitz that the North American Indian dualism, the most distinct and universal feature of their religion, is not to be altogether referred to a modern Christian origin, yet care must be taken not to claim as the result of primitive religious development what shows signs of being borrowed civilized theology. The records remain of the Jesuit missionary teaching under which the Algonquins came to use their native term Manitu, that is, spirit or demon, in speaking of the Christian God and Devil as the good and the evil Manitu. Still later, the Great Spirit and the Evil Spirit, Kitchi Manitu and Matchi Manitu, gained a wider place in the beliefs of North American tribes, who combined these adopted Christian conceptions with older native beliefs in powers of light and warmth and life and protection, of darkness and cold and death and destruction. Thus the two great antagonistic Beings became chiefs of the kindly and harmful spirits pervading the world and struggling for the mastery over it. Here the nature-religion of the savage was expanded and developed rather than set on foot by the foreigner. Among other American races, such combinations of foreign and native religious ideas are easy to find, though hard to analyse. In the extreme north-west, we may doubt any native origin in the semi-Christianized Kodiak’s definition of Shljem Shoá the creator of heaven and earth, to whom offerings were made before and after the hunt, as contrasted with Ijak the bad spirit dwelling in the earth. In the extreme south-east may be found more originality among the Floridan Indians two or three centuries ago, for they are said to have paid solemn worship to the Bad Spirit Toia who plagued them with visions, but to have had small regard for the Good Spirit, who troubles himself little about mankind.[791] On the southern continent, Martius makes this characteristic remark as to the rude tribes of Brazil: ‘All Indians have a lively conviction of the power of an evil principle over them; in many there dawns also a glimpse of the good; but they revere the one less than they fear the other. It might be thought that they hold the Good Being weaker in relation to the fate of man than the evil.’ This generalization is to some extent supported by statements as to particular tribes. The Macusis are said to recognize the good creator Macunaima, ‘he who works by night,’ and his evil adversary Epel or Horiuch: of these people it is observed that ‘All the powers of nature are products of the Good Spirit, when they do not disturb the Indian’s rest and comfort, but the work of evil spirits when they do.’ Uauüloa and Locozy, the good and evil deity of the Yumanas, live above the earth and toward the sun; the Evil Deity is feared by these savages, but the Good Deity will come to eat fruit with the departed and take their souls to his dwelling, wherefore they bury the dead each doubled up in his great earthen pot, with fruit in his lap, and looking toward the sunrise. Even the rude Botocudos are thought to recognize antagonistic principles of good and evil in the persons of the Sun and Moon.[792] This idea has especial interest from its correspondence on the one hand with that of the Iroquois tribes, and on the other with that of the comparatively civilized Muyscas of Bogota, whose good deity is unequivocally a mythic Sun, thwarted in his kindly labours for man by his wicked wife Huythaca the Moon.[793] The native religion of Chili is said to have placed among the subaltern deities Meulen, the friend of man, and Huecuvu the bad spirit and author of evil. These people can hardly have learnt from Christianity to conceive their evil spirit as simply and fully the general cause of misfortune: if the earth quakes, Huecuvu has given it a shock; if a horse tires, Huecuvu has ridden him; if a man falls sick, Huecuvu has sent the disease into his body, and no man dies but that Huecuvu suffocates him.[794]
In Africa, again, allowing for Moslem influence, dualism is not ill represented in native religion. An old account from Loango describes the natives as theoretically recognizing Zambi the supreme deity, creator of good and lover of justice, and over against him Zambi-anbi the destroyer, the counsellor of crime, the author of loss and accident, of disease and death. But when it comes to actual worship, as the good god will always be favourable, it is the god of evil who must be appeased, and it is for his satisfaction that men abstain some from one kind of food and some from another.[795] Among accounts of the two rival deities in West Africa, one describes the Guinea negroes as recognizing below the Supreme Deity two spirits (or classes of spirits), Ombwiri and Onyambe, the one kind and gentle, doing good to men and rescuing them from harm, the other hateful and wicked, whose seldom mentioned name is heard with uneasiness and displeasure.[796] It would be scarcely profitable, in an enquiry where accurate knowledge of the doctrine of any insignificant tribe is more to the purpose than vague speculation on the theology of the mightiest nation, to dwell on the enigmatic traces of ancient Egyptian dualism. Suffice it to say that the two brother-deities Osiris and Seti, Osiris the beneficent solar divinity whose nature the blessed dead took on them, Seti perhaps a rival national god degraded to a Typhon, seem to have become the representative figures of a contrasted scheme of light and darkness, good and evil; the sculptured granite still commemorates the contests of their long-departed sects, where the hieroglyphic square-eared beast of Seti has been defaced to substitute for it the figure of Osiris.[797]
The conception of the light-god as the good deity in contrast to a rival god of evil, is one plainly suggested by nature, and naturally recurring in the religions of the world. The Khonds of Orissa may be counted its most perfect modern exponents in barbaric culture. To their supreme creative deity, Būra Pennu or Bella Pennu, Light-god or Sun-god, there stands opposed his evil consort Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess, and the history of good and evil in the world is the history of his work and her counterwork. He created a world paradisaic, happy, harmless; she rebelled against him, and to blast the lot of his new creature, man, she brought in disease, and poison, and all disorder, ‘sowing the seeds of sin in mankind as in a ploughed field.’
Death became the divine punishment of wickedness, the spontaneously fertile earth went to jungle and rock and mud, plants and animals grew poisonous and fierce, throughout nature good and evil were commingled, and still the fight goes on between the two great powers. So far all Khonds agree, and it is on the practical relation of good and evil that they split into their two hostile sects of Būra and Tari. Būra’s sect hold that he triumphed over Tari, in sign of her discomfiture imposed the cares of childbirth on her sex, and makes her still his subject instrument wherewith to punish; Tari’s sect hold that she still maintains the struggle, and even practically disposes of the happiness of man, doing evil or good on her own account, and allowing or not allowing the Creator’s blessings to reach mankind.[798]
Now that the sacred books of the Zend-Avesta are open to us, it is possible to compare the doctrines of savage tribes with those of the great faith through which of all others Dualism seems to have impressed itself on the higher nations. The religion of Zarathustra was a schism from that ancient Aryan nature-worship which is represented in a pure and early form in the Veda, and in depravity and decay in modern Hinduism. The leading thought of the Zarathustrian faith was the contest of Good and Evil in the world, a contrast typified and involved in that of Day and Night, Light and Darkness, and brought to personal shape in the warfare of Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu, the Good and Evil Deity, Ormuzd and Ahriman. The prophet Zarathustra said: ‘In the beginning there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity. These are the good and the base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one of these two spirits. Be good, not base!’ The sacred Vendidad begins with the record of the primæval contest of the two principles. Ahura-Mazda created the best of regions and lands, the Aryan home, Sogdia, Bactria, and the rest; Anra-Mainyu against his work created snow and pestilence, buzzing insects and poisonous plants, poverty and sickness, sin and unbelief. The modern Parsi, in passages of his formularies of confession, still keeps alive the old antagonism. I repent, he says, of all kind of sins which the evil Ahriman produced amongst the creatures of Ormuzd in opposition. ‘That which was the wish of Ormazd the Creator, and I ought to have thought and have not thought, what I ought to have spoken and have not spoken, what I ought to have done and have not done; of these sins repent I with thoughts, words, and works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as heavenly, with the three words: Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin. That which was the wish of Ahriman, and I ought not to have thought and yet have thought, what I ought not to have spoken and yet have spoken, what I ought not to have done and yet have done; of these sins repent I with thoughts, words, and works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as heavenly, with the three words: Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin.’ ... ‘May Ahriman be broken, may Ormazd increase.’[799] The Izedis or Yezidis, the so-called Devil-worshippers, still remain a numerous though oppressed people in Mesopotamia and adjacent countries. Their adoration of the sun and horror of defiling fire accord with the idea of a Persian origin of their religion (Persian ized = god), an origin underlying more superficial admixture of Christian and Moslem elements. This remarkable sect is distinguished by a special form of dualism. While recognizing the existence of a Supreme Being, their peculiar reverence is given to Satan, chief of the angelic host, who now has the means of doing evil to mankind, and in his restoration will have the power of rewarding them. ‘Will not Satan then reward the poor Izedis, who alone have never spoken ill of him, and have suffered so much for him?’ Martyrdom for the rights of Satan! exclaims the German traveller to whom an old white-bearded devil-worshipper thus set forth the hopes of his religion.[800]
Direct worship of the Evil Principle, familiar as it is to low barbaric races, is scarcely to be found among people higher in civilization than these persecuted and stubborn sectaries of Western Asia. So far as such ideas extend in the development of religion, they seem fair evidence how far worship among low tribes turns rather on fear than love. That the adoration of a Good Deity should have more and more superseded the propitiation of an Evil Deity, is the sign of one of the great movements in the education of mankind, a result of happier experience of life, and of larger and more gladsome views of the system of the universe. It is not, however, through the inactive systems of modern Parsism and Izedism that the mighty Zoroastrian dualism has exerted its main influence on mankind. We must look back to long-past ages for traces of its contact with Judaism and Christianity. It is often and reasonably thought that intercourse between Jews and ancient Persians was an effective agent in producing that theologic change which differences the later Jew of the Rabbinical books from the earlier Jew of the Pentateuch, a change in which one important part is the greater prominence of the dualistic scheme. So in later times (about the fourth century), the contact of Zoroastrism and Christianity appears to have been influential in producing Manichæism. Manichæism is known mostly on the testimony of its adversaries, but thus much seems clear, that it is based on the very doctrine of the two antagonistic principles of good and evil, of spirit and matter. It sets on the one hand God, original good and source of good alone, primal light and lord of the kingdom of light, and on the other hand the Prince of Darkness, with his kingdom of darkness, of matter, of confusion, and destruction. The theory of ceaseless conflict between these contending powers becomes a key to the physical and moral nature and course of the universe.[801] Among Christian or semi-Christian sects, the Manichæans stand as representatives of dualism pushed to its utmost development. It need scarcely be said, however, that Christian dualism is not bounded by the limits of this or that special sect. In so far as the Evil Being, with his subordinate powers of darkness, is held to exist and act in any degree in independence of the Supreme Deity and his ministering spirits of light, so far theological schools admit, though in widely different grades of importance, a philosophy of nature and of life which has its basis rather in dualism than in monotheism.
We now turn to the last objects of our present survey, those theological beliefs of the lower tribes of mankind which point more or less distinctly toward a doctrine of Monotheism. Here it is by no means proposed to examine savage ideas from the point of view of doctrinal theology, an undertaking which would demand arguments quite beyond the present range. Their treatment is limited to classifying the actual beliefs of the lower races, with some ethnographic considerations as to their origin and their relation to higher religions. For this purpose it is desirable to distinguish the prevalent doctrines of the uncultured world from absolute monotheism. At the outset, care is needed to exclude an ambiguity of which the importance often goes unnoticed. How are the mighty but subordinate divinities, recognized in different religions, to be classed? Beings who in Christian or Moslem theology would be called angels, saints, demons, would under the same definitions be called deities in polytheistic systems. This is obvious, but we may realize it more distinctly from its actually having happened. The Chuwashes, a race of Tatar affinity, are stated to reverence a god of Death, who takes to himself the souls of the departed, and whom they call Esrel; it is curious that Castrén, in mentioning this, should fail to point out that this deity is no other than Azrael the angel of death, adopted under Moslem influence.[802] Again, in the mixed Pagan and Christian religion of the Circassians, which at least in its recently prevalent form would be reckoned polytheistic, there stand beneath the Supreme Being a number of mighty subordinate deities, of whom the principal are Iele the Thunder-god, Tleps the Fire-god, Seoseres the god of Wind and Water, Misitcha the Forest-god, and Mariam the Virgin Mary.[803] If the monotheistic criterion be simply made to consist in the Supreme Deity being held as creator of the universe and chief of the spiritual hierarchy, then its application to savage and barbaric theology will lead to perplexing consequences. Races of North and South America, of Africa, of Polynesia, recognizing a number of great deities, are usually and reasonably considered polytheists, yet under this definition their acknowledgment of a Supreme Creator, of which various cases will here be shown, would entitle them at the same time to the name of monotheists. To mark off the doctrines of monotheism, closer definition is required, assigning the distinctive attributes of deity to none save the Almighty Creator. It may be declared that, in this strict sense, no savage tribe of monotheists has been ever known. Nor are any fair representatives of the lower culture in a strict sense pantheists. The doctrine which they do widely hold, and which opens to them a course tending in one or other of these directions, is polytheism culminating in the rule of one supreme divinity. High above the doctrine of souls, of divine manes, of local nature-spirits, of the great deities of class and element, there are to be discerned in barbaric theology shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity, henceforth to be traced onward in expanding power and brightening glory along the history of religion. It is no unimportant task, partial as it is, to select and group the typical data which show the nature and position of the doctrine of supremacy, as it comes into view within the lower culture.
On the threshold of the investigation, there meets us the same critical difficulty which obstructs the study of primitive dualism. Among low tribes who have been in contact with Christianity or Mohammedanism, how are we to tell to what extent, under this foreign influence, dim, uncouth ideas of divine supremacy may have been developed into more cultured forms, or wholly foreign ideas implanted? We know how the Jesuit missionaries led the native Canadians to the conception of the Great Manitu; how they took up the native Brazilian name of the divine Thunder, Tupan, and adapted its meaning to convey in Christian teaching the idea of God. Thus, again, we find most distinctly-marked African ideas of a Supreme Deity in the West, where intercourse with Moslems has actually Islamized or semi-Islamized whole negro nations, and the name of Allah is in all men’s mouths. The ethnographer must be ever on the look-out for traces of such foreign influence in the definition of the Supreme Deity acknowledged by any uncultured race, a divinity whose nature and even whose name may betray his adoption from abroad. Thus the supreme Iroquois deity, Neo or Hawaneu, the pre-existent creator, has been triumphantly adduced to show the monotheism underlying the native creeds of America. But it seems that this divinity was introduced by the French Catholic missionaries, and that Niio is an altered form of Dieu.[804] Among the list of supreme deities of the lower races who are also held to be first ancestors of man, we hear of Louquo, the uncreate first Carib, who descended from the eternal heaven, made the flat earth, and produced man from his own body. He lived long on earth among men, died and came to life again after three days, and returned to heaven.[805] It would be hardly reasonable to enumerate, among genuine deities of native West Indian religion, a being with characteristics thus on the face of them adopted from the religion of the white men. Yet even in such extreme cases, it does not necessarily follow that the definitions of these deities, vitiated as they are for ethnographical use by foreign influence, have not to some extent a native substratum. In criticising details, moreover, it must not be forgotten how largely the similarities in the religions of different races may be of independent origin, and how closely allied are many ideas in the rude native theologies of savages to ideas holding an immemorial place in the religions of their civilized invaders. For the present purpose, however, it is well to dwell especially on such evidence as by characteristic traits or early date is farthest removed from suspicion of being borrowed from a foreign source.
In surveying the peoples of the world, the ethnographer finds many who are not shown to have any definite conception of a supreme deity; and even where such a conception is placed on record, it is sometimes so vaguely asserted, or on such questionable authority, that he can but take note of it and pass on. In numerous cases, however, illustrated by the following collection from different regions, certain leading ideas, singly or blended, may be traced. There are many savage and barbaric religions which solve their highest problem by the simple process of raising to divine primacy one of the gods of polytheism itself. Even the system of the manes-worshipper has been stretched to reach the limit of supreme deity, in the person of the primæval ancestor. More frequently, it is the nature-worshipper’s principle which has prevailed, giving to one of the great nature-deities the precedence of the rest. Here, by no recondite speculation, but by the plain teaching of nature, the choice has for the most part lain between two mighty visible divinities, the all-animating Sun and the all-encompassing Heaven. In the study of such schemes, we are on intellectual terra firma. There is among the religions of the lower races another notable group of systems, seemingly in close connexion with the first. These display to us a heavenly pantheon arranged on the model of an earthly political constitution, where the commonalty are crowds of human souls and other tribes of world-pervading spirits, the aristocracy are great polytheistic gods, and the King is the supreme Deity. To this comparatively intelligible side of the subject, a more perplexed and obscure side stands contrasted. Among thoughtful men whose theory of the soul animating the body has already led them to suppose a divine spirit animating the huge mass of earth or sky, this idea needs but a last expansion to become a doctrine of the universe as animated by one greatest, all-pervading divinity, the World-Spirit. Moreover, where speculative philosophy grapples with the vast fundamental world-problem, the solution is attained by ascending from the Many to the One, by striving to discern through and beyond the Universe a First Cause. Let the basis of such reasoning be laid in theological ground, then the First Cause is realized as the Supreme Deity. In such ways, the result of carrying to their utmost limits the animistic conceptions which among low races and high pervade the philosophy of religion, is to reach an idea of as it were a soul of the world, a shaper, animator, ruler of the universe. Entering these regions of transcendental theology, we are not to wonder that the comparative distinctness belonging to conceptions of lower spiritual beings here fades away. Human souls, subordinate nature-spirits, and huge polytheistic nature-gods, carry with the defined special functions they perform some defined character and figure, but beyond such limits form and function blend into the infinite and universal in the thought of supreme divinity. To realize this widest idea, two especial ways are open. The first way is to fuse the attributes of the great polytheistic powers into more or less of common personality, thus conceiving that, after all, it is the same Highest Being who holds up the heavens, shines in the sun, smites his foes in the thunder, stands first in the human pedigree as the divine ancestor. The second way is to remove the limit of theologic speculation into the region of the indefinite and the inane. An unshaped divine entity looming vast, shadowy, and calm beyond and over the material world, too benevolent or too exalted to need human worship, too huge, too remote, too indifferent, too supine, too merely existent, to concern himself with the petty race of men,—this is a mystic form of formlessness in which religion has not seldom pictured the Supreme.
Thus, then, it appears that the theology of the lower races already reaches its climax in conceptions of a highest of the gods, and that these conceptions in the savage and barbaric world are no copies stamped from one common type, but outlines widely varying among mankind. The degeneration-theory, in some instances no doubt with justice, may claim such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remnants of higher religions. Yet for the most part, the development-theory is competent to account for them without seeking their origin in grades of culture higher than those in which they are found existing. Looked upon as products of natural religion, such doctrines of divine supremacy seem in no way to transcend the powers of the low-cultured mind to reason out, nor of the low-cultured imagination to deck with mythic fancy. There have existed in times past, and do still exist, savage or barbaric peoples who hold such views of a highest god as they may have attained to of themselves, without the aid of more cultured nations. Among these races, Animism has its distinct and consistent outcome, and Polytheism its distinct and consistent completion, in the doctrine of a Supreme Deity.
The native religions of South America and the West Indies display a well-marked series of types. The primacy of the Sun was long ago well stated by the Moluches when a Jesuit missionary preached to them, and they replied, ‘Till this hour, we never knew nor acknowledged anything greater or better than the Sun.’[806] So when a later missionary argued with the chief of the Tobas, ‘My god is good and punishes wicked people,’ the chief replied, ‘My God (the Sun) is good likewise; but he punishes nobody, satisfied to do good to all.’[807] In various manifestations, moreover, there reigns among barbarians a supreme being whose characteristics are those of the Heaven-god. It is thus with the Tamoi of the Guaranis, ‘that beneficent deity worshipped in his blended character of ancestor of mankind and ancient of heaven, lord of the celestial paradise.’[808] It is so with the highest deity of the Araucanians, Pillan the Thunder or the Thunderer, called also Huenu-Pillan or Heaven-Thunder, and Vuta-gen or Great Being. ‘The universal government of Pillan,’ says Molina, ‘is a prototype of the Araucanian polity. He is the great Toqui (Governor) of the invisible world, and as such has his Apo-Ulmenes, and his Ulmenes, to whom he entrusts the administration of affairs of less importance. These ideas are certainly very rude, but it must be acknowledged that the Araucanians are not the only people who have regulated the things of heaven by those of the earth.’[809] A different but not less characteristic type of the Supreme Deity is placed on record among the Caribs, a beneficent power dwelling in the skies, reposing in his own happiness, careless of mankind, and by them not honoured nor adored.[810]
The theological history of Peru, in ages before the Spanish conquest, has lately had new light thrown on it by the researches of Mr. Markham. Here the student comes into view of a rivalry full of interest in the history of barbaric religion, the rivalry between the Creator and the divine Sun. In the religion of the Incas, precedence was given to Uiracocha, called Pachacamac, ‘Creator of the World.’ The Sun (with whom was coupled his sister-wife the Moon) was the divine ancestor, the dawn or origin, the totem or lar, of the Inca family. The three great deities were the Creator, Sun, and Thunder; their images were brought out together at great festivals into the square of Cuzco, llamas were sacrificed to all three, and they could be addressed in prayer together, ‘O Creator, and Sun, and Thunder, be for ever young, multiply the people, and let them always be at peace.’ Yet the Thunder and Lightning was held to come by the command of the Creator, and the following prayer shows clearly that even ‘our father the Sun’ was but his creature:—
‘Uiracocha! Thou who gavest being to the Sun, and afterwards said let there be day and night. Raise it and cause it to shine, and preserve that which thou hast created, that it may give light to men. Grant this, Uiracocha!
‘Sun! Thou who art in peace and safety, shine upon us, keep us from sickness, and keep us in health and safety.’
Among the transitions of religion, however, it is not strange that a subordinate God, by virtue of his nearer intercourse and power, should usurp the place of the supreme deity. Among the various traces of this taking place under the Incas, are traditions of the great temple at Cuzco called ‘The Golden Place,’ where Manco Ccapac originally set up a flat oval golden plate to signify the Creator; Mayta Ccapac, it is said, renewed the Creator’s symbol, but Huascar Inca took it down, and set up in its stead in the place of honour a round golden plate like the sun with rays. The famous temple itself, Ccuricancha the ‘Golden Place,’ was known to the Spaniards as the Temple of the Sun; no wonder that the idea has come to be so generally accepted, that the Sun was the chief god of Peru. There is even on record a memorable protest made by one Inca, who dared to deny that the Sun could be the maker of all things, comparing him to a tethered beast that must make ever the same daily round, and to an arrow that must go whither it is sent, not whither it will. But what availed philosophic protest, even from the head of church and state himself, against a state church of which the world has seldom seen the equal for stiff and solid organization? The Sun reigned in Peru till Pizarro overthrew him, and his splendid golden likeness came down from the temple wall to be the booty of a Castilian soldier, who lost it in one night at play.[811]