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BasicSynth
Creating a Music Synthesizer in Software

Daniel R. Mitchell
BasicSynth: Creating a Music Synthesizer in Software
by Daniel R. Mitchell

© 2008 Daniel R. Mitchell

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-0-557-02212-0

First Edition

http://basicsynth.com
 Table of Contents

Preface ..............................................................................................5
Synthesis Overview..........................................................................8
Sound in Software ..........................................................................16
From Equation to Code ..................................................................22
Output File Format .........................................................................32
Signal Generator.............................................................................37
Envelope Generators ......................................................................43
Complex Waveforms......................................................................64
Wavetable Oscillators ....................................................................80
Mixing and Panning .......................................................................95
Digital Filters................................................................................102
Delay Lines ..................................................................................118
Reverb ..........................................................................................129
Flanging and Chorus ....................................................................136
Synthesis System Architecture.....................................................139
Sequencer .....................................................................................142
MIDI Sequencer ...........................................................................155
Immediate Sound Output .............................................................172
Instrument Design ........................................................................181
Additive Synthesis Instrument .....................................................197
Subtractive Synthesis Instrument .................................................202
FM Synthesis Instrument .............................................................205
Wavefile Playback Instrument .....................................................214
Eight Tone Matrix Instrument......................................................220
Notelist .........................................................................................229
Notelist Interpreter Implementation .............................................262
BSynth ..........................................................................................271
BasicSynth Library.......................................................................275
Further Development....................................................................282
References ....................................................................................284

3
Dedication

I have had many good teachers over the years, each one adding
something to my understanding. But there was one teacher in
particular that shaped my understanding of music more than any
other. From January 1980 until his death in the summer of 1981, I
studied composition and electronic music with Merrill Ellis. It was
one of those rare occurrences where teacher and student “clicked” and
my abilities as a composer increased rapidly during that relatively
short period. Merrill Ellis was a first-rate composer, an exceptional
teacher, and a true pioneer in the field of electronic music. More
important to me personally, it was Merrill Ellis that encouraged me to
hear with the inner ear that is the heart and soul of a musician, and
helped me develop the confidence I needed to write what I heard.
This book is filled with technical details out of necessity. Without
them we could not implement a working synthesizer. Unfortunately,
the technical nature of electronic and computer music can be
dangerous to a composer. We can get caught up in the equations,
algorithms and clever programming techniques to the point we forget
what it is all about. When reading this book, it is good to remember
what Mr. Ellis taught me shortly before he passed away:

When making music, it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do

it…as long as it sounds good.
Preface

My first exposure to synthesized sounds was through the Switched on

Bach recordings by Walter Carlos. Those recordings opened up a
whole new world of sounds for me. My fascination with synthesized
sounds eventually led me to build my own synthesizer from a PAIA
kit. It wasn’t much of a synthesizer. I had one VCO, one VCA, one
VCF, AR envelope generator, LFO and keyboard, and soon
discovered that without a multi-track recorder there wasn’t much I
could do except make interesting sound effects. Nevertheless, that
little synthesizer allowed me to gain an understanding of how
synthesizers make sounds. A few years later I enrolled for graduate
study at the University of North Texas and was able to work with two
powerful synthesizers, a Moog analog synthesizer and a Synclavier II
digital synthesizer.
Later, after I had left school and begun work as a computer
programmer, I began to purchase my own synthesizers. A bonus
check from my job was spent as a down payment on a Yamaha DX7,
a remarkable synthesizer for its time. Hooked up to my Commodore
C64 computer through a home-built MIDI interface, it gave me a way
to continue to use computers and synthesizers to make music. Not
having any commercial music software available, I wrote a simple
sequencing program named Notelist. Notelist didn’t do much more
than convert text into MIDI events, but it became the foundation and
starting point for the score language described later in this book.
Eventually the keyboards were set aside in favor of software
synthesis using Barry Vercoe’s CSound, a direct descendant of the
original software synthesis system, MUSIC by Max Matthews. As
flexible and powerful as a program like CSound is, I always missed
the interactive creation of sound through a keyboard like the DX7.
Being able to hear how the tweaks affect the sound is very useful. I
eventually decided to create some synthesis software routines so that I

5
6 Preface

could get a more immediate result. The software in this book is a

direct outgrowth of that endeavor. Just as I discovered when building
my own synthesizer as a teenager, I found that having to program the
synthesis system myself improved my understanding of the
underlying equations and algorithms that are used to create sound on
a computer. Hopefully, documenting how I went from simple sound
generators to complex instruments will help others gain a better
understanding as well.
A variety of software synthesis systems with large libraries of
patches and almost unlimited sequencing are now available for a
home computer. These systems are inexpensive, produce high quality
sound, and can make music synthesis relatively easy even for those
with limited knowledge of computer programming or digital signal
processing. With all of that capability readily available it may seem
that creating a synthesizer of your own is a lot of unnecessary work.
However, just because you have a thousand patches in your sound
library doesn’t mean you have the sound available that you hear in
your head. If the synthesis system won’t allow you to easily change
patches, or you don’t understand how tweaking the controls will
change the sound, you can get stuck. The more you know about how
the synthesizer works, the better chance you have of realizing what
you hear in your mind. But, even if you know how you want to
produce the sound, the software may not provide a convenient way
for you to do so. Having your own synthesis software available
allows you to extend and adapt it to fit your particular needs.
Sound generation software can also be used to enhance a wide
variety of computer applications. For example, an interactive music
tutorial needs to produce sounds beyond playback of recordings.
Computer game programming is another application that can benefit
by having the ability to generate sound directly. There are potentially
many such applications for sound generation, if you have the right
software libraries available to you as a programmer. A commercial
software synthesizer, or an existing library, may not be in a form you
can easily adapt to your application. For that you need your own
sound generation library.
If you are not an experienced programmer, developing your own
synthesizer in software may seem like an unrealistic goal. Although
both sound generation and sound modification are well described by
the mathematics of digital signal processing (DSP), if you browse
 BasicSynth 7

through a book on DSP your first impression is likely to be, “it’s

incomprehensible.” Fortunately, it turns out that most of what we
need to know to generate sound on a computer is very easy to
understand.
It is not the purpose of this book to describe signal processing
theory or synthesis techniques in detail. In the case of signal
processing, we can take it for granted that the mathematicians and
engineers got it right, and use the derived equations. Likewise, this
book does not explore any new or original methods of sound
synthesis. The examples shown in this book are the way most
synthesis software is implemented and has been implemented since
the 1960s. Instead, the primary purpose of this book is to understand
and address the practical problems of programming the sound
generation routines and combining them in a way to produce an
efficient working synthesizer.
Each chapter begins with an introduction to the necessary theory
and then proceeds to develop actual programs to implement the
theory. The first chapters concentrate on sound generation and
processing functions. Later chapters use the sound generation and
processing code to develop instruments that implement various
synthesis methods. An example score language is then described and
combined with the synthesis instruments to create a complete
synthesizer.
In order to use the information in this book you will need to
understand basic algebra and trigonometry and some basic computer
programming techniques. Significant features of the software are
discussed, but for the most part it is assumed that you can read the
example code and understand it. The examples in the book are shown
in C++ but can be adapted to most computer programming languages.
In addition, the examples are fragments of code with variable
declarations, data type conversions, and error checking left out. The
complete source code is available on-line and should be downloaded
and studied along with each chapter. The example source code is
available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/basicsynth for download.
The latest information on the source code is available at
http://basicsynth.com.
Chapter 1
Synthesis Overview

The sounds we hear are the result of a mechanical vibration that

creates pressure waves in the air. Sound synthesis refers to the
creation of sounds by some electronic means, either electronic circuits
that directly generate electrical signals, or a computer that calculates
the amplitude values for the signals. When the electronic signals are
sent to a loudspeaker, they are converted into a mechanical vibration
that produces sound.
When we say that something is synthetic, we mean that it is a
replacement for a natural substance or process. Likewise, many
musicians consider a synthesizer to be substitute for traditional
musical instruments or other physical devices that make sound.
However, we can also think of a synthesizer as a musical instrument
in its own right with the goal of producing sounds that could not
otherwise be heard. Both views are valid, and a well designed
synthesizer can be used for both purposes. Fortunately, the software
routines used to imitate natural sounds are the same as those used to
produce completely new sounds.
We can think of a synthesizer as either a performance instrument
or as a compositional tool. When used for performance, the focus of
the instrument is on real-time response to the musician and we want
sounds to occur immediately when we press a key on a keyboard,
vary a control, or strike an input pad. Because it requires immediate
response, a synthesizer used for live performance will usually have a
limited range of sounds available at any moment and also be limited
in the number of simultaneous sounds it can produce. When used as a
compositional tool, the synthesizer does not have to respond in real-
time, and can therefore be used to generate almost any sound the
musician can imagine. In addition, the synthesizer can generate

8
 BasicSynth 9

complex polyphonic textures that would be next to impossible for

human players to perform. The compositional tool approach requires
some kind of automated sequencer that controls the selection of
instruments and their performance. In effect, the synthesizer becomes
an “orchestra in a box” with a computer acting as both conductor and
performer. However, the synthesizer does not have to be limited to
one or the other use. A synthesizer designed mainly for live
performance may also include a sequencer for automated playback.
A synthesizer can be designed to have a fixed number of easy to
use preset sounds, or can be designed for maximum flexibility in
sound generation. Preset synthesizers are usually intended for live
performance, but are sometimes useful for quick composition as well.
With a large library of preset sounds, the composer can spend more
time on arranging the sounds as opposed to creating new sounds.
Synthesizers with maximum variability in sound generation require
the musician to set numerous parameters of each instrument and are
usually intended as composition or research tools.
We can also consider a synthesizer to be replacement for a
traditional musical instrument. This is often the case when a
composer wants to preview a composition that is intended for
performance by human players on traditional musical instruments. It
can also be the case when the synthesizer is used to reduce the cost of
commercial music production. In contrast, the synthesizer can be
viewed as an instrument in its own right, and may be used stand-alone
or combined with traditional musical instruments to create an
ensemble.
Combining the various features listed above, we can produce a
diagram showing potential synthesizer applications. Where we locate
the synthesizer application on this diagram will determine the set of
features that are most important in the design of the synthesizer (See
Figure 1 below).
At the top of the circle, we have a combination of features suited
to an instrument that can switch quickly between a limited number of
emulated sounds. Such an instrument may be performed live, or set
up with sequences much like an electronic player piano, but is mainly
used for the purpose of duplicating several instruments in one. An
electronic piano that can also switch to an organ or harpsichord sound
is one example. Along the right side are applications such as
commercial film and video production where the musician needs to
10 Synthesis Overview

produce sound effects, reproduce traditional musical instrument

sounds at low cost, and also be able to closely synchronize the music
with images. The left side area fits well with small ensemble and
recording studio applications where the range of sound varies from
traditional to new, but is typically performed live. Along the bottom
of the circle we have a combination aimed more towards composition
of purely electronic music and research into new synthesis
techniques.

Natural Sound
Emulation
Traditional
Instrument
Preset Replacement

Performed Sequenced

New Instrument
“Synth gratia Configurable
Synthesis”
Sound Creation

Figure 1 - Synthesizer Applications

An advantage of a software synthesis system, as opposed to a

hardware synthesizer, is that it can potentially sit right in the middle
of the circle. Such a system would be quite large and require
considerable forethought, but is not beyond the capabilities of a
typical personal computer. More commonly, the programmer will
have in mind a specific application and design the synthesis system
around those specific needs.

Synthesis Methods

Over the years many sound synthesis techniques have been

developed, each with unique advantages and disadvantages. In many
 BasicSynth 11

cases, the synthesis technique grew directly from the technology

available at the time. Although this book is not intended as a tutorial
on synthesis techniques, it is useful to review the most basic
techniques in terms of possible software implementation so that we
have a starting point for development of the synthesizer.
Additive synthesis creates complex sounds by adding together
more than one signal. Usually, although not always, each signal is a
simple sinusoid waveform with each sinusoid defined by relative
frequency, amplitude and phase. When the signal amplitudes are
relatively close to each other we hear a combination of tones.
However, when the relative amplitudes of the higher frequencies are
small compared to the lowest frequency, the signals blend together
and we hear a single complex tone. The frequencies and amplitudes
of the signals used for additive synthesis are often determined by
analysis of recorded sounds with the goal of reproducing those sounds
as exactly as possible. Additive synthesis can also be done “by ear”
by interactively adjusting the frequency and amplitude values of each
sinusoid until the desired sound is heard. Additive synthesis is the
most straight-forward synthesis method, but requires a large number
of signal generators to be usable. In the past, this requirement
prevented additive synthesis from being widely used. However, with
the ability to generate signals in software, we can implement additive
synthesis methods very easily by running the same signal generator
routine multiple times. The only additional cost for each signal is the
time it takes to execute the signal generator software.
Subtractive synthesis is the inverse of additive synthesis. Where
additive synthesis builds up a complex waveform one signal at a time,
subtractive synthesis starts with a complex waveform and then
attenuates frequencies by filtering the waveform. Subtractive
synthesis requires only a few signal generators and filters to produce
sounds similar to an additive synthesis system requiring many signal
generators. For that reason it was the preferred method in early
synthesizer design. A software synthesis system can easily produce
complex waveforms and filters for use in subtractive synthesis.
However, it is difficult to exactly reproduce a natural sound by
filtering alone. Consequently, subtractive synthesis is more
commonly used to generate unique electronic sounds.
FM and AM synthesis, distortion synthesis and non-linear
synthesis are all variations of the same basic technique. Modulation
12 Synthesis Overview

involves continuous variation of one signal (the carrier) by another

signal (the modulator). When both the carrier and modulator are in
the audio frequency range, the two signals combine to produce sum
and difference tones that sound similar to a sum of sinusoids. The
spectrum that results from modulation can be as complex as a sum of
dozens of individual sinusoid signals. Changing the amplitude and
frequency relationship of the signals produces nearly unlimited
variety of sounds. Because this technique requires so few signal
generators, and produces such a wide range of sounds, it has been
widely used in both analog and digital synthesizers. However, the
complex interaction of the modulator and carrier creates a frequency
spectrum that is difficult to control precisely and traditional signal
synthesis based on spectrum analysis does not easily translate into a
set of carriers and modulators. The relationship of the carrier,
modulator and resulting spectrum is anything but intuitive.
Consequently, simulating natural sounds with modulation is usually
done by tweaking the modulator and carrier until an acceptable sound
is heard. However, the ability to create very unnatural sounds makes
non-linear synthesis especially appropriate for creating new and
unusual sounds.
Wavetable synthesis is a technique that sits somewhere between
additive and non-linear synthesis. Like additive synthesis, the
wavetables combine to produce complex sounds. However, the
transition from one waveform to another is a result of modulating
multiple wavetables with a non-periodic function. Put another way,
wavetable synthesis “morphs” the waveform between several sounds.
Wavetable synthesis can use pre-recorded sounds to fill the
wavetables. However, this introduces the same difficulties as a
sampling system (see below). The main advantage of wavetable
synthesis is that it allows a dynamic spectrum with only one signal
generator constructed from a set of phase integrators. That advantage
is less important when the signal generator exists only in computer
memory. Nevertheless, wavetable synthesis can be implemented
fairly easily in software, and is a good addition to a software synthesis
system.
Granular synthesis is a unique, and specialized, synthesis
technique. It produces a varying sound by stringing together very
short sounds, often only a few milliseconds in length. The effect can
be anything from a “bubbling” sound to a sound that slowly shifts in
 BasicSynth 13

timbre over time. Granular synthesis was developed originally by

physically splicing together small segments of sound recordings. The
same technique can be performed very easily in software by
concatenating recorded sounds, but can also be extended to use grains
directly created with software signal generators.
A sampler synthesis system uses recorded sounds instead of
internally generated waveforms. Such a system can get very close to
exact reproduction of natural sounds. However, there are some limits
that complicate a sampler system. If we only need to generate a sound
effect, such as a buzzer or bell, the program is very simple. However,
to reproduce musical instruments, the pitch, duration and timbre of
the sound need to be variable. This introduces several potential
problems. First, we need to know the fundamental frequency of the
signal and analyzing an arbitrary signal to determine the actual pitch
can be difficult. Second, changing the pitch by playing the recording
at different rates introduces changes in envelope and spectrum of the
signal. In addition, a sampler must be able to loop over the sustained
portion of the sound without producing discontinuities in the
waveform. Consequently, different recordings are used for different
ranges of the instrument’s sound, and the attack and decay portions of
the sound are handled separately from the sustain portion. In short, a
complete sampler requires many sound files and very careful
preparation of the files in order to be usable. Implementing playback
of the recorded sounds is easy, but creating a good set of sounds is
very difficult.
A newer and potentially very powerful synthesis technique is
known as physical modeling and waveguide synthesis. Rather than
trying to analyze and then reproduce the spectrum of a sound,
physical modeling creates a model of the sound as a combination of
impulses, resonators and filters. In theory, any sound that can be
produced by initiating a vibration in some physical object can be
modeled in this manner. The basic software functions needed to
model the sound are surprisingly simple. This is a method that has a
great deal of potential, but one that also requires a significant amount
of analysis of the sound and its controlling parameters.
Any or all of these common synthesis techniques can be used for
any application described above. However, some synthesis techniques
are more appropriate to each category than others. For example,
additive synthesis usually requires the greatest number of calculations
14 Synthesis Overview

and is thus more appropriate for creating sound files for playback than
live performance. In contrast, FM synthesis can produce a wide
variety of sounds with a relatively small number of calculations and
works well for both pre-recorded sound and live performance.
Subtractive synthesis, along with wavetable distortion, granular
synthesis and related techniques, are good for producing very
distinctive artificial sounds, and, although they can simulate natural
sounds, are better suited to new-sound categories than emulation of
natural sounds. Sampled systems, physical modeling and waveguide
synthesis are focused on efficient simulation of natural sounds, but
can also be used to create arbitrary and artificial sounds if appropriate
adjustable parameters are provided.

Expressive Music Synthesis Systems

The discussion above, like most writings on music synthesis,

concentrates on methods for producing sounds. This is understandable
since the unique feature of a synthesizer is its ability to produce a
wide range of sounds from one instrument. Unfortunately, there is
another important feature of a music synthesizer that often gets
ignored.
Music is more than interesting sounds. Interesting music has an
almost mystical quality that we call expressive. Sounds performed on
traditional instruments are not static, but vary from note to note and
over the duration of a single note as the performer varies the sounds
during performance and from one performance to another. To get the
same musical expression, a musician using a computer synthesis
system needs more than a large catalog of interesting sounds. He must
also have a way to control the expressive aspects of the composition.
In traditional music notation, this can be done with a few short
instructions to the performer, such as dynamics, tempo changes,
accents, etc. We need something analogous for our computer music
system if we want to create expressive music with it.
This is the area where synthesis systems most often fall short. The
synthesizer is capable of producing a vast range of interesting sounds,
but the musician or composer cannot easily introduce all the subtle
variations to the sound that make the music expressive. Keyboard
synthesizers have improved considerably in this area through the use
of velocity and touch sensitive keyboards. However, trying to
 BasicSynth 15

simulate all of the subtle variations of performance in software

requires considerable effort and can be tedious. As a result, many
software synthesis systems rely heavily on input from keyboards or
other devices rather than providing a pure software solution.
Furthermore, it is not intuitively obvious how changing a parameter,
such as the value that controls the attack rate of an envelope
generator, will affect the musical expressiveness. When we construct
a synthesizer in software, with the computer acting as performer, we
have to be aware of the need to be able to parameterize these subtle
interactions between musician and sound in such a way that they are
both available and meaningful for musical expression.
Whatever the application or synthesis technique, all synthesis
systems rely on a common set of sound generation and processing
functions that can be combined in various ways. The first section of
this book steps through the process of understanding and creating
those basic sound generation and processing functions. Later, we will
look at designing instruments and automatic sequencing of the music
with the goal of producing a synthesizer suited to expressive music
composition. The additional features needed for simulation of
traditional sounds and live performance are not covered in detail.
However, the synthesis system described in this book can be extended
to include those features.
Other documents randomly have
different content
 I.
SOME SAVAGE MYTHS AND BELIEFS.

The question of the universality of religion, of its presence in some

form or another in every part of the world, seems to be one of those
which lie beyond the bounds of a dogmatic answer. For the accounts
of missionaries and travellers, which furnish the only data for its
solution, have been so largely vitiated, if not by a consciousness of
the interests supposed to be at stake, at least by so strong an
intolerance for the tenets of native savage religions, that it seems
impossible to make sufficient allowance either for the bias of
individual writers or for the extent to which they may have
misunderstood, or been purposely misled by, their informants.
Although, however, on the subject of native religions we can never
hope for more than approximate truth, the reports of missionaries
and others, written at different periods of time about the same place
or contemporaneously about widely remote places, as they must be
free from all possible suspicion of collusion, so they supply a kind of
measure of probability by which the credibility of any given belief
may be tested. Thus an idea, too inconceivable to be credited, if
only reported of one tribe of the human race, may be safely
accepted as seriously held, if reported of several tribes in different
parts of the world. An Englishman, for instance, however much
winds and storms may mentally vex him, would scarcely think of
testifying his repugnance to them by the physical remonstrance of
his fists and lungs, nor would he easily believe that any people of
the earth should seriously treat the wind in this way as a material
agent. If he were told that the Namaquas shot poisoned arrows at
storms to drive them away, he would show no unreasonable
scepticism in disbelieving the fact; but if he learnt on independent
authority that the Payaguan Indians of North America rush with
firebrands and clenched fists against the wind that threatens to blow
down their huts; that in Russia the Esthonians throw stones and
knives against a whirlwind of dust, pursuing it with cries; that the
Kalmucks fire their guns to drive the storm-demons away; that Zulu
rain-doctors or heaven-herds whistle to lightning to leave the skies
just as they whistle to cattle to leave their pens; and that also in the
Aleutian Islands a whole village will unite to shriek and strike against
the raging wind, he would have to acknowledge that the statement
about the Namaquas contained in itself nothing intrinsically
improbable. And besides this test of genuine savage thought, a test
which obviously admits of almost infinite application, there is
another one no less serviceable in ethnological criticism, namely,
where the reality of a belief is supported by customs, widely spread
and otherwise unintelligible. No better illustration can be given of
this than the belief, which, asserted by itself, would be universally
disbelieved, in a second life not only for men but for material things;
but which, supported as it is by the practice, common alike in the old
world and the new, of burying objects with their owner to live again
with him in another state, is certified beyond all possibility of doubt.
If to us there seems a no more self-evident truth than that a man
can take nothing with him out of the world, a vast mass of evidence
proves, that the discovery of this truth is one of comparatively
modern date and of still quite partial distribution over the globe.
So much, then, being premised as to the nature of the evidence
on which our knowledge of the lower races depends, and as to the
limits within which such evidence may be received and its veracity
tested, let us proceed to examine some of the higher beliefs of
savages, which, as they bear some analogy to the beliefs on similar
subjects of more advanced societies, are in a sense religious, and, so
far at least as the collected information justifies us in judging, seem
of indigenous and independent growth.
Few results of ethnology are more interesting than the wide-
spread belief among savages, arrived at purely by their own
reasoning faculties, in a creator of things. The recorded instances of
such a belief are, indeed, so numerous as to make it doubtful
whether instances to the contrary may not have been based on too
scant information. The difficulty of obtaining sound evidence on such
subjects is well illustrated by the experience of Dobritzhoffer, the
Jesuit missionary, who spent seven years among the Abipones of
South America. For when he asked them whether the wonderful
course of the stars and heavenly bodies had never raised in their
minds the thought of an invisible being who had made and who
guided them, he got for answer that of what happened in heaven, or
of the maker or ruler of the stars, the ancestors of the Abipones had
never cared to think, finding ample occupation for their thoughts in
the providing of grass and water for their horses. Yet the Abipones
really believed that they had been created by an Indian like
themselves, whose name they mentioned with great reverence and
whom they spoke of as their ‘grandfather,’ because he had lived so
long ago. He was still, they fancied, to be seen in the Pleiades; and
when that constellation disappeared for some months from the sky
they would bewail the illness of their grandfather, and congratulate
him on his recovery when he returned in May. Still, the creator of
savage reasoning is not necessarily a creator of all things, but only
of some, like Caliban’s Setebos, who made the moon and the sun,
and the isle and all things on it—

But not the stars; the stars came otherwise.

So that it is possible the creator of the Abipones was merely their

deified First Ancestor. For on nothing is savage thought more
confused than on the connection between the first man who lived on
the world and the actual Creator of the world, as if in the logical
need of a first cause they had been unable to divest it of human
personality, or as if the natural idea of a first man had led to the idea
of his having created the world. Thus Greenlanders are divided as to
whether Kaliak was really the creator of all things or only the first
man who sprang from the earth. The Minnetarrees of North America
believed that at first everything was water and there was no earth at
all, till the First Man, the never-dying one, the Lord of Life, sent
down the great red-eyed bird to bring up the earth. The Mingo tribes
also ‘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;’ whilst among the Dog-ribs the First
Man, Chapewee, was also creator of the sun and moon. The Zulus of
Africa likewise merge the ideas of the First Man and the Creator, the
great Unkulunkulu; as also do the Caribs, who believe that Louquo,
the uncreate first Carib, descended from heaven to make the earth
and also to become the father of men.[3] So again in the Aht belief
Quawteaht is not only ‘the first Indian who ever lived,’ their
forefather, but the maker of most things visible, of the earth and all
animals, yet not of the sun and moon.[4] It seems, therefore, not
improbable that savage speculation, being more naturally impelled to
assume a cause for men than a cause for other things, postulated a
First Man as primeval ancestor, and then applying an hypothesis,
which served so well to account for their own existence, to account
for that of the world in general, made the Father of Men the creator
of all things; in other words, that the idea of a First Man preceded
and prepared the way for the idea of a first cause.
However this may be, and admitting the possible existence of
tribes absolutely devoid of any idea of creation at all, the following
savage fancies about it are not without their interest as typical
examples of primitive cosmogony.
In one of the Dog-rib Indian sagas an important part in the
creation is played by a great bird, as among several other tribes who
loved to trace their origin to a bird, as some would trace theirs to a
toad or a rattlesnake. Originally, the saga runs, the world was
nothing but a wide, waste sea, without any living thing upon it save
a gigantic bird, who with the glance of its fiery eyes produced the
lightning, and with the flapping of its wings the thunder. This bird,
by diving into the sea, caused the earth to appear above it, and
proceeded to call all animals to its surface (except, indeed, the
Chippewya Indians, who were descended from a dog). When its
work was complete it made a great arrow, which it bade the Indians
keep with great care; and when this was lost, owing to the stupidity
of the Chippewyas, it was so angry that it left the earth, never
afterwards to revisit it; and men now live no longer, as they did in
those days, till their throats are worn through with eating and their
feet with walking the earth.[5]
Many thousands of miles separate the Tongan Islands from North
America, yet there too we find the idea of the earth having come
from the waters. In the beginning nothing was to be seen above the
waste of waters but the Island of Bolotu, which is as everlasting as
the gods who dwell there or as the stars and the sea. One day the
god Tangaloa went to fish in the sea, when, feeling something heavy
at the end of his line, he drew it in, and there perceived the tops of
rocks, which continued to increase in size and number till they
formed a large continent, and his line broke, and only the Tongan
Islands remained above the surface. These Tangaloa, with the help
of the other gods, filled with trees and herbs and animals from
Bolotu, only of a smaller size and not immortal. Then he bade his
two sons take their wives and go to dwell in Tonga, dividing the land
and dwelling apart. The younger brother was steady and industrious,
and made many discoveries; but the elder was idle and slept away
his time, and envied the works of his brother, till at last his envy
grew so strong that one day he murdered him. Then came Tangaloa
in wrath from Bolotu, to ask him why he had slain his brother, and
he bade him bring his brother’s family to him. They were told to take
their boats and sail eastward till they came to a great land to dwell
in. ‘Your skin’ (to this effect ran Tangaloa’s blessing) ‘shall be white
as your souls, for your souls are pure; you shall be wise, make axes,
have all other riches, and great boats. I myself will command the
wind to blow from your land to Tonga, but the people of Tonga will
not be able with their bad boats to reach you.’ To the others he said:
‘You shall be black, because your souls are black, and you shall
remain poor. You shall not be able to prepare useful things, nor to go
to the land of your brothers. But your brothers shall come to Tonga
and trade with you as they please.’[6]
 This Tongan creation-myth is especially striking, not only from its
resemblance to the well-known stories of Cain and Abel or of
Romulus and Remus, but from the wonderful extension of a similar
story over the world. It has been found among the Esquimaux,
among the Hervey Islanders, among the Hindoos, among the
Iroquois of America. Its origin perhaps lies in early and rude
attempts to account for the more obvious dualisms in nature, as
those, for instance, between the sun and the moon, or between
warm and cold winds. In the Iroquois version the elder brother who
killed the younger is said to have been identical with the sun, though
his mother, not the brother he killed, was the moon.[7] A curious
Indian drawing has been preserved in which the god of the north
wind, or of cold weather, contends with the god of the south, or of
warmth. The former is figured in a snowstorm, the latter in rain;
wolves fight on the side of the one, the crow and plover on that of
the other. The conflict is terrible; the southern god is worsted, cold
weather prevails, and the earth is frozen up. But in spring he sends
forth his crow and plover, who defeat the wolves, and the northern
god is drowned in a flood of spray which arises from the melting of
the snow and ice. And in this contention for cold and warm weather
it is believed they will battle as long as the world shall endure.[8]
The Kamchadal belief is instructive, as showing that by the
creation of the world the savage only means that small portion of it
which he knows, and that, so far from it being any proof of his
intelligence to suppose a cause for the hills or island which limit his
energies, it is rather his want of logical thought which impels him to
the belief. For seeing, as he does, a spirit in everything, whether it
be moving animal, or rushing wind, or standing stone, and
accounting, as he does, for everything by a spirit which is at once its
cause and controlling principle, it is only natural that he should draw
from his unlimited spirit-world one who made and governs all things.
Thus the Kamchadals believe that after their supreme deity, of whom
they predicate nothing but existence, the greatest god is Kutka.
Kutka created the heavens and the earth, making both eternal, like
the men and creatures he placed on the earth. But the Kamchadals
openly avow that they think themselves much cleverer than Kutka,
who in their eyes is so stupid as to be quite undeserving of prayers
or gratitude. Had he been cleverer, they say, he would have made
the world much better, without so many mountains and inaccessible
cliffs, without streams of such rapidity, or such tempests of wind and
rain. In winter, if they are climbing a mountain, or in summer, if their
canoes come to rapids, they will vent loud curses on Kutka for
having made the streams too strong for their canoes, or the
mountains so wearisome for their feet.
The Tamanaks of the Orinoco manifested a not much higher
conception of a creator than the Kamchadals. For they ascribed the
creation of the world to Amalivacca, who in the course of his work
discussed long with his brother about the Orinoco, having the kind
wish so to make it that ships might as easily go up its stream as
down, but being compelled to abandon a task which so far
transcended his powers. The Tamanaks recently showed a cave
where Amalivacca dwelt when he lived among them, before he took
a boat and sailed to the other side of the sea.[9]
Not only, however, is the idea of a creation of things quite
common among untutored savages, but there is often a belief
closely connected therewith that in the beginning death and sickness
were unknown in the world, but came into it in consequence of
some fault committed by its hitherto immortal occupants. Such a
belief, reported as it is from places so widely sundered as Ceylon,
North America, and the Tongan Islands, seems effectually to
discountenance the suspicion which might otherwise attach to it of
collusion or mistake on the part of our informants. It is the fancy of
the Cingalese cosmogony that, in the fifth period of creative energy,
the immortal beings who then inhabited the earth ate of certain
plants, and thereby involved themselves in darkness and mortality.
‘It was then that they were formed male and female, and lost the
power of returning to the heavenly mansions.’ Liable as they had
theretofore been to mental passions, such as envy, covetousness,
and ambition, they were thenceforward subjected to corporeal
passions as well, and the race now inhabiting the earth became
subject to all the evils that afflict them.[10] According to the saga of
the Dog-rib Indians the first man who lived upon the earth, when
food and other good things abounded, was Chapewee, who
afterwards, giving his children two kinds of food, black and white,
forbade them to eat of the former. When he went away for a long
journey to bring the sun into the world, his children were obedient
and ate only of the white fruit, but ate it all. But when he went away
a second time to bring the moon into the world, in their hunger his
children forgot his prohibition and ate of the black fruit. So when
Chapewee returned he was very wroth, and declared that
thenceforth the earth should only produce bad fruit and that men
should be subject to sickness and death. Afterwards, indeed, when
his family lamented that men should have been made mortal for
eating the black fruit, Chapewee granted that those who dreamt
certain dreams should have the power of curing sickness and so of
prolonging human life; but that was the extent to which Chapewee
relented.[11] The Caribs, Waraues, and Arawaks are said to believe
in two distinct creators of men and women; the creator of the
former being superior and doing neither good nor harm. After he
had created men he came on the earth to see what they were
doing; but finding them so bad that they even attempted his own
life, he took from them their immortality and gave it to skin-casting
creatures instead. The Aleutian Islanders believe that the god who
made their islands completed his work by making men to inhabit
them; but these men were immortal beings, for when age came over
them they had but to climb a lofty mountain and plunge from thence
into a lake, in order to come forth young again and vigorous. Then it
happened that a mortal woman, who had the misfortune to draw
upon herself celestial love, remonstrated one day with her lover for
having, in his creation of the Aleutian Islands, made so many
mountains and forgotten to supply the land with forests. This
imprudent criticism caused her brother to be slain by the angry god,
and all men after him to be subject to death. A similar idea is
contained in one of the Tongan traditions of creation; for when the
islands were made, but before they were inhabited by reasonable
beings, some two hundred of the lower gods, male and female alike,
took a great boat to go to see the new land fished up by Tangaloa.
So delighted were they with it that they immediately broke up their
big boat, intending to make some smaller ones out of it. But after a
few days some of them died; and one of them, inspired by God, told
them that since they had come to Tonga, and breathed its air and
eaten its fruits, they should be mortal and fill the world with mortals.
Then were they sorry that they had broken their big boat, and they
set to work to make another, and went to sea, hoping again to reach
Bolotu, the heaven they had left; but being unable to find it, they
returned regretfully to Tonga.
Thus it would seem that wherever men have so far advanced in
power of thought as to realise the conception of antiquity, the
troubles of their actual lot have always tempted them to idealise the
past, and the glories of the age of gold have been sung by the poets
of no particular land nor literature. The Shawnee Indians believed
there was a time when they could walk on the ocean or restore life
to the dead, till they lost these privileges when the nation by its
carelessness became divided into two.[12] The Ashantees trace all
their calamities to the folly of their ancestors, for when the first
created black men were given their choice between a large box and
a piece of sealed-up paper they elected to take the box, but found
therein only some gold, iron, and other metals, whilst the white men
on opening the paper found all that was needful to make them wise,
and have ever since treated the blacks as their slaves.[13] It is
remarkable that a similar fancy is ascribed to the Navajoes of New
Mexico. For their ancestors, after creating the sun and moon, made
two water-jars, both covered at the top, but one gorgeously painted,
containing only rubbish, the other of plain earthenware, unpainted,
but containing flocks and herds and other valuables. The Navajoes,
allowed to choose before the Pueblos, took the beautiful but
worthless jar; whereupon the old men said: ‘Thus it will always be
with the two nations. You, Navajoes, will be a poor and wandering
race; destitute of the comforts of life and ever greedy for things on
account of their outward show rather than their intrinsic value; while
the Pueblos will enjoy an abundance of the good things of life, will
occupy houses, and have plenty of flocks and herds.’[14] According
to the legend in the Zend-Avesta, when Ormuzd created Meschia
and Meschiana, the first man and woman, he appointed heaven as
their dwelling, under the sole condition of humility and obedience to
the law of pure thought, pure speech, and pure action. For some
time they were a blessing to one another and lived happily, saying
that it was from Ormuzd that all things came—the water and earth,
trees and animals, sun, moon, and stars, and all good roots and
fruits on the earth. But at last Ahriman became master over their
thoughts, and they ascribed the creation of all things to him. So they
lost their happiness and their virtue, and their souls were
condemned to remain in Duzakh until the resurrection of their
bodies, when Sosiosch should restore life to the dead.[15]
Among the myths, however, most widely spread over the world
and common to races in all stages of culture, from the most
barbarous to the most civilized, a prominent place is due to the
legend of an all-destructive deluge, a legend which, arising as it
probably did in many different places from exaggerated memories of
purely local floods, must, in spite of its seeming universality, remain
a merely local myth, entirely destitute of all bearing on the question
of the unity of the human race, or of any connection with the story
told in Genesis. A local flood like that which on the occasion of an
earthquake in 1819 was caused by the sea flowing in at the eastern
mouth of the Indus and converting in the space of a few hours a
district of 2,000 square miles into a vast lagoon, would naturally be
an event which would remain for ever in the oral traditions of the
district and tend to become magnified when the event itself was
forgotten. In Australia, which is subject at certain epochs and in
certain localities to great inundations, and which bears evidence of
former floods in what are now waterless deserts, flood stories are
said to be ‘exceedingly common’ among all the tribes, one tribe
having a tradition that when they returned to their old hunting-
grounds on the banks of a river, after a great flood, they found the
sea flowing where had stood the other bank, nor any trace left of its
former inhabitants.[16]
Or, again, it is possible that alterations in the level of the sea and
land or the subsidence of a large continent, such as that of which on
geological as well as ethnological grounds it has been supposed that
the Polynesian islands are the remains, may have originated the
tradition. Thus, the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg imagined the
submersion of a large country in the Atlantic to account for the
deluge-myths of the Central American nations.[17] Dr. Brinton,
indeed, suggests, that not physics, but metaphysics is the exciting
cause of beliefs in periodical convulsions of the globe, maintaining
that ‘by nothing short of a miracle’ could savages preserve the
remembrance of even the most terrible catastrophe beyond a few
generations. But it is at least as likely that such remembrance should
be possible as that savages, starting, as he supposes, with an idea
of creation as a reconstruction of existing elements, should have
added thereto the myth of a universal catastrophe, ‘to avoid the
dilemma of a creation from nothing on the one hand and the
eternity of matter on the other.’[18] Perhaps, however, all such
legends are best regarded as pure nature-myths, to which we may
possibly find the key in the belief of the Esquimaux, that the souls of
the dead are encamped round a large lake in the sky, which when it
overflows causes rain upon earth and would cause a universal
deluge if at any time its floodgates were burst. The belief in a
contingency is never far from the assertion of its actuality, nor are
the steps of thought always visible which separate the possible from
the real.
Although many of the deluge-myths of the world have doubtless
owed their origin to the zeal with which they have been sought for in
the cause of orthodox theories, it is improbable that all of them have
been produced in this way. Dr. Brinton, who has examined the
evidence with care, asserts that there are twenty-eight American
nations among whom a distinct and well-authenticated myth of the
deluge was found.[19]
 It would be tedious to allude to more than a few illustrations of
the belief as it exists in the world, or to try to distinguish the
elements in them of purely native growth from the influences of
Christian teaching. The Kamchadals believe that the earth was once
flooded and many persons drowned, though they tried to save
themselves in boats, those only succeeding who made great rafts of
trees and let down stones for anchors, to prevent themselves from
drifting out to sea; when the waters subsided their rafts rested on
the mountain-tops. The Esquimaux appealed to the bones of whales
found on their mountains in support of their assertion that the world
had once been tilted over and all men drowned but one. The
Mandan Indians, according to Catlin, celebrated every year in
pantomime the subsidence of the great waters.[20]
It is noticeable that in most savage legends of a flood (and it may,
perhaps, be taken as some test of their authenticity) there is an
entire absence of the idea, so familiar to ourselves, of the flood
having resulted from any fault committed by the then inhabitants of
the earth. At most such an idea appears in germ, as in the tradition
of the Society Islanders, that a fisherman, catching his hook in the
hair of the great sea-god as he lay asleep in his coral grove, so
angered that divinity that he caused the waters to arise till they
flooded the very tops of the mountains and drowned the inhabitants,
the fisherman and his family alone being suffered to escape, and
thereby serving to attest the genuineness of the tradition. So in Fiji
the deluge was caused by two grandsons of a god killing his
favourite bird, and instead of being apologetic acting with insolence
and fortifying the town they lived in for the purpose of defying their
grandfather. The connection of the catastrophe with human
wickedness belongs apparently to a more advanced state of thought,
of which the recently deciphered Chaldæan version may be taken as
a sample. In it Hasisadra, the sage, who with his wife escaped the
general destruction, tells Izdubar, the giant, how he built a vessel
according to the directions of Hea, to save himself and his family
from the universal deluge which the gods sent upon the earth to
punish the wickedness of men; how the deluge lasted six days, and
on the seventh, when the storm ceased, the vessel was stranded for
seven days on the mountains of Nizir; and how on the seventh day,
he Hasisadra, sent out first a dove and then a swallow, both of
whom, finding no resting-place, returned to the vessel, till a raven
was sent forth and did not return; and Hasisadra sent out the
animals to the four winds, and poured out a libation in thanksgiving,
and built an altar on the summit of the mountain.
The belief in a future life—a belief perhaps first suggested in that
rude state of culture where the dreaming and waking life are not
clearly distinct but are both equally real—appears to prevail so
generally among the lower races, that it is more difficult to find
instances where it is not found than instances where it is. The dead
who visit the living in their sleep are not thought of as dead, but as
simply invisible; and for this reason all over the globe it is so
common to bury material things in the graves of the departed, to
serve them in that other world which is so vividly conceived as but a
continuation of this one. The Red Indian takes his horses, the
Greenlander his reindeer, and both the common requisites of earthly
economy; just as many tribes still take their slaves and their wives to
accompany them on that journey which, as it is imagined so
distinctly, is undertaken without mystery to a fresh existence. Till
lately, in parts of Sweden, a man’s pipe and tobacco-pouch, some
money and lights, were interred with him; and at Reichenbach, in
Germany, a man’s umbrella and goloshes are still placed in his grave.
[21] In Russia formerly a new pair of shoes was put on the feet of
the dead for the long journey before him, a custom also found
among the natives of California, and the Christian priest used to
place on a man’s breast, as he lay in his coffin, a pass, which,
besides being inscribed with his Christian name and the dates of his
birth and death, was also a certificate of his baptism, of the piety of
his life, and of his having partaken of the communion before his
death.[22] These are but survivals of savage ideas, which picture the
continuation of consciousness far more vividly than more advanced
religions. The Ahts bury blankets with their dead, that they may not
shiver in the cold ones provided in the land of Chayher. The Delawar
Indian used to make an opening at the head-end of the coffin, that
the soul of the deceased might go in and out till it had thoroughly
settled on its future place of residence. When the Chippewyas killed
their aged relatives who could hunt no more, the medicine-song
used proves the simple faith which made the cruel deed an act of
mercy: ‘The Lord of life gives courage. It is true all Indians know
that he loves us, and we give over to him our father, that he may
feel himself young in another land and able to hunt.’
It is possible, indeed, that in many cases the attention shown by
savages to their dead, by the burial of property which would have
been of use to the survivors, or by the placing of food on their
graves at periodical feasts, arose rather from fear than from any
kinder motive, dictated by the dread always felt by the living of the
dead and the wish to satisfy them, if possible, by some peace-
offering. The Samoyed sorcerer, after a funeral, goes through the
ceremony of soothing the departed, that he may not trouble the
survivors nor take their best game; a feeling still further illustrated
by their habit of not taking the dead out to be buried by the regular
hut door, but by a side-opening, that if possible they may not find
their way back—a habit found also in Greenland and in many other
parts of the world. For the fear of the dead is a universal sentiment,
common no less to the Abipones, who thought that sorcerers could
bring the dead from their graves to visit the living, or to the Kaffirs,
who think that bad men alone live a second time and try to kill the
living by night, than it is to the ignorant who still believe in the
blood-sucking vampire, a belief which little more than a century ago
amounted to a kind of epidemic in Hungary, resulting in a general
disinterment and the burning or staking of the suspected bodies. In
the sepulture, therefore, of men with their possessions, it was
probably the original thought that the dead would be less likely to
haunt the dwellings of the living, if they were not compelled to re-
seek upon earth those articles of daily use which they knew were to
be found there.
But the savage belief in a future is very variable; nor could we
expect to find it much affected by ideas of earthly morality, when
such ideas themselves hardly appear to exist. At most it is men of
rank and courage who live again, while cowards and the commonalty
perish utterly; generally there is no qualification of any kind. The
Bedouins have no fixed belief at all, some thinking that after death
they are changed into screech-owls, and others that if a camel is
slain on their graves they will return to life riding on it, but otherwise
on foot. All North American Indians are said to believe in the
continual life of the soul, and, because they think themselves the
highest beings on earth, postulate a hereafter where all their earthly
longings will be satisfied.[23] But they trouble themselves little about
it, thinking that the god they recognise as supreme is too good to
punish them. Thus the Indians of Arauco look forward to an eternal
life in a beautiful land which lies to the west, far over the sea,
whither souls are taken by the sailor Tempulazy and where no
punishment is expected: for Pillican, their god, the Lord of the world,
would not inflict pain.[24] The Tunguz Lapps look on the next life as
simply a continuation of this one; in it there will be no punishment,
for here everyone is as good as he can be, and the gods kill men
reluctantly, but are thereby satisfied. In the Polynesian future there
is a similar absence of any idea of retribution. There is, for instance,
no moral qualification, but only one of rank, for Bolotu, that happy
land of the dead which lies far away to the north-west of Tonga,
beyond the reach of Tongan boats and greater than all the Tongan
islands put together, wherein abound beautiful and useful trees,
whose plucked fruit instantly grows again; where a delicious
fragrance fills the air, and birds of the loveliest colours sit upon the
trees; where the woods swarm with pigs, which are immortal so long
as they are not eaten by the gods. Nothing, indeed, shows better
how independent is imagination of race than the great similarity of
those idealised earths which constitute the heavens of the most
distant savage tribes. The American Indian, who visits in a dream
the unseen world, reports of it, in language recalling that of Homer,
that it is a land where there is neither day nor night, where the sun
never rises nor sets; where rain and tomahawks and arrows are
never seen; where pipes abound everywhere, lying ready to be
smoked; where the earth is ever green, the trees ever in leaf; where
there is no need of bearskin nor of hut; where, if you would travel,
the rivers will take your boat whithersoever you will, without the
need of rudder or of paddle. And just as in the Tongan Bolotu the
plucked fruit is replaced, so there the goat voluntarily offers its
shoulder to the hungry man, in full confidence that it will grow
again, and the beaver for the same reason makes a ready sacrifice
of its beautiful tail.[25]
So far there is no idea of a future life as in any way affected by
this one. But such ideas do exist among savages, and are extremely
interesting as indications of the growth of their moral ideas. The
quality most necessary for a savage is pre-eminently courage, and
courage, therefore, appearing as the first recognised virtue, lays first
claim, as such, to consideration hereafter. The Brazilians believed
that the souls of the dead became beautiful birds, whilst cowards
were turned into reptiles. The Minnetarrees held that there were two
villages which received the dead; but that the cowardly and bad
went to the small one, whilst the brave and good occupied the
larger. Among the Caribs, who entertain the strange fancy that they
have as many souls as they feel nerves in their body, but that the
chief of these resides in the heart and goes to heaven at death,
whilst the others go to the sea or the woods, we meet again with
the reservation of happiness to the souls of the brave. They alone
will live merrily, dancing, feasting, and talking; they alone will swim
in the great streams, feeling no fatigue; the Arawaks will either serve
them as slaves or wander about in desert mountains. Somewhat
similar was the faith of the old Mexicans, who divided the future
world into three parts: the first, the House of the Sun, where the
days were spent in joyful attendance on that luminary, with songs
and games and dances, by such brave soldiers as had died in battle
or as prisoners had been sacrificed to the gods, and by women who
had died in giving children to the community; the second, the
kingdom of Tlalocan, hidden among the Mexican mountains, not so
bright as the former, but cool and pleasant, and filled with unfailing
pumpkins and tomatoes, reserved for priests and for children
sacrificed to Tlaloc and for all persons killed by lightning, by
drowning, or by sickness; the third, the kingdom of Mictlauteuctli,
reserved for all other persons, but with nothing said of any
punishment there awaiting them. One of the beliefs in Greenland is,
that heaven is situate in the sky or the moon, and that the journey
thither is so easy that a soul may reach it the same evening that it
quits the body, and play at ball and dance with those other departed
souls who are encamped round the great lake and shine in heaven
as the northern lights. But others say that it is only witches and bad
people who join the heavenly lights, where they not only enjoy no
rest, owing to the rapid revolutions of the sky, but are so plagued
with ravens that they cannot keep them from settling in their hair.
They believe that heaven lies under the earth or sea, where dwells
Torngarsuk, the Creator, with his mother, in perpetual summer and
beautiful sunshine. There the water is good and there is no night,
and there are plenty of birds, and fish, and seals, and reindeer, all to
be caught at pleasure, or ready cooking in a great kettle; but these
delights are reserved for persons who have done great deeds and
worked steadfastly, who have caught many whales or seals, who
have been drowned at sea, or have died in childbirth. These persons
alone may hope to join the great company and feast on
inconsumable seals. Even then they must slide for five days down
the blood-stained precipice; and unhappy they to whom the journey
falls in stormy weather or in winter, for then they may suffer that
other death of total extinction, especially if their survivors disturb
them by their noise or affect them injuriously by the food they eat.
The Kamchadal belief is very curious, as showing how the idea of
compensation in the next world for the evils of this—an idea already
apparent in the Mexican and Greenland beliefs—may have served to
bridge over the conception of a mere continuance of life for the soul,
and the conception of an actual retribution awaiting it. They imagine
that the dead come to a place under the earth, where Haetsch
dwells, son of Kutka the Creator, and the first man who died on
earth, now Lord of the under-world and general receiver of souls. To
those who come dressed in fine furs and drive fat dogs before their
sledges, he gives instead old ragged furs and lean dogs; but to those
who have known poverty on earth he gives new furs and beautiful
dogs and also a better place to live in than the others. The dead live
again as on earth; their wives are restored to them, they build
ostrogs again, and catch fish, and dance and sing; there is less
storm and snow than above ground, and more people; indeed,
abundance of everything.
It is easy to conceive how, when once the idea had been reached
that the brave deserved compensation in the next world for their
earthly courage, the poor for their earthly wretchedness, or the sick
for their earthly sufferings, and all men for the misfortune of
premature death, it should also be inferred, as soon as any criterion
between goodness and badness more refined than the mere
difference between courage and cowardice had been attained, that
the good should have some advantage over the bad, and from such
an inference to a complete theory of retribution and punishment of
the bad the logical steps seem fairly obvious. Few things, indeed,
are more remarkable among the lower races than the general
absence of the ideas we associate with hell.[26] At most the idea of
future punishment is negative, the lives of slaves and cowards
terminating in a total cessation of consciousness, as opposed to its
continuance for warriors and chiefs. Still, the idea of difficulty in
attaining the blessed abodes, such as that above noticed as
prevalent in Greenland—an idea, as Mr. Tylor suggests, probably
connected with the sun’s passage across the sky to the west, where
the happy land is so generally figured to lie—is very common, and
from such an idea it is natural to connect the difficulty of the journey
to Paradise with the destruction of those whose presence in it would
mar its blessedness.
The trial of merit, varying with experiences of physical geography,
generally lies either in the passage of a river or gulf by a narrow
bridge, or in the climbing of a steep mountain. The Choctaws, for
instance, believe that the dead have to pass a long and slippery
pine-log, across a deep and rapid river, on the other side of which
stand six persons, who pelt new-comers with stones and cause the
bad ones to fall in.[27] In Khond theology the judge of the dead
resides beyond the sea, on the smooth and slippery Leaping Rock,
below which flows a black unfathomable river; and the souls of men
take bold leaps to reach the rock, those that fail contracting a
deformity which is transferred to the next soul animated on earth.
The Blackfoot Indians, on the other hand, believe that departed
souls have to climb a steep mountain, from the summit of which is
seen a great plain, with new tents and swarms of game; that the
dwellers in that happy plain advance to them and welcome those
who have led a good life, but reject the bad—those who have soiled
their hands in the blood of their countrymen—and throw them
headlong from the mountain; whilst women who have been guilty of
infanticide never reach the mountain at all, but hover round the seat
of their crimes with branches of trees tied to their legs. The Fijians
think that even the brave have some difficulty in reaching the
judgment-seat of Ndengei, and they provide the dead with war-clubs
to resist Sama and his host, who will dispute their passage. But
celibacy is in their eyes apparently the only offence which calls for
peremptory and hopeless punishment. Unmarried Fijians are dashed
to pieces by Nangananga as in vain attempts to steal round to a
certain reef they are driven ashore by the rising tide.[28] The
Norwegian Lapps consider that abstinence from stealing, lying, and
quarrelling entitles a man to compensation hereafter. Such receive
after death a new body, and live with the higher gods in Saiwo, and
indulge in hunting and magic, brandy-drinking and smoking, to a far
higher degree than was possible on earth. Wicked men, perjurers,
and thieves go to the place of the bad spirits, to Gerre-Mubben-
Aimo.[29] The idea of compensation of the good leads naturally to
the idea of retribution for the bad; and even among the Guinea
Coast negroes we find future inducements to the practice of such
moral duties as they recognise. For they are wont to make for
themselves idols, called Sumanes whose favour they endeavour to
secure by abstinence from certain kinds of foods, believing that after
death those who have been constant in their vows of abstinence and
in offerings to the Sumanes will come to a large inland river, where a
god inquires of everyone how he has lived his days on earth, and
those who have not kept their vows are drowned and destroyed for
ever. The inland-dwelling negroes declare that at this river dwells a
powerful god in a beautiful house, which, though always exposed, is
never touched by rain. He knows all past and present things; he can
send any kind of weather, he can heal sicknesses and work miracles.
Before him must all the dead appear; the good to receive a happy
and peaceful life, the bad to be killed for ever by the large wooden
club which hangs before his door. Lastly, it may be noticed that
negro tribes believe that death will take them to the land of the
European and give them the white man’s skin; but, as they generally
paint their devil white, we cannot be sure that such a change is not
rather dreaded as a punishment for the bad than regarded as a
change for the better.
So far it appears that savages have developed from the
promptings and imaginings of their own minds some idea of a
Creator and of a soul, as well as of a future to some extent
dependent on earthly antecedents. It is of course difficult to judge
how far the missionaries or travellers, who have mainly supplied the
only evidence we have, may have clearly understood, or how much
they may have unintentionally imported into, beliefs they represent
as purely indigenous. In many cases a remarkable similarity may
lead us to suspect that the belief is not native, but implanted at
some time by Christian or other influence, though traces of such
influence may be absolutely wanting or at least not proved. There
can, for instance, be little doubt whence Sissa, the devil of the
Guinea Coast negroes, derived the pair of horns and long tail with
which he is usually depicted. But, on the other hand, we cannot lay
down any rigid canon for the imaginations of men, nor say that if
one belief is identical with another a thousand miles off it must
therefore have been borrowed and cannot be of independent
growth. Indeed, when we reflect on the limited nature of the mental
faculties of savages, on the limited range of objects for their minds
to work upon, on their childlike fear of the dark and the unseen, and
their still more childlike delight in the indulgence of their fancy, so
far from there being anything strange in the analogies of thought
between distant tribes, the strangeness would rather be if such
analogies did not exist. It is probable that children tell one another
much the same stories in London as they do at the Antipodes, and
there is no more reason to be surprised at finding much the same
theologies current in Africa as in Australia or Ceylon. The same sun,
which shines on men’s bodies alike, shines on their minds alike too;
and myths, like dreams, with all the apparent field for variety in their
formation, are really subject to the closest laws of uniformity and
sameness.
We have, however, to be careful, in applying terms of our own
religious phraseology to savage thoughts and fancies, to discriminate
between the higher and lower meaning they bear, and always to
employ them in the lower. The belief, already noticed, of the
Kamchadals in Kutka well illustrates how different is the meaning
involved in the Kamchadal theory of creation from that involved in
Genesis or the Zend-Avesta. The same is true of the belief in a soul
and its future life; for the savage, intensely vivid as is his future
beyond the grave, seldom doubts for an instant but that he will
share it with all the rest, not only of the animate, but of the
inanimate world. For that reason he buries axes, and clothes, and
food with the dead, to be of service in the next world. The Fijians
used to show ‘the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of
stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the utensils of this
frail world, swimming, or rather tumbling one over the other,’ as they
were borne by a swift stream at the bottom of a deep hole to the
regions of immortality.[30] So of the animate world. The Kamchadal
believes that the smallest fly that breathes will rise after death to
live again in the under-world.[31] If the Laplander expects that all
honest people will re-meet in Aimo, he as fully expects that bears
and wolves will meet there too. The Greenlander believes that all the
heavenly bodies were once Greenlanders, or animals, and that they
shine with a pale or red light according to the food they ate on
earth. He also believes that when all things now living on the earth
are dead, and the earth cleansed from their blood by a great water-
flood; when the purified dust is consolidated again by a great wind,
and a fairer earth, all plain and no cliffs, is substituted for the
present one; when Priksoma, he who is above, breathes on men that
they may live again—then animals will also rise again and be in
great abundance. The old inhabitants of Anahuac and Egypt believed
equally that animals would share the next world with them; and, if
the universality of an opinion were any reason for its credibility, few
opinions could claim a better title to acceptance than this one. So
confident were the Swedish Lapps of the future life of animals, that
whenever they killed one in sacrifice they buried the bones in a box,
that the gods might more easily restore it to life.[32] There is really
nothing very unnatural in this idea, when we remember that in the
lower stages of culture man not only admits the equality of brutes
with himself, but even acknowledges their superiority by actual
worship of them. It is not difficult to understand how it is that
savages who see deities in everything, in the motionless mountain or
stone no less than in the rushing river or wind, should see in animals
deities of extraordinary power, whose capacities infinitely transcend
their own. Recognising as they do in the tiger a strength, in the deer
a speed, in the monkey a cunning, all superior to their own, they
naturally conceive of them as deities whom above all others it is
expedient to humour by adoration and sacrifice. Some negro tribes,
holding that all animals enshrine a spirit, which may injure or benefit
themselves, will refrain from eating certain animals, otherwise
perfectly edible, and endeavour to propitiate them by lifelong
attention. Thus some regularly offer food at the earth-houses of
termites, or fatten sheep and goats, for a purely temporary and
perfectly spiritual advantage. It is on account of their divine and
immortal nature that the well-known custom of apologising to
animals killed in the chase is so general among savages. It is
generally a deprecation of any post-mortem vindictiveness on the
part of the animal’s ghost. The natives of Greenland refrain from
breaking seals’ heads or throwing them into the sea; but they pile
them in a heap before their hut door, that the souls of the seals may
not be angry and in their spite frighten living seals away. The
Yuracares of Bolivia were careful to put small fish-bones carefully
aside, lest fish should disappear; and other Indian tribes would keep
the bones of beavers and sables from their dogs for a year and then
bury them, lest the spirits of those animals should take offence and
no more of them be killed or trapped.[33] The Lapps are so afraid
that the soul of the animal whose flesh they have killed may take its
revenge as a disembodied spirit, that before eating it they not only
entreat pardon for its death, but perform the ceremony of treating it
first with nuts or other delicacies, that it may be led to believe it is
present as a guest—not to be eaten, but to eat. Another Kamchadal
fancy indicates how savages, whose theory of cause and effect
appears to be that it is quite sufficient for two things to be
connected contemporaneously for one to be cause and the other
effect, are led more especially to see deities in birds, from the
observation that changes in weather are associated with their arrival
and departure. Since to be associated with a thing is to be caused
by it, migratory birds take away or bring the summer with them. For
the reason that the spring and the wagtails return together the
Kamchadal thanks the wagtail for bringing back the spring, and it is
probably from a similar confusion of thought that he thanks the
ravens and crows for fine weather.
Whether, in conclusion, it be true or not that the more civilised
nations of the earth have gone through stages of growth in which
their religious conceptions resembled those of contemporary savage
tribes, one result at least is clear, that the actual standpoint of the
savage with regard to the great mysteries of existence is removed
toto cœlo from that of Christian, or Mahometan, or Parsee. The
Creator he believes in is not so much the cause of all things as the
maker of some things, because seemingly the first father of men
needed the wherewithal to exercise his energies. The savage’s soul
is simply his breath or ghost, which indeed will survive his body, but
which may lose its identity in the body of an animal or thing,
destined like himself to live again. He conceives of himself generally
as not mortal, but not therefore as immortal. His future is but a
repetition of his present, with the same base wants and pursuits,
only with a greater possibility of indulgence, and not necessarily
indefinite in duration. It is, perhaps, some compensation for this,
that, if it does not hold out great hopes, its prospect serves to
deprive death of its terror, and brightens the sufferings of the
passing day. To the native American death is said to be rather an
event of gladness than of terror, bringing him rest or enjoyment
after his period of toil; nor does he fear to go to a land ‘which all his
life long he has heard abounds in rewards without punishments.’[34]
No thought of possibly flying from present evils to find immeasurably
greater ones awaiting him after death would ever occur to a savage,
and he will even kill himself or cheerfully submit to be killed by his
friends, in order to realise the sooner the difference imagined
between earth and heaven. The powers of evil which vex him here
will be absent hereafter, and the Spirit he recognises as supreme in
his hierarchy of invisible powers is either conceived as too beneficent
to punish, or, if he punishes at all, as likely to punish at once and for
ever.
 II.
SAVAGE MODES OF PRAYER.

In the same way as a child is insensibly educated by the very

efforts of an adult to place himself on its level, so any tribe of
savages is to some extent modified by the time that a stranger has
fitted himself, by long residence among them and the acquisition of
their language, to tell us anything about them. This primary
difficulty, amounting theoretically to insuperability, might alone
suffice to invalidate most of the received evidence which asserts or
denies concerning savages anything whatsoever in broad general
terms. But when the evidence concerns religious ideas another
difficulty is superadded, and one which appertains to the subject of
religion alone—the reserve, that is, (attested by too many travellers
to need specific references,) with which savages guard their stock of
fundamental beliefs. The delicacy manifested by the most skilled of
the Iowa Indian tribe as to communicating fully or freely on religious
subjects, lest they should bring on themselves or their nation some
great calamity,[35] indicates the feeling that probably underlies such
religious reticence. If a savage dare not pronounce his own name,
much less the names of his dead, it is a fair matter of wonder that
he should ever have become so free with the names and attributes
of his divinities as to have rendered it possible for such systematic
representations of his theology as are current to appear before the
world.
The evidence afforded by ethnology as to the nature of prayer
among savages is slighter than on most subjects relating to them,
partly from the natural disregard paid to such matters by most
Christian missionaries, partly from the secret and hidden character of
prayer, which alone would make its study impossible; but there is
abundant evidence to show that religious supplication of a certain
kind enters more deeply than might be supposed into the daily lives
of the lower races of mankind. Says Ellis of the Society Islanders:
‘Religious rites were connected with almost every act of their lives.
An ubu or prayer was offered before they ate their food, planted
their gardens, built their houses, launched their canoes, cast their
nets, and commenced or concluded a journey.’[36] In the Fijian
Islands business transactions were commonly terminated by a short
wish or prayer; and in the Sandwich Islands the priest would pray
before a battle that the gods he addressed would prove themselves
stronger than the gods of his foes, promising them hecatombs of
victims in the event of victory. But the mere fact of such prayers is of
less interest than the actual formulas used; these, however, have
more rarely been thought worth recording.
According to a recent African traveller it is a daily prayer in some
parts of Guinea: ‘O God, I know thee not, but thou knowest me: thy
aid is necessary to me.’ Or again: ‘O God, help us; we do not know
whether we shall live to-morrow: we are in thy hand.’[37] A
Bushman, being asked how he prayed to Cagn (recognised by his
tribe as the first being and creator of all things), answered, in a low,
imploring tone: ‘O Cagn, O Cagn, are we not your children? do you
not see our hunger? Give us food;’ ‘and,’ he added, ‘he gives us both
hands full.’[38] It further appears that the Bushmen address petitions
to the sun, to the moon, and to the stars;[39] and the Kamchadals,
who have been made to dispute with them the lowest rank of
humanity, had a rude form of prayer to the Storm-god, which was
uttered by a small child, sent naked round the ostrog with a shell in
its uplifted hand: ‘Gsanlga, sit down and cease to storm; the mussel
is accustomed to salt, not to sweet water; you make me too wet,
and from the wet I must freeze. I have no clothes; see how I
freeze.’[40] In a certain African tribe it is said to be usual for the men
to go every morning to a river, and there, after splashing water in
their faces, or throwing sand over their heads, after clasping and
loosing their hands and whispering softly the words Eksuvais, to
pray: ‘Give me to-day rice and yams, gold and aggry-beads, slaves,
riches, and health; make me active and strong.’[41]
The Zulus of Africa and the Khonds of India supply good
illustrations of savage prayer. The head man of a Zulu village, at the
sacrifice of a bullock to the spirits of the dead, thus addresses them
in prayer: ‘I pray for cattle that they may fill this pen. I pray for corn
that many people may come to this village of yours and make a
noise and glorify you. I also ask for children, that this village may
have a large population and that your name may never come to an
end.’[42] The Khonds, also, at the sacrifice of a bullock express their
wishes with rather more emphasis: ‘Let our herds be so numerous
that they cannot be housed; let children so abound that care of
them shall overcome their parents, as shall be seen by their burnt
hands.’ Or, again, they will ask that their swine may so abound that
their fields shall require no other ploughs than their ‘rooting snouts;’
that their poultry may be so numerous as to hide the thatch of their
houses; that neither fish, frog, nor worm shall be able to live in their
drinking ponds beneath the trampling feet of their multitude of
cattle.[43]
These may be taken as fair samples of primitive prayer; but it is
only just, as against the inference that a savage’s prayers have
reference solely to the good and evil things of this world, to notice
indications of higher sentiments. The Yebus of Africa, with faces
bowed to the earth, are said commonly to pray, not only for
preservation from sickness and death, but for the gifts of happiness
and wisdom.[44] The Tahitian priest, praying to the god by whom it
was supposed that a dead man’s spirit had been required, that the
sins of the latter, especially that one for which he had lost his life,
might be buried in a hole then dug in the ground and not attach to
the survivors, points to the occasional presence of a moral motive in
prayer; though even here the deprecation of further anger on the
part of the gods appears the principal object of concern.[45] So little
indeed do thoughts of morality or of a future state enter as factors
into savage prayer, and so little does any ethical distinction appear in
the savage conception of supernatural powers, that not unfrequently
supplication is directed to the attainment of ends morally the reverse
of desirable. Like the Roman tradesman praying to Mercury to aid
him in cheating, the Nootka warrior would entreat his god that he
might find his foes asleep, and so kill a great many of them.[46] But
perhaps the best illustration of the perverted use of prayer is one
employed by a clan of the Hervey Islanders when engaged on a
thieving and murdering expedition, and uttered as near as possible
to the dwelling of the person about to be robbed. It is apparently
addressed to Rongo, or Oro, the great Polynesian god of war, and is
thus translated in Mr. Gill’s ‘Myths and Songs of the South Pacific’:—
[47]

We are on a thieving expedition;

Be close to our left side to give aid.
Let all be wrapped in sleep;
Be as a lofty cocoa-nut tree to support us.

The god is then entreated to cause all things to sleep; the owner
of the house is entreated to sleep on, likewise the threshold of the
house, the insects, beetles, earwigs, and ants that inhabit it, the
central post, the several rafters and beams that support it; and after
the thatch of the house has been asked to sleep on, the prayer thus
concludes:—

The first of its inmates unluckily awaking

Put soundly to sleep again.
If the Divinity so please, man’s spirit must yield.
O Rongo, grant thou complete success.

If, however, we may hope to find anywhere indications of a higher

purpose in prayer than the attainment of merely temporary or
personal needs, we must seek it (nor is the search entirely vain) in
those rites of religion which, from the highest to the lowest levels of
culture, are customary upon the entrance of a fresh life on the stage
of this world’s trials and sorrows. The popular saying, that the cries
of a child at its christening are the cries of the devil going out of it,
expresses identically the same belief which still prompts our savage
contemporaries to drive evil spirits from a new-born child by rites of
mysterious spiritual efficacy; and it is probably to the indigenous
prevalence of baptism among many savage tribes that some Catholic
missionaries, complacently identifying conversion with immersion,
have owed the success of their efforts. It would at least be
interesting to know whether baptism was a native African rite at the
time that the Capuchin Merolla baptized with his own hands 13,000
negroes, and Padre Jerom da Montefarchio his 100,000 in the space
of twenty years.[48] Mungo Park gives an account of a purely
heathen festival held about a week after the birth of a child, at
which a priest, taking the latter in his arms, would pray, soliciting
repeatedly the blessing of God on the child and all the company. And
Bosman tells of a priest binding ropes, corals, and other things
round the limbs of a new-born child, and exorcising the spirits of
sickness and evil.[49]
It cannot, however, be proved with certainty that such rites are of
native growth wherever they have been found, though similar
feelings of natural impurity, of natural anxiety, may well have
contributed to make them common all the world over. With this
reservation, let it suffice to recall some illustrations drawn from the
most distant parts of the world. The most touching form of the
custom is told of a tribe in the Fiji Islands, where the priest,
presented by the relations with food with which to notify the event
to the gods before the birth-festival, would thus petition the latter:
‘This is the food of the little child: take knowledge of it, ye gods. Be
kind to him. Do not pelt him or spit upon him, or seize him, but let
him live to plant sugar-canes.’[50] In New Zealand, the tohunga, or
priest, dipping a green branch into a calabash of water, sprinkled the
child therewith and made incantations according to its sex;[51] whilst
in the Hervey Islands, where the child was immersed in a taro leaf
filled with water, the ceremony was intimately connected with their
system of tribes and dedication for future sacrifice.[52] Crossing over
to America, we find among the Indian tribes of Guiana the native
priest dancing about an infant and dashing water over it, finishing
the ceremony by passing his hands over its limbs, muttering all the
while incantations and charms.[53] In some North American tribes,
water having been boiled with a certain sweet-scented root, and
some of it having been first thrown into the fire and the rest
distributed to the company by the oldest woman present, the latter
would then offer a short prayer to the Master of Life, on behalf of
the child, that its life might be spared and that it might grow; and if,
at the festival held to commemorate the child’s first slain animal, one
of the chief persons present would entreat the Great Spirit to be kind
to the lad and let him grow to be a great hunter, in war to take
many scalps and not to behave like an old woman, it cannot be said
that such a prayer was purely selfish in its aim or confined solely to
present necessities.[54]
Although, however, it is impossible to dissociate baptismal rites so
rude as these from a belief in magic, the idea of water as conferring
moral as well as physical purity appears to have been attained by
some of the more advanced heathen tribes. The rite of baptism, says
Dr. Brinton, was of immemorial antiquity among the Cherokees,
Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians: the use of water as symbolical of
spiritual cleansing clearly appearing, for instance, in the prayer of
the Peruvian Indian, who after confessing his guilt would bathe in
the river and say: ‘O river, receive the sins I have this day confessed
unto the sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more
appear.’[55] It has often been told, on the original authority of
Sahagun, how the Mexican nurse, after bathing the new-born child,
would bid it approach its mother, the goddess of water; praying at
the same time to her that she would receive it and wash it, would
take away its inherited impurity, make it good and clean, and instil
into it good habits and manners.[56]
The mere enunciation of a wish often amounts among savages to
a complete prayer, it being conceived that the expression of desire is
of more moment than the manner of such expression; such a
conception still surviving among ourselves at certain wishing towers,
wishing gates, or on the occurrence of certain natural phenomena.
In Fiji it was common to shout aloud, after drinking a toast, the
name of some object of desire, and this was equivalent to a prayer
for whatever it might be—for food, wealth, a fair wind, or even for
the gratification of cannibal gluttony. Franklin tells how some
Indians, disappointed in the chase, set themselves to beat a large
tambourine and sing an address to the Great Spirit, praying for relief,
their prayer consisting solely of three words constantly repeated;[57]
the tambourine probably being employed for the same purpose that
the Sioux Indians kept a whistle in the mouth of one of their gods,
namely, to make their invocation audible. The Ahts, praying to the
moon, sometimes say no more than teech, teech, that is, Health or
Life; and it is curious that the rude savages of Brazil exclaim teh,
teh, to the same luminary.[58] The Sioux would often say, ‘Spirits of
the dead, have mercy!’ adding thereto a notification of their wishes,
whether for good health, good luck in hunting, or anything else.[59]
The Zulus, however, sometimes carry this principle of brevity
furthest, for sometimes in their prayers to the spirits of their dead
they simply say, ‘Ye people of our house,’ ‘the suppliant taking it for
granted that the Amatongo will know what he wants;’ though
generally their addresses to their ancestors are of a much more
orthodox length than this.[60] When we consider how large a place
the spirits of the dead fill in the savage’s spirit-world it appears
possible that many of the prayers and sacrifices, said to be offered
to the Great Spirit or unknown divinities, are really addressed to the
all-controlling, ever-present spirits of the departed.
If we may believe the testimony of a great many travellers in all
parts of the world, the case of the Yezidis, who to the recognition of
a supreme being are said to join actual worship of the chief power of
evil, represents no exceptional phase of human thought. Yet even
the Yezidis, according to Dr. Latham, are said to be improperly called
Devil-worshippers, since they only try to conciliate Satan, speak of
him with respect or not at all, avoid his name in all their oaths, and
are pained if they hear people make a light use of it.[61] In
Equatorial Africa it is said that whilst Mburri, the spirit of evil, is
worshipped piously as a tyrant to be appeased, it is not considered
necessary to pray to Njambi, the good spirit.[62] Harmon says
distinctly of all the different Indian tribes east of the Rocky
Mountains that they pray and make frequent and costly sacrifices to
the bad spirit for delivery from evils they feel or fear, but that they
seldom pray to the supreme good spirit, to whom they ascribe every
perfection, and whom they consider too benevolent ever to inflict
evil on his creatures.[63] There is, indeed, little doubt that, if a
certain amount of evidence suffices the requirements of proof, we
must yield consent to the fact, in itself neither incredible nor
unintelligible, that many savage tribes, recognising and believing in a
good and powerful spirit, make that very goodness a reason for their
neglect of him, and address their petitions instead to the mercy of
that other spirit to whose power for evil they conceive the world to
lie subject.[64] There is, however, much to be said in favour of the
view, that the mind in its primitive state is unconscious of this moral
dualism in the spirit-world, attributing rather (in perfect accordance
with the analogy of human relationships) good and bad things alike
to the agency of the same beings, according as transitory impulses
affect them.
Thus, according to Castren, an antagonism between absolute
good and absolute evil finds no place among the Samoyeds. They
have no extreme divinities corresponding in their attributes to
Ahriman and Ormuzd. ‘The human temper is the divine temper also,
good and bad mixed.’[65] Mburri, who, according to one writer, is the
evil spirit in Equatorial Africa, is, according to another, the good
spirit, or at least the less wicked of the two, both the good and bad
receiving worship, and being endowed with much the same powers.
[66] The Beetjuans, venerating Morimo as the source of all good and
evil that happened to them, were not agreed as to whether he was
entirely a beneficent or a malevolent being; and, if they thanked him
for benefits, they never hesitated to curse him for ills or for wishes
unfulfilled.[67] ‘To the very same image,’ says Bosman of the
negroes, ‘they at one time make offerings to God and at another to
the devil, so that one image serves them in the capacity of god and
devil.’ It was untrue, he declares, that the negroes prayed and made
offerings to the devil, though some of them would try to appease a
devil by leaving thousands of pots of victuals standing ever ready for
his gratification; on the contrary, the devil was annually banished
from their towns with great ceremony, being hunted away with
dismal cries, and his spirit pelted with wood and stones.[68]
The evidence, again, in this respect concerning the aborigines of
America is important. The Winnebagoes are said to have had a
tradition that soon after the creation a bad spirit appeared on the
scene, whose attempts to vie with the products of the Good Spirit
resulted in making a negro in failure of an Indian, a grizzly bear in
failure of a black one, and snakes which were endowed with venom;
he also it was who made all the worthless trees, thistles, and weeds,
who tempted Indians to lie, murder, and steal, and who receives bad
Indians when they die. The suspicion, however, of Christian influence
among this tribe makes the tradition of little value to the argument.
Turning to other evidence, amid Schoolcraft’s reiterated statements
of the original dualism of Indian theology, whereby the Indian was
careful ‘to guard his good and merciful God from all evil acts and
intentions, by attributing the whole catalogue of evil deeds among
the sons of men to the Great Bad Spirit of his theology,’ we yet find
this admission, that ‘it is impossible to witness closely the rites and
ceremonies which the tribes practise in their sacred and ceremonial
societies without perceiving that there is no very accurate or uniform
discrimination between the powers of the two antagonistical
deities.’[69] Mr. Pond, who resided with the Sioux Indians for
eighteen years and had every opportunity to become acquainted
with such matters, declares that it was ‘next to impossible to
penetrate’ into the subject of their divinities; but he was never able
to discover ‘the least degree of evidence that they divide the gods
into classes of good and evil,’ nor did he believe that they ever
distinguished the Great Spirit from other divinities ‘till they learnt to
do so from intercourse with the whites;’ for they had no chants,
feasts, dances, nor sacrificial rites which had any reference to such a
being, or which, if they had, were not of recent origin.[70] Of the
same people says Mr. Prescott, a man related to and resident among
them many years: ‘As to their belief in evil spirits, they do not
understand the difference between a great good spirit and a great
evil spirit, as we do. The idea the Indians have is that a spirit can be
good if necessary, and do evil if it thinks fit.’ They ‘know very little
about whether the Great Spirit has anything to do with their affairs,
present or future.’ Their idea of the Great Spirit is of the vaguest
possible kind, since they lack entirely any conception of his power, or
of the mode of, or of a reason for, man’s creation. The Great Spirit
they believe made everything but the wild rice and the thunder; and
they have been known to accuse their deity of badness in sending
storms to cause them misery.[71] In the same way the Comanches of
Texas neither worship the evil spirit nor are aware of his existence,
‘attributing everything to arise from the Great Spirit, whether of
good or evil.’[72] Had the ancient Jews been described by Greek
travellers instead of by themselves, we may fairly suspect that they
would have been introduced to posterity as a people, consciously
theistic indeed, but at the same time as addicted, in most of their
rites, to demonolatry and the propitiation of imaginary evil beings.
The true view would seem to be that the theology of the lower races
does not admit of that preciseness of terminology, of that clear
distinction of qualities, of that systematic marshalling of powers,
which has been so often predicated of it, but that in its growth it
undergoes a period of flux and change similar to that which may be
seen to occur in the evolution of the lowest forms of physical life into
more determinate types of being.
The Sioux Indians, abusing their Great Spirit for sending them
storms, or the Kamschadals cursing Kutka for having created their
mountains so high and their streams so rapid, expose a state of
thought relating to the gods which is most difficult to reconcile with
the savage’s habitual dread of them, still more with a high
conception of them, but which is too well authenticated to admit of
doubt. Franklin saw a Cree hunter tie offerings (a cotton
handkerchief, looking-glass, tin pin, some ribbon and tobacco) to the
value of twenty skins round an image of the god Kepoochikan, at the
same time praying to him in a rapid monotonous tone to be
propitious, explaining to him the value of his presents, and strongly
cautioning him against ingratitude.[73] If all the prayers and presents
made to their god by the Tahitians to save their chiefs from dying
proved in vain, his image was inexorably banished from the temple
and destroyed.[74] The Ostiaks of Siberia, if things went badly with
them, would pull down from their place of honour in the hut and in
every way maltreat the idols they generally honoured so
exceedingly; the idols whose mouths were always so diligently
smeared with fish-fat, and within whose reach a supply of snuff ever
lay ready.[75] The Chinese are said to do the same by their
household gods, if for a long time they are deaf to their prayers, and
so do the Cinghalese;[76] so that the practice is more than an
impulsive manifestation of merely local feeling. That such feelings
occasionally crop out in civilised Catholic countries is matter of more
surprise; but it is an authentic historical fact that the good people of
Castelbranco, in Portugal, were once so angry with St. Anthony for
letting the Spaniards plunder their town, contrary to his agreement,
that they broke many of his statues in pieces, and, taking the head
off one they specially revered, substituted for it the head of St.
Francis.[77] Neapolitan fishermen are said to this day to throw their
saints overboard if they do not help them in a storm; and the images
of the Virgin or of St. Januarius, worn in Neapolitan caps, are in
danger of being trodden under foot and destroyed, if adverse
contingencies arise. The latter saint, indeed, once received during a
famine very clear intimation, that, unless corn came by a certain
time, he would forfeit his saintship.[78]
It is perhaps a refinement of thought when a present becomes an
advisable accompaniment to a simple petition; but the principle of
exchange once entered into, the relations between man and the
supernatural lead logically from the offering of fruits and flowers to
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