The Making of Religion Part 27

'It is probable that there were here and there, _G.o.ds that were the creation of the priests that ministered to them, and were not the spirits of dead chiefs_. Such was the G.o.d of the Bure Tribe on the Ra coast, who was called Tui Laga or "Lord of Heaven." When the missionaries first went to convert this town they found the heathen priest their staunch ally. He declared that they had come to preach the same G.o.d that he had been preaching, the Tui Laga, and that more had been revealed to them than to him of the mysteries of the G.o.d.'

Mr. Thomson is reminded of St. Paul at Athens, 'whom then ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.'[38]

Mr. Thomson has clearly no bias in favour of a G.o.d like our own, known to savages, and _not_ derived from ghost-worship. He deduces this G.o.d, Tui Laga, from priestly reflection and speculation. But we find such a G.o.d where we find no priests, where a priesthood has not been developed. Such a G.o.d, being usually unpropitiated by sacrifice and lucrative private practice, is precisely the kind of deity who does not suit a priesthood.

For these reasons--that a priesthood 'sees no money in' a G.o.d of this kind, and that G.o.ds of this kind, ethical and creative, are found where there are no priesthoods--we cannot look on the conception as a late one of priestly origin, as Mr. Thomson does, though a learned caste, like the Peruvian Amantas, may refine on the idea. Least of all can such a G.o.d be 'the creation of the priests that minister to him,' when, as in Peru, the Andaman Isles, and much of Africa, this G.o.d is ministered to by no priests. Nor, lastly, can we regard the absence of sacrifice to the Creative Being as a mere proof that he is an ancestral ghost who 'had lived on earth at too remote a time;' for this absence of sacrifice occurs where ghosts are dreaded, but are not propitiated by offerings of food (as among Australians, Andamanese, and Blackfoot Indians), while the Creative Being is not and never was a ghost, according to his worshippers.

At this point criticism may naturally remark that whether the savage Supreme Being is feted, as by the Comanches, who offer puffs of smoke: or is apparently half forgotten, as by the Algonquins and Zulus: whether he is propitiated by sacrifice (which is very rare indeed), or only by conduct, I equally claim him as the probable descendant in evolution of the primitive, undifferentiated, not necessarily 'spiritual' Being of such creeds as the Australian.

One must reply that this pedigree cannot, indeed, be historically traced, but that it presents none of the logical difficulties inherent in the animistic pedigree--namely, that the savage Supreme Being is the last and highest result of evolution on animistic lines out of ghosts. It does not run counter to the evidence universally offered by savages, that their Supreme Being never was mortal man. It is consistent, whereas the animistic hypothesis is, in this case, inconsistent, with the universal savage theory of Death. Finally, as has been said before, granting my opinion that there are two streams of religious thought, one rising in the conception of an undifferentiated Being, eternal, moral, and creative, the other rising in the ghost-doctrine, it stands to reason that the latter, as best adapted to everyday needs and experiences, normal and supernormal, may contaminate the former, and introduce sacrifice and food-propitiation into the ritual of Beings who, by the original conception, 'need nothing of ours.' At the same time, the conception of 'spirit,' once attained, would inevitably come to be attached to the idea of the Supreme Being, even though he was not at first conceived of as a spirit. We know, by our own experience, how difficult it has become for us to think of an eternal, powerful, and immortal being, except as a spirit. Yet this way of looking at the Supreme Being, merely as _being_, not as spirit, must have existed, granting that the idea of spirit has ghost for its first expression, as, by their very definition, the high G.o.ds of savages are not ghosts, and never were ghosts, but are prior to death.

Here let me introduce, by way of example, a Supreme Being _not_ of the lowest savage level. Metaphysically he is improved on in statement, morally he is stained with the worst crimes of the hungry ghost-G.o.d, or G.o.d framed on the lines of animism. This very interesting Supreme Being, in a middle barbaric race, is the Polynesian Taa-roa, as described by Ellis in that fascinating book 'Polynesian Researches.'[39] 'Several of their _taata-paari_, or wise men, pretend that, according to other traditions, Taa-roa was only a man who was deified after death.'

Euhemerism, in fact, is a natural theory of men acquainted with ancestor-worship, but a Euhemeristic hypothesis by a Polynesian thinker is not a statement of national belief. Taa-roa was 'uncreated, existing from the beginning, or from the time he emerges from the _po_, or world of darkness.' In the Leeward Isles Taa-roa was _Toivi_, fatherless and motherless from all eternity. In the highest heavens he dwells alone. He created the G.o.ds of polytheism, the G.o.ds of war, of peace, and so on. Says a native hymn, 'He was: he abode in the void. No earth, _no sky_, no men!

He became the universe.' In the Windward Isles he has a wife, Papa the rock = Papa, Earth, wife of Rangi, Heaven, in Maori mythology. Thus it may be argued, Taa-roa is no 'primaeval theistic idea,' but merely the Heaven-G.o.d (Ouranos in Greece). But we may distinguish: in the Zuni hymn we have the myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, but Heaven is not the Eternal, Awonawilona, who 'thought himself out into the void,' before which, as in the Polynesian hymn, 'there was no sky.'[40]

Whence came the idea of Taa-roa? The Euhemeristic theory that he was a ghost of a dead man is absurd. But as we are now among polytheists it may be argued that, given a crowd of G.o.ds on the animistic model, an origin had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa. This would be more plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental polytheism to develop them out of. In Tahiti, _Atuas_ are G.o.ds, _Oramutuas tiis_ are spirits; the chief of the spirits were ghosts of warriors. These were mischievous: they, their images, and the skulls of the dead needed propitiation, and these ideas (perhaps) were reflected on to Taa-roa, to whom human victims were sacrificed.[41]

Now this kind of horror, human sacrifice, is unknown, I think, in early savage religions of Supreme Beings, as in Australia, among the Bushmen, the Andamanese, and so on. I therefore suggest that in an advanced polytheism, such as that of Polynesia, the evil sacrificial rites unpractised by low savages come to be attached to the worship even of the Supreme Being. Ghosts and ghost-G.o.ds demanded food, and food was therefore also offered to the Supreme Being.

It was found difficult, or impossible, to induce Christian converts, in Polynesia, to repeat the old prayers. They began, trembled, and abstained.

They had a ritual 'for almost every act of their lives,' a thing unfamiliar to low savages. In fact, beyond all doubt, religious criminal acts, from human sacrifice to the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, increase as religion and culture move away from the stage of Bushmen and Andamanese to the stage of Aztec and Polynesian culture. The Supreme Being is succeeded in advancing civilisation, and under the influences of animism, by ruthless and insatiable ghost-G.o.ds, full of the worst human qualities.

Thus there is what we may really call degeneration, moral and religious, inevitably accompanying early progress.

That this is the case, that the first advances in culture _necessarily_ introduce religious degeneration, we shall now try to demonstrate. But we may observe, in pa.s.sing, that our array of moral or august savage supreme beings (the first who came to hand) will, for some reason, not be found in anthropological treatises on the Origin of Religion. They appear, somehow, to have been overlooked by philosophers. Yet the evidence for them is sufficiently good. Its excellence is proved by its very uniformity, a.s.suredly undesigned. An old, nay, an obsolete theory--that of degeneration in religion--has facts at its basis, which its very supporters have ignored, which orthodoxy has overlooked. Thus the Rev.

Professor Flint informs the audience in the Cathedral of St. Giles's, that, in the religions 'at the bottom of the religious scale,' 'it is always easy to see how wretchedly the divine is conceived of; how little conscious of his own true wants ... is the poor worshipper.' The poor worshipper of Baiame wishes to obey His Law, which makes, to some extent, for righteousness.[42]

[Footnote 1: In Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13, 39; _Prim. Cult_. ii. 342.]

[Footnote 2: See Preface to this edition for corrected statement.]

[Footnote 3: _Myths of the New World_, p. 47.]

[Footnote 4: There is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including Smith's remarks, published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this work with his own MS. in the British Museum, dedicated to Bacon (Verulam). This MS. was edited by Mr. Major, for the Hakluyt Society, in 1849, with a glossary, by Strachey, of the native language. The remarks on religion are in Chapter VII. The pa.s.sage on Ahone occurs in Strachey (1612), but _not_ in Smith (1682), in Pinkerton. I owe to the kindness of Mr. Edmund Gosse photographs of the drawings accompanying the MS. Strachey's story of sacrifice of children (pp. 94, 95) seems to refer to nothing worse than the initiation into the mysteries.]

[Footnote 5: See Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, for a philological theory.]

[Footnote 6: Compare 'The Fire Walk' in _Modern Mythology_.]

[Footnote 7: Compare St. Augustine's curious anecdote in _De Cura pro Mortuis habenda_ about the dead and revived Curio. The founder of the new Sioux religion, based on hypnotism, 'died' and recovered.]

[Footnote 8: Cf. Demeter.]

[Footnote 9: Major North, for long the U.S. Superintendent of the p.a.w.nees.]

[Footnote 10: Schoolcraft, iii. 237.]

[Footnote 11: As envisaged here, Na-pi is not a spirit. The question of spirit or non-spirit has not arisen. So far, Na-pi answers to Marrangarrah, the Creative Being of the Larrakeah tribe of Australians.

'A very good Man called Marrangarrah lives in the sky; he made all living creatures, except black fellows. He made everything.... He never dies, and likes all black fellows.' He has a demiurge, Dawed (Mr. Foelsche, _apud_ Dr. Stirling, _J.A.I_., Nov. 1894, p. 191). It is curious to observe how savage creeds often shift the responsibility for evil from the Supreme Creator, entirely beneficent, on to a subordinate deity.]

[Footnote 12: Grinnell's _Blackfoot Lodge-Tales_ and _p.a.w.nee Hero Stories_.]

[Footnote 13: Garcila.s.so, i. 101.]

[Footnote 14: Op. cit. i. 106.]

[Footnote 15: From all this we might conjecture, like Mr. Prescott, that the Incas borrowed Pachacamac from the Yuncas, and etherealised his religion. But Mr. Clements Markham points out that 'Pachacamac is a pure Quichua word.']

[Footnote 16: Garcila.s.so, ii. 446, 447.]

[Footnote 17: Cieza de Leon. p.253]

[Footnote 18: Markham's translation, p. 253.]

[Footnote 19: _Rites and Laws of the Yncas_, Markham's translation, p. vii.]

[Footnote 20: _Rites_, p. 6. Garcila.s.so, i. 109.]

[Footnote 21: _Rites_, p. 11.]

[Footnote 22: Compare _Reports on Discovery of Peru,_ Introduction.]

[Footnote 23: _Rites_, p. xv.]

[Footnote 24: Lord Ailesbury's _Memoirs_.]

[Footnote 25: Garcila.s.so, ii. 68.]

[Footnote 26: Cieza de Leon, p. 357.]

[Footnote 27: _Rites,_ pp. 28, 29.]

[Footnote 28: Acosta, lib. vi. ch. 21: Garcila.s.so. ii. 88, 89.]

[Footnote 29: _Rites_, p. 12.]

[Footnote 30: Ibid. p.54.]

[Footnote 31: _Prim. Cult_. ii, 337, 338.]

[Footnote 32: _Rites_, p. 29.]

[Footnote 33: Garcila.s.so, ii. 69.]

[Footnote 34: _Rites and Laws_, p. 91 _et seq_.]

[Footnote 35: Payne, i. 139.]

[Footnote 36: Op. cit. i. 468. Mr. Payne absolutely rejects Ixtlilochitl's story of the monotheism of Nezahualcoyotl; 'Torquemada knows nothing of it,' i. 490.]