Part 21

The artistic representations become modified as totemism itself becomes modified. I can only very briefly allude to some of the probable stages in the later evolution of totemism. The attribution of human qualities to the totem is the essence of totemism, and the tribal totem tends to pass into an anthropomorphic god. Mr. Frazer points out that there are often numerous sub-totems associated with each of the main totems, and suggests that there is a sort of life-history of totems, “as sub-totems they are growing; as clan totems they are grown; as sub-phratric and phratric totems they are in successive stages of decay.” He also puts forward the view that these subordinate totems are regarded as incarnations of the gods or god in process of evolution, and as the latter rise more and more into human form, so the former “sink from the dignity of incarnations into the humbler character of favourites and clients; until, at a later age, the links which bound them to the god having wholly faded from memory, a generation of mythologists arises who seek to patch up the broken chain by the cheap method of symbolism. But symbolism is only the decorous though transparent veil which a refined age loves to throw over its own ignorance of the past.”

So far I have mainly referred to the employment of the representation of totem animals as badges, but they are also made use of to indicate descent. Ancestor worship is an important element in the religion of many peoples, and the art which illustrates this naturally varies according to the plane of culture at which a given people have arrived. When a people are in a totemistic plane of culture their ancestors will usually be represented as animals, the same holds good for those that have but recently emerged from this phase. This we know is the explanation of some of the well-known totem-posts and animal carvings of the natives of British Columbia, and it probably holds good for many of the intricate grotesque carvings from New Ireland.

When the totem has been evolved into an anthropomorphic god, human (_i.e._ god) forms are represented in the genealogy, as occurs on the decorated adzes of the Hervey Islands (pp. 270-274).

It is incorrect to term all worship of or attention paid to animals as “Totemism.” In a great number of cases this may have been the origin of a cult, but it is a mistake to apply the lower term when the cult is sublimated into a higher form of religion. That a considerable part of the religion of ancient Greece had its origin in Totemism is generally admitted; but the animal attributes of most of their deities would not characterise the religion of the most cultured Greeks as totemistic.[158] The ox, the bear, the mouse, wild beasts and birds, and similar associates of the Olympian hierarchy, whatever they were to the ancients, are to us milestones which marked the road traversed by Hellenic religion; the Egyptian had been petrified at an earlier phase.

[158] Cf. A. B. Cook, “Animal Worship in the Mycenæan Age,” _Journ. Hellenic Studies_, xiv., 1894, p. 81. Mr. Cook says: “On the whole, I gather that the Mycenæan worshippers were not totemists pure and simple, but that the mode of the worship points to its having been developed out of still earlier totemism” (p. 158).

In the sacred bird of Western Oceania, we can probably trace the commencement of totemistic sublimation.

The cult of the frigate-bird is characteristic of Melanesia, and apparently also extends to the Pelew Islands. Dr. Codrington (_The Melanesians_, 1891, p. 145) informs us that at Florida in the Solomon Group they pray as follows to “Daula, a _tindalo_ generally known and connected with the frigate-bird [a _tindalo_ is the ghost or spirit of a man endowed with _mana_, that is superhuman power or influence]: ‘Do thou draw the canoe, that it may reach the land; speed my canoe, grandfather, that I may quickly reach the shore whither I am bound,’ etc. Daula is invoked to aid in fishing ... after a good catch he is praised.” On p. 180 we read, “The sacred character of the frigate-bird is certain; the figure of it, however conventional, is the most common ornament employed in the Solomon Islands, and is even cut upon the hands of the Bugotu people; the oath by its name of _daula_ is solemn and binding in Florida; where Daula is a _tindalo_, many and powerful to aid at sea are the ghosts which abide in these birds.” Who Daula was, when he was a living man, has “passed far away from any historical remembrance” (p. 126).

In his interesting little book on _The Evolution of Decorative Art_, Mr. H. Balfour gives illustrations of conventional representations of the frigate-bird in the Solomon Islands (Figs. 11, 26). In Figs. 26, 27, 25, he shows a gradation between a “bird-like canoe charm,” through a “human-headed bird canoe-charm,” to a “canoe fetich,” the latter having a very prognathous human head.[159] The mergence of a frigate-bird’s into a human head may be due, as Mr. Balfour suggests, to one design acting upon the other, or it may be the artistic expression of the cult described by Dr. Codrington.

[159] In a letter Dr. Codrington writes: “I do not think that the very prognathous human head has anything to do with a bird. If you look at the very excellent coloured frontispiece to Brenchley’s _Voyage of the Curaçoa_, representing a canoe on a voyage, you will see that all the men are excessively prognathous. The original is in the Maidstone Museum. I have looked at my few Solomon Island things—a common bowl supported by two human figures, which are just the same. A carved bit of soft stone and the head of a betel lime stick, things just cut for amusement, have the same prognathism. In fact I believe that the ordinary representation of the human head is such, the more prognathous the better it is liked.”

The canoes of the Solomon Islands often have as a figure-head the carved representation of the upper part of a man who holds in his hands another human head.[160] The human figure is possibly an image of the _tindalo_ in Daula. (Dr. Codrington states that a _tindalo_ is always the spirit of a real deceased man.[160]) The carvings of birds on the bow of a canoe are practically invocations to the sacred and powerful frigate-bird.

[160] “It is certain that, according to the Florida people (and their neighbours who use the word), a _tindalo_ was once a man; but there are some whose names they know and of whom they know nothing as men. I am by no means of opinion that there was once a man named Daula. The name of the frigate-bird being _kaula_ in Ulawa is against that (k=t=d). Rather daula is the name of the bird, and the birds are vehicles of _tindalos_. So as every _tindalo_ who takes up his abode in a shark is Bagea in Florida (a common shark being _bagea_), so every _tindalo_ in a frigate-bird is Daula.”—DR. CODRINGTON _in a letter to the author_.

The face or head carried in the hands of the human figure-heads (“canoe god,” “charm,” or “fetich”) “represents that taken when the canoe was first used.” A canoe of importance “required a life for its inauguration.” Dr. Codrington (_loc. cit._, p. 296) alludes to other adjuncts to the bow of canoes which give protection and success.

3. _Religion._

The opening remarks in the section dealing with sympathetic magic were largely borrowed from Dr. Frazer, and I again have recourse to that author for the following sketch of the incipient religion of primitive folk.

The savage fails to recognise those limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged.

The conception of gods as supernatural beings entirely distinct from and superior to man, and wielding powers to which he possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course of history.

At first the world is regarded as a great democracy; but with the growth of his knowledge man realises more clearly the vastness of nature and his own feebleness; this, however, enhances his conception of the power of those supernatural beings with which his imagination peoples the universe. If he feels himself to be so frail and slight, how vast and powerful must he deem the beings who control the gigantic machinery of nature!

Thus, as his old sense of equality with gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at the same time the hope of directing the course of nature by his own unaided resources, that is, by magic, and looks more and more to the gods as the sole repositories of those supernatural powers which he once claimed to share with them.

With the first advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic, which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background, and sinks to the level of a black art. It is now regarded as an encroachment, at once vain and impious, on the domain of the gods, and as such encounters the steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation and influence gain or lose with those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period the distinction between religion and superstition has emerged, we find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of the superstitious and ignorant.

Throughout the whole of this slow evolution ornamental art has attempted to visualise the religious conceptions of the period. It would probably be more correct to regard the pictorial representations of religion as usually illustrating a past rather than a present aspect of belief. For a drawing, like a creed, fixes a type, and the form has a tendency to be repeated unconscious of the fact that the spirit may have burst its bonds and soared into a higher region.

Not only does the motive of religious art vary according to the stage of evolution of the religion which it illustrates, but the art itself is subject to modification as it enters into new phases of what I have termed its life-history.

Totemism is one phase of religion, but owing to its great importance in the economy of primitive peoples I have treated it in an independent section. As totemism gradually shades off into god-worship so its artistic symbolism is merged into that of divinities, but it often persists to an unexpected extent.

It is only possible for me to touch lightly on a few of the aspects of religious art from the anthropologist’s point of view.

As the gods were being evolved it was very important for men to retain the remembrance of those family ties between them and mankind which were in danger of being snapped through the length to which they were drawn and the degree of attenuation which consequently ensued.

The statements of tradition as to the descent of mortals from gods are re-enforced by the representations of artists of the unlettered races, just as they are enshrined in the written cosmogonies of more cultured folk; the main difference being that any one may understand the one if he knows the written characters, whereas the other is practically a pictograph, and requires the interpretation of the natives who have the traditional knowledge of the symbols.

We are probably justified in assuming that very early in time (and it is still widely spread among backward peoples) was the custom of carving or painting the pedigree of the man from the god—of the human from the divine. As the god is lost down the ages in the totem so too his eikon is merged into the resemblance of some animal-form. In the intermediary stage we have those monstrous forms which the enlightened pagans endeavoured to rationalise and even to spiritualise. “Yet half a beast is the great god Pan.”

The beautiful wood-carving formerly executed by the natives of the Hervey Group in the South Pacific affords an excellent example of the relation of religion to decorative art.

The Rev. Dr. W. Wyatt Gill states that a significance is “invariably attached to ancient Polynesian carving,” and he and a few other missionaries have given suggestive hints, but without reference to the actual designs.

Dr. H. Stolpe, of Stockholm, was the first ethnographer to study Polynesian art from a scientific point of view, and his paper[161] on Evolution in the Ornamental Art of Savages is a model of this particular kind of research. He asserts “That the carved ornament in Polynesia _always_ had a meaning.... Polynesians cling tenaciously to ancient customs, though often they are no longer capable of accounting for their original meaning.... If one asks the reason of a device or a custom, one usually gets no satisfactory information.... Should any one, therefore, to-day, ask a native of these islands whether the ornamentation here delineated has any significance, and the reply should be ‘no,’ I could not recognise in it any decisive evidence. Our previous investigations suffice of themselves to prove that the forms of development of the old primitive images, highly conventionalised, _must_ have a symbolic significance. They symbolise, they stand in place of, the primitive image. They are to be considered as a sort of cryptograph. By means of perpetual reiteration of certain ornamental elements, they suggest the divinity to whose service the decorated implement was in some way dedicated.” A dozen years ago Dr. Stolpe stated that the linear ornaments on the carved Mangaian adzes were for the most part to be regarded as transformed figures of human beings, or especially as divine beings. (Fig. 124.)

[161] H. Stolpe, _Utvecklingsföreteelser i Naturfolkens Ornamentik_. Ymer, 1890. Translated into English by Mrs. March, “Evolution in the Ornamental Art of Savage People,” _Trans. Rochdale Lit. and Sci. Soc._, 1892; and into German, _Mittheil. Anth. Gesell._ Wien, 1892, xxii. p. 43.

Mr. C. H. Read, of the British Museum, independently[162] arrived at a similar conclusion to Dr. Stolpe’s, and Dr. March[163] has carried the argument a step further. Dr. Stolpe proved that a design generally known as the =K= pattern, but which it is better to call the _tiki-tiki_ pattern, sometimes interrupted, but generally continuous, is in reality a string of human figures, the two horizontal zigzags being limbs, and the vertical bars that join them being the headless bodies. (Fig. 125, A.)

[162] C. H. Read, “On the Origin and Sacred Character of certain Ornaments of the S.E. Pacific,” _Jour. Anth. Inst._, xxi., 1891, p. 139.

[163] H. Colley March, “Polynesian Ornament a Mythography; or a Symbolism of Origin and Descent,” _Jour. Anth. Inst._, xxii., 1893, p. 307.

These figures, which almost cover the handle of a Mangaian paddle or adze, are obviously related to the female forms that are carved on the terminal of its shaft (Figs. 127, 128), and are morphologically derived from them by a process of evolution.

The headless figures are quite recognisable in Fig. 125, A, but the fore-arms and shanks of each of them are absent, their places being taken by the upper arms and thighs of the contiguous figures. In B the serial individuals are separated by narrow vertical clefts; the latter persist in C, but the two boundary lines between the rows of figures are fused into a single line.

In Fig. 126 we have a large area (the blade of a paddle) divided into a number of parallel lines between which are diamonds, which may or may not be connected by horizontal lines. A careful inspection will show that the vertical lines are continuous body-lines; the horizontal lines are the same as those in Fig. 125, A, but the two lines are fused into one; the zigzags are clearly limbs. The absence of the horizontal lines simplifies the pattern, and so each diamond consists in its upper part of the leg, and in its lower part of the arms of human figures whose bodies are represented by the vertical lines.

The pattern in the lower half of Fig. 127 can be derived from the last by the introduction of an intermediate series of vertical lines.

Curvilinear patterns, as in the lower part of Fig. 128, are common on objects from these islands; they are evidently derived from the thighs of serial human forms, as in Fig. 127, and Plate VI., Fig. 13.

“It is abundantly certain,” adds Dr. March, “that the forms that crown the shaft are those of women, for they are invariably distinguished by pendant-pointed breasts. The solitary exception that Dr. Stolpe has been able to find is one in appearance only, for in his Fig. 23 the breasts are really fused into a single cone, exactly as are the legs in his Fig. 24” (p. 322).

Dr. March’s contribution is that these carved shafts of sacred paddles and adzes were pedigree-sticks. Descent is traced through the male line as a rule among the Polynesians, but it is certain that some tribes traced their descent through the female line. Dr. Gill states that this was in some places simply a matter of arrangement. Dr. Gill tells us that the designs on these shafts were called “_tiki-tiki-tangata_;” _tangata_ means a man, or in this combination connotes human, for in a Polynesian word compounded of two nouns, that which comes last has a secondary, explanatory, or adjectival force. _Tiki_ was the first man, and when he died, ruled the entrance of the under-world. The name signifies a “fetched” soul; the spirit of a dead man the frequentative or plural _tiki-tiki_ must mean spirits in succession, or “ancestors.” “The conclusion now drawn is that _tiki-tiki-tangata_ were the multitudinous human links between the divine ancestor and the chief of the living tribe. But to what ancestry did these pedigrees of female lineage assert a claim? From what goddess was it the pride of Mangaians to be descended, unless from the mother, the wife and the daughter-wife of Rongo—from Tu-metua, Taka, and Tavake.

“In Mangaia all the gods were called the children of Vatea, and of these Tane was one. His name indicates the generative principle in Nature. In Mangaia he was especially the drum-god and the axe[164]-god; he presided over the erotic dance as well as over the war-dances. Gill observes[165] that ‘_Tane mata ariki_,’ Tane with the royal face, was enshrined in a sacred triple axe,[164] which symbolised the three priestly families on the island of Mangaia. This axe was buried in a cave, and has disappeared. The =K= pattern which covers the shafts of the sacred Mangaian axe,[164] is an assertion of a Tane pedigree, the _tiki-tiki-tangata_ of the clan. ‘Awake Tane!’ was the invocation,[166] ‘Awake unnumbered progeny of Tane!’” (March, p. 331).

[164] Probably an _adze_, not an _axe_.

[165] W. Wyatt Gill, _Jottings from the Pacific_, 1885, p. 224.

[166] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, 1840, i. p. 343.

4. _Religious Symbolism._

The study of religious symbols[167] is not only a very extensive and extremely attractive undertaking, but it is one of peculiar difficulty, for with it is combined, not a danger, but a certainty of falling into errors. There is hardly a subject upon which such diverse views can be proposed and even maintained with a fair amount of presumptive evidence.

[167] Cf. pp. 119, 122, 213.

The danger of making mistakes is, however, considerably lessened if a scientific method of study is adopted, and if speculation is reduced to a minimum. No better example of the method of such a study is to be found than in Count Goblet d’Alviella’s book on _The Migration of Symbols_.[168] It is upon this valuable book that I have largely drawn in compiling the following account.

[168] _The Migration of Symbols_, 1894.

The meaning of the term Symbol, like the objects we connote by it, has undergone a transformation from a concrete reality to an abstraction. Originally applied amongst the Greeks to the two halves of the tablet they divided between themselves as a pledge of hospitality, in the manner of our contract form, detached along a line of perforations from the counterfoil record, it was gradually extended to the engraved shells by which those initiated in the mysteries made themselves known to each other, and even to the more or less esoteric formulas and sacramental rites that may be said to have constituted the visible bond of their fellowship. Then the meaning became amplified, and “the term came to gradually mean everything that, whether by general agreement or by analogy, conventionally represented something or somebody.”[169]

[169] _Loc. cit._, p. 1.

I have previously (p. 212) given Colonel Garrick Mallery’s definition of the word, which sufficiently indicates the meaning generally applied to it.

A pictorial symbol has the following life-history:—

First, it is simply a representation of an object or a phenomenon, that is, a pictograph. Thus the zigzag was the mark or sign of lightning.

Secondly, “the sign of the concrete grew to be the symbol of the abstract. The zigzag of lightning, for example, became the emblem of power, as in the thunderbolts grasped by Jupiter; or it stood alone for the supreme God; and thus the sign developed into the ideograph.”[170]

[170] H. Colley March, “The Fylfot and the Futhorc Tir,” _Trans. Lancashire and Cheshire Ant. Soc._, 1886.

Thirdly, retrogression set in when new religions and new ideas had sapped the vitality of the old conceptions, and the ideograph came to have no more than a mystical meaning. A religious or sacred savour, so to speak, still clung about it, but it was not a living force within it; the difference is as great as between the dried petals of a rose and the blooming flower itself. “The zigzag, for instance, was no longer used as a symbol of the deity, but was applied auspiciously, or as we should say, for luck.”[170]

The last stage is reached when a sign ceases to have even a mystical or auspicious significance, and is applied to an object as a merely ornamental device.

“By symbolism,” writes Count Goblet d’Alviella, “the simplest, the commonest objects are transformed, idealised, and acquire a new and, so to say, an illimitable value. In the Eleusinian mysteries, the author of _Philosophoumena_ relates that, at the initiation to the higher degree, ‘there was exhibited as the great, the admirable, the most perfect object of mystic contemplation, an ear of corn that had been reaped in silence; and two crossed lines suffice to recall to millions of Christians the redemption of the world by the voluntary sacrifice of a god.’”

As that author points out, “We live in the midst of symbolic representations, from the ceremonies celebrating a birth to the funeral emblems adorning the tomb; from the shaking of hands all round of a morning to the applause with which we gratify the actor, or lecturer, of the evening. We write as we speak in symbols.