CHAPTER V.

THE MOST WIDE-SPREAD PHASE OF ANIMISM.

We have seen that water-worship was a cult of hoary antiquity. The belief that every locality has its presiding genius gave rise to the deification of fountains and rivers just as it led to the deification of hills and trees and other phases of animism. The emphasis of animism lies in its localisation, in the local spirits which, to quote Tylor’s words, belong to mountain and rock and valley, to well and stream and lake, in brief, to those natural objects which in early ages aroused the savage mind to mythological ideas.[11] Some localities may not have in their midst such weird places as mountains and rivers, groves and forests, but scarcely any district is devoid of a well or a pool of water. Of all nature-worship, therefore, well-worship is the most widespread. Just the same scenes as one witnesses to-day at wells and tanks in India were beheld for ages in other parts of the world. Just the same stories as one hears to-day of the mysterious ways and powers of water-spirits were everywhere heard before. We have already seen that it was a general cult with the ancient Iranians and with the help of Professor Robertson Smith and Professor Curtiss we have also noticed how in Arabia the fountain was treated as a living thing and the source itself honoured as a divine being.

Max Müller, however, puts a different construction on the deification of natural objects. He points out that it is in India more than anywhere else that animism has been made to disclose its secret cause, namely, the necessity of deriving all appellative nouns from roots necessarily expressive, as Noire has shown, of action, so that, whether we like it or not, the sun whether called Svar or Vishnu, bull, swan or any other name, becomes _ipso nomine_ an agent, the shiner or the wanderer, the strong man, the swift bird. By the same process the wind is the blower, the night the calmer, the moon, Soma, the rainer. What is classed as animism in ancient Aryan mythology, he observes, is often no more than a poetical conception of nature which enables the poets to address the sun and moon, and rivers and trees as if they could hear and understand his words. “Sometimes however,” he continues, “what is called animism is a superstition which after having recognised agents in sun and moon, rivers and trees, postulates on the strength of analogy the existence of agents or spirits dwelling in other parts of nature also, haunting our houses, bringing misfortunes upon us, though sometimes conferring blessings also.” It lies beyond the scope of this work to enter into any discussion of this theory, but we shall see as we proceed that the theory of poetic personification does not harmonize with the myriad details of folklore of wells and springs.

One might be inclined to attribute the worship of water to the great economic value which water possesses in the hot and dry regions of the east where wells and springs are veritable assets of the people, the most precious gifts of the gods. But it was not in arid lands only that wells received divine honour. There is ample evidence to show that people inhabiting lands rich in springs and fountains also held them sacred and worshipped the divine beings under whose protection the streams flowed bubbling across their fields. It would seem, therefore, that the spiritual element has been the uppermost in the worship of water. It was in view of the religious awe in which the Greeks held rivers that they raised their prayers to the springs, as may be gathered from the prayers offered by Odysseus to the river after his vicissitudes in the deep and from the description given by Homer in the _Iliad_ of the sacrifice offered at flowing springs.

According to the Old Testament water was an important factor during the first three days of Creation. On the first day “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”; on the second day the nether waters were divided from the upper, and the latter were transformed into the “rakia” or “firmament”; and on the third day the nether waters were assigned to their allotted place, which received the name of “sea.” The Gnostics regarded water as the original element and through their influence and the influence of the Greeks similar beliefs gained currency among the Jews, so that Judah ben Pazi transmitted the following saying in the name of R. Ismael: “In the beginning the world consisted of water within water; the water was then changed into ice and again transformed by God into earth. The earth itself, however, rests upon the waters, and the waters on the mountains” (_i.e._ the clouds).[12]

Nature withheld stone and wood from the Babylonian, but bestowed upon him by way of compensation another invaluable gift—the sea and the rivers. The Babylonian fully realized its value as an incentive to civilization. In his work on the _Evolution of the Aryan_ Rudolph von Ibering points out that in his conception of the God Nun the Babylonian personified the idea that water was the source of all life, that historically the earth came forth from the water as well as that water was the source of all blessing, the quickening element of creation. Indeed, in Mesopotamia more than anywhere else one could vividly realize the fact that the inhabited soil had once formed the bottom of the sea and had become dry land through the retreat of the waters. In Egypt Shu, the air, rises from water which existed before the gods and goddesses some of whom like Vishnu, Vira-Kocha and Aphrodite, have actually sprung from waters. In the Quran Lord Almighty says: “We clave the heavens and earth asunder, and by means of water, we gave life to everything.” This is also one of the Ebionite doctrines. The Akkad triad of gods was formed of Ea, the ocean-god, who was also known as “the lord of the earth” with Na, the Sky, and Mul-ge, the lord of the underworld. They had no local water-deities, but from the earliest times we come across two stages of development of one central idea—the conception of the natural element as an animated being itself and the separation of its animating fetish-soul as a distinct spiritual deity. In the _Land of the Hittites_ Garstang says that the Hittites seem to have absorbed into their pantheon a number of acceptable nature-cults, like the worship of mountains and streams and of the mother-goddess of earth, already practised by an earlier population whom they overlaid. In the history of Polybius is recorded an oath made by Hannibal to Philip of Macedon containing two triads sacred to the Phœnicians: “Sun, Moon and Earth”; “Rivers, Meadows and Waters.”

In the Puranas the Vedic God Varuna is the “lord of the waters.” He rides on the Makara, half crocodile, half fish, rules the soft west winds and controls the salt seas and the “seminal principle.”[13] The noose of Varuna is called the Nâgapâsa, or snake-noose, from which the wicked cannot escape. Every twinkle of man’s eyes and his inward thoughts are known to Varuna. “He sees as if he were always near: none can flee from his presence, nor be rid of Varuna. If we flee beyond the sky, he is there; he knows our uprising and lying down.” Originally Mithra and Varuna were merely the names for day and night and it is interesting to note how the conception of the night served to convey the idea of the ocean. “The night,” says Kunte,[14] “presents the phenomenon of an expanse which resembles that of the ocean in colour, in extent, in depth, and in undulating motion. Hence the idea of the one naturally expressed the idea of the other. The god of night became the god of waters.” The same author thus sums up the different stages of the development of the idea of Varuna:

1. Varuna, darkness or night and one possessed of meshes.

2. Varuna, ocean or firmament.

3. Varuna, lord of waters.

4. One who aided sailors, a beneficent god.

Turning to the classic world, we find that the early Greeks, like the Babylonians, regarded the ocean as a broad river surrounding the earth, the abode whence spirits came, and to which they returned, and so a “river of life and death.” They called Okeanos, the ocean, the son of heaven and earth, and his wife was Tēthis, or Tēthus; together they were the parents of all waters.

“To the great Olympian assembly in the halls of cloud-compelling Zeus came the Rivers, all save Ocean, and thither came the nymphs who dwell in lovely groves and at the springs of streams, and in the grassy meads; and they sate upon the polished seats. Even against Hephaistos, the Fire-god, a River-god dared to stand opposed, deep-eddying Xanthos, called of men Skamandros. He rushed down to overwhelm Achilles and bury him in sand and slime, and though Hephaistos prevailed against him with his flames, and forced him, with the fish skurrying hither and thither in his boiling waves and the willows scorched upon his banks, to rush on no more but stand, yet at the word of white-armed Here, that it was not fit for mortals’ sake to handle so roughly an immortal god, Hephaistos quenched his furious fire, and the returning flood sped again along his channel.”

Neptune was the Latin Sea-god, “the lord of dwelling waves.” When Kleomenes marched down to Thyrea, having slaughtered a bull to the sea, he embarked his army in ships for the Tirynthian land and Nauplia. Cicero makes Cotta remark to Balbus that “our generals, embarking on the sea, have been accustomed to immolate a victim to the waves,” and he goes on to argue that if the Earth herself is a goddess she is no other than Tellus and if the earth, the sea too referred to by Balbus as Neptune. Here, says Tylor[15], is direct nature-worship in its extremest sense of fetish-worship. But in the anthropomorphic stage appear that dim pre-Olympian figure of Nēreus, the Old Man of the Sea, father of the Nereids in their ocean-caves, and the Homeric Poseidon, the Earth-shaker, “who stables his coursers in his cave in the Ægean deeps, who harnesses the gold-maned steeds to his chariot and drives through the dividing waves, while the subject sea-beasts come up at the passing of their lord, a king so little bound to the element he governs, that he can come from the brine to sit in the midst of the gods in the assembly on Olympos, and ask the will of Zeus.”

The third greatest god of the Scandinavians was Niörd, born in Vanaheim (the water home), and living among sailors in Noatun (ship town) ruling the winds, and sea, and quenching the fires of day in his waves. To the Vanir, or sea folk, he was the “rich and beneficent one,” and his children were Frey and Freya. Skadi, “the scathing one”, daughter of Thiassi the giant god of land, took him as her husband, but land and water did not long agree. His consort is also Nerthus, the earth-goddess of Rugen, called by the Germans, the iron lady.

Japan deifies separately on land and at sea the lords of the waters. Midsuno Kami, the water-god, is worshipped during the rainy season and Jebisu, the sea-god, is younger brother of the Sun to whom the Japanese offer cloth, rice and bottles of rum, just as the Greek sacrificed a bull to Poseidon and the Romans to Neptune, before a voyage. The Peruvian sea-god Virakocha, “foam of the lake” or “of the waters,” was often identified with the Creator. Arising from the waters he made the sun and the planets, gave life to stones and created all things.

“It appears from Bosman’s account, about 1700,” says Tylor, “that in the religion of Whydah, the sea ranked only as younger brother in the three divine orders, below the serpents and trees. But at present, as appears from Captain Burton’s evidence, the religion of Whydah extends through Dahowe, and the Divine Sea has risen in rank. The youngest brother of the triad is Hu, the ocean or sea. Formerly, it was subject to chastisement, like the Hellespont, if idle or useless. The Huno, or ocean priest, is now considered the highest of all, a fetish king, at Whydah, where he has 500 wives. At stated times he repairs to the beach, begs ‘Agbwe’, the ocean-god, not to be boisterous, and throws in rice and corn, oil and beans, cloth, cowries and other valuables. At times the King sends as an ocean sacrifice from Agbowe a man carried in a hammock, with the dress, the stool, and the umbrella of a caboceer; a canoe takes him out to sea, where he is thrown to the sharks. While in these descriptions the individual divine personality of the sea is so well marked, an account of the closely related slave coast religion states that a great god dwells in the sea, and it is to him, not to the sea itself, that offerings are cast in. In South America the idea of the divine sea is clearly marked in the Peruvian worship of Mamacocha, Mother Sea, giver of food to men.”[16]

The Egyptians gratefully recognize how much they owe to the Nile and in their hymns they thank the Nile-god. Statues of the god are painted green and red, representing the colour of the river in June when it is a bright green before the inundation and the ruddy hue when its wells are charged with the red mud brought down from the Abyssinian mountains. We have already noticed that the spring was and is still adored as Lord Almighty’s daughter by the Zoroastrians. The Zoroastrian scriptures record how she was worshipped by the Heavenly Father Himself when He wanted her assistance in inducing _Zarathushtra_ to become His prophet. Even to this day a festival is held in her honour by the Parsis in Bombay on the tenth day of the eighth month of the Parsi year. This day as well as the month bear the name Aban. The Parsis flock in numbers on this auspicious day to the sea-beach to offer prayers.

Not unlike the Iranians the Greeks also adored their marine goddess Aphrodite, “born in the foam of the sea.” Greek folklore tells us how this goddess rose from the sea opposite the island of Cythera. She was also the goddess of love and was in earlier times regarded as the goddess of domestic life and of the relations between families, being in some places associated with Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, or regarded, like Artemis, as a guardian of children and young maidens. Odysseus invoked the river of Scheria, Skamandros had his priest and Spercheios his grove, and sacrifice was given to the river-god Acheloos, eldest of the three thousand river-children, and old Okeanos.

Greek saints were believed to bestow wells of water endowed with miraculous properties, and frequently on their feast days an extra supply made the wells overflow. The monastery of Plemmyri, in the south-east of Rhodes, possesses a well of this nature. The priest walks round it, offering up certain prayers and sometimes the water rises in answer to his invocation and flows over into the Court. Another such interesting well exists in the Church of the Virgin at Balukli, outside the walls of Constantinople.[17]

Similarly, the Romans had their water-nymph Egeria. Women with child used to offer sacrifices to her, because she was believed to be able, like _Ardevi Sur Anahita_ and Diana, to grant them an easy delivery. Every day Roman Vestals fetched water from her spring to wash the temple of Vesta, carrying it in earthenware pitchers on their heads. In his Golden Bough Sir James Frazer observes that the remains of baths which were discovered near that site together with many terra cotta models of various parts of the human body suggest that the waters of Egeria were used to heal the sick who may have signified their hopes or testified their gratitude by dedicating likenesses of the diseased members to the goddess, in accordance with a custom which is still observed in many parts of Europe. Examples of the survival of this custom in modern times are given by Blunt in his _Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs in Modern Italy and Sicily_. It is also widespread among the Catholic population in Southern Germany and the Christian missionaries from those parts have brought the custom to India also. Almost every Sunday the Goans and Native Christians of Bombay, for instance, will be seen dedicating likenesses of diseased limbs made of wax to Virgin Mary at Mount Mary’s chapel at Bandra in gratitude for the cures effected through her grace. The custom has spread amongst other communities and I have heard of several cases in which Parsi ladies have taken such offerings to the Chapel.

This parallelism of beliefs and catholicity of cures remind one of the faith which not only the Greeks and the Roman Catholics, but the Turks and the Jews had in the miracles wrought by the Greek Saints. The best known instance of this, given by Miss Hamilton in her illuminating work on _Greek Saints and their Festivals_, is the large marble fountain standing in the court of the Panagia’s Church at Tenos. It was the gift of a grateful Turk cured, according to his own conviction, by the Panagia of the Christians. To a certain extent a feeling was prevalent against permitting unbelievers to participate in these boons, but it was futile in effect and the cures of infidels continued. Within the Smyrna Cathedral there is a holy well the water of which is specially renowned for the cure of ophthalmia. Turks, along with Greeks, shared in its benefits to an extent which excited the jealousy of the officials and they resolved to give ordinary water in response to the demands of infidels. This stratagem was, however, ineffectual for the eyes of the Turks were cured nevertheless with the unsanctified medium just as thoroughly as with the holy water. This might have shaken the faith of the believers in the holy well, but fortunately for them no such rude awakening appears to have marred their confidence in the miraculous powers of the well or of the saints.

Numerous proofs of water-worship in Great Britain exist to-day. English folklore is full of these and we shall notice them presently. There is also archæological evidence establishing the prevalence of the cult. On a pavement at Sydney Park, Gloucestershire, on the western bank of the Severn, has been carved the figure of one of the English river divinities. The principal figure is a youthful deity crowned with rays like Phoebus and standing in a chariot drawn, as in the case of _Banu Ardevi Sur Anahita_ of the Iranians, by four horses. Three inscriptions are preserved: (1) Devo Nodenti; (2) D. M. Nodonti and (3) Deo Nudente M. The form Nodens has been identified by Professor Rhys with the Welsh Lludd and with the Irish Nuada. This monumental relic by no means presents the British embodiment of the water-god, the work being Roman it evidently bears the stamp of the Roman interpretation of the British belief in the local god and has been modelled on the Roman standard of the water-god Neptune. The whole find has been fully described and illustrated in a special volume by the Rev. W. H. Bathurst and C. W. King.

In Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_ we find the following American examples of animistic ideas concerning water. “Who makes this river flow?” asks the Algonquin hunter in a medicine song, and his answer is, “The spirit, he makes this river flow.” In any great river, or lake, or cascade, there dwell such spirits, looked upon as mighty manitus. Thus Carver mentions the habit of the Red Indians, when they reached the shores of Lake Superior or the banks of the Mississippi, or any great body of water, to present to the spirit who resides there some kind of offering; this he saw done by a Winnebago chief who went with him to the Falls of St. Anthony. Franklin saw a similar sacrifice made by an Indian, whose wife had been afflicted with sickness by the water-spirits and who accordingly to appease them tied up in a small bundle a knife and a piece of tobacco and some other trifling articles, and committed them to the rapids. On the river-bank the Peruvians would scoop up a handful of water and drink it, praying the river deity to let them cross or to give them some fish, and they threw maize into the stream as a propitiating offering. Even to this day the Indians of the Cordilleras perform the ceremonial sip before they will pass a river on foot or horseback, just as the Hindus and Parsis throw cocoanuts and flowers and sugar.

Tylor also gives the following African rites of water-worship. In the East, among the Wanika, every spring has its spirit, to which oblations are made. In the West, in the Akra district, lakes, ponds and rivers received worship as local deities. In the South, among the Kafirs, streams are venerated as personal beings, or the abodes of personal deities, as when a man crossing a river will ask leave of its spirit, or having crossed will throw in a stone; or when the dwellers by a stream will sacrifice a beast to it in time of drought, or, warned by illness in the tribe that their river is angry, will cast into it a few handfuls of millet or the entrails of a slaughtered ox. Not less strongly marked, says Tylor, are such ideas among the Tartar races of the north. Thus the Ostyaks venerate the river Ob, and when fish is scanty will hang a stone about a rein-deer’s neck and cast it in for a sacrifice. Among the Buræts, who are professing Buddhists, the old worship may still be seen at the picturesque little mountain lake of Ikeougoun, where they come to the wooden temple on the shore to offer sacrifices of milk and butter and the fat of the animals which they burn on the altars.

It is not necessary to overlay this chapter with countless other European and Indian examples. We shall examine these more fully in the subsequent chapters.