Part 4

Another curious point needs to be considered by the advocates of the theory of borrowing. Mr. Hartland offers some deserved censures on Mr. Manning's terminology in his report of Australian religion (1845-1848). Mr. Manning says: 'They believe in the existence of a Son of God, equal with him in omniscience, and but slightly inferior to his Father in any attribute. Him they call "Grogoragally." His divine office is to watch over all the actions of mankind, and to bring to life the dead to appear before the judgment seat of his Father, who alone pronounces the awful judgment of eternal happiness in heaven (Ballima) or eternal misery in "Oorooma" (hell), which is the place of everlasting fire (gumby). The Son ... acts as mediator for their souls to the great God, to whom the good and bad actions of all are known.' As Mr. Hartland truly says, 'this is not an accurate scientific account.' Even Mr. Manning's 'capital letters' are censured.

Probably the native theologian really said something like this: 'Boyma' (Baiame) big man; very budgery man. Him sit on big glass stone. Him son Grogoragally can see everything and go everywhere. See budgery man, like him; see bad man, plenty too much devil devil. Likes budgery man; no likes bad man: he growl too much. Budgery man die, Grogoragally tell Boyma; Boyma say, 'Take him Ballima way, plenty budgery place.' Bad man die; Boyma say, 'Take him Oorooma way, plenty too hot, him growl there.' Grogoragally plenty strong, him not so strong as Boyma.

This, or something like this, would be the actual statement of the dusky theologian. It is easily rendered into Mr. Manning's terminology; but at the same time the native, in his rude _lingua franca_, or pidgin English, could hardly do justice to his creed. It _was_ his creed; Mr. Hartland himself recognises the original character of the native version of the Supernatural Birth.[35]

Here are certainly 'Biblical analogies,' as Mr. Tylor recognises, but they are as certainly unborrowed.

Now let us fancy that a traveller, not a Greek scholar, is storm-driven to a hitherto unknown island. He finds a race of heathen white men. He describes their religion. 'Despite their polytheism, they have certainly been visited by Christian missionaries, or are descended from a Christian colony. They believe in a supreme being whom they call Zeus. He has a son named Apollon or Phœbus Apollon, who is all-knowing and all-seeing. He acts as a kind of mediator between Zeus and men, to whom, as one of the native hymns says, he "delivers the counsels of the Father, and his unerring will." This Apollo is consulted through an hysterical woman, who lives in a cave. After being convulsed, like other savage mediums, she speaks in a kind of verse. Her advice is often obscure and ambiguous, but generally of a moral tendency.

'This son of Zeus is believed to be the only god who really knows the future and the will of his father. There is another son, Hermes, one of whose duties is to conduct the souls of the dead into the presence of their judge, who is not Zeus, but another god.

'There is also a son of Apollo, whom I take to be only a kind of double of that god; he sometimes appears to his worshippers as a serpent: his name is Asclepius.

'This reminds us of what Winslow writes about the Red Indians of New England. They have a supreme being, Kiehtan, whose son, Hobamok, appears in their assemblies as a serpent. Ridley has the same story about the blacks of Australia. I infer, then, that the natives of this island have inherited or been taught some elements of Christianity, as in the case of Apollo, the mediator between Zeus and men; and Hermes, the Guide of Souls as they call him, _psychopompos_ in their language. But they have mixed up all this with degrading superstitions.'

Of course our traveller has arrived among Greeks, and quotes the Homeric hymn to Apollo. But the Greeks, being prior to Christianity, did not borrow from it, as our traveller supposes. On the other hand, the Greek beliefs which he describes resemble Australian and American beliefs more closely than Australian and American beliefs resemble the creed taught by missionaries. Yet neither Mr. Tylor nor any other friend of the borrowing theory asserts that the Australians or Americans borrowed their tenets from Greece.

The truth seems to be that where a supreme being is regarded as too remote and impassive, he is naturally supplied with a deputy. Ahone has Oki, Kiehtan has Hobamok, Boyma has Grogoragally, Baiame has Tundun, or in places Daramulun; Nyankupon, in West Africa, has Bobowissi. Sometimes, as in the Australian Noorele's case, these active deputies are sons of the supreme being. No borrowing is needed to explain ideas so natural to early men, believing in a supreme being remote and retired, little concerned with mundane affairs, and acting through a deputy or deputies. In other cases, as of the Finnish Num, or the Zulu Unkulunkulu, or the Algonquin Atahocan, the being is quite neglected in favour of spirits who receive sacrifices of meat or grease. Human minds work on similar lines, without borrowing, which is only alleged in the case of Christianity to account for the beliefs which do not fit the 'ghost theory' of modern speculators.

The essential point of Mr. Manning's report, injured as it is by his impossible terminology, is the extreme secrecy maintained on these points by his savage informants. They used to believe that the world would perish if the women heard of their dogmas. Thus a man said to Mr. Howitt (whose competence as a witness is indisputable): 'If a woman were to hear these things, or hear what we tell the boys, I would kill her.'[36] One of Mr. Manning's witnesses slunk 'into a wooden fireplace,' whence he whispered his beliefs. He had previously examined doors and windows in search of listeners. A man who reported these creeds would, if they became divulged among the women, be obliged to kill his wife.

If the religious ideas were borrowed from missionaries, the women would know them as well as the men. They would not be reserved for initiates at the mysteries, through which Mr. Howitt derived his most esoteric knowledge of creeds, whereof, in 1881, he was absolutely ignorant.[37]

If the beliefs were of missionary origin, the young men, not the old men, would know most about Baiame. For similar beliefs in North-West Central Queensland I may cite Mr. Both.[38] The being Mulkari is described by Mr. Both as I a benevolent, omnipresent, supernatural being; anything incomprehensible.' 'Mulkari is the supernatural power who makes everything which the blacks cannot otherwise account for; he is a good, beneficent person, and never kills any one.' His home is in the skies. He was also a medicine-man, has the usual low myths about him, and invented magic. So writes Dr. Both, who knows the local Pitta Pitta language--and is not a missionary. Dr. Both is pursuing his researches, and his remarks are only cited provisionally, awaiting confirmation.

Sometimes European observers do not see the trend of their own reports. In 1845 Mr. Eyre described 'the origin of creation 'as narrated to him by Australian blacks on the Murring River. A being, Noorele, with three unbegotten sons, lives up among the clouds. He is 'all powerful and of benevolent nature. He made the earth, trees, water, &c. He receives the souls (_ladko_ = shades, _umbra_) of the natives, who join him in the skies and will never die again.' Yet Mr. Eyre adds: 'A Deity, a Great First Cause, can hardly be said to be acknowledged.'[39] What is Noorele if not a 'Great First Cause'?

Among some tribes Bunjil, merely a title of authority, meaning master, lord, headman, is a name of the superior being. Abundance of the mythology of Bunjil, often ludicrous or degrading, the being showing as a supernormal medicine-man, may be found in Mr. Brough Smyth's great collections.[40] But no evidence can be better than that of native poetry, which proves a higher aspect of Bunjil.

A Woiworung bard of old made a song which moved an aged singer to tears by 'the melancholy which the words conveyed to him.' It was an 'inspired' song, for the natives, like ourselves, would think Tennyson inspired and Tupper not so. Usually 'the spirits' inspire singers; this song was inspired by Bunjil himself, who '"rushes down" into the heart of the singer,' just as Apollo did of old. It is a dirge of the native race:

We go all! The bones of all Are shining white. In this Dulur land! The rushing noise Of Bunjil, our Father, Sings in my breast, This breast of mine![41]

The missionaries do not inspire these songs. They put them down. 'The white man,' says Mr. Howitt, 'knows little or nothing of the black fellows' songs.' One of Mr. Manning's informants (1845) was angry when asked for the Hymn to Baiame (Boyma). He said that Mr. Manning knew too much already.

I have dwelt specially on Australia, because there, as the natives do not worship ancestral spirits (the names of the dead are tabooed), their superior being cannot have been evolved out of ghost worship. I have expressly avoided the evidence of missionaries, except the early Jesuits, because missionaries are believed by some writers to be biassed on this point, though, in fact, on other points they are copiously cited by anthropologists. As Mr. Tylor finds the saintly and often martyred Jesuits of 1620-1660 worth quoting, I have therefore admitted Father Le Jeune's testimony to the existence of Atahocan before their arrival in America, with Father Brebeuf's Oki, or 'un Oki,' whose anger is feared and who sanctions treaties. It is impossible to me to understand how the savages could borrow from Europeans the beliefs which the Europeans found extant when they arrived. I have not touched the case of Africa. In 'The Making of Religion' (pp. 222-228), I argued against Sir A. B. Ellis's elaborate theory of borrowing a god, in the case of the Tshi-speaking races. I did not know that this exact writer had repudiated his theory, which was also rejected by Miss Mary Kingsley.

As to Australia, in face of the evidence (which settled Mr. Howitt's doubts as to the borrowing of these ideas) can any one bring a native of age and credit who has said that Baiame, under any name, was borrowed from the whites? Mr. Palmer is 'perfectly satisfied' that 'none of these ideas were derived from the whites.' He is speaking of the tribes of the Gulf of Carpentaria, far away indeed from Victoria and New South Wales. There is no greater authority among anthropologists than Waitz, and Waitz rejects the hypothesis that the higher Australian religious beliefs were borrowed from Christians.[42]

To sum up, we have proved, by evidence of 1558, 1586, 1612-16, and 1633, that a sort of supreme creative being was known in North America before any missionary influence reached the regions where he prevailed. As to the Australian god Baiame, we have shown out of the mouth of Mr. Tylor's own witness, Mr. Hale, that Baiame preceded the missionaries in the region where literary evidence of his creed first occurs. We have given Mr. Hale's opinion as to the improbability of borrowing. We have left it to Mr. Tylor to find the missionary who, before 1840, translated 'Creator' by the Kamilaroi word 'Baiame' while showing the difficulty--I think the impossibility--of discovering any Kamilaroi philologist before Mr. Threlkeld. And Mr. Threlkeld certainly did not introduce Baiame! We have proved that, contrary to Mr. Tylor's theory of what a missionary can do, Mr. Threlkeld could not introduce his own names for God, Eloi and Jehovah-ka, into Kamilaroi practice. We note the improbability that highly conservative medicine-men would unanimously thrust a European idea into their ancient mysteries. We have observed that by the nature of Mr. Tylor's theory, the hypothetically borrowed divine names and attributes must (if taken over from missionaries) have been well known to the women and children from whom they are concealed under dreadful penalties. We have demonstrated the worthlessness of negative evidence by proving that the facts were discovered, on initiation, by a student (Mr. Howitt), confessedly in the first rank, though he, during many years, had been ignorant of their existence. We show that the ideas of age and paternity, in an object of reverence, are natural and habitual to Australian natives, and stood in no need of being borrowed. We suggest that the absence of prayer to a powerful being is fatal to the theory of borrowing. We show that direct native evidence utterly denies the borrowing of divine names and attributes, and strenuously asserts that before Europeans came to Melbourne (1835) they were revealed in the secret doctrine of ancient initiatory rites. This evidence again removed the doubts which Mr. Howitt had entertained on the point, and Mr. Palmer and Mr. Dawson agree with Mr. Howitt, Mr. Ridley, Mr. Günther, and Mr. Greenway, all experts, all studying the blacks on the spot. In the study, Waitz is of the same opinion. Australian religion is unborrowed.

It is rare, in anthropological speculations, to light on a topic in which verifiable dates occur. The dates of the arrivals of missionaries and other Europeans, the dates of Mr. Hale's book, of Mr. Threlkeld's books, of Mr. Ridley's primer, are definite facts, not conjectures in the air. While this array of facts remains undemolished, science cannot logically argue that the superior beings of low savage belief are borrowed from Christian teachers and travellers. That idea is disproved also by the esoteric and hidden nature of the beliefs, and by the usual, though not universal, absence of prayer. The absence of prayer again, and of sacrifice, proves that gods not bribed or implored were not invented as powerful givers of good things, because good things were found not to be procurable by magic.

This condition of belief is not what a European, whatever his bias, expects to find. He does not import this kind of ideas. If they are all misreports, due to misunderstandings in America and Australia from 1558 to 1898, what is the value of anthropological evidence? It ought to be needless to add that when good observers like Miss Kingsley find traces of Jesuit or other missionary teaching in regions, as Africa or Canada, where Jesuits actually taught in the past, I accept their decision.[43] My arguments against the theory of borrowing apply chiefly to cases where the beliefs reported were found already extant by the first white observers, to tribes where missionaries like Mr. Threlkeld could not introduce their names for deity, and to tribes which jealously conceal their theology from the whites.

[1] _Natives of Central Australia_, London, 1899.

[2] With a case of ignoring the evidence I deal in the following essay, _Magic and Religion_.

[3] _Op. cit_. p. 284.

[4] Le Jeune, _Relations_, 1633, p. 17.

[5] _Ibid_., 1637, p. 49.

[6] _Prim. Cult_. ii. 310.

[7] _Historic of Travaile into Virginia_. By William Strachey, Gent, (a companion of Captain Smith). Hakluyt Society. Date _circ_.1612-1616. See _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. xx-xxxix, 1899.

[8] _Prim. Cult_. ii. p. 308.

[9] _Prim. Cult_. ii. pp. 309, 310 (1873 and 1891).

[10] _Prim. Cult_. ii. p. 308.

[11] Howitt, _Journal of Anthropological Institute_, 1884, 1885.

[12] _United States Exploring Expedition. Ethnology and Philology_ p. 110.

[13] Ridley, _Kamilaroi Vocabularies_, p. 17 (1875). Also in an earlier Grammar, 1866.

[14] _The Life and Adventures of William Buckley_, 1852, pp. 40-48.

[15] Howitt, _J. A. I_., 1885. The Kurnai tribe.

[16] Backhouse, _Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies_, 1843, p. 555. Compare Threlkeld, _An Australian Language_, 1892, p. 47. This is a reprint of Mr. Threlkeld's early works of 1831-1857.

[17] _Op. cit_. p. 47.

[18] _Journal Anthrop. Inst_., 1885.

[19] He was supposed to live on an island, on fish which came at his call, probably a childlike answer to a tedious questioner.

[20] _Exploring Expedition of U. S_., 1846, p. 110.

[21] _Gurre Kamilaroi, or Kamilaroi Sayings_. Sydney, 1856. It is a scarce little book, with illustrations and Bible stories.

[22] Howitt, _Journal Anthrop. Institute, ut supra._

[23] Greenway, _J. A. I_. vii. p. 243.

[24] Collins, _Account of the Colony of New South Wales_, 1798, vol. ii. p. 544.

[25] _J. A. I._. xvi. pp. 49, 50.

[26] _Op. cit_., 1885, p. 54.

[27] For concealment from women and children, see Howitt, _J. A. I_. xiii. p. 192.

[28] Dawson, _Aborigines of Australia_, p. 49.

[29] _J. A. I_. xiii. 1885, p. 142.

[30] _Op. cit_. p. 194.

[31] Two volumes. Nutt.

[32] _Legend of Perseus_, i. 97.

[33] _Folk Lore_, March 1899, p. 55.

[34] Ridley, _J. A. I._, 1872, p. 282.

[35] _Folk Lore_, March 1899, pp. 52, 53.

[36] _J. A. I_. vol. xiv. p. 310.

[37] See his and Mr. Fison's _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, 1881.

[38] _North-West Central Queensland Aborigines_, pp. 14, 36, 116, 153, 158, 165.

[39] Eyre, vol. ii. pp. 355-357.

[40] _Aborigines of Victoria._

[41] Arranged in lines from the literal translation, preserving the native idiom. Howitt, _J. A. I_. vol. xvi. pp. 330, 331.

[42] _Anthropologie_, vi. p. 798.

III

_MAGIC AND RELIGION_

'The sin of witchcraft is as the sin of rebellion.' The idea which inspires this text probably is that a person who seeks to obtain his ends by witchcraft is rebelling against the deity or deities through whom alone these ends should be sought. Witchcraft is also an insult and injury to the official priests, who regard the witch as the surgeon regards the bone-setter, or as the geologist regards the 'dowser' or water-finder who uses the divining-rod.

Magic or witchcraft falls into two main classes. The former is magic of the sort used by people who think that things accidentally like each other influence each other. You find a stone shaped like a yam, and you sow it in the yam plot You find a stone like a duck, and expect to have good duck-shooting while you carry the stone about in a bag. In the same way the part influences the whole; you burn some of a man's hair, and so he catches a fever. Imitation works in the same manner; you imitate the emergence of grubs from the larvæ, and you expect grubs to emerge.

All magic of this kind is wrought by material objects, sticks, stones, hair, and so forth, which sometimes have been 'charmed' by songs chanted over them. Among the Arunta of Central Australia, in many respects a backward people, we do hear of an 'evil spirit' influencing the material object which has been charmed.[1] We also hear of spirits which instruct men in medical magic. But, as a rule, the magic is materialistic. It really does produce effects, by suggestion: a man dies and a woman is won, if they know that magic is being worked to kill or woo.

The second sort of magic acts by spells which constrain spirits or gods to do the will of the magician. This magic involves itself in religion when the magical ceremonies are, so to speak, only symbolic prayers expressed in a kind of sign-language. But if the idea is to put constraint by spells on a god or spirit, then the intention is magical and rebellious. Though the official priest of a savage god may use magic in his appeal to that deity, he is not a wizard. It is the unofficial practitioner who is a witch, just as the unqualified medical practitioner is a quack. In the same way if a minister of the kirk was clairvoyant or second-sighted that was a proof of godliness and inspiration. But if a lay parishioner was second-sighted, he or she was in danger of the stake as a witch or wizard.

These, briefly stated, are the points of contrast and points of contact between magic and religion. The question has recently been raised by Mr. Frazer, in the new edition of his 'Golden Bough,' whether magic has not everywhere preceded religion. Have men not attempted to secure weather and everything else to their desire by magic, before they invented gods, and prayed to them for what magic, as they learned by experience, failed to provide'?

This question cannot be historically determined. If we find a race which has magic but no religion, we cannot be certain that it did not once possess a religion of which it has despaired. I once knew a man who, as a child, suffered from toothache. He prayed for relief: it did not come. He at once, about the age of eight, abandoned religion. What a child may do, in the way of despair of religion, a childlike race may do. Therefore, if we find a race with magic but without religion, we cannot scientifically say that the race has never possessed a religion. Thus the relative priority of religion or magic cannot be ascertained historically.

Again, all depends on our definition of religion, if we are to pursue a speculation rather airy and unbottomed on facts. Mr. Frazer defines religion as 'a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.'[2] I But clearly this definition does not include all that we usually mean by religion. If men believe in a potent being who originally made or manufactured the nature of things or most things (I am warned not to use the word 'creator'), that is an idea so far religious that it satisfies, by the figment of a supernatural agent, the speculative faculty. Clearly the belief in such a being is a germ whence may spring the ideas of duty towards, and an affection for, the being. Nobody can deny that these are religious ideas, though they do not appeal in Mr. Frazer's definition. The believers in such a being, even if they never ask him for anything, cannot be called irreligious. At a period of his life when Coleridge never prayed, he would have been much and not unjustly annoyed if Mr. Frazer had called him irreligious. A man may believe in God, and yet trust him too utterly to address him in petitions for earthly goods and gear. 'Thy Will be Done' may be his only prayer; yet he does not lack religion. He only lacks it in the sense of Mr. Frazer's definition.

If that definition is granted, Mr. Frazer is prepared to produce a backward race, houseless, without agriculture, metals, domestic animals, and without religion in Mr. Frazer's sense. They have magic, but they have no religion, says Mr. Frazer, who presently informs us that 1 the first-born child of every woman was eaten by the tribe as part of a religious ceremony.'[3] So they have a religion, and a bloody religion it is.

That people is the Australian, among whom, 'while magic is universally practised, religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown.'[4] 'Nobody dreams of propitiating gods or spirits by prayer or sacrifice.'