Part 11

Something very similar obtained in Peru. At the time of the vernal equinox, all strangers were bidden to leave the sacred city of Cuzco, where the Inca resided. A human victim was immolated, and the spotless “Virgins of the Sun” were deputed to mingle his blood with meal and bake it into small cakes. These were distributed among the people and eaten, and one was sent to every holy shrine and temple in the kingdom.[231] Precisely such a rite prevailed among the ancient Germans. At the harvest supper the spirit of the corn, represented latterly under the form of an animal but in earlier days as a child, was slain and eaten by those who had aided in the harvest. It was the literal and corporeal union of man and the god.[232]

Still clearer was the similar ceremony of the Aztecs. A youth was chosen and named for the god. For months his every wish was gratified. Then he was slain on the altar and his fresh blood was mixed with dough which was divided among the worshippers and eaten. Thus they became partakers of the Divine Nature.[233]

The fearful similarity of this ceremony both in its form and in its intention to that of the Christian Eucharist could not escape the notice of the Spanish missionaries. They attributed it to the malicious suggestions of the Devil, thus parodying in cruel and debased traits the sacred mysteries of the Church. But the psychologist sees in them all the same inherent tendency, the same yearning of the feeble human soul to reach out towards and make itself a part of the Divine Mind.

II. THE PERSONAL RITES, those for the benefit of the individual, will next occupy us.

I have already observed that while the tribe or gens in primitive conditions worships in common one or several divinities, most of the religious acts of the individual are directed toward a deity whom he may claim as his own special guardian and friend. This is his tutelary god, his personal δαίμων, his “mystagogue,” who will not merely look after the welfare of his human ward, but introduce him into the higher and occult knowledge and power.

This personal deity reveals himself at birth, or may await some later year or incident of life to manifest his name and nature. He may be the spirit of some ancestor or great chieftain or mighty shaman; or he may belong to those deities who never assume mortal habiliments. The teachers of early faiths differed on these points; but nearly all agreed that to each person some such guardian angel or genius was assigned. From these spirits the personal names were frequently received, and, lest these should be misused, they were usually kept secret.

These beliefs are too wide-spread to require support from examples. Probably every American tribe shared them. They are familiar in classic Greece and Rome. The Finns and the ancient Celtic peoples possessed them in marked forms; and they survive in the tutelary Saints of the Roman Church.

Principally to these the adults paid their devotions and offered their vows for what concerned their personal welfare; and many of the rites which I am about to describe, derive their meaning from their connection with this belief. I shall classify them as relating: 1, to birth; 2, to naming; 3, to puberty; 4, to marriage; and 5, to death and the disposal of the corpse.

_1. Rites Relating to Birth._—Although the immediate act of childbirth may not cause the savage mother severe suffering, the appearance of a new human being in the world is not considered of light importance. In her description of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, Mrs. Stevenson remarks that some “of their most sacred and exclusive rites are connected with childbirth,” and her full and accurate account of them reveals in a strong light how solemn the event was considered.[234]

In many tribes the child was considered bound to its father by some mysterious tie closer than connected it with its mother. Among the Northern Indians, the father will not bridle a horse or perform sundry other acts for a fixed period after the birth of his child, for if he did it would die![235] In the rites of Mexico and South America, this refraining from certain labours passed into the strange custom of the _couvade_. This was, that upon the birth of the child, the _father_ took to his bed and remained there for a number of days. Did he neglect this, it was believed that the child would die or have bad luck. For the same reason he had to be extremely careful of his own health and guarded in his actions during his wife’s pregnancy, or otherwise the unborn babe would suffer.[236]

Not less strange are the wide-spread rites and opinions connected with the umbilical cord. As it united the unborn infant to the life of the mother, it was generally held to retain that power in a mystical sense. Among the American Indians, it was a frequent custom to carry it to a distance and bury it, and it became the duty of the individual, in his later life, to visit alone from time to time that spot, and perform certain ceremonies.[237]

Thus the religious life of a person began with his birth. Not infrequently at that time his tutelary divinity was ascertained by the priests and assigned him, as among the Mayas, and the Africans of the Congo River. With the latter, it was also customary to lay upon the new-born babe a series of “vows,” or resolutions touching his conduct in life. These were impressed on the mother, who adopted it as a sacred duty to bring up her child in obedience to them. A similar habit prevailed in the Andaman Islands and elsewhere.[238]

With these vows was often associated the rite of baptism, by sprinkling or by immersion in water. Even among the rude Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego we find that the child, when born, was promptly dipped in water, not for sanitary but for religious reasons.

The ancient inhabitants of Teneriffe considered it necessary to have a child formally asperged by a priestess before acknowledging it as a member of the family,[239] and some such rite was prevalent in many tribes. It was in one sense an initiation, as it was with the neophytes of the mysteries of Mithras, who, according to Tertullian, were baptised upon entering the novitiate. In another, it would seem to have been a purification from inherited sin, in which sense it was practised by the Nahuas of Mexico and the Quichuas of Peru. With the Mayas of Yucatan, it was in common usage and was known by the significant name, “the second birth.”[240]

_2. Relating to the Name_.—The Name, as we have already seen, was looked upon as a part of the person, one of his forms or modes of life. Very generally, its selection was a matter of religious moment, and accompanied with solemn ceremonies. A person might have many names, but there was one which was taken from or referred to his or her tutelary spirit, and this was holy and not to be lightly used.

Among the Nahuas this was generally announced by the priest on the seventh day after birth, but as it would be profane to speak it constantly, another was employed for ordinary conversation. The Algonquin children, says one who lived among them long, are taught by their mothers not to divulge their real names, lest by so doing they should offend the personal god who has taken them under his protection.[241]

When a babe, among the Seminoles of Florida, was about a fortnight old, the mother took it in her arms and walked three times around the public square of the village, calling aloud the name given it; but this name was not that by which it was later known; and “they were always averse to telling it.”[242] With some tribes, as the Choctaws, the idea of profanity existed only if the person himself spoke his name; so that, “it is impossible to get it from him unless he has an acquaintance present, whom he will request to tell it for him.”[243] Analogous customs abound in early religions and many of them survive in modern folk-lore.[244]

In some instances the American Indian would exchange his name for that of a friend, or extend to him his name; a rare and high sign of amity, as it signified that the receiver was thus placed under the guardianship of the same tutelar deity. This custom extended widely throughout the island world of the Pacific and among many primitive peoples. It has often been noted, but its peculiarly religious meaning has generally been misunderstood.

That certain names are auspicious and others inauspicious is a belief that belongs everywhere to mankind in the primitive stage of thought. But it is curious to note that while generally the auspicious names are those of sweet sound and favourable sense, in Tonkin, Siam, and some other regions ugly and unpleasant names are preferred, because these will frighten away the evil spirits.[245]

_3. Rites Relating to Puberty._—On the momentous crisis in the personal life when the boy enters into manhood and the girl becomes a woman, in nearly all primitive tribes a solemn rite is prescribed, the object of which is to prepare the child for the duties of the wider life, which it is about to begin.

No better example for such a ceremony could be selected than that which prevails among the southern tribes of Australia. It is their principal public act of worship. The name by which it is known is the _Bora_,[246] a word derived from the belt or girdle which the men wear, and which is at that time conferred on the youth. Its celebration involves extensive preparations and occupies a number of days. The youths are submitted to severe tests and sometimes to dreadful mutilations. They are taught the holy names and sacred traditions; and when they have satisfied their elders of their endurance and fidelity, they are admitted to the manhood of the tribe.

The _Bora_ is a distinctly religious ceremony. It is said to have been instituted by their chief god Turamulun himself, and remains under his spiritual charge. Its rites “involve the idea of a dedication to supernatural powers,” and the figure of the god, moulded in high relief on the earth in the costume and attitude of the sacred dance, is intended to represent his personal presence. The aim is the education of the individual to fill his place properly in the tribal life; and one of the most intelligent of English observers expresses his conviction that “every rule of conduct under which the novice is placed is directly intended to some end beneficent to the community or believed to be.”

Throughout most of America, a similar initiation was required of the youth before he was entitled to the privileges of manhood. It was frequently accompanied by the most painful tests of his courage and endurance. His naked back was lacerated with rods, his strength was tried by prolonged hunger, thongs were inserted into his flesh and torn out by the bystanders.

More frequently the boy was sent alone into the woods, and there, exposed to inclement weather, cold, hunger and thirst, self-torture and meditation, awaited the divine revelation which entitled him to call himself a man!

“Could it be possible,” exclaims an intelligent traveller, “to hear anything stranger, more wonderful, than these stories of unheard-of castigations and torments to which boys of thirteen or fourteen subject themselves, merely for the sake of an idea, a dream, the fulfilment of a religious duty? More surprising is it that not merely some extraordinary youth is capable of this, but that every young Indian, without exception, displays such heroism.”[247]

The same rule applied to the girl. As it became evident that the period had arrived in her life-history when she was capable of the sacred duties of motherhood, she either retired into the forest, there to commune alone with her guardian spirit, or, as among the Sioux Indians, the fact was made known to the village, and a solemn feast announced by her parents. At this, some venerable priest addressed the guests, “calling attention to the sacred and mysterious manner in which nature had announced the fact that she was ready to embrace the duties of matrimony!”[248]

In these ceremonies, which may be said to belong to primitive religions in all times, we recognise again the one idea which more than any other permeated all their myths and rites,—the idea of Life. It was because the boy and girl, passing to riper years, indicated the acquisition of the power to perpetuate and transmit Life, that at this age it was held necessary for them to mark the epoch by rites of the most sacred import.

_4. Rites Relating to Marriage._—If the notion of life was thus the inspiration of the rites of puberty, still more potently did it control those relating to marriage.

Much has been written by special students concerning the forms of primitive marriage, and much of what has been written is theory only, not supported by actual and intimate knowledge of facts.

The assertion is common in works of the kind that the earliest form of marriage was no marriage at all,—mere promiscuity,—and that, later, a modified form of the same, known as “communal” marriage, prevailed. Not a single example of either of these has been known in history or in ethnology, and it is a gratuitous hypothesis only that either ever prevailed in a permanent community.

What we first discern is the family, generally centred around the mother, and tracing descent through the maternal ancestors only. This is the “matriarchal” as distinguished from the “patriarchal” system, the latter being that in which the father is the centre and head of the family, and the genealogy is traced in his line. Both these forms, however, have existed, so far as we know, in wholly primitive conditions. The selection of one or the other was a matter of local accident or incident.

The primitive family, held together by one or other of these ties of blood-relationship, was a close corporation. It might adopt outsiders, but after admission they were considered of the same blood and lineage. Its property was in common, its laws were laid on all, its very gods were its own. Especially, the rules relating to marriage were prescribed with rigid formality.

The general practice was that the youth must seek his bride from another recognised family (gens or totem) of the tribe. To choose her from his own immediate family was a crime of such deep dye that even an Australian savage “could not consider such a thing possible”; although, in later conditions, this artificial barrier was often weakened.[249]

In matriarchal systems, the husband usually went to live with the gens of the wife, but did not become a member of it. He was looked upon as a stranger and an interloper. Among some Australian and American tribes, he never spoke directly to his wife’s mother, or even looked at her. His children did not acknowledge him as a blood-relation, and when he grew old and useless, he had to look to his own family, not to his own offspring, for his maintenance.

The origin of these strange usages was strictly religious. They have been analysed as they existed in many nations by one of the ablest of German ethnologists, and their source has been shown to be that the gods of the one gens never willingly accept the introduction of a stranger into the household except by the regular formulas of adoption, which would prevent marriage; hence, the husband is, and ever remains, a foreigner and an interloper in the matriarchal household. His wife’s god is not his god, nor are her people his people.[250]

The actual ceremony of marriage itself often indicates this. Much has been said by writers on ethnology of “marriage by capture,” and it is often asserted to be that most usual among primitive peoples, and to continue in survivals in higher conditions of culture.

There is, indeed, very frequently a ceremony which presents the appearance of violently seizing and carrying away by main force the bride-elect. But it is not to be understood as the reminiscence of a time when the man went forth and snatched a girl from some neighbouring tribe to become his slave and his wife. I doubt if in the true totemic marriage, considered as distinct from concubinage, any such method was practised. It is not so to-day, even among the Australian Blacks. If they steal a woman, they first inquire as to her kinship, and if she belongs to a class into which her captor cannot marry, according to the laws of his clan, he sets her free.[251]

The so-called “marriage by capture” was either a recognised tribute to maidenly coyness, by which her real or feigned resistance was to be overcome in a manner creditable to herself,—a sentiment constantly witnessed in the lower animals as well as in modern life; or it was a method of conciliating her household gods, the deities of the gens, by giving the appearance of constraint and succumbing to force on the part of the girl. Some of the northern tribes of America carried these notions to the extent of a pretended concealment of the marriage long after it had been performed. The husband was obliged to enter the home of his wife by night and secretly. To approach it in daytime or to be seen in her company would have been a grave impropriety.[252]

The second primitive form of marriage is by purchase. This also is far less usual than many writers have assumed. There is indeed, very commonly, as in civilised society, an exchange of goods along with or previous to the marital ceremony. But with us it is not regarded as a purchase and sale when an American girl’s father gives his daughter and a million to a foreign nobleman in exchange for the title conferred on the bride. It may in reality be a mere commercial transaction, but in theory it is not so.

Just as little is the “marriage by purchase” among most of the aboriginal tribes, where we find it in vogue. The exchange of goods is often a form of compensation to the household gods for the privilege of remaining a member of the clan, or for the permission to enter its ranks as an authorised resident.

Of course, women were bought and sold as any other commodity; they were part of the booty of victors, and were dispensed as gifts, or kept for enjoyment. But when we confine ourselves to the examination of the strictly totemic marriage we find even among the wildest tribes that it was generally founded in mutual liking, that it was contracted under the sanction of the recognised family laws, and that its ritual was that of a religious ceremony.[253] The poor Bushmen, even, believe that the laws relating to marriage are of divine origin, enacted by the sacred ant-eater, and that their infraction will be severely punished.[254]

The gifts which accompanied the rite were in the nature of offerings. Ceremonies of lustration and purification, in which the sacred elements, fire and water, took a prominent part, were general, and the relationship established was in its essence one of religious significance, and not one of mere secular import.

_5. Relating to Death._—An attractive writer, Professor Frank Granger, remarks in a recent volume: “The first attitude of primitive man to his dead seems to have been one of almost unmixed terror.”[255] Would that we could give primitive man so much credit! But we cannot. The evidence is mountain-high that in the earliest and rudest period of human history the corpse inspired so little terror that it was nearly always eaten by the surviving friends![256]

We can look back clearly through the corridors of time to that stage of development when death and the dead inspired no more terror or aversion in man than they do to-day among the carnivorous brutes.

Throughout the whole of the palæolithic period of culture we discover extremely faint traces of any mode of sepulture, any respect for the dead.

The oldest cemeteries or funeral monuments of any sort date from the neolithic period. Then the full meaning of Death seems to have broken suddenly on man, and his whole life became little more than a _meditatio mortis_, a preparation for the world beyond the tomb. What Professor Granger says of the ancient Romans applies to very many primitive tribes: “In the belief of the Romans, the right to live was not estimated more highly than the right to receive proper burial.”[257]

The funeral or mortuary ceremonies, which are often so elaborate, and so punctiliously performed in savage tribes, have a twofold purpose. They are equally for the benefit of the individual and for that of the community. If they are neglected or inadequately conducted, the restless spirit of the departed cannot reach the realm of joyous peace, and therefore he returns to lurk about his former home and to plague the survivors for their carelessness.

It was therefore to lay the ghost, to avoid the anger of the disembodied spirit, that the living instituted and performed the burial ceremonies; while it became to the interest of the individual to provide for it that those rites should be carried out which would conduct his own soul to the abode of the blessed.

These were as various as were the myths of the after-world and the fancies as to the number and destiny of the personal souls.

Most common of them all was some sort of funeral feast. The disagreeable suggestion is close, that this was a survival of the habit of eating the corpse itself. Up to a very recent date that habit prevailed among the Bolivian Indians; and so desirable an end was it esteemed that the traveller D’Orbigny tells of an old man he met there whose only regret at embracing Christianity was that his body would be eaten by worms instead of by his relations!

The later theory, however, was that then the soul itself was supplied with food. It partook spiritually of the viands and thus, well fortified for its long journey, departed in good humour with those it left behind. The same notion led to the world-wide custom of providing it with many articles by placing them in the tomb or burning them on the funeral pyre. This extended not only to weapons, utensils, ornaments, and clothing, but not infrequently to companions. On the coast of Peru the wives of a man were burned alive with his dead body, and among the Natchez they were knocked on the head and interred under the same mounds.[258] I have seen the mummy of a woman from the Cliff Dwellers of Arizona, holding in her arms the body of her babe which had been strangled with a cord, still tightly stretched around its little neck. Plainly the sympathetic survivors had reflected how lonely the poor mother would be in the next world without her babe, and had determined that its soul should accompany hers. Elsewhere, slaves or companions in arms were slain or slew themselves that they might accompany some famous chieftain to his long home.

In these funeral rites the disposal of the corpse depended upon ethnic traits, ancestral usage, or the instructions of the priests.

Perhaps the earliest was simple exposure. The body was left in the forest for the beasts and birds to consume, as among the Caddo Indians and others; or it was sunk in the waters that the fish should perform the same office; the usual object being to obtain the bones with the least trouble. The oldest of all burials yet discovered, those in the caves in the south of France, were of this character, simple “seposition” as it is called. The body was merely laid in a posture of repose on the cave floor, with the weapons and ornaments it had used during life.[259]

Next in point of time doubtless came inhumation, the interment of the body in the ground or covering it, laid on the surface, with stones and earth,—the burial mound. Homeric Greeks, American Indians, and tribes of all continents practised this method in different ages, and the barrows or tumuli thus erected remain in thousands to this day to attest the religious earnestness of those early peoples. The vast monuments which at times they constructed for their dead, the pyramids, dolmens, and teocalli, have never since been equalled in magnitude or cubical contents.