SCORPION

Culture art. Primitive culture. CHAPTER XV ANIMISM (continued)

Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917 "Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom" CHAPTER XV. ANIMISM (continued). Spirits regarded as personal causes of Phenomena of the World Per- \ vading Spirits as good and evil Demons affecting man Spirits manifest in Dreams and Visions : Nightmares ; Incubi and Succubi ; Vampires ; Visionary Demons Demons of darkness repelled by fire Demons otherwise manifest : seen by animals ; detected by footprints Spirits conceived and treated as material Guardian and Familiar Spirits Nature-Spirits; historical course of the doctrine Spirits of Volcanos, Whirlpools, Rocks Water- Worship : Spirits of Wells, Streams, Lakes, &c. Tree-Worship : Spirits embodied in or inhabiting Trees ; Spirits of Groves and Forests Animal-worship : Animals Worshipped, directly, or as incarnations or representatives of Deities ; Totemism ; Serpent- Worship Species-Deities ; their relation to Archetypal Ideas . 184 CHAPTER XV. ANIMISM (continued). Spirits regarded as personal causes of Phenomena of the World Pervading Spirits as good and evil Demons affecting man Spirits manifest in Dreams and Visions : Nightmares ; Incubi and Succubi ; Vampires ; Visionary Demons Demons of darkness repelled by fire Demons other- wise manifest : seen by animals ; detected by footprints Spirits con- ceived and treated as material Guardian and Familiar Spirits Nature- Spirits ; historical course of the doctrine Spirits of Volcanoes, Whirl- pools, Rocks Water-Worship : Spirits of Wells, Streams, Lakes, &c. Tree-Worship : Spirits embodied in or inhabiting Trees ; Spirits of Groves and Forests Animal- Worship : Animals worshipped, directly, or as incarnations or representatives of Deities ; Totem-Worship ; Serpent- Worship Species-Deities ; their relation to Archetypal Ideas. WE have now to enter on the final topic of the investiga- tion of Animism, by completing the classified survey of spiritual beings in general, from the myriad souls, elves, fairies, genii, conceived as filling their multifarious offices in man's life and the world's, up to the deities who reign, few and mighty, over the spiritual hierarchy. In spite of end- less diversity of detail, the general principles of this investi- gation seem comparatively easy of access to the enquirer, if he will use the two keys which the foregoing studies supply : first, that spiritual beings are modelled by man on his. primary conception of his own human soul, and second, that their purpose is to explain nature on the primitive childlike theory that it is truly and throughout ' Animated Nature.' If, as the poet says, ' Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,' then rude tribes of ancient men had within them this source of happiness, that they could explain to their own content the causes of things. For to 184 SPIRITS AS PERSONAL CAUSES. 185 them spiritual beings, elves and gnomes, ghosts and manes, demons and deities, were the living personal causes of universal life. ' The first men found everything easy, the mysteries of nature were not so hidden from them as from us/ said Jacob Bohme the mystic. True, we may well answer, if these primitive men believed in that animistic philosophy of nature which even now survives in the savage mind. They could ascribe to kind or hostile spirits all good and evil of their own lives, and all striking operations of nature ; they lived in familiar intercourse with the living and powerful souls of their dead ancestors, with the spirits of the stream and grove, plain and mountain, they knew well the living mighty Sun pouring his beams of light and heat upon them, the living mighty Sea dashing her fierce billows on the shore, the great personal Heaven and Earth protecting and producing all things. For as the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by the influence of other spirits. And thus Animism, starting as a philosophy of human life, extended and expanded itself till it became a philosophy of nature at large. To the minds of the lower races it seems that all nature is possessed, pervaded, crowded, with spiritual beings. In seeking by a few types to give an idea of this conception of pervading Spirits in its savage and barbaric stage, it is not indeed possible to draw an absolute line of separation between spirits occupied in affecting for good and ill the life of Man, and spirits specially concerned in carrying on the operations of Nature. In fact these two classes of spiritual beings blend into one another as inextricably as do the original animistic doctrines they are based on. As, however, the spirits con- sidered direct!}' to affect the life and fortune of Man lie closest to the centre of the animistic scheme, it is well to give them precedence. The description and function of these beings extend upwards from among the rudest human tribes. Milligan writes of the Tasmanians : ' They v/crc lS6 ANIMISM. polythcists ; that is, they believed in guardian angels or spirits, and in a plurality of powerful but generally evil- disposed beings, inhabiting crevices and caverns of rocky mountains, and making temporary abode in hollow trees and solitary valleys ; of these a few were supposed to be of great power, while to the majority were imputed much of the nature and attributes of the goblins and elves of our native land.' 1 Oldfield writes of the aborigines of Australia, ' The number of supernatural beings, feared if not loved, that they acknowledge, is exceedingly great ; for not only are the heavens peopled with such, but the whole face of the country swarms with them ; every thicket, most watering-places, and all rocky places abound with evil spirits. In like manner, every natural phenomenon is believed to be the work of demons, none of which seem of a benign nature, one and all apparently striving to do all imaginable mischief to the poor black fellow.'* It must be indeed an unhappy race among whom such a demonology could shape itself, and it is a relief to find that other people of low culture, while recognizing the same spiritual world swarming about them, do not hold its main attribute to be spite against themselves. Among the Algonquin Indians of North America, School- craft finds the very groundwork of their religion in the belief ' that the whole visible and invisible creation is animated with various orders of malignant or benign spirits, who preside over the daily affairs and over the final destinies of men.' 3 Among the Khonds of Orissa, Mac- pherson describes the greater gods and tribal manes, and below these the order of minor and local deities : ' They are the tutelary gods of every spot on earth, having power over the functions of nature which operate there, and over everything relating to human life in it. Their number is 1 F. R. Nixon, ' Cruise of the Beacon ' ; Bonwick, p. 182. 1 Oldfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 228. 3 Schoolcraft, ' Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 41. ' Indian Tribes,' vol. iii. p. 327. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 191. See also J. G. Muller, p. 175. (Antilles Islanders); Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 482. GOOD AND EVIL DEMONS. unlimited. They fill all nature, in which no power or object, from the sea to the clods of the field, is without its deity. They are the guardians of hills, groves, streams, fountains, paths, and hamlets, and are cognizant of every human action, want, and interest in the locality, where they pre- side.' 1 Describing the animistic mythology of the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe, Castren has said that every land, mountain, rock, river, brook, spring, tree, or whatsoever it may be, has a spirit for an inhabitant ; the spirits of the trees and stones, of the lakes and brooks, hear with pleasure the wild man's pious prayers and accept his offerings. 2 Such are the conceptions of the Guinea negro, who 'finds the abodes of his good and evil spirits in great rocks, hollow trees, mountains, deep rivers, dense groves, echoing caverns, and who passing silently by these sacred places leaves some offering, if it be but a leaf or a shell picked up on the beach. 8 Such are examples which not unfairly picture the belief of the lower races in a world of spirits on earth, and such descriptions apply to the state of men's minds along the course of civilization. The doctrine of ancient philosophers such as Philo 4 and lamblichus, 5 of spiritual beings swarming through the atmosphere we breathe, was carried on and developed in special directions in the discussions concerning the nature and functions of the world-pervading host of angels and devils, in the writings of the early Christian Fathers.* Theologians of modern centuries have for the most part seen reason to reduce within comparatively narrow limits the action ascribed to external spiritual beings on mankind ; 1 Macpherson, ' India,' p. 90. See also Cross, ' Karens,' in ' Journ. Amer. Or. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 315 ; Williams, ' Fiji,' vol. i. p. 239. Castren, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 114, 182, &c. J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' p. 218, 388 ; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 171. Philo, De Gigant. I. iv. lamblichus, ii. Collected passages in Calmet, ' Diss. sur les Esprits ' ; Horst, ' Za'uber- Bibliothck,' vol. ii. p. 263, &c. ; vol. vi. p. 49, &c. ; see Migne's Dic- tionaries. l8S ANIMISM. yet there are some who retain to the full the angelology and demonology of Origen and Tertullian. These two views may.be well contrasted by setting side by side the judgments of two ecclesiastics of the Roman Church, as to the belief in pervading demons prevalent in uncivilized countries. The celebrated commentator, Dom Calmet, lays down in the most explicit terms the doctrine of angels and demons, as a matter of dogmatic theology. But he is less inclined to receive unquestioned the narratives of particular manifestations in the mediaeval and modern world. He mentions indeed the testimony of Louis Vivez, that in the newly discovered countries of America, nothing is more common than to see spirits which appear at noon- day, not only in the country but in towns and villages, speaking, commanding, sometimes even striking men ; and the account by Olaus Magnus of the spectres or spirits seen in Sweden and Norway, Finland and Lapland, which do wonderful things, some even serving men as domestics and driving the cattle out to pasture. But what Calmet remarks on these stories, is that the greater ignorance prevails in a country, the more superstitition reigns there. 1 It seems that in our own day, however, the tendency is to encourage less sceptical views. Mon- signor Gaume's book on ' Holy Water,' which not long since received the special and formal approval of Pius IX., appears ' at an epoch when the millions of evil angels which surround us are more enterprising than ever ; ' and here Olaus Magnus' story of the demons infesting Northern Europe is not only cited but corroborated. 1 On the whole, the survey of the doctrine of pervading spirits through all the grades of culture is a remarkable display of intellectual continuity. Most justly does Ellis the missionary, depict- ing the South Sea Islanders' world crowded with its in- numerable pervading spirits, point out the closeness of cor- respondence here between doctrines of the savage and the 1 Calmet, ' Dissertation sur les Esprit*,' vol. i. ch. xlviii. 1 Gaume, ' L'Eau Benite au XIX me Siecle,' pp. 295, 341. SPIRITS IN DREAM AND VISION. 189 civilized animist, expressed as both may be in Milton's familiar lines : ' Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.' * As with souls, so with other spirits, man's most distinct and direct intercourse is had where they become actually present to his senses in dreams and visions. The belief that such phantoms are real and personal spirits, suggested and maintained as it is by the direct evidence of the senses of sight, touch, and hearing, is naturally an opinion usual in savage philosophy, and indeed elsewhere, long and ob- stinately resisting the attacks of the later scientific doctrine. The demon Koin strives to throttle the dreaming Austra- lian ; * the evil ' na ' crouches on the stomach of the Karen ; * the North American Indian, gorged with feasting, is visited by nocturnal spirits; 4 the Caribs, subject to hideous dreams, often woke declaring that the demon Maboya had beaten them in their sleep, and they could still feel the pain.* These demons are the very elves and nightmares that to this day in benighted districts of Europe ride and throttle the snoring peasant, and whose names, not forgotten among the educated, have only made the transition from belief to jest.* A not less dis- tinct product of the savage animistic theory of dreams as real visits from personal spiritual beings, lasted on without a shift or break into the belief of mediaeval Christendom. This is the doctrine of the incubi and succubi, those male and female nocturnal demons which consort sexually with men and women. We may set out Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 331. Backhouse, ' Australia,' p. 555 ; Grey, ' Australia,' vol. ii. p. 337. Mason, ' Karens,' I.e. p. 211. Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 226. Rochefort, ' Antilles,' p. 419. Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 1193 ; Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 332 ; St. Clair and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 59; Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' p. 122 ; Bastian, 4 Psychologic,' p. 103 ; Brand, vol. iii. p. 279. The mare in nightmare means spirit, elf, or nymph ; compare Anglo-Sax, vmdumare (wood-mare) =echo. I9O ANIMISM. with their descriptions among the islanders of the Antilles, where they are the ghosts of the dead, vanishing when clutched ; l in New Zealand, where ancestral deities ' form attachments with females and pay them repeated visits/ while in the Samoan Islands such intercourse of mis- chievious inferior gods caused ' many supernatural concep- tions; ' and in Lapland, where details of this last extreme class have also been placed on record. 8 From these lower grades of culture the idea may be followed onward. Formal rites are specified in the Hindu Tantra, which enable a man to obtain a companion-nymph by worshipping her and repeating her name by night in a cemetery. 4 Augustine, in an instructive passage, states the popular notions of the visits of incubi, vouched for, he tells us, by testimony of such quantity and quality that it may seem impudence to deny it ; yet he is careful not to commit himself to a positive belief in such spirits. 8 Later theologians were less cautious, and grave argumentation on nocturnal intercourse with incubi and succubi was carried on till, at the height of mediaeval civilization, it is found accepted in full belief by ecclesiastics and lawyers. Nor is it to be counted as an ugly but harmless superstition, when for example it is set forth in the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII. in 1484, as an 1 ' Vita del Amm. Christoforo Colombo,' ch. xiii. ; and ' Life of Colon,' in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 84. 1 Taylor, ' New Zealand,' pp. 149, 389. Mariner, ' Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 119. 3 Hogstrom, ' Lapmark,' ch. xi. ' Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 151. See also Borri, ' Cochin-China,' in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 823. ' Augustin. ' De Civ. Dei,' xv. 23 : ' Et quoniam creberrima fama est, multique se expertos, vel ab eis qui experti essent, de quorum fide dubitan- dum non esset, audisse confirmant, Silvanos et Faunos, quos vulgo incubos vocant, improbos saepe extitisse mulieribus, et earum appetisse ac peregisse concubitum; et quosdam daemones, quos Dusioe Galli nuncupant, hanc assidue immunditiam et tentare ct efficerc ; plures talesque asseverant, ut hoc negare impudentix videatur ; non hinc aliquid audeo definire, utrum aliqui spiritus . . . possint etiam hanc pati libidinem ; ut . . . . sentien- tibus feminibus misceantur.' See also Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 449, 479 ; Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 332 ; Cockayne, ' Leechdoms of Early England,' vol. i. p. xxxviii., vol. ii. p. 345. INCUBI AND SUCCUBI. accepted accusation against ' many persons of both sexes, forgetful of their own salvation, and falling away from the Catholic faith.' The practical outcome of this belief is known to students who have traced the consequence of the Papal Bull in the legal manual of the witchcraft tribunals, drawn up by the three appointed Inquisitors, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum ; and have followed the results of this again into those dreadful records which relate in their bald matter-of-fact phraseology the confessions of the crime of diabolic intercourse, wrung from the wretched victims worked on by threat and persuasion in the intervals of the rack, till enough evidence was accumulated for clear judg- ment, and sentence of the stake. 1 I need not dwell on the mingled obscenity and horror of these details, which here only have their bearing on the history of animism. But it will aid the ethnographer to understand the relation of modern to savage philosophy, if he will read Richard Bur- ton's seriously believing account in the ' Anatomy of Melan- choly/ where he concludes with acquiescence in a declara- tion lately made by Lipsius, that on the showing of daily narratives and judicial sentences, in no age had these lecherous demons appeared in such numbers as in his own time and this was about A.D. i6oo. 2 In connexion with the nightmare and the incubus, another variety of nocturnal demon requires notice, the vampire. Inasmuch as certain patients arc seen becoming day by day, without apparent cause, thin, weak, and bloodless, savage animism is called upon to produce a satisfactory explana- tion, and does so in the doctrine that there exist certain demons which cat out the souls or hearts or suck the blood of their victims. The Polynesians said that it was the 1 The ' Malleus Maleficarum ' was published about 1489. See on the general subject, Horst, ' Zauber-Bibliothek,' vol. vi. ; Ennemoser, ' Magic,' vol. ii. ; Maury, ' Magie,' &c. p. 256 ; Lecky, ' Hist, of Rationalism,' vol. i. * Burton, ' Anatomy of Melancholy,' iii. 2. ' Unum dixt-ro, non opinari me ullo retro aevo tantam copiam Satyrorum, ct snlacium istorum Geniorum se ostendisse, quantum mine quotidians? narrntioncs, et judiciaks sentcntizc proferunt.' IQ2 ANIMISM. departed souls (tii) which quitted the graves and grave-idols to creep by night into the houses, and devour the heart and entrails of the sleepers, and these died. 1 The Karens tell of the ' kephu,' which is a wizard's stomach going forth in the shape of a head and entrails, to devour the souls of men, and they die. 1 The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula have their ' hantu penyadin ; ' he is a water-demon, with a dog's head and an alligator's mouth, who sucks blood from men's thumbs and great toes, and they die.* It is in Sla- vonia and Hungary that the demon blood-suckers have their principal abode, and to this district belongs their special name of vampire, Polish upior, Russian />>. There is a whole literature of hideous vampire-stories, which the stu- dent will find elaborately discussed in Calmet. The shortest way of treating the belief is to refer it directly to the prin- ciples of savage animism. We shall see that most of its details fall into their places at once, and that vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts of wasting disease. As to their nature and physical action, there are two principal theories, but both keep close to the original animistic idea of spiritual beings, and consider these demons to be human souk. The first theory is that the soul of a living man, often a sorcerer, leaves its proper body asleep and goes forth, perhaps in the visible form of a straw or fluff of down, slips through keyholes and attacks its sleep- ing victim. If the sleeper should wake in time to clutch this tiny soul-embodiment, he may through it have his revenge by maltreating or destroying its bodily owner. Some say these ' mury ' come by night to men, sit upon their breasts and suck their blood, while others think it is only children's blood they suck, they being to grown people mere nightmares. Here we have the actual phenomenon of nightmare, adapted to a particular purpose. The second 1 J. R. Forstcr, ' Observations during Voyage round World,' p. 543. 1 Cross, ' Karens,' I.e. p. 312. * ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 307. VAMPIRES. 193 theory is that the soul of a dead man goes out from its buried corpse and sucks the blood of living men. The victim becomes thin, languid, and bloodless, falls into a rapid decline and dies. Here again is actual experience, but a new fancy is developed to complete the idea. The corpse thus supplied by its returning soul with blood, is imagined to remain unnaturally fresh and supple and ruddy ; and accordingly the means of detecting a vampire is to open his grave, where the reanimated corpse may be found to bleed when cut, and even to move and shriek. One way to lay a vampire is to stake down the corpse (as with suicides and with the same intention) ; but the more effec- tual plan is to behead and burn it. This is the substance of the doctrine of vampires. Still, as one order of demons is apt to blend into others, the vampire-legends are much mixed with other animistic folklore. Vampires appear in the character of the poltergeist or knocker, as causing those disturbances in houses which modern spiritualism refers in like manner to souls of the departed. Such was the ghost of a certain surly peasant who came out of his grave in the island of Mycone in 1700, after he had been buried but two days ; he came into the houses, upset the furniture, put the lamps out, and carried on his tricks till the whole population went wild with terror. Tournefort happened to be there and was present at the exhumation ; his account is curious evidence of the way an excited mob could persuade themselves, without the least foundation of fact, that the body was warm and its blood red. Again, the blood-sucker is very generally described under the Slavonic names of werewolf (wilkodlak, brukolaka, &c.); the descriptions of the two creatures are inextricably mixed up, and a man whose eyebrows meet, as if his soul were taking flight like a butterfly, to enter some other body, may be marked by this sign either as a werewolf or a vam- pire. A modern account of vampirism in Bulgaria well illustrates the nature of spirits as conceived in such beliefs as these. A sorcerer armed with a saint's picture will hunt 194 ANIMISM. a vampire into a bottle containing some of the filthy food that the demon loves ; as soon as he is fairly inside he is corked down, the bottle is thrown into the fire, and the vampire disappears for ever. 1 As to the savage visionary and the phantoms he beholds, the Greenlander preparing f6r the profession of sorcerer may stand as type, when, rapt in contemplation in his desert solitude, emaciated by fasting and disordered by fits, he sees before him scenes with figures of men and animals, which he believes to be spirits. Thus it is interesting to read the descriptions by Zulu converts of the dreadful creatures which they see in moments of intense religious exaltation, the snake with great eyes and very fearful, the leopard creeping stealthily, the enemy approaching with his long assagai in his hand these coming one after another to the place where the man has gone to pray in secret, and striving to frighten him from his knees. 2 Thus the visionary temptations of the Hindu ascetic and the mediaeval saint are happening in our own day, though their place is now rather in the medical handbook than in the record of miracle. Like the disease-demons and the oracle-demons, these spiritual groups have their origin not in fancy, but in real phenomena interpreted on animistic principles. In the dark especially, harmful spirits swarm. Round native Australian encampments, Sir George Grey used to see the bush dotted with little moving points of fire ; these were the firesticks carried by the old women sent to look after the young ones, but who dared not quit the firelight without a brand to protect them from the evil spirits. 1 So South American Indians would carry brands or torches for fear of evil demons when they ventured into the dark. 4 1 J. V. Grohmann, ' Aberglauben aus Bohmen,' &c., p. 24 ; Calmet, ' Diss. sur les Esprits,' vol. ii.; Grimm, 'D.M.' p. 1048, &c. ; St. Clair and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 49 ; see Ralston, ' Songs of Russian People/ p. 409. * Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 268. Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 246, &c. * Grey, ' Australia,' vol. ii. p. 302. See. also Bonwick, ' Tasmanians,' p. I So. 4 Southey, 'Brazil,' part i. p. 23%. See also Rochefort, p. 418; J. G. HAUNTING DEMONS. Tribes of the Malay Peninsula light fires near a mother at childbirth, to scare away the evil spirits. 1 Such notions extend to higher levels of civilization. In Southern India, where for fear of pervading spirits only pressing need will induce a man to go abroad after sundown, the unlucky wight who has to venture into the dark will carry a fire- brand to keep off the spectral foes. Even in broad day- light, the Hindu lights lamps to keep off the demons,* a ceremony which is to be noticed again at a Chinese wed- ding. 3 In Europe, the details of the use of fire to drive off demons and witches are minute and explicit. The ancient Norse colonists in Iceland carried fire round the lands they intended to occupy, to expel the evil spirits. Such ideas have brought into existence a whole group of Scandinavian customs, still remembered in the country, but dying out in practice. Till a child is baptized, the fire must never be let out, lest the trolls should be able to steal the infant; a live coal must be cast after the mother as she goes to be churched, to prevent the trolls from carrying her off bodily or bewitching her ; a live coal is to be thrown after a troll- wife or witch as she quits a house, and so forth. 4 Into modern times, the people of the Hebrides continued to protect the mother and child from evil spirits, by carrying fire round them. 5 In modern Bulgaria, on the Feast of St. Demetrius, lighted candles are placed in the stables and the wood-shed, to prevent evil spirits from entering into Miiller, p. 273 (Caribs) ; Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 301 ; Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 140. 1 ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. pp. 270, 298 ; vol. ii. ' N. S.' p. 1 17. * Roberts, ' Oriental Illustrations,' p. 531 ; Colebrook in ' As. Res.' vol. vii. p. 274. 8 Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. i. p. 77. 4 Hylten-Cavallius, ' Warend och Wirdarne,' vol. i. p. 191 ; Atkinson, ' Glossary of Cleveland Dial.' p. 597. [Prof. Liebrecht, in ' Zeitschrift fur Ethnologic,' vol. v. 1873, p. 99, adds comparison of the still usual German custom of keeping a light burning in the lying-in room till the child is baptized (Wuttke, 2nd ed. No. 583), and the similar ancient Roman practice whence the goddess Candelifera had her name (note to 2nd. ed.).] 6 Martin, ' Western Islands,' in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 612. 196 ANIMISM. the domestic animals. 1 Nor did this ancient idea remain a mere lingering notion of peasant folklore. Its adoption by the Church is obvious in the ceremonial benediction of candles in the Roman Ritual : ' Ut quibuscumque locis accensae, sive positae fuerint, discedant principes tenebra- rum, et contremiscant, et fugiant pavidi cum omnibus ministris suis ab habitationibus illis, &c.' The metrical translation of Naogeorgus shows perfectly the retention of primitive animistic ideas in the middle ages : .... a wondrous force and might Doth in these candels lie, which if at any time they light, They sure beleve that neyther storm or tempest dare abide, Nor thunder in the skies be heard, nor any devil's spide, Nor fearefull sprightes that walke by night, nor hurts of frost or haile.' Animals stare and startle when we see no cause ; is it that they see spirits invisible to man ? Thus the Green- lander says that the seals and wildfowl are scared by spectres, which no human eye but the sorcerer's can be- hold ; 3 and thus the Khonds hold that their flitting ethereal gods, invisible to man, are seen by beasts. 4 The thought holds no small place in the folklore of the world. Telemachos could not discern Athene standing near him, for not to all do the gods visibly appear ; but Odysseus saw her, and the dogs, and they did not bark, but with low whine slunk across the dwelling to the further side. 8 So in old Scandinavia, the dogs could see Hela the death- goddess move unseen by men ; so Jew and Moslem, hearing the dogs howl, know that they have seen the Angel of Death come on his awful errand; 7 while the 1 St. Clair and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 44. * Rituale Romanum ; Benedictio Candelarum. Brand, ' Popular Antiqui- ties,' vol. i. p. 46. Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 267, see 296. Macpherson, ' India,' p. 100. Homer, Odyss, xvi. 160. Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 632. Eisenmenger, ' Judenthum,' part i. p. 872. Lane, ' Thousand and One Nights,' vol. ii. p. 56. SPIRIT MATERIAL SUBSTANCE. 197 beliefs that animals see spirits, and that a dog's melancholy howl means death somewhere near, are still familiar to our own popular superstition. Another means by which men may detect the presence of invisible spirits, is to adopt the thief-catcher's well-known device of strewing ashes. According to the ideas of a cer- tain stage of animism, a spirit is considered substantial enough to leave a footprint. The following instances relate sometimes to souls, sometimes to other beings. The Philip- pine islanders expected the dead to return on the third day to his dwelling, wherefore they set a vessel of water for him to wash himself clean from the grave-mould, and strewed ashes to see footprints. 1 A more elaborate rite forms part of the funeral customs of the Hos of North-East India. On the evening of a death, the near relatives perform the ceremony of calling the dead. Boiled rice and a pot of water are placed in an inner room, and ashes sprinkled from thence to the threshold. Two relatives go to the place where the body was burnt, and walk round it beating ploughshares and chanting a plaintive dirge to call the spirit home ; while two others watch the rice and water to see if they are disturbed, and look for the spirit-footsteps in the ashes. If a sign appears, it is received with shivering horror and weeping, the mourners outside coming in to join. Till the survivors are thus satisfied of the spirit's return, the rite must be repeated. 2 In Yucatan there is mention of the custom of leaving a child alone at night in a place strewn with ashes ; if the footprint of an animal were found next morning, this animal was the guardian deity of the child. 3 Beside this may be placed the Aztec ceremony at the second festival of the Sun-god Tezcatlipoca, when they sprinkled maize-flour before his sanctuary, and his 1 Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 162. Other localities in ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iv. p. 333. * Tickell in ' Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. ix. p. 795. The dirge is given above, p. 32. 3 De Brasses, ' Dieux Fetiches,' p. 46. 198 ANIMISM. high-priest watched till he beheld the divine footprints, and then shouted to announce, ' Our great god is come.' l Among such rites in the Old World, the Talmud contains a salient instance ; there are a great multitude of devils, it is said; and he who will be aware of them let him take sifted ashes and strew them by his bed, and in the early morning he shall see as it were marks of cocks' feet. 1 This is an idea that has widely spread in the modern world, as where in German folklore the little ' earth- men ' make footprints like a duck's or goose's in the strewn ashes. Other marks, too, betoken the passage of spirit-visitors ; * and as for ghosts, our own superstition is among the most striking of the series. On St. Mark's Eve, ashes are to be sifted over the hearth, and the foot- prints will be seen of any one who is to die within the year ; many mischievous wight has made a superstitious family miserable by slily coming down stairs and marking the print of some one's shoe. 4 Such details as these may justify us in thinking that the lower races are apt to ascribe to spirits in general that kind of ethereal materiality which we have seen they attribute to souls. Explicit statements on the subject are scarce till we reach the level of early Christian theology. The ideas of Tertullian and Origen, as to the thin yet not immaterial substance of angels and demons, probably represent the conceptions of primitive animism far more clearly than the doctrine which Calmet lays down with the weight of theological dogma, that angels, demons, and disembodied souls are pure im- material spirit ; but that when by divine permission spirits appear, act, speak, walk, eat, they must produce tangible bodies by either condensing the air, or substituting 1 Clavigero, ' Messico,' vol. ii. p. 79. 1 Tractat. Berachoth. * Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 420, 1117; St. Clair and Brophy, 'Bulgaria,' p. 54. See also Bastian, ' Mensch.' vol. ii. p. 325 ; Tschudi, ' Peru,' vol. ii. P- 355- * Brand, ' Popular Antiquities,' vol. i. p. 193. See Boeder, ' Ehsten Abergl.' p. 73. SPIRIT MATERIAL SUBSTANCE. 199 other terrestrial solid bodies capable of performing these functions. 1 No wonder that men should attack such material beings by material means, and even sometimes try to rid them- selves by a general clearance from the legion of ethereal beings hovering around them. As the Australians annually drive from their midst the accumulated ghosts of the last year's dead, so the Gold Coast negroes from time to time turn out with clubs and torches to drive the evil spirits from their towns ; rushing about and beating the air with frantic howling, they drive the demons into the woods, and then come home and sleep more easily, and for a while afterwards enjoy better health. 2 When a baby was born in a Kalmuk horde, the neighbours would rush about crying and brandishing cudgels about the tents, to drive off the harmful spirits who might hurt mother and child. 3 Keep- ing up a closely allied idea in modern Europe, the Bohe- mians at Pentecost, and the Tyrolese on Walpurgisnacht, hunt the witches, invisible and imaginary, out of house and stall. 4 Closely allied to the doctrine of souls, and almost rival- ling it in the permanence with which it has held its place through all the grades of animism, is the doctrine of patron, guardian, or familiar spirits. These are beings specially attached to individual men, soul-like in their nature, and sometimes considered as actually being human souls. These beings have, like all others of the spiritual world as originally conceived, their reason and purpose. The special functions which they perform are twofold. First, while man's own proper soul serves him for the ordinary purposes of life and thought, there are times when powers 1 Tertullian, De Came Christ!, vi. ; Adv. Marcion, ii. ; Origen, De Princip. i. 7. See Horst, I.e. Calmet, ' Dissertation,' vol. i. ch. xlvi. 1 J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr." p. 217. See Bosman, ' Guinea,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 402. * Pallas, ' Reisen,' vol. i. p. 360. 4 Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 1212; Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' p. 119; see Hylte'n-Cavallius, part i. p. 178 (Sweden). 2OO ANIMISM. and impressions out of the course of the mind's normal action, and words that seem spoken to him by a voice from without, messages of mysterious knowledge, of counsel or warning, seem to indicate the intervention of as it were a second superior soul, a familiar demon. And as enthu- siasts, seers, sorcerers, are the men whose minds most often show such conditions, so to these classes more than to others the informing and controlling patron-spirits are attached. Second, while the common expected events of daily life pass unnoticed as in the regular course of things, such events as seem to fall out with especial reference to an individual, demand an intervening agent ; and thus the decisions, discoveries, and deliverances, which civilized men variously ascribe to their own judgment, to luck, and to special interposition of Providence, are accounted for in the lower culture by the action of the patron-spirit or guardian-genius. Not to crowd examples from all the dis- tricts of animism to which this doctrine belongs, let us follow it by a few illustrations from the lower grades of savagery upward. Among the Watchandis of Australia, it is held that when a warrior slays his first man, the spirit of the dead enters the slayer's body and becomes his 'woo- rie' or warning spirit; taking up its abode near his liver, it informs him by a scratching or tickling sensation of the approach of danger. 1 In Tasmania, Dr. Milligan heard a native ascribe his deliverance from an accident to the preserving care of his deceased father's spirit, his guardian angel.* That the most important act of the North American Indian's religion is to obtain his individual patron genius or deity, is well known. Among the Esqui- maux, the sorcerer qualifies for his profession by getting a ' torngak ' or spirit which will henceforth be his familiar demon, and this spirit may be the soul of a deceased parent.* In Chili, as to guardian spirits, it has been re- 1 Oldfield, ' Abor. of Australia,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. Hi. p. 240. * Bon wick, ' Tasmanians,' p. 182. 8 Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 268 ; Egcde, p. 187. GUARDIAN SPIRITS. 201 marked that every Araucanian imagines he has one in his service ; ' I keep my amchi-malghen (guardian nymph) still/ being a common expression when they succeed in any undertaking. 1 The Caribs display the doctrine well in both its general and special forms. On the one hand, there is a guardian deity for each man, which accompanies his soul to the next life ; on the other hand, each sorcerer has his familiar demon, which he evokes in mysterious dark- ness by chants and tobacco-smoke ; and when several sorcerers call up their familiars together, the consequence is apt to be a quarrel among the demons, and a fight. 2 In Africa, the negro has his guardian spirit how far identified with what Europeans call soul or conscience, it may be hard to determine ; but he certainly looks upon it as a being separate from himself, for he summons it by sorcery, builds a little fetish-hut for it by the wayside, rewards and propitiates it by libation? of liquor and bits of food. 3 In Asia, the Mongols, each with his patron genius, 4 and the Laos sorcerers who can send their familiar spirits into others' bodies to cause disease, 8 are examples equally to the purpose. Among the Aryan nations of Northern Europe, 8 the old doctrine of man's guardian spirit may be traced, and in classic Greece and Rome it renews with philosophic elo- quence and cultured custom the ideas of the Australian and the African. The thought of the spiritual guide and protector of the individual man is happily defined by Menander, who calls the attendant genius, which each man has from the hour of birth, the good mystagogue (i.e. the novice's guide to the mysteries) of this life. 1 Molina, ' Chili,' vol. ii. p. 86. * Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' pp. 416, 429; J. G. Miiller, ' Amer. Urrel.' pp. 171,217. 8 Waitz, vol. ii. p. 182 ; J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' p. 387 ; Stcinhauser, I.e. p. 134. Compare Callaway, p. 327, &c. * Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 77. * Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 275. * Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 829 ; Rochholz, ' Deutscher Glaube,' part i. p. 92 ; Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 247. II. 2O2 ANIMISM. " Pi.Tra.vri Sai/uDV aVSpi Ev#vs yvo/*ev<|) fiixrraywybs TOU /Stow. Aya#oV KaKciv yap Saifiov ov vopurrfov Etvat TOV j3tov jSXaTTTOvra XP 1 ?O~''<>'' Havra ya/> Act dyaflbv efvai TOV 6eov. The divine warning voice which Sokrates used to hear, is a salient example of the mental impressions leading to the belief in guardian spirits. 1 In the Roman world, the doctrine came to be accepted as a philosophy of human life. Each man had his ' genius natalis,' associated with him from birth to death, influencing his action and his fate, standing represented by its proper image as a lar among the household gods ; and at weddings and joyous times, and especially on the anniversary of the birthday when genius and man began their united career, worship was paid with song and dance to the divine image, adorned with garlands, and propitiated with incense and libations of wine. The demon or genius was, as it were, the man's companion soul, a second spiritual ego. The Egyptian astrologer warned Antonius to keep far from the young Octavius, ' for thy demon,' said he, ' is in fear of his ; ' and truly in after years that genius of Augustus had be- come an imperial deity, by whom Romans swore solemn oaths, not to be broken. 1 The doctrine which could thus personify the character and fate of the individual man, proved capable of a yet further development. Converting into animistic entities the inmost operations of the human mind, a dualistic philosophy conceived as attached to every mortal a good and an evil genius, whose efforts through lif e drew him backward and forward toward virtue and vice, happiness and misery. It was the kakodaimSn of Brutus 1 Menander, 205, in Clement. Stromat. ; Xenophon, Memor. Socr. ; Plato, Apol. Socr. &c. See Plotin. Ennead. iii. 4 ; Porphyr. Plotin. * Paulus Diaconus : ' Genium appellant Deum, qui vim obtineret rerum omnium generandarum.' Censorin. de Die Natali, 3 : ' Eundem esse genium et larem, multi veteres memoria? prodiderunt.' Tibull. Eleg. i. 2, 7 ; Ovid. Trist. iii. 13, 18, v. 5, 10 ; Horat. Epist. ii. I, 140, Od. iv. n, 7. Appian. de Belli* Parth. p. 156. Tertullian, Apol. xxiii. FAMILIAR SPIRITS. 2O3 which appeared to him by night in his tent : ' I am thy evil genius,' it said, ' we meet again at Philippi.' 1 As we study the shapes which the attendant spirits of the individual man assumed in early and mediaeval Christendom, it is plain that the good and evil angels contending for man from birth to death, the guardian angel watching and pro- tecting him, the familiar spirit giving occult knowledge or serving with magic art, continue in principle, and even in detail, the philosophy of earlier culture. Such beings even take visible form. St. Francisca had a familiar angel, not merely that domestic one that is given as a guardian to every man, but this was as it were a boy of nine years old, with a face more splendid than the sun, clad in a little white tunic ; it was in after years that there came to her a second angel, with a column of splendour rising to the sky, and three golden palm-branches in his hands. Or such attendant beings, though invisible, make their presence evident by their actions, as in Calmet's account of that Cistercian monk whose familiar genius waited on him, and used to get his chamber ready when he was coming back from the country, so that people knew when to expect him home.* There is a pleasant quaintness in Luther's remark concerning guardian angels, that a prince must have a greater, stronger, wiser angel than a count, and a count than a common man. 3 Bishop Bull, in one of his vigorous sermons, thus sums up a learned argument : ' I cannot but judge it highly probable, that every faithful person at least hath his particular good Genius or Angel, appointed by God over him, as the Guardian and Guide of his Life.' But he 1 Serv. in Virg. ^En. vi. 743 : ' Cum nascimur, duos genios sortimur : unus hortatur ad bona, alter depravat ad mala, quibus assistentibus post mortem aut asserimur in meliorem vitam, aut condemnamur in deteriorem.' Horat. Epist. ii. 187; Valer. Max. i. 7; Plutarch, Brutus. See Pauly, ' Real- Encyclop. ; ' Smith's ' Die. of Biog. & Myth.' s.v. ' genius.' * Acta Sanctorum Holland. : S. Francisca Romana ix. Mart. Calmet, ' Dissertation,' ch. iv. xxx. ; Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. pp. 140, 347, vol. iii. p. 10 ; Wright, ' St. Patrick's Purgatory,' p. 33. 3 Rochholz, p. 93. 2O4 ANIMISM. will not insist on the belief, provided that the general ministry of angels be accepted. 1 Swedenborg will go beyond this. ' Every man/ he says, ' is attended by an associate spirit ; for without such an associate, a man would be inca- pable of thinking analytically, rationally, and spiritually.' 1 Yet in the modern educated world at large, this group of beliefs has passed into the stage of survival. The concep- tion of the good and evil genius contending for man through life, indeed, perhaps never had much beyond the idealistic meaning which art and poetry still give it. The traveller in France may hear in our own day the peasant's saluta- tion, ' Bonjour a vous et a votre compagnie ! ' (i.e. your guardian angel). But at the birthday festivals of English children, how few are even aware of the historical sequence, plain as it is, from the rites of the classic natal genius and the mediaeval natal saint ! Among us, the doctrine of guardian angels is to be found in commentaries, and may be sometimes mentioned in the pulpit ; but the once distant conception of a present guardian spirit, acting on each individual man and interfering with circumstances on his behalf, has all but lost its old reality. The familiar demon which gave occult knowledge and did wicked work for the magician, and sucked blood from miserable hags by witch- teats, was two centuries ago as real to the popular mind as the alembic or the black cat with which it was associated. Now, it has been cast down to the limbo of unhallowed superstitions. To turn from Man to Nature. General mention has been made already of the local spirits which belong to mountain and rock and valley, to well and stream and lake, in brief to those natural objects and places which in early ages aroused the savage mind to mythological ideas, such as modern poets in their altered intellectual atmosphere strive 1 Bull, ' Sermons,' 2nd cd. London, 1714, vol. ii. p. 506. * Swedenborg, ' True Christian Religion,' p. 380. See also A. J. Davis, ' Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse,' p. 38. ' D. Monnier, ' Traditions Populaires,' p. 7. NATURE-SPIRITS. 2O5 to reproduce. In discussing these imaginary beings, it is above all things needful to bring our minds into sympathy with the lower philosophy. Here we must seek to realize to the utmost the definition of the Nature-Spirits, to under- stand with what distinct and full conviction savage philo- sophy believes in their reality, to discern how, as living causes, they can fill their places and do their daily work in the natural philosophy of primaeval man. Seeing how the Iroquois at their festivals could thank the invisible aids or good spirits, and with them the trees, shrubs, and plants, the springs and streams, the fire and wind, the sun, moon, and stars in a word, every object that ministered to their wants we may judge what real personality they attached to the myriad spirits which gave animated life to the world around them. 1 The Gold Coast negro's generic name for a fetish-spirit is ' wong ; ' these aerial beings dwell in temple-huts and consume sacrifices, enter into and inspire their priests, cause health and sickness among men, and execute the behests of the mighty Heaven-god. But part or all of them are connected with material objects, and the negro can say, ' In this river, or tree, or amulet, there is a wong.' But he more usually says, ' This river, or tree, or amulet is a wong.' Thus among the wongs of the land are rivers, lakes, and springs, districts of land, termite- hills, trees, crocodiles, apes, snakes, elephants, birds.* In a word, his conceptions of animating souls and presiding spirits as efficient causes of all nature are two groups of ideas which we may well find it hard to distinguish, for the sufficient reason that they are but varying developments of the same fundamental animism. In the doctrine of nature-spirits among nations which have reached a higher grade of culture, are found at once traces of such primitive thought, and of its change under 1 L. H. Morgan, ' Iroquois,' p. 64. Brebeuf in ' Rel. des Je"s.' 1636, p. 107. See Schoolcraft, ' Tribes,' vol. iii. p. 337. 1 Steinhauser, ' Religion des Negers,' in ' Magazin der Evang. Misiionen,' Basel, 1856; No. 2, p. 127, &c. 206 ANIMISM. new intellectual conditions. Knowing the thoughts of rude Turanian tribes of Siberia as to pervading spirits of nature, we are prepared to look for remodelled ideas of the same class among a nation whose religion shows plain traces of evolution from the low Turanian stage. The archaic sys- tem of manes-worship and nature-worship, which survives as the state religion of China, fully recognizes the worship of the numberless spirits which pervade the universe. The belief in their personality is vouched for by the sacrifices offered to them. ' One must sacrifice to the spirits,' says Confucius, ' as though they were present at the sacrifice.' At the same time, spirits were conceived as embodied in material objects. Confucius says, again : ' The action of the spirits, how perfect is it ! Thou perceivest it, and yet seest it not ! Incorporated or immembered in things, they cannot quit them. They cause men, clean and pure and better clothed, to bring them sacrifice. Many, many, are there of them, as the broad sea, as though they were above and right and left.' Here are traces of such a primi- tive doctrine of personal and embodied nature-spirits as is still at home in the religion of rude Siberian hordes. But it was natural that Chinese philosophers should find means of refining into mere ideality these ruder animistic crea- tions. Spirit (shin), they tell us, is the fine or tender part in all the ten thousand things ; all that is extraordinary or supernatural is called spirit ; the unsearchable of the male and female principles is called spirit ; he who knows the way of passing away and coming to be, he knows the work- ing of spirit. 1 The classic Greeks had inherited from their barbaric an- cestors a doctrine of the universe essentially similar to that of the North American Indian, the West African, and the Siberian. We know, more intimately than the heathen religion of our own land, the ancient Greek scheme of nature-spirits impelling and directing by their personal power and will the functions of the universe, the ancient 1 Plath, ' Religion der alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 44. NATURE-SPIRITS. 207 Greek religion of nature, developed by imagination, adorned by poetry, and consecrated by faith. History records for our instruction, how out of the midst of this splendid and honoured creed there were evolved the germs of the new philosophy. Led by minuter insight and stricter reason, thoughtful Greeks began the piecemeal supersession of the archaic scheme, and set in movement the transformation of animistic into physical science, which thence pervaded the whole cultured world. Such, in brief, is the history of the doctrine of nature-spirits from first to last. Let us endeavour, by classifying some of its principal special groups, to understand its place in the history of the human intellect. What causes volcanos ? The Australians account for volcanic rocks by the tradition that the sulky underground ' ingna ' or demons made great fires and threw up red-hot stones. 1 The Kamchadals say that just as they themselves warm up their winter-houses, so the ' kamuli ' or moun- tain-spirits heat up the mountains in which they dwell, and fling the brands out of the chimney.* The Nicaraguans offered human sacrifices to Masaya or Popogatepec (Smok- ing-Mountain), by throwing the bodies into the crater. It seems as though it were a controlling deity, not the mountain itself, that they worshipped ; for one reads of the chiefs going to the crater, whence a hideous old naked woman came out and gave them counsel and oracle ; at the edge were placed earthen vessels of food to please her, or to appease her when there was a storm or earthquake. 3 Thus animism provided a theory of volcanoes, and so it was likewise with whirlpools and rocks. In the Vei country in West Africa, there is a dangerous rock on the Mafa river, which is never passed without offering a tribute to the spirit of the flood a leaf of tobacco, a handful of rice, or 1 Oldfield, ' Abor. of Austr.' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 232. * Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' pp. 47, 265. * Oviedo, ' Nicaragua,' in Ternaux-Compans, part xiv. pp. 132, 160. Com- pare Catlin, ' N. A. Ind.' vol. ii. p. 169. 208 ANIMISM. a drink of rum. 1 An early missionary account of a rock- demon worshipped by the Huron Indians will show with what absolute personality savages can conceive such a being. In the hollow of a certain sacred rock, it is related, dwells an ' oki ' or spirit who can give success to travellers, wherefore they put tobacco into one of the cracks, and pray thus : ' Demon who dwellest in this place, behold tobacco I present to thee ; help us, keep us from shipwreck, defend us against our enemies, and vouchsafe that when we have made a good trade, we may return safe and sound to our village.' Father Marquette relates how, travelling on a river in the then little known region of North America, he was told of a dreadful place to which the canoe was just drawing near, where dwells a demon waiting to devour such as dare to approach ; this terrific manitu proved on arrival to be some high rocks in the bend of the river, against which the current runs violently. 1 Thus the missionary found in living belief among the savage Indians the very thought which had so long before passed into the classic tale of Skylla and Charybdis. In those moments of the civilized man's life when he casts off hard dull science, and returns to childhood's fancy, the world-old book of animated nature is open to him anew. Then the well-worn thoughts come back fresh to him, of the stream's life that is so like his own ; once more he can see the rill leap down the hillside like a child, to wander playing among the flowers ; or can follow it as, grown to a river, it rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in sluggish strength to carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all that water does, the poet's fancy can discern its personality of life. It gives fish to the fisher, and crops to the husbandman ; it swells in fury and lays waste the land ; it grips the bather with chill 1 Creswick, ' Veys,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 359. See Du Chaillu, ' Ashango-land,' p. 106. 1 Brebeuf in ' Rel. des JeV 1636, p. 108. Long's Exp. vol. i. p. 46. See Loskiel, ' Indians of N. A.' part i. p. 45. WATER-WORSHIP. 209 and cramp, and holds with inexorable grasp its drowning victim : l " Tweed said to Till, ' What gars ye rin sae still ? ' Till said to Tweed, ' Though ye rin wi' speed, And I rin slaw, Yet, where ye drown ae man, I drown twa.' " What ethnography has to teach of that great element of the religion of mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook and river, is simply this that what is poetry to us was philosophy to early man ; that to his mind water acted not by laws of force, but by life and will ; that the water- spirits of primaeval mythology are as souls which cause the water's rush and rest, its kindness and its cruelty ; that lastly man finds, in the beings which with such power can work him weal and woe, deities with a wider influence over his life, deities to be feared and loved, to be prayed to and praised and propitiated with sacrificial gifts. In Australia, special water-demons infest pools and watering-places. In the native theory of disease and death, no personage is more prominent than the water- spirit, which afflicts those who go into unlawful pools or bathe at unlawful times, the creature which causes women to pine and die, and whose very presence is death to the beholder, save to the native doctors, who may visit the water-spirit's subaqueous abode and return with bleared eyes and wet clothes to tell the wonders of their stay. 1 It would seem that creatures with such attributes come naturally into the category of spiritual beings, but in such stories as that of the bunyip living in the lakes 1 For details of the belief in water-spirits as the cause of drowning, see ante, vol. i. p. 109. * Oldfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. in. p. 328 ; Eyre, vol. ii. p. 362 ; Grey, vol. ii. p. 339 ; Bastian, ' Vorstellungen von Wasser und Feuer,' in 'Zeit- schrift fur Ethnologic ,' vol. i. (contains a general collection of details as to water-worship). 2IO ANIMISM. and rivers and seen floating as big as a calf, which carries off native women to his retreat below the waters, there appears that confusion between the spiritual water-demon and the material water-monster, which runs on into the midst of European mythology in such conceptions as that of the water-kelpie and the sea-serpent. 1 America gives cases of other principal animistic ideas concerning water. The water has its own spirits, writes Cranz, among the Greenlanders, so when they come to an untried spring, an angekok or the oldest man must drink first, to free it from a harmful spirit.* ' 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 Su- perior or the banks of the Mississippi, or any other 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 fish, and they threw maize into the stream as a propitiatory offering ; even to this day the Indians of the Cordilleras perform the ceremonial sip before they will pass a river on foot or hoiseback. 4 Africa displays well the 1 Compare John Morgan, ' Life of William Buckley ' ; Bonwick, p. 203 ; Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 48, with Forbes Leslie, Brand, &c. 1 Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 267. Tanner, ' Narr.' p. 341 ; Carver, ' Travels,' p. 383 ; Franklin, ' Journey to Polar Sea,' vol. ii. p. 245 ; Lubbock, ' Origin of Civilization,' pp. 213-20 (contains details as to water-worship) ; see Brinton, p. 124. Rivero and Tschudi, ' Peruvian Ant.' p. 161 ; Garcilaso de la Vega, WATER- WORSHIP. 211 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 hand- fuls of millet or the entrails of a" slaughtered ox. 1 Not less strongly marked are such ideas among the Tatar races of the North. Thus the Ostyaks venerate the river Ob, and when fish is scanty will hang a stone about a reindeer's neck and cast it in for a sacrifice. Among the Buraets, 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 sacri- fices of milk and butter and the fat of the animals which they burn on the altars. So across in Northern Europe, almost every Esthonian village has its sacred sacrificial spring. The Esths could at times even see the churl with blue and yellow stockings rise from the holy brook Woh- handa, no doubt that same spirit of the brook to whom in older days there were sacrificed beasts and little children ; in newer times, when a German landowner dared to build a mill and dishonour the sacred water, there came bad seasons that lasted year after year, and the country people burned down the abominable thing. 2 As for the water-worship prevailing among non-Aryan indigenes of British India, it ' Comm. Real.' i. 10. Sec also J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 258, 260, 282. 1 Krapf, ' E. Afr.' p. 198 ; Steinhauser, I.e. p. 131 ; Villault in Astley, vol. i. p. 668 ; Backhouse, ' Afr.' p. 230 ; Callaway, ' Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 90 ; Bastian, I.e. 1 Castren, ' Vorlesungen iiber die Altaischen Volker,' p. 114. 'Finn. Myth.' p. 70. Atkinson, ' Siberia,' p. 444. Boeder, ' Ehsten Aberglaub. Gebrauche,' ed. Kreutzwald, p. 6. 212 ANIMISM. seems to reach its climax among the Bodo and Dhimal of the North-East, tribes to whom the local rivers are the local deities, 1 so that men worship according to their water-sheds, and the map is a pantheon. Nor is such reverence strange to Aryan nations. To the modern Hindu, looking as he still does on a river as a living personal being to be adored and sworn by, the Ganges is no solitary water deity, but only the first and most familiar of the long list of sacred streams. 2 Turn to the classic world, and we but find the beliefs and rites of a lower barbaric culture holding their place, consecrated by venerable an- tiquity and glorified by new poetry and art. 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 : Ovre TIS o$v IIoTa/ia)v dirfTjv, vocrfi Qfceavoia, OUT' apa Nu/w/xxwv rat T* aAxrta *aAa ve/^ovrat, Kat Tn/yas Trora/iwv, KCU wwrca ironjevra. EA0OJ/T4S 8' ? 8w/^ia Aids ve<t>e\r)yepeTao, , as Ait irarpi 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 pre- vailed 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 : 1 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' p. 164; Hunter, 'Rural Bengal.' p. 184. See also Lubbock, I.e. ; Forbes Leslie, ' Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i. p. 163, vol. ii. p. 497. 1 Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 206, Ac. WATER-WORSHIP. 213 "H<ai<rre, (r\eo t Tfxvov dya/<A.es' ov yap 'Addvarov $ebv a>8e /Sporwv "12s f<f>ad'' "H<awrTos "A^oppov 8' apa KVfia KaTr<rvTO xaAa pt To beings thus conceived in personal divinity, full wor- ship was given. Odysseus invokes the river of Scheria ; Skamandros had his priest and Spercheios his grove ; and sacrifice was done to the rival of Herakles, the river-god Acheloos, eldest of the three thousand river-children of old Okeanos. 1 Through the ages of the classic world, the river-gods and the water-nymphs held their places, till within the bounds of Christendom they came to be classed with ideal beings like them in the mythology of the northern nations, the kindly sprites to whom offerings were given at springs and lakes, and the treacherous nixes who entice men to a watery death. In times of transition, the new Christian authorities made protest against the old worship, passing laws to forbid adoration and sacrifice to fountains as when Duke Bretislav forbade the still half -pagan country folk of Bohemia to offer libations and sacrifice victims at springs, 8 and in England Ecgbert's Poenitentiale proscribed the like rites, 'if any man vow or bring his offerings to any well,' ' if one hold his vigils at any well.' 3 But the old veneration was too strong to be put down, and with a varnish of Christianity and some- times the substitution of a saint's name, water- worship has held its own to our day. The Bohemians will go to pray on the river-bank where a man has been drowned, and there they will cast in an offering, a loaf of new bread and a pair of wax-candles. On Christmas Eve they will put 1 Homer, II. xx. xxi. . See Gladstone, ' Ju vent us Mundi,' pp. 190, 345, &c., &c. * Cosmas, book iii. p. 197, ' supers titios as institutiones, quas villani adhuc semipagani in Pentecosten tertia give quarta feria observabant offerentes libamina super fontes mactabant victimas et da^monibus immolabant.' 3 Poenitentiale Ecgbcrti, ii. 22, 'gif hwilc man his aelmessan gehate oththe bringe to hwilcon wylle ; ' iv. 19, ' gif hwa his wxccan zt xnigum wylle hzbbe.' Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 54.9, &c. See Hylten-Cavallius, ' Warend och Wirdarne,' part i. pp. 131, 171 (Sweden). 214 ANIMISM. a spoonful of each dish on a plate, and after supper throw the food into the well, with an appointed formula, some- what thus : ' House-father gives thee greeting, Thee by me entreating : Springlet, share our feast of Yule, But give us water to the full ; When the land is plagued with drought, Drive it with thy well-spring out.' l It well shows the unchanged survival of savage thought in modern peasants' minds, to find still in Slavonic lands the very same fear of drinking a harmful spirit in the water, that has been noticed among the Esquimaux. It is a sin for a Bulgarian not to throw some water out of every bucket brought from the fountain; some elemental spirit might be floating on the surface, and if not thrown out, might take up his abode in the house, or enter into the body of some one drinking from the vessel.* Elsewhere in Europe, the list of still existing water-rites may be extended. The ancient lake-offerings of the South of France seem not yet forgotten in La Lozere, the Bretons venerate as of old their sacred springs, and Scotland and Ireland can show in parish after parish the sites and even the actual survivals of such observance at the holy wells. Perhaps Welshmen no longer offer cocks and hens to St. Tecla at her sacred well and church of Llandegla, but Cornish folk still drop into the old holy- wells offerings of pins, nails, and rags, expecting from their waters cure for disease, and omens from their bubbles as to health and marriage.* The spirits of the tree and grove no less deserve our 1 Grohmann, ' Aberglauben aus Bohmen und Mahren,' p. 43, &c Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 291, &c. Ralston, ' Songs of Russian People,' p. 139, &c. 1 St. Clair and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 46. Similar ideas in Grohmann, p. 44. Eisenmenger, ' Entd. Judenthum,' part i. p. 426. 8 Maury, 'Magic,' &c., p. 158. Brand, * rp. Ant." vol. ii. p. 366, &c. Hunt, ' Pop. Rom. 2nd Series,' p. 40, &c. Forbes Leslie, ' Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i. p. 1 56, &c. TREE- WORSHIP. 215 study for their illustrations of man's primitive animistic theory of nature. This is remarkably displayed in that stage of thought where the individual tree is regarded as a conscious personal being, and as such receives adoration and sacrifice. Whether such a tree is looked on as in- habited, like a man, by its own proper life or soul, or as possessed, like a fetish, by some other spirit which has entered it and uses it for a body, is often hard to deter- mine. Shelley's lines well express a doubting conception familiar to old barbaric thought ' Whether the sensitive plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say.' But this vagueness is yet again a proof of the principle which I have confidently put forward here, that the conceptions of the inherent soul and of the embodied spirit are but modi- fications of one and the same deep-lying animistic thought. The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula believe in ' hantu kayu,' i.e. ' tree-spirits,' or ' tree-demons,' which fre- quent every species of tree, and afflict men with diseases ; some trees are noted for the malignity of their demons. 1 Among the Dayaks of Borneo, certain trees possessed by spirits must not be cut down ; if a missionary ventured to fell one, any death that happened afterwards would naturally be set down to this crime. 2 The belief of certain Malays of Sumatra is expressly stated, that certain venerable trees are the residence, or rather the material frame, of spirits of the woods. 3 In the Tonga Islands, we hear of natives laying offerings at the foot of particular trees, with the idea of their being inhabited by spirits. 4 So in America, the Ojibwa medicine-man has heard the tree utter its complaint 1 ' Jourri. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 307. * Becker, ' Dyaks,' in ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. 1 1 1. 8 Marsden, ' Sumatra,' p. 301. 4 S. S. Farmer, ' Tonga,' p. 127. 2l6 ANIMISM. when wantonly cut down. 1 A curious and suggestive description bearing on this point is given in Friar Roman Pane's account of the religion of the Antilles islanders, drawn up by order of Columbus. Certain trees, he declares, were believed to send for sorcerers, to whom they gave orders how to shape their trunks into idols, and these ' cemi ' being then installed in temple-huts, received prayer and inspired their priests with oracles. 1 Africa shows as well-defined examples. The negro woodman cuts down certain trees in fear of the anger of their inhabiting demons, but he finds his way out of the difficulty by a sacrifice to his own good genius, or, when he is giving the first cuts to the great asorin-tree, and its indwelling spirit comes out to chase him, he cunningly drops palm-oil on the ground, and makes his escape while the spirit is licking it up.* A negro was once worshiping a tree with an offering of food, when some one pointed out to him that the tree did not eat ; the negro answered, ' O the tree is not fetish, the fetish is a spirit and invisible, but he has descended into this tree. Certainly he cannot devour our bodily food, but he enjoys its spiritual part and leaves behind the bodily which we see.' 4 Tree-worship is largely prevalent in Africa, and much of it may be of this fully animistic kind ; as where in Whidah Bosnian says that ' the trees, which are the gods of the second rank of this country, are only prayed to and presented with offerings in time of sickness, more especially fevers, in order to restore the patients to health; ' or where in Abyssinia the Gallas made pil- grimage from all quarters to their sacred tree Wodanabe on the banks of the Hawash, worshipping it and praying to it for riches, health, life, and every blessing/ 1 Bastian, ' Der Baum in vergleichender Ethnologic,' in Lazarus and Steiathal's 'Zeitschrift fur Volkerpiychologie,' &c., vol. v. 1868. Chr. Colombo, ch. xix. ; and in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87. Burton, ' W. ic W. fr. W. Afr.' pp. 205, 243. Waitz, vol. ii. p. 188. Bosnian, letter 19, and in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 500. Krapf, ' E. Afr.' p. 77 ; Prichard, ' N. H. of Man,' p. 290 ; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 518. See also Merolla, 'Congo,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 236. TREE-WORSHIP. 217 The position of tree-worship in Southern Asia in relation to Buddhism is of particular interest. To this day there are districts of this region, Buddhist or under strong Buddhist influence, where tree-worship is still displayed with absolute clearness of theory and practice. Here in legend a dryad is a being capable of marriage with a human hero, while in actual fact a tree-deity is considered human enough to be pleased with dolls set up to swing in the branches. The Talein of Burmah, before they cut down a tree, offer prayers to its ' kaluk ' (i.q., ' kelah '), its inhabiting spirit or soul. The Siamese offer cakes and rice to the takhien- tree before they fell it, and believe the inhabiting nymphs or mothers of trees to pass into guardian-spirits of the boats built of their wood, so that they actually go on offering sacrifice to them in this their new condition. 1 These people have indeed little to learn from any other race, however savage, of the principles of the lower animism. The ques- tion now arises, did such tree-worship belong to the local religions among which Buddhism established itself ? There is strong evidence that this was the case. Philosophic Buddhism, as known to us by its theological books, does not include trees among sentient beings possessing mind, but it goes so far as to acknowledge the existence of the ' dewa ' or genius of a tree. Buddha, it is related, told a story of a tree crying out to the brahman carpenter who was going to cut it down, ' I have a word to say, hear my word ! ' but then the teacher goes on to explain that it was not really the tree that spoke, but a dewa dwelling in it. Buddha himself was a tree-genius forty-three times in the course of his transmigrations. Legend says that during one such existence, a certain brahman used to pray for protec- tion to the tree which Buddha was attached to ; but the transformed teacher reproved the tree-worshipper for thus 1 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. pp. 457, 461, vol. iii. pp. 187, 251, 289, 497. For details of tree-worship from other Asiatic districts, see Ainsworth, ' Yezidis,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 23 -, Jno. Wilson, ' Parsi Reli-ion,' p. 262. 2l8 ANIMISM. addressing himself to a senseless thing which hears and knows nothing. 1 As for the famous Bo tree, its miraculous glories are not confined to the ancient Buddhist annals ; for its surviving descendant, grown from the branch of the parent tree sent by King Asoka from India to Ceylon in the 3rd century B.C., to this day receives the worship of the pilgrims who come by thousands to do it honour, and offer prayer before it. Beyond these hints and relics of the old worship, however, Mr. Fergusson's recent investigations, published in his ' Tree and Serpent Worship,' have brought to light an ancient state of things which the ortho- dox Buddhist literature gives little idea of. It appears from the sculptures of the Sanchi tope in Central India, that in the Buddhism of about the ist century A.D., sacred trees had no small place as objects of authorized worship. It is especially notable that the representatives of indigenous race and religion in India, the Nagas, characterized by their tutelary snakes issuing from their backs between their shoulders and curving over their heads, and other tribes actually drawn as human apes, are seen adoring the divine tree in the midst of unquestionable Buddhist surroundings.* Tree-worship, even now well marked among the indigenous tribes of India, was obviously not abolished on the Buddhist conversion. The new philosophic religion seems to have amalgamated, as new religions ever do, with older native thoughts and rites. And it is quite consistent with the habits of the Buddhist theologians and hagiologists, that when tree-worship was suppressed, they should have slurred over the fact of its former prevalence, and should even have used the recollection of it as a gibe against the hostile Brahmans. Conceptions like those of the lower races in character, and rivalling them in vivacity, belong to the mythology of Greece and Rome. The classic thought of the tree in- habited by a deity and uttering oracles, is like that of 1 Hardy, ' Manual of Budhism,' pp. 100, 443. * Fergusson, ' Tree and Serpent Worship,' pi. xxiv. xxvi. <tc. TREE-WORSHIP. 2IQ other regions. Thus the sacred palm of Negra in Yemen, whose demon was propitiated by prayer and sacrifice to give oracular response, 1 or the tall oaks inhabited by the gods, where old Slavonic people used to ask questions and hear the answers, 2 have their analogue in the pro- phetic oak of Dodona, wherein dwelt the deity, 'vaiev 8' tvl TrvOufvt, fayov.' 3 The Homeric hymn to Aphrodite tells of the tree-nymphs, long-lived yet not immortal they grow with their high-topped leafy pines and oaks upon the mountains, but when the lot of death draws nigh, and the lovely trees are sapless, and the bark rots away and the branches fall, then their spirits depart from the light of the sun : fJ.IV at roSe vaifTa.ov(riv opos fieya TC a$eov Tf ai p ovTf 6vT)Tois ovr' ddavdrouru' effovrat" cri Kal a.fjL/3pOTov e?<$ap eSovcrc, i T /icr' dflavuTOMri KaXov \ppov e 8e ^th.rivoi rf KOI fvcrKcnros fj-uryovr' tv </>iAoT?/Ti (J.i>x<i> 8' a^t' fi eAarat >} Spi'es I'l t<J>v<ra.:' ri KaXai, TT)\t8dova'a.i t fv ovptcriv vi/rjAoicrii/ 1 aXA' ore Kev 8r) /xoipa irapea-Tr'jKji OVLVVLTOIO, afaverai fitv irptHtrov eirl x^ovt SevSpea KaAa, </>Aotbs 8* dfji.<f>nrpi<f>6 kvvOtt, Triirrovm &' O.TT' o{bt, TWV 8f & ofiov ^vx>) AttVet </>aos t}eX.ioto.' * The hamadryad's life is bound to her tree, she is hurt when it is wounded, she cries when the axe threatens, she dies with the fallen trunk : ' Non sine hamadryadis fato cadit arborea trabs.' 5 How personal a creature the tree-nymph was to the classic mind, is shown in legends like that of Paraibios, 1 Tabary in Bastian, I.e. p. 295. * Hartknoch, ' Alt. und Neues Preussen,' part i. ch. v. 3 See Pauly, ' Real-Encyclopedic.' Homer. Odyss. xiv. 327, xix. 296. 4 Hymn. Homer. Aphrod. 257. 8 Ausonii Idyll. De^Histor. 7. 22O ANIMISM. whose father, regardless of the hamadryad's entreaties, cut down her ancient trunk, and in himself and in his off- spring suffered her dire vengeance. 1 The ethnographic student finds a curious interest in transformation-myths like Ovid's, keeping up as they do vestiges of philosophy of archaic type Daphne turned into the laurel that Apollo honours for her sake, the sorrowing sisters of Phae- thon changing into trees, yet still dropping blood and crying for mercy when their shoots are torn. 1 Such episodes mediaeval poetry could still adapt, as in the path- less infernal forest whose knotted dusk-leaved trees re- vealed their human animation to the Florentine when he plucked a twig, 4 Allor porti la mano un poco avante, colsi un ramoscel da un gran pruno : ' 1 tronco suo gridd : Perche mi schiant e ? ' * or the myrtle to which Ruggiero tied his hippogrif!, who tugged at the poor trunk till it murmured and oped its mouth, and with doleful voice told that it was Astolfo, enchanted by the wicked Alcina among her other lovers, ' D* entrar o in fera o in fonte o in legno o in sasso.' 4 If these seem to us now conceits over quaint for beauty, we need not scruple to say so. They are not of Dante and Ariosto, they are sham antiques from classic models. And if even the classic originals have become unpleasing, we need not perhaps reproach ourselves with decline of poetic taste. We have lost something, and the loss has spoiled our appreciation of many an old poetic theme, yet it is not always our sense of the beautiful that has dwindled, but the old animistic philosophy of nature that is gone from us, dissipating from such fancies their meaning, and with 1 Apollon. Rhod. Argonautica, ii. 476. See Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. iii. p. 57. * Ovid. Metamm. i. 452, ii. 345, xi. 67. 8 Dante, ' Divina Commedia,' ' Inferno,' canto xiii. 4 Ar<osto, ' Orlando Furioso,' canto vi. TREE-WORSHIP. 221 their meaning their loveliness. Still, if we look for living men to whom trees are, as they were to our distant fore- fathers, the habitations and embodiments of spirits, we shall not look in vain. The peasant folklore of Europe still knows of willows that bleed and weep and speak when hewn, of the fairy maiden that sits within the fir-tree, of that old tree in Rugaard forest that must not be felled, for an elf dwells within, of that old tree on the Heinzenberg near Zell, which uttered its complaint when the woodman cut it down, for in it was Our Lady, whose chapel now stands upon the spot. 1 One may still look on where Fran- conian damsels go to a tree on St. Thomas's Day, knock thrice solemnly, and listen for the indwelling spirit to give answer .by raps from within, what manner of husbands they are to have. 8 In the remarkable document of mythic cosmogony, pre- served by Eusebius under the alleged authorship of the Phoenician Sanchoniathon, is the following passage : ' But these first men consecrated the plants of the earth, and judged them gods, and worshipped the things upon which they themselves lived and their posterity, and all before them, and (to these) they made libations and sacrifices.' 3 From examples such as have been here reviewed, it seems that direct and absolute tree-worship of this kind may in- deed lie very wide and deep in the early history of religion. But the whole tree-cultus of the world must by no means be thrown indiscriminately into this one category. It is only on such distinct evidence as has been here put forward, that a sacred tree may be taken as having a spirit em- bodied irt or attached to it. Beyond this limit, there is a wider range of animistic conceptions connected with tree and forest worship. The tree may be the spirit's perch or shelter or favourite haunt. Under this definition come the 1 Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 61 5, &c. Bastian, ' Der Baum,' I.e. p. 297 ; Hanusch, 4 Slaw. Myth.' p. 313. * Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' p. 57, see 183. 1 Euseb. ' Praep. Evang.' i. 10. 222 ANIMISM. trees hung with objects which are the receptacles of disease- spirits. As places of spiritual resort, there is no real dis- tinction between the sacred tree and the sacred grove. The tree may serve as a scaffold or altar, at once convenient and conspicuous, where offerings can be set out for some spiritual being, who may be a tree-spirit, or perhaps the local deity, living there just as a man might do who had his hut and owned his plot of land around. The shelter of some single tree, or the solemn seclusion of a forest grove, is a place of worship set apart by nature, of some tribes the only temple, of many tribes perhaps the earliest. Lastly, the tree may be merely a sacred object patronized by or associated with or symbolizing some divinity, often one of those which we shall presently notice as presiding over a whole species of trees or other things. How all these conceptions, from actual embodiment or local resi- dence or visit of a demon or deity, down to mere ideal association, can blend together, how hard it often is to distinguish them, and yet how in spite of this confusion they conform to the animistic theology in which all have their essential principles, a few examples will show better than any theoretical comment. 1 Take the groups of malicious wood-fiends so obviously devised to account for the mysterious influences that beset the forest wan- derer. In the Australian bush, demons whistle in the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to seize the wayfarer ; the lame demon leads astray the hunter in the Brazilian forest ; the Karen crossing a fever-haunted jungle shudders in the grip of the spiteful ' phi," and runs to lay an offering by the tree he rested under last, from whose boughs the malaria-fiend came down upon him ; the negro of Senegambia seeks to pacify the long-haired tree-demons that send diseases ; the terrific cry of the wood-demon is heard in the Finland 1 Further details as to tree-worship in Bastian, ' Der Baum,' &c., here cited ; Lubbock, ' Origin of Civilization,' p. 206, &c. ; Fergusson, ' Tree and Serpent Worship,' &c. TREE-WORSHIP. 223 forest ; the baleful shapes of terror that glide at night through our own woodland are familiar still to peasant and poet. 1 The North American Indians of the Far West, entering the denies of the Black Mountains of Nebraska, will often hang offerings on the trees or place them on the rocks, to propitiate the spirits and procure good weather and hunting. 2 In South America, Mr. Darwin describes the Indians offering their adorations by loud shouts when they came in sight of the sacred tree standing solitary on a high part of the Pampas, a landmark visible from afar. To this tree were hanging by threads numberless offerings such as cigars, bread, meat, pieces of cloth, &c., down to the mere thread pulled from his poncho by the poor wayfarer who had nothing better to give. Men would pour libations of spirits and mate into a certain hole, and smoke upwards to gratify Walleechu, and all around lay the bleached bones of the horses slaughtered as sacrifices. All Indians made their offerings here, that their horses might not tire, and that they themselves might prosper. Mr. Darwin reason- ably judges on this evidence that it was to the deity Wal- leechu that the worship was paid, the sacred tree being only his altar ; but he mentions that the Gauchos think the Indians consider the tree as the god itself, a good example of the misunderstanding possible in such cases. 3 The New Zealanders would hang an offering of food or a lock of hair on a branch at a landing place, or near remarkable rocks or trees would throw a bunch of rushes as an offering to the spirit dwelling there. 4 The Dayaks fasten rags of their clothes on trees at cross roads, fearing for their health if they neglect the custom; 5 the Macassar man halting to eat in the forest will put a morsel of rice or fish on a leaf, and lay it on a stone or stump. 8 The divinities of African tribes 1 Bastian, ' Dcr Baum,' I.e. &c. 2 Irving, ' Astoria,' vol. ii. ch. viii. 8 Darwin, ' Journal,' p. 68. 4 Polack, ' NewZ.' vol. ii. p. 6 ; Taylor, p. 171, see 99. 5 St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 89. * Wallace, ' Eastern Archipelago,' vol. i. p. 338. 224 ANIMISM. may dwell in trees remarkable for size and age, or inhabit sacred groves where the priest alone may enter. 1 Trees treated as idols by the Congo people, who put calabashes of palm wine at their feet in case they should be thirsty,* and amongst West African negro tribes farther north, trees hung with rags by the passers-by, and the great baobabs pegged to hang offerings to, and serving as shrines before which sheep are sacrificed, 3 display well the rites of tree sacrifice, though leaving undefined the precise relation conceived between deity and tree. The forest theology that befits a race of hunters is dominant still among Turanian tribes of Siberia, as of old it was across to Lapland. Full well these tribes know the gods of the forest. The Yakuts hang on any remarkably fine tree iron, brass, and other trinkets ; they choose a green spot shaded by a tree for their spring sacrifice of horses and oxen, whose heads are set up in the boughs ; they chant their extemporised songs to the Spirit of the Forest, and hang for him on the branches of the trees along the roadside offerings of horsehair, emblems of their most valued possession. A clump of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur-coats, each set up beneath its great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless reindeer-hides and peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and spoons and snuff-horns and house- hold valuables strewn as offerings before the gods such is the description of a Siberian holy grove, at the stage when the contact of foreign civilization has begun by ornament- ing the rude old ceremonial it must end by abolishing. 4 A race ethnologically allied to these tribes, though risen to higher culture, kept up remarkable relics of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In Esthonian districts, during the last 1 Prichard, ' Nat. Hist, of Man,' p. 531. 2 Merolla in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 236. 8 Lubbock, p. 193 ; Basuan, I.e. ; Park, ' Travels,' vol. i. pp. 64, 106. * Castrin, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 86, &c., 191, &c. ; Latham, ' Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 363 ; Simpson, ' Journey,' vol. ii. p. 261. TREE-WORSHIP. 225 century, the traveller might often see the sacred tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing inviolate in a sheltered spot near the dwelling-house, and old memories are handed down of -the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast was sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back, which stone he kissed thrice when he had said, ' Receive the food as an ofiering ! ' It may well have been an indwelling tree-deity for whom this worship was intended, for folklore shows that the Esths recognized such a conception with the utmost distinctness ; they have a tale of the tree-elf who appeared in personal shape outside his crooked birch- tree, whence he could be summoned by three knocks on the trunk and the inquiry, ' Is the crooked one at home ? ' But also it may have been the Wood-Father or Tree-King, or some other deity, who received sacrifice and answered prayer be- neath his sacred tree, as in a temple. 1 If, again, we glance at the tree-and-grove worship of the non- Aryan indigenous tribes of British India, we shall gather clear and instructive hints of its inner significance. In the courtyard of a Bodo house is planted the sacred ' sij ' or euphorbia of Batho, the national god, to whom under this representation the ' deoshi ' or priest offers prayer and kills a pig.* When the Khonds settle a new village, the sacred cotton-tree must be planted with solemn rites, and beneath it is placed the stone which enshrines the village deity. 8 Nowhere, per- haps, in the world in these modern days is the original meaning of the sacred grove more picturesquely shown than among the Mundas of Chota-Nagpur, in whose settlements a sacred grove of sal-trees, a remnant of the primaeval forest spared by the woodman's axe, is left as a home for the 1 Boeder, ' Ehsten Aberglaubische Gebrauche,' &c., ed. Kreutzwald, pp. 2, 112, 146. 8 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' pp. 165, 173. 3 Macpherson, p. 61. 226 ANIMISM. spirits, and in this hallowed place offerings to the gods are made. 1 Here, then, among the lower races, is surely evidence enough to put on their true historic footing the rites of tree and grove which are found flourishing or surviving within the range of Semitic or Aryan culture. Mentions in the Old Testament record the Canaanitish Ashera- worship, the sacrifice under every green tree, the incense rising beneath oak and willow and shady terebinth, rites whose obstinate revival proves how deeply they were rooted in the old reli- gion of the land. 2 The evidence of these Biblical passages is corroborated by other evidence from Semitic regions, as in the lines by Silius Italicus which mention the prayer and sacrifice in the Numidian holy groves, and the records of the council of Carthage which show that in the 5th century, an age after Augustine's time, it was still needful to urge that the relics of idolatry in trees and groves should be done away. 3 From the more precise descriptions which lie within the range of Aryan descent and influence, examples may be drawn to illustrate every class of belief and rite of the forest. Modern Hinduism is so largely derived from the religions of the non- Aryan indigenes, that we may fairly explain thus a considerable part of the tree-worship of modern India, as where in the Birbhum district of Bei gal a great annual pilgrimage is made to a shrine in a jungle, to give offerings of rice and money and sacrifice animals to a certain ghost who dwells in a bela-tree. 4 In thoroughly Hindu districts may be seen the pippala (Ficus religiosa) planted as the Village tree, the ' chaityataru ' of Sanskrit 1 Dalton, ' Kols,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' Vol. vi. p. 34. Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien.' vol. i. p. 134, vol. iii. p. 252. 2 Deut. xii. 3 ; xvi. 21. Judges vi. 25. I Kings xiv. 23 ; xv. 13 ; xviii. 19. 2 Kings xvii. 10 ; xxiii. 4. Is. Ivii. 5. Jerem. xvii. 2. Ezek. vi. 13 ; xx. 28. Hos. iv. 13, &c., &c. 3 Sil. Ital. Punica, iii. 675, 690. Harduin, Acta Conciliorum, vol. i. For further evidence as to Semitic trec-and-grove worship, see Movers, ' Phonizier,' vol. i. p. 560, &c. 4 Hunter, ' Rural Bengal,' pp. 131, 194. GROVE-WORSHIP. 227 literature, while the Hindu in private life plants the banyan and other trees and worships them with divine honours. 1 Greek and Roman mythology give perfect types not only of the beings attached to individual trees, but of the dryads, fauns, and satyrs living and roaming in the forest crea- tures whose analogues are our own elves and fairies of the woods. Above these graceful fantastic beings are the higher deities who have trees for shrines and groves for temples. Witness the description in Ovid's story of Erisichthon : ' And Ceres' grove he ravaged with the axe, They say, and shame with iron the ancient glades. There stood a mighty oak of age-long strength, Festooned with garlands, bearing on its trunk Memorial tablets, proofs of helpful vows. Beneath, the dryads Jed their festive dance, And circled hand-in-hand the giant bole.' a In more prosaic fashion, Cato instructs the woodman how to gain indemnity for thinning a holy grove ; he must offer a hog in sacrifice with this prayer, ' Be thou god or goddess to whom this grove is* sacred, permit me, by the expiation of this pig, and in order to restrain the over- growth of this wood, &c., &c.' 3 Slavonic lands had their groves where burned the everlasting fire of Piorun the Heaven-god ; the old Prussians venerated the holy oak of Romowe, with its drapery and images of the gods, standing in the midst of the sacred inviolate forest where no twig might be broken nor beast slain; and so on down to the elder-tree beneath which Pushkait was worshipped with offerings of bread and beer. 4 The Keltic Heaven-god, whose image was a mighty oak, the white-robed Druids climbing the sacred tree to cut the mistletoe, and sacrificing 1 Boehtlingk and Roth, s.v. ' chaityataru.' Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 204. 1 Ovid. Metamm. viii. 741. 8 Cato de Re Rustica, 139 ; Plin. xvii. 47. * Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' pp. 98, 229. Hartknoch, part i. ch. v. vii.; Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 67. 228 ANIMISM. the two white bulls beneath, are types from another national group. 1 Teutonic descriptions begin with Tacitus, ' Lucos ac nemora consecrant, deorumque nominibus adpellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident,' and the curious passage which describes the Semnones entering the sacred grove in bonds, a homage to the deity that dwelt there; many a century after, the Swedes were still hold- ing solemn sacrifice and hanging the carcases of the slaughtered beasts in the grove hard by the temple of Upsal. 1 With Christianity comes a crusade against the holy trees and groves. Boniface hews down in the presence of the priest the huge oak of the Hessian Heaven-god, and builds of the timber a chapel to St. Peter. Amator expostulated with the hunters who hung the heads of wild beasts to the boughs of the sacred pear-tree of Auxerre, ' Hoc opus idololatriae culturae est, non christianae elegant- issimae discipline ; ' but this mild persuasion not avail- ing, he chopped it down and burned it. In spite of all such efforts, the old religion of the tree and grove sur- vived in Europe often in most pristine form. Within the last two hundred years, there were old men in Goth- land who would ' go to pray under a great tree, as their forefathers had done in their time ; ' and to this day the sacrificial rite of pouring milk and beer over the roots of trees is said to be kept up on out-of-the-way Swedish farms. 8 In Russia, the Lyeshy or wood-demon still pro- tects the birds and beasts in his domain, and drives his 'flocks of field-mice and squirrels from forest to forest, when we should say they are migrating. The hunter's luck depends on his treatment of the forest-spirit, where- fore he will leave him as a sacrifice the first game he kills, or some smaller offering of bread or salted pancake on a stump. Or if one falls ill on returning from the forest, it is known that this is the Lyeshy 's doing, so 1 Maxim. Tyr. viii. ; Plin. xvi. 95. * Tacit. Germania, 9, 39, &c. ; Grimm, ' D. M." p. 66. * Hylt^n-Cavallius, ' Warend och Wirdarne,' part i. p. 141. ANIMAL-WORSHIP. 22Q the patient carries to the wood some bread and salt in a clean rag, and leaving it with a prayer, comes home cured. 1 Names like Holyoake and Holywood record our own old memories of the holy trees and groves, memories long lingering in the tenacious peasant mind ; and it was a great and sacred linden-tree with three stems, standing in the parish of Hvitaryd in South Sweden, which with curious fitness gave a name to the family of Linn&us. Lastly, Jakob Grimm even ventures to connect historically the ancient sacred inviolate wood with the later royal forest, an ethnological argument which would begin with the savage adoring the Spirit of the Forest, and end with the modern landowner preserving his pheasants. 1 To the modern educated world, few phenomena of the lower civilization seem more pitiable than the spectacle of a man worshipping a beast. We have learnt the lessons of Natural History at last thoroughly enough to recognize our superiority to our 'younger brothers,' as the Red Indians call them, the creatures whom it is our place not to adore but to understand and use. By men at lower levels of cul- ture, however, the inferior animals are viewed with a very different eye. For various motives, they have become ob- jects of veneration ranking among the most important in the lower ranges of religion. Yet I must here speak shortly and slightly of Animal- worship, not as wanting in interest, but as over-abounding in difficulty. Wishing rather to bring general principles into view than to mass uninter- preted facts, all I can satisfactorily do is to give some select examples from the various groups of evidence, so as at once to display the more striking features of the subject, and to trace the ancient ideas upward from the savage level far into the higher civilization. First and foremost, uncultured man seems capable of simply worshipping a beast as beast, looking on it as pos- sessed of power, courage, cunning, beyond his own, and 1 Ralston, ' Songs of Russian People,' p. 153, see 238. * Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 62, &C. 23O ANIMISM. animated like a man by a soul which continues to exist after bodily death, powerful as ever for good and harm. Then this idea blends with the thought of the creature as being an incarnate deity, seeing, hearing, and acting even at a distance, and continuing its power after the death of the animal body to which the divine spirit was attached. Thus the Kamchadals, in their simple veneration of all things that could do them harm or good, worshipped the whales that could overturn their boats, and the bears and wolves of whom they stood in fear. The beasts, they thought, could understand their language, and therefore they ab- stained from calling them by their names when they met them , but propitiated them with certain appointed formulas . l Tribes of Peru, says Garcilaso de la Vega, worshipped the fish and vicunas that provided them food, the monkeys for their cunning, the sparrowhawks for their keen sight. The tiger and the bear were to them ferocious deities, and man- kind, mere strangers and intruders in the land, might well adore these beings, its old inhabitants and lords. 2 How, indeed, can one wonder that in direct and simple awe, the Philippine islanders, when they saw an alligator, should have prayed him with great tenderness to do them no harm, and to this end offered him of whatever they had in their boats, casting it into the water. 8 Such rites display at least a partial truth in the famous apophthegm which attri- butes to fear the origin of religion : ' Primes in orbe deos fecit timor.' 4 In discussing the question of the souls of animals in a previous chapter, instances were adduced of men seeking to appease by apologetic phrase and rite the animals they killed. 5 It is instructive to observe how naturally such personal intercourse between man and animal may pass into full worship, when the creature is powerful 1 Stelleiy/^Kamtschatka,' p. 276. 2 Garcilaso de la Vega, ' Comentarioe Reales,' i. ch. ix. &c. 3 Marsden, ' Sumatra,' p. 303. 4 Petron. Arb. Fragm. ; Statius, Hi. Theb. 66 1. 5 See ante, ch.jci. ANIMAL-WORSHIP. 23! or dangerous enough to claim it. When the Sti&is of Kambodia asked pardon of the beast they killed, and offered sacrifice in expiation, they expressly did so through fear lest the Creature's disembodied soul should come and tor- ment them. 1 Yet, strange to say, even the worship of the animal as divine does not prevent the propitiatory ceremony from passing into utter mockery. Thus Charlevoix de- scribes North American Indians who, when they had killed a bear, would set up its head painted with many colours, and offer it homage and praise while they performed the painful duty of feasting on its body. 2 So among the Ainos, the indigenes of Yesso, the bear is a great divinity. It is true they slay him when they can, but while they are cutting him up they salute him with obeisances and fair speeches, and set up his head outside the house to preserve them from misfortune. 8 In Siberia, the Yakuts worship the bear in common with the spirits of the forest, bowing toward his favourite haunts with appropriate phrases of prose and verse, in praise of the bravery and generosity of their ' beloved uncle.' Their kindred the Ostyaks swear in the Russian courts of law on a bear's head, for the bear, they say, is all-knowing, and will slay them if they lie. This idea actually serves the people as a philosophical, though one would say rather superfluous, explanation of a whole class of accidents : when a hunter is killed by a bear, it is considered that he must at some time have for- sworn himself, and now has met his doom. Yet these Ostyaks, when they have overcome and slain their deity, will stuff its skin with hay, kick it, spit on it, insult and mock it till they have satiated their hatred and revenge, and are ready to set it up in a yurt as an object of worship. 4 Whether an animal be worshipped as the receptacle or 1 Mouhot, ' Indo-China,' vol. i. p. 252. 2 Charlevoix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. v. p. 443. 3 W. M. Wood in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 36. * Simpson, ' Journey,' vol. ii. p. 269 ; Erman, ' Siberia,' vol. i. p. 492 ; Latham, ' Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 456 ; ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iv. p. 590. 232 ANIMISM. incarnation of an indwelling divine soul or other deity, or as one of the myriad representatives of the presiding god of its class, the case is included under and explained by the general theory of fetish-worship already discussed. Evi- dence which displays these two conceptions and their blend- ing is singularly perfect in the islands of the Pacific. In the Georgian group, certain herons, kingfishers, and woodpeckers were held sacred and fed on the sacrifices, with the distinct view that the deities were embodied in the birds, and in this form came to eat the offered food and give the oracular re- sponses by their cries. 1 The Tongans never killed certain birds, or the shark, whale, &c., as being sacred shrines in which gods were in the habit of visiting earth ; and if they chanced in sailing to pass near a whale they would offer scented oil or kava to him.* In the Fiji Islands, certain birds, fish, plants, and some men, were supposed to have deities closely connected with or residing in them. Thus the hawk, fowl, eel, shark, and nearly every other animal became the shrine of some deity, which the worshipper of that deity might not eat, so that some were even tabued from eating human flesh, the shrine of their god being a man. Ndengei, the dull and otiose supreme deity, had his shrine or incarnation in the serpent. 3 Every Samoan islander had his tutelary deity or ' aitu,' appearing in some animal, an eel, shark, dog, turtle, &c., which species became his fetish, not to be slighted or injured or eaten, an offence which the deity would avenge by entering the sinner's body and generating his proper incarnation within him till he died. 4 The ' atua ' of the New Zealander, corre- sponding with this in name, is a divine ancestral soul, and is also apt to appear in the body of an animal. 6 If we pass to Sumatra, we shall find that the veneration paid by the Malays to the tiger, and their habit of apologizing to it Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 336. Farmer, ' Tonga,' p. 126 ; Mariner, vol. ii. p. 106. Williams, ' Fiji,' vol. i. p. 217, &c. Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 238. Shortland, ' Trads. of N. Z.' ch. iv. PATRON-ANIMALS. 233 when a trap is laid, is connected with the idea of tigers being animated by the souls of departed men. 1 In other districts of the world, one of the most important cases connected with these is the worship paid by the North American Indian to his medicine-animal, of which he kills one specimen to preserve its skin, which thenceforth re- ceives adoration and grants protection as a fetish. 2 In South Africa, as has been already mentioned, the Zulus hold that divine ancestral shades are embodied in certain tame and harmless snakes, whom their human kinsfolk receive with kindly respect and propitiate with food. 3 In West Africa, monkeys near a grave-yard are supposed to be animated by the spirits of the dead, and the general theory of sacred and worshipped crocodiles, snakes, birds, bats, elephants, hyaenas, leopards, &c., is divided between the two great departments of the fetish-theory, in some cases the creature being the actual embodiment or per- sonation of the spirit, and in other cases sacred to it or under its protection. 4 Hardly any region of the world displays so perfectly as this the worship of serpents as fetish-animals endowed with high spiritual qualities, to kill one of whom would be an offence unpardonable. For a single description of negro ophiolatry, may be cited Bos- man's description from Whydah in the Bight of Benin; here the highest order of deities were a kind of snakes which swarm in the villages, reigned over by that huge chief monster, uppermost and greatest and as it were the grandfather of all, who dwelt in his snake-house beneath a lofty tree, and there received the royal offerings of meat and drink, cattle and money and stuffs. So heartfelt was the veneration of the snakes, that the Dutchmen made it a 1 Marsden, ' Sumatra,' p. 292. * Loskicl, ' Ind. of N. A.' part i. p. 40 ; Catlin, ' N. A. Ind.' vol. i. p. 36 ; Schoolcraft, ' Tribes," part i. p. 34, part v. p. 652 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 190. 3 See ante, p. 8 ; Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 196. 4 Steinhauser, ' Religion des Negers,' I.e. p. 133. J. L. Wilson, ' W. Air.' pp. 210, 218. Schlegel, ' Ewe-Sprache,' p. xv. II. Q. 234 ANIMISM. means of clearing their warehouses of tiresome visitors ; as Bosman says, ' If we are ever tired with the natives of this country, and would fain be rid of them, we need only speak ill of the snake, at which they immediately stop their ears and run out of doors.' 1 Lastly, among the Tatar tribes of Siberia, Castren finds the explanation of the veneration which the nomade pays to certain animals, in a distinct fetish-theory which he thus sums up : ' Can he also con- trive to propitiate the*snake, bear, wolf, swan, and various other birds of the air and beasts of the field, he has in them good protectors, for in them are hidden mighty spirits.'* In the lower levels of civilization the social institution known as Totemism is of frequent occurrence. Its anthro- pological importance was especially brought into notice by J. F. McLennan, whose views as to an early totem-period of society have much influenced opinion since his time. 3 The totemic tribe is divided into clans, the members of each clan connecting themselves with, calling themselves by the name of, and even deriving their mythic pedigree from some animal, plant, or thing, but most often an animal ; these totem-dans are exogamous, marriage not being permissible within the clan, while permissible or obligatory between clan and clan. Thus among the Ojibwa Indians of North America, the names of such clan-animals, Bear, Wolf, Tortoise, Deer, Rabbit, &c., served to designate the inter- marrying clans into which the tribes were divided, Indians being actually spoken of as bears, wolves, &c., and the figures of these animals indicating their clans in the native picture-writing. The Ojibwa word for such a clan-name has passed into English in the form ' totem,' and thus has become an accepted term among anthropologists to denote 1 Bosman, ' Guinea,' letter 19 ; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 499. See Burton, ' Dahome,' ch. iv., xvii. An account of the Vaudoux serpent-wor- ship still carried on among the negroes of Hayti, in ' Lippincott's Magazine,' Philadelphia, March, 1870. * Castren, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 196, see 228. * J. F. McLennan in 'Fortnightly Review,' 1869-70; reprinted in 'Studies in Ancient History,' 2nd Series, pp. 117, 491, TOTEM-ANIMALS. 235 similar clan-names customary over the world, this system of dividing tribes being called Totemism. Unfortunately for the study of the subject, John Long, the trader inter- preter who introduced the Ojibwa word totem into Europe in 1791, does not seem to have grasped its meaning in the native law of marriage and clanship, but to have confused the totem-animal of the clan with the patron or guardian animal of the individual hunter, his manitu or ' medicine.' 1 Even when the North American totem-clans came to be better understood as social institutions regulating marriage, the notion of the guardian spirit still clung to them. Sir George Grey, who knew of the American totem-clans from the ' Archaeologia Americana,' put on record in 1841 a list of exogamous classes in West Australia, and mentioned the opinion frequently given by the natives as to the origin of these class-names, that they were derived from some animal or vegetable being very common in the district which the family inhabited, so that the name of this animal or vegetable came to be applied to the family. This seems so far valuable evidence, but Grey was evidently led by John Long's mistaken statement, which he quotes, to fall himself into the same confusion between the tribal name and the patron animal or vegetable, the 'kobong' of his natives, which he regarded as a tribal totem.* In Mr. J. G. Frazer's valuable collection of information on totemism, 8 the use of the self -contradictory term 'individual totem' has unfortunately tended to perpetuate this confusion. In the present state of the problem of totemism, it would be premature to discuss at length its development and pur- pose. Mention may however be made of observations which tend to place it on a new footing, as being distinctly related to the transmigration of souls. In Melanesia men 1 John Long, ' Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter,' London, 1791, p. 86. See pp. 233, 41 1 of present volume. * Grey, ' Journals of Expeditions in N. W. & W. Australia,' vol. ii. pp. 225-9 > ' Archaeologia Americana,' vol. ii. p. 109. * J. G. Frazer, ' Totemism,' p. 53 ; ' Golden Bough/ 2nd ed. vol. iii. pp. 419, 423. 236 ANIMISM. may say that after death they will reappear for instance as sharks or bananas, and the family will acknowledge the kinship by feeding the sharks and abstaining from the bananas. It is not unreasonable that Dr. Codrington should suggest such practices as throwing light on the origin of totemism. 1 The late investigations of Spencer and Gillen, conducted with scrupulous care in an almost untouched district of Central Australia, show totemism in the Arunta tribe, not as the means of regulating the intermarriage of clans, but as based on a native theory of the ancestry of the race, as descended from the Alcheringa, quasi-human animal or vegetable ancestors, whose souls are still reborn in human form in successive generations.* This careful and definite account may be the starting-point of a new study. Savages would be alive to the absurdity of naming clans after animals in order to indicate a prohibition of marrying- in> opposed to the habit of the animals themselves. Indeed, it seems more likely that such animal-names may have com- monly belonged to inbred clans, before the rule of exogamy was developed. At present the plainest fact as to Totemism is its historical position as shown by its immense geographical distribution. Its presence in North America and Australia has been noticed. It extends its organization through the forest- region of South America from Guyana to Patagonia. North- ward of Australia it is to be traced among the more un- changed of the Malay populations, who underneath foreign influence still keep remains of a totemic system like that of the American tribes. Thence we follow the totem-clan into India, when it appears among non- Aryan hill-tribes such as the Oraons and Mundas, who have clans named after Eel, Hawk, Heron, and so on, and must not kill or eat these creatures. North of the Himalaya it appears among Mon- goloid tribes in their native low cultured state, such as the Yakuts with their intermarrying totem-clans Swan, Raven, 1 Codrington, ' Melanesians,' pp. 32-3, 170. ' Spencer and Gillen, ' Native Tribes of Central Australia,' 1899, PP- 73> 121. TOTEM-ANIMALS. 237 and the like. In Africa totemism appears in the Bantu district up to the West Coast. For example, the Bechuana are divided into Bakuena, men of the crocodile ; Batlapi, of the fish ; Balaung, of the lion ; Bamorara, of the wild vine. A man does not eat his tribe-animal, or clothe himself in its skin, and if he must kill it as hurtful, the lion for instance, he asks pardon of it, and purifies himself from the sacrilege. These few instances illustrate the generalization that totemism in its complete form belongs to the savage and early barbaric stages of culture, only partial remains or survivals of it having lasted into the civilized period. Though appearing in all other quarters of the globe, it is interesting to notice that there is no distinct case of totemism found or recorded in Europe. 1 The three motives of animal-worship which have been described, viz., direct worship of the animal for itself, in- direct worship of it as a fetish acted through by a deity, and veneration for it as a totem or representative of a tribe- ancestor, no doubt account in no small measure for the phenomena of Zoolatry among the lower races, due allow- ance being also made for the effects of myth and symbolism, of which we may gain frequent glimpses. Notwithstanding the obscurity and complexity of the subject, a survey of Animal- worship as a whole may yet justify an ethnographic view of its place in the history of civilization. If we turn from its appearances among the less cultured races to notice the shapes in which it has held its place among peoples advanced to the stage of national organization and stereo- typed religion, we shall find a reasonable cause for its new position in the theory of development and survival, whereby ideas at first belonging to savage theology have in part con- tinued to spread and solidify in their original manner, while in part they have been changed to accommodate them to more advanced ideas, or have been defended from the attacks of reason by being set up as sacred mysteries. Ancient Egypt 1 General references in J. F. McLennan, ' Studies in Ancient History ; ' J. G. Frazer, ' Totemism.' 238 ANIMISM. was a land of sacred cats and jackals and hawks, whose mummies are among us to this day, but the reason of whose worship was a subject too sacred for the Father of History to discuss. Egyptian animal-worship seems to show, in a double line, traces of a savage ancestry extending into ages lying far behind even the remote antiquity of the Pyramids. Deities patronising special sacred animals, incarnate in their bodies, or represented in their figures, have nowhere better examples than the divine bull-dynasty of Apis, the sacred hawks caged and fed in the temple of Horus, Thoth and his cynocephalus and ibis, Hathor the cow and Sebek the crocodile. Moreover, the local character of many of the sacred creatures, worshipped in certain nomes yet killed and eaten with impunity elsewhere, fits remarkably with that character of tribe-fetishes and deified totems with which Mr. McLennan's argument is concerned. See the men of Oxyrynchos reverencing and sparing the fish oxyrynchos, and those of Latopolis like- wise worshipping the latos. At Apollinopolis men hated crocodiles and never lost a chance of killing them, while the people of the Arsinoite nome dressed geese and fish for these sacred creatures, adorned them with necklaces and bracelets, and mummified them sumptuously when they died. 1 In the modern world the most civilized people among whom animal-worship vigorously survives, lie within the range of Brahmanism, where the sacred animal, the deity incarnate in an animal or invested with or symbolized by its shape, may to this day be studied in clear example. The sacred cow is not merely to be spared, she is as a deity worshipped in annual ceremony, daily perambulated and bowed to by the pious Hindu, who offers her fresh grass and flowers ; Hanuman the monkey-god has his temples and his idols, and in him Siva is incarnate, as Durga is in the jackal ; the wise Ganesa wears the elephant's head ; 1 Herod, ii. ; Plutarch, De Iside tt Osiride ; Strabo, xvii. i ; Wilkinson, ' Ancient Eg.,' edited by Birch, vol. Hi. ; Bunsen, 2nd Edition, with note* by Birch, vol. i. SERPENT-WORSHIP. 239 the divine king of birds, Garuda, is Vishnu's vehicle ; the forms of fish, and boar, and tortoise, were assumed in those avatar-legends of Vishnu which are at the intellectual level of the Red Indian myths they so curiously resemble. 1 The conceptions which underlie the Hindu creed of divine animals were not ill displayed by that Hindu who, being shown the pictures of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John with their respective man, lion, ox, and eagle, explained these quite naturally and satisfactorily as the avatars or vehicles of the four evangelists. In Animal-worship, some of the most remarkable cases of development and survival belong to a class from which striking instances have already been taken. Serpent-wor- ship unfortunately fell years ago into the hands of specu- lative writers, who mixed it up with occult philosophies, Druidical mysteries, and that portentous nonsense called the ' Arkite Symbolism/ till now sober students hear the very name of Ophiolatry with a shiver. Yet it is in itself a rational and^ instructive subject of inquiry, especially notable for its width of range in mythology and religion. We may set out among the lower races, with such accounts as those of the Red Indian's reverence to the rattlesnake, as grandfather and king of snakes, as a divine protector able to give fair winds or cause tempests ; * or of the wor- ship of great snakes among the tribes of Peru before they received the religion of the Incas, as to whom an old author says, ' They adore the demon when he presents himself to them in the figure of some beast or serpent, and talks with them.' 3 Thenceforth such examples of direct Ophiolatry may be traced on into classic and barbaric Europe ; the great serpent which defended the citadel of Athens and enjoyed its monthly honey-cakes ; ' the Roman genius loci appearing in the form of the snake (Nullus eiiim locus sine <. / 1 Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 195, &c. * Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 231 ; Brinton, p. 108, &c. 8 Garcilaso dc la Vega, ' Comentarios Rcales,' i. 9. 4 Herodot. viii. 41. 240 ANIMISM. genio est, qui per anguem plerumque ostenditur) ; l the old Prussian serpent- worship and offering of food to the household snakes ; * the golden viper adored by the Lom- bards, till Barbatus got it in his hands and the goldsmiths made it into paten and chalice. 3 To this day, Europe has not forgotten in nursery tales or more serious belief the snake that comes with its golden crown and drinks milk out of the child's porringer ; the house-snake, tame and kindly but seldom seen, that cares for the cows and the children and gives omens of a death in the family ; the pair of household snakes which have a mystic connexion of life and death with the husband and housewife themselves. 4 Serpent-worship, apparently of the directest sort, was pro- minent in the indigenous religions of Southern Asia. It now even appears to have maintained no mean place in early Indian Buddhism, for the sculptures of the Sanchi tope show scenes of adoration of the five-headed snake- deity in his temple, performed by a race of serpent- wor- shippers, figuratively represented with snakes growing from their shoulders, and whose raja himself has a five-headed snake arching hood- wise over his head. Here, moreover, the totem-theory comes into contact with ophiolatry. The Sanskrit name of the snake, ' naga/ becomes also the accepted designation of its adorers, and thus mythological interpretation has to reduce to reasonable sense legends of serpent-races who turn out to be simply serpent-worship- pers, tribes who have from the divine reptiles at once their generic name of Nagas, and with it their imagined ancestral descent from serpents.* In different ways, these Naga tribes of South Asia are on the one hand analogues of the 1 Servius ad /En. v. 95. * Hartknoch, ' Prcussen,' part i. pp. 143, 162. 3 Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 648. 4 Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 650. Rochholz, ' Dcutscher Glaube,' &c., vol. i. p. 146. Monnier, ' Traditions Populaires,' p. 644. Grohmann, ' Aberglauben aut Bohmen,' &c., p. 78. Ralston, ' Songs of Russian People,' p. 175. 6 Fergusson ' Tree and Serpent Worship,' p. 55, &c., pi. xxiv. McLennan l.c. p. 563, &c. SERPENT-WORSHIP. 24! Snake Indians of America, and on the other of the Ophio- genes or Serpent-race of the Troad, kindred of the vipers whose bite they could cure by touch, and descendants of an ancient hero transformed into a snake. 1 Serpents hold a prominent place in the religions of the world, as the incarnations, shrines, or symbols of high deities. Such were the rattlesnake worshipped in the Natchez temple of the Sun, and the snake belonging in name and figure to the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl ; * the snake as worshipped still by the Slave Coast negro, not for itself but for its indwelling deity ; 3 the snake kept and fed with milk in the temple of the old Slavonic god Potrimpos ; * the serpent-symbol of the healing deity Asklepios, who abode in or manifested himself through the huge tame snakes kept in his temples 5 (it is doubtful whether this had any original connexion with the adoption of the snake, from its renewal by casting its old slough, as the accepted emblem of new life or immortality in later symbolism) ; and lastly, the Phoenician serpent with its tail in its mouth, symbol of the world and of the Heaven-god Taaut, in its original meaning perhaps a mythic world-snake like the Scandina- vian Midgard-worm, but in the changed fancy of later ages adapted into an emblem of eternity. 9 It scarcely seems proved that savage races, in all their mystic contemplations of the serpent, ever developed out of their own minds the idea, to us so familiar, of adopting it as a personification of evil. 7 In ancient times, we may ascribe this character per- haps to the monster whose well-known form is to be seen on the mummy-cases, the Apophis-serpent of the Egyptian 1 Strabo, xiii. i, 14. * J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrel.' pp. 62, 585. 8 J. B. Schlegel, ' Ewe-Sprache,' p. xiv. 4 Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 217. 8 Pausan. ii. 28 ; JElian. xvi. 39. See Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. ii. P- 734- 8 Macrob. Saturnal. i. 9. Movers, ' Phonizier,' vol. i. p. 500. 7 Details such as in Schoolcraft, ' Ind. Tribes,' part i. pp. 38, 414, may be ascribed to Christian intercourse. See Brinton, p. 121. 242 ANIMISM. Hades ; l and it unequivocally belongs to the destroying set- pent of the Zarathustrians, Azhi Dahaka,* a figure which bears so remarkable a relation to that of the Semitic serpent of Eden, which may possibly stand in historical connexion with it. A wondrous blending of the ancient rites of Ophi- olatry with mystic conceptions of Gnosticism appears in the cultus which tradition (in truth or slander) declares the semi- Christian sect of Ophites to have rendered to their tame snake, enticing it out of its chest to coil round the sacra- mental bread, and worshipping it as representing the great king from heaven who in the beginning gave to the man and woman the knowledge of the mysteries.* Thus the extreme types of religious veneration, from the soberest matter-of-fact to the dreamiest mysticism, find their places in the worship of animals.' Hitherto in the study of animistic doctrine, our attention has been turned especially to those minor spirits whose functions concern the closer and narrower detail of man's life and its surroundings. In passing thence to the con- sideration of divine beings whose functions have a wider scope, the transition may be well made through a special group. An acute remark of Auguste Comte's calls attention to an important process of theological thought, which we may here endeavour to bring as clearly as possible before our minds. In his ' Philosophic Positive,' he defines deities proper as differing by their general and abstract character from pure fetishes (i.e., animated objects), the humble fetish governing but a single object from which it is inseparable, while the gods administer a special order of phenomena at once in different bodies. When, he con- 1 Lepsius, ' Todtenbuch,' and Birch's transl. in Bunsen's ' Egypt,' vol. v. * Spiegel, ' Avesta,' vol. i. p. 66, vol. iii. p. lix. * Epiphan. Adv. Hxres. xxxvii. Tertullian. De Prescript, contra Haereticos, 47. 4 Further collections of evidence relating to Zoohtry in general may be found in Bastian, ' Das Thier in seiner mythologischen Bedeutung,' in Bastian and Hartmann's ' Zeitschrift fur Ethnologic,' vi-i. i. , Meiners, ' Geschichte der Religionen,' vol. L SPECIES-DEITIES. 243 tinues, the similar vegetation of the different oaks of a forest led to a theological generalization from their common phenomena, the abstract being thus produced was no longer the fetish of a single tree, but became the god of the forest ; here, then, is the intellectual passage from fetishism to polytheism, reduced to the inevitable preponderance of specific over individual ideas. 1 Now this observation of Comte's may be more immediately applied to a class of divine beings which may be accurately called species-deities. It is highly suggestive to study the crude attempts of bar- baric theology to account for the uniformity observed in large classes of objects, by making this generalization from individual to specific ideas. To explain the existence of what we call a species, they would refer it to a common ancestral stock, or to an original archetype, or to a species- deity, or they combined these conceptions. For such specu- lations, classes of plants and animals offered perhaps an early and certainly an easy subject. The uniformity of each kind not only suggested a common parentage, but also the notion that creatures so wanting in individuality, with qualities so measured out as it were by line and rule, might not be independent arbitrary agents, but mere copies from a common model, or mere instruments used by controlling deities. Thus in Polynesia, as has been just mentioned, certain species of animals were considered as incarnations of certain deities, and among the Samoans it appears that the question as to the individuality of such creatures was actually asked and answered. If, for instance, a village god were accustomed to appear as an owl, and one of his votaries found a dead owl by the roadside, he would mourn over the sacred bird and bury it with much ceremony, but the god himself would not be thought to be dead, for he remains incarnate in all existing owls. 1 According to Father Geronimo Boscana, the Acagchemen tribe of Upper California furnish a curious rJarallel to this notion. They 1 Comte, ' Philosophic Positive/ voL v. p. 101. * Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 242. 244 ANIMISM. worshipped the ' panes ' bird, which seems to have been an eagle or vulture, and each year, in the temple of each village, one of them was solemnly killed without shedding blood, and the body burned. Yet the natives maintained and believed that it was the same individual bird they sacri- ficed each year, and more than this, that the same bird was slain by each of the villages. 1 Among the comparatively cultured Peruvians, Acosta describes another theory of celestial archetypes. Speaking of star-deities, he says that shepherds venerated a certain star called Sheep, another star called Tiger protected men from tigers, &c. : ' And generally, of all the animals and birds there are on the earth, they believed that a like one lived in heaven, in whose charge were their procreation and increase, and thus they accounted of divers stars, such as that they call Chacana, and Topatorca, and Mamana, and Mizco, and Miquiquiray, and other such, so that in a manner it appears that they were drawing towards the dogma of the Platonic ideas.'* The North American Indians also have speculated as to the common ancestors or deities of species. One missionary notes down their idea as he found it in 1634. ' They say, moreover, that all the animals of each species have an elder brother, who is as it were the principle and origin of all the individuals, and this elder brother is marvellously great and powerful. The elder brother of the beavers, they told me, is perhaps as large as our cabin.' Another early account is that each species of animals has its archetype in the land of souls; there exists, for example/ a manitu or archetype of all oxen, which animates all oxen. 8 Here, again, occurs a noteworthy correspondence with the ideas of a distant race. In Buyan, the island paradise of Russian myth, there 1 Brinton, ' Myths of New World,' p. 105. 8 Acosta, ' Historia de las Indias,' book v. c. iv. ; Rivero & Tschudi, pp. 161, 179; J. G. Miiller, p. 365. 3 Le Jcune in 'sRel. des Jis. dans la Nouvelle France,' 1634, p. 13. Lafitau, ' Moeurs des Sauvagcs,' vol. i. p. 370. See also VVaitz, vol. iii. p. 194; Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 327. SPECIES-DEITIES. 245 are to be found the Snake older than all snakes, and the prophetic Raven, elder brother of all ravens, and the Bird, the largest and oldest of all birds, with iron beak and copper claws, and the Mother of Bees, eldest among bees. 1 Morgan's comparatively modem account of the Iroquois mentions their belief in a spirit of each species of trees and plants, as of oak, hemlock, maple, whortleberry, rasp- berry, spearmint, tobacco ; most objects of nature being thus under the care of protecting spirits.* The doctrine of such species-deities is perhaps nowhere more definitely stated than by Castren in his ' Finnish Mythology.' In his description of the Siberian nature-worship, the lowest level is exemplified by the Samoyeds, whose direct worship of natural objects for themselves may perhaps indicate the original religious condition of the whole Turanian race. But the doctrine of the comparatively cultured heathen Finns was at a different stage. Here every object in nature has a ' haltia,' a guardian deity or genius, a being which was its creator and thenceforth became attached to it. These deities or genii are, however, not bound to each single transitory object, but are free personal beings which have movement, form, body, and soul. Their existence in no wise depends on the existence of the individual objects, for although no object in nature is without its guardian deity, this deity extends to the whole race or species. This ash-tree, this stone, this house, has indeed its particular ' haltia,' yet these same ' haltiat ' concern themselves with other ash-trees, stones, and houses, of which the indi- viduals may perish, but their presiding genii live on in the species. 3 It seems as though some similar view ran through the doctrine of more civilized races, as in the well-known 1 Ralston, ' Songs of the Russian People,' p. 375. The Slavonic myth of Buyan with its dripping oak and the snake Garafena lying beneath, is obviously connected with the Scandinavian myth of the dripping ash, Yggdrasill, the snake Nidhogg below, and the two Swans of the Urdhar- fount, parents of all swans. 8 Morgan, ' Iroquois,' p. 162. 3 Caa trlii, 'Finn. Myth.' pp. 106, 160, 189, &c. 246 ANIMISM. Egyptian and Greek examples where whole species of ani- mals, plants, or things, stand as symbolic of, and as pro- tected by, particular deities. The thought appears with most perfect clearness in the Rabbinical philosophy which apportions to each of the 2100 species, of plants for in- stance, a presiding angel in heaven, and assigns this as the motive of the Levitical prohibition of mixtures among ani- mals and plants. 1 The interesting likeness pointed out by Father Acosta between these crude theological conceptions and the civilized philosophical conceptions which have re- placed them, was again brought into view in the last century by the President De Brosses, in comparing the Red Indians' archetypes of species with the Platonic archetypal ideas.* As for animals and plants, the desire of naturalists to ascend to primal unity to some extent finds satisfaction in a theory tracing each species to an origin in a single pair. And though this is out of the question with inanimate objects, our language seems in suggestive metaphor to lay hold on the same thought, when we say of a dozen similar swords, or garments, or chairs, that they have the same pattern (patronus, as it were father), whereby they were shaped from their matter (materia, or mother substance). 1 Eisenmenger, ' Judenthum,' part ii. p. 376 ; Bastion, ' Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 194. 1 De Brosses, ' Dieux Fetiches,' p. 58.