SCORPION

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

Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917 "Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom" CHAPTER XVI. ANIMISM (continued). Higher Deities of Polytheism Human characteristics applied to Deity Lords of Spiritual Hierarchy Polytheism : its course of development in lower and higher Culture Principles of its inves- tigation ; classification of Deities according to central concep- tions of their significance and function Heaven-god Rain-god Thunder-god Wind-gods Earth-god Water-god Sea-god Fire-god Sun-god Moon-god . . 247 CHAPTER XVI. ANIMISM (continued). Higher Deities of Polytheism Human characteristics applied to Deity Lords of Spiritual Hierarchy Polytheism : its course of development in lower and higher Culture Principles of its investigation ; classifi- cation of Deities according to central conceptions of their significance and function Heaven-god Rain-god Thunder-god Wind-gods Earth-god Water-god Sea-god Fire-god Sun-god Moon-god. SURVEYING the religions of the world and studying the descriptions of deity among race after race, we may recur to old polemical terms in order to define a dominant idea of theology at large. Man so habitually ascribes to his deities human shape, human passions, human nature, that we may declare him an Anthropomorphite, an Anthropopathite, and (to complete the series) an Anthropophysite. In this state of religious thought, prevailing as it does through so im- mense a range among mankind, one of the strongest con- firmations may be found of the theory here advanced con- cerning the development of Animism. This theory that the conception of the human soul is the very ' fons et origo ' of the conceptions of spirit and deity in general, has been already vouched for by the fact of human souls being held to pass into the characters of good and evil demons, and to ascend to the rank of deities. But beyond this, as we consider the nature of the great gods of the nations, in whom the vastest functions of the universe arc vested, it will still be apparent that these mighty deities are modelled on human souls, that in great measure their feeling and sympathy, their character and habit, their will and action, even their material and form, display throughout their adaptations, exaggerations and distortions, charac- 248 ANIMISM. teristics shaped upon those of the human spirit. The key to investigation of the Dii Ma jorum Gentium of the world is the reflex of humanity, and as we behold their figures in their proper districts of theology, memory ever brings back the Psalmist's words, ' Thou thoughtest I was altogether as thyself.' The higher deities of Polytheism have their places in the general animistic system of mankind. Among nation after nation it is still clear how, man being the type of deity, human society and government became the model on which divine society and government were shaped. As chiefs and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser spirits. They differ from the souls and minor spiritual beings which we have as yet chiefly considered, but the difference is rather of rank than of nature. They are personal spirits, reigning over personal spirits. Above the disembodied souls and manes, the local genii of rocks and fountains and trees, the host of good and evil demons, and the rest of the spiritual commonality, stand these mightier deities, whose influence is less confined to local or individual interests, and who, as it pleases them, can act directly within their vast domain, or control and operate through the lower beings of their kind, their servants, agents, or mediators. The great gods of Polytheism, numerous and elaborately defined in the theology .of the cultured world, do not however make their earliest ap- pearance there. In the religions of the lower races their principal types were already cast, and thenceforward, for many an age of progressing or relapsing culture, it became the work of poet and priest, legend-monger and historian, theologian and philosopher, to develop and renew, to de- grade and abolish, the mighty lords of the Pantheon. With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric sys- tem of religion is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe. In the lists, it is true, there are set down great deities, good or evil, who probably came HIGHER DEITIES. 249 in from modern Christian missionary teaching, or other- wise by contact with foreign religions. It is often difficult to distinguish from these the true local gods, animistic figures of native meaning and origin. Among the follow- ing polytheistic systems, examples may be found of such combinations, with the complex theological problems they suggest. Among the Australians, above the swarm- ing souls, nature-spirits, demons, there stand out mythic figures of higher divinity ; Nguk-wonga, the Spirit of the Waters ; Biam, who gives ceremonial songs and causes disease, and is perhaps the same as Baiame the creator ; Nambajandi and Warrugura, lords of heaven and the nether world. 1 In South America, if we look into the theology of the Manaos (whose name is well known in the famous legend of El Dorado and the golden city of Manoa), we see Mauari and Saraua, who may be called the Good and Evil Spirit, and beside the latter the two Gamainhas, Spirits of the Waters and the Forest. 2 In North America the description of a solemn Algonquin sacrifice introduces a list of twelve dominant manitus or gods ; first the Great Manitu in heaven, then the Sun, Moon, Earth, Fire, Water, the House-god, the Indian corn, and the four Winds or Cardinal Points. 3 The Polynesian's crowd of manes, and the lower ranks of deities of earth, sea, and air, stand below the great gods of Peace and War, Oro and Tane the national deities of Tahiti and Huahine, Raitubu the Sky-producer, Hina who aided in the work of forming the world, her father Taaroa, the uncreate Creator who dwells in Heaven. 4 Among the Land Dayaks of Borneo, the commonalty of spirits consists of the souls of the departed, and of such beings as dwell in the noble old forests on the tops of lofty hills, or such as hover about villages and devour the stores of rice ; above these are Tapa, creator and preserver of man, 1 Eyre, ' Australia,' vol. ii. p. 362 ; Oldfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 228 ; Lang, ' Queensland,' p. 444. 2 Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 583. 3 Loskiel, ' Ind. of N. America,' part'i. p. 43. 4 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p.*322. 250 ANIMISM. and lang, who taught the Dayaks their religion, Jirong, whose function is the birth and death of men, and Ten- abi, who made, and still causes to flourish, the earth and all things therein save the human race. 1 In West Africa, an example may be taken from the theology of the Slave Coast, a systematic scheme of all nature as moved and quickened by spirits, kindly or hostile to mankind. These spirits dwell in field and wood, mountain and valley; they live in air and water; multitudes of them have been human souls, such ghosts hover about the graves and near the living, and have influence with the under-gods, whom they worship ; among these ' edro ' are the patron-deities of men and families and tribes ; through these subordinate beings works the highest god, Mawu. The missionary who describes this negro hierarchy quite simply sees in it Satan and his Angels. 1 In Asia, the Samoyed's little spirits that are bound to his little fetishes, and the little elves of wood and stream, have greater beings above them, the Forest-Spirit, the River-Spirit, the Sun and Moon, the Evil Spirit and the Good Spirit above all.* The countless host of the local gods of the Khonds per- vade the world, rule the functions of nature, and control the life of men, and these have their chiefs; above them rank the deified souls of men who have become tutelary gods of tribes ; above these are the six great gods, the Rain- god, the goddess of Firstfruits, the god of Increase, the god of Hunting, the iron god of War, the god of Boundaries, with which group stands also the Judge of the Dead, and above all other gods, the Sun-god and Creator Boora Pennu, and his wife the mighty Earth-goddess,Tari Pennu. 4 The Spanish conquerors found in Mexico a complex and systematic hierarchy of spiritual beings ; numberless were the little deities who had their worship in house and lane, 1 St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 180. 1 J. B. Schlegel, ' Schlussel zur Ewe Sprache,' p. xii. ; compare Bowen, 'Yoruba Lang.' in 'Smithsonian Contrib.' vol. i. p. xvi. * Samoiedia, in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 531. 4 Macpherson, p. 84, &c. POLYTHEISTIC HIERARCHY. 251 grove and temple, and from these the worshipper could pass to gods of flowers or of pulque, of hunters and gold- smiths, and then to the great deities of the nation and the world, the figures which the mythologist knows so well, Centeotl the Earth-goddess, Tlaloc the Water-god, Huit- zilopochtli the War-god, Mictlanteuctli the Lord of Hades, Tonatiuh and Metztli the Sun and Moon. 1 Thus, starting from the theology of savage tribes, the student arrives at the polytheistic hierarchies of the Aryan nations. In ancient Greece, the cloud-compelling Heaven-god reigns over such deities as the god of War and the goddess of Love, the Sun-god and the Moon-goddess, the Fire-god and the ruler of the Under- world, the Winds and Rivers, the nymphs of wood and well and forest. 2 In modern India, Brahma- Vishnu-Siva reign pre-eminent over a series of divinities, heterogeneous and often obscure in nature, but among whom stand out in clear meaning and purpose such figures as Indra of Heaven and Surya of the Sun, Agni of the Fire, Pavana of the Winds and Varuna of the Waters, Yama lord of the Under-world, Kama god of Love and Karttikeya of War, Panchanana who gives epilepsy and Manasa who preserves from snake-bites, the divine Rivers, and below these the ranks of nymphs, elves, demons, minis- tering spirits, of heaven and earth Gandharvas, Apsaras, Siddhas, Asuras, Bhutas, Rakshasas. 3 The systematic comparison of polytheistic religions has been of late years worked with admirable results. These have been due to the adoption of comparatively exact methods, as where the ancient Aryan deities of the Veda have been brought into connexion with those of the Homeric poems, in some cases as clearly as where we Englishmen can study in the Scandinavian Edda the old gods of our own race, whose names stand in local names on the map of England, and serve as counters to reckon our days of the 1 Clavigero, ' Messico,' vol. ii. ch. i. 2 Gladstone, ' Juventus Mundi,' ch. vii. &c. 3 Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. 252 ANIMISM. week. Yet it need scarcely be said that to compare in full detail the deities even of closely connected nations, and a fortiori those of tribes not united in language and history, is still a difficult and unsatisfactory task. The old-fashioned identifications of the gods and heroes of different nations admitted most illusory evidence. Some had little more ground than similar-sounding names, as when the Hindu Brahma and Prajapati were discovered to be the Hebrew Abraham and Japhet, and when even Sir William Jones identified Woden with Buddha. With not much more stringency, it is still often taken as matter of course that the Keltic Beal, whose bealtines correspond with a whole class of bonfire-customs among several branches of the Aryan race, is the Bel or the Baal of the Semitic cultus. Unfor- tunately, classical scholarship at the Renaissance started the subject on an unsound footing, by accepting the Greek deities with the mystified shapes and perverted names they had assumed in Latin literature. That there was a partial soundness in such comparisons, as in identifying Zeus and Jupiter, Hestia and Vesta, made the plan all the more mis- leading when Kronos came to figure as Saturn, Poseidon as Neptune, Athene as Minerva. To judge by example of the possible results of comparative theology worked on such principles, Thoth being identified with Hermes, Hermes with Mercury, and Mercury with Woden, there comes to pass the absurd transition from the Egyptian ibis-headed divine scribe of the gods, to the Teutonic heaven-dwelling driver of the raging tempest. It is not in this loose fashion that the mental processes are to be sought out, which led nations to arrange so similarly and yet so diversely their array of deities. A twofold perplexity besets the soberest investigator on this ground, caused by the modification of deities by deve- lopment at home and adoption from abroad. Even among the lower races, gods of long traditional legend and worship acquire a mixed and complex personality. The mythologist who seeks to ascertain the precise definition of the Red CLASSIFICATION OF DEITIES. 253 Indian Michabu in his various characters of Heaven-god and Water-god, Creator of the Earth and first ancestor of Man, or who examines the personality of the Polynesian Maui in his relation to Sun, lord of Heaven or Hades, first Man, and South Sea Island hero, will sympathize with the Semitic or Aryan student bewildered among the hetero- geneous attributes of Baal and Astarte, Herakles and Athene. Sir William Jones scarcely overstated the per- plexity of the problem in the following remarkable forecast delivered more than a century ago, in the first anniver- sary discourse before the Asiatic Society of Bengal, at a time when glimpses of the relation of the Hindu to the Greek Pantheon were opening into a new broad view of comparative theology in his mind. ' We must not be sur- prised,' he says, ' at finding, on a close examination, that the characters of all the Pagan deities, male and female, melt into each other and at last into one or two ; for it seems a well-founded opinion, that the whole crowd of gods and goddesses in ancient Rome, and modern Varanes [Benares] mean only the powers of nature, and principally those of the Sun, expressed in a variety of ways and by a multitude of fanciful names.' As to the travelling of gods from country to country, and the changes they are apt to suffer on the road, we may judge by examples of what has happened within our knowledge. It is not merely that one nation borrows a god from another with its proper figure and attributes and rites, as where in Rome the worshipper of the Sun might take his choice whether he-would adore in the temple of the Greek Apollo, the Egyptian Osiris, the Persian Mithra, or the Syrian Elagabalus. The intercourse of races can produce quainter results than this. Any Orientalist will appreciate the wonderful hotchpot of Hindu and Arabic language and religion in the following details, noted down among rude tribes of the Malay Peninsula. We hear of Jin Bumi the Earth-god (Arabic jin = demon, Sanskrit bhumi = earth) ; incense is burnt to Jewajewa (Sanskrit dewa = god) who intercedes with Pirman the 254 ANIMISM. supreme invisible deity above the sky (Brahma ?) ; the Moslem Allah Taala, with his wife Nabi Mahamad (Prophet Mohammed), appear in the Hinduized characters of creator and destroyer of all things ; and while the spirits worshipped in stones are called by the Hindu term of ' dewa ' or deity, Moslem conversion has so far influenced the mind of the stone-worshipper, that he will give to his sacred boulder the title of a Prophet Mohammed. 1 If we would have ex- amples nearer home, we may trace the evil demon Aeshma Daeva of the ancient Persian religion becoming the Asmo- deus of the book of Tobit, afterwards to find a place in the devilry of the middle ages, and to end his career as the Diable Boiteux of Le Sage. Even the Aztec war-god Huitzilopochtli may be found figuring as the demon Vizli- puzli in the popular drama of Doctor Faustus. In ethnographic comparisons of the religions of mankind, unless there is evidence of direct relation between gods be- longing to two peoples, the safe and reasonable principle is to limit the identification of deities to the attributes they have in common. Thus it is proper to compare the Dendid of the White Nile with the Aryan Indra, in so far as both are Heaven-gods and Rain-gods; the Aztec Tonatiuh with the Greek Apollo, in so far as both are Sun-gods ; the Australian Baiame with the Scandinavian Thor, in so far as both are Thunder-gods. The present purpose of dis- playing Polytheism as a department of Animism does not require that elaborate comparison of systems which would be in place in a manual of the religions of the world. The great gods may be scientifically ranged and treated accord- ing to their fundamental ideas, the strongly-marked and intelligible conceptions which, under names often obscure and personalities often mixed and mystified, they stand to represent. It is enough to show the similarity of principle on which the theologic mind of the lower races shaped those old familiar types of deity, with which our first acquaintance was gained in the pantheon of classic mytho- 1 ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. pp. 33, 255, 275, 338, vol. ii. p. 691. HEAVEN-GOD. 255 logy. It will be observed that not all, but the principal figures, belong to strict Nature-worship. These may be here first surveyed. They are Heaven and Earth, Rain and Thunder, Water and Sea, Fire and Sun and Moon, worshipped either directly for themselves, or as animated by their special deities, or these deities are more fully set apart and adored in anthropomorphic shape a group of conceptions distinctly and throughout based on the princi- ples of savage fetishism. True, the great Nature-gods are huge in strength and far-reaching in influence, but this is because the natural objects they belong to are immense in size or range of action, pre-eminent and predominant among lesser fetishes, though still fetishes themselves. In the religion of the North American Indians, the Heaven-god displays perfectly the gradual blending of the material sky itself with its personal deity. In the early times of French colonization, Father Brebeuf mentions the Hurons addressing themselves to the earth, rivers, lakes, and dangerous rocks, but above all to heaven, believing that it is all animated, and some powerful demon dwells therein. He describes them as speaking directly to heaven by its personal name ' Aronhiate ! ' Thus when they throw tobacco into the fire as sacrifice, if it is Heaven they address, they say ' Aronhiat ! (Heaven !) behold my sacrifice, have pity on me, aid me ! ' They have recourse to Heaven in almost all their necessities, and respect this great body above all creatures, remarking in it particularly something divine. They imagine in the sky an ' oki/ i.e. demon or power, which rules the seasons of the year and controls the winds and waves. They dread its anger, calling it to witness when they make some important promise or treaty, saying, Heaven hears what we do this day, and fearing chastisement should their word be broken. One of their renowned sorcerers said, Heaven will be angry if men mock him ; when they cry .every day to Heaven, Aronhiate ! yet give him nothing, he will avenge himself. Etymology again suggests 256 ANIMISM. the divine sky as the inner meaning of the Iroquois supreme deity, Taronhiawagon the ' sky-comer ' or ' sky- holder/ who had his festival about the winter solstice, who brought the ancestral race out of the mountain, taught them hunting, marriage, and religion, gave them corn and beans, squashes and potatoes and tobacco, and guided them on their migrations as they spread over the land. Among the North American tribes, not only does the conception of the personal divine Heaven thus seem the fundamental idea of the Heaven-god, but it may expand under Christian in- fluence into a yet more general thought of divinity in the Great Spirit in Heaven. 1 In South Africa, the Zulus speak of the Heaven as a person, ascribing to it the power of ex^ ercising a will, and they also speak of a Lord of Heaven, whose wrath they deprecate during a thunderstorm. In the native legends of the Zulu princess in the country of the Half -Men, the captive maiden expostulates personally with the Sky, for only acting in an ordinary way, and not in the way she wishes, to destroy her enemies : ' Listen, yon heaven. Attend ; mayoya, listen. Listen, heaven. It does not thunder with loud thunder. It thunders in an undertone. What is it doing ? It thunders to produce rain and change of season.' Thereupon the clouds gather tumultuously ; the princess sings again and it thunders terribly, and the Heaven kills the Half-Men round about her, but she is left unharmed. 1 West Africa is another district where the Heaven-god reigns, in whose attributes may be traced the transition from the direct conception of the personal sky to that of the supreme creative deity. Thus in Bonny, one word serves for god, heaven, cloud ; and in Aquapim, Yankupong is at once the highest god and the weather. Of this latter deity, the 1 Brebeuf in 'Rel. des J6s./ 1636, p. 107; Lafitau, 'Mceurs des Sauvages Ameriquains,' vol. i. p. 132. Schoolcraft, 'Iroquois,' 'p. 36, &c. 237. Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' pp. 48, 172. J. G. Miiller, ' Amer. Urrelig.' p. 119. 2 Callaway, ' Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 203. HEAVEN-GOD. 257 Nyankupon of the Oji nation, it is remarked by Riis, ' The idea of him as a supreme spirit is obscure and un- certain, and often confounded with the visible heavens or sky, the upper world (sorro) which lies beyond human reach ; and hence the same word is used also for heavens, sky, and even for rain and thunder.' 1 The same transi- tion from the divine sky. to its anthropomorphic deity shows out in the theology of the Tatar tribes. The rude Samoyed's mind scarcely if at all separates the visible per- sonal Heaven from the divinity united with it under one and the same name, Num. Among the more cultured Finns, the cosmic attributes of the Heaven-god, Ukko the Old One, display the same original nature ; he is the ancient of Heaven, the father of Heaven, the bearer of the Firma- ment, the god of the Air, the dweller on the Clouds, the Cloud-driver, the shepherd of the Cloud-lambs. 1 So far as the evidence of language, and document, and ceremony, can preserve the record of remotely ancient thought, China shows in the highest deity of the state religion a like theologic development. Tien, Heaven, is in personal shape the Shang-ti or Upper Emperor, the Lord of the Uni- verse. The Chinese books may idealize this supreme divinity ; they may say that his command is fate, that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked, that he loves and protects the people beneath him, that he manifests himself through events, that he is a spirit full of insight, penetrating, fearful, majestic. Yet they cannot refine him so utterly away into an abstract celestial deity, but that language and history still recognize him as what he was in the beginning, Tien, Heaven. 8 1 Waitz, ' Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 168, &c. ; Burton, ' W. & W. fr. W. Afr.' p. 76. * Castre"n, ' Finn. Myth." p. 7, &c. 8 Plath, ' Religion und Cultus der alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 18, &c. ; part ii. p. 32; Doolittle, 'Chinese/ vol. ii. p. 396. See Max Muller, ' Lectures,' 2nd S. p. 437; Legge, 'Confucius,' p. 100. For further evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Heaven as Supreme Deity, see chap. xvii. 258 ANIMISM. With such evidence perfectly accords the history of the Heaven-god among our Indo-European race. This being, adored in ancient Aryan religion, was . ' . . . the whole circle of the heavens, for him A sensitive existence, and a God, With lifted hands invoked, and songs of praise.' The evidence of language to this effect has been set forth with extreme clearness by Professor Max Muller. In the first stage, the Sanskrit Dyu (Dyaus), the bright sky, is taken in a sense so direct that it expresses the idea of day, and the storms are spoken of as going about in it ; while Greek and Latin rival this distinctness in such terms as tvStos, ' in the open air,' evSios, ' well-skyed, calm,' sub divo, ' in the open air,' sub Jove frigido, ' under the cold sky,' and that graphic description by Ennius of the bright firmament, Jove whom all invoke : ' Aspice hoc sublime candens, quern invocant omncs Jovem.' In the second stage, Dyaus pitar, Heaven-father, stands in the Veda as consort of Prithivi matar, Earth-mother, ranked high or highest among the bright gods. To the Greek he is Zevs Trarjjp, the Heaveji-father, Zeus the All-seer, the Cloud-compeller, King of Gods and Men. As Max Muller writes : ' There was nothing that could be told of the sky that was not in some form or other ascribed to Zeus. It was Zeus who rained, who thundered, who snowed, who hailed, who sent the lightning, who gathered the clouds, who let loose the winds, who held the rainbow. It is Zeus who orders the days and nights, the months, seasons, and years. It is he who watches over the fields, who sends rich harvests, and who tends the flocks. Like the sky, Zeus dwells on the highest mountains ; like the sky, Zeus em- braces the earth ; like the sky, Zeus is eternal, unchanging, the highest god. For good and for evil, Zeus the sky and Zeus the god are wedded together in the Greek mind, lan- guage triumphing over thought, tradition over religion.' The same Aryan Heaven-father is Jupiter, in that original RAIN-GOD. 259 name and nature which he bore in Rome long before they arrayed him in the borrowed garments of Greek myth, and adapted him to the ideas of classic philosophy. 1 Thus, in nation after nation, took place the great religious develop- ment by which the Father-Heaven became the Father in Heaven. The Rain-god is most often the Heaven-god exercising a special function, though sometimes taking a more distinctl y individual form, or blending in characteristics with a general Water-god. In East Central Africa, the spirit of an old chief dwelling on a cloudy mountain-top may receive the worship of his votaries and send down the refreshing showers in answer to their prayers ; among the Damaras the highest deity is Omakuru the Rain-giver, who dwells in the far North ; while to the negro of West Africa the Heaven-god is the rain-giver, and may pass in name into the rain itself. 2 Pachacamac, the Peruvian world- creator, has set the Rain-goddess to pour waters over the land, and send down hail and snow. 3 The Aztec Tlaloc was no doubt originally a Heaven-god, for he holds the thunder and lightning, but he has taken especially the attri- butes of Water-god and Rain-god ; and so in Nicaragua the Rain-god Quiateot (Aztec quiahuitl = rain, teotl = god) to whom children were sacrificed to bring rain, shows his larger celestial nature by being also sender of thunder and lightning. 4 The Rain-god of the Khonds is Pidzu Pennu, whom the priests and elders propitiate with eggs and arrack and rice and a sheep, and invoke with quaintly pathetic prayers. They tell him how, if he will not give water, the 1 Max Muller, ' Lectures,' 2nd Series, p. 425 ; Grimm, ' D. M.' ch. ix.; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 4. Connexion of the Sanskrit Dyu with the Scandinavian Tyr and the Anglo Saxon Tiw is perhaps rather of etymology than definition. * Duff Macdonald, ' Africana,' vol. i. p. 60 (E. Centr. Air.). Waitr, ' Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 169 (W. Afr.) p. 416 (Damaras). 8 Markham, ' Quichua Gr. and Die.' p. 9 ; J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrel.' pp. 318, 368. 4 Ibid. pp. 496-9 ; Oviedo, ' Nicaragua,' pp. 40, 72. 260 ANIMISM. land must remain unploughed, the seed will rot in the ground, they and their children and cattle will die of want, the deer and the wild hog will seek other haunts, and then of what avail will it be for the Rain-god to relent, how little any gift of water will avail, when there shall be left neither man, nor cattle, nor seed ; so let him, resting on the sky, pour waters down upon them through his sieve, till the deer are drowned out of the forest and take refuge in the houses, till the soil of the mountains is washed into the valleys, till the cooking-pots burst with the force of the swelling rice, till the beasts gather so plentifully in the green and favoured land, that men's axes shall be blunted with cutting up the game. 1 With perfect meteorological fitness, the Kol tribes of Bengal consider their great deity Marang Bum, Great Mountain, to be the Rain-god. Marang Bum, one of the most conspicuous hills of the plateau near Lodmah in Chota-Nagpur, is the diety himself or his dwelling. Before the rains come on, the women climb the hill, led by the wives of the pahans, with girls drumming, to carry offerings of milk and bel-leaves, which are put on the flat rock at the top. Then the wives of the pahans kneel with loosened hair and invoke the deity, be- seeching him to give the crops seasonable rain. They shake their heads violently as they reiterate this prayer, till they work themselves into a frenzy, and the movement becomes involuntary. They go on thus wildly gesticula- ting, till a cloud is seen ; then they rise, take the drums, and dance the kurrun on the rock, till Marang Bum's re- sponse to their prayer is heard in the distant rumbling of thunder, and they go home rejoicing. They mut go fasting to the mount, and stay there till there is ' a sound of abundance of rain,' when they get them down to eat and drink. It is said that the rain always comes before evening, but the old women appear to choose their own moment for beginning the fast.* It was to Ukko the 1 Macpherson, ' India,' pp. 89, 355. * Dalton, ' Kols,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 34. Compare i Kings xviii. RAIN-GOD. 26l Heaven-god, that in old days the Finn turned with such prayers : ' Ukko, thou, O God above us Thou, O Father in the heavens, Thou who rulest in the cloud-land, And the little cloud-lambs leadest, Send us down the rain from heaven, Make the clouds to drop with honey, Let the drooping corn look upward, Let the grain with plenty rustle.' 1 Quite like this were the classic conceptions of Zeus ve'nos Jupiter Pluvius. They are typified in the famous Athenian prayer recorded by Marcus Aurelius, ' Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the plough-lands of the Athenians, and the plains ! '* and in Petronius Arbiter's complaint of the irreligion of his times, that now no one thinks heaven is heaven, no one keeps a fast, no one cares a hair for Jove, but all men with closed eyes reckon up their goods. Afore- time the ladies walked up the hill in their stoles with bare feet and loosened hair and pure minds, and entreated Jove for water ; then all at once it rained bucketsfull, then or never, and they all went home wet as drowned rats. 3 In later ages, when drought parched the fields of the mediaeval husbandman, he transferred to other patrons the functions of the Rain-god, and with procession and litany sought help from St. Peter or St. James, or, with more of mytho- logical consistency, from the Queen of Heaven. As for ourselves, we have lived to see the time when men shrink from addressing even to Supreme Deity the old customary rain-prayers, for the rainfall is passing from the region of the supernatural, to join the tides and seasons in the realm of physical science. 1 Castr^n, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 36 ; Kalcwala, Rune ii. 317. * Marc. Antonin. v. 7. ' EI'-XTJ 'A.0rjva.t<i>v, vjov, VITOV, u> (j>i\e Zed, KCLTO. rrjt d/>o!'pa? TUIV \0 i]ve.ib)v KO.I rOiv ireSiwv. 3 Petron. Arbiter. Sat. xliv. ' Antea stolatrc ibant nudis pedibus in clivum, passis capillis, mentibus puris, et Jovem aquam exorabant. Itaque statim urceatim pluebat : aut tune aut nunquam ; et omnes redibant udi tanquam mures.' Sec Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 160. 262 ANIMISM. The place of the Thunder-god in polytheistic religion is similar to that of the Rain-god, in many cases even to entire coincidence. But his character is rather of wrath than of beneficence, a character which we have half lost the power to realize, since the agonizing terror of the thunder- storm which appals savage minds has dwindled away in ours, now that we behold in it not the manifestation of divine wrath, but the restoration of electric equilibrium. North American tribes, as the Mandans, heard in the thunder and saw in the lightning the clapping wings and flashing eyes of that awful heaven-bird which belongs to, or even is, the Great Manitu himself. 1 The Dacotas could show at a place called Thunder-tracks, near the source of the St. Peter's River, the footprints of the thunder-bird five and twenty miles apart. It is to be noticed that these Sioux, among their varied fancies about thunder-birds and the like, give unusually well a key to the great thunderbolt- myth which recurs in so many lands. They consider the lightning entering the ground to scatter there in all direc- tions thunderbolt-stones, which are flints, &c., their reason for this notion being the very rational one, that these siliceous stones actually produce a flash when struck.* In an account of certain Carib deities, who were men and are now stars, occurs the name of Savacou, who was changed into a great bird ; he is captain of the hurricane and thunder, he blows fire through a tube and that is lightning, he gives the great rain. Rochefort describes the effect of a thunderstorm on the partly Europeanized Caribs of the West Indies two centuries ago. When they perceive its approach, he says, they quickly betake themselves to their cabins, and range themselves in the kitchen on their little seats near the fire ; hiding their faces and leaning their heads in their hands and on their knees, they fall to weeping and lamenting in their jargon ' Maboya mouche fache contre Caraibe,' i.e., 1 Pr. Max v. Wied, ' N. Amer.' voL ii. pp. 152, 223 ; J. G. Muller, p. no ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 179, 1 Keating, 'Narr.' vol. i. p. 407; Eastman, 'Dahcotah,' p. 71 ; Brinton, p. 150, &c. ; see M'Coy, ' Baptist Indian Missions,' p. 363. THUNDER-GOD. 263 Maboya (the evil demon) is very angry with the Caribs. This they say also when there comes a hurricane, not leaving off this dismal exercise till it is over, and there is no end to their astonishment that the Christians on these occasions manifest no such affliction and fear. 1 The Tupi tribes of Brazil are an example of a race among whom the Thunder or the Thunderer, Tupan, flapping his celestial wings and flashing with celestial light, was developed into the very representative of highest deity, whose name still stands among their Christian descendants as the equivalent of God.* In Peru, a mighty and far-worshipped deity was Catequil the Thunder-god, child of the Heaven-god, he who set free the Indian race from out of the ground by turning it up with his golden spade, he who in thunder- flash and clap hurls from his sling the small round smooth thunderstones, treasured in the villages as fire-fetishes and charms to kindle the flames of love. How distinct in per- sonality and high in rank was the Thunder and Lightning (Chuqui yllayllapa) in the religion of the Incas, may be judged from his huaca or fetish-idol standing on the bench beside the idols of the Creator and the Sun at the great Solar festival in Cuzco, when the beasts to be sacrificed were led round them, and the priests prayed thus : ' O Creator, and Sun, and Thunder, be for ever young ! do not grow old. Let all things be at peace ! let the people multiply, and their food, and let all other things continue to increase.' 3 In Africa, we may contrast the Zulu, who perceives in thunder and lightning the direct action of Heaven or Heaven's lord, with the Yoruba, who assigns them not to Olorun the Lord of Heaven, but to a lower deity, Shango the Thunder-god, whom they call also Dzakuta the Stone- caster, for it is he who (as among so many other peoples 1 De la Bordc, ' Caraibes,' p. 530 ; Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 431. 1 De Laet, ' Novus Orbis,' xv. 2. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 417 ; J. G. Muller, p. 270 ; also 421 (thunderstorms by anger of Sun, in Cumana, &c.). * Brinton, p. 153; Herrera, ' Indias Occidentals,' Dec., v. 4. J. G. Muller p. 327. ' Rites and Laws of the Yncas,' tr. & ed. by C. R. Markham, p. 16, see 81 ; Prescott, ' Peru,' vol. i. p. 86. 264 ANIMISM. who have forgotten their Stone Age) flings down from heaven the stone hatchets which are found in the ground, and preserved as sacred objects. 1 In the religion of the Kamchadals, Billukai, the hem of whose garment is the rainbow, dwells in the clouds with many spirits, and sends thunder and lightning and rain.* Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus the Thunderer is Ilya, in whose name mytholo- gists trace a Christian tradition of Elijah, whose fiery chariot seems indeed to have been elsewhere identified with that of the Thunder-god, while the highest peak of jEgina, once the seat of Pan-hellenic Zeus, is now called Mount St. Elias. Among certain Moslem schismatics, it is even the historical Ali, cousin of Mohammed, who is enthroned in the clouds, where the thunder is his voice, and the light- ning the lash wherewith he smites the wicked. 3 Among the Turanian or Tatar race, the European branch shows most distinctly the figure of the Thunder-god. To the Lapps, Tiermes appears to have been the Heaven-god, especially conceived as Aija the Thunder-god ; of old they thought the Thunder (Aija) to be a living being, hovering in the air and hearkening to the talk of men, smiting such as spoke of him in an unseemly way; or, as some said, the Thunder- 'god is the foe of sorcerers, whom he drives from heaven and smites, and then it is that men hear in thunder-peals the hurtling of his arrows, as he speeds them from his bow, the Rainbow. In Finnish poetry, likewise, Dkko the Heaven-god is portrayed with such attributes. The Runes call him Thunderer, he speaks through the clouds, his fiery shirt is the lurid storm-cloud, men talk of his stones and his hammer, he flashes his fiery sword and it lightens, or he draws his mighty rainbow, Ukko's bow, to shoot his fiery copper arrows, wherewith men would invoke him to 1 Bowen, ' Yoruba Lang.' p. xvi. in ' Smithsonian Contr.' vol. i. See Burton, ' Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 142. Details as to thunder-axes, &c., in ' Early Hist, of Mankind,' ch. viii. 1 Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 266. * Klemm, ' C. G.' vol. iv. p. 85. (Ossetes, &c.) See Welcker, vol. i. p. 170 ; Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 1 58. Bastian, ' Mensch.' vol. ii. p. 423 (Ali-sect.). THUNDER-GOD. 265 smite their enemies. Or when it is dark in his heavenly house he strikes fire, and that is lightning. To this day the Philanders call a thunderstorm an ' ukko,' or an ' uk- konen,' that is, ' a little ukko/ and when it lightens they say, ' There is Ukko striking fire ! .' l What is the Aryan conception of the Thunder-god, but a poetic elaboration of thoughts inherited from the savage state through which the primitive Aryans had passed ? The Hindu Thunder-god is the Heaven-god Indra, Indra's bow is the rainbow, Indra hurls the thunderbolts, he smites his enemies, he smites the dragon-clouds, and the rain pours down on earth, and the sun shines forth again. The Veda is full of Indra's glories : ' Now will I sing the feats of Indra, which he of the thunderbolt did of old. He smote Ahi, then he poured forth the waters ; he divided the rivers of the mountains. He smote Ahi by the mountain ; Tvash- tar forged for him the glorious bolt.' ' Whet, O strong Indra, the heavy strong red weapon against the enemies ! ' ' May the axe (the thunderbolt) appear with the light ; may the red one blaze forth bright with splendour ! ' ' When Indra hurls again and again his thunderbolt, then they believe in the brilliant god.' Nor is Indra merely a great god in the ancient Vedic pantheon, he is the very patron-deity of the invading Aryan race in India, to whose help they look in their conflicts with the dark-skinned tribes of the land. ' Destroying the Dasyus, Indra protected the Aryan colour ' ' Indra protected in battle the Aryan worshipper, he subdued the lawless for Manu, he conquered the black skin.' 1 This Hindu Indra is the offspring of Dyaus the Heaven. But in the Greek religion, Zeus is himself Zeus Kerauneios, the wielder of the thunderbolt, and thunders from the cloud-capped tops of Ida or Olym- pos. In like manner the Jupiter Capitolinus of Rome is himself Jupiter Tonans : 1 Castren, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 39, &c. ' Rig- Veda,' i. 32. i, 55. 5, 130. 8, 165 ; iii. 34. 9 ; vi. 20 ; x. 44. 9, 89, 9. Max Miiller, ' Lectures,' 2nd S. p. 427 ; ' Chips,' vol. i. p. 42, vol. ii. p. 323. See Muir, ' Sanskrit Texts.' II. 3 266 ANIMISM. ' Ad penetrale Numae, CapJtolinumque Tonantem.' l Thus, also, it was in accurate language that the old Slavonic nations were described as adoring Jupiter Tonans as their highest god. He was the cloud-dwelling Heaven-god, his weapon the thunder-bolt, the lightning-flash, his name Perun the Smiter (Perkun, Perkunas). In the Lithuanian district, the thunder itself is Perkun ; in past times the peasant would cry when he heard the thunder peal ' Dewe Perkune apsaugog mus ! God Perkun spare us ! ' and to this day he says, ' Perkunas gravja ! Perkun is thunder- ing ! ' or ' Wezzajs barrahs ! the Old One growls ! ' The old German and Scandinavian theology made Thunder, Donar, Thor, a special deity to rule the clouds and rain, and hurl his crushing hammer theough the air. He reigned high in the Saxon heaven, till the days came when the Christian convert had to renounce him in solemn form, ' ec forsacho Thunare ! I forsake Thunder ! ' Now, his survival is for the most part in mere verbal form, in the etymology of such names as Donnersberg, Thorwaldsen, Thursday. 3 In the polytheism of the lower as of the higher races, the Wind-gods are no unknown figures. The Winds them- selves, and especially the Four Winds in their four regions, take name and shape as personal divinities, while some deity of wider range, a Wind-god, Storm-god, Air-god, or the mighty Heaven-god himself, may stand as compeller or controller of breeze and gale and tempest. We have already taken as examples from the Algonquin mythology of North America the four winds whose native legends have been versified in ' Hiawatha ; ' Mudjekeewis the West Wind, Father of the Winds of Heaven, and his children, Wabun the East Wind, the morning-bringer, the lazy Shawondasse the South Wind, the wild and cruel North 1 Homer. II. viii. 170, xvii. 595. Ovid. Fast. ii. 69. See Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. ii. p. 194. * Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 257. 3 Grimm, ' Deutsche Myth.' ch. viii. Edd i ; G y If agi lining, 21, 44. WIND-GOD. 267 Wind, the fierce Kabibonokka. Viewed in their religious aspect, these mighty beings correspond with four of the great manitus sacrificed to among the Delawares, the West, South, East, and North ; while the Iroquois acknowledged a deity of larger grasp, Gaoh, the Spirit of the Winds, who holds them prisoned in the mountains in the Home of the Winds. 1 The Polynesian Wind-gods are thus described by Ellis : ' The chief of these were Veromatautoru and Tairibu brother and sister to the children of Taaroa, their dwelling was near the great rock, which was the foundation of the world. Hurricanes, tempests, and all destructive winds, were supposed to be confined within them, and were em- ployed by them to punish such as neglected the worship of the gods. In stormy weather their compassion was sought by the tempest-driven mariner at sea, or the friends of such on shore. Liberal presents, it was supposed, would at any time purchase a calm. If the first failed, subsequent ones were certain of success. The same means were resorted to for procuring a storm, but with less certainty. Whenever the inhabitants of one island heard of invasion from those of another, they immediately carried large offerings to these deities, and besought them to destroy by tempest the hos- tile fleet whenever it might put to sea. Some of the most intelligent people still think evil spirits had formerly great power over the winds, as they say there have been no such fearful storms since they abolished idolatry, as there were before.' Or, again, the great deity Maui adds a new com- plication to his enigmatic solar-celestial character by appear- ing as a Wind-God. In Tahiti he was identified with the East Wind ; in New Zealand he holds all the winds but the west in his hands, or he imprisons them with great stones rolled to the mouths of their caves, save the West Wind 1 Schoolcraft, ' Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 139, vol. ii. p. 214; Loskiel, part i. p. 43; Waitz, vol. iii. p.. 190. Morgan, 'Iroquois,' p. 157; J. G. Miiller, p. 56. Further American evidence in Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' pp. 50, 74 ; Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 267 (Sillagiksartok, Weather-spirit) ; De la Borde, ' Caraibes,' p. 530 (Carib Star Curumon, makes the billows and upsets canoes). 268 ANIMISM. which he cannot catch or prison, so that it almost always blows. 1 To the Kamchadal, it is Billukai the Heaven-god who comes down and drives his sledge on earth, and men see his traces in the wind-drifted snow.* To the Finn, while there are traces of subordinate Wind-gods in his mythology, the great ruler of wind and storm is Ukko the Heaven-god ;* while the Esth looked rather to Tuule-ema, Wind's Mother, and when the gale shrieks he will still say ' Wind's mother wails, who knows what mothers shall wail next.' 4 Such instances from Allophylian mythology 5 show types which are found developed in full vigour by the Aryan races. In the Vedic hymns, the Storm Gods, the Maruts. borne along with the fury of the boisterous winds, with the rain-clouds distribute showers over the earth, make dark- ness during the day, rend the trees and devour the forests like wild elephants . No e ff ort of the Red Indian's personify- ing fancy in the tales of the dancing Pauppuk-keewis the Whirlwind, or that fierce and shifty hero, Manabozho the North- West Wind, can more than match the description in the Iliad, of Achilles calling on Boreas and Zephyros with libations and vows of sacrifice, to blow into a blaze the funeral pyre of Patroklos .... his prayer Swift Iris heard, and bore it to the Winds. They in the hall of gusty Zephyrus Were gathered round the feast ; in haste appearing, Swift Iris on the stony threshold stood. They saw, and rising all, besought her each To sit beside him ; she with their requests Refused compliance, and addressed them thus,' &c. 1 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 329 (compare with the Maori Tempest-god Tawhirimatea, Grey, ' Polyn. Myth.' p. 5) ; Schirren, ' Wandersage der Neuseelander,' Ac. p. 85 ; Yate, ' New Zealand,' p. 144. See also Mariner, ' Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 1 1.5. 2 Steller, ' Kamschatka,' p. z66. 3 Castren, ' Finn. Myth.' pp. 37, 68. 4 Boeder, pp. 106, 147. 8 See also KJemm, ' Cultur-Gesch.' vol. iv. p. 85 (Circassian Water-god and Wind-god). Muir, ' Sanskrit Texts,' vol. v. p. 150. WIND-GOD. 269 ^Eolus with the winds imprisoned in his cave has the office of the Red Indian Spirit of the Winds, and of the Polynesian Maui. With quaint adaptation to nature-myth and even to moral parable, the Harpies, the Storm-gusts that whirl and snatch and dash and smirch with eddying dust-clouds, become the loathsome bird-monsters sent to hover over the table of Phineus to claw and defile his dainty viands. 1 If we are to choose an Aryan Storm-god for ideal grandeur, we must seek him in '. . . . the hall where Runic Odin Howls his war-song to the gale.' Jakob Grimm has denned Odin or Woden as ' the all- penetrating creative and formative power.' But such ab- stract conceptions can hardly be ascribed to his barbaric worshippers. As little may his real nature be discovered among the legends which degrade him to a historical king of Northern men, an ' Othinus rex.' See the All-father sit- ting cloud-mantled on his heaven-seat, overlooking the deeds of men, and we may discern in him the attributes of the Heaven-god. Hear the peasant say of the raging tempest, that it is ' Odin faring by ; ' trace the mythological transi- tion from Woden's tempest to the ' Wiitende Heer,' the ' Wild Huntsman ' of our own grand storm-myth, and we shall recognize the old Teutonic deity in his function of cloud-compeller, of Tempest-god.* The ' rude Carinthian boor ' can show a relic from a yet more primitive stage of mental history, when he sets up a wooden bowl of various meats on a tree before his house, to fodder the wind that it may do no harm. In Swabia, Tyrol, and the Upper Pala- tinate, when the storm rages, they will fling a spoonful or a handful of meal in the face of the gale, with this formula in the last-named district, ' Da Wind, hast du Mehl fur dein Kind, aber aufhoren musst du ! '* 1 Homer. II. xxiii. 192, Odyss. xx. 66, 77 ; Apollon. Rhod. Argonautica ; Apollodor. i. 9. 21 ; Virg. ./En. i. 56; Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. i. p. 707, vol. iii. p. 67. * Grimm, ' Deutsche Myth.' pp. 121, 871. 8 Wuttke, ' Deutsche Volksabergl.' p. 86. 270 ANIMISM, The Earth-deity takes an important place in polytheistic religion. The Algonquins would sing medicine-songs to Mesukkummik Okwi, the Earth, the Great-Grandmother of all. In her charge (and she must be ever at home in her lodge) are left the animals whose flesh and skins are man's food and clothing, and the roots and medicines of sovereign power to heal sickness and kill game in time of hunger ; therefore good Indians never dig up the roots of which their medicines are made, without depositing an offering in the earth for Mesukkummik Okwi. 1 In the list of fetish- deities of Peruvian tribes, the Earth, adored as Mamapacha, Mother Earth, took high subordinate rank below Sun and Moon in the pantheon of the Incas, and at harvest-time ground corn and libations of chicha were offered to her that she might grant a good harvest. 2 Her rank is similar in the Aquapim theology of West Africa ; first the Highest God in the firmament, then the Earth as universal mother, then the fetish. The negro, offering his libation before some great undertaking, thus calls upon the triad : ' Crea- tor, come drink ! Earth, come drink ! Bosumbra, come drink ! >s Among the indigenes of India, the Bygah tribes of Seonee show a well-marked worship of the Earth. They call her ' Mother Earth ' or Dhurteemah, and before praying or eating their food, which is looked on always as a daily sacrifice, they invariably offer some of it to the earth, before using the name of any other god.* Of all religions of the world, perhaps that of the Khonds of Orissa gives the Earth-goddess her most remarkable place and function. Boora Pennu or Bella Pennu, the Light-god or Sun-god, created Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess for his 1 Tanner's ' Narrative,' p. 193 ; Loskiel, I.e. See also Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 414 ; J. G. Miiller, p. 178 (Antilles). * Garcilaso de la Vega, ' Commentaries Reales,' i. 10 ; Rivero & Tschudi, p. 161 ; J. G. Miiller, p. 369. 3 Waitz, ' Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 170. 4 ' Report of Ethnological Committee, Jubbulpore Exhibition,' 1866-7. Nagpore, 1868, pan ii. p. ^4. EARTH-GOD. 27! consort, and from them were born the other great gods. But strife arose between the mighty parents, and it became the wife's work to thwart the good creation of her husband, and to cause all physical and moral ill. Thus to the Sun- worshipping sect she stands abhorred on the bad eminence of the Evil Deity. But her own sect, the Earth-worship- ping sect, seem to hold ideas of her nature which are more primitive and genuine. The functions which they ascribe to her, and the rites with which they propitiate her, display her as the Earth-mother, raised by an intensely agricultural race to an extreme height of divinity. It was she who with drops of her blood made the soft muddy ground harden into firm earth ; thus men learnt to offer human victims, and the whole earth became firm ; the pastures and ploughed fields came into use, and there were cattle and sheep and poultry for man's service ; hunting began, and there were iron and ploughshares and harrows and axes, and the juice of the palm-tree ; and love arose between the sons and daughters of the people, making new households, and society with its relations of father and mother, and wife and child, and the bonds between ruler and subject. It was the Khond Earth-goddess who was propitiated with those hideous sacrifices, the suppression of which is matter of recent Indian history. With dances and drunken orgies, and a mystery play to explain in dramatic dialogue the purpose of the rite, the priest offered Tari Pennu her sacrifice, and prayed for children and cattle and poultry and brazen pots and all wealth ; every man and woman wished a wish, and they tore the slave-victim piecemeal, and spread the morsels over the fields they were to fertilize. 1 In Northern Asia, also, among the Tatar races, the office of the Earth-deity is strongly and widely marked. Thus in the nature-worship of the Tunguz and Buraets, Earth stands among the greater divinities. It is especially interesting to notice among the Finns a transition like that just observed from the god 1 Macpherson, ' India,' chap. vi. 272 ANIMISM. Heaven to the Heaven-god. In the designation of Maa- ema, Earth-mother, given to the earth itself, there may be traced survival from the stage of direct nature-worship, while the passage to the conception of a divine being inhabiting and ruling the material substance, is marked by the use of the name Maan emo, Earth's mother, for the ancient sub- terranean goddess whom men would ask to make the grass shoot thick and the thousandfold ears mount high, or might even entreat to rise in person out of the earth to give them strength. The analogy of other mythologies agrees with the definition of the divine pair who reign in Finn theology : as Ukko the Grandfather is the Heaven-god, so his spouse Akka the Grandmother is the Earth-goddess. 1 Thus in the ancient nature-worship of China, the personal Earth holds a place below the Heaven. Tien and Tu are closely associated in the national rites, and the idea of the pair as universal parents, if not an original conception in Chinese theology, is at any rate developed in Chinese classic symbolism. Heaven and Earth receive their solemn sacrifices not at the hands of common mortals but of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, and his great vassals and mandarins. Yet their adoration is national ; they are wor- shipped by the people who offer incense to them on the hill-tops at their autumn festival, they are adored by suc- cessful candidates in competitive examination ; and, espe- cially and appropriately, the prostration of bride and bridegroom before the father and mother of all things, the ' worshipping of Heaven and Earth/ is the all-important ceremony of a Chinese marriage. 1 The Vedic hymns commemorate the goddess Prithivi, the broad Earth, and in their ancient strophes the modern Brahmans still pray for benefits to mother Earth and father Heaven, side by side : 1 Georgi, ' Reise im Russ. Reich,' vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Castrln, ' Finn. Myth,' p. 86, &c. * Plath, ' Religion dcr alien Chincscn,' part i. pp. 36, 73, part ii. p. 32. Doolittle. ' Chinese,' vol. i. pp. 86, 354, 413, vol. ii. pp. 67, 380, 455. EARTH-GOD. 273 ' Tanno Vato mayobhu vatu bheshajam tanmata Prithivt tatpita Dyauh.' 1 Greek religion shows a transition to have taken place like that among the Turanian tribes, for the older simpler nature-deity Gaia, FT} TTCUTWV wrnp, Earth the All-Mother, seems to have faded into the more anthropomorphic De- meter, Earth-Mother, whose eternal fire burned in Man- tinea, and whose temples stood far and wide over the land which she made kindly to. the Greek husbandman.* The Romans acknowledged her plain identity as Terra Mater, Ops Mater. 8 Tacitus could rightly recognize this deity of his own land among German tribes, worshippers of ' Ner- thum (or, Hertham), id est Terram matrem,' Mother Earth, whose holy grove stood in an ocean isle, whose chariot drawn by cows passed through the land making a season of peace and joy, till the goddess, satiated with mortal conver- sation, was taken back by her priest to her temple, and the chariot and garments and even the goddess herself were washed in a secret lake, which forthwith swallowed up the ministering slaves ' hence a mysterious terror and sacred ignorance, what that should be which only the doomed to perish might behold.' 4 If in these modern days we seek in Europe traces of Earth-worship, we may find them in curiously distinct survival in Germany, if no longer in the Christmas food-offerings buried in and for the earth up to early in this century, 4 at any rate among Gypsy hordes. Dewel, the great god in heaven (dewa, deus), is rather feared than loved by these weatherbeaten outcasts, for he harms them on their wanderings with his thunder and lightning, his snow and rain, and his stars interfere with their dark doings. Therefore they curse him foully when misfortune falls on them, and when a child dies, they say that Dewel has eaten it. But Earth, Mother of all good, 1 ' Rig-Veda,' i. 89. 4, &c., &c. * Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. i. p. 385, Stc. * Varro de Ling. Lat. iv. 4 Tacit. Germania, 40. Grimm, ' Deutsche Myth.' p. 229, &c. 4 Wuttkc, ' Deutsche Volksabergl.' p. 87. 274 ANIMISM. self-existing from the beginning, is to them holy, so holy that they take heed never to let the drinking-cup touch the ground, for it would become too sacred to be used by men. 1 Water-worship, as has been seen, may be classified as a special department of religion. It by no means follows, however, that savage water-worshippers should necessarily have generalized their ideas, and passed beyond their par- ticular water-deities to arrive at the conception of a general deity presiding over water as an element. Divine springs, streams, and lakes, water-spirits, deities concerned with the clouds and rain, are frequent, and many details of them are cited here, but I have not succeeded in finding among the lower races any divinity whose attributes, fairly criticized, will show him or her to be an original and absolute ele- mental Water-god. Among the deities of the Dakotas, Unktahe the fish-god of the waters is a master-spirit of sorcery and religion, the rival even of the mighty Thunder- bird.* In the Mexican pantheon, Tlaloc god of rain and waters, fertilizer of earth and lord of paradise, whose wife is Chalchihuitlicue, Emerald-Skirt, dwells among the mountain-tops where the clouds gather and pour down the streams.* Yet neither of these mythic beings approaches the generality of conception that belongs to full elemental deity, and even the Greek Nereus, though by his name he should be the very personification of water (VTJPOS), seems too exclusively marine in his home and family to be cited as the Water-god. Nor is the reason of this hard to find. It is an extreme stretch of the power of theological gene- ralization to bring water in its myriad forms under one divinity, though each individual body of water, even the smallest stream or lake, can have its personal individuality or indwelling spirit. 1 Liebich, ' Die Zigeuner,' pp. 30, 84. * Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes," part iii. p. 485 ; Eastman, ' Dahcotah,' pp. i. 118, 161. * Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 14. WATER-GOD. 275 Islanders and coast-dwellers indeed live face to face with mighty water-deities, the divine Sea and the great Sea-gods. What the sea may seem to an uncultured man who first beholds it, we may learn among the Lampongs of Sumatra : ' The inland people of that country are said to pay a kind of adoration to the sea, and to make to it an offering of cakes and sweetmeats on their beholding it for the first time, deprecating its power of doing them mischief.' 1 The higher stage of such doctrine is where the sea, no longer itself personal, is considered as ruled by indwelling spirits. Thus Tuaraatai and Ruahatu, principal among marine deities of Polynesia, send the sharks to execute their ven- geance. Hiro descends to the depths of the ocean and dwells among the monsters, they lull him to sleep in a cavern, the Wind-god profits by his absence to raise a violent storm to destroy the boats in which Hire's friends are sailing, but, roused by a friendly spirit-messenger, the Sea-god rises to the surface and quells the tempest.* This South Sea Island myth might well have been in the Odyssey. We may point to the Guinea Coast as a barbaric region where Sea-worship survives in its extremest form. It ap- pears from Bosnian's account, about 1700, that in the religion of Whydah, the Sea ranked only as younger bro- ther in the three divine orders, below the Serpents and Trees. But at present, as appears from Captain Burton's evidence, the religion of Whydah extends through Dahome, and the divine Sea has risen in rank. ' The youngest brother of the triad is Hu, the ocean or sea. Formerly it was subject to chastisement, like the Hellespont, if idle or useless. The Huno, or ocean priest, is now considered the highest of all, a fetish king, at Whydah, where he has 500 wives. At stated times he repairs to the beach, begs ' Ag- bwe,' the . . . ocean god, not to be boisterous, and throws in rice and corn, oil and beans, cloth, cowries, and other valu- ables. ... At times the king sends as an ocean sacrifice 1 Marsden, ' Sumatra,' p. 301 ; see also 303 (Tapals). 2 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 328. 276 ANIMISM. from Agbome a man carried in a hammock, with the dress, the stool, and the umbrella of a caboceer ; a canoe takes him out to sea, where he is thrown to the sharks.' 1 While in these descriptions the individual divine personality of the sea is so well marked, an account of the closely related Slave Coast religion states that a great god dwells in the sea, and it is to him, not to the sea itself, that offerings are cast in. 1 In South America the idea of the divine Sea is clearly marked in the Peruvian worship of Mama- cocha, Mother Sea, giver of food to men. 8 Eastern Asia, both in its stages of lower and higher civilization, contri- butes members to the divine group. In Kamchatka, Mitgk the Great Spirit of the Sea, fish-like himself, sends the fish up the rivers. 4 Japan deifies separately on land and at sea the lords of the waters ; Midsuno Kami, the Water-god, is worshipped during the rainy season ; Jebisu, the Sea-god, is younger brother of the Sun. Among barbaric races we thus find two conceptions current, the personal divine Sea and the anthropomorphic Sea-god. These represent two stages of development of one idea the view of the natural object as itself an ani- mated being, and the separation of its animating fetish-soul as a distinct spiritual deity. To follow the enquiry into classic times shows the same distinction as strongly marked- When Kleomenes marched down to Thyrea, having slaugh- tered a bull to the Sea (o-^ayioo-a/ievos Sc T-Q OaXaavg ravpov) he embarked his army in ships for the Tirynthian land and Nauplia.* Cicero makes Cotta remark to Balbus that ' our generals, embarking on the sea, have been accustomed to immolate a victim to the waves,' and he goes on to argue. 1 Bosnian, ' Guinea,' letter xix. ; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 494. Burton, 'Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 141. See also below, chap, xviii. (sacrifice). . Schlegel, ' Ewe Sprache,' p. xiv. Garcilaso de la Vega, ' Commentaries Reales,' i. 10, vi. 17 ; Rivero & Tt hudi, ' Peru,' p. 161. Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 265. Siebold, ' Nippon,' part v. p. 9. Herod, vi. 76. SEA-GOD. 277 not unfairly, that if the Earth herself is a goddess, what is she other than Tellus, and ' if the Earth, the Sea too, whom thou saidst to be Neptune.' 1 Here is direct nature- worship in its extremest sense of fetish-worship. But in the anthropomorphic stage appear that dim prae-Olympian figure of Nereus the Old Man of the Sea, father of the Ne- reids in their ocean caves, and the Homeric Poseidon the Earth-shaker, who stables his coursers in his cave in the jEgean deeps, who harnesses the gold-maned steeds to his chariot and drives through the dividing waves, while the subject sea-beasts come up at the passing of their lord, a king so little bound to the element he governs, that he can come from the brine to sit in the midst of the gods in the assembly on Olympos, and ask the will of Zeus.* Fire-worship brings into view again, though under dif- ferent aspects and with different results, the problems pre- sented by water-worship. The real and absolute worship of fire falls into two great divisions, the first belonging rather to fetishism, the second to polytheism proper, and the two apparently representing an earlier and later stage of theological ideas. The first is the rude barbarian's adora- tion of the actual flame which he watches writhing, roaring, devouring like a live animal ; the second belongs to an ad- vanced generalization, that any individual fire is a mani- festation of one general elemental being- the Fire-god. Unfortunately, evidence of the exact meaning of fire-worship among the lower races is scanty, while the transition from fetishism to polytheism seems a gradual process of which the stages elude close definition. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that rites performed with fire are, though often, yet by no means necessarily, due to worship of the fire itself. Authors who have indiscriminately mixed up such rites as the new fire, the perpetual fire, the passing 1 Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 20. 1 Homer, II. i. 538, xiii. 18, xx. 13. Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. i. p. 616 (Nereus), p. 622 (Poseidon). Cox, ' Mythology of Aryan Nations,' vol. ii. ch. vi, 278 ANIMISM. through the fire, classing them as acts of fire-worship, with- out proper evidence as to their meaning in any particular case, have added to the perplexity of a subject not too easy to deal with; even under strict precautions. Two sources or error are especially to be noted. On the one hand, fire happens to be a usual means whereby sacrifices are trans- mitted to departed souls and deities in general ; and on the other hand, the ceremonies of earthly fire-worship are habi- tually and naturally transferred to celestial fire-worship in the religion of the Sun. It may best serve the -present purpose to carry a line of some of the best-defined facts which seems to bear on fire- worship proper, from savagery on into the higher culture. In the last century, Loskiel, a missionary among the North American Indians, remarks that ' In great danger, an Indian has been observed to lie prostrate on his face, and throwing a handful of tobacco into the fire, to call aloud, as in an agony of distress, " There, take and smoke, be paci- fied, and don't hurt me." ' Of course this may have been a mere sacrifice transmitted to some other spiritual being through fire, but we have in this region explicit statements as to a distinct fire-deity. The Delawares, it appears from the same author, acknowledged the Fire-manitu, first parent of all Indian nations, and celebrated a yearly festival in his honour, when twelve manitus, animal and vegetable, at- tended him as subordinate deities. 1 In North- West America, in Washington Irving's account of the Chinooks and other Columbia River Tribes, mention is made of the spirit which inhabits fire. Powerful both for evil and good, and seem- ingly rather evil than good in nature, this being must be kept in good humour by frequent offerings. The Fire-spirit has great influence with the winged aerial supreme deity, wherefore the Indians implore him to be their interpreter, to procure them success in hunting and fishing, fleet horses, obedient wives, and male children. 2 In the elaborately 1 Loskiel, ' Ind. of N. A.' part i. pp. 41, 45. See also J. G. Muller, p. 55. 1 Irving, ' Astoria,' vol. ii. ch. xxii. FIRE-GOD. 279 systematic religion of Mexico, there appears in his proper place a Fire-god, closely related to the Sun-god in character, but keeping well marked his proper identity. His name was Xiuhteuctli, Fire-lord, and they called him likewise Huehueteotl, the old god. Great honour was paid to this god Fire, who gives them heat, and bakes their cakes, and roasts their meat. Therefore at every meal the first morsel and libation were cast into the fire, and every day the deity had incense burnt to him. Twice in the year were held his solemn festivals. At the first, a felled tree was set up in his honour, and the sacrificers danced round his fire with the human victims, whom afterwards they cast into a great fire, only to drag them out half roasted for the priests to complete the sacrifice. The second was distinguished by the rite of the new fire, so well known in connexion with solar worship ; the friction-fire was solemnly made before the image of Xiuhteuctli in his sanctuary in the court of the great teocalli, and the game brought in at the great hunt which began the festival was cooked at the sacred fire for the banquets that ended it. 1 Polynesia well knows from the mythological point of view Mahuika the Fire-god, who keeps the volcano-fire on his subterranean hearth, whither Maui goes down (as the Sun into the Underworld) to bring up fire for man ; but in the South Sea islands there is scarcely a trace of actual rites of fire-worship.* In West Africa, among the gods of Dahome is Zo the fire- fetish ; a pot of fire is placed in a room, and sacrifice is offered to it, that fire may ' live ' there, and not go forth to destroy the house. 3 Asia is a region where distinct fire-worship may be pecu- liarly well traced through the range of lower and higher civilization. The rude Kamchadals, worshipping all things 1 Torquemada, ' Monarquia Indiana,' vi. c. 28, x. c. 22, 30 ; Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. iii. pp. 492, 522, 536. * Schirren, ' Wandersage dcr Neuscelander,' &c., p. 32 ; Turner, ' Poly- nesia,' pp. 252, 527. 3 Burton, ' Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 148 ; Schlcgel, ' Ewe Sprache,' p. xv. 28O ANIMISM. that did them harm or good, worshipped the fire, offering to it noses of foxes and other game, so that one might tell by looking at furs whether they had been taken by baptized or heathen hunters. 1 The Ainos of Yesso worship Abe kamui the Fire-deity as the benefactor of men, the messenger to the other gods, the purifier who heals the sick. 1 Turanian tribes likewise hold fire a sacred element, many Tunguz, Mon- gol, and Turk tribes sacrifice to Fire, and some clans will not eat meat without first throwing a morsel upon the hearth. The following passage is from a Mongol wedding-song to the personified Fire, ' Mother Ut, Queen of Fire, thou who art made from the elm that grows on the mountain-tops of Changgai-Chan and Burchatu-Chan, thou who didst come forth when heaven and earth divided, didst come forth from the footsteps of Mother Earth, and wast formed by the King of Gods. Mother Ut, whose father is the hard steel, whose mother is the flint, whose ancestors are the elm-trees, whose shining reaches to the sky and pervades the earth. Goddess Ut, we bring thee yellow oil for offering, and a white wether with yellow head, thou who hast a manly son, a beauteous daughter-in-law, bright daughters. To thee, Mother Ut, who ever lookest upward, we bring brandy in bowls, and fat in both hands. Give prosperity to the King's son (the bridegroom), to the King's daughter (the bride), and to all the people ! ' 8 As an analogue to Hephaistos the Greek divine smith, may stand the Cir- cassian Fire-god, Tleps, patron of metal-workers, and the peasants whom he has provided with plough and hoe. 4 Among the most ancient cultured nations of the Old World, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, accounts of fire- worship are absent, or so scanty and obscure that their 1 Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 276. * Batchelor in ' Tr. As. Soc. Japan,' vols. x. xvi. 3 Castren, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 57 ; Billings, ' N. Russia,' p. 123 (Yakuts) Bastian, ' Vorstellungcn von Wasser und Feuer,' in ' Zeitschr. fur Ethno- logic,' vol. i. p. 383 (Mongols). 4 Klemm, ' Cultur-Gesch.' vol. vi. p. 85 (Circassia). Welcker, vol. i. p. 663. FIRE-GOD. 28l study is more valuable in compiling the history than in elucidating the principles of religion. 1 For this scientific purpose, the more full and minute documents of Aryan religion can give a better answer. In various forms and under several names, the Fire-god is known. Nowhere does he carry his personality more distinctly than under his Sanskrit name of Agni, a word which keeps its quality, though not his divinity, in the Latin ' ignis.' The name of Agni is the first word of the first hymn of the Rig- Veda : Agnim ile puro-hitarh yajnasya devarh ritvijam 1 Agni I entreat, divine appointed priest of sacrifice ! ' The sacri- fices which Agni receives go to the gods, he is the mouth of the gods, but he is no lowly minister, as it is said in another hymn : ' No god indeed, no mortal is beyond the might of thee, the mighty one, with the Maruts come hither, O Agni ! ' Such the mighty Agni is among the gods, yet he comes within the peasant's cottage to be protector of the domestic hearth. His worship has survived the transformation of the ancient patriarchal Vedic religion of nature into the priest- ridden Hinduism of our own day. In India there may yet be found the so-called Fire-priests (Agnihotri) who perform ac- cording to Vedic rite the sacrifices entitling the worshippers to heavenly life. The sacred fire-drill for churning the new fire by friction of wood (arani) is used so that Agni still is new-born of the twirling fire-sticks, and receives the melted butter of the sacrifice. 8 Among the records of fire-worship in Asia, is the account of Jonas Hanways's ' Travels,' dating from about 1740, of the everlasting fire at the burning wells near Baku, on the Caspian. At the sacred spot stood several ancient stone temples, mostly arched vaults 10 to 15 feet high. One little temple was 1 See 'Records of the Past,' vol. iii. p. 137, vol. ix. p. 143; Sayce, ' Lectures on Rel. of Ancient Babylonians,' p. 170. For accounts of Semitic fire-worship, see Movers, ' Phonizier,' vol. i. p. 327, &c., 337, &c., 401. 2 ' Rig- Veda,' i. I. i, 19. 2, iii. I. 18, &c. ; Max Miiller, vol. i. p. 39 ; Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 53. Haug, ' Essays on Parsis,' iv. ; ' Early Hist, of Mankind,' p. 255. 282 ANIMISM. still used for worship, near the altar of which, about three feet high, a large hollow cane conveyed the gas up from the ground, burning at the mouth with a blue flame. Here were generally forty or fifty poor devotees, come on pilgrimage from their country to make expiation for them- selves and others, and subsisting on wild celery, &c. These pilgrims are described as marking their foreheads with saffron, and having great veneration for a red cow ; they wore little clothing, and the holiest of them kept one arm on their heads, or continued unmoved in some other pos- ture ; they are described as Ghebers, or Gours, the usual Moslem term for Fire-worshippers. 1 In general, this name of Ghebers is applied to the Zoroastrians or Parsis, whom a modern European would all but surely point to if asked to instance a modern race of Fire-worshippers. Classical accounts of the Persian reli- gion set down fire-worship as part and parcel of it ; the Magi, it is recorded, hold the gods to be Fire and Earth and Water ; and again, the Persians reckon the Fire to be a god (0eo</>opoGo-tv). s On the testimony of the old religious books of the Parsis themselves, Fire, as the greatest Ized, as giver of increase and health, as craving for wood and scents and fat, seems to take the distinctest divine per- sonality. Their doctrine that Ardebehist, the presiding angel or spirit of fire, is adored, but not the material object he belongs to, is a perfect instance of the development of the idea of an elemental divinity from that of an animated fetish. When, driven by Moslem persecution from Persia, Parsi exiles landed in Gujarat, they described their reli- gion in an official document as being the worship of Agni or Fire, thus claiming for themselves a place among recog- nized Hindu sects. 3 In modern times, though for the most part the Parsis have found toleration and prosperity in 1 Hanway, ' Journal of Travels,' London, 1753, vol. i. ch. Ivii. 8 Diog. Laert. Prooem. ii. 6. Sextus Empiricus adv. Physicos, ix. ; Strabo, xv. 3, 13. 8 John Wilson, ' The Parsi Religion,' ch. iv. ; ' Avesta,' tr. by Spiegel, Yacna, i. Ixi. FIRE-GOD. 283 India, yet an oppressed remnant of the race still keeps up the everlasting fires at Yezd and Kirman, in their old Per- sian land. The modern Parsis, as in Strabo's time, scruple to defile the fire or blow it with their breath, they abstain from smoking out of regard not to themselves but to the sacred element, and they keep up consecrated ever-burning fires before which they do worship. Nevertheless, Prof. Max Miiller is able to say of the Parsis of our own day : ' The so-called Fire-worshippers certainly do not worship the fire, and they naturally object to a name which seems to place them on a level with mere idolaters. All they admit is, that in their youth they are taught to face some luminous object while worshipping God, and that they regard the fire, like other great natural phenomena, as an emblem of the Divine power. But they assure us that they never ask assistance or blessings from an unintelligent material object, nor is it even considered necessary to turn the face to any emblem whatever in praying to Ormuzd ' l Now, admitting this view of fire-worship as true of the more intelligent Parsis, and leaving aside the question how far among the more ignorant this symbolism may blend (as in such cases is usual) into actual adoration, we may ask what is the history of ceremonies which thus imitate, yet are not, fire-worship. The ethnographic answer is clear and instruc- tive. The Parsi is the descendant of a race in this respect represented by the modern Hindu, a race who did simply and actually worship Fire. Fire-worship still forms a link historically connecting the Vedic with the Zoroastrian ritual ; for the Agnishtoma or praise of Agni the Fire, where four goats are to be sacrificed and burnt, is repre- sented by the Yajishn ceremony, where the Parsi priests are now content to put some hair of an ox in a vessel and show in to the Fire. But the development of the more philosophic Zarathustrian doctrines has led to a result com- mon in the history of religion, that the ancient distinctly 1 Max Miiller, ' Chips,' vol. i. p. 169. Haug, ' Essays on Parsis,' p. 281. 284 ANIMISM. meant rite has dwindled to a symbol, to be preserved with changed sense in a new theology. Somewhat of the same kind may have taken place among the European race who seem in some respects the closest relatives of the old Persians. Slavonic history possibly keeps up some trace of direct and absolute fire-worship, as where in Bohemia the Pagans are described as worshipping fires, groves, trees, stones. But though the Lithuanians and Old Prussians and Russians are among the nations whose especial rite it was to keep up sacred everlasting fires, yet it seems that their fire-rites were in the symbolic stage, ceremonies of their great celestial-solar religion, rather than acts of direct worship to a Fire-god. 1 Classical religion, on the other hand, brings prominently into view the special deities of fire. Hephaistos, Vulcan, the divine metallurgist who had his temples on JEtna. and Lipari, stands in especial connexion with the subterranean volcanic fire, and combines the nature of the Polynesian Mahuika and the Circassian Tleps. The Greek Hestia, the divine hearth, the ever- virgin venerable goddess, to whom Zeus gave fair office instead of wedlock, sits in the midst of the house, receiv- ing fat : Tfl 8 irarrjp Zev? 8(oKf KaXhv yepas dvrl ydfioio, Kai rt. /zr<t> ouc(j> KO.T' ap' CTO rriap In the high halls of gods and men she has her everlasting seat, and without her are no banquets among mortals, for to Hestia first and last is poured the honey-sweet wine : EOTIT;, YI TravTiov ev S<o/&a<riv v AOavdratv re $<3v X a / xa ' ep\OfjV<av r avdpwirtav KaXbv e\ovcra yepas tat TI/XIOV ov yap arep crov 0W7TOMTIV, IV OV TTpWTTJ TTVUO.rQ T ea oivov. 9 In Greek civil life, Hestia sat in house and assembly as 1 Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' pp. 88, 98. * Homer. Hymn. Aphrod. 29, Hestia i. Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. ii. pp. 686, 691. SUN-GOD. 285 representative of domestic and social order Like her in name and origin, but not altogether in development, is Vesta with her ancient Roman cultus, and her retinue of virgins to keep up her pure eternal fire in her temple, need- ing no image, for she herself dwelt within : ' Esse diu stultus Vesta- simulacra putavi : Mox didici curvo nulla subesse tholo. Ignis inextinctus templo celatur in illo. Effigiem nullam Vesta nee ignis habet.' 1 The last lingering relics of fire-worship in Europe reach us, as usual, both through Turanian and Aryan channels of folklore. The Esthonian bride consecrates her new hearth and home by an offering of money cast into the fire, or laid on the oven for Tule-ema, Fire-mother. 2 The Carinthian peasant will ' fodder ' the fire to make it kindly, and throw lard or dripping to it, that it may not burn his house. To the Bohemian it is a godless thing to spit into the fire, ' God's fire ' as he calls it. It is not right to throw away the crumbs after a meal, for they belong to the fire. Of every kind of dish some should be given to the fire, and if some runs over it is wrong to scold, for it belongs to the fire. It is because these rites are now so neglected that harmful fires so often break out. 3 What the Sea is to Water-worship, in some measure the Sun is to Fire-worship. From the doctrines and rites of earthly fire, various and ambiguous in character, generalized from many phenomena, applied to many purposes, we pass to the religion of heavenly fire, whose great deity has a perfect definiteness from his embodiment in one great indi- vidual fetish, the Sun. Rivalling in power and glory the all-encompassing Heaven, the Sun moves eminent among the deities of nature, no mere cosmic globe affecting distant material worlds by force 1 Ovid. Fast. vi. 295. * Boeder, ' Ehsten Abergl.' p. 29, &c. 3 Wuttke, ' Volksabergl.' p. 86. Grohmann, ' Aberglauben aus Bohmen,' p. 41. 286 ANIMISM. in the guise of light and heat and gravity, but a living reigning Lord : ' O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd, Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God Of this new world.' It is no exaggeration to say, with Sir William Jones, that one great fountain of all idoltary in the four quarters of the globe was the veneration paid by men to the sun : it is no more than an exaggeration to say with Mr. Helps of the sun-worship in Peru, that it was inevitable. Sun-worship is by no means universal among the lower races of mankind, but manifests itself in the upper levels of savage religion in districts far and wide over the earth, often assuming the prominence which it keeps and develops in the faiths of the barbaric world. Why some races are sun-worshippers and others not, is indeed too hard a question to answer in general terms. Yet one important reason is obvious, that the Sun is not so evidently the god of wild hunters and fishers, as of the tillers of the soil, who watch him day by day giving or taking away their wealth and their very life. On the geographical significance of sun-worship, D'Orbigny has made a remark, suggestive if not altogether sound, connecting the worship of the sun not so much with the torrid regions where his glaring heat oppresses man all day long, and drives him to the shade for refuge, as with climates where his presence is welcomed for his life-giving heat, and nature chills at his departure. Thus while the low sultry forests of South America show little prominence of Sun-worship, this is the dominant organized cultus of the high table-lands of Peru and Cundinamarca. 1 The theory is ingenious, and if not carried too far may often be supported. We may well compare the feelings with which the sun-worshipping Massagetae of Tartary must have sacrificed their horses to the deity who freed them from the miseries of winter, with the thoughts of men in those burn- 1 D'Orbigny, ' L'Homme Am^ricain,' vol. i. p. 242. SUN-GOD. 287 ing lands of Central Africa where, as Sir Samuel Baker says, ' the rising of the sun is always dreaded . . . the sun is regarded as the common enemy,' words which recall Herodotus' old description of the Atlantes or Atarantes who dwelt in the interior of Africa, who cursed the sun at his rising, and abused him with shameful epithets for afflicting them with his burning heat, them and their land. 1 The details of Sun-worship among the native races of America give an epitome of its development among man- kind at large. Among many of the ruder tribes of the northern continent, the Sun is looked upon as one of the great deities, as representative of the greatest deity, or as that greatest deity himself. Indian chiefs of Hudson's Bay smoked thrice to the rising sun. In Vancouver Island men pray in time of need to the sun as he mounts toward the zenith. Among the Delawares the sun received sacrifice as second among the twelve great manitus : the Virginians bowed before him with uplifted hands and eyes as he rose and set ; the Pottawatomis would climb sometimes at sun- rise on their huts, to kneel and offer to the luminary a mess of Indian corn ; his likeness is found representing the Great Manitu in Algonquin picture-writings. Father Hen- nepin, whose name is well known to geologists as the earliest visitor to the Falls of Niagara, about 1678, gives an account of the native tribes, Sioux and others, of this far-west region. He describes them as venerating the Sun, ' which they recognize, though only in appearance, as the Maker and Preserver of all things ; ' to him first they offer the calumet when they light it, and to him they often present the best and most delicate of their game in the lodge of the chief, ' who profits more by it than the Sun.' The Creeks regarded the Sun as symbol or minister of the Great Spirit, sending toward him the first puff of the calumet at treaties, and bowing reverently toward him in confirming their council talk or haranguing their warriors to battle. 2 1 Herod, i. 216, iv. 184. Baker, 'Albert Nyanza,' vol. i. p. 144. 1 Waitz, ' Anthropologie,' vol. iii. p. 181 (Hudson's B., Pottawatomies), 288 ANIMISM. Among the rude Botocudos of Brazil, the idea of the Sun as the great good deity seems not unknown ; the Arauca- nians are described as bringing offerings to him as highest deity ; the Puelches as ascribing to the sun, and praying to him for, all good things they possess or desire ; the Dia- guitas of Tucuman as having temples dedicated to the Sun, whom they adored, and to whom they consecrated birds' feathers, which they then brought back to their cabins, and sprinkled from time to time with the blood of animals. 1 Such accounts of Sun-worship appearing in the lower native culture of America, may be taken to represent its first stage. It is on the whole within distinctly higher cul- ture that its second stage appears, where it has attained to full development of ritual and appurtenance, and become in some cases even the central doctrine of national religion and statecraft. Sun-worship had reached this level among the Natchez of Louisiana, with whom various other tribes of this district stood in close relation. Every morning at sun- rise the great Sun-chief stood at the house-door facing the east, shouted and prostrated himself thrice, and smoked first toward the sun, and then toward the other three quarters. The Sun-temple was a circular hut some thirty feet across and dome-roofed : here in the midst was kept up the everlasting fire, here prayer was offered thrice daily, and here were kept images and fetishes and the bones of dead chiefs. The Natchez government was a solar hierarchy. At its head stood the great chief, called the Sun or the 205 (Virginians). J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrel.' p. 117 (Delawares, Sioux, Mingos, &c.). Sproat, ' Ind. of Vancouver's I.' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. v. p. 253. Loskiel, ' Ind. of N. A.' part i. p. 43 (Delawares). Hennepin, ' Voyage dans I'Amerique,' p. 302 (Sioux), &c. Bartram, ' Creek and Cherokee Ind.' in ' Tr. Amer. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. part i. pp. 20, 26 ; see also Schoolcraft, ' Ind. Tribes,' part ii. p. 127 (Comanches, &c.) ; Morgan, ' Iroquois,' p. 164 ; Gregg, vol. ii. p. 238 (Shawnees) ; but compare the remarks of Brinton, ' Myths of New World,' p. 141. 1 Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 327 (Botocudos). Waitz, vol. iii. p. 518 (Araucanians). Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 89 (Puelches). Charlevoix, 'Hist, du Paraguay," vol. i. p. 331 (Diaguitas). J. G. Miiller, p. 255 (Botocudos, Aucas, Diaguitas). SUN-GOD. 289 Sun's brother, high priest and despot over his people. By his side stood his sister or nearest female relative, the female chief who of all women was alone permitted to enter the Sun-temple. Her son, after the custom of female succession common among the lower races, would succeed to the primacy and chiefship ; and the solar family took to themselves wives and husbands from the plebeian order, who were their inferiors in life, and were slain to follow them as attendants in death. 1 Another nation of sun-worship- pers were the Apalaches of Florida, whose daily service was to salute the Sun at their doors as he rose and set. The Sun, they said, had built his own conical mountain of Olaimi, with its spiral path leading to the cave-temple, in the east side. Here, at the four solar festivals, -the worshippers saluted the rising sun with chants and incense as his rays entered the sanctuary, and 'again when at mid- day the sunlight poured down upon the altar through the hole or shaft pierced for this purpose in the rocky vault of the cave ; through this passage the sun-birds, the tonat- zuli, were let fly up sunward as messengers, and the cere- mony was over. 8 Day by day, in the temples of Mexico, the rising sun was welcomed with blast of horns, and incense, and offering of a little of the officiators' own blood drawn from their ears, and a sacrifice of quails. Saying, the Sun has risen, we know not how he will fulfil his course nor whether misfortune will happen, they prayed to him ' Our Lord, do your office prosperously.' In dis- tinct and absolute personality, the divine Sun in Aztec theology was Tonatiuh, whose huge pyramid-mound stands on the plain of Teotihuacan, a witness of his worship for future ages. Beyond this, the religion of Mexico, in its complex system or congeries of great gods, such as results from the mixture and alliance of the deities of several nations, shows the solar element rooted deeply and widely in other personages of its divine mythology, and attributes 1 Charlevoix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. p. 172 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 217. * Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' book ii. ch. viii. 2QO ANIMISM. especially to the Sun the title of Teotl, God. 1 Again, the high plateau of Bogota in New Granada was the seat of the semi-civilized Chibchas or Muyscas, of whose myth- ology and religion the leading ideas were given by the Sun. The Sun was the great deity to whom the human sacrifices were offered, and especially the holiest sacrifice, the blood of a pure captive youth daubed on a rock on a mountain-top for the rising sun to shine on. In native Muysca legend, the mythic civilizer of the land, the teacher of agriculture, the founder of the theocracy and institutor of sun-worship, is a figure in whom we cannot fail to discern the personal Sun himself. 1 It is thus, lastly, in the far more celebrated native theocracy to the south. In the royal religion of Peru, the Sun was at once ancestor and founder of the dynasty of Incas, who reigned as his representatives and almost in his person, who took wives from the convent of virgins of the Sun, and whose de- scendants were the solar race, the ruling aristocracy. The Sun's innumerable flocks of llamas grazed on the mountains, and his fields were tilled in the valleys, his temples stood throughout the land, and first among them the ' Place of Gold ' in Cuzco, where his new fire was kindled at the annual solar festival of Raymi, and where his splendid golden disc with human countenance looked forth to receive the first rays of its divine original. Sun-worship was ancient in Peru, but it was the Incas who made it the great state religion, imposing it wherever their wide conquests reached, till it became the central idea of Peruvian life. 3 1 Torquemada, ' Monarquia Indiana,' ix. c. 34 ; Sahagun, ' Hist, de Nueva Espana,' ii. App. in Kingsborough, ' Antiquities of Mexico ; ' Waitz, vol. iv. p. 138; J. G. Miiller, p. 474, &c. ; Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 487; Tylor, ' Mexico," p. 141. a Piedrahita,' Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reynode Granada,' Antwerp, 1688 : part i. book i. c. iii. iv. ; Humboldt, ' Vues des Cordilleres ; ' Waitz, vol. iv. p. 352, &c. ; J. G. Miiller, p. 432, &c. 8 Garcilaso de la Vega, ' Commentaries Reales,' lib. i. c. 1 5, &c., iii. c. 20 ; v. c. 2, 6 ; ' Rites and Laws of the Yncas,' tr. & ed. by C. R. Markham, (Hakluyt Soc., 1873) P- 8 4 5 Prescott, ' Peru,' book i. ch. iii. ; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 447, &c. ; J. G. Miiller, p. 362, &c. SUN-GOD. 291 The culture of the Old World never surpassed this highest range of Sun-worship in the New. . In Australia and Polynesia the place of the solar god or hero is rather in myth than in religion. In Africa, though found in some districts, 1 Sun-worship is not very con- spicuous out of Egypt. In tracing its Old World develop- ment, we begin among the ruder Allophylian tribes of Asia, and end among the great polytheistic nations. The north- east quarter of India shows the doctrine well denned among the indigenous stocks. The Bodo and Dhimal place the Sun in the pantheon as an elemental god, though in practical rank below the sacred rivers. 2 The Kol tribes of Bengal, Mundas, Oraons, Santals, know and worship as supreme, Sing-bonga, the Sun-god ; to him some tribes offer white animals in token of his purity, and while not regarding him as author of sickness or calamity, they will resort to him when other divine aid breaks down in sorest need. 3 Among the Khonds, Bura Pennu the Light-god, or Bella Pennu the Sun-god, is creator of all things in heaven and earth, and great first cause of good. As such, he is worshipped by his own sect above the ranks of minor deities whom he brought into being to carry out the details of the universal work.* The Tatar tribes with much unanimity recognize as a great god the Sun, whose figure may be seen beside the Moon's on their magic drums, from Siberia to Lapland. Castre"n, the ethnologist, speaking of the Samoyed expres- sion for heaven or deity in general (jilibeambaertje), tells an anecdote from his travels, which gives a lively idea of the thorough simple nature-religion still possible to the wan- derers of the steppes. ' A Samoyed woman,' he says, ' told me it was her habit every morning and evening to step out of her tent and bow down before the sun ; in the morning 1 Meiners, ' Gesch. der Rel.' vol. i. p. 383. Burton, ' Central Afr.' vol ii.. p. 346 ; ' Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 147. 1 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' pp. 167, 175 (Bodos, &c.). 8 Dalton, ' Kols,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 33 (Oraons, &c.) ; Hunter, ' Annals of Rural Bengal,' p. 184 (Santals). 4 Macpherson, ' India,' p. 84, &c. (Khonds). 292 ANIMISM. saying, ' When thou Jilibeambaertje risest, I too rise from my bed ! ' in the evening, ' When thou Jilibeambaertje sinkest down, I too get me to rest ! ' The woman brought this as a proof of her assertion that even among the Samoyeds they said their morning and evening prayers, but she added with pity that ' there were also among them wild people who never sent up a prayer to God.' Mongol hordes may still be met with whose shamans invoke the Sun, and throw milk up into the air as an offering to him, while the Karagas Tatars would bring to him as a sacrifice the head and heart of bear or stag. Tunguz, Ostyaks, Woguls, worship him in a character blending with that of their highest deity and Heaven-god ; while among the Lapps, Baiwe the Sun, though a mighty deity, stood in rank below Tiermes the Thunder-god, and the great celestial ruler who had come to bear the Norwegian name of Storjunkare. 1 In direct personal nature-worship like that of Siberian nomades of our day, the solar cultus of the ancient pastoral Aryans had its source. The Vedic bards sing of the great god Surya, knower of beings, the all-revealer before whom the stars depart with the nights like thieves. We approach Surya (they say) shining god among the gods, light most glorious. He shines on the eight regions, the three worlds, the seven rivers ; the golden-handed Savitar, all-seeing, goes between heaven and earth. To him they pray, ' On thy ancient paths, O Savitar, dustless, well made, in the air, on those good-going paths this day preserve us and bless us, O God ! ' Modern Hinduism is full of the ancient Sun-worship, in offerings and prostrations, in daily rites and appointed festivals, and it is Savitar the Sun who is invoked in the ' gayatri,' the time-honoured formula repeated day by day since long-past ages by every Brah- man : ' Tat Savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi 1 Castrdn, ' Finn. Myth.' pp. 16, 51, &c. Meiners, I.e. Georgi, ' Reise im Russ. Reich.' vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Klemm, ' Cultur-Geschichte,' voL iii. p. 87. Sun-Worship in Japan, Siebold, ' Nippon," part v. p. 9. For further evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Sun as Supreme Deity, see chap. tvii. SUN-GOD. 293 dhiyo yo nah prakodayat. Let us meditate on the desirable light of the divine Sun ; may he rouse our minds ! ' Every morning the Brahman worships the sun, standing on one foot and resting the other against his ankle or heel, looking towards the east, holding his hands open before him in a hollow form, and repeating to himself these prayers : ' The rays of light announce the splendid fiery sun, beautifully rising to illumine the universe.' ' He rises, wonderful, the eye of the sun, of water, and of fire, collective power of gods ; he fills heaven, earth, and sky with his luminous net ; he is the soul of all that is fixed or locomotive.' ' That eye, supremely beneficial, rises pure from the east ; may we see him a hundred years ; may we live a hundred years ; may we hear a hundred years.' ' May we, preserved by the divine power, contemplating heaven above the region of darkness, approach the deity, most splendid of luminaries!' 1 A Vedic celestial deity, Mitra the Friend, came to be deve- loped in the Persian religion into that great ruling divinity of light, the victorious Mithra, lord of life and head of all created beings. The ancient Persian Mihr-Yasht invokes him in the character of the sun-light, Mithra with wide pastures, whom the lords of the regions praise at early dawn, who as the first heavenly Yazata rises over Hara-berezaiti before the sun, the immortal with swift steeds, who first with golden form seizes the fair summits, then surrounds the whole Aryan region. Mithra came to be regarded as the very Sun, as where Dionysos addresses the Tyrian Bel, 'eiTt <rv Mtflprjs HeAios Ba/3vA<3vos.' His worship spread from the East across the Roman empire, and in Europe he takes rank among the great solar gods absolutely identified with the personal Sun, as in this inscription on a Roman altar dating from Trajan's time ' Deo Soli Mithrae.'* 1 ' Rig- Veda,' i. 35, 50 ; iii. 62, 10. Max Muller, ' Lectures,' 2nd Ser. pp. 378, 411;' Chips,' vol. i. p. 19. Colebrooke, ' Essays,' vol. i. pp. 30, 133. Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 42. 2 ' Khordah-Avesta,' xxvi. in Avesta tr. by Spiegel, vol. iii. ; M. Haug, ' Essays on Parsis.' Strabo, xv. 3,13. Nonnus, xl. 400. Movers, ' Phonizier," vol. i. p. 1 80 : ' ' HXiy Miffpq, dvt/cijrv ' ; ' Atit toucf/rov ' HXlov.' 2Q4 ANIMISM. The earlier Sun-worship of Europe, upon which this new Oriental variety was intruded, in certain of its developments shows the same clear personality. The Greek Helios, to whom horses were sacrificed on the mountain-top of Tau- getos, was that same personal Sun to whom Sokrates, when he had staid rapt in thought till daybreak, offered a prayer before he departed (' <!>x T> diriwv 7rpoo-va/vos T<j> 7jA.i<{>). Caesar devotes to the German theology of his time three lines of his Commentaries. They reckon in the number of the gods, he says, those only whom they perceive and whose benefits they openly enjoy, Sun and Vulcan and Moon, the rest they know not even by report.* It is true that Caesar's short summary does no justice to the real number and quality of the deities of the German pantheon, yet his forcible description of nature-worship in its most primitive stage may probably be true of the direct adoration of the sun and moon, and possibly of fire. On the other hand, European sun-worship leads into the most perplexing pro- blems of mythology. Well might Cicero exclaim, ' How many suns are set forth by the theologians ! '* The modern student who shall undertake to discriminate among the Sun-gods of European lands, to separate the solar and non-solar elements of the Greek Apollo and Herakles, or of the Slavonic Swatowit, has a task before him complicate with that all but hopeless difficulty which besets the study of myth, the moment that the clue of direct comparison with nature falls away. The religion of ancient Egypt is one of which we know much, yet little much of its temples, rites, names of deities, liturgical formulas, but little of the esoteric reli- gious ideas which lay hidden within these outer manifesta- tions. Yet it is clear that central solar conceptions as it 1 Plat. Sympos. xxxvi. Sec Welcker, ' Griech. GStterlehre,' vol. i. pp. 400, 412. * Caesar de Bello Gallico, vi. 21 : ' Deorum numero cos solos ducunt, quos cernunt et quorum aperte opibus juvantur, Solem et Vulcanum et Lunam, reliquos ne fama quidem acceperunt.' ' Cicero de Natura Deorum, Hi. 21. SUN-GOD. 295 were radiate through the Egyptian theology. Ra, who traverses in his boat the upper and lower regions of the universe, is the Sun himself in plain cosmic personality. And to take two obvious instances of solar characters in other deities, Osiris the manifester of good and truth, who dies by the powers of darkness and becomes judge of the dead in the west-land of Amenti, is solar in his divine nature, as is also his son Horus, smiter of the monster Set. 1 In the religions of the Semitic race, the place of the Sun is marked through a long range of centuries. The warning to the Israelites lest they should worship and serve sun, moon, and stars, and the mention of Josiah taking away the horses that the Kings of Judah had given to the sun, and burning the chariots of the sun with fire,* agree with the place given in other Semitic religions to the Sun-god, Shamas of Assyria, or Baal, even expressly qualified as Baal-Shemesh or Lord Sun. Syrian religion, like Persian, introduced a new phase of Sun-worship into Rome, the cultus of Elagabal, and the vile priest emperor who bore this divine name made it more intelligible to classic ears as Heliogabalus. 3 Eusebius is a late writer as regards Semitic religion, but with such facts as these before us we need not withhold our confidence from him when he describes the Phoenicians and Egyptians as holding Sun, Moon, and Stars to be gods, sole causes of the generation and destruction of all things. 4 The widely spread and deeply rooted religion of the Sun naturally offered strenuous resistance to the invasion of Christianity, and it was one of the great signs of the reli- gious change of the civilized world when Constantine, that ardent votary of the Sun, abandoned the faith of Apollo for that of Christ. Amalgamation even proved possible 1 See Wilkinson, ' Ancient Egyptians ' ; Renouf, ' Religion of Ancient Egypt.' * Deut. iv. 19, xvii. 3 ; 2 Kings xxiii. n. * Movers, ' Phonizier,' vol. i. pp. 162, 180, &c. Lamprid. Heliogabal. i. 4 Euseb. Prseparat. Evang. i. 6. 296 ANIMISM. between the doctrines of Sabaeism and Christianity, and in and near Armenia a sect of Sun-worshippers have lasted on into modern times under the profession of Jacobite Chris- tians ; l a parallel case within the limits of Mohammedanism being that of Beduin Arabs who still continue the old ado- ration of the rising sun, in spite of the Prophet's expressed command not to bow before the sun or moon, and in spite of the good Moslem's dictum, that ' the sun rises between the devil's horns.' 2 Actual worship of the sun in Chris- tendom soon shrank to the stage of survival. In Lucian's time the Greeks kissed their hands as an act of worship to the rising sun ; and Tertullian had still to complain of many Christians that with an affectation of adoring the heavenly bodies they would move their lips toward the sunrise (Sed et plerique vestrum affectatione aliquando et coelestia adorandi ad solis ortum labia vibratis).* In the 5th century, Leo the Great complains of certain Christians who, before entering the Basilica of St. Peter, or from the top of a hill, would turn and bow to the rising sun ; this comes, he says, partly of ignorance and partly of the spirit of paganism. 4 To this day, in the Upper Palatinate, the peasant takes off his hat to the rising sun ; and in Pomerania, the fever- stricken patient is to pray thrice turning toward the sun at sunrise, ' Dear Sun, come soon down, and take the seventy-seven fevers from me. In the name of God the Father, &c.' 6 For the most part, the ancient rites of solar worship are represented in modern Christendom in two ways ; by the ceremonies connected with turning to the east, of which an account is given in an ensuing chapter under the heading of Orientation ; and in the continuance of the great sun- 1 Neander, ' Church History,' vol. vi. p. 341. Carsten Niebuhr, ' Reise- beschr.' vol. ii. p. 396. 1 Palgrave, ' Arabia,' vol. i. p. 9 ; vol. ii. p. 258. See Koran, xli. 37. * Tertullian. Apolog. adv. Gentes, xvi. See Lucian. de Saltat. xvii. ; com- pare Job. xxxi. 26. 4 Leo. I. Serm. viii. in Natal. Dom. ' Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' p. 1 50. SUN-GOD. 297 festivals, countenanced by or incorporated in Christianity. Spring-tide, reckoned by so many peoples as New- Year, has in great measure had its solar characteristics transferred to the Paschal festival. The Easter bonfires with which the North German hills used to be ablaze mile after mile, are not altogether given up by local custom. On Easter morn- ing in Saxony and Bradenburg, the peasants still climb the hill-tops before dawn, to see the rising sun give his three joyful leaps, as our forefathers used to do in England in the days when Sir Thomas Browne so quaintly apologized for declaring that ' the sun doth not dance on Easter Day.' The solar rite of the New Fire, adopted by the Roman Church as a Paschal ceremony, may still be witnessed in Europe, with its solemn curfew on Easter Eve, and the ceremonial striking of the new holy fire. On Easter Eve, under the solemn auspices of the Greek Church, a mob of howling fanatics crush and trample to death the victims who faint and fall in their struggles to approach the most shameless imposture of modern Christendom, the miracu- lous fire from heaven which descends into the Holy Sepul- chre. 1 Two other Christian festivals have not merely had solar rites transferred to them, but seem distinctly them- selves of solar origin. The Roman winter-solstice festival, as celebrated on December 25 (VIII. Kal. Jan.) in con- nexion with the worship of the Sun-god Mithra, appears to have been instituted in this special form after the Eastern campaign of Aurelian A.D. 273, and to this festival the day owes its apposite name of Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, ' Dies Natalis Solis invicti.' With full symbolic appropriateness, though not with historical justification, the day was adopted in the Western Church, where it appears to have been generally introduced by the 4th century, and whence in time it passed to the Eastern Church, as the solemn anniversary of the birth of Christ, 1 Grijnm, ' Deutsche Myth.' p. 581, &c. Wuttke, pp. 17, 93. Brand, Pop. Ant.' vol. i. p. 157, &c. ' Early Hist, of Mankind,' p. 260. Murray's Handbook for Syria and Palestine,' 1868, p. 162. H. u 298 ANIMISM. the Christian Dies Natalis, Christmas Day. Attempts have been made to ratify this date as matter of history, but no valid nor even consistent early Christian tradition vouches for it. The real solar origin of the festival is clear from the writings of the Fathers after its institution. In religious symbolism of the material and spiritual sun, Augustine and Gregory of Nyassa discourse on the glowing light and dwindling darkness that follow the Nativity, while Leo the Great, among whose people the earlier solar mean- ing of the festival evidently remained in strong remem- brance, rebukes in a sermon the pestiferous persuasion, as he calls it, that this solemn day is to be honoured not for the birth of Christ, but for the rising, as they say, of the new sun. 1 As for modern memory of the sun-rites of mid-winter, Europe recognizes Christmas as a primitive solar festival by bonfires which our ' yule-log,' the ' souche de Noel,' still keeps in mind ; while the adaptation of ancient solar thought to Christian allegory is as plain as ever in the Christmas service chant, ' Sol novus oritur.'* The solar Christmas festival has its pendant at Midsummer. The summer solstice was the great season of fire-festivals throughout Europe, of bonfires on the heights, of dancing round and leaping through the fires, of sending blazing fire-wheels to roll down from the hills into the valleys in sign of the sun's descending course. These ancient rites attached themselves in Christendom to St. John's Eve. 8 It seems as though the same train of symbolism which had adapted the mid- winter festival to the Nativity, may have suggested the dedication of the midsummer festival to John the Baptist, in clear allusion to his words, ' He must increase, but I must decrease.' 1 See Pauly, ' Real-Encyclop.' s.v. ' Sol ; ' Petavius, ' Julian! Imp. Opera,' 290-2, 277. Bingham, ' Antiquities of Christian Church,' book xx. ch. iv. ; Neander, ' Church Hist.' vol. iii. p. 437 ; Beausobre, ' Hist, de Maniche'e,' vol. ii. p. 691 ; Gibbon, ch. xxii. ; Creuzer, ' Symbolik,' vol. i. p. 761, &c. 8 Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 593, 1223. Brand, ' Popular Antiquities,' vol. i. p. 467. Monnier, 'Traditions Populaires,' p. 188. * Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 583 ; Brand, vol. i. p. 298 ; Wuttke, pp. 14, 140. Beausobre, I.e. MOON-GOD. 299 Moon-worship, naturally ranking below Sun-worship in importance, ranges through nearly the same district of culture. There are remarkable cases in which the Moon is recognized as a great deity by tribes who take less ac- count, or none at all, of the Sun. The rude savages of Brazil seem especially to worship or respect the moon, by which they regulate their time and festivals, and draw their omens. They would lift up their hands to the moon with wonder-struck exclamations of teh ! teh ! they would have children smoked by the sorcerers to preserve them from moon-given sickness, or the women would hold up their babes to the luminary. The Botocudos are said to give the highest rank among the heavenly bodies to Taru the Moon, as causing thunder and lightning and the failure of vege- tables and fruits, and as even sometimes falling to the earth, whereby many men die. 1 An old account of the Caribs describes them as esteeming the Moon more than the Sun, and at new moon coming out of their houses crying ' Be- hold the Moon ! '* The Ahts of Vancouver's Island, it is stated, worship the Sun and Moon, particularly the full moon and the sun ascending to the zenith. Regarding the Moon as husband and the Sun as wife, their prayers are more generally addressed to the Moon as the superior deity ; he is the highest object of their worship, and they speak of him as ' looking down upon the earth in answer to prayer, and seeing everybody.' 3 With a somewhat different turn of mythic fancy, the Hurons seems to have considered Ata- entsic the Moon as maker of the earth and man, and grand- mother of louskeha the Sun, with whom she governs the world. 4 In Africa, Moon-worship is prominent in an im- mense district where Sun-worship is unknown or insignifi- cant. Among south-central tribes, men will watch for the 1 Spix and Martins, ' Reise in Brasilien,' vol. i. pp. 377, 381 ; Martius, 4 Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 327 ; Pr. Max. v. Wied, vol. ii. p. 58 ; J. G. Miiller, pp. 218, 254; also Musters, ' Patagonians,' pp. 58, 179. 8 De la Borde, ' Caraibes,' p. 525. 8 Sproat, ' Savage Life,' p. 206 ; ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. v. p. 253. 4 Brebeuf in ' Rel. des J6s.' 1635, p. 34. 300 ANIMISM. first glimpses of the new Moon, which they hail with shouts of kua ! and vociferate prayers to it ; on such an occasion Dr. Livingstone's Makololo prayed, ' Let our journey with the white man be prosperous ! ' &c. J These people keep holiday at new-moon, as indeed in many countries her worship is connected with the settlement of periodic festival . Negro tribes seem almost universally to greet the new Moon, whether in delight or disgust. The Guinea people fling themselves about with droll gestures, and pretend to throw firebrands at it ; the Ashango men behold it with super- stitious fear ; the Fetu negroes jumped thrice into the air with hands together and gave thanks. 1 The Congo people fell on their knees, or stood and clapped their hands, crying, ' So may I renew my life as thou art renewed ! ' * The Hottentots are described early in the last century as dancing and singing all night at new and full moon, calling the Moon the Great Captain, and crying to him ' Be greeted ! ' ' Let us get much honey ! ' ' May our cattle get much to eat and give much milk ! ' With the same thought as that just noticed in the district north-west of them, the Hotten- tots connect the Moon in legend with that fatal message sent to Man, which ought to have promised to the human race a moon-like renewal of life, but which was perverted into a doom of death like that of the beast who brought it. 4 The more usual status of the Moon in the religions of the world is, as nature suggests, that of a subordinate com- panion deity to the Sun, such a position as is acknowledged in the precedence of Sunday to Monday. Their various mutual relations as brother and sister, husband and wife, have already been noticed here as matter of mythology. As wide-lying rude races who place them thus side by side in their theology, it is enough to mention the Delawares of 1 Livingstone, ' S. Afr.' p. 235 ; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 175, 342. 1 Romer, ' Guinea,' p. 84 ; Du Chaillu, ' Ashango-land,' p. 428 ; see Purchas, vol. v. p. 766. Muller, ' Fetu,' p. 47. 8 Merolla, ' Congo,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 273. 4 Kolbe, ' Beschryving van de Kaap de Goede Hoop,' part i. xxix. See ante, vol. i. p. 355. MOON-GOD. 3OI North America, 1 the Ainos of Yesso,* the Bodos of North- East-India, 8 the Tunguz of Siberia. 4 This is the state of things which continues at higher levels of systematic civili- zation. Beside the Mexican Tonatiuh the Sun, Metztli the Moon had a smaller pyramid and temple ; 6 in Bogota, the Moon, identified in local myth with the Evil Deity, had her place and figure in the temple beside the Sun her hus- band;' the Peruvian Mother-Moon, Mama-Quilla, had her silver disc-face to match the golden one of her brother and husband the Sun, whose companion she had been in the- legendary civilizing of the land. 7 In the ancient Kami- religion of Japan, the supreme Sun-god ranks high above the Moon-god, who was worshipped under the form of a fox. 8 Among the historic nations of the Old World, docu- ments of Semitic culture show Sun and Moon side by side. For one, we may take the Jewish law, to stone with stones till they died the man or woman who ' hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven.' For another, let us glance over the curious record of the treaty-oath between Philip of Macedon and the general of the Carthaginian and Libyan army, which so well shows how the original identity of nature-deities may be forgotten in their different local shapes, so that the same divinity may come twice or even three times over in as many national names and forms. Herakles and Apollo stand in company with the personal Sun, and as well as the personal Moon is to be seen the ' Carthaginian deity,' whom there is reason to look on as Astarte, a goddess latterly of lunar nature. This is the list of deities invoked : ' Before Zeus and Hera and 1 Loskiel, ' Ind. of N. A.' part i. p. 43. 1 Bickmore, ' Ainos,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 20. 8 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' p. 167. 4 Georgi, ' Reise im Russ. R.' vol. i. p. 275. 5 Clavigero, ' Messico,' vol. ii. pp. 9, 35 ; Tylor, ' Mexico,' I.e. 6 Waitz, vol. iv. p. 362. 7 Garcilaso de la Vega, ' Commentaries Reales,' iii. 21. 8 Siebold, ' Nippon/ part v. p. 9. 3O2 ANIMISM. Apollo; before the goddess of the Carthaginians ( Kapxr)8ovi<av) and Herakles and lolaos ; before Ares, Triton, Poseidon ; before the gods who fought with the armies, and Sun and Moon and Earth ; before the rivers and meadows and waters ; before all the gods who rule Mace- donia and the rest of Greece ; before all the gods who were at the war, they who have presided over this oath.' 1 When Lucian visited the famous temple of Hierapolis in Syria, he saw the images of the other gods, ' but only of the Sun and Moon they show no images.' And when he asked why, they told him that the forms of other gods were not seen by all, but Sun and Moon are altogether clear, and all men see them. 2 In Egyptian theology, not to discuss other divine beings to whom a lunar nature has been ascribed, it is at least certain that Khonsu is the Moon in absolute personal divinity. 8 In Aryan theology, the personal Moon stands as Selene beside the more anthropomorphic forms of Hekate and Artemis, 4 as Luna beside the less understood Lucina, and Diana with her borrowed attri- butes, 5 while our Teutonic forefathers were content with his plain name of Moon. 6 As for lunar survivals in the higher religions, they are much like the solar. Monotheist as he is, the Moslem still claps his hands at sight of the new moon, and says a prayer. 7 In Europe in the I5th century it was matter of complaint that some still adored the new moon with bended knee, or hood or hat removed, and to this day we may still see a hat raised or a curtsey dropped to her, half in conservatism and half in jest. It is with reference to silver as the lunar metal, that money is turned 1 Deuteron. xvii. 3; Polyb. vii. 9; see Movers, ' Phonizier,' pp. 159, 536, 605. Lucian. de Syria Dea, iv. 34. Wilkinson, ' Ancient Egyptians,' ed. by Birch, vol. iii. p. 174. See Plutarch. Is. et Osir. Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. i. p. 550, &c. Cic. de Nat. Deor. ii. 27. Grimm, ' D. M.' ch. xxii. 7 Akerblad, ' Lettre a Italinsky.' Burton, ' Central Afr.' vol. ii. p. 346. Mungo Park, ' Travels,' in ' Pinkerton,' vol. xvi. p. 875. MOON-GOD. 303 when the act of adoration is performed, while practical peasant wit dwells on the ill-luck of having no piece of silver when the new moon is first seen. 1 Thus, in tracing the development of Nature-Worship, it appears that though Fire, Air, Earth, and Water are not yet among the lower races systematized into a quaternion of elements, their adoration, with that of Sun and Moon, shows already arising in primitive culture the familiar types of those great divinities, who received their further develop- ment in the higher Polytheism. 1 Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 29, 667 ; Brand, vol. iii. p. 146 ; Forbes Leslie, ' Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i. p. 136.