Daniel G. Brinton

Contents:—The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical Rites—Division of Rites into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I. Communal Rites: 1. The Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The Festal Function—Joyous Character of Primitive Rites—Commensality—The “Ceremonial Circuit”—Masks and Dramas—3. The Sacrifice—Early and Later Forms—4. The Communion with God—Pagan Eucharists. II. Personal Rites: 1. Relating to Birth—Vows and Baptism—2. Relating to Naming—The Personal Name—3. Relating to Puberty—Initiation of Boys and Girls—4. Relating to Marriage—Marriage “by Capture” and “by Purchase”—5. Relating to Death—Early Cannibalism—Sepulchral Monuments—Funerary Ceremonies—Modes of Burial—Customs of Mourning.

We have seen how the religious sentiment finds expression in the Word and in the Object. It remains to consider it as revealed in the Act. This is known as the Rite or the Ritual. It is a combination of forms and ceremonies collectively known as Worship.

So important is it that one eminent German authority has declared the ritual to be “the source of all religions”[208]; and Dr. W. Robertson Smith, also a profound student of the subject, has maintained that “in the study of ancient religions we must begin, not with the myth, but with the ritual”; because, he adds, “in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth.”[209]

If I do not follow these authorities, it is because my own studies have led me to a different opinion from theirs. I believe that every rite is originally based on a myth. In later days the myth was often obscured or lost, and another coined to explain the rite; and this second growth is what has misled the authors I have quoted.

The evidence which has convinced me is, that in truly primitive condition the rite is constantly a mimicry of the supposed doings of the god; or it is a means of summoning him according to accepted statements; or it is a method of communing with the Divine, plainly drawn from the facts of suggestion and sub-conscious mentality. Occasionally it is a magical procedure to constrain the deities; but this is rare in primitive conditions.[210]

The mimicry or imitative origin of rites is well illustrated in that in use for “rain-making,” one of the commonest of all. In periods of drought, “The Indian rain-maker mounts to the roof of his hut, and rattling vigorously a dry gourd containing pebbles to represent the thunder, scatters water through a reed on the ground beneath, as he imagines up above in the clouds do the spirits of the storm.”[211]

The Australian rite is analogous. The women of the tribe erect a hut of leaves and branches, in which are placed some stones. The men enter, and while some scatter bird’s down in the air, others scarify their arms and let the blood drop upon the stones. These are then placed high up in trees, and the hut demolished. The symbolism is, that the hut represents the firmament; the down, the light cirrus clouds which precede the storm; the stones, the heavy rain-clouds; the dropping blood, the fertilising rain.[212] This is again an imitation of their myth of the making of rain by the celestial powers.

Very many rites are of this character. Others again are of the nature of an invitation to the divinity, based on beliefs and narratives of his supposed actions or customs. The Mayas of Yucatan, for instance, had a deity doubtless of solar character, who bore the name, “The Eye of the Day.” The myth stated that his form was that of a bird of brilliant plumage, and that he was nearest the earth at high noon about the summer solstice. At that time, therefore, they constructed an altar in an open spot, built upon it a fire and placed the sacred offerings. The people then witnessed the gorgeous parrot, the sacred ara, descend through the air to take the offerings, who was none other than the god himself, responding to the invitation.[213]

The magical class of rites was common in the Orient. To this day in China it is believed that if a military camp be laid out in a particular form, and under the proper auspicious conditions, not only is it impregnable by foes, but neither gods nor demons can prevail against it. Many later rituals are thus magical, or have magical elements in them by the aid of which the celebrant claims to control the powers divine.

The Mexican Nagualist, or priest, for instance, after he has performed his magical rites and spoken the words of power, does not hesitate to shout: “Lo! I myself am here! I am most furious! I make the loudest noise! I respect no one! Even sticks and stones tremble before me! What god or mighty demon dares face me?”[214] Here, through the power of the rite, the celebrant has become as one of the gods themselves.

These examples further serve to illustrate a fundamental distinction in rites themselves. It has been well expressed by a German writer, Dr. Freihold, who has said that their tendencies point toward one of two aims, either to bring down the god to men, to have “God with us”; or, to elevate the man to God, to clothe him with supernatural powers. The one culminates in the epiphany, the other in the apotheosis. The writer quoted believes that this special culmination of one or the other of these tendencies is largely a matter of race, that it is an ethnic trait, and explains much otherwise obscure in the historical development of religions.[215]

Without entering into this interesting but too extensive inquiry, I will remark that these two tendencies run closely parallel to the division of rites which I shall adopt, a division based on a comparison of the large numbers which I have classified in the study of primitive religions.

This division is also twofold. It embraces, first, all those rites which are primarily intended for the benefit of the community; and, second, all those primarily intended for the benefit of the individual. The former I shall call communal, the latter, personal rites.

It is the more necessary that I shall insist on this distinction because it has been overlooked and even denied by some eminent scholars. Dr. Robertson Smith, for example, with whom I have been before compelled to disagree, refused to recognise personal worship in primitive conditions. He wrote thus: “It was the community and not the individual who was sure of the help of its deity.” The individual, he adds, was obliged to have recourse to merely magical measures for his own protection.[216]

This statement is contradicted by nearly every primitive religion known to me; and it can be explained only by the concentration of the writer’s mind on a faith so peculiar as that of the ancient Hebrews.[217]

I. The Communal Rites, those for the benefit of the community, be it large or small, may be classed under four forms: 1, the assemblage; 2, the festal function; 3, the sacrifice; and 4, the communion with the Divine.

1. The Assemblage.—Of these the assemblage should first be considered, as it is the necessary condition of all communal worship. The ecclesia, the meeting, the gathering together, the congregation, has a far higher importance than for the mere purpose of unity in an outward function. It is the means by which that most potent agent in religious life, collective suggestion, is brought to bear upon the mind. It has been instinctively recognised by every religion, and especially by mystical teachers, as an indispensable element in the dissemination of doctrine.

Strange, indeed, is the influence on the individual of “the crowd,” when it is animated by deep feeling, by positive belief, by intense activity! It is difficult even for the calmest mind not to be thrilled with the contagious impulses of an assemblage tossed on the waves of wild religious emotion. Its vertiginous passion whirls those who yield to it out of themselves, beyond their senses, into some lofty, hyper-sensuous state, where reason totters and reality fades. We have but to watch an active “revival,” or the hysterical outbursts of an old-fashioned “camp-meeting,” to be convinced of this.

These effects are hastened and strengthened by the Liturgy, the responsive songs and chants, the music, the dancing hand in hand, the touch of flesh, and the intoxication of breath with breath,—all that the theologians class as the anaphora, the going back and forth of mind and mind, through the varied forms of sensuous expression.[218]

All this is perfectly familiar to primitive religions. Among the rude tribes of our Western plains, the Dakotas and Chipeways for instance, thousands will gather at the annual festivals to unite in common worship and ceremonies. The first missionaries to Mexico report it a common sight to see six or seven thousand natives moving as one man in the swaying figures of the sacred dances; and it were easy to multiply examples. Everywhere was the religious value of worship in common recognised.

2. The Festal Function.—I have already referred to the fact that although the fear of demons and ghosts prevailed generally in early faiths, their prevailing character was by no means always gloomy.

In early conditions the public religious ceremonies have an atmosphere of joyousness about them. They are thanksgivings and merrymakings, such as still exist among us in pale survivals in our harvest homes, Christmas festivities, and Easter-tide amusements. In ancient Greek and Roman rites this is still more visible. “Worship the gods with a joyous heart,” prescribes Cicero; and true to the precept, the Romans included among their acts of worship such cheering adjuncts as theatrical performances, horse races, games, and dancing girls. No sign of mourning was permitted, no word of lamentation was allowed, and a serene mood, a joyous countenance and bright garments were enjoined, that the gaiety of the occasion might not suffer diminution.[219]

There was nothing in this peculiar to the Romans. The same is well known to be true of the Greeks; Jacob Grimm is our authority that the religious rites of the ancient Germans were as a rule cheerful, and those which were most cheerful were “the earliest and the commonest”; while Robertson Smith testifies to the effect that the early Semitic ceremonies were likewise gay and festal, passing at times into a truly orgiastic character.[220]

Probably most of us will feel some surprise when this trait of early and heathen religions is pressed upon our attention. We have been accustomed to hear of their dark and cruel mysteries, their immolations and holocausts, their cries of anguish and blood-stained altars, until we have imagined that light-hearted gaiety was even farther from their teachings than it is from our own faith, whose cardinal principle is the holiness of suffering and self-abnegation.

Nothing could be wider from the truth. Probably the first of all public rites of worship was one of joyousness, to wit, the invitation to the god to be present and partake of the repast. To spread a meal and ask the deity to share it, that which is called commensality, belongs to the most archaic of ceremonies. Captain Clark tells us of the Western Indians that “feasts form an essential part of every ceremony.” There is a certain solemnity observed about them, even when not strictly religious in character. The first mouthful is offered to the gods, and “something in the manner of a grace” is usual when the person begins and finishes his meal.[221]

It was but a step from this to purely religious banquets, festal commemorations for thanksgiving, in acknowledgment of benefits received. They were derived from the older practice of asking the god to share the common meal, not, as some have argued, from the later custom of offering food before the idols. Such solemn banquets occur where idols are unknown, or form a minor element in religious expression. Sacrificial banquets assume a different phase, to which I shall presently refer.

Next in antiquity to the commensality of God with man, was the sacred procession, that which is known as the “ceremonial circuit.”

Jacob Grimm informs us that the ancient Germans were accustomed at certain seasons to carry the images of the gods, Holda, Bertha, and others, or the sacred symbols, the plough, the ship, etc., around the borders or marches of the tribal territory, over which they were held to exercise especial protection. Thus they bestowed the active beneficence of their personal presence on these confines. This divine progress was accompanied with shouts and songs and joyous acclamations.[222]

To this day in central France, when the seed is sown in the spring and the husbandman has trusted his labour and his grain to the uncertain season, the image of Our Lady of Mercy is solemnly carried through the prepared fields, with song and prayer, that her blessing may rest upon them, and the grain return a hundred-fold.

Far away from France and Germany, up in the chilly valleys of the Peruvian Andes, when the natives used to fear, for their crops, killing frost or withering drought, the sacred huaca, the divine guardian of the village, was brought forth and carried in solemn procession around the fields, and its intercession beseeched in moving cries and with abundant gifts.[223]

Numberless other examples of this universal rite might be mentioned, a rite the shadow of which still falls among us in the processional and recessional of high Protestant churches. Among primitive peoples and in the folk-lore of modern nations, it develops into the forms which are known as “the sinistral and dextral circuits,” depending on whether the procession is from right to left or the reverse, connected doubtless with the motion of the celestial bodies, and with the reverse of that motion, each appropriate to certain forms of worship. Throughout the American tribes this is always a point of the greatest importance, and constantly appears, not merely in their religious exercises, but in their social customs, their arts, and their habits of life.[224]

I mentioned that the old Romans used to consider theatrical entertainments a proper part of a religious ceremony. They were not alone in that. In fact, the opinion was so universal that students of literary origins are agreed that the beginning of the drama, both comedy and tragedy, was in sacred scenic representations of the supposed doings of the gods. We may recognise the earliest form of the drama in the masked actors of the American Indian medicine dances. They usually take the part of some lower animal, comic or serious, the face concealed either with a part of its hide, or with a wooden mask, on which is painted some semblance or symbol of the animal. The language of the actor is appropriate to his rÔle, and often involves curious modifications of the customary tongue, to suit the creature he represents.[225]

Long before the discovery of America by Columbus the native tribes of Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru had developed from this source a dramatic literature, which, like that of the early Greek classic period, had thrown off its first, purely religious garb, and had developed into an independent art, devoted equally to Melpomene and Thalia, the tragic and the comic muses.

These latter, of which a few specimens survive, were exotic plants compared to the indigenous growth of the American sacred dramas. So essential, indeed had these become to the native notions of worship of any sort, that the Christian missionaries were fain to compromise the situation, and permit them to remain, merely changing the names of the heathen gods to those of Christian saints, and modifying where necessary the wording of the older text and its heathen scenario.

The extreme of these festal rejoicings is seen in the orgiastic ceremonies so widely prevalent in early cults, the Bacchanalia, the Saturnalia, the “Witches’ Sabbath” of the Middle Ages, and the like. They are nowise peculiar to primitive religions, although in them they hold a more conspicuous place. Within a year, the “angel-dancers” of Hoboken, New Jersey, have reproduced them in their true original colours, and they are always ready to crop out under the influence of the proper stimuli to the religious emotions.

In their earliest forms, they are far from deserving the odium which attached to them later. The Bacchantes of Greece were, at first, not a rout of dissolute women, but an inspired train of devout virgins and chaste matrons. No man was permitted in the ranks under pain of death. This was true also in Rome, in the Orient, and in many tribes of America. It was a later and an evil innovation which sanctioned the unrestrained mingling of the sexes in these wild processions of intoxicated fanatics. Their intoxication was, however, with the divine spirit, not the purple grape-juice. They were, as the Greeks said, “theoleptic,” possessed or infuriated with the maddening joy of the gods, drunk with the celestial ambrosia.

To our cold observation, they were in hysterical mania, with minds disordered by religious excitement, worked up to a high contagious pitch through collective suggestion, following crazily the disordered fancies of their sub-conscious selves, mistaking them for the inspiration of divine emanations.

3. The Sacrifice.—In the custom of offering to the divine visitant a portion of the food and drink, we discover the origin of sacrifice. The word has acquired sad associations, seen in our common expression “to make a sacrifice,” which signifies some painful self-surrender.

This was foreign to its original meaning. The sacrifice at first was a free-will offering, a pleasing and grateful recognition of the kindness of the deity. The first-fruits, the young kid, the earliest ear of corn to mature, were offered to the beneficent being who had sent them for the good of man. It was the willing acknowledgment we pay to a kind friend. The earliest species of sacrifice is in the nature of a thank-offering. They were of the class which has been termed “honorific,” and were little more than “meals offered to the deity.”[226]

I may illustrate it from a custom of the Papuans of New Guinea. They believe, being ancestral worshippers, that the good things of life are mainly owing to the continuing solicitude of their departed progenitors. Therefore, to testify their gratitude, once in several years they dig up the skulls of those deceased relations, paint them with chalk, decorate them with feathers and flowers, and placing them on a scaffold, offer to them food and trinkets.[227]

There is nothing of fear in this rite, and nothing fearful, for it is made the occasion of a merry festival.

Soon, however, in the development of the cult it was perceived that loss and affliction abounded and increased; the gods grew careless of their votaries, or angry with them. They must be pacified and propitiated. Hence arose the second form of sacrifices, those which are called “conciliatory” or “piacular.”[228] They were atoning in significance, mystic in their symbolism, expiatory in their aims. The gods were displeased at what man had done or had left undone, and they must be reconciled by humility and self-abnegation.

In this the primitive worshipper acted towards his deity just as he would toward an earthly superior whose displeasure he had incurred. There was no new sentiment or line of action introduced. The rite of sacrifice in any of its phases offers nothing apart from the general motives of mankind.

The most common reason for early sacrifice was to expiate breaches of the ceremonial law. Whether this occurred intentionally or not of purpose, it was deemed requisite to make amends by some painful act, to pacify the demonic power behind the law.

Naturally, the greater the self-denial displayed in the offering, the higher its merit and the more efficacious its character. The ancient Germans laid it down that in time of famine beasts should first be slain and offered to the gods. Did these bring no relief, then men must be slaughtered; and if still there was no aid from on high, then the chieftain of the tribe himself must mount the altar[229]; for the nobler and dearer the victim, the more pleased were the gods!

The same doctrine prevailed practically through most primitive religions, and was carried to a like extent. Painful mutilations of oneself, the lopping of a finger, scarification, driving thorns through the tongue or the flesh elsewhere, burning with hot coals, scourging, and supporting crushing weights: these are but a few of the many terrible sufferings which the individual inflicted on himself.

Thus steeled to pain in his own person, he knew no limit to its infliction on others. The tortures of captives or of slaves dedicated to the gods, common in American religions, formed part of the religious value of the ceremony. Not merely captives and slaves, but those of his own household and blood, his nearest and his dearest, must the true worshipper be prepared to surrender, were it his first-born son or the wife of his bosom. It was not heartlessness or cruelty which prompted him, but obedience to that law of the supernatural, which ever claims for itself supremacy over all laws and all passions of the natural man.

Traces of human sacrifice are discovered in the early history of even the noblest religions, and the rite extended so widely that scarce a cult can be named in which it did not exist.

What rendered them the more general was the underlying belief that, let the sacrifice be sufficiently exalted, the gods could not resist it. They were constrained by its magical power, and whatever was desired could be extorted from them, with or without their volition. So to this day teach the Hindu priests, and so believed the ancient Romans and various primitive nations.

4. The Communion with God.—The idea of atonement in the piacular sacrifice is in reality that of being one with the god, that of entering into union or communion with him. This, indeed, lies largely at the base of all the forms of ritualistic worship. Its purpose, more or less clearly avowed, is to bring into spiritual unison the worshipper and the worshipped.

A few examples from American rites will illustrate this.

The natives of Nicaragua at the time of maize gathering were accustomed to sacrifice a man to the gods of the harvest. Around the altar were strewn grains of corn. Over these the worshippers stood and with flint knives let blood from the most sensitive parts of their bodies, the drops falling on the grains. These were then eaten as holy food, part of the sacrifice.[230]

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

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

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

II. The Personal Rites, those for the benefit of the individual, will next occupy us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another and significant funeral rite of high antiquity is that of cremation or incineration. It was symbolic in character, the body being given to the flames in order that the spirit, by their purifying agency, should promptly be set free and united with the gods. This method also prevailed extensively among the American race, and was quite in consonance with their opinions of the after-life. “It is the one passion of his superstition,” writes Mr. Powers of the Californian Indian, “to think of the soul of his departed friend as set free, and purified by the flames; not bound to the mouldering body, but borne up on the soft clouds of the smoke toward the beautiful sun.”[260]

Other peoples entertained the opinion that the body as it is, in all its parts, must be preserved in order that it might be again habitable for the soul, when this ethereal essence should return to earth from its celestial wanderings. Therefore, with utmost care they sought for means to preserve the fleshly tenement. In Virginia, in some parts of South America, on the Madeira Islands, the aboriginal population dried the corpse over a slow fire into a condition that resisted decay; while elsewhere, the nitrous soil of caves offered a natural means of embalming. The Alaskan and Peruvian mummies, like those of ancient Egypt, were artificially prepared and swathed in numerous cerecloths. In all, the same faith in the literal resurrection of the flesh was the prevailing motive.

More generally, the belief was held that the soul remained attached in some way to the bones. These were carefully cleaned and either preserved in the house, or stored in ossuaries. Frequently they were kept as amulets or mascots, in the notion that the friendly spirit which animated the living person would continue to hover around his skeleton or skull, and exert its amicable power. The Peruvians held that the bones of their deceased priests were oracular, speaking good counsel, and the missionaries were obliged to break them into small fragments to dispel this superstition[261]; though they themselves continued to hold it heretical to doubt the efficacy of the bones of the saints! A tribe on the Orinoco was wont to beat the bones of their dead into powder and mix it with their cassava bread, holding that thus their friends and parents lived again in the bodies of the eaters!

After cremation, the ashes were left upon the altar, and the whole covered with earth; or they were preserved in urns with the fragments of the bones; or, as with a tribe of the Amazon, they were cast upon the waters of the great river and floated down to the limitless ocean.

Thus closed the last scene in the existence of the primitive man. From birth to death he had been surrounded and governed by the ceremonies of his religion; and on his passage out of this life, he confidently looked to another in which he should find a compensation and a consolation for the woes of his present condition.

Following these funerary functions came the customs of mourning. They were often excessively protracted and severe, involving self-mutilation, as the lopping of a finger or an ear, scarification, flagellation, fasting, and cutting the hair. These were shared by the friends and relatives of the deceased, and at the death of some famous chief “the whole tribe will prostrate themselves to their woe.”

The psychic explanation of these demonstrations is not wholly clear. By some they have been interpreted as a commutation for cannibalism, and by others as an excuse for not accompanying the corpse into the other world. One writer says: “Barbarism, abandoned to sorrow, finds physical suffering a relief from mental agony.”[262] On the other hand, a recent student of the subject claims that in these rites we perceive “the oldest evidence of active conscience in the human race; the individual laid hands on himself in order to restore the moral equilibrium.”[263] Need we go farther than to see in them merely exaggerated forms of the same emotional outbursts which lead nervous temperaments everywhere to wring the hands and tear the hair in moments of violent grief?