The question of the universality of religion, of its presence in some form or another in every part of the world, seems to be one of those which lie beyond the bounds of a dogmatic answer. For the accounts of missionaries and travellers, which furnish the only data for its solution, have been so largely vitiated, if not by a consciousness of the interests supposed to be at stake, at least by so strong an intolerance for the tenets of native savage religions, that it seems impossible to make sufficient allowance either for the bias of individual writers or for the extent to which they may have misunderstood, or been purposely misled by, their informants.

Although, however, on the subject of native religions we can never hope for more than approximate truth, the reports of missionaries and others, written at different periods of time about the same place or contemporaneously about widely remote places, as they must be free from all possible suspicion of collusion, so they supply a kind of measure of probability by which the credibility of any given belief may be tested. Thus an idea, too inconceivable to be credited, if only reported of one tribe of the human race, may be safely accepted as seriously held, if reported of several tribes in different parts of the world. An Englishman, for instance, however much winds and storms may mentally vex him, would scarcely think of testifying his repugnance to them by the physical remonstrance of his fists and lungs, nor would he easily believe that any people of the earth should seriously treat the wind in this way as a material agent. If he were told that the Namaquas shot poisoned arrows at storms to drive them away, he would show no unreasonable scepticism in disbelieving the fact; but if he learnt on independent authority that the Payaguan Indians of North America rush with firebrands and clenched fists against the wind that threatens to blow down their huts; that in Russia the Esthonians throw stones and knives against a whirlwind of dust, pursuing it with cries; that the Kalmucks fire their guns to drive the storm-demons away; that Zulu rain-doctors or heaven-herds whistle to lightning to leave the skies just as they whistle to cattle to leave their pens; and that also in the Aleutian Islands a whole village will unite to shriek and strike against the raging wind, he would have to acknowledge that the statement about the Namaquas contained in itself nothing intrinsically improbable. And besides this test of genuine savage thought, a test which obviously admits of almost infinite application, there is another one no less serviceable in ethnological criticism, namely, where the reality of a belief is supported by customs, widely spread and otherwise unintelligible. No better illustration can be given of this than the belief, which, asserted by itself, would be universally disbelieved, in a second life not only for men but for material things; but which, supported as it is by the practice, common alike in the old world and the new, of burying objects with their owner to live again with him in another state, is certified beyond all possibility of doubt. If to us there seems a no more self-evident truth than that a man can take nothing with him out of the world, a vast mass of evidence proves, that the discovery of this truth is one of comparatively modern date and of still quite partial distribution over the globe.

So much, then, being premised as to the nature of the evidence on which our knowledge of the lower races depends, and as to the limits within which such evidence may be received and its veracity tested, let us proceed to examine some of the higher beliefs of savages, which, as they bear some analogy to the beliefs on similar subjects of more advanced societies, are in a sense religious, and, so far at least as the collected information justifies us in judging, seem of indigenous and independent growth.

Few results of ethnology are more interesting than the wide-spread belief among savages, arrived at purely by their own reasoning faculties, in a creator of things. The recorded instances of such a belief are, indeed, so numerous as to make it doubtful whether instances to the contrary may not have been based on too scant information. The difficulty of obtaining sound evidence on such subjects is well illustrated by the experience of Dobritzhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, who spent seven years among the Abipones of South America. For when he asked them whether the wonderful course of the stars and heavenly bodies had never raised in their minds the thought of an invisible being who had made and who guided them, he got for answer that of what happened in heaven, or of the maker or ruler of the stars, the ancestors of the Abipones had never cared to think, finding ample occupation for their thoughts in the providing of grass and water for their horses. Yet the Abipones really believed that they had been created by an Indian like themselves, whose name they mentioned with great reverence and whom they spoke of as their ‘grandfather,’ because he had lived so long ago. He was still, they fancied, to be seen in the Pleiades; and when that constellation disappeared for some months from the sky they would bewail the illness of their grandfather, and congratulate him on his recovery when he returned in May. Still, the creator of savage reasoning is not necessarily a creator of all things, but only of some, like Caliban’s Setebos, who made the moon and the sun, and the isle and all things on it—

So that it is possible the creator of the Abipones was merely their deified First Ancestor. For on nothing is savage thought more confused than on the connection between the first man who lived on the world and the actual Creator of the world, as if in the logical need of a first cause they had been unable to divest it of human personality, or as if the natural idea of a first man had led to the idea of his having created the world. Thus Greenlanders are divided as to whether Kaliak was really the creator of all things or only the first man who sprang from the earth. The Minnetarrees of North America believed that at first everything was water and there was no earth at all, till the First Man, the never-dying one, the Lord of Life, sent down the great red-eyed bird to bring up the earth. The Mingo tribes also ‘revere and make offerings to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a powerful deity under the Master of Life, or even as identified with him;’ whilst among the Dog-ribs the First Man, Chapewee, was also creator of the sun and moon. The Zulus of Africa likewise merge the ideas of the First Man and the Creator, the great Unkulunkulu; as also do the Caribs, who believe that Louquo, the uncreate first Carib, descended from heaven to make the earth and also to become the father of men.[3] So again in the Aht belief Quawteaht is not only ‘the first Indian who ever lived,’ their forefather, but the maker of most things visible, of the earth and all animals, yet not of the sun and moon.[4] It seems, therefore, not improbable that savage speculation, being more naturally impelled to assume a cause for men than a cause for other things, postulated a First Man as primeval ancestor, and then applying an hypothesis, which served so well to account for their own existence, to account for that of the world in general, made the Father of Men the creator of all things; in other words, that the idea of a First Man preceded and prepared the way for the idea of a first cause.

However this may be, and admitting the possible existence of tribes absolutely devoid of any idea of creation at all, the following savage fancies about it are not without their interest as typical examples of primitive cosmogony.

In one of the Dog-rib Indian sagas an important part in the creation is played by a great bird, as among several other tribes who loved to trace their origin to a bird, as some would trace theirs to a toad or a rattlesnake. Originally, the saga runs, the world was nothing but a wide, waste sea, without any living thing upon it save a gigantic bird, who with the glance of its fiery eyes produced the lightning, and with the flapping of its wings the thunder. This bird, by diving into the sea, caused the earth to appear above it, and proceeded to call all animals to its surface (except, indeed, the Chippewya Indians, who were descended from a dog). When its work was complete it made a great arrow, which it bade the Indians keep with great care; and when this was lost, owing to the stupidity of the Chippewyas, it was so angry that it left the earth, never afterwards to revisit it; and men now live no longer, as they did in those days, till their throats are worn through with eating and their feet with walking the earth.[5]

Many thousands of miles separate the Tongan Islands from North America, yet there too we find the idea of the earth having come from the waters. In the beginning nothing was to be seen above the waste of waters but the Island of Bolotu, which is as everlasting as the gods who dwell there or as the stars and the sea. One day the god Tangaloa went to fish in the sea, when, feeling something heavy at the end of his line, he drew it in, and there perceived the tops of rocks, which continued to increase in size and number till they formed a large continent, and his line broke, and only the Tongan Islands remained above the surface. These Tangaloa, with the help of the other gods, filled with trees and herbs and animals from Bolotu, only of a smaller size and not immortal. Then he bade his two sons take their wives and go to dwell in Tonga, dividing the land and dwelling apart. The younger brother was steady and industrious, and made many discoveries; but the elder was idle and slept away his time, and envied the works of his brother, till at last his envy grew so strong that one day he murdered him. Then came Tangaloa in wrath from Bolotu, to ask him why he had slain his brother, and he bade him bring his brother’s family to him. They were told to take their boats and sail eastward till they came to a great land to dwell in. ‘Your skin’ (to this effect ran Tangaloa’s blessing) ‘shall be white as your souls, for your souls are pure; you shall be wise, make axes, have all other riches, and great boats. I myself will command the wind to blow from your land to Tonga, but the people of Tonga will not be able with their bad boats to reach you.’ To the others he said: ‘You shall be black, because your souls are black, and you shall remain poor. You shall not be able to prepare useful things, nor to go to the land of your brothers. But your brothers shall come to Tonga and trade with you as they please.’[6]

This Tongan creation-myth is especially striking, not only from its resemblance to the well-known stories of Cain and Abel or of Romulus and Remus, but from the wonderful extension of a similar story over the world. It has been found among the Esquimaux, among the Hervey Islanders, among the Hindoos, among the Iroquois of America. Its origin perhaps lies in early and rude attempts to account for the more obvious dualisms in nature, as those, for instance, between the sun and the moon, or between warm and cold winds. In the Iroquois version the elder brother who killed the younger is said to have been identical with the sun, though his mother, not the brother he killed, was the moon.[7] A curious Indian drawing has been preserved in which the god of the north wind, or of cold weather, contends with the god of the south, or of warmth. The former is figured in a snowstorm, the latter in rain; wolves fight on the side of the one, the crow and plover on that of the other. The conflict is terrible; the southern god is worsted, cold weather prevails, and the earth is frozen up. But in spring he sends forth his crow and plover, who defeat the wolves, and the northern god is drowned in a flood of spray which arises from the melting of the snow and ice. And in this contention for cold and warm weather it is believed they will battle as long as the world shall endure.[8]

The Kamchadal belief is instructive, as showing that by the creation of the world the savage only means that small portion of it which he knows, and that, so far from it being any proof of his intelligence to suppose a cause for the hills or island which limit his energies, it is rather his want of logical thought which impels him to the belief. For seeing, as he does, a spirit in everything, whether it be moving animal, or rushing wind, or standing stone, and accounting, as he does, for everything by a spirit which is at once its cause and controlling principle, it is only natural that he should draw from his unlimited spirit-world one who made and governs all things. Thus the Kamchadals believe that after their supreme deity, of whom they predicate nothing but existence, the greatest god is Kutka. Kutka created the heavens and the earth, making both eternal, like the men and creatures he placed on the earth. But the Kamchadals openly avow that they think themselves much cleverer than Kutka, who in their eyes is so stupid as to be quite undeserving of prayers or gratitude. Had he been cleverer, they say, he would have made the world much better, without so many mountains and inaccessible cliffs, without streams of such rapidity, or such tempests of wind and rain. In winter, if they are climbing a mountain, or in summer, if their canoes come to rapids, they will vent loud curses on Kutka for having made the streams too strong for their canoes, or the mountains so wearisome for their feet.

The Tamanaks of the Orinoco manifested a not much higher conception of a creator than the Kamchadals. For they ascribed the creation of the world to Amalivacca, who in the course of his work discussed long with his brother about the Orinoco, having the kind wish so to make it that ships might as easily go up its stream as down, but being compelled to abandon a task which so far transcended his powers. The Tamanaks recently showed a cave where Amalivacca dwelt when he lived among them, before he took a boat and sailed to the other side of the sea.[9]

Not only, however, is the idea of a creation of things quite common among untutored savages, but there is often a belief closely connected therewith that in the beginning death and sickness were unknown in the world, but came into it in consequence of some fault committed by its hitherto immortal occupants. Such a belief, reported as it is from places so widely sundered as Ceylon, North America, and the Tongan Islands, seems effectually to discountenance the suspicion which might otherwise attach to it of collusion or mistake on the part of our informants. It is the fancy of the Cingalese cosmogony that, in the fifth period of creative energy, the immortal beings who then inhabited the earth ate of certain plants, and thereby involved themselves in darkness and mortality. ‘It was then that they were formed male and female, and lost the power of returning to the heavenly mansions.’ Liable as they had theretofore been to mental passions, such as envy, covetousness, and ambition, they were thenceforward subjected to corporeal passions as well, and the race now inhabiting the earth became subject to all the evils that afflict them.[10] According to the saga of the Dog-rib Indians the first man who lived upon the earth, when food and other good things abounded, was Chapewee, who afterwards, giving his children two kinds of food, black and white, forbade them to eat of the former. When he went away for a long journey to bring the sun into the world, his children were obedient and ate only of the white fruit, but ate it all. But when he went away a second time to bring the moon into the world, in their hunger his children forgot his prohibition and ate of the black fruit. So when Chapewee returned he was very wroth, and declared that thenceforth the earth should only produce bad fruit and that men should be subject to sickness and death. Afterwards, indeed, when his family lamented that men should have been made mortal for eating the black fruit, Chapewee granted that those who dreamt certain dreams should have the power of curing sickness and so of prolonging human life; but that was the extent to which Chapewee relented.[11] The Caribs, Waraues, and Arawaks are said to believe in two distinct creators of men and women; the creator of the former being superior and doing neither good nor harm. After he had created men he came on the earth to see what they were doing; but finding them so bad that they even attempted his own life, he took from them their immortality and gave it to skin-casting creatures instead. The Aleutian Islanders believe that the god who made their islands completed his work by making men to inhabit them; but these men were immortal beings, for when age came over them they had but to climb a lofty mountain and plunge from thence into a lake, in order to come forth young again and vigorous. Then it happened that a mortal woman, who had the misfortune to draw upon herself celestial love, remonstrated one day with her lover for having, in his creation of the Aleutian Islands, made so many mountains and forgotten to supply the land with forests. This imprudent criticism caused her brother to be slain by the angry god, and all men after him to be subject to death. A similar idea is contained in one of the Tongan traditions of creation; for when the islands were made, but before they were inhabited by reasonable beings, some two hundred of the lower gods, male and female alike, took a great boat to go to see the new land fished up by Tangaloa. So delighted were they with it that they immediately broke up their big boat, intending to make some smaller ones out of it. But after a few days some of them died; and one of them, inspired by God, told them that since they had come to Tonga, and breathed its air and eaten its fruits, they should be mortal and fill the world with mortals. Then were they sorry that they had broken their big boat, and they set to work to make another, and went to sea, hoping again to reach Bolotu, the heaven they had left; but being unable to find it, they returned regretfully to Tonga.

Thus it would seem that wherever men have so far advanced in power of thought as to realise the conception of antiquity, the troubles of their actual lot have always tempted them to idealise the past, and the glories of the age of gold have been sung by the poets of no particular land nor literature. The Shawnee Indians believed there was a time when they could walk on the ocean or restore life to the dead, till they lost these privileges when the nation by its carelessness became divided into two.[12] The Ashantees trace all their calamities to the folly of their ancestors, for when the first created black men were given their choice between a large box and a piece of sealed-up paper they elected to take the box, but found therein only some gold, iron, and other metals, whilst the white men on opening the paper found all that was needful to make them wise, and have ever since treated the blacks as their slaves.[13] It is remarkable that a similar fancy is ascribed to the Navajoes of New Mexico. For their ancestors, after creating the sun and moon, made two water-jars, both covered at the top, but one gorgeously painted, containing only rubbish, the other of plain earthenware, unpainted, but containing flocks and herds and other valuables. The Navajoes, allowed to choose before the Pueblos, took the beautiful but worthless jar; whereupon the old men said: ‘Thus it will always be with the two nations. You, Navajoes, will be a poor and wandering race; destitute of the comforts of life and ever greedy for things on account of their outward show rather than their intrinsic value; while the Pueblos will enjoy an abundance of the good things of life, will occupy houses, and have plenty of flocks and herds.’[14] According to the legend in the Zend-Avesta, when Ormuzd created Meschia and Meschiana, the first man and woman, he appointed heaven as their dwelling, under the sole condition of humility and obedience to the law of pure thought, pure speech, and pure action. For some time they were a blessing to one another and lived happily, saying that it was from Ormuzd that all things came—the water and earth, trees and animals, sun, moon, and stars, and all good roots and fruits on the earth. But at last Ahriman became master over their thoughts, and they ascribed the creation of all things to him. So they lost their happiness and their virtue, and their souls were condemned to remain in Duzakh until the resurrection of their bodies, when Sosiosch should restore life to the dead.[15]

Among the myths, however, most widely spread over the world and common to races in all stages of culture, from the most barbarous to the most civilized, a prominent place is due to the legend of an all-destructive deluge, a legend which, arising as it probably did in many different places from exaggerated memories of purely local floods, must, in spite of its seeming universality, remain a merely local myth, entirely destitute of all bearing on the question of the unity of the human race, or of any connection with the story told in Genesis. A local flood like that which on the occasion of an earthquake in 1819 was caused by the sea flowing in at the eastern mouth of the Indus and converting in the space of a few hours a district of 2,000 square miles into a vast lagoon, would naturally be an event which would remain for ever in the oral traditions of the district and tend to become magnified when the event itself was forgotten. In Australia, which is subject at certain epochs and in certain localities to great inundations, and which bears evidence of former floods in what are now waterless deserts, flood stories are said to be ‘exceedingly common’ among all the tribes, one tribe having a tradition that when they returned to their old hunting-grounds on the banks of a river, after a great flood, they found the sea flowing where had stood the other bank, nor any trace left of its former inhabitants.[16]

Or, again, it is possible that alterations in the level of the sea and land or the subsidence of a large continent, such as that of which on geological as well as ethnological grounds it has been supposed that the Polynesian islands are the remains, may have originated the tradition. Thus, the AbbÉ Brasseur de Bourbourg imagined the submersion of a large country in the Atlantic to account for the deluge-myths of the Central American nations.[17] Dr. Brinton, indeed, suggests, that not physics, but metaphysics is the exciting cause of beliefs in periodical convulsions of the globe, maintaining that ‘by nothing short of a miracle’ could savages preserve the remembrance of even the most terrible catastrophe beyond a few generations. But it is at least as likely that such remembrance should be possible as that savages, starting, as he supposes, with an idea of creation as a reconstruction of existing elements, should have added thereto the myth of a universal catastrophe, ‘to avoid the dilemma of a creation from nothing on the one hand and the eternity of matter on the other.’[18] Perhaps, however, all such legends are best regarded as pure nature-myths, to which we may possibly find the key in the belief of the Esquimaux, that the souls of the dead are encamped round a large lake in the sky, which when it overflows causes rain upon earth and would cause a universal deluge if at any time its floodgates were burst. The belief in a contingency is never far from the assertion of its actuality, nor are the steps of thought always visible which separate the possible from the real.

Although many of the deluge-myths of the world have doubtless owed their origin to the zeal with which they have been sought for in the cause of orthodox theories, it is improbable that all of them have been produced in this way. Dr. Brinton, who has examined the evidence with care, asserts that there are twenty-eight American nations among whom a distinct and well-authenticated myth of the deluge was found.[19]

It would be tedious to allude to more than a few illustrations of the belief as it exists in the world, or to try to distinguish the elements in them of purely native growth from the influences of Christian teaching. The Kamchadals believe that the earth was once flooded and many persons drowned, though they tried to save themselves in boats, those only succeeding who made great rafts of trees and let down stones for anchors, to prevent themselves from drifting out to sea; when the waters subsided their rafts rested on the mountain-tops. The Esquimaux appealed to the bones of whales found on their mountains in support of their assertion that the world had once been tilted over and all men drowned but one. The Mandan Indians, according to Catlin, celebrated every year in pantomime the subsidence of the great waters.[20]

It is noticeable that in most savage legends of a flood (and it may, perhaps, be taken as some test of their authenticity) there is an entire absence of the idea, so familiar to ourselves, of the flood having resulted from any fault committed by the then inhabitants of the earth. At most such an idea appears in germ, as in the tradition of the Society Islanders, that a fisherman, catching his hook in the hair of the great sea-god as he lay asleep in his coral grove, so angered that divinity that he caused the waters to arise till they flooded the very tops of the mountains and drowned the inhabitants, the fisherman and his family alone being suffered to escape, and thereby serving to attest the genuineness of the tradition. So in Fiji the deluge was caused by two grandsons of a god killing his favourite bird, and instead of being apologetic acting with insolence and fortifying the town they lived in for the purpose of defying their grandfather. The connection of the catastrophe with human wickedness belongs apparently to a more advanced state of thought, of which the recently deciphered ChaldÆan version may be taken as a sample. In it Hasisadra, the sage, who with his wife escaped the general destruction, tells Izdubar, the giant, how he built a vessel according to the directions of Hea, to save himself and his family from the universal deluge which the gods sent upon the earth to punish the wickedness of men; how the deluge lasted six days, and on the seventh, when the storm ceased, the vessel was stranded for seven days on the mountains of Nizir; and how on the seventh day, he Hasisadra, sent out first a dove and then a swallow, both of whom, finding no resting-place, returned to the vessel, till a raven was sent forth and did not return; and Hasisadra sent out the animals to the four winds, and poured out a libation in thanksgiving, and built an altar on the summit of the mountain.

The belief in a future life—a belief perhaps first suggested in that rude state of culture where the dreaming and waking life are not clearly distinct but are both equally real—appears to prevail so generally among the lower races, that it is more difficult to find instances where it is not found than instances where it is. The dead who visit the living in their sleep are not thought of as dead, but as simply invisible; and for this reason all over the globe it is so common to bury material things in the graves of the departed, to serve them in that other world which is so vividly conceived as but a continuation of this one. The Red Indian takes his horses, the Greenlander his reindeer, and both the common requisites of earthly economy; just as many tribes still take their slaves and their wives to accompany them on that journey which, as it is imagined so distinctly, is undertaken without mystery to a fresh existence. Till lately, in parts of Sweden, a man’s pipe and tobacco-pouch, some money and lights, were interred with him; and at Reichenbach, in Germany, a man’s umbrella and goloshes are still placed in his grave.[21] In Russia formerly a new pair of shoes was put on the feet of the dead for the long journey before him, a custom also found among the natives of California, and the Christian priest used to place on a man’s breast, as he lay in his coffin, a pass, which, besides being inscribed with his Christian name and the dates of his birth and death, was also a certificate of his baptism, of the piety of his life, and of his having partaken of the communion before his death.[22] These are but survivals of savage ideas, which picture the continuation of consciousness far more vividly than more advanced religions. The Ahts bury blankets with their dead, that they may not shiver in the cold ones provided in the land of Chayher. The Delawar Indian used to make an opening at the head-end of the coffin, that the soul of the deceased might go in and out till it had thoroughly settled on its future place of residence. When the Chippewyas killed their aged relatives who could hunt no more, the medicine-song used proves the simple faith which made the cruel deed an act of mercy: ‘The Lord of life gives courage. It is true all Indians know that he loves us, and we give over to him our father, that he may feel himself young in another land and able to hunt.’

It is possible, indeed, that in many cases the attention shown by savages to their dead, by the burial of property which would have been of use to the survivors, or by the placing of food on their graves at periodical feasts, arose rather from fear than from any kinder motive, dictated by the dread always felt by the living of the dead and the wish to satisfy them, if possible, by some peace-offering. The Samoyed sorcerer, after a funeral, goes through the ceremony of soothing the departed, that he may not trouble the survivors nor take their best game; a feeling still further illustrated by their habit of not taking the dead out to be buried by the regular hut door, but by a side-opening, that if possible they may not find their way back—a habit found also in Greenland and in many other parts of the world. For the fear of the dead is a universal sentiment, common no less to the Abipones, who thought that sorcerers could bring the dead from their graves to visit the living, or to the Kaffirs, who think that bad men alone live a second time and try to kill the living by night, than it is to the ignorant who still believe in the blood-sucking vampire, a belief which little more than a century ago amounted to a kind of epidemic in Hungary, resulting in a general disinterment and the burning or staking of the suspected bodies. In the sepulture, therefore, of men with their possessions, it was probably the original thought that the dead would be less likely to haunt the dwellings of the living, if they were not compelled to re-seek upon earth those articles of daily use which they knew were to be found there.

But the savage belief in a future is very variable; nor could we expect to find it much affected by ideas of earthly morality, when such ideas themselves hardly appear to exist. At most it is men of rank and courage who live again, while cowards and the commonalty perish utterly; generally there is no qualification of any kind. The Bedouins have no fixed belief at all, some thinking that after death they are changed into screech-owls, and others that if a camel is slain on their graves they will return to life riding on it, but otherwise on foot. All North American Indians are said to believe in the continual life of the soul, and, because they think themselves the highest beings on earth, postulate a hereafter where all their earthly longings will be satisfied.[23] But they trouble themselves little about it, thinking that the god they recognise as supreme is too good to punish them. Thus the Indians of Arauco look forward to an eternal life in a beautiful land which lies to the west, far over the sea, whither souls are taken by the sailor Tempulazy and where no punishment is expected: for Pillican, their god, the Lord of the world, would not inflict pain.[24] The Tunguz Lapps look on the next life as simply a continuation of this one; in it there will be no punishment, for here everyone is as good as he can be, and the gods kill men reluctantly, but are thereby satisfied. In the Polynesian future there is a similar absence of any idea of retribution. There is, for instance, no moral qualification, but only one of rank, for Bolotu, that happy land of the dead which lies far away to the north-west of Tonga, beyond the reach of Tongan boats and greater than all the Tongan islands put together, wherein abound beautiful and useful trees, whose plucked fruit instantly grows again; where a delicious fragrance fills the air, and birds of the loveliest colours sit upon the trees; where the woods swarm with pigs, which are immortal so long as they are not eaten by the gods. Nothing, indeed, shows better how independent is imagination of race than the great similarity of those idealised earths which constitute the heavens of the most distant savage tribes. The American Indian, who visits in a dream the unseen world, reports of it, in language recalling that of Homer, that it is a land where there is neither day nor night, where the sun never rises nor sets; where rain and tomahawks and arrows are never seen; where pipes abound everywhere, lying ready to be smoked; where the earth is ever green, the trees ever in leaf; where there is no need of bearskin nor of hut; where, if you would travel, the rivers will take your boat whithersoever you will, without the need of rudder or of paddle. And just as in the Tongan Bolotu the plucked fruit is replaced, so there the goat voluntarily offers its shoulder to the hungry man, in full confidence that it will grow again, and the beaver for the same reason makes a ready sacrifice of its beautiful tail.[25]

So far there is no idea of a future life as in any way affected by this one. But such ideas do exist among savages, and are extremely interesting as indications of the growth of their moral ideas. The quality most necessary for a savage is pre-eminently courage, and courage, therefore, appearing as the first recognised virtue, lays first claim, as such, to consideration hereafter. The Brazilians believed that the souls of the dead became beautiful birds, whilst cowards were turned into reptiles. The Minnetarrees held that there were two villages which received the dead; but that the cowardly and bad went to the small one, whilst the brave and good occupied the larger. Among the Caribs, who entertain the strange fancy that they have as many souls as they feel nerves in their body, but that the chief of these resides in the heart and goes to heaven at death, whilst the others go to the sea or the woods, we meet again with the reservation of happiness to the souls of the brave. They alone will live merrily, dancing, feasting, and talking; they alone will swim in the great streams, feeling no fatigue; the Arawaks will either serve them as slaves or wander about in desert mountains. Somewhat similar was the faith of the old Mexicans, who divided the future world into three parts: the first, the House of the Sun, where the days were spent in joyful attendance on that luminary, with songs and games and dances, by such brave soldiers as had died in battle or as prisoners had been sacrificed to the gods, and by women who had died in giving children to the community; the second, the kingdom of Tlalocan, hidden among the Mexican mountains, not so bright as the former, but cool and pleasant, and filled with unfailing pumpkins and tomatoes, reserved for priests and for children sacrificed to Tlaloc and for all persons killed by lightning, by drowning, or by sickness; the third, the kingdom of Mictlauteuctli, reserved for all other persons, but with nothing said of any punishment there awaiting them. One of the beliefs in Greenland is, that heaven is situate in the sky or the moon, and that the journey thither is so easy that a soul may reach it the same evening that it quits the body, and play at ball and dance with those other departed souls who are encamped round the great lake and shine in heaven as the northern lights. But others say that it is only witches and bad people who join the heavenly lights, where they not only enjoy no rest, owing to the rapid revolutions of the sky, but are so plagued with ravens that they cannot keep them from settling in their hair. They believe that heaven lies under the earth or sea, where dwells Torngarsuk, the Creator, with his mother, in perpetual summer and beautiful sunshine. There the water is good and there is no night, and there are plenty of birds, and fish, and seals, and reindeer, all to be caught at pleasure, or ready cooking in a great kettle; but these delights are reserved for persons who have done great deeds and worked steadfastly, who have caught many whales or seals, who have been drowned at sea, or have died in childbirth. These persons alone may hope to join the great company and feast on inconsumable seals. Even then they must slide for five days down the blood-stained precipice; and unhappy they to whom the journey falls in stormy weather or in winter, for then they may suffer that other death of total extinction, especially if their survivors disturb them by their noise or affect them injuriously by the food they eat. The Kamchadal belief is very curious, as showing how the idea of compensation in the next world for the evils of this—an idea already apparent in the Mexican and Greenland beliefs—may have served to bridge over the conception of a mere continuance of life for the soul, and the conception of an actual retribution awaiting it. They imagine that the dead come to a place under the earth, where Haetsch dwells, son of Kutka the Creator, and the first man who died on earth, now Lord of the under-world and general receiver of souls. To those who come dressed in fine furs and drive fat dogs before their sledges, he gives instead old ragged furs and lean dogs; but to those who have known poverty on earth he gives new furs and beautiful dogs and also a better place to live in than the others. The dead live again as on earth; their wives are restored to them, they build ostrogs again, and catch fish, and dance and sing; there is less storm and snow than above ground, and more people; indeed, abundance of everything.

It is easy to conceive how, when once the idea had been reached that the brave deserved compensation in the next world for their earthly courage, the poor for their earthly wretchedness, or the sick for their earthly sufferings, and all men for the misfortune of premature death, it should also be inferred, as soon as any criterion between goodness and badness more refined than the mere difference between courage and cowardice had been attained, that the good should have some advantage over the bad, and from such an inference to a complete theory of retribution and punishment of the bad the logical steps seem fairly obvious. Few things, indeed, are more remarkable among the lower races than the general absence of the ideas we associate with hell.[26] At most the idea of future punishment is negative, the lives of slaves and cowards terminating in a total cessation of consciousness, as opposed to its continuance for warriors and chiefs. Still, the idea of difficulty in attaining the blessed abodes, such as that above noticed as prevalent in Greenland—an idea, as Mr. Tylor suggests, probably connected with the sun’s passage across the sky to the west, where the happy land is so generally figured to lie—is very common, and from such an idea it is natural to connect the difficulty of the journey to Paradise with the destruction of those whose presence in it would mar its blessedness.

The trial of merit, varying with experiences of physical geography, generally lies either in the passage of a river or gulf by a narrow bridge, or in the climbing of a steep mountain. The Choctaws, for instance, believe that the dead have to pass a long and slippery pine-log, across a deep and rapid river, on the other side of which stand six persons, who pelt new-comers with stones and cause the bad ones to fall in.[27] In Khond theology the judge of the dead resides beyond the sea, on the smooth and slippery Leaping Rock, below which flows a black unfathomable river; and the souls of men take bold leaps to reach the rock, those that fail contracting a deformity which is transferred to the next soul animated on earth. The Blackfoot Indians, on the other hand, believe that departed souls have to climb a steep mountain, from the summit of which is seen a great plain, with new tents and swarms of game; that the dwellers in that happy plain advance to them and welcome those who have led a good life, but reject the bad—those who have soiled their hands in the blood of their countrymen—and throw them headlong from the mountain; whilst women who have been guilty of infanticide never reach the mountain at all, but hover round the seat of their crimes with branches of trees tied to their legs. The Fijians think that even the brave have some difficulty in reaching the judgment-seat of Ndengei, and they provide the dead with war-clubs to resist Sama and his host, who will dispute their passage. But celibacy is in their eyes apparently the only offence which calls for peremptory and hopeless punishment. Unmarried Fijians are dashed to pieces by Nangananga as in vain attempts to steal round to a certain reef they are driven ashore by the rising tide.[28] The Norwegian Lapps consider that abstinence from stealing, lying, and quarrelling entitles a man to compensation hereafter. Such receive after death a new body, and live with the higher gods in Saiwo, and indulge in hunting and magic, brandy-drinking and smoking, to a far higher degree than was possible on earth. Wicked men, perjurers, and thieves go to the place of the bad spirits, to Gerre-Mubben-Aimo.[29] The idea of compensation of the good leads naturally to the idea of retribution for the bad; and even among the Guinea Coast negroes we find future inducements to the practice of such moral duties as they recognise. For they are wont to make for themselves idols, called Sumanes whose favour they endeavour to secure by abstinence from certain kinds of foods, believing that after death those who have been constant in their vows of abstinence and in offerings to the Sumanes will come to a large inland river, where a god inquires of everyone how he has lived his days on earth, and those who have not kept their vows are drowned and destroyed for ever. The inland-dwelling negroes declare that at this river dwells a powerful god in a beautiful house, which, though always exposed, is never touched by rain. He knows all past and present things; he can send any kind of weather, he can heal sicknesses and work miracles. Before him must all the dead appear; the good to receive a happy and peaceful life, the bad to be killed for ever by the large wooden club which hangs before his door. Lastly, it may be noticed that negro tribes believe that death will take them to the land of the European and give them the white man’s skin; but, as they generally paint their devil white, we cannot be sure that such a change is not rather dreaded as a punishment for the bad than regarded as a change for the better.

So far it appears that savages have developed from the promptings and imaginings of their own minds some idea of a Creator and of a soul, as well as of a future to some extent dependent on earthly antecedents. It is of course difficult to judge how far the missionaries or travellers, who have mainly supplied the only evidence we have, may have clearly understood, or how much they may have unintentionally imported into, beliefs they represent as purely indigenous. In many cases a remarkable similarity may lead us to suspect that the belief is not native, but implanted at some time by Christian or other influence, though traces of such influence may be absolutely wanting or at least not proved. There can, for instance, be little doubt whence Sissa, the devil of the Guinea Coast negroes, derived the pair of horns and long tail with which he is usually depicted. But, on the other hand, we cannot lay down any rigid canon for the imaginations of men, nor say that if one belief is identical with another a thousand miles off it must therefore have been borrowed and cannot be of independent growth. Indeed, when we reflect on the limited nature of the mental faculties of savages, on the limited range of objects for their minds to work upon, on their childlike fear of the dark and the unseen, and their still more childlike delight in the indulgence of their fancy, so far from there being anything strange in the analogies of thought between distant tribes, the strangeness would rather be if such analogies did not exist. It is probable that children tell one another much the same stories in London as they do at the Antipodes, and there is no more reason to be surprised at finding much the same theologies current in Africa as in Australia or Ceylon. The same sun, which shines on men’s bodies alike, shines on their minds alike too; and myths, like dreams, with all the apparent field for variety in their formation, are really subject to the closest laws of uniformity and sameness.

We have, however, to be careful, in applying terms of our own religious phraseology to savage thoughts and fancies, to discriminate between the higher and lower meaning they bear, and always to employ them in the lower. The belief, already noticed, of the Kamchadals in Kutka well illustrates how different is the meaning involved in the Kamchadal theory of creation from that involved in Genesis or the Zend-Avesta. The same is true of the belief in a soul and its future life; for the savage, intensely vivid as is his future beyond the grave, seldom doubts for an instant but that he will share it with all the rest, not only of the animate, but of the inanimate world. For that reason he buries axes, and clothes, and food with the dead, to be of service in the next world. The Fijians used to show ‘the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the utensils of this frail world, swimming, or rather tumbling one over the other,’ as they were borne by a swift stream at the bottom of a deep hole to the regions of immortality.[30] So of the animate world. The Kamchadal believes that the smallest fly that breathes will rise after death to live again in the under-world.[31] If the Laplander expects that all honest people will re-meet in Aimo, he as fully expects that bears and wolves will meet there too. The Greenlander believes that all the heavenly bodies were once Greenlanders, or animals, and that they shine with a pale or red light according to the food they ate on earth. He also believes that when all things now living on the earth are dead, and the earth cleansed from their blood by a great water-flood; when the purified dust is consolidated again by a great wind, and a fairer earth, all plain and no cliffs, is substituted for the present one; when Priksoma, he who is above, breathes on men that they may live again—then animals will also rise again and be in great abundance. The old inhabitants of Anahuac and Egypt believed equally that animals would share the next world with them; and, if the universality of an opinion were any reason for its credibility, few opinions could claim a better title to acceptance than this one. So confident were the Swedish Lapps of the future life of animals, that whenever they killed one in sacrifice they buried the bones in a box, that the gods might more easily restore it to life.[32] There is really nothing very unnatural in this idea, when we remember that in the lower stages of culture man not only admits the equality of brutes with himself, but even acknowledges their superiority by actual worship of them. It is not difficult to understand how it is that savages who see deities in everything, in the motionless mountain or stone no less than in the rushing river or wind, should see in animals deities of extraordinary power, whose capacities infinitely transcend their own. Recognising as they do in the tiger a strength, in the deer a speed, in the monkey a cunning, all superior to their own, they naturally conceive of them as deities whom above all others it is expedient to humour by adoration and sacrifice. Some negro tribes, holding that all animals enshrine a spirit, which may injure or benefit themselves, will refrain from eating certain animals, otherwise perfectly edible, and endeavour to propitiate them by lifelong attention. Thus some regularly offer food at the earth-houses of termites, or fatten sheep and goats, for a purely temporary and perfectly spiritual advantage. It is on account of their divine and immortal nature that the well-known custom of apologising to animals killed in the chase is so general among savages. It is generally a deprecation of any post-mortem vindictiveness on the part of the animal’s ghost. The natives of Greenland refrain from breaking seals’ heads or throwing them into the sea; but they pile them in a heap before their hut door, that the souls of the seals may not be angry and in their spite frighten living seals away. The Yuracares of Bolivia were careful to put small fish-bones carefully aside, lest fish should disappear; and other Indian tribes would keep the bones of beavers and sables from their dogs for a year and then bury them, lest the spirits of those animals should take offence and no more of them be killed or trapped.[33] The Lapps are so afraid that the soul of the animal whose flesh they have killed may take its revenge as a disembodied spirit, that before eating it they not only entreat pardon for its death, but perform the ceremony of treating it first with nuts or other delicacies, that it may be led to believe it is present as a guest—not to be eaten, but to eat. Another Kamchadal fancy indicates how savages, whose theory of cause and effect appears to be that it is quite sufficient for two things to be connected contemporaneously for one to be cause and the other effect, are led more especially to see deities in birds, from the observation that changes in weather are associated with their arrival and departure. Since to be associated with a thing is to be caused by it, migratory birds take away or bring the summer with them. For the reason that the spring and the wagtails return together the Kamchadal thanks the wagtail for bringing back the spring, and it is probably from a similar confusion of thought that he thanks the ravens and crows for fine weather.

Whether, in conclusion, it be true or not that the more civilised nations of the earth have gone through stages of growth in which their religious conceptions resembled those of contemporary savage tribes, one result at least is clear, that the actual standpoint of the savage with regard to the great mysteries of existence is removed toto coelo from that of Christian, or Mahometan, or Parsee. The Creator he believes in is not so much the cause of all things as the maker of some things, because seemingly the first father of men needed the wherewithal to exercise his energies. The savage’s soul is simply his breath or ghost, which indeed will survive his body, but which may lose its identity in the body of an animal or thing, destined like himself to live again. He conceives of himself generally as not mortal, but not therefore as immortal. His future is but a repetition of his present, with the same base wants and pursuits, only with a greater possibility of indulgence, and not necessarily indefinite in duration. It is, perhaps, some compensation for this, that, if it does not hold out great hopes, its prospect serves to deprive death of its terror, and brightens the sufferings of the passing day. To the native American death is said to be rather an event of gladness than of terror, bringing him rest or enjoyment after his period of toil; nor does he fear to go to a land ‘which all his life long he has heard abounds in rewards without punishments.’[34] No thought of possibly flying from present evils to find immeasurably greater ones awaiting him after death would ever occur to a savage, and he will even kill himself or cheerfully submit to be killed by his friends, in order to realise the sooner the difference imagined between earth and heaven. The powers of evil which vex him here will be absent hereafter, and the Spirit he recognises as supreme in his hierarchy of invisible powers is either conceived as too beneficent to punish, or, if he punishes at all, as likely to punish at once and for ever.