In the same way as a child is insensibly educated by the very efforts of an adult to place himself on its level, so any tribe of savages is to some extent modified by the time that a stranger has fitted himself, by long residence among them and the acquisition of their language, to tell us anything about them. This primary difficulty, amounting theoretically to insuperability, might alone suffice to invalidate most of the received evidence which asserts or denies concerning savages anything whatsoever in broad general terms. But when the evidence concerns religious ideas another difficulty is superadded, and one which appertains to the subject of religion alone—the reserve, that is, (attested by too many travellers to need specific references,) with which savages guard their stock of fundamental beliefs. The delicacy manifested by the most skilled of the Iowa Indian tribe as to communicating fully or freely on religious subjects, lest they should bring on themselves or their nation some great calamity,[35] indicates the feeling that probably underlies such religious reticence. If a savage dare not pronounce his own name, much less the names of his dead, it is a fair matter of wonder that he should ever have become so free with the names and attributes of his divinities as to have rendered it possible for such systematic representations of his theology as are current to appear before the world.

The evidence afforded by ethnology as to the nature of prayer among savages is slighter than on most subjects relating to them, partly from the natural disregard paid to such matters by most Christian missionaries, partly from the secret and hidden character of prayer, which alone would make its study impossible; but there is abundant evidence to show that religious supplication of a certain kind enters more deeply than might be supposed into the daily lives of the lower races of mankind. Says Ellis of the Society Islanders: ‘Religious rites were connected with almost every act of their lives. An ubu or prayer was offered before they ate their food, planted their gardens, built their houses, launched their canoes, cast their nets, and commenced or concluded a journey.’[36] In the Fijian Islands business transactions were commonly terminated by a short wish or prayer; and in the Sandwich Islands the priest would pray before a battle that the gods he addressed would prove themselves stronger than the gods of his foes, promising them hecatombs of victims in the event of victory. But the mere fact of such prayers is of less interest than the actual formulas used; these, however, have more rarely been thought worth recording.

According to a recent African traveller it is a daily prayer in some parts of Guinea: ‘O God, I know thee not, but thou knowest me: thy aid is necessary to me.’ Or again: ‘O God, help us; we do not know whether we shall live to-morrow: we are in thy hand.’[37] A Bushman, being asked how he prayed to Cagn (recognised by his tribe as the first being and creator of all things), answered, in a low, imploring tone: ‘O Cagn, O Cagn, are we not your children? do you not see our hunger? Give us food;’ ‘and,’ he added, ‘he gives us both hands full.’[38] It further appears that the Bushmen address petitions to the sun, to the moon, and to the stars;[39] and the Kamchadals, who have been made to dispute with them the lowest rank of humanity, had a rude form of prayer to the Storm-god, which was uttered by a small child, sent naked round the ostrog with a shell in its uplifted hand: ‘Gsanlga, sit down and cease to storm; the mussel is accustomed to salt, not to sweet water; you make me too wet, and from the wet I must freeze. I have no clothes; see how I freeze.’[40] In a certain African tribe it is said to be usual for the men to go every morning to a river, and there, after splashing water in their faces, or throwing sand over their heads, after clasping and loosing their hands and whispering softly the words Eksuvais, to pray: ‘Give me to-day rice and yams, gold and aggry-beads, slaves, riches, and health; make me active and strong.’[41]

The Zulus of Africa and the Khonds of India supply good illustrations of savage prayer. The head man of a Zulu village, at the sacrifice of a bullock to the spirits of the dead, thus addresses them in prayer: ‘I pray for cattle that they may fill this pen. I pray for corn that many people may come to this village of yours and make a noise and glorify you. I also ask for children, that this village may have a large population and that your name may never come to an end.’[42] The Khonds, also, at the sacrifice of a bullock express their wishes with rather more emphasis: ‘Let our herds be so numerous that they cannot be housed; let children so abound that care of them shall overcome their parents, as shall be seen by their burnt hands.’ Or, again, they will ask that their swine may so abound that their fields shall require no other ploughs than their ‘rooting snouts;’ that their poultry may be so numerous as to hide the thatch of their houses; that neither fish, frog, nor worm shall be able to live in their drinking ponds beneath the trampling feet of their multitude of cattle.[43]

These may be taken as fair samples of primitive prayer; but it is only just, as against the inference that a savage’s prayers have reference solely to the good and evil things of this world, to notice indications of higher sentiments. The Yebus of Africa, with faces bowed to the earth, are said commonly to pray, not only for preservation from sickness and death, but for the gifts of happiness and wisdom.[44] The Tahitian priest, praying to the god by whom it was supposed that a dead man’s spirit had been required, that the sins of the latter, especially that one for which he had lost his life, might be buried in a hole then dug in the ground and not attach to the survivors, points to the occasional presence of a moral motive in prayer; though even here the deprecation of further anger on the part of the gods appears the principal object of concern.[45] So little indeed do thoughts of morality or of a future state enter as factors into savage prayer, and so little does any ethical distinction appear in the savage conception of supernatural powers, that not unfrequently supplication is directed to the attainment of ends morally the reverse of desirable. Like the Roman tradesman praying to Mercury to aid him in cheating, the Nootka warrior would entreat his god that he might find his foes asleep, and so kill a great many of them.[46] But perhaps the best illustration of the perverted use of prayer is one employed by a clan of the Hervey Islanders when engaged on a thieving and murdering expedition, and uttered as near as possible to the dwelling of the person about to be robbed. It is apparently addressed to Rongo, or Oro, the great Polynesian god of war, and is thus translated in Mr. Gill’s ‘Myths and Songs of the South Pacific’:—[47]

The god is then entreated to cause all things to sleep; the owner of the house is entreated to sleep on, likewise the threshold of the house, the insects, beetles, earwigs, and ants that inhabit it, the central post, the several rafters and beams that support it; and after the thatch of the house has been asked to sleep on, the prayer thus concludes:—

If, however, we may hope to find anywhere indications of a higher purpose in prayer than the attainment of merely temporary or personal needs, we must seek it (nor is the search entirely vain) in those rites of religion which, from the highest to the lowest levels of culture, are customary upon the entrance of a fresh life on the stage of this world’s trials and sorrows. The popular saying, that the cries of a child at its christening are the cries of the devil going out of it, expresses identically the same belief which still prompts our savage contemporaries to drive evil spirits from a new-born child by rites of mysterious spiritual efficacy; and it is probably to the indigenous prevalence of baptism among many savage tribes that some Catholic missionaries, complacently identifying conversion with immersion, have owed the success of their efforts. It would at least be interesting to know whether baptism was a native African rite at the time that the Capuchin Merolla baptized with his own hands 13,000 negroes, and Padre Jerom da Montefarchio his 100,000 in the space of twenty years.[48] Mungo Park gives an account of a purely heathen festival held about a week after the birth of a child, at which a priest, taking the latter in his arms, would pray, soliciting repeatedly the blessing of God on the child and all the company. And Bosman tells of a priest binding ropes, corals, and other things round the limbs of a new-born child, and exorcising the spirits of sickness and evil.[49]

It cannot, however, be proved with certainty that such rites are of native growth wherever they have been found, though similar feelings of natural impurity, of natural anxiety, may well have contributed to make them common all the world over. With this reservation, let it suffice to recall some illustrations drawn from the most distant parts of the world. The most touching form of the custom is told of a tribe in the Fiji Islands, where the priest, presented by the relations with food with which to notify the event to the gods before the birth-festival, would thus petition the latter: ‘This is the food of the little child: take knowledge of it, ye gods. Be kind to him. Do not pelt him or spit upon him, or seize him, but let him live to plant sugar-canes.’[50] In New Zealand, the tohunga, or priest, dipping a green branch into a calabash of water, sprinkled the child therewith and made incantations according to its sex;[51] whilst in the Hervey Islands, where the child was immersed in a taro leaf filled with water, the ceremony was intimately connected with their system of tribes and dedication for future sacrifice.[52] Crossing over to America, we find among the Indian tribes of Guiana the native priest dancing about an infant and dashing water over it, finishing the ceremony by passing his hands over its limbs, muttering all the while incantations and charms.[53] In some North American tribes, water having been boiled with a certain sweet-scented root, and some of it having been first thrown into the fire and the rest distributed to the company by the oldest woman present, the latter would then offer a short prayer to the Master of Life, on behalf of the child, that its life might be spared and that it might grow; and if, at the festival held to commemorate the child’s first slain animal, one of the chief persons present would entreat the Great Spirit to be kind to the lad and let him grow to be a great hunter, in war to take many scalps and not to behave like an old woman, it cannot be said that such a prayer was purely selfish in its aim or confined solely to present necessities.[54]

Although, however, it is impossible to dissociate baptismal rites so rude as these from a belief in magic, the idea of water as conferring moral as well as physical purity appears to have been attained by some of the more advanced heathen tribes. The rite of baptism, says Dr. Brinton, was of immemorial antiquity among the Cherokees, Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians: the use of water as symbolical of spiritual cleansing clearly appearing, for instance, in the prayer of the Peruvian Indian, who after confessing his guilt would bathe in the river and say: ‘O river, receive the sins I have this day confessed unto the sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear.’[55] It has often been told, on the original authority of Sahagun, how the Mexican nurse, after bathing the new-born child, would bid it approach its mother, the goddess of water; praying at the same time to her that she would receive it and wash it, would take away its inherited impurity, make it good and clean, and instil into it good habits and manners.[56]

The mere enunciation of a wish often amounts among savages to a complete prayer, it being conceived that the expression of desire is of more moment than the manner of such expression; such a conception still surviving among ourselves at certain wishing towers, wishing gates, or on the occurrence of certain natural phenomena. In Fiji it was common to shout aloud, after drinking a toast, the name of some object of desire, and this was equivalent to a prayer for whatever it might be—for food, wealth, a fair wind, or even for the gratification of cannibal gluttony. Franklin tells how some Indians, disappointed in the chase, set themselves to beat a large tambourine and sing an address to the Great Spirit, praying for relief, their prayer consisting solely of three words constantly repeated;[57] the tambourine probably being employed for the same purpose that the Sioux Indians kept a whistle in the mouth of one of their gods, namely, to make their invocation audible. The Ahts, praying to the moon, sometimes say no more than teech, teech, that is, Health or Life; and it is curious that the rude savages of Brazil exclaim teh, teh, to the same luminary.[58] The Sioux would often say, ‘Spirits of the dead, have mercy!’ adding thereto a notification of their wishes, whether for good health, good luck in hunting, or anything else.[59] The Zulus, however, sometimes carry this principle of brevity furthest, for sometimes in their prayers to the spirits of their dead they simply say, ‘Ye people of our house,’ ‘the suppliant taking it for granted that the Amatongo will know what he wants;’ though generally their addresses to their ancestors are of a much more orthodox length than this.[60] When we consider how large a place the spirits of the dead fill in the savage’s spirit-world it appears possible that many of the prayers and sacrifices, said to be offered to the Great Spirit or unknown divinities, are really addressed to the all-controlling, ever-present spirits of the departed.

If we may believe the testimony of a great many travellers in all parts of the world, the case of the Yezidis, who to the recognition of a supreme being are said to join actual worship of the chief power of evil, represents no exceptional phase of human thought. Yet even the Yezidis, according to Dr. Latham, are said to be improperly called Devil-worshippers, since they only try to conciliate Satan, speak of him with respect or not at all, avoid his name in all their oaths, and are pained if they hear people make a light use of it.[61] In Equatorial Africa it is said that whilst Mburri, the spirit of evil, is worshipped piously as a tyrant to be appeased, it is not considered necessary to pray to Njambi, the good spirit.[62] Harmon says distinctly of all the different Indian tribes east of the Rocky Mountains that they pray and make frequent and costly sacrifices to the bad spirit for delivery from evils they feel or fear, but that they seldom pray to the supreme good spirit, to whom they ascribe every perfection, and whom they consider too benevolent ever to inflict evil on his creatures.[63] There is, indeed, little doubt that, if a certain amount of evidence suffices the requirements of proof, we must yield consent to the fact, in itself neither incredible nor unintelligible, that many savage tribes, recognising and believing in a good and powerful spirit, make that very goodness a reason for their neglect of him, and address their petitions instead to the mercy of that other spirit to whose power for evil they conceive the world to lie subject.[64] There is, however, much to be said in favour of the view, that the mind in its primitive state is unconscious of this moral dualism in the spirit-world, attributing rather (in perfect accordance with the analogy of human relationships) good and bad things alike to the agency of the same beings, according as transitory impulses affect them.

Thus, according to Castren, an antagonism between absolute good and absolute evil finds no place among the Samoyeds. They have no extreme divinities corresponding in their attributes to Ahriman and Ormuzd. ‘The human temper is the divine temper also, good and bad mixed.’[65] Mburri, who, according to one writer, is the evil spirit in Equatorial Africa, is, according to another, the good spirit, or at least the less wicked of the two, both the good and bad receiving worship, and being endowed with much the same powers.[66] The Beetjuans, venerating Morimo as the source of all good and evil that happened to them, were not agreed as to whether he was entirely a beneficent or a malevolent being; and, if they thanked him for benefits, they never hesitated to curse him for ills or for wishes unfulfilled.[67] ‘To the very same image,’ says Bosman of the negroes, ‘they at one time make offerings to God and at another to the devil, so that one image serves them in the capacity of god and devil.’ It was untrue, he declares, that the negroes prayed and made offerings to the devil, though some of them would try to appease a devil by leaving thousands of pots of victuals standing ever ready for his gratification; on the contrary, the devil was annually banished from their towns with great ceremony, being hunted away with dismal cries, and his spirit pelted with wood and stones.[68]

The evidence, again, in this respect concerning the aborigines of America is important. The Winnebagoes are said to have had a tradition that soon after the creation a bad spirit appeared on the scene, whose attempts to vie with the products of the Good Spirit resulted in making a negro in failure of an Indian, a grizzly bear in failure of a black one, and snakes which were endowed with venom; he also it was who made all the worthless trees, thistles, and weeds, who tempted Indians to lie, murder, and steal, and who receives bad Indians when they die. The suspicion, however, of Christian influence among this tribe makes the tradition of little value to the argument. Turning to other evidence, amid Schoolcraft’s reiterated statements of the original dualism of Indian theology, whereby the Indian was careful ‘to guard his good and merciful God from all evil acts and intentions, by attributing the whole catalogue of evil deeds among the sons of men to the Great Bad Spirit of his theology,’ we yet find this admission, that ‘it is impossible to witness closely the rites and ceremonies which the tribes practise in their sacred and ceremonial societies without perceiving that there is no very accurate or uniform discrimination between the powers of the two antagonistical deities.’[69] Mr. Pond, who resided with the Sioux Indians for eighteen years and had every opportunity to become acquainted with such matters, declares that it was ‘next to impossible to penetrate’ into the subject of their divinities; but he was never able to discover ‘the least degree of evidence that they divide the gods into classes of good and evil,’ nor did he believe that they ever distinguished the Great Spirit from other divinities ‘till they learnt to do so from intercourse with the whites;’ for they had no chants, feasts, dances, nor sacrificial rites which had any reference to such a being, or which, if they had, were not of recent origin.[70] Of the same people says Mr. Prescott, a man related to and resident among them many years: ‘As to their belief in evil spirits, they do not understand the difference between a great good spirit and a great evil spirit, as we do. The idea the Indians have is that a spirit can be good if necessary, and do evil if it thinks fit.’ They ‘know very little about whether the Great Spirit has anything to do with their affairs, present or future.’ Their idea of the Great Spirit is of the vaguest possible kind, since they lack entirely any conception of his power, or of the mode of, or of a reason for, man’s creation. The Great Spirit they believe made everything but the wild rice and the thunder; and they have been known to accuse their deity of badness in sending storms to cause them misery.[71] In the same way the Comanches of Texas neither worship the evil spirit nor are aware of his existence, ‘attributing everything to arise from the Great Spirit, whether of good or evil.’[72] Had the ancient Jews been described by Greek travellers instead of by themselves, we may fairly suspect that they would have been introduced to posterity as a people, consciously theistic indeed, but at the same time as addicted, in most of their rites, to demonolatry and the propitiation of imaginary evil beings. The true view would seem to be that the theology of the lower races does not admit of that preciseness of terminology, of that clear distinction of qualities, of that systematic marshalling of powers, which has been so often predicated of it, but that in its growth it undergoes a period of flux and change similar to that which may be seen to occur in the evolution of the lowest forms of physical life into more determinate types of being.

The Sioux Indians, abusing their Great Spirit for sending them storms, or the Kamschadals cursing Kutka for having created their mountains so high and their streams so rapid, expose a state of thought relating to the gods which is most difficult to reconcile with the savage’s habitual dread of them, still more with a high conception of them, but which is too well authenticated to admit of doubt. Franklin saw a Cree hunter tie offerings (a cotton handkerchief, looking-glass, tin pin, some ribbon and tobacco) to the value of twenty skins round an image of the god Kepoochikan, at the same time praying to him in a rapid monotonous tone to be propitious, explaining to him the value of his presents, and strongly cautioning him against ingratitude.[73] If all the prayers and presents made to their god by the Tahitians to save their chiefs from dying proved in vain, his image was inexorably banished from the temple and destroyed.[74] The Ostiaks of Siberia, if things went badly with them, would pull down from their place of honour in the hut and in every way maltreat the idols they generally honoured so exceedingly; the idols whose mouths were always so diligently smeared with fish-fat, and within whose reach a supply of snuff ever lay ready.[75] The Chinese are said to do the same by their household gods, if for a long time they are deaf to their prayers, and so do the Cinghalese;[76] so that the practice is more than an impulsive manifestation of merely local feeling. That such feelings occasionally crop out in civilised Catholic countries is matter of more surprise; but it is an authentic historical fact that the good people of Castelbranco, in Portugal, were once so angry with St. Anthony for letting the Spaniards plunder their town, contrary to his agreement, that they broke many of his statues in pieces, and, taking the head off one they specially revered, substituted for it the head of St. Francis.[77] Neapolitan fishermen are said to this day to throw their saints overboard if they do not help them in a storm; and the images of the Virgin or of St. Januarius, worn in Neapolitan caps, are in danger of being trodden under foot and destroyed, if adverse contingencies arise. The latter saint, indeed, once received during a famine very clear intimation, that, unless corn came by a certain time, he would forfeit his saintship.[78]

It is perhaps a refinement of thought when a present becomes an advisable accompaniment to a simple petition; but the principle of exchange once entered into, the relations between man and the supernatural lead logically from the offering of fruits and flowers to the sacrifice of animals and of men. Some Algonkin Indians, mistaking once a missionary for a god, and petitioning his mercy, begged him to let the earth yield them corn, the rivers fish, and to prevent sickness from slaying or hunger from tormenting them. Their request they backed with the offer of a pipe;[79] and in this ridiculous incident the whole of the savage’s philosophy of sacrifice is contained. Prescott, coming with some Indians to a lake they were to cross, saw his companions light their pipes and smoke by way of invoking the winds to be calm.[80] And the Hurons offered a similar prayer with tobacco to a local god, saying: ‘Oki, thou who livest on this spot, we offer thee tobacco. Help us, save us from shipwreck. Defend us from our enemies. Give us good trade, and bring us safe back to our villages.’[81] In the island of Tanna, the village priest, addressing the spirits of departed chiefs (thought to preside over the growth of yams and fruits), after the firstfruits of vegetation had been deposited on a stone, on the branch of a tree, or on a rude altar of sticks, would pray: ‘Compassionate father, here is some food; eat it, be kind to us on account of it;’ and in Samoa, too, a libation of ava at the evening meal was the offering, in return for which the father of a family would beg of the gods health and prosperity, productiveness for his plantations, and for his tribe generally a strong and large population for war.[82] In Fiji, again, when the chief priests and leading men assembled to discuss public affairs in the yaquona or kava circle, the chief herald, as the water was poured into the kava, after naming the gods for whom the libation was prepared, would say: ‘Be gracious, ye lords, the gods, that the rain may cease, and the sun shine forth;’ and again when the potion was ready: ‘Let the gods be of a gracious mind, and send a wind from the east.’[83]

It is a somewhat obvious inference, if presents like these fail to obtain corresponding results, that the spirit addressed is not satisfied, and that he requires a greater value in exchange for the blessings at his disposal. The crowning petition, therefore, of disappointed and despairing humanity is, by an irrefragable chain of reasoning, the sacrifice of a human life, or, if this fails, of many lives. Long and frequent were the prayers of the Tahitians to the gods when their chiefs were ill, for, under the idea that ‘the gods were always influenced by the same motives as themselves, they imagined that the efficacy of their prayers would be in exact proportion to the value of the offerings with which they were accompanied.’ Hence, if the disease grew violent, the fruits of whole plantain fields or more than a hundred pigs would be hurried to the marae; nay, not unfrequently a number of men with ropes round their necks would be led to the altar and presented to the idol, with prayers that the mere sight of them might satisfy his wrath.[84] It does not appear that on such occasions they were actually slain, but we seem here rather to see the first step towards human sacrifice than merely a survival of it, for the obtaining of this particular wish. The process is naturally from the sacrifice of the least possible to the sacrifice of the greatest possible, though after that point has been reached there may well be a tendency, varying with the character of a tribe, to fall back upon make-believe, curtailed losses. The Mandan Indians, Catlin repeats, always sacrificed the best of its kind to the Great Spirit, the favourite horse, the best arrow, or the best piece of buffalo;[85] so that the sacrifice of their fingers was more probably a form of incipient human sacrifice than, as it sometimes is, a relic of a more complete self-surrender. Both the Aztecs and the Mayas, with all the cruel forms of sacrifice that disgraced their civilization, retained traditions of a time when the gods were contented with the milder offerings of fruits and flowers; and in Yucatan, where hundreds of young girls were sacrificed in the dark but sacred pit of Chichen, there were recollections of a time when one victim sufficed the demands of the spirit-world. And in this instance may be seen how human sacrifice, besides being the highest gift man could offer to his god or gods, was in yet another sense a mode of prayer; for whilst the victims stood round the pit, whilst the incense burnt on the altar and in the braziers, the officiating priest explained to the messengers from earth ‘the things for which they were to implore the gods into whose presence they were about to be introduced.’[86] So also the priests of Mexico would exhort the deputation of eighteen souls they sent to the sun to remember the mission for which they were sent, the people’s wants they were to make known, the favours they were to ask for their countrymen.[87]

Less obviously connected with prayer than sacrifice is dancing, a custom which the civilized world has long since ceased to regard as in any sense connected with religion, but which among savages, besides being a natural expression of joy in life, of thankfulness for sun or shower, is not unfrequently a mode of prayer, a means employed for the attainment of desire. This at least seems the case with those imitative dances or pantomimes in which with marvellous exactitude the savage all the world over acts the part of the animals he pursues in the chase. The national dance of the Kamschadals consists in the imitation of the manners and motions of seals and bears, varying from the gentlest movement of their bodies to the most violent agitation of their thighs and knees, accompanied with singing and stamping in time;[88] and it is remarkable that in Vancouver’s Island also there is a seal dance, for which the natives, stripping themselves naked, enter the water, regardless of the cold of the night, and emerge ‘dragging their bodies along the sand like seals,’ then enter the houses and crawl about the fires, and finally jump up and dance about.[89]

But although it is intelligible that such facility and perfection of beast-acting as, for instance, enabled the Dog-rib Indians to approach and kill the reindeer, acquired originally by the necessities of the chase, should be perpetuated as a religious ceremony to keep up a habit of actual importance to existence, there are cases to which this explanation would hardly apply, as, for example, to the African gorilla dance, which has been so vividly described by a recent eye-witness, and which, he says, ‘was a religious festival held on the eve of an enterprise,’ the eve, namely, of a gorilla hunt. An African dancing to a drum and harp imitated closely all the attitudes and movements of the gorilla, being joined in the chorus by all the rest present. ‘Now he would be seated on the ground, his legs apart, his hands resting on his knees, his head drooping, and in his face the vacant expression of the brute. Sometimes he folded his arms on his forehead. Suddenly he would raise his head with prone ears and flaming eyes,’ till in the last act he represented the gorilla attacked and killed.[90] But, unless gorillas are ever killed by so clever an imitation of themselves that they really mistake their African neighbours for their own brothers, the gorilla dance must, by a phenomenon of thought not without analogy, be a mode of prayer for obtaining a desired result; the same fetishistic law of thought prevailing that is traceable in the idea that by pouring water on a stone you can bring rain on the earth, or that you can injure your enemy by an injury to his effigy.

It may be, however, that pantomimic dances were employed originally as a clearer expression than mere words of the suppliant’s wishes, the acting of a hunt or battle being equivalent to a petition for favour and success in the same, and the unseen deities addressed being not unnaturally conceived as more likely to see the bodily movements than to hear the feeble voice of the petitioner. The analogy of the various tongues, prevalent among birds, beasts, and men, might well suggest to a savage the possibility of the spiritual world being unavoidably deaf to his utterances from mere inability to comprehend them; whilst dealings with the nearest tribe might make it natural for him to resort to the use of signs and symbols as the least mistakable vehicle for his meaning. The Ahts, retiring to the solitude of the woods, and there standing naked with outstretched arms before the moon, employ set words and gestures according to the nature of the object they desire. Thus in praying for salmon the suppliant rubs the back of his hands, and, looking upwards, says, ‘Many salmon, many salmon;’ in asking for deer he carefully rubs both his eyes, for geese the back of his shoulders, for bears his sides and legs, uttering in a sing-song way the usual formula. The meaning of all these rubbings is obscure; but it has been suggested that the rubbing of the hands indicates a wish that the hand may have the requisite steadiness for throwing the salmon spear; the rubbing of the eyes, a prayer, that they may be opened to discern deer in the forest.[91] Among a Californian tribe it was usual, preparatory to the chase, to resort to a certain stake-inclosure and there to pray to the god’s image for success, by mimicry of the actions of the hunt, as by leaping and twanging of the bow.[92] In the Society Islands, if the land had been in any way defiled by an enemy, a mode of religious purification consisted in offering pieces of coral, collected expressly, on the altar to the gods, to induce them ‘to cleanse the land from pollution, that it might be pure as the coral fresh from the sea.’[93]

The Voguls, whose most frequent prayers are for success in hunting, are said to promote their fulfilment by ‘images in the shape of the beast more especially sought for, rudely shaped out of wood or stone.’[94] But to dance like the animal would naturally serve the purpose as well; and so the interpretation of some dances as symbolised prayers explains several American customs which are strikingly analogous to the African gorilla dance already described. Every Mandan Indian was compelled by social law to keep his buffalo’s mask, consisting of the skin and horns of a buffalo’s head, in his lodge, ready to put on and wear in the buffalo dance, whenever the protracted absence of that animal from the prairie rendered it expedient to resort to this means for the purpose of inducing the herds to change the direction of their wanderings and bend their course towards the Mandan villages. And a principal part in the annual celebration of the subsidence of the great waters consisted in the buffalo dance, wherein eight men dressed in entire buffalo skins, so as to imitate closely the appearance and motions of buffaloes, were the chief actors, and four old men chanted prayers to the Great Spirit for the continuation of his favours in sending them good supplies of buffaloes for the coming year.[95] In this instance the close relation between dance and prayer, the dance being either supplementary or explicative, clearly appears; as it also does in a very similar buffalo dance performed by a neighbouring tribe of the Mandans, the Minnatarees. In their ceremony six elderly men acted the animals, imitating with great perfection even the peculiar sound of their voice.[96] Behind them came a man, who represented the driving of the beasts forward, and who, at a certain point, placing his hands before his face, sang, and made a long speech in the nature of a prayer, containing good wishes for the buffalo hunt and for war, as also an appeal to the heavenly powers to be propitious to the huntsmen and their arms. So again the Sioux Indians for several days before starting on a bear hunt would hold a bear dance, which was regarded as ‘a most important and indispensable form,’ and in which the whole tribe joined in a song to the Bear Spirit, to conciliate as well as to consult him. ‘All with the motions of their hands closely imitated the movements of that animal; some representing its motion in running, and others the peculiar attitude and hanging of the paws when it is sitting up on its hind feet and looking out for the approach of an enemy.’[97] And the same tribe, whenever they had bad luck in hunting, would institute a dance to invoke the aid of one of their gods.[98]

To the African gorilla dance, the Mandan buffalo dance, the Sioux bear dance, may be added the custom of the Koossa Kafirs, who, before they start on a hunt, perform a wonderful game, which is considered absolutely necessary to the success of the undertaking.[99] One of them, representing some kind of game, takes a handful of grass in his mouth and runs about on all fours; whilst the rest make-believe to transfix him with their spears, till at last he throws himself on the ground as if he were killed.[100] On the occasion of a Sioux Indian dreaming of the fish-eating cormorant, a fish dance was instituted, to ward off any danger portended, in which the most elaborate imitation of the cormorant was observed. The medicine-men, dancing up to a fish, affixed to a pole, began quacking, flapping their arms like wings, biting at the fish, and pretending to hide a piece in their nests away from the wolves.[101] The Ahts, again, Sproat observed, spent the eve of a deer hunt ‘in dancing and singing and in various ceremonies intended to secure good luck on the morrow.’[102] And in South Australia it is remarkable that, when boys of a certain age undergo the ceremony of losing their front teeth, power is conferred on them of killing the kangaroo by a kind of kangaroo dance. First of all, a kangaroo of grass is deposited at their feet; and then the actors, the adults of the tribe, having fitted themselves with long tails of grass, set off ‘as a herd of kangaroos, now jumping along, then lying down and scratching themselves, as those animals do when basking in the sun,’ two armed men following them meanwhile, as it were to steal on them unmolested and spear them.[103]

The same thought occurs in prayers for rain. Modern Servian peasants, pouring water over a girl covered with grass and flowers, employ a mode of petition for rain very similar to that in vogue near Lake Nyanza. There, after a wild dance, a jar of water is placed before the village chief: the woman who acts as priestess of the ceremonies washes her hands, arms, and face with the water; then a large quantity of it is poured over her, and finally all the women present rush to dip their calabashes in the jar and to toss the water in the air with loud cries and wild gesticulations.[104]

Again, the common savage war dance may be taken to have a religious significance in addition to its secular motive of sustaining martial feelings and habits. In the war dance of the Navajoes of New Mexico the most important part of the war dance was the arrow dance, when a young virgin, beautifully dressed, represented in gesture ‘the war path.’ An eye-witness has described it as a really beautiful performance. Slowly and steadily she would pursue her imaginary foe; suddenly her step would quicken as she came in sight of the enemy; she would dance faster and faster, and, seizing an arrow, demonstrate by the rapidity of her movements that the fight had begun; she would point with the arrow, show how it wings its course, how the scalp is taken, how the victory is won.[105] Among the Winnebagoe Indians also it was part of the war dance for a warrior to go through the pantomime of the discovery of the enemy, of the ambuscade, the attack, the slaughter, and the scalping.[106] And in this reference may be noted the curious proceeding of the women of Accra, on the Guinea Coast, who, whilst the male population were engaged in war with a neighbouring people, endeavoured every day to bring it to a happy issue by dancing fetish; that is, by fighting sham battles with wooden swords, flying to the boats on the beach and pretending to row, throwing some one into the sea, taking a trowel and making believe to build a wall—all actions literally symbolical of corresponding ones to be performed by the men in the course of defeating their enemy.[107] In Madagascar, too, when the men are absent in war, the custom of the women to dance, in order to inspire their husbands with courage, has been thought not to be destitute of a religious meaning.

That a dance may be in reality a form of prayer, a petition acted instead of spoken, as more likely so to be understood, makes it possible that prayers may be hidden under customs which are generally only cited to illustrate the absurdity of primitive metaphysics. May it not be that the Indian, when he thinks to ensure a successful chase by drawing a figure of his game with a line leading to its heart from its mouth, and by so subjecting its movements to himself, or when he thinks to cure a man of sickness by shooting the bark-effigy of the animal supposed to possess him—may it not be that he thereby hopes to influence known or unknown natural forces in his favour by a clear representation of his wants? The control of natural phenomena by witchcraft may thus have been in its origin a direction to natural phenomena, or rather to the spirits ruling them; an address perhaps to those spirits of the dead which to a savage are his earliest and for long his only gods; and thus the absurdities of fetishism might become intelligible as lifeless prayers, with more or less of their primal meaning, descended from such a philosophy of nature. The Kamschadal child sent out naked to make the rain stop, clear as the meaning of the custom is with the prayer joined to it, would without it appear in the light of ordinary fetishism. So the Khond, carrying a branch cut from hostile soil to his god of war, and there, after he has dressed it like one of the enemy, throwing it down, with certain incantations, on the shrine of the divinity, urges his petition in a way which even the god of war can scarcely fail to understand. And the Basuto woman, who in her wish for children, prays to her tutelary divinity for the accomplishment of her desires by making dolls of clay and treating them as infants, affords yet another illustration of the operation of the same law of thought.[108]

It remains to show how, in primitive theology, prayer attaches itself as well to the material as the spiritual world, for it is here especially that it finds its counterpart in the folk-lore of our own day. As, however, there is scarcely an object in nature which in a state of ignorance may not with reason be worshipped, a few illustrations must be taken for thousands on a subject it were less easy to exhaust than the patience of the reader.

‘As for animals having reasoning powers,’ says an exceptionally credible witness, ‘I have heard Indians talk and reason with a horse the same as with a person.’[109] Our fairy tales of talking animals would be commonplace facts to a savage. Hence it can be no matter of surprise to find that it is a common Indian custom to converse with rattlesnakes, and to endeavour to propitiate them with presents of tobacco. On one occasion, the Iowas having begun to build a village, the presence of a rattlesnake on a neighbouring hill was suddenly announced, when forthwith started the great snake doctor with tobacco and other presents: when he had offered these, and had had a long talk with the snake, he returned to his village, with the satisfactory news that his tribesmen might now travel in safety, as peace had been made between them and the snakes.[110]

But perhaps of all natural objects that have attracted human worship, and been regarded as a supreme source of human woe or welfare, none can compare with the moon. For the moon’s changes of aspect being far more remarkable than any of the sun’s, and more calculated to inspire dread by the nocturnal darkness they contend with, are held in popular fancy nearly everywhere to cause, portend, or accord with changes in the lot of mortals and all things terrestrial. In the Hervey Islands cocoa-nuts are invariably planted at the full of the moon, the size of the latter being held symbolical of the future fulness of the fruit;[111] and in South Africa it is unlucky to begin a journey or any work of importance in the last quarter of the moon.[112] The moon’s wane makes things on earth wane too; when it is new or full, it is everywhere the proper season for new crops to be sown, new households to be formed, new weather to begin.

The feeling of the Congo Africans, who at the sight of the new moon fall on their knees or stand and clap their hands, praying that their lives may be renewed like that of the moon, corresponds exactly with the idea of English folk-lore that crops are more likely to be plentiful if sown when the moon is young, or with the idea of German folk-lore that the new moon is the season for counting money which it is desired may increase. ‘On the first appearance of the new moon, which,’ says Mungo Park, ‘the Kafirs look upon as newly created, the pagan natives, as well as Mahomedans, say a short prayer,’ seemingly the only adoration they offer to the Supreme Being;[113] so that the sentiment of the Congo prayer may be guessed to underlie, consciously or not, the salutations by which the new moon is greeted generally throughout Africa, from the salutations of the Hottentots to the prayers of the Makololos, for the success of their journeys or the destruction of their enemies.[114]

More difficult to understand than the worship of either animals or the heavenly bodies is that of such inanimate things as stones, trees, or rivers. Yet the state of thought is not so far remote from our own but that we can still listen with pleasure, in stories like ‘Undine,’ to the voices of the forest or the river. To a savage, however, it is not only the motion or the sound of natural objects which suggests their divinity, but the danger that is ever latent in them; and it is rather to prevent the river from drowning him or the tree from falling on him than from any perception of their beauty that he makes offerings to them and pays them homage. Such feelings as that of the Cree Indians, who believed that a deer, found dead within a few yards of a willow bush which they worshipped and of which it had eaten, had fallen a victim to the sin of its sacrilege, are not confined to savage lands nor times.[115] As savages have been known to apologize to a slain elephant or bear, assuring it that its death was accidental, so it is said that in parts of Germany a woodcutter will still (or would recently) beg the pardon of a fine healthy tree before cutting it down.[116] In our own midland counties there is a feeling to this day against binding up elder-wood with other faggots; and in Suffolk it is believed misfortune will ensue if ever it is burnt. In Germany formerly an elder-tree might not be cut down entirely; and Grimm was himself an eye-witness of a peasant praying with bare head and folded hands before venturing to cut its branches. That trees are still popularly endowed with a conscious personality is further proved by the custom, not yet extinct, of trying to secure the future favours of fruit trees by presents and prayers. The placing of money in a hole dug at the foot of them, the presenting them with money on New Year’s Day, the shaking under them of the remainder of the Christmas dinner, the beating of them with rods on Holy Innocents’ Day—all German methods to incite fruit trees to further fertility—answer closely to the English custom of apple-howling or wassailing, when at Christmas or Epiphany the inhabitants of a parish, walking in procession to the principal orchards, and there singling out the principal tree, sprinkle it with cider, or place cider-soaked cakes of toast and sugar in its branches, saluting it at the same time with set words in the form of a prayer to the trees to be fruitful for the ensuing year, as the doggerel verses following show plainly enough:—

And similar prayers, as lifeless now as the fossil shells on the shore of some ancient coral sea, lie scattered abundantly in many an English rhyme and ballad, serving to show how the philosophy of one age passes into the nonsense of a later one, and how ideas which constituted a religion for one time may only survive as an amusement for another.