530 



NA TURE 



[September 29, 1898 



for he has affiliated it to those ideas which have been so com- 

 monly formed among rude and primitive peoples. It is true, 

 he says, fables in general are composed of ductile matter, that 

 may be drawn into great variety by a witty talent or an 

 inventive genius, and be delivered of plausible meanings which 

 they never contained. But the argument of most weight with 

 him, he continues, " is that many of these fables by no means 

 appear to have been invented by the persons who relate and 

 divulge them, whether Homer, Ilesiod, or others ; but whoever 

 attentively considers the thing will find that these fables are 

 delivered down and related by those writers, not as matters 

 then first invented and proposed, but as things received and 

 embraced in earlier ages. The relators drew from the common 

 stock of ancient tradition, and varied but in point of embellish- 

 ment, which is their own. This principally raises my esteem 

 of these fables, which I receive, not as the product of the age, 

 or invention of the poets, but as sacred relics, gentle whispers, 

 and the breath of better times, that from the traditions of more 

 ancient nations came, at length, into the flutes and trumpets 

 of the Greeks." 



Except that he supposes them to be a relic of better times, 

 the poet's dream of a golden age no doubt still ringing in his 

 ears, Bacon had, in this as in many other matters, a clear insight 

 into the meaning of things. 



Another idea that appears among very early and primitive 

 peoples, and has had in all time a powerful influence on man- 

 kind, is that of a separable spirit. The aborigines of North- 

 west Central Queensland, who have lately been studied to such 

 excellent purpose by Dr. Walter Roth, the brother of a much- 

 esteemed past officer of this Section, are in many respects low 

 in the scale of humanity ; yet they possess this idea. They 

 believe that the ghost, or .shade, or spirit of some one departed 

 can so initiate an individual into the mysteries of the craft of 

 doctor or medicine-man as to enable him, by the use of a death- 

 bone apparatus, to produce sickness and death in another. This 

 apparatus is supposed to extract blood from the victim against 

 whom it is pointed without actual contact, and to insert in him 

 some foreign substance. They will not go alone to the grave 

 of a relative for fear of .seeing his ghost. It appears that they 

 have the fancy that Europeans are ghosts. The Tasmanians 

 also, as Mr. Ling Roth himself tells us, had the same fancy as 

 to the Europeans, and believed that the dead could act upon 

 the living. The Pawnee Indians, we are assured by Mr. 

 Grinnell, believe that the spirits of the dead live after their 

 bodies are dust. They imagine that the little whirlwinds often 

 seen in summer are ghosts. The Blackfeet think the shadow 

 of a person is his soul, and that while the souls of the good are 

 allowed to go to the sand-hills, those of the bad remain as 

 ghosts near the place where they died. The Shillooks of 

 Central Africa are said to believe that the ghostly spectres of 

 the dead are always invisibly present with the living, and 

 accompany them wherever they go. The aborigines of Samoa 

 believed in a land of ghosts, to which the spirits of the deceased 

 were carried immediately after death. The religious system of 

 the Amazulu, as described by Bishop Callaway, rests largely on 

 the foundation of belief in the continued activity of the dis- 

 embodied spirits of deceased ancestors. 



Mr. Bryce, in his " Impressions of South Africa," says that 

 at Lezapi, in Mashonaland, are three huts, one of which is 

 roofed, and is the grave of a famous chief, whose official name 

 was Makoni. " On the grave there stands a large earthenware 

 pot, which used to be regularly filled with native beer when, 

 once a year, about the anniversary of his death, his sons and 

 other descendants came to venerate and propitiate his ghost. 

 Five years ago, when the white men came into the country, 

 the ceremony was disused, and the poor ghost is now left with- 

 out honour and nutriment. The pot is broken, and another 

 pot, which stood in an adjoining hut, and was used by the 

 worshippers, has disappeared. The place, however, retains its 

 awesome character, and a native boy who was with us would 

 not enter it. The sight brought vividly to mind the similar 

 spirit worship which went on among the Romans, and which 

 goes on to-day in China ; but I could not ascertain for how 

 many generations back an ancestral ghost receives these attentions 

 — a point which has remained obscure in the case of Roman 

 ghosts also." 



The aborigines of New Britain are said to believe that the 

 ghosts of their deceased ancestors exercise a paramount in- 

 fluerice on human affairs, for good or for evil. 'I'hey have the 

 poetical idea that the stars are lamps held out by the ghosts to 



NO. 1509, VOL. 58] 



light the path of those who are to fellow in their footsteps. Oii 

 the other hand, they think these ancestral ghosts are most 

 malicious during full moon. Not te multiply instances, we may- 

 say with Mr, Staniland Wake, it is much to be doubted whether 

 there is any race of uncivilised men who are not firm believers- 

 in the existence of spirits or ghosts. If this is so, and the 

 idea of a separable spirit, capable of feeling and of action 

 apart from the body, is found to be practically universal among 

 mankind, and to have been excogiitated by some of the least 

 advanced among peoples ; and if we observe how large a share 

 that idea has in forming the dogmas of the more specialised 

 religions of the present day, we shall not see anything inherently 

 unreasonable in the generalisatiorv that the group of theories 

 and practices which constitute the great province of man's 

 emotions and mental operations expressed in the term 

 "religion" has passed through the same stages and produced 

 itself in the same way from these early rude beginnings of the 

 religious sentiment as every other mental exertion. We shall 

 see in religion as real a part of man's organisation as any physical 

 member or mental faculty. We shall have no reason to think 

 that it is an exception to any general law of progress and of 

 continuity which is found to prevail in any other part of man's- 

 nature. 



The same inference may be drawn from many other consider- 

 ations. Take, for instance, the belief in witchcraft, which is so- 

 characteristic of uncivilised man tlnat it is hardly necessary to- 

 cite examples of it. The Rev. Mr. Coillard, a distinguished 

 missionary of the Evangelical Society of Paris^ in a delightful 

 record, which has just been published, of his twenty years' 

 labours as a missionary pioneer among the Banyai and Barotzi 

 of the Upper Zambesi, "on the threshold of Central Africa," 

 says : " In the prison of the Barotzi, toiling at earthworks, is a 

 woman — young, bright, and intelligent. She told me her story. 

 A man of remarkably gentle character had married her. The 

 king's sister, Katoka, having got rid of one of her husbands, 

 cast her eyes on this man and took him. He had to forsake his 

 young wife — quite an easy matter. Unfortunately, a little later 

 on, a dead mouse was found in the princess's house. There was 

 a great commotion, and the cry of witchcraft was raised. The 

 bones did not fail to designate the young woman, and she was 

 made a convict. A few years ago she would have been burnt 

 alive. Ah, my friends, paganism' is an odious and a cruel 

 thing ! " Ah, Mr. Coillard, is it many years ago that she would 

 have been burnt alive or drowned in Christian England or 

 Christian America? Surely the odiousness and the cruelty are 

 not special to paganism any more than to Christianity. The 

 one and the other are due to ignorance and superstition, and 

 these are more hateful in a Matthew Hale or a Patrick Henry 

 than in a Barotzi princess in the proportion that they ought to 

 have been more enlightened and intelligent than she. It is only 

 122 years since John Wesley wrote : " I cannot give up to all 

 the Deists in Great Britain the existence of witchcraft"; and I 

 believe that to this day the Order of Exorcists is a recognised 

 order in the Catholic Church. 



The same line of argument — which, of course, I am only indi- 

 cating here— might be pursued, I am persuaded, in numberless 

 other directions. Mr. Frazer, in his work on the Golden Bough, 

 has most learnedly applied it to a remarkable group of beliefs 

 and observances. Mr. Hartland has followed up that research 

 with a singularly luminous study of several other groups of ideas 

 in the three volumes of his " Legend of Perseus." More 

 recently, Mr. Andrew Lang has sought to show that the idea of 

 a Supreme Being occurs at an earlier stage in the development 

 of savage thought than we had hitherto supposed. Striking as 

 these various collocations of facts and the conclusions drawn 

 from them may appear, I am convinced there is much more for 

 the folk-lorist to do in the same directions. 



The principle that underlies it all seems to be this : man can 

 destroy nothing, man can create nothing, man cannot of his own 

 mere volition even permanently modify anything. A higher 

 power restrains his operations, and often reverses his work. You 

 think you have exterminated a race : you have put to the sword 

 every male you can find, and you have starved and poisoned all 

 the survivors of the community. In the meanwhile, their blood 

 has been mingled with yours, and for generations to come your 

 bones and those of your descendants will preserve a record of 

 that lost race. You think you have exterminated a religion ; 

 you have burned to death all of its teachers you can find, and 

 converted forcibly or by persuasion the rest of the community. 

 But you cannot control men's thoughts, and the old beliefs and 



