IMAGES AND NAMES. 113 



describes as having the Great or Good Spirit painted on one 

 side of it, and the Bad Spirit on the other. His drawing, un- 

 fortunately, only shows clearly one figure, in the unmistakable 

 uniform of a white soldier with a musket in the one hand and a 

 pipe in the other,^ and this may very likely be the figure of the 

 Good Spirit, for the pipe is a known symbol of peace.^ But 

 the white man stands also to the savage painter for the portrait 

 of the Evil Demon, especially in Africa, where we find the 

 natives of Mozambique drawing their devil in the likeness of a 

 white man,^ while Eomer, speaking of the people of the Guinea 

 coast, says that they say the devil is white, and paint him with 

 their whitest colours. The pictures of him are lent on hire for 

 a week or so by the old woman who makes them, to people 

 whom the devil visits at night. When he sees his image, he is 

 so terrified that he never comes back.* This impersonation 

 need not, however^ be intended by any means as an insult to 

 the white man. As Captain Burton says of his African name 

 of Muzungu Mhaya, " the wicked white man," it would have 

 been but a sorry compliment to have called him a good white 

 man. Much of the reverence of the savage is born rather of 

 fear than of love, and the white colonist has seldom failed to 

 make out that title to the respect of the savage, which lies in 

 the power, not unaccompanied by the will, to hurt him. 



The rudeness and shapelessness of some of the blocks and 

 stones which serve as idols among many tribes, and those not 

 always the lowest, is often surprising. There seems to be but 

 one limit to the shapelessness of an idol, which is yet to repre- 

 sent the human form, and this is the same which a child would 

 unconsciously apply, namely, that its length, breadth, and 

 thickness must bear a proportion not too far different from the 

 proportions of the human body. A wooden brick or a cotton- 

 reel, set up or lying down^ will serve well enough for a child to 



' Catlin, vol. i. p. 44. 



2 Sii- G. Simpson, Narrative of a Journey round the World ; London, 1847, 

 vol. i. p. 75. 



^ Pui'chas, vol. V. p. 758. See Livingstone, Missionary Travels, etc., in South 

 Africa ; London, 1857, p. 465. 



* L. F. Eomer, Nachr. von der Kiiste Guinea's ; Copenhagen, Leipzig, 1769, 

 p. 43. 



I 



