Magic and Religion
As to the future life, Mr. Cameron received his account from a tribesman named Makogo, 'an intelligent member of the Wathi Wathi tribe.' The belief was that current 'before his people came into contact with Europeans, and Makogo expressed an opinion that, whether right or wrong, they would have been better off now had their beliefs never been disturbed.' Probably Makogo was right. The beliefs were in a future state of reward or punishment. European contact does not import but destroy the native form of this creed.
The Wathi Wathi belief answers in character to the creeds expressed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Fijian hymns, the famous Orphic gold talisman of Petilia, the Red Indian belief published by Kohl, and to many other examples.100 The Way of Souls, as in these ancient or savage beliefs, is beset by dangers and temptations, to which the Egyptian Book of the Dead is a guide-book. If any one desires to maintain that this Australian idea, held before contact with Europeans, and now to some extent abandoned after that contact, is of Christian origin (we know this argument), he must suppose that the Wathi Wathi adapted the idea from our old 'Lyke Wake Dirge:'
When Brig o' Dread is over and past,Every night and all,To Whinny Muir thou comest at last,And Christ receive thy saul.A weak point there is. The soul of the Wathi Wathi, after death, is met by another soul, 'who directs him to the road for good men.'
But the natives had no roads, the opponent will reply. They have trade routes and markets, however, and barter of articles made in special localities goes on across hundreds of miles of country.101 Let us allow that the Wathi Wathi may know a clean path or track from a dirty one.
The soul meets a dirty and a clean path. The good soul, being instructed, chooses the dirty path: the other path is kept clean by bad spirits 'in order to induce the unthinking to follow it,' as Bunyan's Mr. Ignorance unwarily chose a by-path into hell. The soul next meets a woman who tries to seduce him. He escapes her lures, and comes to two women who try to trip him by whirling a rope. One of them is blind, and the soul evades her. Next comes a deep narrow gap, in which flames rise and fall. The good soul watches the fall of the flames, and leaps across; there is no Brig o' Dread. Bed Indian souls cross by a log which nearly spans the abyss. Two old women meet the good soul, and take him 'to the Deity, Tha-Tha-Puli.' He tests the soul's strength and skill by making him throw a nulla-nulla. 'When the Wathi Wathi see a shooting star, they believe it to be the passage of such a nulla-nulla through space, and say: "Tha-Tha-Puli is trying the strength of some new spirit." The soul of a bad man, if it escapes the traps set for it, is sure to fall into the hell of fire. Many of the natives have had their beliefs modified by contact with the whites,' and I 'feel doubtful,' says Mr. Cameron, 'whether the pit of fire was not of this kind, and questioned my informant very closely on the subject, but he assured me that there was no doubt whatever that the above was the exact belief before the settlement of the country by the white men.'
It is the standing reply of believers in the borrowing theory that a native, cross-examined, will always agree with whatever the European inquirer wishes him to say. The natives examined by Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Langloh Parker, Mr. Howitt, Mr. Manning, and others were exceptions. They would not allow that their beliefs were borrowed.
This particular form of native belief is exactly analogous to that of ancient Egypt, of Greece, of Fiji, and so on: not to the doctrine of our missionaries. The believers in borrowing must therefore say that the Wathi Wathi stole heaven, hell, and the ways thither from missionaries, and adapted them, accidentally coinciding with Egyptians, Greeks, Red Indians, Fijians, Aztecs, and the rest, as to a gulf to be crossed, and temptations on the way to the abode of the powerful being and the souls of the good. The native proverbial explanation of a shooting star establishes, as historical fact, their belief in Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good spirits. Mr. Frazer has six pages on beliefs about shooting stars.[54] One case is to our point. The Yerrunthally of Queensland think that the souls of the dead climb to a place among the stars by a rope; when they let the rope fall, it 'appeared to people on earth as a shooting star.'102
Now if the evidence of Mr. Palmer, in the 'Journal of the Anthropological Institute,' is good evidence for this Australian belief, why is the evidence of Mr. Howitt and Mr. Cameron, in the same serial, to an unborrowed Australian religion (in this case with Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good souls) unworthy even of mention?
We fall back on Sir Alfred Lyall: 'I think that one effect of the accumulation of materials has been to encourage speculative generalisation, because it has provided a repertory out of which one may make arbitrary selection of examples and precedents to suit any theory.'103 Here I have the pleasure of agreeing with this great authority. Mr. Frazer has chosen Australia as the home of magic, as a land where magic is, but religion has not yet been evolved. As I have shown, in this and the preceding paper, there is abundance of evidence for an unborrowed Australian religion. I shall abandon the evidence so soon as it is confuted, but I cannot reject it while the witnesses are treated as good on many other points, but are unmentioned just when their testimony, if true, seems inconsistent with a theory of the priority of magic to religion.
By the concurring testimony of a crowd of observers,' writes Mr. Tylor, 'it is known that the natives of Australia were at their discovery, and have ever since remained, a race with minds saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities.'104 What can a young student commencing anthropologist think, when he compares Mr. Tylor's 'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers' of Australian religion with Mr. Frazer's remark that there are 'some faint beginnings of religion' in Southern Australia, but that 'traces of a higher faith, where they occur, are probably sometimes due to European influence,' though the people, Mr. Tylor says, were in all things so 'saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities' – 'at their discovery'? There is no use in building a theory of the origin of religion on the case of Australia till we are at least told about the 'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers.' That Mr. Frazer has some reason for disregarding the testimonies which I have cited, that he must have grounds for doubting their validity, I feel assured. But the grounds for the doubt are not apparent, and to state them would make Mr. Frazer's abstention intelligible.
IV
THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
Among the many recent theories concerning the origin of religion, certainly the most impressive is Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ. Unlike several modern speculations, Mr. Frazer's is based on an extraordinary mass of erudition. We are not put off with vague and unvouched-for statements, or with familiar facts extracted from the collections of Mr. Tylor, Lord Avebury, and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Frazer does not collect knowledge, as his Babylonian kings are supposed by him to have been sacrificed – by proxy. No writer is so erudite, and few are so exact in their references. While venturing to differ from Mr. Frazer, I must often, as it were, make use of his own ammunition in this war. Let me say sincerely that I am not pitting my knowledge or industry against his. I rather represent the student who has an interest in these subjects, and peruses 'The Golden Bough,' not as 'the general reader' does, but with some care, and with some verification of the citations and sources.
It is first necessary to state, as briefly as possible, Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the Divinity of our Lord, or, at least, as to what he thinks a very powerful factor in the evolution of that creed.
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1
Golden Bough, i. xvii, 1900.
2
Golden Bough, i. xxi., 1900.
3
G. B. i. 77.
4
Tylor, Prim. Cult. ii. 309, citing Thevet, Singularitez de la France Antarctique, Paris, 1558, ch. 77.
5
Journal of Anthropological Institute, Oct. – Dec. 1900 and N.S. II., Nos. 1, 2, p. 85.
6
Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 16.
7
Natives of Central Australia, London, 1899.
8
With a case of ignoring the evidence I deal in the following essay, Magic and Religion.
9
Op. cit. p. 284.
10
Le Jeune, Relations, 1633, p. 17.
11
Ibid., 1637, p. 49.
12
Prim. Cult. ii. 310.
13
Historic of Travaile into Virginia. By William Strachey, Gent, (a companion of Captain Smith). Hakluyt Society. Date circ.1612-1616. See Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. xx-xxxix, 1899.
14
Prim. Cult. ii. p. 308.
15
Prim. Cult. ii. pp. 309, 310 (1873 and 1891).
16
Prim. Cult. ii. p. 308.
17
Howitt, Journal of Anthropological Institute, 1884, 1885.
18
United States Exploring Expedition. Ethnology and Philology p. 110.
19
Ridley, Kamilaroi Vocabularies, p. 17 (1875). Also in an earlier Grammar, 1866.
20
The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, 1852, pp. 40-48.
21
Howitt, J. A. I., 1885. The Kurnai tribe.
22
Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, 1843, p. 555. Compare Threlkeld, An Australian Language, 1892, p. 47. This is a reprint of Mr. Threlkeld's early works of 1831-1857.
23
Op. cit. p. 47.
24
Journal Anthrop. Inst., 1885.
25
He was supposed to live on an island, on fish which came at his call, probably a childlike answer to a tedious questioner.
26
Exploring Expedition of U.S., 1846, p. 110.
27
Gurre Kamilaroi, or Kamilaroi Sayings. Sydney, 1856. It is a scarce little book, with illustrations and Bible stories.
28
Howitt, Journal Anthrop. Institute, ut supra.
29
Greenway, J. A. I. vii. p. 243.
30
Collins, Account of the Colony of New South Wales, 1798, vol. ii. p. 544.
31
J. A. I.. xvi. pp. 49, 50.
32
Op. cit., 1885, p. 54.
33
For concealment from women and children, see Howitt, J. A. I. xiii. p. 192.
34
Dawson, Aborigines of Australia, p. 49.
35
J. A. I. xiii. 1885, p. 142.
36
Op. cit. p. 194.
37
Two volumes. Nutt.
38
Legend of Perseus, i. 97.
39
Folk Lore, March 1899, p. 55.
40
Ridley, J. A. I., 1872, p. 282.
41
Folk Lore, March 1899, pp. 52, 53.
42
J. A. I. vol. xiv. p. 310.
43
See his and Mr. Fison's Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 1881.
44
North-West Central Queensland Aborigines, pp. 14, 36, 116, 153, 158, 165.
45
Eyre, vol. ii. pp. 355-357.
46
Aborigines of Victoria.
47
Arranged in lines from the literal translation, preserving the native idiom. Howitt, J. A. I. vol. xvi. pp. 330, 331.
48
Anthropologie, vi. p. 798.
49
Spencer and Gillen, p. 549.
50
G. B. i. p. 63.
51
G. B. ii. p. 51.
52
G. B. i. p. 71.
53
J. Dawson, Australian Aborigines, pp. 50, sq.
54
A. W. Howitt in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xiii. (1884), 191.
55
Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 255.
56
See A. W. Hewitt in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xiii. (1884), p. 459.
57
See A. W. Howitt in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xviii. (1889), pp. 32, sq. Religion is not mentioned here.
58
See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia.
59
E. M. Curr, The Australian Race, i. 45.
60
Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 260.
61
E. M. Curr, The Australian Race, i. 45.
62
Cf. Mr. Matthews and Mr. Crawley, J. A. I. xxiv. 413.
63
J. A. I. xiv. 1885, p. 521.
64
G. B. i. 72, note; J. A. I. xiii. p. 191 (1884).
65
J. A. I., 1885, p. 321, note 2.
66
G. B. i. 72, note 1. In the first edition of Myth, Ritual, and Religion I quoted Mr. Howitt's evidence of 1881. In the second edition I naturally cited his later testimony.
67
G. B. ii. 49, 50.
68
G. B. ii. 51, citing Brough Smyth's Aborigines of Victoria, ii. 311.
69
November 1894, pp. 158-198.
70
G. B. ii. 51-53.
71
For 'Fisher's Ghost' see Blackwood's Magazine, August 1897, p. 78 et seq.
72
J. A. I. xv. 4.
73
To be true to my own principles, I note a few points in Mr. Frazer's Australian evidence, published by him in J. A. I., November 1894.
Mr. Gason, an excellent witness, says that the Dieri think some souls turn into old trees or rocks, or 'as breath ascend to the heavens,' to 'Purriewillpanina.' The Dieri believe the Mooramoora created them and will look after their spirits (op. cit. p. 175). Mr. Frazer, however, calls the Mura Mura 'remote ancestral spirits,' who would have a difficulty, one thinks, in creating the Dieri. The names of the dead may not be mentioned (p. 176).
The station master at Powell's Creek denies that magic 'exists in any shape or form.' There are no religious dances, no belief in a future life (p. 180). Mr. Lindsay Crawford says 'nothing is known of the nature of souls.' For the last ten years this gentleman 'had held no communication with the natives at all, except with the rifle.' Perhaps his negative evidence is not very valuable, as he does not appear to have won the friendly confidence of the blacks. Mr. Matthews says: 'Many tribes believe future existence is regulated by due observances at burial according to the rites of the tribe' (p. 190). Mr. Foelsche, described by Dr. Stirling as 'a most intelligent and accurate observer, who knows the natives well,' contributes a belief in a benevolent creator, with a demiurge who made the blacks. He inhabits Teelahdlah, among the stars. 'He never dies.' He is 'a very good man,' not a 'spirit.' A subterranean being 'can read and write, and keeps a book' of men's actions. This is so manifestly due to European influence that I have not cited Mr. Foelsche's evidence. Mr. Foelsche 'knows of no magic or witchcraft being practised' (p. 197). The blacks believe that after death their souls 'go up'; they then point skywards (p. 198).
74
G.B. i. 72 note i. 77.
75
See 'The Theory of Loan Gods.'
76
J. A. I. January to June, 1900, No. 31, p. 27.
77
Asiatic Studies, ii. 172.
78
G. B. i. 77.
79
G. B. ii. 1.
80
G. B. ii. 1-59, and passim, almost.
81
G. B. i. 78, 79.
82
G. B. i. 81.
83
G. B. ii. 8; i. 232, 233.
84
G. B. i. 81-114.
85
G. B. i. 88, 89.
86
G. B. i. 86.
87
G. B. i. 72, note 1.
88
G. B. i. 86, 87.
89
G. B. i. 72.
90
G. B. i. 87.
91
G. B. i. 72, note.
92
G. B. ii. 75-80. The hypothesis is offered with all due diffidence.
93
G. B. iii. 424.
94
Natives of Central Australia, p. 246, note 1.
95
J. A. I., 1872, pp. 268, 269. Lang's Queensland, pp. 444, 445. Winslow, in Arber's Captain Smith, p. 768.
96
See 'The Theory of Loan-Gods,' supra.
97
G. B. i. xvii.
98
J. A. I., 1885, pp. 344-370.
99
Parenthetically, I may remark that many beliefs as to the future state originate in, or are confirmed by, visions of 'doctors' who visit the Hades or Paradise of a tribe, and by reports of men given up for dead, who recover and narrate their experiences. The case of Montezuma's aunt is familiar to readers of Mr. Prescott's Conquest of Mexico. The new religion of the Sioux is based on a similar vision. Anthropologists have given slight attention to these circumstances.
100
See my Modern Mythology, and introduction to my Homeric Hymns.
101
Roth, North-West Queensland Central Aborigines, p. 132. Spencer and Gillen, 575.
102
G. B. ii. 21. E. Palmer, J. A. I. xiii. p. 292.
103
Asiatic Studies, i. ix.
104
Primitive Culture, i. 379, 1871.
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