About a century later, Father Lafitau wrote passages which illustrate well the transformation of native animistic conceptions under missionary influence into analogues of Christian theology. Such general terms for spiritual beings as 'oki' or 'manitu' had become to him individual names of one supreme being. This great Spirit, known among the Caribs under the name of Chemiin, under that of Manitou among the Algonquin nations, and under that of Okki among those who speak the Huron tongue. . .' &c. All American tribes, he says, use expressions which can only denote God: they call him the great Spirit, sometimes the Master and Author of Life . . .' &c.1 The longer rude tribes of America have been in contact with European belief, the less confidently can we ascribe to purely native sources the theologic scheme their religions have settled into. Yet the Creeks towards the end of the 18th century preserved some elements of native faith. They believed in the Great Spirit, the Master of Breath (a being whom Bartram represents as a soul and governor of the universe): to him they would address their frequent prayers and ejaculations, at the same time paying a kind of homage to the sun, moon, and stars, as the mediators or ministers of the Great Spirit, in dispensing his attributes for their comfort and well-being in this life.2 In our own day, among the wild Comanches of the prairies, the Great Spirit, their creator and supreme deity, is above Sun and Moon and Earth; towards him is sent the first puff of tobacco-smoke before the Sun receives the second, and to him is offered the first morsel of the feast.3 Turning from the simple faiths of savage tribes of North America to the complex religion of the half- civilized Mexican nation, we find what we might naturally expect, a cumbrous polytheism complicated by mixture of several national pantheons, and beside and beyond this, certain 1 Lafitau, 'Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains,' 1724, vol. i. pp. 124-6. 2 Bartram in 'Tr. Amer. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. pp. 20, 26. 3 Schoolcraft, 'Ind. Tribes,' part ii. p. 127. appearances of a doctrine of divine supremacy. But these doctrines seem to have been spoken of more definitely than the evidence warrants. A remarkable native development of Mexican theism must be admitted, in so far as we may receive the native historian Ixtlilxochitl's account of the worship paid by Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Tezcuco, to the invisible supreme Tloque Nahuaque, he who has all in him, the cause of causes, in whose star-roofed pyramid stood no idol, and who there received no bloody sacrifice, but only flowers and incense. Yet it would have been more satisfactory were the stories told by this Aztec panegyrist of his royal ancestor confirmed by other records. Traces of divine supremacy in Mexican religion are especially associated with Tezcatlipoca, 'Shining Mirror,' a deity who seems in his original nature the Sun-god, and thence by expansion to have become the soul of the world, creator of heaven and earth, lord of all things, Supreme Deity. Such conceptions may in more or less measure have arisen in native thought, but it should be pointed out that the remarkable Aztec religious formulas collected by Sahagun, in which the deity Tezcatlipoca is so prominent a figure, show traces of Christian admixture in their material, as well as of Christian influence in their style. For instance, all students of Mexican antiquities know the belief in Mictlan, the Hades of the dead. But when one of these Aztec prayer-formulas (concerning auricular confession, the washing away of sins, and a new birth) makes mention of sinners being plunged into a lake of intolerable misery and torment, the introduction of an idea so obviously European condemns the composition as not purely native. The question of the actual developments of ideas verging on pantheism or theism, among the priests and philosophers of native Mexico, is one to be left for further criticism.1 In the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity ་ 1 Prescott, Mexico,' book i. ch. vi. Sahagun, 'Hist. de Nueva España,' lib. vi. in Kingsborough, vol. v. ; Torquemada, 'Monarq. Ind.' lib. x. c. 14. Waitz, vol. iv. p. 136; J. G. Müller, p. 621, &c. is especially manifested in that great mythologic divinity of the Polynesian race, whom the New Zealanders call Tangaroa, the Hawaiians Kanaroa, the Tongans and Samoans Tangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa. Students of the science of religion who hold polytheism to be but the mis-development of a primal idea of divine unity, which in spite of corruption continues to pervade it, might well choose this South Sea Island divinity as their aptest illustration from the savage world. Taaroa, says Moerenhout, is their supreme or rather only god; for all the others, as in other known polytheisms, seem scarcely more than sensible figures and images of the infinite attributes united in his divine person. The following is given as a native poetic definition of the Creator. 'He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named.' According to Ellis, Taaroa is described in the Leeward Islands as the eternal parentless uncreate Creator, dwelling alone in the highest heaven, whose bodily form mortals cannot see, who after intervals of innumerable seasons casts off his body or shell and becomes renewed. It was he who created Hina his daughter, and with her aid formed the sky and earth and sea. He founded the world on a solid rock, which with all the creation he sustains by his invisible power. Then he created the ranks of lesser deities such as reign over sea and land and air, and govern peace and war, and preside over physic and husbandry, and canoe-building, and roofing, and theft. The version from the Windward Islands is that Taaroa's wife was the rock, the foundation of all things, and she gave birth to earth and sea. Now, fortunately for our understanding of this myth, the name of Taaroa's wife, with whom he begat the lesser deities, was taken down in Tahiti in Captain Cook's time. She was a rock called Papa, and her name plainly suggests her identity with Papa the Earth, the wife of Rangi the Heaven in the New Zealand myth of Heaven and Earth, the great first parents. If this inference be just, then it seems that Taaroa the Creator is no personification of a primæval theistic idea, but simply the divine personal Heaven transformed under European influence into the supreme Heaven-god. Thus, when Turner gives the Samoan myths of Tangaloa in heaven presiding over the production of the earth from beneath the waters, or throwing down from the sky rocks which are now islands, the classic name by which he calls him is that which rightly describes his nature and mythic origin-Tangaloa, the Polynesian Jupiter. Yet in island district after district, we find the name of the mighty heavenly creator given to other and lesser mythic beings. In Tahiti, the manes-worshipper's idea is applied not only to lesser deities, but to Taaroa the Creator himself, whom some maintained to be but a man deified after death. In the New Zealand mythology, Tangaroa figures on the one hand as Sea-god and father of fish and reptiles, on the other as the mischievous eaves-dropping god who reveals secrets. In Tonga, Tangaloa was god of artificers and arts, and his priests were carpenters; it was he who went forth to fish, and dragged up the Tonga islands from the bottom of the sea. Here, then, he corresponds with Maui, and indeed Tangaroa and Maui are found blending in Polynesia even to full identification. It is neither easy nor safe to fix to definite origin the Protean shapes of South Sea mythology, but on the whole the native myths are apt to embody cosmic ideas, and as the idea of the Sun preponderates in Maui, so the idea of the Heaven in Taaroa.1 In the Fiji Islands, whose native mythology is on the whole distinct from that of Polynesia proper, a strange weird figure takes the supreme place among the gods. His name is Ndengei, 1 Moerenhout, Voy. aux Iles du Grand Océan,' vol. i. pp. 419, 437. Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 321, &c. J. R. Forster, 'Voyage round the World,' pp. 540, 567. Grey, 'Polyn. Myth.'p. 6. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,' p. 118; see above, vol. i. p. 322. Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 244. Mariner, Tonga Is.' vol. ii. pp. 116, 121. Schirren, 'Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,' pp. 68, 89, the serpent is his shrine, some traditions represent him with a serpent's head and body and the rest of him stone. He passes a monotonous existence in his gloomy cavern, feeling no emotion nor sensation, nor any appetite but hunger; he takes no interest in any one but Uto, his attendant, and gives no sign of life beyond eating, answering his priest, and changing his position from one side to the other. No wonder Ndengei is less worshipped than most of the inferior gods. The natives have even made a comic song about him, where he talks with his attendant, Uto, who has been to attend the feast at Rakiraki, where Ndengei has especially his temple and worship. Ndengei. 'Have you been to the sharing of food to-day?' Uto. Ndengei. Indeed, Uto! This is very bad. but only the under-shell How is it? We made them men, placed them on the earth, gave them food, and yet they share to us only the under-shell. Uto, how is this?'1 The native religion of Africa, a land pervaded by the doctrines of divine hierarchy and divine supremacy, affords apt evidence for the problem before us. The capacity of the manes-worshipper's scheme to extend in this direction may be judged from the religious speculations of the Zulus, where may be traced the merging of the First Man, the Old-Old-One, Unkulunkulu, into the ideal of the Creator, Thunderer, and Heaven-god.2 If we examine a collection of documents illustrating the doctrines of the West African races lying between the Hottentots on the south and the Berbers on the north, we may fairly judge their conceptions, evidently influenced as these have been by Christian intercourse, to be nevertheless based on native ideas of the personal Heaven. Whether they think of their 3 1 Williams, Fiji,' vol. i. p. 217. 2 Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,' part i. See ante, pp. 116, 313. 3 See especially Waitz, vol. ii. p. 167, &c. ; J. L. Wilson, W. Afr.' pp. 209, 387; Bosman, Mungo Park, &c. Comp. Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 390. |
