Page images
PDF
EPUB

art of tillage, and therefore acknowledging him as a deity.1 Among the Guarani race, Tamoi the Ancient of Heaven had no less rightful claim, in his character of heaven-god, to be venerated as the divine teacher of agriculture to his people. In Mexico, Centeotl the Grain-goddess received homage and offerings at her two great festivals, and took care of the growth and keeping of the corn. In Polynesia, we hear in the Society Islands of Ofanu the god of husbandry, in the Tonga Islands of Alo Alo the fanner, god of wind and weather, bearing office as god of harvest, and receiving his offering of yams when he had ripened them.* A picturesque figure from barbaric Asia is Pheebee Yau, the Ceres of the Karens, who sits on a stump and watches the growing and ripening corn, to fill the granaries of the frugal and industrious. The Khonds worship at the same shrine, a stone or tree near the village, both Būrbi Pennu the goddess of new vegetation, and Pidzu Pennu the rain-god. Among Finns and Esths it is the Earth-mother who appropriately undertakes the task of bringing forth the fruits." And so among the Greeks it is the same being, Dēmētēr the Earth-mother, who performs this function, while the Roman Ceres who is confused with her is rather, as in Mexico, a goddess of grain and fruit.8

The War-god is another being wanted among the lower races, and formed or adapted accordingly. Areskove the Iroquois War-god seems to be himself the great celestial deity; for his pleasant food they slaughtered human victims, that he might give them victory over their enemies; as a pleasant sight for him they tortured the war-captives; on

[ocr errors]

1 De Laet, Novus Orbis,' xv. 2; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 417; Brinton, pp152, 185; J. G. Müller, p. 271, etc.

2 D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. ii. p. 319.

3 Clavigero, 'Messico,' vol. ii. pp. 16, 68, 75.

4 Ellis, Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 333. Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 115.

5 Cross, in 'Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.' vol. iv. p. 316; Mason, p. 215.

6 Macpherson, India,' pp. 91, 355.

7 Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 89.'

8 Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. ii. p. 467. Cox, 'Mythology of Aryan Nations,' vol. ii. p. 308.

him the war-chief called in solemn council, and the warriors, shouting his name, rushed into the battle he was surveying from on high. Canadian Indians before the fight would look toward the sun, and their leader prayed to the Great Spirit; Floridan Indians prayed to the Sun before their wars.1 Araucanians of Chili entreated Pillan the Thundergod that he would scatter their enemies, and thanked him amidst their cups after a victory. The very name of Mexico seems derived from Mexitli, the national War-god, identical or identified with the hideous gory Huitzilopochtli. Not to attempt a general solution of the enigmatic nature of this inextricable compound parthenogenetic deity, we may notice the association of his principal festival with the winter-solstice, when his paste idol was shot through with an arrow, and being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten, wherefore the ceremony was called the teoqualo or "god-eating." This and other details tend to show Huitzilopochtli as originally a nature-deity, whose life and death were connected with the year's, while his functions of War-god may be of later addition. Polynesia is a region where quite an assortment of war-gods may be collected. Such, to take but one example, was Tairi, war-god of King Kamehameha of the Sandwich Islands, whose hideous image, covered with red feathers, shark-toothed, mother-of-pearleyed, with helmet-crest of human hair, was carried into battle by his special priest, distorting his own face into hideous grins, and uttering terrific yells which were considered to proceed from the god. Two examples from Asia may show what different original conceptions may serve to shape such deities as these upon. The Khond War-god, who entered into all weapons, so that from instruments of peace they became weapons of war, who gave edge to the

1 J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 141, 271, 274, 591, etc.

[ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]

Ellis, Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 326; vol. iv. p. 158. See also Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 112; Williams, ‘Fiji,' vol. i. p. 218.

axe and point to the arrow, is the very personified spirit of tribal war, his token is the relic of iron and the iron weapons buried in his sacred grove which stands near each group of hamlets, and his name is Loha Pennu or Irongod. The Chinese War-god, Kuang Tä, on the other hand, is an ancient military ghost; he was a distinguished officer, as well as a "faithful and honest courtier," who flourished during the wars of the Han dynasty, and emperors since then have delighted to honour him by adding to his usual title more and more honorary distinctions. Looking at these selections from the army of War-gods of the different regions of the world, we may well leave their classic analogues, Arēs and Mars, as beings whose warlike function we recognize, but not so easily their original nature.3

2

It would be easy, going through the religious systems of Polynesia and Mexico, Greece and Rome, India and China, to give the names and offices of a long list of divinities, patrons of hunting and fishing, carpentering and weaving, and so forth. But studying here rather the continuity of polytheistic ideas than the analysis of polytheistic divinities, it is needless to proceed farther in the comparison of these deities of special function, as recognized to some extent in the lower civilization, before their elaborate development became one of the great features of the higher.

The great polytheistic deities we have been examining, concerned as they are with the earthly course of nature and human life, are gods of the living. But even in savage levels man began to feel an intellectual need of a God of the Dead, to reign over the souls of men in the next life, and this necessity has been supplied in various ways. Of the deities set up as lords of Deadman's Land, some are beings whose original meaning is obscure. Some are distinctly nature-deities appointed to this office, often for local reasons,

1 Macpherson, 'India,' pp. 90, 360.

2 Doolittle, Chinese,' vol. i. p. 267.

3 Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. i. p. 413. Cox, 'Myth. of Aryan N.', vol. ii. pp. 254, 311.

2

as happening to belong to the regions where the dead take up their abode. Some, again, are as distinctly the deified souls of men. The two first classes may be briefly instanced together in America, where the light-side and shadow-side (as Dr. J. G. Müller well calls them) of the conception of a future life are broadly contrasted in the definitions of the Lord of the Dead. Among the Northern Indians this may be Tarenyawagon the Heaven-god, or the Great Spirit who receives good warriors in his happy hunting-grounds, or his grandmother, the bloodthirsty Death-goddess Atahentsic.1 In Brazil, the Underworld-god, who places good warriors and sorcerers in Paradise, contrasts with Aygnan the evil deity who takes base and cowardly Tupi souls, much as the Mexican Tlaloc, Water-god and lord of the earthly paradise, contrasts with Mictlanteuctli, ruler of the dismal dead-land in the shades below.3 In Peru there seems to have existed a belief that the spirits of the departed went to be with the Creator and Teacher of the World-" Bring us too near to thee . . . that we may be fortunate, being near to thee, O Uira-cocha!" There are also statements as to an underworld of shades, the land of the demon Supay.* Accounts of this class must often be suspected of giving ideas mis-stated under European influence, or actually adopted from Europeans, but there is in some a look of untouched genuineness. Thus in Polynesia, the idea of a Devil borrowed from colonists or missionaries may be suspected in such a figure as the evil deity Wiro, chief of Reigna, the New Zealander's western world of departed souls. But few conceptions of deity are more quaintly original than that of the Samoan deity Saveasiuleo, at once

1 J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 137, etc. 272, 286, etc. 500, etc. See Sproat, p. 213 (Ahts), cited ante, p. 85. Chay-her signifies not only the world below, but Death personified as a boneless greybeard who wanders at night stealing men's souls away.

2 Lery, 'Bresil,' p. 234.

Clavigero, vol. ii. pp. 14, 17; Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 495.

4 Rites and Laws of Yncas,' tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, pp. 32, 48 (prayer from M.S. communication by C. R. M.); Garcilaso de la Vega, lib. ii. c. 2, 7; Brinton, Myths of New World,' p. 251.

ruler of destinies of war and other affairs of men, and chief of the subterranean Bulotu, with the human upper half of his body reclining in his great house in company with the spirits of departed chiefs, while his tail or extremity stretched far away into the sea, in the shape of an eel or serpent. Different in name and nature, yet not so different as to be in either beyond recognition, this being reappears in the kindred myths of the neighbouring group, the Tonga Islands. The Tongan Hikuleo has his home in the spiritland of Bulotu, here conceived as out in the far western sea. Here we are told the use of his tail. His body goes away on journeys, but his tail remains watching in Bulotū, and thus he is aware of what goes on in more places than one. Hikuleo used to carry off the first-born sons of Tongan chiefs, to people his island of the blest, and he so thinned the ranks of the living that at last the other gods were moved to compassion. Tangaloa and Maui seized Hikuleo, passed a strong chain round him, and fastened one end to heaven and the other to earth. Another god of the dead, of well-marked native type, is the Rarotongan Tiki (no doubt a solar deity, a Maui), to whose long house, a place of unceasing joys, the dead are to find their way.1 Among Turanian tribes, there are Samoyeds who believe in a deity called A', dwelling in impenetrable darkness, sending disease and death to men and reindeer, and ruling over a crowd of spirits which are manes of the dead. Tatars tell of the nine Irle-Chans, who in their gloomy subterranean kingdom not only rule over souls of the dead, but have at their command a multitude of ministering spirits, visible and invisible. In the gloomy under-world of the Finns reigns Mana or Tuoni, a being whose nature is worked out by personification from the dismal dead-land or death itself. Much the

1 Turner, Polynesia,' p. 237; Farmer, Tonga,' p. 126. Yate, 'New Zealand,' p. 140; J. Williams, Missionary Enterprise,' p. 145. See Schirren, Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,' p. 89; Williams, Fiji,' vol. i. p. 246.

2. Castrén, Finn. Myth.' pp. 128, 147, 155; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 171 (Africa).

« PreviousContinue »