rites of water-worship. In the East, among the Wanika, every spring has its spirit, to which oblations are made; in the West, in the Akra district, lakes, ponds, and rivers received worship as local deities. In the South, among the Kafirs, streams are venerated as personal beings, or the abodes of personal deities, as when a man crossing a river will ask leave of its spirit, or having crossed will throw in a stone; or when the dwellers by a stream will sacrifice a beast to it in time of drought, or, warned by illness in the tribe that their river is angry, will cast into it a few handfuls of millet or the entrails of a slaughtered ox.1 Not less strongly marked are such ideas among the Tatar races of the North. Thus the Ostyaks venerate the river Ob, and when fish is scanty will hang a stone about a rein-deer's neck and cast it in for a sacrifice. Among the Buraets, who are professing Buddhists, the old worship may still be seen at the picturesque little mountain lake of Ikeougoun, where they come to the wooden temple on the shore to offer sacrifices of milk and butter and the fat of the animals which they burn on the altars. So across in Northern Europe, almost every Esthonian village has its sacred sacrificial spring. The Esths could at times even see the churl with blue and yellow stockings rise from the holy brook Wöhhanda, no doubt that same spirit of the brook to whom in. older days there were sacrificed beasts and little children; in newer times, when a German landowner dared to build a mill and dishonour the sacred water, there came bad seasons that lasted year after year, and the country people burned down the abominable thing. As for the water-worship prevailing among non-Aryan indigenes of British India, it Comm. Real.' i. 10. See also J. G. Müller, Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 258, 260, 282. 1 Krapf, ‘E. Afr.' p. 198; Steinhauser, 1. c. p. 131; Villault in Astley, vol. i. p. 668; Backhouse, 'Afr.' p. 230; Callaway, 'Zulu Tales, vol. i. p. 90; Bastian, 1. c. 2 Castrén, 'Vorlesungen über die Altaischen Völker,' p. 114. 'Finn. Myth.' p. 70. Atkinson, 'Siberia,' p. 444. Boecler, Ehsten Abergläub. Gebräuche, ed. Kreutzwald, p. 6. seems to reach its climax among the Bodo and Dhimal of the North-East, tribes to whom the local rivers are the local deities, so that men worship according to their water-sheds, and the map is a pantheon. Nor is such reverence strange to Aryan nations. To the modern Hindu, looking as he still does on a river as a living personal being to be adored and sworn by, the Ganges is no solitary water deity, but only the first and most familiar of the long list of sacred streams. Turn to the classic world, and we but find the beliefs and and rites of a lower barbaric culture holding their place, consecrated by venerable antiquity and glorified by new poetry and art. To the great Olympian assembly in the halls of cloud-compelling Zeus, came the Rivers, all save Ocean, and thither came the nymphs who dwell in lovely groves and at the springs of streams, and in the grassy meads; and they sate upon the polished seats :— “ Οὔτε τις οὖν Ποταμῶν ἀπέην, νόσφ' Ωκεανοῖο, Ηφαιστος ποίησεν ἰδυίῃσι πραπίδεσσιν.” Even against Hephaistos the Fire-god, a River-god dared to stand opposed, deep-eddying Xanthos, called of men Skamandros. He rushed down to overwhelm Achilles and bury him in sand and slime, and though Hephaistos prevailed against him with his flames, and forced him, with the fish skurrying hither and thither in his boiling waves and the willows scorched upon his banks, to rush on no more but stand, yet at the word of white-armed Here, that it was not fit for mortals' sake to handle so roughly an immortal god, Hephaistos quenched his furious fire, and the returning flood sped again along his channel: 1 Hodgson, Abor. of India,' p. 164; Hunter, 'Rural Bengal,' p. 184. See also Lubbock, 1. c.; Forbes Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i. p. 163, vol. ii. p. 497. “Ήφαιστε, σχέο, τέκνον ἀγακλέες· οὐ γὰρ ἔοικεν To beings thus conceived in personal divinity, full worship was given. Odysseus invokes the river of Scheria; Skamandros had his priest and Spercheios his grove; and sacrifice was done to the rival of Herakles, the river-god Acheloos, eldest of the three thousand river-children of old Okeanos.1 Through the ages of the classic world, the river-gods and the water-nymphs held their places, till within the bounds of Christendom they came to be classed with ideal beings like them in the mythology of the northern nations, the kindly sprites to whom offerings were given at springs and lakes, and the treacherous nixes who entice men. to a watery death. In times of transition, the new Christian authorities made protest against the old worship, passing laws to forbid adoration and sacrifice to fountains-as when Duke Bretislav forbade the still halfpagan country folk of Bohemia to offer libations and sacrifice victims at springs, and in England Ecgbert's Poenitentiale proscribes the like rites, "if any man vow or bring his offerings to any well" "if one hold his vigils at any well." But the old veneration was too strong to be put down, and with a varnish of Christianity and sometimes. the substitution of a saint's name, water-worship has held its own to our day. The Bohemians will go to pray on the river-bank where a man has been drowned, and there they will cast in an offering, a loaf of new bread and a pair of 3 1 Homer. Il. xx. xxi. See Gladstone, 'Juventus Mundi,' pp. 190, 345, etc. etc. 2 Cosmas, book iii. p. 197, "superstitiosas institutiones, quas villani adhuc semipagani in Pentecosten tertia sive quarta feria observabant offerentes libamina super fontes mactabant victimas et dæmonibus immolabant." 3 Poenitentiale Ecgberti, ii. 22, "gif hwile man his ælmessan gehâte oththe bringe to hwilcon wylle;" iv. 19, "gif hwâ his wæccan æt ænigum wylle hæbbe." Grimm, D. M.' p. 549, etc. See Hyltén-Cavallius, Wärend och Wirdarne,' part i. pp. 131, 171 (Sweden). wax-candles. On Christmas Eve they will put a spoonful of each dish on a plate, and after supper throw the food into the well, with an appointed formula, somewhat thus: up It well shows the unchanged survival of savage thought in modern peasants' minds, to find still in Slavonic lands the very same fear of drinking a harmful spirit in the water, that has been noticed among the Esquimaux. It is a sin for a Bulgarian not to throw some water out of every bucket brought from the fountain; some elemental spirit might be floating on the surface, and if not thrown out, might take his abode in the house, or enter into the body of some one drinking from the vessel.2 Elsewhere in Europe, the list of still existing water-rites may be extended. The ancient lake-offerings of the South of France seem not yet forgotten in La Lozère, the Bretons venerate as of old their sacred springs, and Scotland and Ireland can show in parish after parish the sites and even the actual survivals of such observance at the holy wells. Perhaps Welshmen no longer offer cocks and hens to St. Tecla at her sacred well and church of Llandegla, but Cornish folk still drop into the old holy-wells offerings of pins, nails, and rags, expecting from their waters cure for disease, and omens from their bubbles as to health and marriage.3 The spirits of the tree and grove no less deserve our 1 Grohmann, Aberglauben aus Böhmen and Mähren,' p. 43, etc. Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' p. 291, etc. Ralston, Songs of Russian People,' p. 139, etc. 2 St. Clair and Brophy, Bulgaria,' p. 46. Similar ideas in Grohmann, p. 44. Eisenmenger, 'Entd. Judenthum,' part i. p. 426. 3 Maury, 'Magie,' etc. p. 158. Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.' vol. Hunt, Pop. Rom. 2nd Series,' p. 40, etc. Forb s Leslie, Scotland,' vol. i. p. 156, etc. ii. p. 366, etc. Early Races of study for their illustrations of man's primitive animistic theory of nature. This is remarkably displayed in that stage of thought where the individual tree is regarded as a conscious personal being, and as such receives adoration and sacrifice. Whether such a tree is looked on as inhabited, like a man, by its own proper life or soul, or as possessed, like a fetish, by some other spirit which has entered it and uses it for a body, is often hard to determine. Shelley's lines well express a doubting conception familiar to old barbaric thought "Whether the sensitive plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat But this vagueness is yet again a proof of the principle which I have confidently put forward here, that the conceptions of the inherent soul and of the embodied spirit are but modifications of one and the same deep-lying animistic thought. The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula believe in "hantu kayu," i. e. "tree-spirits," or "tree-demons," which frequent every species of tree, and afflict men with diseases; some trees are noted for the malignity of their demons.1 Among the Dayaks of Borneo, certain trees possessed by spirits must not be cut down; if a missionary ventured to fell one, any death that happened afterwards would naturally be set down to this crime. The belief of certain Malays of Sumatra is expressly stated, that certain venerable trees are the residence, or rather the material frame, of spirits of the woods. In the Tonga Islands, we hear of natives laying offerings at the foot of particular trees, with the idea of their being inhabited by spirits. So in America, the Ojibwa medicine-man has heard the tree utter its complaint 1 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 307. 2 Beeker, Dyaks, in 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. 111. 3 Marsden, Sumatra,' p. 301. 4 S. S. Farmer, Tonga,' p. 127. |
