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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Making of Religion, by Andrew Lang
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Making of Religion
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: May 14, 2004 [EBook #12353]
+[Date last updated: March 30, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAKING OF RELIGION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Connal, William A. Pifer-Foote and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders. This file was produced from images generously made
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+
+
+
+THE MAKING OF RELIGION
+
+BY
+ANDREW LANG
+
+M.A., LL.D. ST ANDREWS
+
+HONORARY FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE OXFORD
+SOMETIME GIFFORD LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS
+
+SECOND EDITION
+1900
+
+
+
+
+_TO THE PRINCIPAL
+OF THE
+UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS
+
+
+DEAR PRINCIPAL DONALDSON,
+
+I hope you will permit me to lay at the feet of the University of St.
+Andrews, in acknowledgment of her life-long kindnesses to her old pupil,
+these chapters on the early History of Religion. They may be taken as
+representing the Gifford Lectures delivered by me, though in fact they
+contain very little that was spoken from Lord Gifford's chair. I wish they
+were more worthy of an Alma Mater which fostered in the past the leaders
+of forlorn hopes that were destined to triumph; and the friends of lost
+causes who fought bravely against Fate--Patrick Hamilton, Cargill, and
+Argyll, Beaton and Montrose, and Dundee.
+
+Believe me
+
+Very sincerely yours,
+
+ANDREW LANG_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+By the nature of things this book falls under two divisions. The first
+eight chapters criticise the current anthropological theory of the origins
+of the belief in _spirits._ Chapters ix.-xvii., again, criticise the
+current anthropological theory as to how, the notion of _spirit_ once
+attained, man arrived at the idea of a Supreme Being. These two branches
+of the topic are treated in most modern works concerned with the Origins
+of Religion, such as Mr. Tyler's "Primitive Culture," Mr. Herbert
+Spencer's "Principles of Sociology," Mr. Jevons's "Introduction to the
+History of Religion," the late Mr. Grant Allen's "Evolution of the Idea of
+God," and many others. Yet I have been censured for combining, in this
+work, the two branches of my subject; and the second part has been
+regarded as but faintly connected with the first.
+
+The reason for this criticism seems to be, that while one small set of
+students is interested in, and familiar with the themes examined in the
+first part (namely the psychological characteristics of certain mental
+states from which, in part, the doctrine of spirits is said to have
+arisen), that set of students neither knows nor cares anything about the
+matter handled in the second part. This group of students is busied with
+"Psychical Research," and the obscure human faculties implied in alleged
+cases of hallucination, telepathy, "double personality," human automatism,
+clairvoyance, and so on. Meanwhile anthropological readers are equally
+indifferent as to that branch of psychology which examines the conditions
+of hysteria, hypnotic trance, "double personality," and the like.
+Anthropologists have not hitherto applied to the savage mental conditions,
+out of which, in part, the doctrine of "spirits" arose, the recent
+researches of French, German, and English psychologists of the new school.
+As to whether these researches into abnormal psychological conditions do,
+or do not, indicate the existence of a transcendental region of human
+faculty, anthropologists appear to be unconcerned. The only English
+exception known to me is Mr. Tylor, and his great work, "Primitive
+Culture," was written thirty years ago, before the modern psychological
+studies of Professor William James, Dr. Romaine Newbold, M. Richet, Dr.
+Janet, Professor Sidgwick, Mr. Myers, Mr. Gurney, Dr. Parish, and many
+others had commenced.
+
+Anthropologists have gone on discussing the trances, and visions, and
+so-called "demoniacal possession" of savages, as if no new researches into
+similar facts in the psychology of civilised mankind existed; or, if they
+existed, threw any glimmer of light on the abnormal psychology of savages.
+I have, on the other hand, thought it desirable to sketch out a study of
+savage psychology in the light of recent psychological research. Thanks to
+this daring novelty, the book has been virtually taken as two books;
+anthropologists have criticised the second part, and one or two Psychical
+Researchers have criticised the first part; each school leaving one part
+severely alone. Such are the natural results of a too restricted
+specialism.
+
+Even to Psychical Researchers the earlier division is of scant interest,
+because witnesses to _successful_ abnormal or supernormal faculty in
+savages cannot be brought into court and cross-examined. But I do not give
+anecdotes of such savage successes as evidence to _facts;_ they are only
+illustrations, and evidence to _beliefs and methods_ (as of crystal gazing
+and automatic utterances of "secondary personality"), which, among the
+savages, correspond to the supposed facts examined by Psychical Research
+among the civilised. I only point out, as Bastian had already pointed out,
+the existence of a field that deserves closer study by anthropologists
+who can observe savages in their homes. We need persons trained in
+the psychological laboratories of Europe and America, as members of
+anthropological expeditions. It may be noted that, in his "Letters from
+the South Seas," Mr. Louis Stevenson makes some curious observations,
+especially on a singular form of hypnotism applied to himself with
+fortunate results. The method, used in native medicine, was novel; and
+the results were entirely inexplicable to Mr. Stevenson, who had not been
+amenable to European hypnotic practice. But he was not a trained expert.
+
+Anthropology must remain incomplete while it neglects this field, whether
+among wild or civilised men. In the course of time this will come to be
+acknowledged. It will be seen that we cannot really account for the origin
+of the belief in spirits while we neglect the scientific study of those
+psychical conditions, as of hallucination and the hypnotic trance, in
+which that belief must probably have had some, at least, of its origins.
+
+As to the second part of the book, I have argued that the first dim
+surmises as to a Supreme Being need not have arisen (as on the current
+anthropological theory) in the notion of spirits at all. (See chapter xi.)
+Here I have been said to draw a mere "verbal distinction" but no
+distinction can be more essential. If such a Supreme Being as many savages
+acknowledge is _not_ envisaged by them as a "spirit," then the theories
+and processes by which he is derived from a ghost of a dead man are
+invalid, and remote from the point. As to the origin of a belief in a
+kind of germinal Supreme Being (say the Australian Baiame), I do not, in
+this book, offer any opinion. I again and again decline to offer an
+opinion. Critics, none the less, have said that I attribute the belief to
+revelation! I shall therefore here indicate what I think probable in so
+obscure a field.
+
+As soon as man had the idea of "making" things, he might conjecture as to
+a Maker of things which he himself had not made, and could not make. He
+would regard this unknown Maker as a "magnified non-natural man." These
+speculations appear to me to need less reflection than the long and
+complicated processes of thought by which Mr. Tylor believes, and probably
+believes with justice, the theory of "spirits" to have been evolved. (See
+chapter iii.) This conception of a magnified non-natural man, who is a
+Maker, being given; his Power would be recognised, and fancy would clothe
+one who had made such useful things with certain other moral attributes,
+as of Fatherhood, goodness, and regard for the ethics of his children;
+these ethics having been developed naturally in the evolution of social
+life. In all this there is nothing "mystical," nor anything, as far as I
+can see, beyond the limited mental powers of any beings that deserve to be
+called human.
+
+But I hasten to add that another theory may be entertained. Since this
+book was written there appeared "The Native Tribes of Central Australia,"
+by Professor Spencer and Mr. Gillen, a most valuable study.[1] The
+authors, closely scrutinising the esoteric rites of the Arunta and other
+tribes in Central Australia, found none of the moral precepts and
+attributes which (according to Mr. Howitt, to whom their work is
+dedicated), prevail in the mysteries of the natives of New South Wales and
+Victoria. (See chapter x.) What they found was a belief in 'the great
+spirit, _Twanyirika_,' who is believed 'by uninitiated boys and women'
+(but, apparently, not by adults) to preside over the cruel rites of tribal
+initiation.[2] No more is said, no myths about 'the great spirit' are
+given. He is dismissed in a brief note. Now if these ten lines contain
+_all_ the native lore of Twanyirika, he is a mere bugbear, not believed in
+(apparently) by adults, but invented by them to terrorise the women and
+boys. Next, granting that the information of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen is
+exhaustive, and granting that (as Mr. J.G. Frazer holds, in his essays in
+the 'Fortnightly Review,' April and May, 1899) the Arunta are the most
+primitive of mortals, it will seem to follow that the _moral_ attributes
+of Baiame and other gods of other Australian regions are later accretions
+round the form of an original and confessed bugbear, as among the
+primitive Arunta, 'a bogle of the nursery,' in the phrase repudiated by
+Maitland of Lethington. Though not otherwise conspicuously more civilised
+than the Arunta (except, perhaps, in marriage relations), Mr. Howitt's
+South Eastern natives will have improved the Arunta confessed 'bogle'
+into a beneficent and moral Father and Maker. Religion will have its
+origin in a tribal joke, and will have become not '_diablement_,' but
+'_divinement_,' '_changée en route_.' Readers of Messrs. Spencer and
+Gillen will see that the Arunta philosophy, primitive or not, is of a high
+ingenuity, and so artfully composed that it contains no room either for a
+Supreme Being or for the doctrine of the survival of the soul, with a
+future of rewards and punishments; opinions declared to be extant among
+other Australian tribes. There is no creator, and every soul, after death,
+is reincarnated in a new member of the tribe. On the other hand (granting
+that the brief note on Twanyirika is exhaustive), the Arunta, in their
+isolation, may have degenerated in religion, and may have dropped, in the
+case of Twanyirika, the moral attributes of Baiame. It may be noticed
+that, in South Eastern Australia, the Being who presides, like Twanyirika,
+over initiations is _not_ the supreme being, but a son or deputy of his,
+such as the Kurnai Tundun. We do not know whether the Arunta have, or have
+had and lost, or never possessed, a being superior to Twanyirika.
+
+With regard, to all such moral, and, in certain versions, creative Beings
+as Baiame, criticism has taken various lines. There is the high a priori
+line that savage minds are incapable of originating the notion of a moral
+Maker. I have already said that the notion, in an early form, seems to be
+well within the range of any minds deserving to be called human. Next, the
+facts are disputed. I can only refer readers to the authorities cited.
+They speak for tribes in many quarters of the world, and the witnesses
+are laymen as well as missionaries. I am accused, again, of using a
+misleading rhetoric, and of thereby covertly introducing Christian or
+philosophical ideas into my account of "savages guiltless of Christian
+teaching." As to the latter point, I am also accused of mistaking for
+native opinions the results of "Christian teaching." One or other charge
+must fall to the ground. As to my rhetoric, in the use of such words as
+'Creator,' 'Eternal,' and the like, I shall later qualify and explain it.
+For a long discussion between myself and Mr. Sidney Hartland, involving
+minute detail, I may refer the reader to _Folk-Lore_, the last number of
+1898 and the first of 1899, and to the Introduction to the new edition of
+my 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion' (1899).
+
+Where relatively high moral attributes are assigned to a Being, I have
+called the result 'Religion;' where the same Being acts like Zeus in
+Greek fable, plays silly or obscene tricks, is lustful and false, I have
+spoken of 'Myth.'[3] These distinctions of Myth and Religion may be, and
+indeed are, called arbitrary. The whole complex set of statements about
+the Being, good or bad, sublime or silly, are equally Myths, it may be
+urged. Very well; but one set, the loftier set, is fitter to survive, and
+does survive, in what we still commonly call Religion; while the other
+set, the puerile set of statements, is fairly near to extinction, and is
+usually called Mythology. One set has been the root of a goodly tree: the
+other set is being lopped off, like the parasitic mistletoe.
+
+I am arguing that the two classes of ideas arise from two separate human
+moods; moods as different and distinct as lust and love. I am arguing
+that, as far as our information goes, the nobler set of ideas is as
+ancient as the lower. Personally (though we cannot have direct evidence)
+I find it easy to believe that the loftier notions are the earlier. If man
+began with the conception of a powerful and beneficent Maker or Father,
+then I can see how the humorous savage fancy ran away with the idea of
+Power, and attributed to a potent being just such tricks as a waggish and
+libidinous savage would like to play if he could. Moreover, I have
+actually traced (in 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion') some plausible processes
+of mythical accretion. The early mind was not only religious, in its way,
+but scientific, in its way. It embraced the idea of Evolution as well as
+the idea of Creation. To one mood a Maker seemed to exist. But the
+institution of Totemism (whatever its origin) suggested the idea of
+Evolution; for men, it was held, developed out of their Totems-animals and
+plants. But then, on the other hand, Zeus, or Baiame, or Mungun-ngaur, was
+regarded as their Father. How were these contradictions to be reconciled?
+Easily, thus: Zeus _was_ the Father, but, in each case, was the Father by
+an amour in which he wore the form of the Totem-snake, swan, bull, ant,
+dog, or the like. At once a degraded set of secondary erotic myths cluster
+around Zeus.
+
+Again, it is notoriously the nature of man to attribute every institution
+to a primal inventor or legislator. Men then, find themselves performing
+certain rites, often of a buffooning or scandalous character; and, in
+origin, mainly magical, intended for the increase of game, edible plants,
+or, later, for the benefit of the crops. _Why_ do they perform these
+rites? they ask: and, looking about, as usual, for a primal initiator,
+they attribute what they do to a primal being, the Corn Spirit, Demeter,
+or to Zeus, or to Baiame, or Manabozho, or Punjel. This is man's usual way
+of going back to origins. Instantly, then, a new set of parasitic myths
+crystallises round a Being who, perhaps, was originally moral. The savage
+mind, in short, has not maintained itself on the high level, any more than
+the facetious mediaeval myths maintained themselves, say, on the original
+level of the conception of the character of St. Peter, the keeper of the
+keys of Heaven.
+
+All this appears perfectly natural and human, and in this, and in other
+ways, what we call low Myth may have invaded the higher realms of
+Religion: a lower invaded a higher element. But reverse the hypothesis.
+Conceive that Zeus, or Baiame, was _originally_, not a Father and
+guardian, but a lewd and tricky ghost of a medicine-man, a dancer of
+indecent dances, a wooer of other men's wives, a shape-shifter, a
+burlesque droll, a more jocular bugbear, like Twanyirika. By what means
+did he come to be accredited later with his loftiest attributes, and with
+regard for the tribal ethics, which, in practice, he daily broke and
+despised? Students who argue for the possible priority of the lowest, or,
+as I call them, mythical attributes of the Being, must advance an
+hypothesis of the concretion of the nobler elements around the original
+wanton and mischievous ghost.
+
+Then let us suppose that the Arunta Twanyirika, a confessed bugbear,
+discredited by adults, and only invented to keep women and children in
+order, was the original germ of the moral and fatherly Baiame, of South
+Eastern Australian tribes. How, in that case, did the adults of the tribe
+fall into their own trap, come to believe seriously in their invented
+bugbear, and credit him with the superintendence of such tribal ethics as
+generosity and unselfishness? What were the processes of the conversion of
+Twanyirika? I do not deny that this theory may be correct, but I wish to
+see an hypothesis of the process of elevation.
+
+I fail to frame such an hypothesis. Grant that the adults merely chuckle
+over Twanyirika, whose 'voice' they themselves produce; by whirling the
+wooden tundun, or bull-roarer. Grant that, on initiation, the boys learn
+that 'the great spirit' is a mere bogle, invented to mystify the women,
+and keep them away from the initiatory rites. How, then, did men come to
+believe in _him_ as a terrible, all-seeing, all-knowing, creative, and
+potent moral being? For this, undeniably, is the belief of many Australian
+tribes, where his 'voice' (or rather that of his subordinate) is produced
+by whirling the tundun. That these higher beliefs are of European origin,
+Mr. Howitt denies. How were they evolved out of the notion of a confessed
+artificial bogle? I am unable to frame a theory.
+
+From my point of view, namely, that the higher and simple ideas may well
+be the earlier, I have, at least, offered a theory of the processes by
+which the lower attributes crystallised around a conception supposed
+(_argumenti gratia_) to be originally high. Other processes of degradation
+would come in, as (on my theory) the creed and practice of Animism, or
+worship of human ghosts, often of low character, swamped and invaded the
+prior belief in a fairly moral and beneficent, but not originally
+spiritual, Being. My theory, at least, _is_ a theory, and, rightly or
+wrongly, accounts for the phenomenon, the combination of the highest
+divine and the lowest animal qualities in the same Being. But I have yet
+to learn how, if the lowest myths are the earliest, the highest attributes
+came in time to be conferred on the hero of the lowest myths. Why, or how,
+did a silly buffoon, or a confessed 'bogle' arrive at being regarded as a
+patron of such morality as had been evolved? An hypothesis of the
+processes involved must be indicated. It is not enough to reply, in
+general, that the rudimentary human mind is illogical and confused. That
+is granted; but there must have been a method in its madness. What that
+method was (from my point of view) I have shown, and it must be as easy
+for opponents to set forth what, from their point of view, the method was.
+
+We are here concerned with what, since the time of the earliest Greek
+philosophers, has been the _crux_ of mythology: why are infamous myths
+told about 'the Father of gods and men'? We can easily explain the nature
+of the myths. They are the natural flowers of savage fancy and humour.
+But wherefore do they crystallise round Zeus? I have, at least, shown some
+probable processes in the evolution.
+
+Where criticism has not disputed the facts of the moral attributes, now
+attached to, say, an Australian Being, it has accounted for them by a
+supposed process of borrowing from missionaries and other Europeans. In
+this book I deal with that hypothesis as urged by Sir A.B. Ellis, in West
+Africa (chapter xiii.). I need not have taken the trouble, as this
+distinguished writer had already, in a work which I overlooked, formally
+withdrawn, as regards Africa, his theory of 'loan-gods.' Miss Kingsley,
+too, is no believer in the borrowing hypothesis for West Africa, in
+regard, that is, to the highest divine conception. I was, when I wrote,
+unaware that, especially as concerns America and Australia, Mr. Tylor had
+recently advocated the theory of borrowing ('Journal of Anthrop.
+Institute,' vol. xxi.). To Mr. Tylor's arguments, when I read them, I
+replied in the 'Nineteenth Century,' January 1899: 'Are Savage Gods
+Borrowed from Missionaries?' I do not here repeat my arguments, but await
+the publication of Mr. Tylor's 'Gifford Lectures,' in which his hypothesis
+may be reinforced, and may win my adhesion.
+
+It may here be said, however, that if the Australian higher religious
+ideas are of recent and missionary origin, they would necessarily be known
+to the native women, from whom, in fact, they are absolutely concealed by
+the men, under penalty of death. Again, if the Son, or Sons, of Australian
+chief Beings resemble part of the Christian dogma, they much more closely
+resemble the Apollo and Hermes of Greece.[4] But nobody will say that the
+Australians borrowed them from Greek mythology!
+
+In chapter xiv., owing to a bibliographical error of my own, I have done
+injustice to Mr. Tylor, by supposing him to have overlooked Strachey's
+account of the Virginian god Ahone. He did not overlook Ahone, but
+mistrusted Strachey. In an excursus on Ahone, in the new edition of 'Myth,
+Ritual, and Religion,' I have tried my best to elucidate the bibliography
+and other aspects of Strachey's account, which I cannot regard as
+baseless. Mr. Tylor's opinion is, doubtless, different, and may prove more
+persuasive. As to Australia, Mr. Howitt, our best authority, continues to
+disbelieve in the theory of borrowing.
+
+I have to withdraw in chapters x. xi. the statement that 'Darumulun never
+died at all.' Mr. Hartland has corrected me, and pointed out that, among
+the Wiraijuri, a myth represents him as having been destroyed, for his
+offences, by Baiame. In that tribe, however, Darumulun is not the highest,
+but a subordinate Being. Mr. Hartland has also collected a few myths in
+which Australian Supreme Beings _do_ (contrary to my statement) 'set the
+example of sinning.' Nothing can surprise me less, and I only wonder that,
+in so savage a race, the examples, hitherto collected, are so rare, and so
+easily to be accounted for on the theory of processes of crystallisation
+of myths already suggested.
+
+As to a remark in Appendix B, Mr. Podmore takes a distinction. I quote his
+remark, 'the phenomena described are quite inexplicable by ordinary
+mechanical means,' and I contrast this, as illogical, with his opinion
+that a girl 'may have been directly responsible for all that took place.'
+Mr. Podmore replies that what was 'described' is not necessarily identical
+with what _occurred_. Strictly speaking, he is right; but the evidence was
+copious, was given by many witnesses, and (as offered by me) was in part
+_contemporary_ (being derived from the local newspapers), so that here Mr.
+Podmore's theory of illusions of memory on a large scale, developed in the
+five weeks which elapsed before he examined the spectators, is out of
+court. The evidence was of contemporary published record.
+
+The handling of fire by Home is accounted for by Mr. Podmore, in the same
+chapter, as the result of Home's use of a 'non-conducting substance.'
+Asked, 'what substance?' he answered, 'asbestos.' Sir William Crookes,
+again repeating his account of the performance which he witnessed, says,
+'Home took up a lump of red-hot charcoal about twice the size of an egg
+into his hand, on which certainly no asbestos was visible. He blew into
+his hands, and the flames could be seen coming out between his fingers,
+and he carried the charcoal round the room.'[5] Sir W. Crookes stood close
+beside Home. The light was that of the fire and of two candles. Probably
+Sir William could see a piece of asbestos, if it was covering Home's
+hands, which he was watching.
+
+What I had to say, by way of withdrawal, qualification, explanation, or
+otherwise, I inserted (in order to seize the earliest opportunity) in the
+Introduction to the recent edition of my 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion'
+(1899). The reader will perhaps make his own kind deductions from my
+rhetoric when I talk, for example, about a Creator in the creed of low
+savages. They have no business, anthropologists declare, to entertain so
+large an idea. But in 'The Journal of the Anthropological Institute,'
+N.S. II., Nos. 1, 2, p. 85, Dr. Bennett gives an account of the religion
+of the cannibal Fangs of the Congo, first described by Du Chaillu. 'These
+anthropophagi have some idea of a God, a superior being, their _Tata_
+("Father"), _a bo mam merere_ ("he made all things"), Anyambi is their
+_Tata_ (Father), and ranks above all other Fang gods, because _a'ne yap_
+(literally, "he lives in heaven").' This is inconsiderate in the Fangs. A
+set of native cannibals have no business with a creative Father who is in
+heaven. I say 'creative' because 'he made all things,' and (as the bowler
+said about a 'Yorker') 'what else can you call him?' In all such cases,
+where 'creator' and 'creative' are used by me, readers will allow for the
+imperfections of the English language. As anthropologists say, the savages
+simply cannot have the corresponding ideas; and I must throw the blame on
+people who, knowing the savages and their language, assure us that they
+_have_. This Fang Father or _Tata_ 'is considered indifferent to the wants
+and sufferings of men, women, and children.' Offerings and prayers are
+therefore made, not to him, but to the ghosts of parents, who are more
+accessible. This additional information precisely illustrates my general
+theory, that the chief Being was not evolved out of ghosts, but came to be
+neglected as ghost-worship arose. I am not aware that Dr. Bennett is a
+missionary. Anthropologists distrust missionaries, and most of my evidence
+is from laymen. If the anthropological study of religion is to advance,
+the high and usually indolent chief Beings of savage religions must be
+carefully examined, not consigned to a casual page or paragraph. I have
+found them most potent, and most moral, where ghost-worship has not
+been evolved; least potent, or at all events most indifferent, where
+ghost-worship is most in vogue. The inferences (granting the facts) are
+fatal to the current anthropological theory.
+
+The phrases 'Creator,' 'creative,' as applied to Anyambi, or Baiame,
+have been described, by critics, as rhetorical, covertly introducing
+conceptions of which savages are incapable. I have already shown that I
+only follow my authorities, and their translations of phrases in various
+savage tongues. But the phrase 'eternal,' applied to Anyambi or Baiame,
+may be misleading. I do not wish to assert that, if you talked to a savage
+about 'eternity,' he would understand what you intend. I merely mean what
+Mariner says that the Tongans mean as to the god Tá-li-y Tooboo. 'Of his
+origin they had no idea, rather supposing him to be eternal.' The savage
+theologians assert no beginning for such beings (as a rule), and no end,
+except where Unkulunkulu is by some Zulus thought to be dead, and
+where the Wiraijuris declare that their Darumulun (_not_ supreme) was
+'destroyed' by Baiame. I do not wish to credit savages with thoughts more
+abstract than they possess. But that their thought can be abstract is
+proved, even in the case of the absolutely 'primitive Arunta,' by
+their myth of the _Ungambikula_, 'a word which means "out of nothing,"
+or "self-existing,"' say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.[6] Once more,
+I find that I have spoken of some savage Beings as 'omnipresent'
+and 'omnipotent.' But I have pointed out that this is only a modern
+metaphysical rendering of the actual words attributed to the savage: 'He
+can go everywhere, and do everything.' As to the phrase, also used, that
+Baiame, for example, 'makes for righteousness,' I mean that he sanctions
+the morality of his people; for instance, sanctions veracity and
+unselfishness, as Mr. Howitt distinctly avers. These are examples of
+'righteousness' in conduct. I do not mean that these virtues were
+impressed on savages in some supernatural way, as a critic has daringly
+averred that I do. The strong reaction of some early men against the
+cosmical process by which 'the weakest goes to the wall,' is, indeed, a
+curious moral phenomenon, and deserves the attention of moralists. But I
+never dreamed of supposing that this reaction (which extends beyond the
+limit of the tribe or group) had a 'supernatural' origin! It has been
+argued that 'tribal morality' is only a set of regulations based on the
+convenience of the elders of the tribe: is, in fact, as the Platonic
+Thrasymachus says, 'the interest of the strongest.' That does not appear
+to me to be demonstrated; but this is no place for a discussion of the
+origin of morals. 'The interest of the strongest,' and of the nomadic
+group, would be to knock elderly invalids on the head. But Dampier says,
+of the Australians, in 1688, 'Be it little, or be it much they get, every
+one has his part, as well the young and tender, and the old and feeble,
+who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty.' The origin of
+this fair and generous dealing may be obscure, but it is precisely the
+kind of dealing on which, according to Mr. Howitt, the religion of the
+Kurnai insists (chapter x.). Thus the Being concerned does 'make for
+righteousness.'
+
+With these explanations I trust that my rhetorical use of such phrases as
+'eternal,' 'creative,' 'omniscient,' 'omnipotent,' 'omnipresent,' and
+'moral,' may not be found to mislead, or covertly to import modern or
+Christian ideas into my account of the religious conceptions of savages.
+
+As to the evidence throughout, a learned historian has informed me that
+'no anthropological evidence is of any value.' If so, there can be no
+anthropology (in the realm of institutions). But the evidence that I
+adduce is from such sources as anthropologists, at least, accept, and
+employ in the construction of theories from which, in some points, I
+venture to dissent.
+
+A.L.
+
+[Footnote 1: Macmillans, 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Op. cit. p. 246, note.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See the new edition of _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_,
+especially the new Introduction.]
+
+[Footnote 4: See Introductions to my _Homeric Hymns_. Allen. 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Journal S.P.R._, December 1890, p. 147.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 388.]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+'The only begetter' of this work is Monsieur Lefébure, author of 'Les
+Yeux d'Horus,' and other studies in Egyptology. He suggested the writing
+of the book, but is in no way responsible for the opinions expressed.
+
+The author cannot omit the opportunity of thanking Mr. Frederic Myers for
+his kindness in reading the proof sheets of the earlier chapters and
+suggesting some corrections of statement. Mr. Myers, however, is probably
+not in agreement with the author on certain points; for example, in
+the chapter on 'Possession.' As the second part of the book differs
+considerably from the opinions which have recommended themselves to most
+anthropological writers on early Religion, the author must say here, as he
+says later, that no harm can come of trying how facts look from a new
+point of view, and that he certainly did not expect them to fall into the
+shape which he now presents for criticism.
+
+ST. ANDREWS: _April 3, 1898._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
+II. SCIENCE AND 'MIRACLES'
+
+III. ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION
+IV. 'OPENING THE GATES OF DISTANCE'
+V. CRYSTAL VISIONS, SAVAGE AND CIVILISED
+VI. ANTHROPOLOGY AND HALLUCINATIONS
+VII. DEMONIACAL POSSESSION
+VIII. FETISHISM AND SPIRITUALISM
+IX. EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
+X. HIGH GODS OF LOW RACES
+XI. SUPREME GODS NOT NECESSARILY DEVELOPED OUT OF 'SPIRITS'
+XII. SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+XIII. MORE SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+XIV. AHONE. TI-RA-WÁ. NÀ-PI. PACHACAMAC. TUI LAGA. TAA-ROA
+XV. THE OLD DEGENERATION THEORY
+XVI. THEORIES OF JEHOVAH
+XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+APPENDICES.
+
+A. OPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE
+B. THE POLTERGEIST AND HIS EXPLAINERS
+C. CRYSTAL-GAZING
+D. CHIEFS IN AUSTRALIA
+
+INDEX
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MAKING OF RELIGION
+
+I
+
+_INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER_
+
+The modern Science of the History of Religion has attained conclusions
+which already possess an air of being firmly established. These
+conclusions may be briefly stated thus: Man derived the conception of
+'spirit' or 'soul' from his reflections on the phenomena of sleep, dreams,
+death, shadow, and from the experiences of trance and hallucination.
+Worshipping first the departed souls of his kindred, man later extended
+the doctrine of spiritual beings in many directions. Ghosts, or other
+spiritual existences fashioned on the same lines, prospered till they
+became gods. Finally, as the result of a variety of processes, one of
+these gods became supreme, and, at last, was regarded as the one only God.
+Meanwhile man retained his belief in the existence of his own soul,
+surviving after the death of the body, and so reached the conception of
+immortality. Thus the ideas of God and of the soul are the result of early
+fallacious reasonings about misunderstood experiences.
+
+It may seem almost wanton to suggest the desirableness of revising a
+system at once so simple, so logical, and apparently so well bottomed on
+facts. But there can never be any real harm in studying masses of evidence
+from fresh points of view. At worst, the failure of adverse criticism must
+help to establish the doctrines assailed. Now, as we shall show, there are
+two points of view from which the evidence as to religion in its early
+stages has not been steadily contemplated. Therefore we intend to ask,
+first, what, if anything, can be ascertained as to the nature of the
+'visions' and hallucinations which, according to Mr. Tylor in his
+celebrated work 'Primitive Culture,' lent their aid to the formation of
+the idea of 'spirit.' Secondly, we shall collect and compare the accounts
+which we possess of the High Gods and creative beings worshipped or
+believed in, by the most backward races. We shall then ask whether these
+relatively Supreme Beings, so conceived of by men in very rudimentary
+social conditions, can be, as anthropology declares, mere developments
+from the belief in ghosts of the dead.
+
+We shall end by venturing to suggest that the savage theory of the soul
+may be based, at least in part, on experiences which cannot, at present,
+be made to fit into any purely materialistic system of the universe. We
+shall also bring evidence tending to prove that the idea of God, in its
+earliest known shape, need not logically be derived from the idea of
+spirit, however that idea itself may have been attained or evolved. The
+conception of God, then, need not be evolved out of reflections on dreams
+and 'ghosts.'
+
+If these two positions can be defended with any success, it is obvious
+that the whole theory of the Science of Religion will need to be
+reconsidered. But it is no less evident that our two positions do not
+depend on each other. The first may be regarded as fantastic, or
+improbable, or may be 'masked' and left on one side. But the strength of
+the second position, derived from evidence of a different character, will
+not, therefore, be in any way impaired. Our first position can only be
+argued for by dint of evidence highly unpopular in character, and, as a
+general rule, condemned by modern science. The evidence is obtained by
+what is, at all events, a legitimate anthropological proceeding. We may
+follow Mr. Tylor's example, and collect savage _beliefs_ about visions,
+hallucinations, 'clairvoyance,' and the acquisition of knowledge
+apparently not attainable through the normal channels of sense. We may
+then compare these savage beliefs with attested records of similar
+_experiences_ among living and educated civilised men. Even if we attain
+to no conclusion, or a negative conclusion, as to the actuality and
+supernormal character of the alleged experiences, still to compare data of
+savage and civilised psychology, or even of savage and civilised illusions
+and fables, is decidedly part, though a neglected part, of the function of
+anthropological science. The results, whether they do or do not strengthen
+our first position, must be curious and instructive, if only as a chapter
+in the history of human error. That chapter, too, is concerned with no
+mean topic, but with what we may call the X region of our nature. Out of
+that region, out of miracle, prophecy, vision, have certainly come forth
+the great religions, Christianity and Islam; and the great religious
+innovators and leaders, our Lord Himself, St. Francis, John Knox, Jeanne
+d'Arc, down to the founder of the new faith of the Sioux and Arapahoe. It
+cannot, then, be unscientific to compare the barbaric with the civilised
+beliefs and experiences about a region so dimly understood, and so fertile
+in potent influences. Here the topic will be examined rather by the method
+of anthropology than of psychology. We may conceivably have something to
+learn (as has been the case before) from the rough observations and hasty
+inferences of the most backward races.
+
+We may illustrate this by an anecdote:
+
+'The Northern Indians call the _Aurora Borealis_ "Edthin," that is "Deer."
+Their ideas in this respect are founded on a principle one would not
+imagine. Experience has shown them that when a hairy deer-skin is briskly
+stroked with the hand on a dark night, it will emit many sparks of
+electrical fire.'
+
+So says Hearne in his 'Journey,' published in 1795 (p. 346).
+
+This observation of the Red Men is a kind of parable representing a part
+of the purport of the following treatise. The Indians, making a hasty
+inference from a trivial phenomenon, arrived unawares at a probably
+correct conclusion, long unknown to civilised science. They connected the
+Aurora Borealis with electricity, supposing that multitudes of deer
+in the sky rubbed the sparks out of each other! Meanwhile, even in
+the last century, a puzzled populace spoke of the phenomenon as 'Lord
+Derwentwater's Lights.' The cosmic pomp and splendour shone to welcome the
+loyal Derwentwater into heaven, when he had given his life for his exiled
+king.
+
+Now, my purpose in the earlier portion of this essay is to suggest that
+certain phenomena of human nature, apparently as trivial as the sparks
+rubbed out of a deer's hide in a dark night, may indicate, and may be
+allied to a force or forces, which, like the Aurora Borealis, may shine
+from one end of the heavens to the other, strangely illumining the
+darkness of our destiny. Such phenomena science has ignored, as it so long
+ignored the sparks from the stroked deer-skin, and the attractive power of
+rubbed amber. These trivial things were not known to be allied to the
+lightning, or to indicate a force which man could tame and use. But just
+as the Indians, by a rapid careless inference, attributed the Aurora
+Borealis to electric influences, so (as anthropology assures us) savages
+everywhere have inferred the existence of soul or spirit, intelligence
+that
+
+  'Does not know the bond of Time,
+  Nor wear the manacles of Space,'
+
+in part from certain apparently trivial phenomena of human faculty. These
+phenomena, as Mr. Tylor says, 'the great intellectual movement of the last
+two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless.'[1] I refer to alleged
+experiences, merely odd, sporadic, and, for commercial purposes, useless,
+such as the transference of thought from one mind to another by no known
+channel of sense, the occurrence of hallucinations which, _prima facie_,
+correspond coincidentally with unknown events at a distance, all that is
+called 'second sight,' or 'clairvoyance,' and other things even more
+obscure. Reasoning on these real or alleged phenomena, and on other quite
+normal and accepted facts of dream, shadow, sleep, trance, and death,
+savages have inferred the existence of spirit or soul, exactly as the
+Indians arrived at the notion of electricity (not so called by them, of
+course) as the cause of the Aurora Borealis. But, just as the Indians
+thought that the cosmic lights were caused by the rubbing together of
+crowded deer in the heavens (a theory quite childishly absurd), so the
+savage has expressed, in rude fantastic ways, his conclusion as to the
+existence of spirit. He believes in wandering separable souls of men,
+surviving death, and he has peopled with his dreams the whole inanimate
+universe.
+
+My suggestion is that, in spite of his fantasies, the savage had possibly
+drawn from his premises an inference not wholly, or not demonstrably
+erroneous. As the sparks of the deer-skin indicated electricity, so the
+strange lights in the night of human nature may indicate faculties which
+science, till of late and in a few instances, has laughed at, ignored,
+'thrown aside as worthless.'
+
+It should be observed that I am not speaking of 'spiritualism,' a word of
+the worst associations, inextricably entangled with fraud, bad logic, and
+the blindest credulity. Some of the phenomena alluded to have, however,
+been claimed as their own province by 'spiritists,' and need to be rescued
+from them. Mr. Tylor writes:
+
+'The issue raised by the comparison of savage, barbaric, and civilised
+spiritualism is this: Do the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar
+necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer, and the Boston medium, share the
+possession of belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import,
+which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two
+centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless?'
+
+_Distinguo!_ That does not seem to me to be the issue. In my opinion the
+issue is: 'Have the Red Indian, the Tatar, the Highland seer, and the
+Boston medium (the least reputable of the menagerie) observed, and
+reasoned wildly from, and counterfeited, and darkened with imposture,
+certain genuine by-products of human faculty, which do not _prima facie_
+deserve to be thrown aside?'
+
+That, I venture to think, is the real issue. That science may toss aside
+as worthless some valuable observations of savages is now universally
+admitted by people who know the facts. Among these observations is the
+whole topic of Hypnotism, with the use of suggestion for healing purposes,
+and the phenomena, no longer denied, of 'alternating personalities.' For
+the truth of this statement we may appeal to one of the greatest of
+Continental anthropologists, Adolf Bastian.[2] The missionaries, like
+Livingstone, usually supposed that the savage seer's declared ignorance--
+after his so-called fit of inspiration--of what occurred in that state,
+was an imposture. But nobody now doubts the similar oblivion of what has
+passed that sometimes follows the analogous hypnotic sleep. Of a
+remarkable cure, which the school of the Salpêtrière or Nancy would
+ascribe, with probable justice, to 'suggestion,' a savage example will be
+given later.
+
+Savage hypnotism and 'suggestion,' among the Sioux and Arapahoe, has been
+thought worthy of a whole volume in the Reports of the Ethnological Bureau
+of the Smithsonian Institute (Washington, U.S., 1892-98). Republican
+Governments publish scientific matter 'regardless of expense,' and the
+essential points might have been put more shortly. They illustrate the
+fact that only certain persons can hypnotise others, and throw light on
+some peculiarities of _rapport._[3] In brief, savages anticipated us in
+the modern science of experimental psychology, as is frankly acknowledged
+by the Society for Experimental Psychology of Berlin. 'That many mystical
+phenomena are much more common and prominent among savages than among
+ourselves is familiar to everyone acquainted with the subject. The
+_ethnological_ side of our inquiry demands penetrative study.'[4]
+
+That study I am about to try to sketch. My object is to examine some
+'superstitious practices' and beliefs of savages by aid of the comparative
+method. I shall compare, as I have already said, the ethnological evidence
+for savage usages and beliefs analogous to thought-transference,
+coincidental hallucinations, alternating personality, and so forth, with
+the best attested modern examples, experimental or spontaneous. This
+raises the question of our evidence, which is all-important. We proceed to
+defend it. The savage accounts are on the level of much anthropological
+evidence; they may, that is, be dismissed by adversaries as 'travellers'
+tales.' But the best testimony for the truth of the reports as to actual
+belief in the facts is the undesigned coincidence of evidence from all
+ages and quarters.[5] When the stories brought by travellers, ancient and
+modern, learned and unlearned, pious or sceptical, agree in the main, we
+have all the certainty that anthropology can offer. Again, when we find
+practically the same strange neglected sparks, not only rumoured of
+in European popular superstition, but attested in many hundreds of
+depositions made at first hand by respectable modern witnesses, educated
+and responsible, we cannot honestly or safely dismiss the coincidence of
+report as indicating a mere 'survival' of savage superstitious belief, and
+nothing more.
+
+We can no longer do so, it is agreed, in the case of hypnotic phenomena. I
+hope to make it seem possible that we should not do so in the matter of
+the hallucinations provoked by gazing in a smooth deep, usually styled
+'crystal-gazing.' Ethnologically, this practice is at least as old as
+classical times, and is of practically world-wide distribution. I shall
+prove its existence in Australia, New Zealand, North America, South
+America, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and among the Incas, not to speak of
+the middle and recent European ages. The universal idea is that such
+visions may be 'clairvoyant.' To take a Polynesian case, 'resembling the
+Hawaiian _wai harru_.' When anyone has been robbed, the priest, after
+praying, has a hole dug in the floor of the house, and filled with water.
+Then he gazes into the water, 'over which the god is supposed to place the
+spirit of the thief.... The image of the thief was, according to their
+account, reflected in the water, and being perceived by the priest, he
+named the individual, or the parties.'[6] Here the statement about the
+'spirit' is a mere savage philosophical explanation. But the fact that
+hallucinatory pictures can really be seen by a fair percentage of educated
+Europeans, in water, glass balls, and so forth, is now confirmed by
+frequent experiment, and accepted by opponents, 'non-mystical writers,'
+like Dr. Parish of Munich.[7] I shall bring evidence to suggest that the
+visions may correctly reflect, as it were, persons and places absolutely
+unknown to the gazer, and that they may even reveal details unknown to
+every one present. Such results among savages, or among the superstitious,
+would be, and are, explained by the theory of 'spirits.' Modern science
+has still to find an explanation consistent with recognised laws of
+nature, but 'spirits' we shall not invoke.
+
+In the same way I mean to examine all or most of the 'so-called mystical
+phenomena of savage life.' I then compare them with the better vouched for
+modern examples. To return to the question of evidence, I confess that I
+do not see how the adverse anthropologist, psychologist, or popular
+agnostic is to evade the following dilemma: To the anthropologist we say,
+'The evidence we adduce is your own evidence, that of books of travel in
+all lands and countries. If _you_ may argue from it, so may we. Some
+of it is evidence to unusual facts, more of it is evidence to singular
+beliefs, which we think not necessarily without foundation. As raising a
+presumption in favour of that opinion, we cite examples in which savage
+observations of abnormal and once rejected facts, are now admitted by
+science to have a large residuum of truth, we argue that what is admitted
+in some cases may come to be admitted in more. No _a priori_ line can here
+be drawn.'
+
+To the psychologist who objects that our modern instances are mere
+anecdotes, we reply by asking, 'Dear sir, what are _your_ modern
+instances? What do you know of "Mrs. A.," whom you still persistently
+cite as an example of morbid recurrent hallucinations? Name the German
+servant girl who, in a fever, talked several learned languages, which she
+had heard her former master, a scholar, declaim! Where did she live? Who
+vouches for her, who heard her, who understood her? There is, you know, no
+evidence at all; the anecdote is told by Coleridge: the phenomena are said
+by him to have been observed "in a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a year
+or two before my arrival at Göttingen.... Many eminent physiologists and
+psychologists visited the town." Why do you not name a few out of the
+distinguished crowd?'[8] This anecdote, a rumour of a rumour of a
+Protestant explanation of a Catholic marvel, was told by Coleridge at
+least twenty years after the possible date. The psychologists copy it,[9]
+one after the other, as a flock of sheep jump where their leader has
+jumped. An example by way of anecdote may be permitted.
+
+According to the current anthropological theory, the idea of soul or
+spirit was suggested to early men by their experiences in dreams. They
+seemed, in sleep, to visit remote places; therefore, they argued,
+something within them was capable of leaving the body and wandering about.
+
+This something was the soul or spirit. Now it is obvious that this opinion
+of early men would be confirmed if they ever chanced to acquire, in
+dreams, knowledge of places which they had never visited, and of facts as
+to which, in their waking state, they could have no information. This
+experience, indeed, would suggest problems even To Mr. Herbert Spencer, if
+it occurred to him.
+
+Conversing on this topic with a friend of acknowledged philosophical
+eminence, I illustrated my meaning by a story of a dream. It was reported
+to me by the dreamer, with whom I am well acquainted, was of very recent
+occurrence, and was corroborated by the evidence of another person, to
+whom the dream was narrated, before its fulfilment was discovered. I am
+not at liberty to publish the details, for good reasons, but the essence
+of the matter was this: A. and B. (the dreamer) had common interests. A.
+had taken certain steps about which B. had only a surmise, and a vague
+one, that steps had probably been taken. A. then died, and B. in an
+extremely vivid dream (a thing unfamiliar to him) seemed to read a mass of
+unknown facts, culminating in two definite results, capable of being
+stated in figures. These results, by the very nature of the case, could
+not be known to A., so that, before he was placed out of B.'s reach by
+death, he could not have stated them to him, and, afterwards, had
+assuredly no means of doing so.
+
+The dream, two days after its occurrence, and after it had been told to
+C., proved to be literally correct. Now I am not asking the reader's
+belief for this anecdote (for that could only be yielded in virtue of
+knowledge of the veracity of B. and C.), but I invite his attention to the
+psychological explanation. My friend suggested that A. had told B. all
+about the affair, that B. had not listened (though his interests were
+vitally concerned), and that the crowd of curious details, naturally
+unfamiliar to B., had reposed in his subconscious memory, and had been
+revived in the dream.
+
+Now B.'s dream was a dream of reading a mass of minute details, including
+names of places entirely unknown to him. It may be admitted, in accordance
+with the psychological theory, that B. might have received all this
+information from A., but, by dint of inattention--'the malady of not
+marking'--might never have been _consciously_ aware of what he heard. Then
+B.'s subconscious memory of what he did not _consciously_ know might break
+upon him in his dream. Instances of similar mental phenomena are not
+uncommon. But the general result of the combined details was one which
+could not possibly be known to A. before his death; nor to B. could it be
+known at all. Yet B.'s dream represented this general result with perfect
+accuracy, which cannot be accounted for by the revival of subconscious
+memory in sleep. Neither asleep nor awake can a man remember what it is
+impossible for him to have known. The dream contained no _prediction_ for
+the results were now fixed; but (granting the good faith of the narrator)
+the dream did contain information not normally accessible.
+
+However, by way of psychological explanation of the dream, my friend cited
+Coleridge's legend, as to the German girl and her unconscious knowledge of
+certain learned languages. 'And what is the evidence for the truth of
+Coleridge's legend?' Of course, there is none, or none known to all the
+psychologists who quote it from Coleridge. Neither, if true, was the
+legend to the point. However, psychology will accept such unauthenticated
+narratives, and yet will scoff at first baud, duly corroborated testimony
+from living and honourable people, about recent events.
+
+Only a great force of prejudice can explain this acceptance, by
+psychologists, of one kind of marvellous tale on no evidence, and this
+rejection of another class of marvellous tale, when supported by first
+hand, signed and corroborated evidence, of living witnesses. I see only
+one escape for psychologists from this dilemma. Their marvellous tales are
+_possible_, though unvouched for, because they have always heard them and
+repeated them in lectures, and read and repeated them in books. _Our_
+marvellous tales are impossible, because the psychologists know that they
+are impossible, which means that they have not been familiar with them,
+from youth upwards, in lectures and manuals. But man has no right to have
+'clear ideas of the possible and impossible,' like Faraday, _a priori_,
+except in the exact sciences. There are other instances of weak evidence
+which satisfies psychologists.
+
+Hamilton has an anecdote, borrowed from Monboddo, who got it from Mr. Hans
+Stanley, who, 'about twenty-six years ago,' heard it from the subject of
+the story, Madame de Laval. 'I have the memorandum somewhere in my
+papers,' says Mr. Stanley, vaguely. Then we have two American anecdotes by
+Dr. Flint and Mr. Rush; and such is Sir William Hamilton's equipment of
+odd facts for discussing the unconscious or subconscious. The least
+credible and worst attested of these narratives still appears in popular
+works on psychology. Moreover, all psychology, except experimental
+psychology, is based on anecdotes which people tell about their own
+subjective experiences. Mr. Galton, whose original researches are well
+known, even offered rewards in money for such narratives about visualised
+rows of coloured figures, and so on.
+
+Clearly the psychologist, then, has no _prima facie_ right to object to
+our anecdotes of experiences, which he regards as purely subjective. As
+evidence, we only accept them at first hand, and, when possible, the
+witnesses have been cross-examined personally. Our evidence then, where it
+consists of travellers' tales, is on a level with that which satisfies the
+anthropologist. Where it consists of modern statements of personal
+experience, our evidence is often infinitely better than much which is
+accepted by the nonexperimental psychologist. As for the agnostic writer
+on the Non-Religion of the Future, M. Guyau actually illustrates the
+Resurrection of our Lord by an American myth about a criminal, of whom a
+hallucinatory phantasm appeared to each of his gaol companions, separately
+and successively, on a day after his execution! For this prodigious fable
+no hint of reference to authority is given.[10] Yet the evidence appears
+to satisfy M. Guyau, and is used by him to reinforce his argument.
+
+The anthropologist and psychologist, then, must either admit that their
+evidence is no better than ours, if as good, or must say that they only
+believe evidence as to 'possible' facts. They thus constitute themselves
+judges of what is possible, and practically regard themselves as
+omniscient. Science has had to accept so many things once scoffed at as
+'impossible,' that this attitude of hers, as we shall show in chapter ii.,
+ceases to command respect.
+
+My suggestion is that the trivial, rejected, or unheeded phenomena
+vouched for by the evidence here defended may, not inconceivably, be of
+considerable importance. But, stating the case at the lowest, if we are
+only concerned with illusions and fables, it cannot but be curious to note
+their persistent uniformity in savage and civilised life.
+
+To make the first of our two main positions clear, and in part to justify
+ourselves in asking any attention for such matters, we now offer an
+historical sketch of the relations between Science and the so-called
+'Miraculous' in the past.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Primitive Culture_, i. 156. London, 1891.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Ueber psychische Beobachiungen bei Naiurvülkern_. Leipzig,
+Gunther, 1890.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See especially pp. 922-926. The book is interesting in other
+ways, and, indeed, touching, as it describes the founding of a new Red
+Indian religion, on a basis of Hypnotism and Christianity.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Programme of the Society, p. iv.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, i, 9, 10.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, ii. p. 240.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Hallucinations and Illusions_, English edition, pp. 69-70,
+297.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Sir William Hamilton's _Lectures_, i. 345.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Maudsley, Kerner, Carpentor, Du Prel, Zangwill.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Coleridge's mythical maid (p. 10) is set down by Mr. Samuel
+Laing to an experiment of Braid's! No references are given.--Laing:
+_Problems of the Future._]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+SCIENCE AND 'MIRACLES'
+
+_Historical Sketch_
+
+Research in the X region is not a new thing under the sun. When Saul
+disguised himself before his conference with the Witch of Endor, he made
+an elementary attempt at a scientific test of the supernormal. Croesus,
+the king, went much further, when he tested the clairvoyance of the
+oracles of Greece, by sending an embassy to ask what he was doing at a
+given hour on a given day, and by then doing something very _bizarre_. We
+do not know how the Delphic oracle found out the right answer, but various
+easy methods of fraud at once occur to the mind. However, the procedure of
+Croesus, if he took certain precautions, was relatively scientific.
+Relatively scientific also was the inquiry of Porphyry, with whose
+position our own is not unlikely to be compared. Unable, or reluctant, to
+accept Christianity, Porphyry 'sought after a sign' of an element of
+supernormal truth in Paganism. But he began at the wrong end, namely at
+Pagan spiritualistic _séances_, with the usual accompaniments of darkness
+and fraud. His perplexed letter to Anebo, with the reply attributed to
+Iamblichus, reveal Porphyry wandering puzzled among mediums, floating
+lights, odd noises, queer dubious 'physical phenomena.' He did not begin
+with accurate experiments as to the existence of rare, and apparently
+supernormal human faculties, and he seems to have attained no conclusion
+except that 'spirits' are 'deceitful.'[1]
+
+Something more akin to modern research began about the time of the
+Reformation, and lasted till about 1680. The fury for burning witches led
+men of sense, learning, and humanity to ask whether there was any reality
+in witchcraft, and, generally, in the marvels of popular belief. The
+inquiries of Thyraeus, Lavaterus, Bodinus, Wierus, Le Loyer, Reginald
+Scot, and many others, tended on the whole to the negative side as regards
+the wilder fables about witches, but left the problems of ghosts and
+haunted houses pretty much where they were before. It may be observed that
+Lavaterus (circ. 1580) already put forth a form of the hypothesis of
+telepathy (that 'ghosts' are hallucinations produced by the direct action
+of one mind, or brain, upon another), while Thyraeus doubted whether the
+noises heard in 'haunted houses' were not mere hallucinations of the sense
+of hearing. But all these early writers, like Cardan, were very careless
+of first-hand evidence, and, indeed, preferred ghosts vouched for by
+classical authority, Pliny, Plutarch, or Suetonius. With the Rev. Joseph
+Glanvil, F.R.S. (circ. 1666), a more careful examination of evidence came
+into use. Among the marvels of Glanvil's and other tracts usually
+published together in his 'Sadducismus Triumphatus' will be found letters
+which show that he and his friends, like Henry More and Boyle, laboured to
+collect first-hand evidence for second sight, haunted houses, ghosts, and
+wraiths. The confessed object was to procure a 'Whip for the Droll,' a
+reply to the laughing scepticism of the Restoration. The result was to
+bring on Glanvil a throng of bores--he was 'worse haunted than Mr.
+Mompesson's house,' he says-and Mr. Pepys found his arguments 'not very
+convincing.' Mr. Pepys, however, was alarmed by 'our young gib-cat,'
+which he mistook for a 'spright.' With Henry More, Baxter, and Glanvil
+practically died, for the time, the attempt to investigate these topics
+scientifically, though an impression of doubt was left on the mind of
+Addison. Witchcraft ceased to win belief, and was abolished, as a crime,
+in 1736. Some of the Scottish clergy, and John Wesley, clung fondly
+to the old faith, but Wodrow, and Cotton Mather (about 1710-1730) were
+singularly careless and unlucky in producing anything like evidence for
+their narratives. Ghost stories continued to be told, but not to be
+investigated.
+
+Then one of the most acute of philosophers decided that investigation
+ought never to be attempted. This scientific attitude towards X phenomena,
+that of refusing to examine them, and denying them without examination,
+was fixed by David Hume in his celebrated essay on 'Miracles.' Hume
+derided the observation and study of what he called 'Miracles,' in the
+field of experience, and he looked for an _a priori_ argument which would
+for ever settle the question without examination of facts. In an age of
+experimental philosophy, which derided _a priori_ methods, this was Hume's
+great contribution to knowledge. His famous argument, the joy of many an
+honest breast, is a tissue of fallacies which might be given for exposure
+to beginners in logic, as an elementary exercise. In announcing his
+discovery, Hume amusingly displays the self-complacency and the want of
+humour with which we Scots are commonly charged by our critics:
+
+'I flatter myself that I have discovered an argument which, if just,
+will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds
+of superstitious delusions, and consequently will be useful as long as
+the world endures.'
+
+He does not expect, however, to convince the multitude. Till the end of
+the world, 'accounts of miracles and prodigies, I suppose, will be found
+in all histories, sacred and profane.' Without saying here what he
+means by a miracle, Hume argues that 'experience is our only guide in
+reasoning.' He then defines a miracle as 'a violation of the laws
+of nature.' By a 'law of nature' he means a uniformity, not of all
+experience, but of each experience as he will deign to admit; while he
+excludes, without examination, all evidence for experience of the absence
+of such uniformity. That kind of experience cannot be considered. 'There
+must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the
+event would not merit that appellation.' If there be any experience in
+favour of the event, that experience does not count. A miracle is counter
+to universal experience, no event is counter to universal experience,
+therefore no event is a miracle. If you produce evidence to what Hume
+calls a miracle (we shall see examples) he replies that the evidence is
+not valid, unless its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact.
+Now no error of human evidence can be more miraculous than a 'miracle.'
+Therefore there can be no valid evidence for 'miracles.' Fortunately,
+Hume now gives an example of what he means by 'miracles.' He says:--
+
+'For, first, there is _not to be found_, in _all history_, any miracle
+attested by a _sufficient number_ of men, of such unquestioned _good
+sense, education_, and _learning_, as to secure us against all delusion
+in themselves; of such undoubted _integrity_, as to place them beyond
+all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and
+reputation in the eyes of mankind, as to have a great deal to lose in
+case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time
+attesting facts performed in such a _public manner_, and in so
+_celebrated a part of the world_, as to render the detection
+unavoidable; all which circumstances are requisite to give us a full
+assurance in the testimony of men.'[2]
+
+Hume added a note at the end of his book, in which he contradicted every
+assertion which he had made in the passage just cited; indeed, be
+contradicted himself before he had written six pages.
+
+'There surely never was a greater number of miracles ascribed to one person
+than those which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the
+tomb of Abbé Paris, the famous Jansenist, with whose sanctity the people
+were so long deluded. The curing of the sick, giving hearing to the deaf,
+and sight to the blind, were everywhere talked of as the usual effects of
+that holy sepulchre. But what is more extraordinary, many of the miracles
+were _immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned
+integrity_, attested by _witnesses of credit and distinction_, in _a
+learned age_, and on the most _eminent theatre_ that is _now in the
+world_. Nor is this all. A relation of them was published and dispersed
+everywhere; nor were the Jesuits, though a learned body, supported
+by the civil magistrate, and determined enemies to those opinions,
+in whose favour the miracles were said to have been wrought, ever able
+_distinctly to refute or detect them_. Where shall we find such a number
+of circumstances, agreeing to the corroboration of one fact? And what
+have we to oppose to such a cloud of witnesses, but the absolute
+_impossibility, or miraculous nature_ of the events which they relate?
+And this, surely, in the eyes of all reasonable people, will alone be
+regarded as a sufficient refutation.'
+
+Thus Hume, first denies the existence of such evidence, given in such
+circumstances as he demands, and then he produces an example of that very
+kind of evidence. Having done this, he abandons (as Mr. Wallace observes)
+his original assertion that the evidence does not exist, and takes refuge
+in alleging 'the absolute impossibility' of the events which the evidence
+supports. Thus Hume poses as a perfect judge of the possible, in a kind of
+omniscience. He takes his stand on the uniformity of all experience that
+is not hostile to his idea of the possible, and dismisses all testimony to
+other experience, even when it reaches his standard of evidence. He is
+remote indeed from Virchow's position 'that what we call the laws of
+nature must vary according to our frequent new experiences.'[3] In his
+note, Hume buttresses and confirms his evidence for the Jansenist
+miracles. They have even a martyr, M. Montgeron, who wrote an account of
+the events, and, says Hume lightly, 'is now said to be somewhere in a
+dungeon on account of his book.' 'Many of the miracles of the Abbé Paris
+were proved immediately by witnesses before the Bishop's court at Paris,
+under the eye of Cardinal Noailles....' 'His successor was an enemy to the
+Jansenists, yet twenty-two _curés_ of Paris ... pressed him to examine
+these miracles ... _But he wisely forbore_.' Hume adds his testimony to
+the character of these _curés_. Thus it is wisdom, according to Hume, to
+dismiss the most public and well-attested 'miracles' without examination.
+This is experimental science of an odd kind.
+
+The phenomena were cases of healing, many of them surprising, of
+cataleptic rigidity, and of insensibility to pain, among visitors to the
+tomb of the Abbé Paris (1731). Had the cases been judicially examined (all
+medical evidence was in their favour), and had they been proved false, the
+cause of Hume would have profited enormously. A strong presumption would
+have been raised against the miracles of Christianity. But Hume applauds
+the wisdom of not giving his own theory this chance of a triumph. The
+cataleptic seizures were of the sort now familiar to science. These have,
+therefore, emerged from the miraculous. In fact, the phenomena which
+occurred at the tomb of the Abbé Paris have emerged almost too far, and
+now seem in danger of being too readily and too easily accepted. In 1887
+MM. Binet and Féré, of the school of the Salpêtrière, published in English
+a popular manual styled 'Animal Magnetism.' These authors write with great
+caution about such alleged phenomena as the reading, by the hypnotised
+patient, of the thoughts in the mind of the hypnotiser. But as to the
+phenomena at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, they say that 'suggestion
+explains them.'[4] That is, in the opinion of MM. Binet and Féré
+the so-called 'miracles' really occurred, and were worked by 'the
+imagination,' by 'self-suggestion.'
+
+The most famous case--that of Mlle. Coirin--has been carefully examined by
+Dr. Charcot.[5]
+
+Mlle. Coirin had a dangerous fall from her horse, in September 1716, in
+her thirty-first year. The medical details may be looked for in Dr.
+Charcot's essay or in Montgeron.[6] 'Her disease was diagnosed as cancer
+of the left breast,' the nipple 'fell off bodily.' Amputation of the
+breast was proposed, but Madame Coirin, believing the disease to be
+radically incurable, refused her consent. Paralysis of the left side set
+in (1718), the left leg shrivelling up. On August 9, 1731, Mlle. Coirin
+'tried the off chance' of a miracle, put on a shift that had touched the
+tomb of Paris, and used some earth from the grave. On August 11, Mlle.
+Coirin could turn herself in bed; on the 12th the horrible wound 'was
+staunched, and began to close up and heal.' The paralysed side recovered
+life and its natural proportions. By September 3, Mlle. Coirin could go
+out for a drive.
+
+All her malady, says Dr. Charcot, paralysis, 'cancer,' and all, was
+'hysterical;' 'hysterical oedema,' for which he quotes many French
+authorities and one American. 'Under the physical [psychical?] influence
+brought to bear by the application of the shift ... the oedema, which was
+due to vaso-motor trouble, disappeared almost instantaneously. The breast
+regained its normal size.'
+
+Dr. Charcot generously adds that shrines, like Lourdes, have cured
+patients in whom he could not 'inspire the operation of the faith cure.'
+He certainly cannot explain everything which claims to be of supernatural
+origin in the faith cure. We have to learn the lesson of patience. I am
+among the first to recognise that Shakespeare's words hold good to-day:
+
+  'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+   Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'
+
+If Dr. Charcot had believed in what the French call _suggestion mentale_--
+suggestion by thought-transference (which I think he did not)--he could
+have explained the healing of the Centurion's servant, 'Say the word,
+Lord, and my servant shall be healed,' by suggestion & distance
+(telepathy), and by premising that the servant's palsy was 'hysterical.'
+But what do we mean by 'hysterical'? Nobody knows. The 'mind,' somehow,
+causes gangrenes, if not cancers, paralysis, shrinking of tissues; the
+mind, somehow, cures them. And what is the 'mind'? As my object is to give
+savage parallels to modern instances better vouched for. I quote a
+singular Red Indian cure by 'suggestion.' Hearne, travelling in Canada, in
+1770, met a native who had 'dead palsy,' affecting the whole of one side.
+He was dragged on a sledge, 'reduced to a mere skeleton,' and so was
+placed in the magic lodge. The first step in his cure was the public
+swallowing by a conjurer of a board of wood, 'about the size of a
+barrel-stave,' twice as wide across as his mouth. Hearne stood beside the
+man, 'naked as he was born,' 'and, notwithstanding I was all attention, I
+could not detect the deceit.' Of course, Hearne believes that this was
+mere legerdemain, and (p. 216) mentions a most suspicious circumstance.
+The account is amusing, and deserves the attention of Mr. Neville
+Maskelyne. The same conjurer had previously swallowed a cradle! Now
+bayonet swallowing, which he also did, is possible, though Hearne denies
+it (p. 217).
+
+The real object of these preliminary feats, however performed, is,
+probably, to inspire _faith_, which Dr. Charcot might have done by
+swallowing a cradle. The Indians explain that the barrel staves apparently
+swallowed are merely dematerialised by 'spirits,' leaving only the forked
+end sticking out of the conjurer's mouth. In fact, Hearne caught the
+conjurer in the act of making a separate forked end.
+
+Faith being thus inspired, the conjurer, for three entire days, blew,
+sang, and danced round 'the poor paralytic, fasting.' 'And it is truly
+wonderful, though the strictest truth, that when the poor man was taken
+from the conjuring house ... he was able to move all the fingers and toes
+of the side that had been so long dead.... At the end of six weeks he went
+a-hunting for his family' (p. 219). Hearne kept up his acquaintance, and
+adds, what is very curious, that he developed almost a secondary
+personality. 'Before that dreadful paralytic stroke, he had been
+distinguished for his good nature and benevolent disposition, was entirely
+free from every appearance of avarice,... but after this event he was the
+most fractious, quarrelsome, discontented, and covetous wretch alive'
+(p. 220).
+
+Dr. Charcot, if he had been acquainted with this case, would probably have
+said that it 'is of the nature of those which Professor Russell Reynolds
+has classified under the head of "paralysis dependent on idea."'[7]
+Unluckily, Hearne does not tell us how his hunter, an untutored Indian,
+became 'paralysed by idea.'
+
+Dr. Charcot adds: 'In every case, science is a foe to systematic negation,
+which the morrow may cause to melt away in the light of its new triumphs.'
+The present 'new triumph' is a mere coincidence with the dicta of our
+Lord, 'Thy faith hath made thee whole.... I have not found so great faith,
+no, not in Israel.' There are cures, as there are maladies, caused 'by
+idea.' So, in fact, we had always understood. But the point is that
+science, wherever it agrees with David Hume, is not a foe, but a friend to
+'systematic negation.'
+
+A parallel case of a 'miracle,' the stigmata of St. Francis, was, of
+course, regarded by science as a fable or a fraud. But, now that blisters
+and other lesions can be produced by suggestion, the fable has become a
+probable fact, and, therefore, not a miracle at all.[8] Mr. James remarks:
+'As so often happens, a fact is denied till a welcome interpretation
+comes with it. Then it is admitted readily enough, and evidence quite
+insufficient to back a claim, so long as the Church had an interest
+in making it, proves to be quite sufficient for modern scientific
+enlightenment the moment it appears that a reputed saint can thereby be
+claimed as a case of "hystero-epilepsy."'[9]
+
+But the Church continues to have an interest in the matter. As the class
+of facts which Hume declined to examine begins to be gradually admitted by
+science, the thing becomes clear. The evidence which could safely convey
+these now admittedly possible facts, say from the time of Christ, is so
+far proved to be not necessarily mythical--proved to be not incapable of
+carrying statements probably correct, which once seemed absolutely
+false. If so, where, precisely, ends its power of carrying facts? Thus
+considered, the kinds of marvellous events recorded in the Gospels,
+for example, are no longer to be dismissed on _a priori_ grounds as
+'mythical.' We cannot now discard evidence as necessarily false because
+it clashes with our present ideas of the possible, when we have to
+acknowledge that the very same evidence may safely convey to us facts
+which clashed with our fathers' notions of what is possible, but which
+are now accepted. Our notions of the possible cease to be a criterion of
+truth or falsehood, and our contempt for the Gospels as myths must
+slowly die, as 'miracle' after 'miracle' is brought within the realm of
+acknowledged law. With each such admission the hypothesis that the Gospel
+evidence is mythical must grow weaker, and weaker must grow the negative
+certainty of popular science.
+
+The occurrences which took place at and near the tomb of Paris were
+attested, as Hume truly avers, by a great body of excellent evidence. But
+the wisdom which declined to make a judicial examination has deprived us
+of the best kind of record. Analogous if not exactly similar events now
+confessedly take place, and are no longer looked upon as miraculous. But
+as long as they were held to be miraculous, not to examine the evidence,
+said Hume, was the policy of 'all reasonable people.' The result was to
+deprive Science of the best sort of record of facts which she welcomes as
+soon as she thinks she can explain them.[10] Examples of the folly of
+_a priori_ negation are common. The British Association refused to hear
+the essay which Braid, the inventor of the word 'hypnotism,' had written
+upon the subject. Braid, Elliotson, and other English inquirers of the
+mid-century, were subjected to such persecutions as official science could
+inflict. We read of M. Deslon, a disciple of Mesmer, about 1783, that he
+was 'condemned by the Faculty of Medicine, without any examination of the
+facts.' The Inquisition proceeded more fairly than these scientific
+obscurantists.
+
+Another curious example may be cited. M. Guyau, in his work 'The
+Non-Religion of the Future,' argues that Religion is doomed. 'Poetic
+genius has withdrawn its services,' witness Tennyson and Browning! 'Among
+orthodox Protestant nations miracles do not happen.'[11] But 'marvellous
+facts' _do_ happen.[12] These 'marvellous facts,' accepted by M. Guyau,
+are what Hume called 'miracles,' and advised the 'wise and learned' to
+laugh at, without examination. They were not facts, and could not be, he
+said. Now to M. Guyau's mind they _are_ facts, and therefore are not
+miracles. He includes 'mental suggestion taking place even at a distance.'
+A man 'can transmit an almost compulsive command, it appears nowadays, by
+a simple tension of his will.' If this be so, if 'will' can affect matter
+from a distance, obviously the relations of will and matter are not what
+popular science tells us that they are. Again, if this truth is now
+established, and won from that region which Hume and popular science
+forbid us to investigate, who knows what other facts may be redeemed from
+that limbo, or how far they may affect our views of possibilities? The
+admission of mental action, operative _à distance_, is, of course,
+personal only to M. Guyau, among friends of the new negative tradition.
+
+We return to Hume. He next argues that the pleasures of wonder make all
+accounts of 'miracles' worthless. He has just given an example of the
+equivalent pleasures of dogmatic disbelief. Then Religion is a disturbing
+force; but so, manifestly, is irreligion. 'The wise and learned are
+content to deride the absurdity, without informing themselves of the
+particular facts.' The wise and learned are applauded for their scientific
+attitude. Again, miracles destroy each other, for all religions have their
+miracles, but all religions cannot be true. This argument is no longer of
+force with people who look on 'miracles' as = 'X phenomena,' not as divine
+evidences to the truth of this or that creed. 'The gazing populace
+receives, without examination, whatever soothes superstition,' and
+Hume's whole purpose is to make the wise and learned imitate the gazing
+populace by rejecting alleged facts 'without examination.' The populace
+investigated more than did the wise and learned.
+
+Hume has an alternative definition of a miracle--'a miracle is a
+transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or
+by the interposition of some invisible agent.' We reply that what
+Hume calls a 'miracle' may result from the operation of some as yet
+unascertained law of nature (say self-suggestion), and that our business,
+at present, is to examine such events, not to account for them.
+
+It may fairly be said that Hume is arguing against men who wished to make
+so-called 'miracles' a test of the truth of Jansenism, for example, and
+that he could not be expected to answer, by anticipation, ideas not
+current in his day. But he remains guilty of denouncing the investigation
+of apparent facts. No attitude can be less scientific than his, or more
+common among many men of science.
+
+According to the humorous wont of things in this world, the whole question
+of the marvellous had no sooner been settled for ever by David Hume than
+it was reopened by Emanuel Swedenborg. Now, Kant was familiar with certain
+of the works of Hume, whether he had read his 'Essay on Miracles' or not.
+Far from declining to examine the portentous 'visions' of Swedenborg, Kant
+interested himself deeply in the topic. As early as 1758 he wrote his
+first remarks on the seer, containing some reports of stories or legends
+about Swedenborg's 'clairvoyance.' In the true spirit of psychical
+research, Kant wrote a letter to Swedenborg, asking for information at
+first hand. The seer got the letter, but he never answered it. Kant,
+however, prints one or two examples of Swedenborg's successes. Madame
+Harteville, widow of the Dutch envoy in Stockholm, was dunned by a
+silversmith for a debt of her late husband's. She believed that it had
+been paid, but could not find the receipt. She therefore asked Swedenborg
+to use his renowned gifts. He promised to see what he could do, and, three
+days later, arrived at the lady's house while she was giving a tea, or
+rather a coffee, party. To the assembled society Swedenborg remarked, 'in
+a cold-blooded way, that he had seen her man, and spoken to him.' The late
+M. Harteville declared to Swedenborg that he had paid the bill, seven
+months before his decease: the receipt was in a cupboard upstairs. Madame
+Harteville replied that the cupboard had been thoroughly searched to no
+purpose. Swedenborg answered that, as he learned from the ghost, there was
+a secret drawer behind the side-plank within the cupboard. The drawer
+contained diplomatic correspondence, and the missing receipt. The whole
+company then went upstairs, found the secret drawer, and the receipt among
+the other papers. Kant adds Swedenborg's clairvoyant vision, from
+Gothenburg, of a great fire at Stockholm (dated September 1756). Kant
+pined to see Swedenborg himself, and waited eagerly for his book, 'Arcana
+Coelestia.' At last he obtained this work, at the ransom, ruinous to Kant
+at that time, of 7£. But he was disappointed with what he read, and in
+'Träume eines Geistersehers,' made a somewhat sarcastic attempt at a
+metaphysical theory of apparitions.
+
+  'Velut aegri somnia vanae
+  Finguntur species'
+
+is his motto.
+
+Kant's real position about all these matters is, I venture to say, almost
+identical with that of Sir Walter Scott. A Scot himself, by descent, Kant
+may have heard tales of second-sight and bogles. Like Scott, he dearly
+loved a ghost-story; like Scott he was canny enough to laugh, publicly, at
+them and at himself for his interest in them. Yet both would take trouble
+to inquire. As Kant vainly wrote to Swedenborg and others--as he vainly
+spent 7£. on 'Arcana Coelestia,' so Sir Walter was anxious to go to Egypt
+to examine the facts of ink-gazing clairvoyance. Kant confesses that each
+individual ghost-story found him sceptical, whereas the cumulative mass
+made a considerable impression.[13]
+
+The first seventy pages of the 'Tribune' are devoted to a perfectly
+serious discussion of the metaphysics of 'Spirits.' On page 73 he
+pleasantly remarks, 'Now we shall understand that all said hitherto is
+superfluous,' and he will not reproach the reader who regards seers _not_
+as citizens of two worlds (Plotinus), but as candidates for Bedlam.
+
+Kant's irony is peculiarly Scottish. He does not himself know how far he
+is in earnest, and, to save his self-respect and character for canniness,
+he 'jocks wi' deeficulty.' He amuses himself with trying how far he can
+carry speculations on metaphysics (not yet reformed by himself) into the
+realm of the ghostly. He makes admissions about his own tendency to think
+that he has an immaterial soul, and that these points are, or may be, or
+some day will be, scientifically solved. These admissions are eagerly
+welcomed by Du Prel in his 'Philosophy of Mysticism;' but they are only
+part of Kant's joke, and how far they are serious, Kant himself does not
+know. If spiritualists knew their own business, they would translate and
+publish Kant's first seventy pages of 'Träume.' Something like telepathy,
+action of spirit, even discarnate, on spirit, is alluded to, but the idea
+is as old as Lavaterus at least (p. 52). Kant has a good deal to say, like
+Scott in his 'Demonology,' on the physics of Hallucination, but it is
+antiquated matter. He thinks the whole topic of spiritual being only
+important as bearing on hopes of a future life. As speculation, all is 'in
+the air,' and as in such matters the learned and unlearned are on a level
+of ignorance, science will not discuss them. He then repeats the
+Swedenborg stories, and thinks it would be useful to posterity if some one
+would investigate them while witnesses are alive and memories are fresh.
+
+In fact, Kant asks for psychical research.
+
+As for Swedenborg's so costly book, Kant laughs at it. There is in it no
+evidence, only assertion. Kant ends, having pleased nobody, he says, and
+as ignorant as when he began, by citing _cultivons notre jardin_.
+
+Kant returned to the theme in 'Anthropologische Didaktik.' He discusses
+the unconscious, or sub-conscious, which, till Sir William Hamilton
+lectured, seems to have been an absolutely unknown topic to British
+psychologists. 'So ist das Feld dunkler Vorstellungen das grösste in
+Menschen.' He has a chapter on 'The Divining Faculty' (pp. 89-93). He will
+not hear of presentiments, and, unlike Hegel, he scouts the Highland
+second-sight. The 'possessed' of anthropology are epileptic patients.
+Mystics (Swedenborg) are victims of _Schwärmerei_.
+
+This reference to Swedenborg is remarked upon by Schubert in his preface
+to the essay of Kant. He points out that 'it is interesting to compare the
+circumspection, the almost uncertainty of Kant when he had to deliver a
+judgment on the phenomena described by himself and as to which he had made
+inquiry [i.e. in his letter _re_ Swedenborg to Mlle. de Knobloch], and the
+very decided opinions he expressed forty years later on Swedenborg and
+his companions' [in the work cited, sections 35-37. The opinion in
+paragraph 35 is a general one as to mystics. There is no other mention of
+Swedenborg].
+
+On the whole Kant is interested, but despairing. He wants facts, and no
+facts are given to him but the book of the Prophet Emanuel. But, as it
+happened, a new, or a revived, order of facts was just about to solicit
+scientific attention. Kant had (1766) heard rumours of healing by
+magnetism, and of the alleged effect of the magnet on the human frame. The
+subject was in the air, and had already won the attention of Mesmer, about
+whom Kant had information. It were superfluous to tell again the familiar
+story of Mesmer's performances at Paris. While Mesmer's theory of
+'magnetism' was denounced by contemporary science, the discovery of the
+hypnotic sleep was made by his pupil, Puységur. This gentleman was
+persuaded that instances of 'thought-transference' (not through known
+channels of sense) occurred between the patient and the magnetiser, and he
+also believed that he had witnessed cases of 'clairvoyance,' 'lucidity,'
+_vue à distance_, in which the patient apparently beheld places and events
+remote in space. These things would now be explained by 'unconscious
+suggestion' in the more sceptical schools of psychological science. The
+Revolution interrupted scientific study in France to a great degree, but
+'somnambulism' (the hypnotic sleep) and 'magnetism' were eagerly examined
+in Germany. Modern manuals, for some reason, are apt to overlook these
+German researches and speculations. (Compare Mr. Vincent's 'Elements of
+Hypnotism,' p. 34.) The Schellings were interested; Ritter thought he had
+detected a new force, 'Siderism.' Mr. Wallace, in his preface to Hegel's
+'Philosophie des Geistes,' speaks as if Ritter had made experiments in
+telepathy. He may have done so, but his 'Siderismus' (Tübingen, 1808)
+is a Report undertaken for the Academy of Munich, on the doings of an
+Italian water-finder, or 'dowser.' Ritter gives details of seventy-four
+experiments in 'dowsing' for water, metals, or coal. He believes in the
+faculty, but not in 'psychic' explanations, or the Devil. He talks
+about 'electricity' (pp. 170, 190). He describes his precautions to
+avoid vulgar fraud, but he took no precautions against unconscious
+thought-transference. He reckoned the faculty 'temperamental' and useful.
+
+Amoretti, at Milan, examined hundreds of cases of the so-called Divining
+Rod, and Jung Stilling became an early spiritualist and 'full-welling
+fountain head' of ghost stories.
+
+Probably the most important philosophical result of the early German
+researches into the hypnotic slumber is to be found in the writings of
+Hegel. Owing to his peculiar use of a terminology, or scientific language,
+all his own, it is extremely difficult to make Hegel's meaning even
+moderately clear. Perhaps we may partly elucidate it by a similitude of
+Mr. Frederic Myers. Suppose we compare the ordinary everyday consciousness
+of each of us to a _spectrum_, whose ends towards each extremity fade out
+of our view.
+
+Beyond the range of sight there may be imagined a lower or physiological
+end: for our ordinary consciousness, of course, is unaware of many
+physiological processes which are eternally going on within us. Digestion,
+so long as it is healthy, is an obvious example. But hypnotic experiment
+makes it certain that a patient, in the _hypnotic_ condition, can
+consciously, or at least purposefully, affect physiological processes to
+which the _ordinary_ consciousness is blind--for example, by raising a
+blister, when it is suggested that a blister must be raised. Again
+(granting the facts hypothetically and merely for the sake of argument),
+at the _upper_ end of the spectrum, beyond the view of ordinary everyday
+consciousness, knowledge may be acquired of things which are out of the
+view of the consciousness of every day. For example (for the sake of
+argument let us admit it), unknown and remote people and places may be
+seen and described by clairvoyance, or _vue à distance_.
+
+Now Hegel accepted as genuine the facts which we here adduce merely for
+the sake of argument, and by way of illustrations. But he did not regard
+the clairvoyant consciousness (or whatever we call it) which, _ex
+hypothesi_, is untrammelled by space, or even by time, as occupying what
+we style the _upper_ end of the psychical spectrum. On the contrary, he
+placed it at the _lower_ end. Hegel's upper end 'loses itself in light;'
+the lower end, _qui voit tant de choses_, as La Fontaine's shepherd says,
+is _not_ 'a sublime mental phase, and capable of conveying general
+truths.' Time and space do not thwart the consciousness at Hegel's _lower_
+end, which springs from 'the great soul of nature.' But that lower end,
+though it may see for Jeanne d'Arc at Valcouleurs a battle at Rouvray, a
+hundred leagues away, does not communicate any lofty philosophic
+truths.[14] The phenomena of clairvoyance, in Hegel's opinion, merely
+indicate that the 'material' is really 'ideal,' which, perhaps, is as much
+as we can ask from them. 'The somnambulist and clairvoyant see without
+eyes, and carry their visions directly into regions where the waiting
+consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter' (Wallace). Hegel
+admits, however, that 'in ordinary self-possessed conscious life' there
+are traces of the 'magic tie,' 'especially between female friends of
+delicate nerves,' to whom he adds husband and wife, and members of the
+same family. He gives (without date or source) a case of a girl in Germany
+who saw her brother lying dead in a hospital at Valladolid. Her brother
+was at the time in the hospital, but it was another man in the nest bed
+who was dead. 'It is thus impossible to make out whether what the
+clairvoyants really see preponderates over what they deceive themselves
+in.'
+
+As long as the facts which Hegel accepted are not officially welcomed by
+science, it may seem superfluous to dispute as to whether they are
+attained by the lower or the higher stratum of our consciousness. But
+perhaps the question here at issue may be elucidated by some remarks of
+Dr. Max Dessoir. Psychology, he says, has proved that in every conception
+and idea an image or group of images must be present. These mental images
+are the recrudescence or recurrence of perceptions. We see a tree, or a
+man, or a dog, and whenever we have before our minds the conception or
+idea of any of these things the original perception of them returns,
+though of course more faintly. But in Dr. Dessoir's opinion these revived
+mental images would reach the height of actual hallucinations (so that the
+man, dog, or tree would seem visibly present) if other memories and new
+sensations did not compete with them and check their development.
+
+Suppose, to use Mlle. Ferrand's metaphor, a human body, living, but with
+all its channels of sensation hitherto unopened. Open the sense of sight
+to receive a flash of green colour, and close it again. Apparently,
+whenever the mind informing this body had the conception of green (and it
+could have no other) it would also have an hallucination of green, thus
+
+  'Annihilating all that's made,
+  To a green thought in a green shade.'
+
+Now, in sleep or hypnotic trance the competition of new sensations and
+other memories is removed or diminished, and therefore the idea of a man,
+dog, or tree once suggested to the hypnotised patient, does become an
+actual hallucination. The hypnotised patient sees the absent object which
+he is told to see, the sleeper sees things not really present.
+
+Our primitive state, before the enormous competition of other memories and
+new sensations set in, would thus be a state of hallucination. Our normal
+present condition, in which hallucination is checked by competing memories
+and new sensations, is a suppression of our original, primitive, natural
+tendencies. Hallucination represents 'the main trunk of our psychical
+existence.'[15] In Dr. Dessoir's theory this condition of hallucination
+is man's original and most primitive condition, but it is not a _higher_,
+rather a lower state of spiritual activity than the everyday practical
+unhallucinated consciousness.
+
+This is also the opinion of Hegel, who supposes our primitive mental
+condition to be capable of descrying objects remote in space and time. Mr.
+Myers, as we saw, is of the opposite opinion, as to the relative dignity
+and relative reality of the present everyday self, and the old original
+fundamental Self. Dr. Dessoir refrains from pronouncing a decided opinion
+as to whether the original, primitive, hallucinated self within us does
+'preside over powers and actions at a distance,' such as clairvoyance; but
+he believes in hypnotisation at a distance. His theory, like Hegel's, is
+that of 'atavism,' or 'throwing back' to some very remote ancestral
+condition. This will prove of interest later.
+
+Hegel, at all events, believed in the fact of clairvoyance (though deeming
+it of little practical use); he accepted telepathy ('the magic tie'); he
+accepted interchange of sensations between the hypnotiser and the
+hypnotised; he believed in the divining rod, and, unlike Kant, even in
+'Scottish second-sight.' 'The intuitive soul oversteps the conditions of
+time and space; it beholds things remote, things long past, and things to
+come.'[16]
+
+The pendulum of thought has swung back a long way from the point whither
+it was urged by David Hume. Hegel remarks: 'The facts, it might seem,
+first of all call for verification. But such verification would be
+superfluous to those on whose account it was called for, since they
+facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring the narratives,
+infinitely numerous though they be, and accredited by the education and
+character of the witnesses, to be mere deception and imposture. Their _a
+priori_ conceptions are so rooted that no testimony can avail against
+them, and they have even denied what they have seen with their own eyes,'
+and reported under their own hands, like Sir David Brewster. Hegel, it
+will be observed, takes the facts as given, and works them into his
+general theory of the Sensitive Soul (_fühlende Seele_). He does not try
+to establish the facts; but to establish, or at least to examine them, is
+the first business of Psychical Research. Theorising comes later.
+
+The years which have passed between the date of Hegel's 'Philosophy of
+Mind' and our own time have witnessed the long dispute over the existence,
+the nature, and the causes of the hypnotic condition, and over the reality
+and limitations of the phenomena. Thus the Academy of Medicine in Paris
+appointed a Committee to examine the subject in 1825. The Report on
+'Animal Magnetism,' as it was then styled, was presented in 1831. The
+Academy lacked the courage to publish it, for the Report was favourable
+even to certain of the still disputed phenomena. At that time, in
+accordance with a survival of the theory of Mesmer, the agent in hypnotic
+cases was believed to be a kind of efflux of a cosmic fluid from the
+'magnetiser' to the patient. There was 'a magnetic connection.'
+
+Though no distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is taken in popular
+language, 'mesmerism' is a word implying this theory of 'magnetic' or
+other unknown personal influence. 'Hypnotism,' as will presently be seen,
+implies no such theory. The Academy's Report (1831) attested the
+development, under 'magnetism,' of 'new faculties,' such as clairvoyance
+and intuition, also the production of 'great changes in the physical
+economy,' such as insensibility, and sudden increase of strength. The
+Report declared it to be 'demonstrated' that sleep could be produced
+'without suggestion,' as we say now, though the term was not then in use.
+'Sleep has been produced in circumstances in which the persons could not
+see or were ignorant of the means employed to produce it.'
+
+The Academy did its best to suppress this Report, which attests the
+phenomena that Hegel accepted, phenomena still disputed. Six years later
+(1837), a Committee reported against the pretensions of a certain Berna,
+a 'magnetiser.' No person acted on both Committees, and this Report was
+accepted. Later, a number of people tried to read a letter in a box, and
+failed. 'This,' says Mr. Vincent, 'settled the question with regard to
+clairvoyance;' though it might be more logical to say that it settled the
+pretensions of the competitors on that occasion. The Academy now decided
+that, because certain persons did not satisfy the expectations raised by
+their preliminary advertisements, therefore the question of magnetism was
+definitely closed.
+
+We have often to regret that scientific eminence is not always accompanied
+by scientific logic. Where science neglects a subject, charlatans and
+dupes take it up. In England 'animal magnetism' had been abandoned to this
+class of enthusiasts, till Thackeray's friend, Dr. Elliotson, devoted
+himself to the topic. He was persecuted as doctors know how to persecute;
+but in 1841, Braid, of Manchester, discovered that the so-called 'magnetic
+sleep' could be produced without any 'magnetism,' He made his patients
+stare fixedly at an object, and encouraged them to expect to go to sleep.
+He called his method 'Hypnotism,' a term which begs no question. Seeming
+to cease to be mysterious, hypnotism became all but respectable, and was
+being used in surgical operations, till it was superseded by chloroform.
+In England, the study has been, and remains, rather _suspect_, while on
+The Continent hypnotism is used both for healing purposes and in the
+inquiries of experimental psychology. Wide differences of opinion still
+exist, as to the nature of the hypnotic sleep, as to its physiological
+concomitants, and as to the limits of the faculties exercised in or out of
+the slumber. It is not even absolutely certain that the exercise of the
+stranger faculties--for instance, that the production of anaesthesia and
+rigidity--are the results merely of 'suggestion' and expectancy. A
+hypnotised patient is told that the middle finger of his left hand will
+become rigid and incapable of sensation. This occurs, and is explained by
+'suggestion,' though _how_ 'suggestion' produces the astonishing effect
+is another problem. The late Mr. Gurney, however, made a number of
+experiments in which no suggestion was pronounced, nor did the patients
+know which of their fingers was to become rigid and incapable of pain. The
+patient's hands were thrust through a screen; on the other side of which
+the hypnotist made passes above the finger which was to become rigid. The
+lookers-on selected the finger, and the insensibility was tested by a
+strong electric current. The effect was also produced _without_ passes,
+the operator merely pointing at the selected finger, and 'willing' the
+result. If he did not 'will' it, nothing occurred, nor did anything occur
+if he willed without pointing. The proximity of the operator's hand
+produced no effect if he did not 'will,' nor was his 'willing' successful
+if he did not bring his hand near that of the patient. Other people's
+hands, similarly situated, produced no effect.
+
+Experiments in transferring taste, as of salt, sugar, cayenne pepper, from
+operator to subject, were also successful. Drs. Janet and Gibert also
+produced sleep in a woman at a distance, by 'willing' it, at hours which
+were selected by a system of drawing lots.[17] These facts, of course,
+rather point to an element of truth in the old mesmeric hypothesis of some
+specific influence in the operator. They cannot very well be explained by
+suggestion and expectancy. But these facts and facts of clairvoyance and
+thought-transference will be rejected as superstitious delusions by people
+who have not met them in their own experience. This need not prevent us
+from examining them, because _all_ the facts, including those now
+universally accepted by Continental and scarcely impeached by British
+science, have been noisily rejected again and again on Hume's principles.
+
+The rarer facts, as Mr. Gurney remarks, 'still go through the hollow form
+of taking place.' Here is an example of the mode in which these phenomena
+are treated by popular science. Mr. Vincent says that 'clairvoyance and
+phrenology were Elliotson's constant stock in trade.' (Phrenology was
+also Braid's stock in trade.) 'It is a matter of congratulation to have
+been so soon delivered from what Dr. Lloyd Tuckey has well called "a mass
+of superincumbent rubbish."'[18] Clairvoyance is part of a mass of
+rubbish, on page 57. On page 67, Mr. Vincent says: 'There are many
+interesting questions, such as telepathy, thought-reading, clairvoyance,
+upon which it would be perhaps rash to give any decided opinion.... All
+these strange psychical conditions present problems of great interest,'
+and are only omitted because 'they have not a sufficient bearing on the
+normal states of hypnosis....' Thus what was 'rubbish' in one page
+'presents problems of great interest' ten pages later, and, after offering
+a decided opinion that clairvoyance is rubbish, Mr. Vincent thinks it rash
+to give any decided opinion. It is rather rash to give a decided opinion,
+and then to say that it is rash to do so.[19]
+
+This brief sketch shows that science is confronted by certain facts,
+which, in his time, Hume dismissed as incredible miracles, beneath the
+contempt of the wise and learned. We also see that the stranger and rarer
+phenomena which Hegel accepted as facts, and interwove with his general
+philosophy, are still matters of dispute. Admitted by some men of science,
+they are doubted by others; by others, again, are denied, while most of
+the journalists and authors of cheap primers, who inspire popular
+tradition, regard the phenomena as frauds or fables of superstition. But
+it is plain that these phenomena, like the more ordinary facts of
+hypnotism, _may_ finally be admitted by science. The scientific world
+laughed, not so long ago, at Ogham inscriptions, meteorites, and at
+palaeolithic weapons as impostures, or freaks of nature. Now nobody has
+any doubt on these matters, and clairvoyance, thought-transference, and
+telepathy may, not inconceivably, be as fortunate in the long run as
+meteorites, or as the more usual phenomena of hypnotism.
+
+It is only Lord Kelvin who now maintains, or lately maintained, that in
+hypnotism there is nothing at all but fraud and malobservation. In years
+to come it may be that only some similar belated voice will cry that in
+thought-transference there is nothing but malobservation and fraud. At
+present the serious attention and careful experiment needed for the
+establishment of the facts are more common among French than among English
+men of science. When published, these experiments, if they contain any
+affirmative instances, are denounced as 'superstitious,' or criticized
+after what we must charitably deem to be a very hasty glance, by the
+guides of popular opinion. Examples of this method will be later quoted.
+Meanwhile the disputes as to these alleged facts are noticed here, because
+of their supposed relation to the Origin of Religion.
+
+[Footnote 1: See Mr. Myers's paper on the 'Ancient Oracles,' in _Classical
+Essays_, and the author's 'Ancient Spiritualism,' in _Cock Lane and Common
+Sense_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The italics here are those of Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, in
+his _Miracles and Modern Science_. Mr. Huxley, in his exposure of Hume's
+fallacies (in his Life of Hume), did not examine the Jansenist 'miracles'
+which Hume was criticising.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Moll, _Hypnotism_, p. 357.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Animal Magnetism_, p. 355.]
+
+[Footnote 5: A translation of his work was published in the _New Review_,
+January 1693.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _La Vérité des Miracles_, Cologne, 1747, Septièmo
+Démonstration.]
+
+[Footnote 7: See Dr. Russell Reynolds's paper in _British Medical
+Journal_, November 1869.]
+
+[Footnote 8: James, _Principles of Psychology_, ii. 612. Charcot,
+op. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 9: I do not need to be told that Dr. Maudsley denied the fact in
+1886. I am prepared with the evidence, if it is asked for by some savant
+who happens not to know it.]
+
+[Footnote 10: I am not responsible, of course, for the scientific validity
+of Dr. Charcot's theory of healing 'by idea.' My point merely is that
+certain experts of no slight experience or mean reputation do now admit,
+as important certainties within their personal knowledge, exactly the
+phenomena which Hume asks the wise and learned to laugh at, indeed, but
+never to investigate.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Pp. 353-356.]
+
+[Footnote 12: P. 93.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Träume_, p. 76.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Hegel accepts the clairvoyance of the Pucelle.]
+
+[Footnote 15: See Dr. Dessoir, in _Das Doppel Ich,_ as quoted by Mr.
+Myers, _Proceedings_, vol. vi. 213.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Philosophie des Geistes, Werke,_ vol. vii. 179. Berlin.
+1845. The examples and much of the philosophising are in the _Zusätze_,
+not translated in Mr. Wallace's version, Oxford, 1894.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., vol. ii. pp. 201-207, 390-392.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Elements of Hypnotism_, p. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Possibly Mr. Vincent only means that Elliotson's
+experiments, 'little more than sober footing' (p. 57), with the sisters
+Okey, were rubbish. But whether the sisters Okey were or were not honest
+is a question on which we cannot enter here.]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION
+
+Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the
+new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough,
+Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of
+the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining. The British
+Association used to reject anthropological papers as 'vain dreams based on
+travellers' tales.' No doubt the British Association would reject a paper
+on clairvoyance as a vain dream based on old wives' fables, or on
+hysterical imposture. Undeniably the study of such themes is hampered by
+fable and fraud, just as anthropology has to be ceaselessly on its guard
+against 'travellers' tales,' against European misunderstandings of savage
+ideas, and against civilised notions and scientific theories unconsciously
+read into barbaric customs, rites, traditions, and usages. Man, _ondoyant
+et divers_, is the subject alike of anthropology and of psychical
+research. Man (especially savage man) cannot be secluded from disturbing
+influences, and watched, like the materials of a chemical experiment in a
+laboratory. Nor can man be caught in a 'primitive' state: his intellectual
+beginnings lie very far behind the stage of culture in which we find the
+lowest known races. Consequently the matter on which anthropology works is
+fluctuating; the evidence on which it rests needs the most sceptical
+criticism, and many of its conclusions, in the necessary absence of
+historical testimony as to times far behind the lowest known savages, must
+be hypothetical.
+
+For these sound reasons official science long looked askance on
+Anthropology. Her followers were not regarded as genuine scholars, and,
+perhaps as a result of this contempt, they were often 'broken men,'
+intellectual outlaws, people of one wild idea. To the scientific mind,
+anthropologists or ethnologists were a horde who darkly muttered of
+serpent worship, phallus worship, Arkite doctrines, and the Ten Lost
+Tribes that kept turning up in the most unexpected places. Anthropologists
+were said to gloat over dirty rites of dirty savages, and to seek reason
+where there was none. The exiled, the outcast, the pariah of Science, is,
+indeed, apt to find himself in odd company. Round the camp-fire of
+Psychical Research too, in the unofficial, unstaked waste of Science,
+hover odd, menacing figures of Esoteric Buddhists, _Satanistes_,
+Occultists, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, and Astrologers, as the
+Arkites and Lost Tribesmen haunted the cradle of anthropology.
+
+But there was found at last to be reason in the thing, and method in the
+madness. Evolution was in it. The acceptance, after long ridicule, of
+palaeolithic weapons as relics of human culture, probably helped to bring
+Anthropology within the sacred circle of permitted knowledge. Her topic
+was full of illustrations of the doctrine of Mr. Darwin. Modern writers on
+the theme had been anticipated by the less systematic students of the
+eighteenth century--Goguet, de Brosses, Millar, Fontenelle, Lafitau,
+Boulanger, or even Hume and Voltaire. As pioneers these writers answer to
+the early mesmerists and magnetists, Puységur, Amoretti, Ritter,
+Elliotson, Mayo, Gregory, in the history of Psychical Research. They
+were on the same track, in each case, as Lubbock, Tylor, Spencer,
+Bastian, and Frazer, or as Gurney, Richet, Myers, Janet, Dessoir, and Von
+Schrenck-Notzing. But the earlier students were less careful of method and
+evidence.
+
+Evidence! that was the stumbling block of anthropology. We still hear, in
+the later works of Mr. Max Müller, the echo of the old complaints.
+Anything you please, Mr. Max Müller says, you may find among your useful
+savages, and (in regard to some anthropologists) his criticism is just.
+You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil in hand, and pick out
+what suits your case. Suppose, as regards our present theme, your theory
+is that savages possess broken lights of the belief in a Supreme Being.
+You can find evidence for that. Or suppose you want to show that they have
+no religious ideas at all; you can find evidence for that also. Your
+testimony is often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the
+people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by one or
+other theory or bias. How can you pretend to raise a science on such
+foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or to
+mystify inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their
+most sacred institutions, or have never paid any attention to the subject?
+
+To all these perfectly natural objections Mr. Tylor has replied.[1]
+Evidence must be collected, sifted, tested, as in any other branch of
+inquiry. A writer, 'of course, is bound to use his best judgment as to
+the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and, if possible, to obtain
+several accounts to certify each point in each locality.' Mr. Tylor then
+adduces 'the test of recurrence,' of undesigned coincidence in testimony,
+as Millar had already argued in the last century.[2] If a mediaeval
+Mahommedan in Tartary, a Jesuit in Brazil, a Wesleyan in Fiji, one may add
+a police magistrate in Australia, a Presbyterian in Central Africa, a
+trapper in Canada, agree in describing some analogous rite or myth in
+these diverse lands and ages, we cannot set down the coincidence to chance
+or fraud. 'Now, the most important facts of ethnography are vouched for in
+this way.'
+
+We may add that even when the ideas of savages are obscure, we can
+often detect them by analysis of the institutions in which they are
+expressed.[3]
+
+Thus anthropological, like psychical or any other evidence, must be
+submitted to conscientious processes of testing and sifting. Contradictory
+instances must be hunted for sedulously. Nothing can be less scientific
+than to snatch up any traveller's tale which makes for our theory, and to
+ignore evidence, perhaps earlier, or later, or better observed, which
+makes against it. Yet this, unfortunately, in certain instances (which
+will be adduced) has been the occasional error of Mr. Huxley and Mr.
+Spencer.[4] Mr. Spencer opens his 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' by the
+remark that 'the implication [from the reported absence of the ideas of
+belief in persons born deaf and dumb] is that the religious ideas of
+civilised men are not innate' (who says they are?), and this implication
+Mr. Spencer supports by 'proofs that among various savages religious ideas
+do not exist.' 'Sir John Lubbock has given many of these.' But it would be
+well to advise the reader to consult Roskoff's confutation of Sir John
+Lubbock, and Mr. Tylor's masterly statement.[5] Mr. Spencer cited Sir
+Samuel Baker for savages without even 'a ray of superstition' or a trace
+of worship. Mr. Tylor, twelve years before Mr. Spencer wrote, had
+demolished Sir Samuel Baker's assertion,[6] as regards many tribes, and so
+shaken it as regards the Latukas, quoted by Mr. Spencer. The godless
+Dinkas have 'a good deity and heaven-dwelling creator,' carefully recorded
+years before Sir Samuel's 'rash denial.' We show later that Mr. Spencer,
+relying on a single isolated sentence in Brough Smyth, omits all his
+essential information about the Australian Supreme Being; while Mr.
+Huxley--overlooking the copious and conclusive evidence as to their
+ethical religion--charges the Australians with having merely a non-moral
+belief in casual spirits. We have also to show that Mr. Huxley, under the
+dominance of his theory, and inadvertently, quotes a good authority as
+saying the precise reverse of what he really does say.
+
+If the facts not fitting their theories are little observed by authorities
+so popular as Mr. Huxley and Mr. Spencer; if _instantiae contradictoriae_
+are ignored by them, or left vague; if these things are done in the green
+tree, we may easily imagine what shall be done in the dry. But we need not
+war with hasty _vulgarisateurs_ and headlong theorists.
+
+Enough has been said to show the position of anthropology as regards
+evidence, and to prove that, if he confines his observations to certain
+anthropologists, the censures of Mr. Max Müller are justified. It is
+mainly for this reason that the arguments presently to follow are strung
+on the thread of Mr. Tylor's truly learned and accurate book, 'Primitive
+Culture.'
+
+Though but recently crept forth, _vix aut ne vix quidem_, from the chill
+shade of scientific disdain, Anthropology adopts the airs of her elder
+sisters among the sciences, and is as severe as they to the Cinderella of
+the family, Psychical Research. She must murmur of her fairies among the
+cinders of the hearth, while they go forth to the ball, and dance with
+provincial mayors at the festivities of the British Association. This is
+ungenerous, and unfortunate, as the records of anthropology are rich in
+unexamined materials of psychical research. I am unacquainted with any
+work devoted by an anthropologist of renown to the hypnotic and kindred
+practices of the lower races, except Herr Bastian's very meagre tract,
+'Über psychische Beobachtungen bei Naturvölkern.'[7] We possess, none the
+less, a mass of scattered information on this topic, the savage side of
+psychical phenomena, in works of travel, and in Mr. Tylor's monumental
+'Primitive Culture.' Mr. Tylor, however, as we shall see, regards it as a
+matter of indifference, or, at least, as a matter beyond the scope of his
+essay, to decide whether the parallel supernormal phenomena believed
+in by savages, and said to recur in civilisation, are facts of actual
+experience, or not.
+
+Now, this question is not otiose. Mr. Tylor, like other anthropologists,
+Mr. Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and their followers and popularisers,
+constructs on anthropological grounds, a theory of the Origin of Religion.
+
+That origin anthropology explains as the result of early and fallacious
+reasonings on a number of biological and psychological phenomena, both
+normal and (as is alleged by savages) supernormal. These reasonings led to
+the belief in souls and spirits. Now, first, anthropology has taken for
+granted that the Supreme Deities of savages are envisaged by them as
+'spirits.' This, paradoxical as the statement may appear, is just what
+does not seem to be proved, as we shall show. Next, if the supernormal
+phenomena (clairvoyance, thought-transference, phantasms of the dead,
+phantasms of the dying, and others) be real matters of experience, the
+inferences drawn from them by early savage philosophy may be, in some
+degree, erroneous. But the inferences drawn by materialists who reject the
+supernormal phenomena will also, perhaps, be, let us say, incomplete.
+Religion will have been, in part, developed out of facts, perhaps
+inconsistent with materialism in its present dogmatic form. To put it less
+trenchantly, and perhaps more accurately, the alleged facts 'are not
+merely dramatically strange, they are not merely extraordinary and
+striking, but they are "odd" in the sense that they will not easily fit in
+with the views which physicists and men of science generally give us of
+the universe in which we live' (Mr. A.J. Balfour, President's Address,
+'Proceedings,' S.P.R. vol. x. p. 8, 1894).
+
+As this is the case, it might seem to be the business of Anthropology, the
+Science of Man, to examine, among other things, the evidence for the
+actual existence of those alleged unusual and supernormal phenomena,
+belief in which is given as one of the origins of religion.
+
+To make this examination, in the ethnographic field, is almost a new
+labour. As we shall see, anthropologists have not hitherto investigated
+such things as the 'Fire-walk' of savages, uninjured in the flames, like
+the Three Holy Children. The world-wide savage practice of divining by
+hallucinations induced through gazing into a smooth deep (crystal-gazing)
+has been studied, I think, by no anthropologist. The veracity of
+'messages' uttered by savage seers when (as they suppose) 'possessed' or
+'inspired' has not been criticised, and probably cannot be, for lack of
+detailed information. The 'physical phenomena' which answer among savages
+to the use of the 'divining rod,' and to 'spiritist' marvels in modern
+times, have only been glanced at. In short, all the savage parallels
+to the so-called 'psychical phenomena' now under discussion in England,
+America, Germany, Italy, and France, have escaped critical analysis and
+comparison with their civilised counterparts.
+
+An exception among anthropologists is Mr. Tylor. He has not suppressed the
+existence of these barbaric parallels to our modern problems of this kind.
+But his interest in them practically ends when he has shown that the
+phenomena helped to originate the savage belief in 'spirits,' and when he
+has displayed the 'survival' of that belief in later culture. He does not
+ask 'Are the phenomena real?' he is concerned only with the savage
+philosophy of the phenomena and with its relics in modern spiritism and
+religion. My purpose is to do, by way only of _ébauche_, what neither
+anthropology nor psychical research nor psychology has done: to put the
+savage and modern phenomena side by side. Such evidence as we can give for
+the actuality of the modern experiences will, so far as it goes, raise a
+presumption that the savage beliefs, however erroneous, however darkened
+by fraud and fancy, repose on a basis of real observation of actual
+phenomena.
+
+Anthropology is concerned with man and what is in man--_humani nihil
+a se alienum putat_. These researches, therefore, are within the
+anthropological province, especially as they bear on the prevalent
+anthropological theory of the Origin of Religion. By 'religion' we mean,
+for the purpose of this argument, the belief in the existence of an
+Intelligence, or Intelligences not human, and not dependent on a material
+mechanism of brain and nerves, which may, or may not, powerfully control
+men's fortunes and the nature of things. We also mean the additional
+belief that there is, in man, an element so far kindred to these
+Intelligences that it can transcend the knowledge obtained through the
+known bodily senses, and may possibly survive the death of the body. These
+two beliefs at present (though not necessarily in their origin) appear
+chiefly as the faith in God and in the Immortality of the Soul.
+
+It is important, then, to trace, if possible, the origin of these two
+beliefs. If they arose in actual communion with Deity (as the first at
+least did, in the theory of the Hebrew Scriptures), or if they could be
+proved to arise in an unanalysable _sensus numinis_, or even in 'a
+perception of the Infinite' (Max Müller), religion would have a divine, or
+at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but
+be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained,
+therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is
+true. The atheist, or non-theist, of course draws no such inferences.
+
+But if religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary
+form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a
+blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but
+unessential refinements on that blunder, the inference that religion is
+untrue--that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis--is very easily
+drawn. The inference is not, perhaps, logical, for all our science itself
+is the result of progressive refinements upon hypotheses originally
+erroneous, fashioned to explain facts misconceived. Yet our science is
+true, within its limits, though very far from being exhaustive of the
+truth. In the same way, it might be argued, our religion, even granting
+that it arose out of primitive fallacies and false hypotheses, may yet
+have been refined, as science has been, through a multitude of causes,
+into an approximate truth.
+
+Frequently as I am compelled to differ from Mr. Spencer both as to facts
+and their interpretation, I am happy to find that he has anticipated me
+here. Opponents will urge, he says, that 'if the primitive belief' (in
+ghosts) 'was absolutely false, all derived beliefs from it must be
+absolutely false?' Mr. Spencer replies: 'A germ of truth was contained in
+the primitive conception--the truth, namely, that the power which
+manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of
+the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness.' In fact, we find
+Mr. Spencer, like Faust as described by Marguerite, saying much the same
+thing as the priests, but not quite in the same way. Of course, I allow
+for a much larger 'germ of truth' in the origin of the ghost theory than
+Mr. Spencer does. But we can both say 'the ultimate form of the religious
+consciousness is' (will be?) 'the final development of a consciousness
+which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous
+errors.'[8]
+
+  'One God, one law, one element,
+  And one far-off divine event,
+  To which the whole creation moves.'
+
+Coming at last to Mr. Tylor, we find that he begins by dismissing the idea
+that any known race of men is devoid of religious conceptions. He
+disproves, out of their own mouths, the allegations of several writers who
+have made this exploded assertion about 'godless tribes.' He says:
+'The thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to
+intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the
+very origin of human civilisation, _perhaps even of human existence_.'[9]
+So far we abound in Mr. Tylor's sense. 'As a minimum definition of
+religion' he gives 'the belief in spiritual beings,' which appears
+'among all low races with whom we have attained to thoroughly intimate
+relations.' The existence of this belief at present does not prove that no
+races were ever, at any time, destitute of all belief. But it prevents us
+from positing the existence of such creedless races, in any age, as a
+demonstrated fact. We have thus, in short, no opportunity of observing,
+_historically_, man's development from blank unbelief into even the
+minimum or most rudimentary form of belief. We can only theorise and make
+more or less plausible conjectures as to the first rudiments of human
+faith in God and in spiritual beings. We find no race whose mind, as to
+faith, is a _tabula rasa_.
+
+To the earliest faith Mr. Tylor gives the name of _Animism_, a term not
+wholly free from objection, though 'Spiritualism' is still less desirable,
+having been usurped by a form of modern superstitiousness. This Animism,
+'in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future
+state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits.' In Mr. Tylor's
+opinion, as in Mr. Huxley's, Animism, in its lower (and earlier) forms,
+has scarcely any connection with ethics. Its 'spirits' do not 'make for
+righteousness.' This is a side issue to be examined later, but we may
+provisionally observe, in passing, that the ethical ideas, such as they
+are, even of Australian blacks are reported to be inculcated at the
+religious mysteries (_Bora_) of the tribes, which were instituted by and
+are performed in honour of the gods of their native belief. But this topic
+must be reserved for our closing chapters.
+
+Mr. Tylor, however, is chiefly concerned with Animism as 'an ancient and
+world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory, and worship is the
+practice.' Given Animism, then, or the belief in spiritual beings, as the
+earliest form and minimum of religious faith, what is the origin of
+Animism? It will be seen that, by Animism, Mr. Tylor does not mean the
+alleged early theory, implicitly if not explicitly and consciously held,
+that all things whatsoever are animated and are personalities.[10] Judging
+from the behaviour of little children, and from the myths of savages,
+early man may have half-consciously extended his own sense of personal and
+potent and animated existence to the whole of nature as known to him. Not
+only animals, but vegetables and inorganic objects, may have been looked
+on by him as persons, like what he felt himself to be. The child (perhaps
+merely because _taught_ to do so) beats the naughty chair, and all objects
+are persons in early mythology. But this _feeling_, rather than theory,
+may conceivably have existed among early men, before they developed the
+hypothesis of 'spirits,' 'ghosts,' or souls. It is the origin of _that_
+hypothesis, 'Animism,' which Mr. Tylor investigates.
+
+What, then, is the origin of Animism? It arose in the earliest traceable
+speculations on 'two groups of biological problems:
+
+(1) 'What is it that makes the difference between a living body and a
+dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death?'
+
+(2) 'What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and
+visions?'[11]
+
+Here it should be noted that Mr. Tylor most properly takes a distinction
+between sleeping 'dreams' and waking 'visions,' or 'clear vision.' The
+distinction is made even by the blacks of Australia. Thus one of the
+Kurnai announced that his _Yambo_, or soul, could 'go out' during sleep,
+and see the distant and the dead. But 'while any one might be able to
+communicate with the ghosts, _during sleep_, it was only the wizards who
+were able to do so in waking hours.' A wizard, in fact, is a person
+susceptible (or feigning to be susceptible) when awake to hallucinatory
+perceptions of phantasms of the dead. 'Among the Kulin of Wimmera River a
+man became a wizard who, as a boy, had seen his mother's ghost sitting at
+her grave.'[12] These facts prove that a race of savages at the bottom of
+the scale of culture do take a formal distinction between normal dreams in
+sleep and waking hallucinations--a thing apt to be denied.
+
+Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer offers the massive generalisation that savages do
+not possess a language enabling a man to say 'I dreamed that I saw,'
+instead of 'I saw' ('Principles of Sociology,' p. 150). This could only be
+proved by giving examples of such highly deficient languages, which Mr.
+Spencer does not do.[13] In many savage speculations there occur ideas as
+subtly metaphysical as those of Hegel. Moreover, even the Australian
+languages have the verb 'to see,' and the substantive 'sleep.' Nothing,
+then, prevents a man from saying 'I saw in sleep' (_insomnium_,
+[Greek: enupnion]).
+
+We have shown too, that the Australians take an essential distinction
+between waking hallucinations (ghosts seen by a man when awake) and the
+common hallucinations of slumber. Anybody can have these; the man who sees
+ghosts when awake is marked out for a wizard.
+
+At the same time the vividness of dreams among certain savages, as
+recorded in Mr. Im Thurn's 'Indians of Guiana,' and the consequent
+confusion of dreaming and waking experiences, are certain facts. Wilson
+says the same of some negroes, and Mr. Spencer illustrates from the
+confusion of mind in dreamy children. They, we know, are much more
+addicted to somnambulism than grown-up people. I am unaware that
+spontaneous somnambulism among savages has been studied as it ought to be.
+I have demonstrated, however, that very low savages can and do draw an
+essential distinction between sleeping and waking hallucinations.
+
+Again, the crystal-gazer, whose apparently telepathic crystal pictures are
+discussed later (chap. v.), was introduced to a crystal just because she
+had previously been known to be susceptible to waking and occasionally
+veracious hallucinations.
+
+It was not only on the dreams of sleep, so easily forgotten as they are,
+that the savage pondered, in his early speculations about the life and the
+soul. He included in his materials the much more striking and memorable
+experiences of waking hours, as we and Mr. Tylor agree in holding.
+
+Reflecting on these things, the earliest savage reasoners would decide:
+(1) that man has a 'life' (which leaves him temporarily in sleep, finally
+in death); (2) that man also possesses a 'phantom' (which appears to
+other people in their visions and dreams). The savage philosopher would
+then 'combine his information,' like a celebrated writer on Chinese
+metaphysics. He would merely 'combine the life and the phantom,' as
+'manifestations of one and the same soul.' The result would be 'an
+apparitional soul,' or 'ghost-soul.'
+
+This ghost-soul would be a highly accomplished creature, 'a vapour, film,
+or shadow,' yet conscious, capable of leaving the body, mostly invisible
+and impalpable, 'yet also manifesting physical power,' existing and
+appearing after the death of the body, able to act on the bodies of other
+men, beasts, and things.[14]
+
+When the earliest reasoners, in an age and in mental conditions of which
+we know nothing historically, had evolved the hypothesis of this
+conscious, powerful, separable soul, capable of surviving the death of the
+body, it was not difficult for them to develop the rest of Religion, as
+Mr. Tylor thinks. A powerful ghost of a dead man might thrive till, its
+original owner being long forgotten, it became a God. Again (souls once
+given) it would not be a very difficult logical leap, perhaps, to conceive
+of souls, or spirits, that had never been human at all. It is, we may say,
+only _le premier pas qui coûte_, the step to the belief in a surviving
+separable soul. Nevertheless, when we remember that Mr. Tylor is
+theorising about savages in the dim background of human evolution, savages
+whom we know nothing of by experience, savages far behind Australians and
+Bushmen (who possess Gods), we must admit that he credits them with great
+ingenuity, and strong powers of abstract reasoning. He may be right in his
+opinion. In the same way, just as primitive men were keen reasoners, so
+early bees, more clever than modern bees, may have evolved the system of
+hexagonal cells, and only an early fish of genius could first have hit
+on the plan, now hereditary of killing a fly by blowing water at it.
+
+To this theory of metaphysical genius in very low savages I have no
+objection to offer. We shall find, later, astonishing examples of savage
+abstract speculation, certainly not derived from missionary sources,
+because wholly out of the missionary's line of duty and reflection.
+
+As early beasts had genius, so the earliest reasoners appear to have been
+as logically gifted as the lowest savages now known to us, or even as some
+Biblical critics. By Mr. Tylor's hypothesis, they first conceived the
+extremely abstract idea of Life, 'that which makes the difference between
+a living body and a dead one.'[15] This highly abstract conception must
+have been, however, the more difficult to early man, as, to him, all
+things, universally, are 'animated.'[16] Mr. Tylor illustrates this
+theory of early man by the little child's idea that 'chairs, sticks, and
+wooden horses are actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and
+children and kittens.... In such matters the savage mind well represents
+the childish stage.'[17]
+
+Now, nothing can be more certain than that, if children think sticks are
+animated, they don't think so because they have heard, or discovered, that
+they possess souls, and then transfer souls to sticks. We may doubt, then,
+if primitive man came, in this way, by reasoning on souls, to suppose
+that all things, universally, were animated. But if he did think all
+things animated--a corpse, to his mind, was just as much animated as
+anything else. Did he reason: 'All things are animated. A corpse is not
+animated. Therefore a corpse is not a thing (within the meaning of my
+General Law)'?
+
+How, again, did early man conceive of Life, before he identified Life
+(1) with 'that which makes the difference between a living body and a dead
+one' (a difference which, _ex hypothesi_, he did not draw, _all_ things
+being animated to his mind) and (2) with 'those human shapes which appear
+in dreams and visions'? 'The ancient savage philosophers probably reached
+the obvious inference that every man had two things belonging to him, a
+life and a phantom.' But everything was supposed to have 'a life,' as far
+as one makes out, before the idea of separable soul was developed, at
+least if savages arrived at the theory of universal animation as children
+are said to do.
+
+We are dealing here quite conjecturally with facts beyond our experience.
+
+In any case, early man excogitated (by the hypothesis) the abstract idea
+of Life, _before_ he first 'envisaged' it in material terms as 'breath,'
+or 'shadow.' He next decided that mere breath or shadow was not only
+identical with the more abstract conception of Life, but could also take
+on forms as real and full-bodied as, to him, are the hallucinations of
+dream or waking vision. His reasoning appears to have proceeded from the
+more abstract (the idea of Life) to the more concrete, to the life first
+shadowy and vaporous, then clothed in the very aspect of the real man.
+
+Mr. Tylor has thus (whether we follow his logic or not) provided man with
+a theory of active, intelligent, separable souls, which can survive the
+death of the body. At this theory early man arrived by speculations on the
+nature of life, and on the causes of phantasms of the dead or living
+beheld in 'dreams and visions.' But our author by no means leaves out of
+sight the effects of alleged supernormal phenomena believed in by savages,
+with their parallels in modern civilisation. These supernormal phenomena,
+whether real or illusory, are, he conceives, facts in that mass of
+experiences from which savages constructed their belief in separable,
+enduring, intelligent souls or ghosts, the foundation of religion.
+
+While we are, perhaps owing to our own want of capacity, puzzled by what
+seem to be two kinds of early philosophy--(1) a sort of instinctive or
+unreasoned belief in universal animation, which Mr. Spencer calls
+'Animism' and does not believe in, (2) the reasoned belief in separable
+and surviving souls of men (and in things), which Mr. Spencer believes in,
+and Mr. Tylor calls 'Animism'--we must also note another difficulty. Mr.
+Tylor may seem to be taking it for granted that the earliest, remote,
+unknown thinkers on life and the soul were existing on the same psychical
+plane as we ourselves, or, at least, as modern savages. Between modern
+savages and ourselves, in this regard, he takes certain differences, but
+takes none between modern savages and the remote founders of religion.
+
+Thus Mr. Tylor observes:
+
+'The condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on
+such slight excitement into positive hallucination, is rather the rule
+than the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes,
+whose minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a
+gesture, an unaccustomed noise.'[18]
+
+I find evidence that low contemporary savages are _not_ great ghost-seers,
+and, again, I cannot quite accept Mr. Tylor's psychology of the 'modern
+ghost-seer.' Most such favoured persons whom I have known were steady,
+unimaginative, unexcitable people, with just one odd experience. Lord
+Tennyson, too, after sleeping in the bed of his recently lost father on
+purpose to see his ghost, decided that ghosts 'are not seen by imaginative
+people.'
+
+We now examine, at greater length, the psychical conditions in which,
+according to Mr. Tylor, contemporary savages differ from civilised men.
+Later we shall ask what may be said as to possible or presumable psychical
+differences between modern savages and the datelessly distant founders of
+the belief in souls. Mr. Tylor attributes to the lower races, and
+even to races high above their level, 'morbid ecstasy, brought on by
+meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease.' Now, we may
+still 'meditate'--and how far the result is 'morbid' is a matter for
+psychologists and pathologists to determine. Fasting we do not practise
+voluntarily, nor would we easily accept evidence from an Englishman as to
+the veracity of voluntary fasting visions, like those of Cotton Mather.
+The visions of disease we should set aside, as a rule, with those of
+'excitement,' produced, for instance, by 'devil-dances.' Narcotic and
+alcoholic visions are not in question.[19] For our purpose the _induced_
+trances of savages (in whatever way voluntarily brought on) are analogous
+to the modern induced hypnotic trance. Any supernormal acquisitions of
+knowledge in these induced conditions, among savages, would be on a par
+with similar alleged experiences of persons under hypnotism.
+
+We do not differ from known savages in being able to bring on non-normal
+psychological conditions, but we produce these, as a rule, by other
+methods than theirs, and such experiments are not made on _all_ of us, as
+they were on all Red Indian boys and girls in the 'medicine-fast,' at
+the age of puberty.
+
+Further, in their normal state, known savages, or some of them, are more
+'suggestible' than educated Europeans at least.[20] They can be more
+easily hallucinated in their normal waking state by suggestion. Once more,
+their intervals of hunger, followed by gorges of food, and their lack of
+artificial light, combine to make savages more apt to see what is not
+there than are comfortable educated white men. But Mr. Tylor goes too far
+when he says 'where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has
+come to amuse himself with fancies.'[21] The civilised man, beyond all
+doubt, is capable of being _enfantosmé_.
+
+In all that he says on this point, the point of psychical condition, Mr.
+Tylor is writing about known savages as they differ from ourselves. But
+the savages who _ex hypothesi_ evolved the doctrine of souls lie beyond
+our ken, far behind the modern savages, among whom we find belief not
+only in souls and ghosts, but in moral gods. About the psychical condition
+of the savages who worked out the theory of souls and founded religion we
+necessarily know nothing. If there be such experiences as clairvoyance,
+telepathy, and so on, these unknown ancestors of ours may (for all that we
+can tell) have been peculiarly open to them, and therefore peculiarly apt
+to believe in separable souls. In fact, when we write about these far-off
+founders of religion, we guess in the dark, or by the flickering light of
+analogy. The lower animals have faculties (as in their power of finding
+their way home through new unknown regions, and in the ants' modes of
+acquiring and communicating knowledge to each other) which are mysteries
+to us. The terror of dogs in 'haunted houses' and of horses in passing
+'haunted' scenes has often been reported, and is alluded to briefly by Mr.
+Tylor. Balaam's ass, and the dogs which crouched and whined before Athene,
+whom Eumaeus could not see, are 'classical' instances.
+
+The weakness of the anthropological argument here is, we must repeat, that
+we know little more about the mental condition and experiences of the
+early thinkers who developed the doctrine of Souls than we know about
+the mental condition and experiences of the lower animals. And the more
+firmly a philosopher believes in the Darwinian hypothesis, the less, he
+must admit, can he suppose himself to know about the twilight ages,
+between the lower animal and the fully evolved man. What kind of creature
+was man when he first conceived the germs, or received the light,
+of Religion? All is guess-work here! We may just allude to Hegel's
+theory that clairvoyance and hypnotic phenomena are produced in a
+kind of temporary _atavism_, or 'throwing hack' to a remotely ancient
+condition of the 'sensitive soul' (_füklende Seele_). The 'sensitive'
+[unconditioned, clairvoyant] faculty or 'soul' is 'a disease when it
+becomes a state of the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human
+being of civilisation.'[22] 'Second sight,' Hegel thinks, was a product
+of an earlier day and earlier mental condition than ours.
+
+Approaching this almost untouched subject--the early psychical condition
+of man--not from the side of metaphysical speculations like Hegel, but
+with the instruments of modern psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir,
+of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at
+somewhat similar conclusions. 'This fully conscious life of the spirit,'
+in which we moderns now live, 'seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex
+action of a hallucinatory type.' Our actual modern condition is _not_
+'fundamental,' and 'hallucination represents, at least in its nascent
+condition, the main trunk of our psychical existence.'[23]
+
+Now, suppose that the remote and unknown ancestors of ours who first
+developed the doctrine of souls had not yet spread far from 'the main
+trunk of our psychical existence,' far from constant hallucination. In
+that case (at least, according to Dr. Dessoir's theory) their psychical
+experiences would be such as we cannot estimate, yet cannot leave, as a
+possibility influencing religion, out of our calculations.
+
+If early men were ever in a condition in which telepathy and clairvoyance
+(granting their possibility) were prevalent, one might expect that
+faculties so useful would be developed in the struggle for existence. That
+they are deliberately cultivated by modern savages we know. The Indian
+foster-mother of John Tanner used, when food was needed, to suggest
+herself into an hypnotic condition, so that she became _clairvoyante_ as
+to the whereabouts of game. Tanner, an English boy, caught early
+by the Indians, was sceptical, but came to practise the same art, not
+unsuccessfully, himself.[24] His reminiscences, which he dictated on his
+return to civilisation, were certainly not feigned in the interests of any
+theories. But the most telepathic human stocks, it may be said, ought,
+_ceteris paribus_, to have been the most successful in the struggle
+for existence. We may infer that the _cetera_ were not _paria_, the
+clairvoyant state not being precisely the best for the practical business
+of life. But really we know nothing of the psychical state of the earliest
+men. They may have had experiences tending towards a belief in 'spirits,'
+of which we can tell nothing. We are obliged to guess, in considerable
+ignorance of the actual conditions, and this historical ignorance
+inevitably besets all anthropological speculation about the origin of
+religion.
+
+The knowledge of our nescience as to the psychical condition of our first
+thinking ancestors may suggest hesitation as to taking it for granted that
+early man was on our own or on the modern savage level in 'psychical'
+experience. Even savage races, as Mr. Tylor justly says, attribute
+superior psychical knowledge to neighbouring tribes on a yet lower level
+of culture than themselves. The Finn esteems the Lapp sorcerers above his
+own; the Lapp yields to the superior pretensions of the Samoyeds. There
+may be more ways than one of explaining this relative humility: there is
+Hegel's way and there is Mr. Tylor's way. We cannot be certain, _a
+priori_, that the earliest man knew no more of supernormal or apparently
+supernormal experiences than we commonly do, or that these did not
+influence his thoughts on animism.
+
+It is an example of the chameleon-like changes of science (even of
+'science falsely so called' if you please) that when he wrote his book, in
+1871, Mr. Tylor could not possibly have anticipated this line of argument.
+
+'Psychical planes' had not been invented; hypnotism, with its problems,
+had not been much noticed in England. But 'Spiritualism' was flourishing.
+Mr. Tylor did not ignore this revival of savage philosophy. He saw very
+well that the end of the century was beholding the partial rehabilitation
+of beliefs which were scouted from 1660 to 1850. Seventy years ago, as Mr.
+Tylor says, Dr. Macculloch, in his 'Description of the Western Islands of
+Scotland,' wrote of 'the famous Highland second sight' that 'ceasing to be
+believed it has ceased to exist.'[25]
+
+Dr. Macculloch was mistaken in his facts. 'Second sight' has never
+ceased to exist (or to be believed to exist), and it has recently been
+investigated in the 'Journal' of the Caledonian Medical Society. Mr. Tylor
+himself says that it has been 'reinstated in a far larger range of
+society, and under far better circumstances of learning and prosperity.'
+This fact he ascribes generally to 'a direct revival from the regions of
+savage philosophy and peasant folklore,' a revival brought about in great
+part by the writings of Swedenborg. To-day things have altered. The
+students now interested in this whole class of alleged supernormal
+phenomena are seldom believers in the philosophy of Spiritualism in the
+American sense of the word.[26]
+
+Mr. Tylor, as we have seen, attributes the revival of interest in this
+obscure class of subjects to the influence of Swedenborg. It is true, as
+has been shown, that Swedenborg attracted the attention of Kant. But
+modern interest has chiefly been aroused and kept alive by the phenomena
+of hypnotism. The interest is now, among educated students, really
+scientific.
+
+Thus Mr. William James, Professor of Psychology in the University of
+Harvard, writes:
+
+'I was attracted to this subject (Psychical Research) some years ago by
+my love of fair play in Science.'[27]
+
+Mr. Tylor is not incapable of appreciating this attitude. Even the
+so-called 'spirit manifestations,' he says, 'should be discussed on their
+merits,' and the investigation 'would seem apt to throw light on some most
+interesting psychological questions.' Nothing can be more remote from the
+logic of Hume.
+
+The ideas of Mr. Tylor on the causes of the origin of religion are
+now criticised, not from the point of view of spiritualism, but of
+experimental psychology. We hold that very probably there exist human
+faculties of unknown scope; that these conceivably were more powerful
+and prevalent among our very remote ancestors who founded religion; that
+they may still exist in savage as in civilised races, and that they may
+have confirmed, if they did not originate, the doctrine of separable
+souls. If they _do_ exist, the circumstance is important, in view of the
+fact that modern ideas rest on a denial of their existence.
+
+Mr. Tylor next examines the savage and other _names_ for the ghost-soul,
+such as shadow (_umbra_), breath (_spiritus_), and he gives cases in
+which the _shadow_ of a man is regarded as equivalent to his _life_. Of
+course, the shadow in the sunlight does not resemble the phantasm in a
+dream. The two, however, were combined and identified by early thinkers,
+while _breath_ and _heart_ were used as symbols of 'that in men which
+makes them live,' a phrase found among the natives of Nicaragua in 1528.
+The confessedly symbolical character of the phrase, 'it is _not_
+precisely the heart, but that in them which makes them live,' proves that
+to the speaker life was _not_ 'heart' or 'breath,' but that these terms
+were known to be material word-counters for the conception of life.[1]
+Whether the earliest thinkers identified heart, breath, shadow, with life,
+or whether they consciously used words of material origin to denote an
+immaterial conception, of course we do not know. But the word in the
+latter case would react on the thought, till the Roman inhaled (as his
+life?) the last breath of his dying kinsman, he well knowing that the
+Manes of the said kinsman were elsewhere, and not to be inhaled.
+
+Subdivisions and distinctions were then recognised, as of the Egyptian
+_Ka_, the 'double,' the Karen _kelah_, or 'personal life-phantom'
+(_wraith_), on one side, and the Karen _thah_, 'the responsible moral
+soul,' on the other. The Roman _umbra_ hovers about the grave, the _manes_
+go to Orcus, the _spiritus_ seeks the stars.
+
+We are next presented with a crowd of cases in which sickness or lethargy
+is ascribed by savages to the absence of the patient's spirit, or of one
+of his spirits. This idea of migratory spirit is next used by savages to
+explain certain proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer. His soul,
+or one of his souls is thought to go forth to distant places in quest of
+information, while the seer, perhaps, remains lethargic. Probably, in the
+struggle for existence, he lost more by being lethargic than he gained by
+being clairvoyant!
+
+Now, here we touch the first point in Mr. Tylor's theory, where a critic
+may ask, Was this belief in the wandering abroad of the seer's spirit a
+theory not only false in its form (as probably it is), but also wholly
+unbased on experiences which might raise a presumption in favour of the
+existence of phenomena really supernormal? By 'supernormal' experiences I
+here mean such as the acquisition by a human mind of knowledge which could
+not be obtained by it through the recognised channels of sensation. Say,
+for the sake of argument, that a person, savage or civilised, obtains in
+trance information about distant places or events, to him unknown, and,
+through channels of sense, unknowable. The savage will explain this by
+saying that the seer's soul, shadow, or spirit, wandered out of the body
+to the distant scene. This is, at present, an unverified theory. But
+still, for the sake of argument, suppose that the seer did honestly
+obtain this information in trance, lethargy, or hypnotic sleep, or any
+other condition. If so, the modern savage (or his more gifted ancestors)
+would have other grounds for his theory of the wandering soul than any
+ground presented by normal occurrences, ordinary dreams, shadows, and so
+forth. Again, in human nature there would be (if such things occur) a
+potentiality of experiences other and stranger than materialism will admit
+as possible. It will (granting the facts) be impossible to aver that there
+is _nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu_. The soul will be not
+_ce qu'un vain peuple pense_ under the new popular tradition, and the
+savage's theory of the spirit will be, at least in part, based on other
+than normal and every-day facts. That condition in which the seer acquires
+information, not otherwise accessible, about events remote in space, is
+what the mesmerists of the mid-century called 'travelling clairvoyance.'
+
+If such an experience be _in rerum natura_, it will not, of course,
+justify the savage's theory that the soul is a separable entity, capable
+of voyaging, and also capable of existing after the death of the body. But
+it will give the savage a better excuse for his theory than normal
+experiences provide; and will even raise a presumption that reflection on
+mere ordinary experiences--death, shadow, trance--is not the sole origin
+of his theory. For a savage so acute as Mr. Tylor's hypothetical early
+reasoner might decline to believe that his own or a friend's soul had been
+absent on an expedition, unless it brought back information not normally
+to be acquired. However, we cannot reason, _a priori_, as to how far the
+logic of a savage might or might not go on occasion.
+
+In any case, a scientific reasoner might be expected to ask: 'Is this
+alleged acquisition of knowledge, _not_ through the ordinary channels of
+sense, a thing _in rerum natura_?' Because, if it is, we must obviously
+increase our list of the savage's reasons for believing in a soul: we
+must make his reasons include 'psychical' experiences, and there must be
+an X region to investigate.
+
+These considerations did not fail to present themselves to Mr. Tylor. But
+his manner of dealing with them is peculiar. With his unequalled knowledge
+of the lower races, it was easy for him to examine travellers' tales about
+savage seers who beheld distant events in vision, and to allow them what
+weight he thought proper, after discounting possibilities of falsehood and
+collusion. He might then have examined modern narratives of similar
+performances among the civilised, which are abundant. It is obvious and
+undeniable that if the supernormal acquisition of knowledge in trance is a
+_vera causa_, a real process, however rare, Mr. Tylor's theory needs
+modifications; while the character of the savage's reasoning becomes more
+creditable to the savage, and appears as better bottomed than we had been
+asked to suppose. But Mr. Tylor does not examine this large body of
+evidence at all, or, at least, does not offer us the details of his
+examination. He merely writes in this place:
+
+'A typical spiritualistic instance may be quoted from Jung-Stilling, who
+says that examples have come to his knowledge of sick persons who,
+longing to see absent friends, have fallen into a swoon, during which
+they have appeared to the distant objects of their affection.'[29]
+
+Jung-Stilling (though he wrote before modern 'Spiritualism' came in) is
+not a very valid authority; there is plenty of better evidence than his,
+but Mr. Tylor passes it by, merely remarking that 'modern Europe has kept
+closely enough to the lines of early philosophy.' Modern Europe has indeed
+done so, if it explains the supernormal acquisition of knowledge, or the
+hallucinatory appearance of a distant person to his friend by a theory of
+wandering 'spirits.' But facts do not cease to be facts because wrong
+interpretations have been put upon them by savages, by Jung-Stilling, or
+by anyone else. The real question is, Do such events occur among lower and
+higher races, beyond explanation by fraud and fortuitous coincidence? We
+gladly grant that the belief in Animism, when it takes the form of a
+theory of 'wandering spirits,' is probably untenable, as it is assuredly
+of savage origin. But we are not absolutely so sure that in this aspect
+the theory is not based on actual experiences, not of a normal and
+ordinary kind. If so, the savage philosophy and its supposed survivals in
+belief will appear in a new light. And we are inclined to hold that an
+examination of the mass of evidence to which Mr. Tylor offers here so
+slight an allusion will at least make it wise to suspend our judgment,
+not only as to the origins of the savage theory of spirits, but as to the
+materialistic hypothesis of the absence of a psychical element in man.
+
+I may seem to have outrun already the limits of permissible hypothesis. It
+may appear absurd to surmise that there can exist in man, savage or
+civilised, a faculty for acquiring information not accessible by the known
+channels of sense, a faculty attributed by savage philosophers to the
+wandering soul. But one may be permitted to quote the opinion of
+M. Charles Richet, Professor of Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine
+in Paris. It is not cited because M. Richet is a professor of physiology,
+but because he reached his conclusion after six years of minute
+experiment. He says: 'There exists in certain persons, at certain moments,
+a faculty of acquiring knowledge which has no _rapport_ with our normal
+faculties of that kind.'[30]
+
+Instances tending to raise a presumption in favour of M. Richet's idea may
+now be sought in savage and civilised life.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Primitive Culture,_ i. 9, 10.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Origin of Ranks._]
+
+[Footnote 3: I may be permitted to refer to 'Reply to Objections' in the
+appendix to my _Myth, Ritual, and Religion,_ vol. ii.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Spencer, _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, pp. 672, 673.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Primitive Culture_, i. 417-425. Cf. however _Princip. Of
+Sociol._, p. 304.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Op. cit. i. 423, 424.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Published for the Berlin Society of Experimental Psychology,
+Günther, Leipzig, 1890.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 837-839.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Primitive Culture_, i. 421, chapter xi.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This theory is what Mr. Spencer calls 'Animism,' and does
+not believe in. What Mr. Tylor calls 'Animism' Mr. Spencer believes in,
+but he calls it the 'Ghost Theory.']
+
+[Footnote 11: _Primitive Culture_, i. 428.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Howitt, _Journal of Anthropological Institute_, xiii.
+191-195.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The curious may consult, for savage words for 'dreams,' Mr.
+Scott's _Dictionary of the Mang'anja Language_, s.v. 'Lots,' or any
+glossary of any savage language.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Prim. Cult._ i. 429.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Prim. Cult._ i. 428.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Ibid. i. 285.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Ibid. i. 285, 286.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Primitive Culture_, i. 446.]
+
+[Footnote 19: See, however, Dr. Von Schrenck-Notzing, _Die Beobachtung
+narcolischer Mittel für den Hypnotismus_, and S.P.R. _Proceedings_, x.
+292-899.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Primitive Culture_, i. 306-316.]
+
+[Footnote 21: i. 315.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Phil. des Geistes_, pp. 406, 408.]
+
+[Footnote 23: See also Mr. A.J. Balfour's Presidential Address to the
+Society for Psychical Research, _Proceedings_, vol. x. See, too, Taine,
+_De l'Intelligence_, i. 78, 106, 139.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Tanner's _Narrative_, New York, 1830.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _Primitive Culture_, i. 143.]
+
+[Footnote 26: As 'spiritualism' is often used in opposition to
+'materialism,' and with no reference to rapping 'spirits,' the modern
+belief in that class of intelligences may here be called spiritism.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _The Will to Believe_, preface, p. xiv.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Primitive Culture_, i. 432,433. Citing Oviedo, _Hist. De
+Nicaragua,_ pp. 21-51.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _Primitive Culture_, i. 440. Citing Stilling after Dale Owen,
+and quoting Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace's _Scientific Aspect of the
+Supernatural_, p. 43. Mr. Tylor also adds folk-lore practices of
+ghost-seeing, as on St. John's Eve. St. Mark's Eve, too, is in point, as
+far as folk-lore goes.]
+
+[Footnote 30: _Proceedings_, S.P.R. v. 167.]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+'OPENING THE GATES OF DISTANCE'
+
+'To open the Gates of Distance' is the poetical Zulu phrase for what is
+called clairvoyance, or _vue à distance_. This, if it exists, is the
+result of a faculty of undetermined nature, whereby knowledge of remote
+events may be acquired, not through normal channels of sense. As the Zulus
+say: '_Isiyezi_ is a state in which a man becomes slightly insensible. He
+is awake, but still sees things which he would not see if he were not in a
+state of ecstasy (_nasiyesi_).'[1] The Zulu description of _isiyezi_
+includes what is technically styled 'dissociation.' No psychologist or
+pathologist will deny that visions of an hallucinatory sort may occur in
+dissociated states, say in the _petit mal_ of epilepsy. The question,
+however, is whether any such visions convey actual information not
+otherwise to be acquired, beyond the reach of chance coincidence to
+explain.
+
+A Scottish example, from the records of a court of law, exactly
+illustrates the Zulu theory. At the moment when the husband of Jonka
+Dyneis was in danger six miles from her house in his boat, Jonka 'was
+found, and seen standing at her own house wall in a trance, and being
+taken, she could not give answer, but stood as bereft of her senses, and
+when she was asked why she was so moved, she answered, "If our boat be not
+lost, she was in great hazard."' (October 2, 1616.)[2]
+
+The belief in opening the Gates of Distance is, of course, very widely
+diffused. The gift is attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, to Plotinus, to
+many Saints, to Catherine de' Medici, to the Rev. Mr. Peden,[3] and to
+Jeanne d'Arc, while the faculty is the stock in trade of savage seers in
+all regions.[4]
+
+The question, however, on which Mr. Tylor does not touch, is, _Are any of
+the stories true?_ If so, of course they would confirm in the mind
+of the savage his theory of the wandering soul. Now, to find anything
+like attested cases of successful clairvoyance among savages is a
+difficult task. White men either scout the idea, or are afraid of seeming
+superstitious if they give examples, or, if they do give examples, are
+accused of having sunk to the degraded level of Zulus or Red Indians. Even
+where travellers, like Scheffer, have told about their own experiences,
+the narratives are omitted by modern writers on savage divination.[5] We
+must therefore make our own researches, and it is to be noted that
+the stories of successful savage clairvoyance are given as illustrations
+merely, not as evidence to facts, for we cannot cross-examine the
+witnesses.
+
+Mr. Tylor dismisses the topic in a manner rather cavalier:
+
+'Without discussing on their merits the accounts of what is called
+"second sight,"[6] it may be pointed out that they are related among
+savage tribes, as when Captain Jonathan Carver obtained from a Cree
+medicine-man a true prophecy of the arrival of a canoe with news next
+day at noon; or when Mr. J. Mason Brown, travelling with two _voyageurs_
+on the Copper Mine River, was met by Indians of the very band he was
+seeking, these having been sent by their medicine-man, who, on
+enquiry, stated that "he saw them coming, and heard them talk on their
+journey."'[7]
+
+Now, in our opinion, the 'merits' of stories of second sight need
+discussion, because they may, if well attested, raise a presumption that
+the savage's theory has a better foundation than Mr. Tylor supposes. Oddly
+enough, though Mr. Tylor does not say so, Dr. Brinton (from whom he
+borrows his two anecdotes) is more or less of our opinion.
+
+'There are,' says Dr. Brinton, 'statements supported by unquestionable
+testimony, which ought not to be passed over in silence, and yet I cannot
+but approach them with hesitation. They are so revolting to the laws of
+exact science, so alien, I had almost said, to the experience of our
+lives. Yet is this true, or are such experiences only ignored and put
+aside without serious consideration?'
+
+That is exactly what we complain of; the alleged facts are 'put aside
+without serious consideration.'
+
+We, at least, are not slaves to the idea that 'the laws of exact science'
+must be the only laws at work in the world. Science, however exact, does
+not pretend to have discovered all 'laws.'
+
+To return to actual examples of the alleged supernormal acquisition of
+knowledge by savages: Dr. Brinton gives an example from Charlevoix and
+General Mason Brown's anecdote.[8] In General Mason Brown's instance the
+medicine-man, at a great distance, bade his emissaries 'seek three whites,
+whose horses, arms, attire, and personal appearance he minutely described,
+which description was repeated to General Brown by the warriors _before
+they saw his two companions.'_ General Brown assured Dr. Brinton of 'the
+accuracy of this in every particular.' Mr. Tylor has certainly not
+improved the story in his condensed version. Dr. Brinton refers to 'many'
+tales such as these, and some will be found in 'Among the Zulus,' by Mr.
+David Leslie (1875).
+
+Mr. Leslie was a Scottish sportsman, brought up from boyhood in
+familiarity with the Zulus. His knowledge of their language and customs
+was minute, and his book, privately printed, contains much interesting
+matter. He writes:
+
+'I was obliged to proceed to the Zulu country to meet my Kaffir
+elephant-hunters, the time for their return having arrived. They were
+hunting in a very unhealthy country, and I had agreed to wait for them
+on the North-East border, the nearest point I could go to with safety.
+I reached the appointed rendezvous, but could not gain the slightest
+intelligence of my people at the kraal.
+
+'After waiting some time, and becoming very uneasy about them, one of
+my servants recommended me to go to the doctor, and at last, out of
+curiosity and _pour passer le temps_, I did go.
+
+'I stated what I wanted--information about my hunters--and I was met by
+a stern refusal. "I cannot tell anything about white men," said he, "and
+I know nothing of their ways." However, after some persuasion and
+promise of liberal payment, impressing upon him the fact that it was not
+white men but Kaffirs I wanted to know about, he at last consented,
+saying "he would _open the Gate of Distance_, and would travel through
+it, even although his body should lie before me."
+
+'His first proceeding was to ask me the number and names of my hunters.
+To this I demurred, telling him that if he obtained that information
+from me he might easily substitute some news which he may have heard
+from others, instead of the "spiritual telegraphic news" which I
+expected him to get from his "familiar."
+
+'To this he answered: "I told you I did not understand white men's ways;
+but if I am to do anything for you it must be done in my way--not
+yours." On receiving this fillip I felt inclined to give it up, as I
+thought I might receive some rambling statement with a considerable
+dash of truth, it being easy for anyone who knew anything of hunting to
+give a tolerably correct idea of their motions.
+
+'However, I conceded this point also, and otherwise satisfied him.
+
+'The doctor then made eight little fires--that being the number of my
+hunters; on each he cast some roots,[9] which emitted a curious sickly
+odour and thick smoke; into each he cast a small stone, shouting, as he
+did so, the name to which the stone was dedicated; then he ate some
+"medicine," and fell over in what appeared to be a trance for about ten
+minutes, during all which time his limbs kept moving. Then he seemed to
+wake, went to one of the fires, raked the ashes about, looked at the
+stone attentively, described the man faithfully, and said: "This man has
+died of the fever, and your gun is lost."
+
+'To the next fire as before: "This man" (correctly described) "has
+killed four elephants," and then he described the tusks. The next: "This
+man" (again describing him) "has been killed by an elephant, but your
+gun is coming home," and so on through the whole, the men being minutely
+and correctly described; their success or non-success being equally so.
+I was told where the survivors were, and what they were doing, and that
+in three months they would come out, but as they would not expect to
+find me waiting on them there so long after the time appointed, they
+would not pass that way.
+
+'I took a particular note of all this information at the time, and to my
+utter amazement _it turned out correct in every particular_.
+
+'It was scarcely within the bounds of possibility that this man could
+have had ordinary intelligence of the hunters; they were scattered about
+in a country two hundred miles away.'
+
+Mr. Leslie could discover no explanation, nor was any suggested by friends
+familiar with the country and the natives whom he consulted. He gives
+another example, which may be explained by 'suggestion.' A parallel case
+from Central Africa will be found in the 'Journal of the Anthropological
+Institute,' November 1897, p. 320, where 'private information,' as usual,
+would explain the singular facts.
+
+The Zulus themselves lay claim to a kind of clairvoyance which looks like
+the result of intense visualising power, combined with the awakening of
+the subconscious memory.[10]
+
+'There is among black men a something which is divination within them.
+When anything valuable is lost, they look for it at once; when they
+cannot find it, each one begins to practise this inner divination,
+trying to feel where the thing is; for, not being able to see it, he
+feels internally a pointing, which tells him if he will go down to such
+a place it is there, and he will find it. At length it says he will find
+it; at length he sees it, and himself approaching it; before he begins
+to move from where he is, he sees it very clearly indeed, and there is
+an end of doubt. That sight is so clear that it is as though it was not
+an inner sight, but as if he saw the very thing itself, and the place
+where it is; so he quickly arises and goes to the place. If it is a
+hidden place he throws himself into it, as though there was something
+that impelled him to go as swiftly as the wind; and, in fact, he finds
+the thing, if he has not acted by mere head-guessing. If it has been
+done by real inner divination, he really sees it. But if it is done by
+mere head-guessing and knowledge that he has not gone to such a place
+and such a place, and that therefore it must be in such another place,
+he generally misses the mark.'
+
+Other Zulu instances will be given under the heads 'Possession' and
+'Fetishism.'
+
+To take a Northern people: In his 'History of the Lapps'[11] Scheffer
+describes mechanical modes of divination practised by that race, who use a
+drum and other objects for the purpose. These modes depend on more
+traditional rules for interpreting the accidental combinations of lots.
+But a Lapp confessed to Scheffer, with tears, that he could not help
+seeing visions, as he proved by giving Scheffer a minute relation 'of
+whatever particulars had happened to me in my journey to Lapland. And he
+further complained that he know not how to make use of his eyes, since
+things altogether distant were presented to them.' This Lapp was anxious
+to become a Christian, hence his regret at being a 'rare and valuable'
+example of clairvoyance. Torfaeus also was posed by the clairvoyance of a
+Samoyed, as was Regnard by a Lapp seer.[12]
+
+The next case is of old date, and, like the other savage examples, is
+merely given for purposes of illustration.
+
+  '_25e Lettre_.[13]
+
+  '"_Suite des Traditions des Sauvages._"
+
+  'Au Fort de la Rivière de St. Joseph, ce 14 Septembre 1721.
+
+  '"_Des Jongleurs_"-- ... Vous ayez vu à Paris Madame de Marson, & elle
+  y est encore; voici ce que M. le Marquis de Vaudreuil son Gendre,
+  actuellement notre Gouverneur Général, me raconta cet Hyver, & qu'il a
+  sçû de cette Dame, qui n'est rien moíns qu'un esprit foible. Elle etoit
+  un jour fort inquiette an sujet de M. de Marson, son Mari, lequel
+  commandoit dans un Poste, que nous avions en Accadie; et etoit absent, &
+  le tems qu'il avoit marqué pour son retour, etoit passé.
+
+  'Une Femme Sauvage, qui vit Madame de Marson en peine, lui en demanda la
+  cause, & l'ayant apprise, lui dit, après y avoir un peu rêvé, de ne plus
+  se chagriner, que son Epoux reviendroit tel jour et à telle heure,
+  qu'elle lui marqua, avec un chapeau gris sur la tête. Comme elle
+  s'apperçut que la Dame n'ajoutoit point foi à sa prédiction, au jour & à
+  l'heure, qu'elle avoit assignée, elle rotourna chez elle, lui demanda si
+  elle ne vouloit pas venir voir arriver son Mari, & la pressa de telle
+  sorte de la suivre, qu'elle l'entraîna au bord de la Rivière.
+
+  'A peine y etoíent-elles arrivées, que M. de Marson parut dans un Canot,
+  un chapeau gris sur la tête; & ayant appris ce qui s'etoit passé, assûra
+  qu'il ne pouvoit pas comprendre comment la Sauvagesse avoit pû sçavoir
+  l'heure & le jour de son arrivée.'
+
+It is unusual for European travellers and missionaries to give anecdotes
+which might seem to 'confirm the delusions of benighted savages.' Such
+anecdotes, again, are among the _arcana_ of these wild philosophers, and
+are not readily communicated to strangers. When successful cases are
+reported, it is natural to assert that they come through Europeans who
+have sunk into barbarous superstition, or that they may be explained by
+fraud and collusion. It is certain, however, that savage proficients
+believe in their own powers, though no less certainly they will eke them
+out by imposture. Seers are chosen in Zululand, as among Eskimos and
+Samoyeds, from the class which in Europe supplies the persons who used to
+be, but are no longer the most favourite hypnotic subjects, 'abnormal
+children,' epileptic and hysterical. These are subjected to 'a long and
+methodical course of training.'[14] Stoll, speaking of Guatemala, says
+that 'certainly most of the induced and spontaneous phenomena with which
+we are familiar occur among savages,' and appeals to travellers for
+observations.[15] Information is likely to come in, as educated travellers
+devote attention to the topic.
+
+Dr. Callaway translates some Zulu communications which indicate the
+amount of belief in this very practical and sceptical people. Amusing
+illustrations of their scepticism will be quoted later, under
+'Possession,' but they do accept as seers certain hysterical patients.
+These are tested by their skill in finding objects which have been
+hidden without their knowledge. They then behave much like Mr. Stuart
+Cumberland, but have not the advantage of muscular contact with the
+person who knows where the hidden objects are concealed. The neighbours
+even deny that they have hidden anything at all. 'When they persist in
+their denial ... he finds all the things that they have hidden. They see
+that he is a great _inyanga_ (seer) when he has found all the things they
+have concealed.' No doubt he is guided, perhaps in a super-sensitive
+condition, by the unconscious indications of the excited spectators.
+
+The point is that, while the savage conjurer will doubtless use fraud
+wherever he can, still the experience of low races is in favour of
+employing as seers the class of people who in Europe were, till recently,
+supposed to make the best hypnotic subjects. Thus, in West Africa, 'the
+presiding elders, during your initiation to the secret society of your
+tribe, discover this gift [of Ebumtupism, or second sight], and so select
+you as "a witch doctor."'[15] Among the Karens, the 'Wees,' or prophets,
+'are nervous excitable men, such as would become mediums,'[16] as mediums
+are diagnosed by Mr. Tylor.
+
+In short, not to multiply examples, there is an element of actual
+observation and of _bona fides_ entangled in the trickery of savage
+practice. Though the subjects may be selected partly because of the
+physical phenomena of convulsions which they exhibit, and which
+favourably impress their clients, they are also such subjects as
+occasionally yield that evidence of supernormal faculty which is
+investigated by modern psychologists, like Richet, Janet, and William
+James.
+
+The following example, by no means unique, shows the view taken by savages
+of their own magic, after they have become Christians. Catherine Wabose, a
+converted Red Indian seeress, described her preliminary fast, at the age
+of puberty. After six days of abstention from food she was rapt away to an
+unknown place, where a radiant being welcomed her. Later a dark round
+object promised her the gift of prophecy. She found her natural senses
+greatly sharpened by lack of food. She first exercised her powers when her
+kinsfolk in large numbers were starving, a medicine-lodge, or 'tabernacle'
+as Lufitau calls it, was built for her, and she crawled in. As is well
+known, these lodges are violently shaken during the magician's stay within
+them, which the early Jesuits at first attributed to muscular efforts by
+the seers. In 1637 Père Lejeune was astonished by the violent motions of a
+large lodge, tenanted by a small man. One sorcerer, with an appearance of
+candour, vowed that 'a great wind entered boisterously,' and the Father
+was assured that, if he went in himself, he would become clairvoyant. He
+did not make the experiment. The Methodist convert, Catherine, gave the
+same description of her own experience: 'The lodge began shaking violently
+by supernatural means. I knew this by the compressed current of air above,
+and the noise of motion.' She had been beating a small drum and singing,
+now she lay quiet. The radiant 'orbicular' spirit then informed her that
+they 'must go westwards for game; how short-sighted you are!' 'The
+advice was taken and crowned by instant success.' This established her
+reputation.[17] Catherine's conversion was led up to by a dream of her
+dying son, who beheld a Sacred Figure, and received from Him white
+raiment. Her magical songs tell how unseen hands shake the magic lodge.
+They invoke the Great Spirit that
+
+    'Illumines earth
+    Illumines heaven!
+  Ah, say what Spirit, or Body, is this Body,
+    That fills the world around,
+    Speak, man, ah say
+  What Spirit, or Body, is this Body?'
+
+It is like a savage hymn to Hegel's _fühlende Seele_: the all-pervading
+Sensitive Soul. We are reminded, too, of 'the doctrine of the Sanscrit
+Upanishads: There is no limit to the knowing of the Self that knows.'[18]
+
+Unluckily Catherine was not asked to give other examples of what she
+considered her successes.
+
+Acosta, who has not the best possible repute as an authority, informs us
+that Peruvian clairvoyants 'tell what hath passed in the furthest parts
+before news can come. In the distance of two or three hundred leagues
+they would tell what the Spaniards did or suffered in their civil wars.' To
+Du Pont, in 1606, a sorcerer 'rendered a true oracle of the coming of
+Poutrincourt, saying his Devil had told him so.'[19]
+
+We now give a modern case, from a scientific laboratory, of knowledge
+apparently acquired in no normal way, by a person of the sort usually
+chosen to be a prophet, or wizard, by savages.
+
+Professor Richet writes:[20]
+
+'On Monday, July 2, 1888, after having passed all the day in my
+laboratory, I hypnotised Léonie at 8 P.M., and while she tried to make
+out a diagram concealed in an envelope I said to her quite suddenly:
+"What has happened to M. Langlois?" Léonie knows M. Langlois from
+having seen him two or three times some time ago in my physiological
+laboratory, where he acts as my assistant.--"He has burnt himself,"
+Léonie replied,--"Good," I said, "and where has he burnt himself?"--"On
+the left hand. It is not fire: it is--I don't know its name. Why does he
+not take care when he pours it out?"--"Of what colour," I asked, "is the
+stuff which he pours out?"--"It is not red, it is brown; he has hurt
+himself very much--the skin puffed up directly."
+
+'Now, this description is admirably exact. At 4 P.M. that day M.
+Langlois had wished to pour some bromine into a bottle. He had done this
+clumsily, so that some of the bromine flowed on to his left hand, which
+held the funnel, and at once burnt him severely. Although he at once put
+his hand into water, wherever the bromine had touched it a blister was
+formed in a few seconds--a blister which one could not better describe
+than by saying, "the skin puffed up." I need not say that Léonie had not
+left my house, nor seen anyone from my laboratory. Of this I am
+_absolutely certain,_ and I am certain that I had not mentioned the
+incident of the burn to anyone. Moreover, this was the first time for
+nearly a year that M. Langlois had handled bromine, and when Léonie saw
+him six months before at the laboratory he was engaged in experiments
+of quite another kind.'
+
+Here the savage reasoner would infer that Léonie's spirit had visited M.
+Langlois. The modern inquirer will probably say that Léonie became aware
+of what was passing in the mind of M. Richet. This supranormal way of
+acquiring knowledge was observed in the last century by M. de Puységur in
+one of his earliest cases of somnambulism. MM. Binet and Féré say: 'It is
+not yet admitted that the subject is able to divine the thoughts of the
+magnetiser without any material communication;' while they grant, as a
+minimum, that 'research should be continued in this direction.'[21] They
+appear to think that Léonie may have read 'involuntary signs' in the
+aspect of M. Richet. This is a difficult hypothesis.
+
+Here follows a case recorded in his diary by Mr. Dobbie, of Adelaide,
+Australia, who has practised hypnotism for curative purposes. He explains
+(June 10, 1884) that he had mesmerised Miss ---- on several occasions to
+relieve rheumatic pain and sore throat. He found her to be clairvoyant.
+
+'The following is a verbatim account of the second time I tested her
+powers in this respect, April 12, 1884. There were four persons present
+during the _séance_. One of the company wrote down the replies as they
+were spoken.
+
+'Her father was at the time over fifty miles away, but we did not know
+exactly where, so I questioned her as follows: "Can you find your father
+at the present moment?" At first she replied that she could not see him,
+but in a minute or two she said, "Oh, yes; now I can see him, Mr.
+Dobbie." "Where is he?" "Sitting at a large table in a large room, and
+there are a lot of people going in and out." "What is he doing?"
+"Writing a letter, and there is a book in front of him." "Whom is he
+writing to?" "To the newspaper." Here she paused and laughingly said,
+"Well, I declare, he is writing to the A B" (naming a newspaper). "You
+said there was a book there. Can you tell me what book it is?" "It has
+gilt letters on it." "Can you read them, or tell me the name of the
+author?" She read, or pronounced slowly, "W.L.W." (giving the full
+surname of the author). She answered several minor questions _re_ the
+furniture in the room, and I then said to her, "Is it any effort or
+trouble to you to travel in this way?" "Yes, a little; I have to think."
+
+'I now stood behind her, holding a half-crown in my hand, and asked her
+if she could tell me what I had in my hand, to which she replied, "It is
+a shilling." It seemed as though she could see what was happening miles
+away easier than she could see what was going on in the room.
+
+'Her father returned home nearly a week afterwards, and was perfectly
+astounded when told by his wife and family what he had been doing on
+that particular evening; and, although previous to that date he was a
+thorough sceptic as to clairvoyance, he frankly admitted that my
+clairvoyant was perfectly correct in every particular. He also informed
+us that the book referred to was a new one, which he had purchased after
+he had left his home, so that there was no possibility of his daughter
+guessing that he had the book before him. I may add that the letter in
+due course appeared in the paper; and I saw and handled the book.'
+
+A number of cases of so-called 'clairvoyance' will be found in the
+'Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.'[22] As the authors of
+these essays remark, even after discounting, in each case, fraud,
+malobservation, and misreporting, the residue of cases can seldom justify
+either the savage theory of the wandering soul (which is not here
+seriously proposed) or Hegel's theory that the _fühlende Seele_ is
+unconditioned by space. For, if thought transference be a fact, the
+apparent clairvoyant may only be reading the mind of a person at a
+distance. The results, however, when successful, would naturally suggest
+to the savage thinker the belief in the wandering soul, or corroborate it
+if it had already been suggested by the common phenomena of dreaming.
+
+To these instances of knowledge acquired otherwise than by the recognised
+channels of sense we might add the Scottish tales of 'second sight.' That
+phrase is merely a local term covering examples of what is called
+'clairvoyance'--views of things remote in space, hallucinations of sight
+that coincide with some notable event, premonitions of things future, and
+so on. The belief and hallucinatory experiences are still very common in
+the Highlands, where I have myself collected many recent instances. Mr.
+Tylor observes that the examples 'prove a little too much; they vouch not
+only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for
+still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found
+no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or
+miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is
+obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena
+misconstrued. Again, funerals are not uncommonly seen where no funeral is
+taking place; it is then alleged that a real funeral, similar and
+similarly situated, soon afterwards occurred. On the hypothesis of
+believers, the percipients somehow behold
+
+  'Such refraction of events
+    As often rises ere they rise.'
+
+Even the savage cannot account for this experience by the wandering of the
+soul in space; nor do I suggest any explanation. I give, however, one or
+two instances. They are published in the 'Journal of the Caledonian
+Medical Society,' 1897, by Dr. Alastair Macgregor, on the authority of the
+MSS. of his father, a minister in the island of Skye.
+
+'He once told me that when he first went to Skye he scoffed at the idea of
+such a power as second sight being genuine; but he said that, after having
+been there for some years as a clergyman, he had been so often consulted
+_beforehand_ by people who said they had seen visions of events which
+subsequently occurred, to my father's knowledge, in exact accordance with
+the form and details of the vision as foretold, that he was compelled to
+confess that some folks had, apparently at least, the unfortunate faculty.
+
+'As my father expressed it, this faculty was "neither voluntary nor
+constant, and was considered rather annoying than agreeable to the
+possessors of it. The gift was possessed by individuals of both sexes, and
+its fits came on within doors and without, sitting and standing, at night
+and by day, and at whatever employment the votary might chance to be
+engaged."'
+
+Here follows a typical example of the vision of a funeral:
+
+'The session clerk at Dull, a small village in Perthshire, was ill, and
+my grandfather, clergyman there at the time, had to do duty for him. One
+fine summer evening, about 7 o'clock, a young man and woman came to get
+some papers filled up, as they were going to be married. My grandfather
+was with the couple in the session clerk's room, no doubt attending to
+the papers, when suddenly _all three_ saw through the window a funeral
+procession passing along the road. From their dress the bulk of the
+mourners seemed to be farm labourers--indeed the young woman recognised
+some of them as natives of Dull, who had gone to live and work near
+Dunkeld. Remarks were naturally made by my grandfather and the young
+couple about the untimely hour for a funeral, and, hastily filling in
+the papers, my grandfather went out to get the key of the churchyard,
+which was kept in the manse, as, without the key, the procession
+could not get into God's acre. Wondering how it was that he had received
+no intimation of the funeral, he went to the manse by a short cut, got
+the key, and hurried down to the churchyard gate, where, of course, he
+expected to find the cortège waiting. _Not a soul was there_ except the
+young couple, who were as amazed as my grandfather!
+
+'Well, at the same hour in the evening of the same day in the following
+week the funeral, this time in reality, arrived quite unexpectedly. The
+facts were that a boy, a native of Dull, had got gored by a bull at
+Dunkeld, and was so shockingly mangled that his remains were picked
+up and put into a coffin and taken without delay to Dull. A grave was
+dug as quickly as possible--the poor lad having no relatives--and the
+remains were interred. My grandfather and the young couple recognised
+several of the mourners as being among those whom they had seen out of
+the session clerk's room, exactly a week previously, in the phantom
+cortège. The young woman knew some of them personally, and related to
+them what she had seen, but they of course denied all knowledge of the
+affair, having been then in Dunkeld.'
+
+I give another example, because the experience was auditory, as well as
+visual, and the prediction was announced before the event.
+
+'The parishioners in Skye were evidently largely imbued with the
+Romanist-like belief in the powers of intercession vested in their
+clergyman; so when they had a "warning" or "vision" they usually consulted
+my father as to what they could do to prevent the coming disaster
+befalling their relatives or friends. In this way my father had the
+opportunity of noting down the minutiae of the "warning" or "vision"
+directly it was told him. Having had the advantage of a medical, previous
+to his theological, training, he was able to note down sound facts,
+unembellished by superadded imagination. Entering into this method of
+case-taking with a mind perfectly open, except for a slight touch of
+scepticism, he was greatly surprised to discover how very frequently
+realisations occurred exactly in conformance with the minutiae of the
+vision as detailed in his note-book. Finally, he was compelled to
+discard his scepticism, and to admit that some people had undoubtedly
+the uncanny gift. Almost the first case he took (Case X.) was that of a
+woman who had one day a vision of her son falling over a high rock at Uig,
+in Skye, with a sheep or lamb.
+
+'CASE X.--She heard her son exclaim in Gaelic, "This is a fatal lamb for
+me." As her son lived several miles from Uig, and was a fisherman,
+realisation seemed to my father very unlikely, but one month afterwards
+the realisation occurred only too true. Unknown to his mother, who had
+warned him against having anything to do with sheep or lambs, the son
+one day, instead of going out in his boat, thought he would take a
+holiday inland, and went off to Uig, where a farmer enlisted his
+services in separating some lambs from the ewes. One of the lambs ran
+away, and the fisher lad ran headlong after it, and not looking where he
+was going, on catching the lamb was pulled by it to the edge of one of
+the very picturesque but exceedingly dangerous rocks at Uig. Too late
+realizing his critical position, he exclaimed, "This is a fatal lamb for
+me," but going with such an impetus he was unable to bring himself up in
+time, and, along with the lamb, fell over into the ravine below, and
+was, of course, killed on the spot. The farmer, when he saw the lad's
+danger, ran to his assistance, but was only in time to hear him cry out
+in Gaelic before disappearing over the brink of the precipice. This was
+predicted by the mother a month before. Was this simply a coincidence?'
+
+Dr. Macgregor's remarks on the involuntary and unwelcome nature of the
+visions is borne out by what Scheffer, as already quoted, says concerning
+the Lapps.
+
+In addition to visions which thus come unsought, contributing knowledge of
+things remote or even future, we may glance at visions which are provoked
+by various methods. Drugs (_impepo_) are used, seers whirl in a wild
+dance till they fall senseless, or trance is induced by various kinds of
+self-suggestion or 'auto-hypnotism.' Fasting is also practised. In modern
+life the self-induced trance is common among 'mediums'--a subject to which
+we recur later.
+
+So far, it will be observed, our evidence proves that precisely similar
+_beliefs_ as to man's occasional power of opening the gates of distance
+have been entertained in a great variety of lands and ages, and by races
+in every condition of culture.[23] The alleged experiences are still
+said to occur, and have been investigated by physiologists of the eminence
+of M. Richet. The question cannot but arise as to the residuum of fact in
+these narrations, and it keeps on arising.
+
+In the following chapter we discuss a mode of inducing hallucinations
+which has for anthropologists the interest of universal diffusion. The
+width of its range in savage races has not, we believe, been previously
+observed. We then add facts of modern experience, about the authenticity
+of which we, personally, entertain no doubt; and the provisional
+conclusion appears to be that savages have observed a psychological
+circumstance which has been ignored by professed psychologists, and which,
+certainly, does not fit into the ordinary materialistic hypothesis.
+
+[Footnote 1: Callaway, _Religion of the Zulus_, p. 232.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Graham Dalzell, _Darker Superstitions of Scotland_, p. 481.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See good evidence in _Ker of Kersland's Memoirs_.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Autus Gellius, xv. 18, Dio Cassius, lxvii., Crespet, _De la
+Haine du Diable, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc_.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See 'Shamanism in Siberia,' _J.A.I._, November 1894,
+pp. 147-149, and compare Scheffer. The article is very learned and
+interesting.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Williams mentions second sight in Fiji, but gives no
+examples.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Primitive Culture,_ i. 447. Mr. Tylor cites Dr. Brinton's
+_Myths of the New World,_ p. 269. The reference in the recent edition is
+p. 289. Carver's case is given under the head 'Possession' later.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Journal Historique_ p. 362; _Atlantic Monthly_, July 1866.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Probably _impepo_, eaten by seers, according to Callaway.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Callaway's _Religion of the Amazulu_, p. 358.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Oxford, 1674.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Voyages_.]
+
+[Footnote 13: From Charlevoix, _Journal Historique_, p. 362.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Bastian, _Ueber psych. Beobacht_. p.21.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Op. cit. p.26.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Miss Kingsley, _Travels in West Africa_, p. 460.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Primitive Culture_, ii, 181; Mason's _Burmah_, p. 107.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Schoolcraft, i. 394.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Brinton's _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, p. 57.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Purchas, p. 629.]
+
+[Footnote 20: S.P.R. _Proceedings_, vol. vi. 69.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Binet and Féré, _Animal Magnetism_, p. 64.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Vol. vii. Mrs. Sidgwick, pp. 30, 356; vol. vi. p. 66,
+Professor Richet, p. 407, Drs. Dufay and Azam.]
+
+[Footnote 23: The examples in the Old Testament, and in the _Life of St.
+Columba_ by Adamnan, need only be alluded to as too familiar for
+quotation.]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CRYSTAL VISIONS, SAVAGE AND CIVILISED
+
+Among savage methods of provoking hallucinations whence knowledge may be
+supernormally obtained, various forms of 'crystal-gazing' are the most
+curious. We find the habit of looking into water, usually in a vessel,
+preferably a glass vessel, among Red Indians (Lejeune), Romans (Varro,
+cited in _Civitas Dei_, iii. 457), Africans of Fez (Leo Africanus); while
+Maoris use a drop of blood (Taylor), Egyptians use ink (Lane), and
+Australian savages employ a ball of polished stone, into which the seer
+'puts himself' to descry the results of an expedition.[1]
+
+I have already given, in the Introduction, Ellis's record of the
+Polynesian case. A hole being dug in the door of his house, and filled
+with water, the priest looks for a vision of the thief who has carried off
+stolen goods. The Polynesian theory is that the god carries the spirit of
+the thief over the water, in which it is reflected. Lejeune's Red Indians
+make their patients gaze into the water, in which they will see the
+pictures of the things in the way of food or medicine that will do them
+good. In modern language, the instinctive knowledge existing implicitly
+in the patient's subconsciousness is thus brought into the range of his
+ordinary consciousness.
+
+In 1887 the late Captain J. T. Bourke, of the U.S. Cavalry, an original
+and careful observer, visited the Apaches in the interests of the
+Ethnological Bureau. He learned that one of the chief duties of the
+medicine-men was to find out the whereabouts of lost or stolen property.
+Na-a-cha, one of these _jossakeeds_, possessed a magic quartz crystal,
+which he greatly valued. Captain Bourke presented him with a still finer
+crystal. 'He could not give me an explanation of its magical use, except
+that by looking into it he could see everything he wanted to see,'
+Captain Bourke appears never to have heard of the modern experiments in
+crystal-gazing. Captain Bourke also discovered that the Apaches, like the
+Greeks, Australians, Africans, Maoris, and many other, races, use the
+bull-roarer, turndun, or _rhombos_--a piece of wood which, being whirled
+round, causes a strange windy roar--in their mystic ceremonies. The wide
+use of the rhombos was known to Captain Bourke; that of the crystal was
+not.
+
+For the Iroquois, Mrs. Erminie Smith supplies information about the
+crystal. 'Placed in a gourd of water, it could render visible the
+apparition of a person who has bewitched another.' She gives a case in
+European times of a medicine-man who found the witch's habitat, but
+got only an indistinct view of her face. On a second trial he was
+successful.[2] One may add that treasure-seekers among the Huille-che
+'look earnestly' for what they want to find 'into a smooth slab of black
+stone, which I suppose to be basalt.'[3]
+
+The kindness of Monsieur Lefébure enables me to give another example from
+Madagascar.[4] Flacourt, describing the Malagasies, says that they
+_squillent_ (a word not in Littré), that is, divine by crystals, which
+'fall from heaven when it thunders,' Of course the rain reveals the
+crystals, as it does the flint instruments called 'thunderbolts' in many
+countries. 'Lorsqu'ils squillent, ils ont une de ces pierres au coing de
+leurs tablettes, disans qu'elle à la vertu de faire faire operation à leur
+figure de geomance.' Probably they used the crystals as do the Apaches. On
+July 15 a Malagasy woman viewed, whether in her crystal or otherwise, two
+French vessels which, like the Spanish fleet, were 'not in sight,' also
+officers, and doctors, and others aboard, whom she had seen, before their
+return to France, in Madagascar. The earliest of the ships did not arrive
+till August 11.
+
+Dr. Callaway gives the Zulu practice, where the chief 'sees what will
+happen by looking into the vessel.'[5] The Shamans of Siberia and Eastern
+Russia employ the same method.[6] The case of the Inca, Yupanqui, is very
+curious. 'As he came up to a fountain he saw a piece of crystal fall into
+it, within which he beheld a figure of an Indian in the following
+shape ... The apparition then vanished, while the crystal remained. The
+Inca took care of it, and they say that he afterwards saw everything he
+wanted in it.'[7]
+
+Here, then, we find the belief that hallucinations can be induced by one
+or other form of crystal-gazing, in ancient Peru, on the other side of the
+continent among the Huille-che, in Fez, in Madagascar, in Siberia, among
+Apaches, Hurons, Iroquois, Australian black fellows, Maoris, and in
+Polynesia. This is assuredly a wide range of geographical distribution. We
+also find the practice in Greece (Pausanias, VII. xxi. 12), in Rome
+(Varro), in Egypt, and in India.
+
+Though anthropologists have paid no attention to the subject, it was of
+course familiar to later Europe. 'Miss X' has traced it among early
+Christians, in early Councils, in episcopal condemnations of _specularii_,
+and so to Dr. Dee, under James VI.; Aubrey; the Regent d'Orléans
+in St. Simon's Memoirs; the modern mesmerists (Gregory, Mayo) and the
+mid-Victorian spiritualists, who, as usual, explained the phenomena, in
+their prehistoric way, by 'spirits[8].' Till this lady examined the
+subject, nobody had thought of remarking that a belief so universal had
+probably some basis of facts, or nobody if we except two professors of
+chemistry and physiology, Drs. Gregory and Mayo. Miss X made experiments,
+beginning by accident, like George Sand, when a child.
+
+The hallucinations which appear to her eyes in ink, or crystal, are:
+
+  1. Revived memories 'arising thus, and thus only, from the subconscious
+  strata;'
+
+  '2. Objectivation of ideas or images--(a) consciously or (b)
+  unconsciously--in the mind of the percipient;
+
+  '3. Visions, possibly telepathic or clairvoyant, implying acquirement of
+  knowledge by supernormal means.'[9]
+
+The examples given of the last class, the class which would be so useful
+to a priest or medicine-man asked to discover things lost, are of very
+slight interest.[10]
+
+Since Miss X drew attention to this subject, experiments have proved
+beyond doubt that a fair percentage of people, sane and healthy, can see
+vivid landscapes, and figures of persons in motion, in glass balls and
+other vehicles. This faculty Dr. Parish attributes to 'dissociation,'
+practically to drowsiness. But he speaks by conjecture, and without
+having witnessed experiments, as will be shown later. I now offer a series
+of experiments with a glass ball, coming under my own observation, in
+which knowledge was apparently acquired in no ordinary way. Of the absence
+of fraud I am personally convinced, not only by the characters of all
+concerned, but by the nature of the circumstances. That adaptive memory
+did not later alter the narratives, as originally told, I feel certain,
+because they were reported to me, when I was not present, within less than
+a week, precisely as they are now given, except in cases specially noted.
+
+Early in the present year (1897) I met a young lady who told me of three
+or four curious hallucinatory experiences of her own, which were
+sufficiently corroborated. She was innocent of psychical studies, and
+personally was, and is, in perfect health; the pale cast of thought being
+remote from her. I got a glass ball, and was present when she first looked
+into it. She saw, I remember, the interior of a house, with a full-length
+portrait of a person unknown. There were, I think, one or two other fancy
+pictures of the familiar kind. But she presently (living as she was, among
+strangers) developed a power of 'seeing' persons and places unknown to
+her, but familiar to them. These experiences do seem to me to be good
+examples of what is called 'thought transference;' indeed, I never before
+could get out of a level balance of doubt on that subject, a balance which
+now leans considerably to the affirmative side. There may be abundance of
+better evidence, but, knowing the persons and circumstances, and being
+present once at what seemed to me a crucial example, I was more inclined
+to be convinced. This attitude appears, to myself, illogical, but it is
+natural and usual.
+
+We cannot tell what indications may be accidentally given in experiments
+in thought transference. But, in these cases of crystal-gazing, the detail
+was too copious to be conveyed, by a looker-on, in a wink or a cough. I do
+not mean to say that success was invariable. I thought of Dr. W.G. Grace,
+and the scryer saw an old man crawling along with a stick. But I doubt if
+Dr. Grace is very deeply seated in that mystic entity, my subconscious
+self. The 'scries' which came right were sometimes, but not always, those
+of which the 'agent' (or person scried for) was consciously thinking. But
+the examples will illustrate the various kinds of occurrences.
+
+Here one should first consider the arguments against accepting recognition
+of objects merely described by another person. The crystal-gazer may know
+the inquirer so intimately as to have a very good guess at the subject of
+his meditation. Again, a man is likely to be thinking of a woman, and a
+woman of a man, so the field of conjecture is limited. In answer to the
+first objection I may say that the crystal-gazer was among strangers, all
+of whom, myself included, she now saw for the first time. Nor could she
+have studied their histories beforehand, for she could not know (normally)
+when she left home, that she was about to be shown a glass ball, or whom
+she would meet. The second objection is met by the circumstance that
+ladies were _not_ usually picked out for men, nor men for women. Indeed,
+these choices were the exceptions, and in each case were marked by
+minutely particular details. A third objection is that credulity, or the
+love of strange novelties, or desire to oblige, biases the inquirers, and
+makes them anxious to recognise something familiar in the scryer's
+descriptions. In the same way we know how people recognise faces
+in the most blurred and vague of spiritist photographs, or see family
+resemblances in the most rudimentary doughfaced babies. Take descriptions
+of persons in a passport, or in a proclamation sketching the personal
+appearance of a criminal. These fit the men or women intended, but they
+also fit a crowd of other people. The description given by the scryer then
+may come right by a fortuitous coincidence, or may be too credulously
+recognised.
+
+The complex of coincidences, however, could not be attributed to chance
+selection out of the whole possible field of conjecture. We must remember,
+too, that a series of such hits increases, at an enormous rate, the odds
+against accidental conjecture. Of such mere luck I may give an example. I
+was writing a story of which the hero was George Kelly, one of the 'Seven
+Men of Moidart.' A year after composing my tale, I found the Government
+description of Mr. Kelly (1736). It exactly tallied with my purely
+fanciful sketch, down to eyes, and teeth, and face, except that I made my
+hero 'about six feet,' whereas the Government gave him five feet ten. But
+I knew beforehand that Mr. Kelly was a clergyman; his curious career
+proved him to be a person of great activity and geniality--and he was of
+Irish birth. Even a dozen such guesses, equally correct, could not
+suggest any powers of 'vision,' when so much was known beforehand about
+the person guessed at. I now give cases in the experience of Miss Angus,
+as one may call the crystal-gazer. The first occurred the day after she
+got the glass ball for the first time. She writes:
+
+'I.--A lady one day asked me to scry out a friend of whom she would
+think. Almost immediately I exclaimed "Here is an old, old lady looking
+at me with a triumphant smile on her face. She has a prominent nose and
+nut-cracker chin. Her face is very much wrinkled, especially at the
+sides of her eyes, as if she were always smiling. She is wearing a
+little white shawl with a black edge. _But!_ ... she _can't_ be old as
+her hair is quite brown! although her face looks so very very old." The
+picture then vanished, and the lady said that I had accurately described
+her friend's _mother_ instead of himself; that it was a family joke that
+the mother must dye her hair, it was so brown and she was eighty-two
+years old. The lady asked me if the vision were distinct enough for me
+to recognise a likeness in the son's photograph; next day she laid
+several photographs before me, and in a moment, without the slightest
+hesitation I picked him out from his wonderful likeness to my vision!'
+
+The inquirer verbally corroborated all the facts to me, within a week, but
+leaned to a theory of 'electricity.' She has read and confirms this
+account.
+
+'II.--One afternoon I was sitting beside a young lady whom I had never
+seen or heard of before. She asked if she might look into my crystal,
+and while she did so I happened to look over her shoulder and saw a ship
+tossing on a very heavy choppy sea, although land was still visible in
+the dim distance. That vanished, and, as suddenly, a little house
+appeared with five or six (I forget now the exact number I then counted)
+steps leading up to the door. On the second step stood an old man
+reading a newspaper. In front of the house was a field of thick
+stubbly grass where some _lambs_, I was going to say, but they were more
+like very small sheep.. were grazing.
+
+'When the scene vanished, the young lady told me I had vividly described
+a spot in Shetland where she and her mother were soon going to spend a
+few weeks.'
+
+I heard of this case from Miss Angus within a day or two of its
+occurrence, and it was then confirmed to me, verbally, by the other lady.
+She again confirms it (December 21, 1897). Both ladies had hitherto been
+perfect strangers to each other. The old man was the schoolmaster,
+apparently. In her MS., Miss Angus writes 'Skye,' but at the time both she
+and the other lady said Shetland (which I have restored). In Shetland the
+sheep, like the ponies, are small. Fortuitous coincidence, of course, may
+be invoked. The next account is by another lady, say Miss Rose.
+
+'III.--Writes Miss Rose--My first experience of crystal gazing was not
+a pleasant one, as will be seen from the following which I now relate as
+exactly as I can remember. I asked my friend, Miss Angus, to allow me to
+look in her crystal, and, after doing so for a short time, gave up,
+saying it was very unsatisfactory, as, although I saw a room with a
+bright fire in it and a bed all curtained and people coming and going,
+I could not make out who they were, so I returned the crystal to Miss
+Angus, with the request that she might look for me. She said at once,
+"I see a bed with a man in it looking very ill and a lady in black
+beside it." Without saying any more Miss Angus still kept looking, and,
+after some time, I asked to have one more look, and on her passing the
+ball back to me, I received quite a shock, for there, perfectly clearly
+in a bright light, I saw stretched out in bed an old man apparently
+dead; for a few minutes I could not look, and on doing so once more
+there appeared a lady in black and out of dense darkness a long black
+object was being carried and it stopped before a dark opening overhung
+with rocks. At the time I saw this I was staying with cousins,
+and it was a Friday evening. On Sunday we heard of the death of the
+father-in-law of one of my cousins; of course I knew the old gentleman
+was very ill, but my thoughts were not in the least about him when
+looking in the crystal. I may also say I did not recognise in the
+features of the dead man those of the old gentleman whose death I
+mention. On looking again on Sunday, I once more saw the curtained bed
+and some people.'
+
+I now give Miss Angus's version of this case, as originally received from
+her (December 1897). I had previously received an oral version, from a
+person present at the scrying. It differed, in one respect, from what Miss
+Angus writes. Her version is offered because it is made independently,
+without consultation, or attempt to reconcile recollections.
+
+'At a recent experience of gazing, for the first time I was able to make
+another see what _I_ saw in the crystal. Miss Rose called one afternoon,
+and begged me to look in the ball for her. I did so, and immediately
+exclaimed, "Oh! here is a bed, with a man in it looking very ill [I saw
+he was dead, but refrained from saying so], and there is a lady dressed
+in black sitting beside the bed." I did not recognise the man to be
+anyone I knew, so I told her to look. In a very short time she called
+out, "Oh! I see the bed too! But, oh! take it away, the man is _dead_!"
+She got quite a shock, and said she would never look in it again. Soon,
+however, curiosity prompted her to have one more look, and the scene at
+once came back again, and slowly, from a misty object at the side of the
+bed, the lady in black became quite distinct. Then she described
+several people in the room, and said they were carrying something all
+draped in black. When she saw this, she put the ball down and would not
+look at it again. She called again on Sunday (this had been on Friday)
+with her cousin, and we teased her about being _afraid_ of the crystal,
+so she said she would just look in it once more. She took the ball, but
+immediately laid it down again, saying, "No, I won't look, as the bed
+with the awful man in it is there again!"
+
+'When they went home, they heard that the cousin's father-in-law had
+died that afternoon,[11] but to show he had never been in our thoughts,
+although we _all_ knew he had not been well, _no one_ suggested him; his
+name was never mentioned in connection with the vision.'
+
+'Clairvoyance,' of course, is not illustrated here, the corpse being
+unrecognised, and the coincidence, doubtless, accidental.
+
+The next case is attested by a civilian, a slight acquaintance of Miss
+Angus's, who now saw him for the second time only, but better known to her
+family.
+
+'IV.--On Thursday, March --? 1897, I was lunching with my friends the
+Anguses, and during luncheon the conversation turned upon crystal balls
+and the visions that, by some people, can be seen in them. The subject
+arose owing to Miss Angus having just been presented with a crystal ball
+by Mr. Andrew Lang. I asked her to let me see it, and then to try and
+see if she could conjure up a vision of any person of whom I might
+think.... I fixed my mind upon a friend, a young trooper in the
+[regiment named], as I thought his would be a striking and peculiar
+personality, owing to his uniform, and also because I felt sure that
+Miss Angus could not possibly know of his existence. I fixed my mind
+steadily upon my friend, and presently Miss Angus, who had already seen
+two cloudy visions of faces and people, called out, "Now I see a man on
+a horse most distinctly; he is dressed most queerly, and glitters all
+over--why, it's a soldier! a soldier in uniform, but it's not an
+officer." My excitement on hearing this was so great that I ceased to
+concentrate my attention upon the thought of my friend, and the vision
+faded away and could not afterwards be recalled.--December 2, 1897.'
+
+The witness gives the name of the trooper, whom he had befriended in a
+severe illness. Miss Angus's own account follows: she had told me the
+story in June 1897.
+
+'Shortly after I became the happy possessor of a "crystal" I managed to
+convert several very decided "sceptics," and I will here give a short
+account of my experiences with two or three of them.
+
+'One was with a Mr. ----, who was so determined to baffle me, he said he
+would think of a friend it would not be _possible_ for me to describe!
+
+'I had only met Mr. ---- the day before, and knew utmost nothing about
+him or his personal friends.
+
+'I took up the ball, which immediately became misty, and out of this
+mist gradually a crowd of people appeared, but too indistinctly for me
+to recognise anyone, until suddenly a man on horseback came galloping
+along. I remember saying, "I can't describe what he is like, but he is
+dressed in a very queer way--in something so bright that the sun shining
+on him quite dazzles me, and I cannot make him out!" As he came nearer I
+exclaimed. "Why, it's a _soldier_ in shining armour, but it's not an
+_officer_, only a soldier!" Two friends who were in the room said
+Mr. ----'s excitement was intense, and my attention was drawn from the
+ball by hearing him call out, "It's wonderful! it's perfectly true! I
+was thinking of a young boy, a son of a crofter, in whom I am deeply
+interested, and who is a trooper in the ---- in London, which would
+account for the crowd of people round him in the street!"'
+
+The next case is given, first in the version of the lady who was
+unconsciously scried for, and next in that of Miss Angus. The other lady
+writes:
+
+'V.--I met Miss A. for the first time in a friend's house in the south
+of England, and one evening mention was made of a crystal ball, and our
+hostess asked Miss A. to look in it, and, if possible, tell her what was
+happening to a friend of hers. Miss A. took the crystal, and our hostess
+put her hand on Miss A.'s forehead to "will her." I, not believing in
+this, took up a book and went to the other side of the room. I was
+suddenly very much startled to hear Miss A., in quite an agitated way,
+describe a scene that had most certainly been very often in my thoughts,
+but of which I had never mentioned a word, She accurately described a
+race-course in Scotland, and an accident which happened to a friend of
+mine only a week or two before, and she was evidently going through the
+same doubt and anxiety that I did at the time as to whether he was
+actually killed or only very much hurt. It really was a most wonderful
+revelation to me, as it was the very first time I had seen a crystal.
+Our hostess, of course, was very much annoyed that she had not been able
+to influence Miss A., while I, who had appeared so very indifferent,
+should have affected her.--November 28, 1897.'
+
+Miss Angus herself writes:
+
+'Another case was a rather interesting one, as I somehow got inside the
+thoughts of _one_ lady while _another_ was doing her best to influence
+me!
+
+'Miss ----, a friend in Brighton, has strange "magnetic" powers, and
+felt quite sure of success with me and the ball.
+
+'Another lady, Miss H., who was present, laughed at the whole thing,
+especially when Miss ---- insisted on holding my hand and patting her
+other hand on my forehead! Miss H. in a scornful manner took up a book,
+and, crossing to the other side of the room, left us to our folly.
+
+'In a very short time I felt myself getting excited, which had never
+happened before, when I looked in the crystal. I saw a crowd of people,
+and in some strange way I felt I was in it, and we all seemed to be
+waiting for something. Soon a rider came past, young, dressed for
+racing. His horse ambled past, and he smiled and nodded to those he
+knew in the crowd, and then was lost to sight.
+
+'In a moment we all seemed to feel as if something had happened, and I
+went through great agony of suspense trying to see what seemed _just_
+beyond my view. Soon, however, two or three men approached, and carried
+him past before my eyes, and again my anxiety was intense to discover if
+he were only very badly hurt or if life were really extinct. All this
+happened in a few moments, but long enough to have left me so agitated
+that I could not realise it had only been a vision in a glass ball.
+
+'By this time Miss H. had laid aside her book, and came forward quite
+startled, and told me that I had accurately described a scene on a
+race-course in Scotland which she had witnessed just a week or two
+before--a scene that had very often been in her thoughts, but, as we
+were strangers to each other, she had never mentioned. She also said I
+had exactly described her own feelings at the time, and had brought it
+all back in a most vivid manner.
+
+'The other lady was rather disappointed that, after she had concentrated
+her thoughts so hard, I should have been influenced instead by one who
+had jeered at the whole affair.'
+
+[This anecdote was also told to me, within a few days of the occurrence,
+by Miss Angus. Her version was that she first saw a gentleman rider going
+to the post and nodding to his friends. Then she saw him carried on a
+stretcher through the crowd. She seemed, she said, to be actually present,
+and felt somewhat agitated. The fact of the accident was, later, mentioned
+to me in Scotland by another lady, a stranger to all the persons.--A.L.]
+
+VI.--I may briefly add an experiment of December 21, 1897. A gentleman had
+recently come from England to the Scottish town where Miss Angus lives. He
+dined with her family, and about 10.15 to 10.30 P.M. she proposed to look
+in the glass for a scene or person of whom he was to think. He called up a
+mental picture of a ball at which he had recently been, and of a young
+lady to whom he had there been introduced. The lady's face, however, he
+could not clearly visualise, and Miss Angus reported nothing but a view of
+an empty ball-room, with polished floor and many lights. The gentleman
+made another effort, and remembered his partner with some distinctness.
+Miss Angus then described another room, not a ball-room, comfortably
+furnished, in which a girl with brown hair drawn back from her forehead,
+and attired in a high-necked white blouse, was reading, or writing
+letters, under a bright light in an unshaded glass globe. The description
+of the features, figure, and height tallied with Mr. ----'s recollection;
+but he had never seen this Geraldine of an hour except in ball dress. He
+and Miss Angus noted the time by their watches (it was 10.30), and
+Mr. ---- said that on the first opportunity he would ask the young lady
+how she had been dressed and how employed at that hour on December 21. On
+December 22 he met her at another dance, and her reply corroborated the
+crystal picture. She had been writing letters, in a high-necked white
+blouse, under an incandescent gas lamp with an unshaded glass globe. She
+was entirely unknown to Miss Angus, and had only been seen once by
+Mr. ----. Mr. ---- and the lady of the crystal picture corroborated all
+this in writing.
+
+I now suggested an experiment to Miss Angus, which, after all, was clearly
+not of a nature to establish a 'test' for sceptics. The inquirer was to
+write down, and inclose in an envelope, a statement of his thoughts; Miss
+Angus was to do the same with her description of the picture seen by her;
+and these documents were to be sent to me, without communication between
+the inquirer and the crystal-gazer. Of course, this could in no way prove
+absence of collusion, as the two parties might arrange privately
+beforehand what the vision was to be.
+
+Indeed, nobody is apt to be convinced, or shaken, unless he is himself the
+inquirer and a stranger to the seeress, as the people in these experiments
+were. Evidence interesting to _them_--and, in a secondary degree, to
+others who know them--can thus be procured; but strangers are left to the
+same choice of doubts as in all reports of psychological experiences,
+'chromatic audition,' views of coloured numerals, and the other topics
+illustrated by Mr. Galton's interesting researches.
+
+In this affair of the envelopes the inquirer was a Mr. Pembroke, who had
+just made Miss Angus's acquaintance, and was but a sojourner in the land.
+He wrote, before knowing what Miss Angus had seen in the ball:
+
+'VII.--On Sunday, January 23, 1898, whilst Miss Angus was looking in the
+crystal ball, I was thinking of my brother, who was, I believe, at that
+time, somewhere between Sabathu (Punjab, India) and Egypt. I was anxious
+to know what stage of his journey he had reached.'
+
+Miss Angus saw, and wrote, before telling Mr. Pembroke:
+
+'A long and very white road, with tall trees at one side; on the other,
+a river or lake of greyish water. Blue sky, with a crimson sunset. A
+great black ship is anchored near, and on the deck I see a man lying,
+apparently very ill. He is a powerful-looking man, fair, and very much
+bronzed. Seven or eight Englishmen, in very light clothes, are standing
+on the road beside the boat.
+
+'January 28, 1898.'
+
+'A great black ship,' anchored in 'a river or lake,' naturally suggests
+the Suez Canal, where, in fact, Mr. Pembroke's brother was just arriving,
+as was proved by a letter received from him eight days after the
+experiment was recorded, on January 31. At that date Mr. Pembroke had not
+yet been told the nature of Miss Angus's crystal picture, nor had she any
+knowledge of his brother's whereabouts.
+
+In February 1898, Miss Angus again came to the place where I was residing.
+We visited together the scene of an historical crime, and Miss Angus
+looked into the glass ball. It was easy for her to 'visualise' the
+incidents of the crime (the murder of Cardinal Beaton), for they are
+familiar enough to many people. What she did see in the ball was a tall,
+pale lady, 'about forty, but looking thirty-five,' with hair drawn
+back from the brows, standing beside a high chair, dressed in a wide
+farthingale of stiff grey brocade, without a ruff. The costume corresponds
+well (as we found) with that of 1546, and I said, 'I suppose it is
+Mariotte Ogilvy'--to whom Miss Angus's historical knowledge (and perhaps
+that of the general public) did not extend. Mariotte was the Cardinal's
+lady-love, and was in the Castle on the night before the murder,
+according to Knox. She had been in my mind, whence (on the theory of
+thought transference) she may have passed to Miss Angus's mind; but I had
+never speculated on Mariotte's costume. Nothing but conjecture, of course,
+comes of these apparently 'retrospective' pictures; though a most singular
+and picturesque coincidence occurred, which may be told in a very
+different connection.
+
+The next example was noted at the same town. The lady who furnishes it is
+well known to me, and it was verbally corroborated by Miss Angus, to whom
+the lady, her absent nephew, and all about her, were entirely strange.
+
+'VIII.--I was very anxious to know whether my nephew would be sent to
+India this year, so I told Miss Angus that I had thought of something,
+and asked her to look in the glass ball. She did so, but almost
+immediately turned round and looked out of the window at the sea, and
+said, "I saw a ship so distinctly I thought it must be a reflection."
+She looked in the ball again, and said, "It is a large ship, and it is
+passing a huge rock with a lighthouse on it. I can't see who are on the
+ship, but the sky is very clear and blue. Now I see a large building,
+something like a club, and in front there are a great many people
+sitting and walking about. I think it must be some place abroad, for the
+people are all dressed in very light clothes, and it seems to be very
+sunny and warm. I see a young man sitting on a chair, with his feet
+straight out before him. He is not talking to anyone, but seems to be
+listening to something. He is dark and slight, and not very tall; and
+his eyebrows are dark and very distinctly marked."
+
+'I had not had the pleasure of meeting Miss Angus before, and she knew
+nothing whatever about my nephew; but the young man described was
+exactly like him, both in his appearance and in the way he was sitting.'
+
+In this case thought transference may be appealed to. The lady was
+thinking of her nephew in connection with India. It is not maintained, of
+course, that the picture was of a prophetic character.
+
+The following examples have some curious and unusual features. On
+Wednesday, February 2, 1897, Miss Angus was looking in the crystal,
+to amuse six or seven people whose acquaintance she had that day made.
+A gentleman, Mr. Bissett, asked her 'what letter was in his pocket,'
+She then saw, under a bright sky, and, as it were, a long way off,
+a large building, in and out of which many men were coming and going.
+Her impression was that the scene must be abroad. In the little company
+present, it should be added, was a lady, Mrs. Cockburn, who had
+considerable reason to think of her young married daughter, then at a
+place about fifty miles away. After Miss Angus had described the large
+building and crowds of men, some one asked, 'Is it an exchange?' 'It
+might be,' she said. 'Now comes a man in a great hurry. He has a broad
+brow, and short, curly hair;[12] hat pressed low down on his eyes. The
+face is very serious; but he has a delightful smile.' Mr. and Mrs.
+Bissett now both recognised their friend and stockbroker, whose letter was
+in Mr. Bissett's pocket.
+
+The vision, which interested Miss Angus, passed away, and was interrupted
+by that of a hospital nurse, and of a lady in a _peignoir_, lying on a
+sofa, _with bare feet_.[13] Miss Angus mentioned this vision as a bore,
+she being more interested in the stockbroker, who seems to have inherited
+what was once in the possession of another stockbroker--'the smile of
+Charles Lamb.' Mrs. Cockburn, for whom no pictures appeared, was rather
+vexed, and privately expressed with freedom a very sceptical opinion
+about the whole affair. But, on Saturday, February 5, 1897, Miss Angus was
+again with Mr. and Mrs. Bissett. When Mrs. Bissett announced that she had
+'thought of something,' Miss Angus saw a walk in a wood or garden, beside
+a river, under a brilliant blue sky. Here was a lady, very well dressed,
+twirling a white parasol on her shoulder as she walked, in a curious
+'stumpy' way, beside a gentleman in light clothes, such as are worn in
+India. He was broad-shouldered, had a short neck and a straight nose, and
+seemed to listen, laughing, but indifferent, to his obviously vivacious
+companion. The lady had a 'drawn' face, indicative of ill health. Then
+followed a scene in which the man, without the lady, was looking on at a
+number of Orientals busy in the felling of trees. Mrs. Bissett recognised,
+in the lady, her sister, Mrs. Clifton, in India--above all, when Miss
+Angus gave a realistic imitation of Mrs. Clifton's walk, the peculiarity
+of which was caused by an illness some years ago. Mrs. and Mr. Bissett
+also recognised their brother-in-law in the gentleman seen in both
+pictures. On being shown a portrait of Mrs. Clifton as a girl, Miss Angus
+said it was 'like, but too pretty.' A photograph done recently, however,
+showed her 'the drawn face' of the crystal picture.[14]
+
+Next day, Sunday, February 6, Mrs. Bissett received, what was not
+usual--a letter from her sister in India, Mrs. Clifton, dated January 20.
+Mrs. Clifton described a place in a native State, where she had been at a
+great 'function,' in certain gardens beside a river. She added that they
+were going to another place for a certain purpose, 'and then we go into
+camp till the end of February.' One of Mr. Clifton's duties is to direct
+the clearing of wood preparatory to the formation of the camp, as in Miss
+Angus's crystal picture.[15] The sceptical Mrs. Cockburn heard of these
+coincidences, and an idea occurred to her. She wrote to her daughter, who
+has been mentioned, and asked whether, on Wednesday, February 2, she had
+been lying on a sofa in her bed-room, with bare feet. The young lady
+confessed that it was indeed so;[16] and, when she heard how the fact came
+to be known, expressed herself with some warmth on the abuse of glass
+balls, which tend to rob life of its privacy.
+
+In this case the _prima facie_ aspect of things is that a thought
+of Mr. Bissett's about his stockbroker, _dulce ridentem_, somehow
+reflected itself into Miss Angus's mind by way of the glass ball, and
+was interrupted by a thought of Mrs. Cockburn's, as to her daughter. But
+how these thoughts came to display the unknown facts concerning the
+garden by the river, the felling of trees for a camp, and the bare feet,
+is a question about which it is vain to theorise.[17]
+
+On the vanishing of the jungle scene there appeared a picture of a man in
+a dark undress uniform, beside a great bay, in which were ships of war.
+Wooden huts, as in a plague district, were on shore. Mr. Bissett asked,
+'What is the man's expression?' 'He looks as if he had been giving a lot
+of last orders.' Then appeared 'a place like a hospital, with five or six
+beds--no, berths: it is a ship. Here is the man again.' He was minutely
+described, one peculiarity being the way in which his hair grew--or,
+rather, did not grow--on his temples.
+
+Miss Angus now asked, 'Where is my little lady?'--meaning the lady of the
+twirling parasol and _staccato_ walk. 'Oh, I've left off thinking of her,'
+said Mrs. Bissett, who had been thinking of, and recognised in the
+officer in undress uniform, her brother, the man with the singular hair,
+whose face, in fact, had been scarred in that way by an encounter with a
+tiger. He was expected to sail from Bombay, but news of his setting
+forth has not been received (February 10) at the moment when this is
+written.[18]
+
+In these Indian cases, 'thought transference' may account for the
+correspondence between the figures seen by Miss Angus and the ideas in the
+mind of Mr. and Mrs. Bissett. But the hypothesis of thought transference,
+while it would cover the wooden huts at Bombay (Mrs. Bissett knowing that
+her brother was about to leave that place), can scarcely explain the scene
+in the garden by the river and the scene with the trees. The incident of
+the bare feet may be regarded as a fortuitous coincidence, since Miss
+Angus saw the young lady foreshortened, and could not describe her face.
+
+In the Introductory Chapter it was observed that the phenomena which
+apparently point to some unaccountable supernormal faculty of acquiring
+knowledge are 'trivial.' These anecdotes illustrate the triviality; but
+the facts certainly left a number of people, wholly unfamiliar with such
+experiments, under the impression that Miss Angus's glass ball was like
+Prince Ali's magical telescope in the 'Arabian Nights.'[19] These
+experiments, however, occasionally touch on intimate personal matters,
+and cannot be reported in such instances.
+
+It will be remarked that the faculty is freakish, and does not always
+respond to conscious exertion of thought in the mind of the inquirer.
+Thus, in Case I. a connection of the person thought of is discerned; in
+another the mind of a stranger present seems to be read. In another
+case (not given here) the inquirer tried to visualise a card for a
+person present to guess, while Miss Angus was asked to describe an object
+which the inquirer was acquainted with, but which he banished from his
+conscious thought. The double experiment was a double-barrelled success.
+
+It seems hardly necessary to point out that chance coincidence will not
+cover this set of cases, where in each 'guess' the field of conjecture
+is boundless, and is not even narrowed by the crystal-gazer's knowledge
+of the persons for whose diversion she makes the experiment. As
+'muscle-reading' is not in question (in the one case of contact between
+inquirer and crystal-gazer the results were unexpected), and as no
+unconsciously made signs could convey, for example, the idea of a cavalry
+soldier in uniform, or an accident on a race-course in two _tableaux_, I
+do not at present see any more plausible explanation than that of thought
+transference, though how that is to account for some of the cases given I
+do not precisely understand.
+
+Any one who can accept the assurance of my personal belief in the
+good faith of all concerned will see how very useful this faculty of
+crystal-gazing must be to the Apache or Australian medicine-man or
+Polynesian priest. Freakish as the faculty is, a few real successes, well
+exploited and eked out by fraud, would set up a wizard's reputation. That
+a faculty of being thus affected is genuine seems proved, apart from
+modern evidence, by the world-wide prevalence of crystal-gazing in the
+ethnographic region. But the discovery of this prevalence had not been
+made, to my knowledge, before modern instances induced me to notice the
+circumstances, sporadically recorded in books of travel.
+
+The phenomena are certainly of a kind to encourage the savage theory of
+the wandering soul. How else, thinkers would say, can the seer visit the
+distant place or person, and correctly describe men and scenes which, in
+the body, he never saw? Or they would encourage the Polynesian belief
+that the 'spirit' of the thing or person looked for is suspended by a god
+over the water, crystal, blood, ink, or whatever it may be. Thus, to
+anthropologists, the discovery of crystal-gazing as a thing widely
+diffused and still flourishing ought to be grateful, however much they
+may blame my childish credulity. I may add that I have no ground to
+suppose that crystal-gazing will ever be of practical service to the
+police or to persons who have lost articles of portable property. But I
+have no objection to experiments being made at Scotland Yard.[20]
+
+[Footnote 1: Information, with a photograph of the stones, from a
+correspondent in West Maitland, Australia.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Report Ethnol. Bureau_, 1887-88, p. 460; vol. ii. p. 69.
+Captain Bourke's volume on _The Medicine Men of the Apaches_ may also be
+consulted.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Fitzroy, _Adventure_, vol. ii. p. 389.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _L'Histoire de la grand Ile Madagascar_, par le Sieur de
+Flacourt. Paris, 1661, ch. 76. Veue de deux Navires de France predite par
+les Negres, avant que l'on en peust sçavoir des Nouvelles, &c.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Religion of the Amazulu_, p. 341.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _J.A.I_., November 1894, p. 155. Ryckov is cited; _Zhurnal_,
+p. 86.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Rites and Laws of the Yncas_, Christoval de Molina, p. 12.]
+
+[Footnote 8: See Miss X's article, S.P.R. _Proceedings_, v. 486.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Op. cit. v. 505.]
+
+[Footnote 10: If any reader wishes to make experiments, he, or she, should
+not be astonished if the first crystal figure represents 'the sheeted
+dead,' or a person ill in bed. For some reason, or no reason, this is
+rather a usual prelude, signifying nothing.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Sunday afternoon. It is not implied that the pictures on
+Friday were prophetic. Probably Miss Rose saw what Miss Angus had seen by
+aid of 'suggestion.']
+
+[Footnote 12: Miss Angus could not be sure of the colour of the hair.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The position was such that Miss Angus could not see the face
+of the lady.]
+
+[Footnote 14: I saw the photographs.]
+
+[Footnote 15: I have been shown the letter of January 20, which confirmed
+the evidence of the crystal pictures. The camp was formed for official
+purposes in which Mr. Clifton was concerned. A letter of February 9
+unconsciously corroborates.]
+
+[Footnote 16: The incident of the feet occurred at 4.30 to 7.30 P.M. The
+crystal picture was about 10 P.M.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Miss Angus had only within the week made the acquaintance of
+Mrs. Cockburn and the Bissetts. Of these relations of theirs at a distance
+she had no knowledge.]
+
+[Footnote 18: I have seen a photograph of this gentleman, Major Hamilton,
+which tallies with the full description given by Miss Angus, as reported
+by Mrs. Bissett. All the proper names here, as throughout, are altered.
+
+This account I wrote from the verbal statement of Mrs. Bissett. It
+was then read and corroborated by herself, Mr. Bissett, Mr. Cockburn,
+Mrs. Cockburn, and Miss Angus, who added dates and signatures.]
+
+[Footnote 19: The letters attesting each of these experiments are in my
+possession. The real names are in no case given in this account, by my own
+desire, but (with permission of the persona concerned) can be communicated
+privately.]
+
+[Footnote 20: The faculty of seeing 'fancy pictures' in the glass is
+far from uncommon. I have only met with three other persons besides
+Miss Angus, two of them men, who had any success in 'telepathic'
+crystal-gazing. In correcting 'revises' (March 16), I leant that the
+brother of Mr. Pembroke (p. 105) wrote from Cairo on January 27. The
+'scry' of January 23 represented his ship in the Suez Canal. He was, as
+his letter shows, in quarantine at Suez, at Moses's Wells, from January 25
+to January 26. Major Hamilton (pp. 109, 110), on the other hand, left
+Bombay, indeed, but not by sea, as in the crystal-picture. See Appendix C.
+Mr. Starr, an American critic, adds Cherokees, Aztecs, and Tonkaways to
+the ranks of crystal gazers.]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ANTHROPOLOGY AND HALLUCINATIONS
+
+We have been examining cases, savage or civilised, in which knowledge is
+believed to be acquired through no known channel of sense. All such
+instances among savages, whether of the nature of clairvoyance simple,
+or by aid of gazing in a smooth surface, or in dreams, or in trance, or
+through second sight, would confirm if they did not originate the belief
+in the separable soul. The soul, if it is to visit distant places and
+collect information, must leave the body, it would be argued, and must so
+far be capable of leading an independent life. Perhaps we ought next to
+study cases of 'possession,' when knowledge is supposed to be conveyed by
+an alien soul, ghost, spirit, or god, taking up its abode in a man, and
+speaking out of his lips. But it seems better first to consider the
+alleged super-normal phenomena which may have led the savage reasoner to
+believe that _he_ was not the only owner of a separable soul: that other
+people were equally gifted.
+
+The sense, as of separation, which a savage dreamer or seer would feel
+after a dream or vision in which he visited remote places, would satisfy
+him that _his_ soul, at least, was volatile. But some experience of what
+he would take to be visits from the spirits of others, would be needed
+before he recognised that other men, as well as he, had the faculty of
+sending their souls a journeying.
+
+Now, ordinary dreams, in which the dreamer seemed to see persons who were
+really remote; would supply to the savage reasoner a certain amount of
+affirmative evidence. It is part of Mr. Tylor's contention that savages
+(like some children) are subject to the difficulty which most of us may
+have occasionally felt in deciding 'Did this really happen, or did I dream
+it?' Thus, ordinary dreams would offer to the early thinker some
+evidence that other men's souls could visit his, as he believes that his
+can visit them.
+
+But men, we may assume, were not, at the assumed stage of thought, so
+besotted as not to take a great practical distinction between sleeping
+and waking experience on the whole. As has been shown, the distinction
+is made by the lowest savages of our acquaintance. One clear _waking_
+hallucination, on the other hand, of the presence of a person really
+absent, could not but tell more with the early philosopher than a score of
+dreams, for to be easily forgotten is of the essence of a dream. Savages,
+indeed, oddly enough, have hit on our theory, 'dreams go by contraries.'
+Dr. Callaway illustrates this for the Zulus, and Mr. Scott for the
+Mang'anza. Thus they _do_ discriminate between sleeping and waking. We
+must therefore examine _waking_ hallucinations in the field of actual
+experience, and on such recent evidence as may be accessible. If these
+hallucinations agree, in a certain ratio, beyond what fortuitous
+coincidence can explain, with real but unknown events, then such
+hallucinations would greatly strengthen, in the mind of an early
+thinker, the savage theory that a man at a distance may, voluntarily or
+involuntarily, project his spirit on a journey, and be seen where he is
+not present.
+
+When Mr. Tylor wrote his book, the study of the occasional waking
+hallucinations of the sane and healthy was in its infancy. Much, indeed,
+had been written about hallucinations, but these were mainly the chronic
+false perceptions of maniacs, of drunkards, and of persons in bad
+health such as Nicolai and Mrs. A. The hallucinations of persons of
+genius--Jeanne d'Arc, Luther, Socrates, Pascal, were by some attributed
+to lunacy in these famous people. Scarcely any writers before Mr. Galton
+had recognised the occurrence of hallucinations once in a life, perhaps,
+among healthy, sober, and mentally sound people. If these were known to
+occur, they were dismissed as dreams of an unconscious sleep. This is
+still practically the hypothesis of Dr. Parish, as we shall see later.
+But in the last twenty years the infrequent hallucinations of the sane
+have been recognised by Mr. Galton, and discussed by Professor James,
+Mr. Gurney, Dr. Parish, and many other writers.
+
+Two results have followed. First, 'ghosts' are shown to be, when not
+illusions caused by mistaking one object for another, then hallucinations.
+As these most frequently represent a living person who is not present, by
+parity of reason the appearance of a dead person is on the same level, is
+not a space-filling 'ghost,' but merely an hallucination. Such an
+appearance can, _prima facie_, suggest no reasonable inference as to the
+continued existence of the dead. On the other hand, the new studies have
+raised the perhaps insoluble question, 'Do not hallucinations of the sane,
+representing the living, coincide more frequently than mere luck can
+account for, with the death or other crisis of the person apparently
+seen?' If this could be proved, then there would seem to be a causal
+_nexus_, a relation of cause and effect between the hallucination and the
+coincident crisis. That connection would be provisionally explained by
+some not understood action of the mind or brain of the person in the
+crisis, on that of the person who has the hallucination. This is no new
+idea; only the name, Telepathy, is modern. Of course, if all this were
+accepted, it would be the next step to ask whether hallucinations
+representing the dead show any signs of being caused by some action on the
+side of the departed. That is a topic on which the little that we have to
+say must be said later.
+
+In the meantime the reader who has persevered so far is apt to go no
+further. The prejudice against 'wraiths' and 'ghosts' is very strong; but,
+then, our innocent phantasms are neither (as we understand their nature)
+ghosts nor wraiths. Kant broke the edges of his metaphysical tools
+against, not these phantasms, but the logically inconceivable entities
+which were at once material and non-material, at once 'spiritual' and
+'space-filling.' There is no such difficulty about hallucinations, which,
+whatever else may be said about them, are familiar facts of experience.
+The only real objections are the statements that hallucinations are
+always _morbid_ (which is no longer the universal belief of physiologists
+and psychologists), and that the alleged coincidences of a phantasm of a
+person with the unknown death of that person at a distance are 'pure
+flukes.' That is the question to which we recur later.
+
+In the meantime, the defenders of the theory, that there is some not
+understood connection of cause and effect between the death or other
+crisis at one end and the perception representing the person affected by
+the crisis at the other end, point out that such hallucinations, or other
+effects on the percipient, exist in a regular rising scale of potency and
+perceptibility. Suppose that 'A's' death in Yorkshire is to affect the
+consciousness of 'B' in Surrey before he knows anything about the fact
+(suppose it for the sake of argument), then the effect may take place
+(1) on 'B's' emotions, producing a vague _malaise_ and gloom; (2) on his
+motor nerves, urging him to some act; (3) or may translate itself into his
+senses, as a touch felt, a voice heard, a figure seen; or (4) may render
+itself as a phrase or an idea.
+
+Of these, (1) the emotional effect is, of course, the vaguest. We may all
+have had a sudden fit of gloom which we could not explain. People rarely
+act on such impressions, and, when they do, are often wrong. Thus a
+friend of my own was suddenly so overwhelmed, at golf, with inexplicable
+misery (though winning his match) that he apologised to his opponent and
+walked home from the ninth hole. Nothing was wrong at home. Probably some
+real ground of apprehension had obscurely occurred to his mind and
+expressed itself in his emotion.
+
+But one may illustrate what did look like a coincidence by the experience
+of the same friend. He inhabited, as a young married man, a flat in a
+house belonging to an acquaintance. The hall was covered by a kind of
+glass roof, over part of its extent. He was staying in the country
+with his wife, and as they travelled home the lady was beset with an
+irresistible conviction that something terrible had occurred, _not_ to her
+children. On reaching their house they found that one of their maids had
+fallen through the glass roof and killed herself. They also learned that
+the girl's sister had arrived at the house, immediately after the
+accident, explaining that she was driven to come by a sense that something
+dreadful had happened. The lawyer, too, who represented the owner of the
+house, had appeared, unsummoned, from a conviction, which he could not
+resist, that for some reason unknown he was wanted there.[1] Here, then,
+was not an hallucination, but an emotional effect simultaneously reaching
+the consciousness of three persons, and coinciding with an unknown
+crisis.[2]
+
+Cases in which a person feels urged to an act (2) are also recorded.
+Indeed, the lawyer's in our anecdote is such an instance. Not to trouble
+ourselves (3) with 'voices,' hallucinations of sight, coinciding with a
+distant unknown crisis, are traced from a mere feeling that somebody is in
+the room, followed by a _mental_, or _mind's eye_ picture of a person
+dying at a distance, up to a kind of 'vision' of a person or scene, and so
+on to hallucinations appealing, at once, to touch, sight, and hearing. As
+some hundreds of these narratives of coincidental hallucinations in every
+degree have been collected from witnesses at first hand, often personally
+known, and usually personally cross-questioned, by the student, it is
+difficult to deny that there is a _prima facie_ case for inquiry.[3]
+
+There is here no question of 'spirits,' with all their physical and
+metaphysical difficulties. Nor is there any desire to shirk the fact that
+many 'presentiments' and hallucinations of the sane coincide with no
+ascertainable fact. We only provisionally posit the possibility of an
+influence, in its nature unknown, of one mind on another at a distance,
+such influence translating itself into an hallucination. An inquiry into
+this subject, in the ethnographic and modern fields, may be new but
+involves no 'superstition.'
+
+We now return to Mr. Tylor, who treats of hallucinations among other
+experiences which led early savage thinkers to believe in ghosts or
+separable souls, the origin of religion.
+
+As to the causes of hallucinations in general, Mr. Tylor has something to
+say, but it is nothing systematic. 'Sickness, exhaustion, and excitement'
+cause savages to behold 'human spectres,' in 'the objective reality' of
+which they believe. But if an educated modern, not sick, nor exhausted,
+nor excited, has an hallucination of a friend's presence, he, too,
+believes that it is 'objective,' is his friend in flesh and blood, till
+he finds out his mistake, by examination or reflection. As Professor
+William James remarks, in his 'Principles of Psychology,' such solitary
+hallucinations of the sane and healthy, once in a life-time, are difficult
+to account for, and are by no means rare. 'Sometimes,' Mr. Tylor observes,
+'the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all of
+an assembled company,' and he adds 'to assert or imply that they are
+visible sometimes, and to some persons, but not always, or to everyone,
+is to lay down an explanation of facts which is not, indeed, our usual
+modern explanation, but which is a perfectly rational and intelligible
+product of early science.'
+
+It is, indeed, nor has later science produced any rational and
+intelligible explanation of collective hallucinations, shared by several
+persons at once, and perhaps not perceived by others who are present. Mr.
+Tylor, it is true, asserts that 'in civilised countries a rumour of some
+one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a sight of it to others whose
+minds are in a properly receptive state.' But this is arguing in a circle;
+What is 'a properly receptive state'? If illness, overwork, 'expectant
+attention,' make 'a properly receptive state,' I should have seen several
+phantoms in several 'haunted houses.' But the only thing of the sort I
+ever saw occurred when I was thinking of nothing less, when I was in good
+health, and when I did not know (nor did I learn till long after) that it
+was the right and usual phantom to see. Mr. Podmore remarks that various
+members of the Psychical Society have sojourned in various 'haunted
+houses,' 'some of them in a state of expectancy and nervous excitement,'
+which never caused them to see phantoms, for they saw none.[4]
+
+Mr. Tylor treats of waking hallucinations in much the same manner as he
+deals with 'travelling clairvoyance.' He does not study them 'in the field
+of experience.' He is not concerned with the truth of the facts, important
+as we think it would be, but with his theory that hallucinations, among
+other causes, would naturally give rise to the belief in spirits, and thus
+to the early philosophy of Animism. Now, certainly, the hallucination of a
+person's presence, say at the moment of his death at a distance, would
+suggest to a savage that something of the dying man's, something
+symbolised in the word 'shadow,' or 'breath' _(spiritus)_, had come to say
+farewell. The modern 'spiritualistic' theory, again, that the dead man's
+'spirit' is actually present to the percipient, in space, corresponds to,
+and is derived from, the animistic philosophy of the savage. But we may
+believe in such 'death-wraiths,' or hallucinatory appearances of
+the dying, without being either savages or spiritualists. We may
+believe without pretending to explain, or we may advance the theory of
+'Telepathy,' Hegel's 'magical tie,' according to which the distant mind
+somehow impresses itself, in a more or less perfect hallucination, on the
+mind of the person who perceives the wraith. If this be so, or even if no
+explanation be offered, the truth of the stories of coincidental
+apparitions becomes important, as pointing to a new region of psychical
+inquiry. Then the evidence of savages as to hallucinations of their own,
+coincident with the death of their absent friends, will confirm,
+_quantum valeat_, the evidence of many modern observers in all ranks of
+life, and all degrees of culture, from Lord Brougham to an old nurse.[5]
+
+As to hallucinations coincident with the death of the person apparently
+seen, Mr. Tylor says: 'Narratives of this class I can here only specify
+without arguing on them, they are abundantly in circulation.'[6] Now, the
+modern hallucinations themselves can scarcely, perhaps, be called
+'survivals from savagery,' though the opinion that an hallucination of a
+person must be his 'spirit' is really such a survival. It is with that
+opinion, with Animism in its hallucinatory origins, that Mr. Tylor is
+concerned, not with the hallucinations themselves or with the evidence
+for their veridical existence.
+
+Mr. Tylor gives three anecdotes, narrated to him, in two cases, by the
+seers, of phantasms of the living beheld by them (and in one case by a
+companion also) when the real person was dying at a distance. He adds: 'My
+own view is that nothing but dreams and visions could have ever put into
+men's minds such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of
+bodies.'[7] The idea may be perfectly erroneous; but if the occurrence
+of such coincidental appearances as Mr. Tylor tells us about could be
+shown to be too frequent for mere chance to produce, then there would be
+a presumption in favour of some unknown faculties in our nature--a proper
+theme for anthropology.
+
+The hallucinations of which we hear most are those in which a person
+sees the phantom of another person, who, unknown to him, is in or near
+the hour of death. Mr. Tylor, in addition to his three instances in
+civilised life, alludes to one in savage life, with references to other
+cases.[8] We turn to his savage instance, offering it at full length from
+the original.[9]
+
+'Among the Maoris' (says Mr. Shortland) 'it is always ominous to see the
+figure of an absent person. If the figure is very shadowy, and its face is
+not seen, death, although he may ere long be expected, has not seized his
+prey. If the face of the absent person is seen, the omen forewarns the
+beholder that he is already dead.'
+
+The following statement is from the mouth of an eyewitness:
+
+'A party of natives left their village, with the intention of being
+absent some time, on a pig-hunting expedition. One night, while they
+were seated in the open air around a blazing fire, the figure of a
+relative who had been left ill at home was seen to approach. The
+apparition appeared to two of the party only, and vanished immediately
+on their making an exclamation of surprise. When they returned to the
+village they inquired for the sick man, and then learnt that he had
+died about the time he was said to have been seen.'
+
+I now give Maori cases, communicated to me by Mr. Tregear, F.R.G.S.,
+author of a 'Maori Comparative Dictionary.'
+
+A very intelligent Maori chief said to me, 'I have seen but two ghosts.
+I was a boy at school in Auckland, and one morning was asleep in bed
+when I found myself aroused by some one shaking me by the shoulder. I
+looked up, and saw bending over me the well-known form of my uncle, whom
+I supposed to be at the Bay of Islands. I spoke to him, but the form
+became dim and vanished. The next mail brought me the news of his
+death. Years passed away, and I saw no ghost or spirit--not even when
+my father and mother died, and I was absent in each case. Then one day I
+was sitting reading, when a dark shadow fell across my book. I looked
+up, and saw a man standing between me and the window. His back was
+turned towards me. I saw from his figure that he was a Maori, and I
+called out to him, "Oh friend!" He turned round, and I saw my other
+uncle, Ihaka. The form faded away as the other had done. I had not
+expected to hear of my uncle's death, for I had seen him hale and strong
+a few hours before. However, he had gone into the house of a missionary,
+and he (with several white people) was poisoned by eating of a pie made
+from tinned meat, the tin having been opened and the meat left in it all
+night. That is all I myself had seen of spirits.'
+
+One more Maori example may be offered:[10]
+
+From Mr. Francis Dart Fenton, formerly in the Native Department of the
+Government, Auckland, New Zealand. He gave the account in writing to his
+friend, Captain J.H. Crosse, of Monkstown, Cork, from whom we received
+it. In 1852, when the incident occurred, Mr. Fenton was 'engaged in
+forming a settlement on the banks of the Waikato.'
+
+'March 25, 1860
+
+'Two sawyers, Frank Philps and Jack Mulholland, were engaged cutting
+timber for the Rev. R. Maunsell at the mouth of the Awaroa creek--a very
+lonely place, a vast swamp, no people within miles of them. As usual,
+they had a Maori with them to assist in felling trees. He came from
+Tihorewam, a village on the other side of the river, about six miles
+off. As Frank and the native were cross-cutting a tree, the native
+stopped suddenly, and said, "What are you come for?" looking in the
+direction of Frank. Frank replied, "What do you mean?" He said, "I am
+not speaking to you; I am speaking to my brother." Frank said, "Where is
+he?" The native replied, "Behind you. What do you want?" (to the other
+Maori), Frank looked round and saw nobody. The native no longer saw
+anyone, but bid down the saw and said, "I shall go across the river; my
+brother is dead."
+
+'Frank laughed at him, and reminded him that be had left him quite well
+on Sunday (five days before), and there had been no communication since.
+The Maori spoke no more, but got into his canoe and pulled across. When
+he arrived at the landing-place, he met people coming to fetch him. His
+brother had just died. I knew him well.'
+
+In answer to inquiries as to his authority for this narrative, Mr. Fenton
+writes:
+
+'December 18, 1883.
+
+'I knew all the parties concerned well, and it is quite true, _valeat
+quantum_, as the lawyers say. Incidents of this sort are not infrequent
+among the Maoris.
+
+'F.D. FENTON,
+ _'Late Chief Judge, Native Law-Court of N.Z.'_
+
+Here is a somewhat analogous example from Tierra del Fuego:
+
+'Jemmy Button was very superstitious' (says Admiral Fitzroy, speaking of
+a Fuegian brought to England). 'While at sea, on board the "Beagle," he
+said one morning to Mr. Bynoe that in the night some man came to the
+side of his hammock and whispered in his ear that his father was dead.
+He fully believed that such was the case,' and he was perfectly
+right.... 'He reminded Bennett of the dream.'[11]
+
+Mr. Darwin also mentions this case, a coincidental auditory hallucination.
+
+I have found no other savage cases quite to the point. This is,
+undeniably, 'a puir show for Kirkintilloch,' a meagre collection of savage
+death-wraiths, but it may be so meagre by reason of want of research, or
+of lack of records, travellers usually pooh-poohing the benighted
+superstitions of the heathen, or fearing to seem superstitious if they
+chronicle instances. However few the instances, they are, undeniably,
+exact parallels to those recorded in civilised life.
+
+In filling up the lacuna in Mr. Tylor's anthropological work, in asking
+questions as to the proportion between phantasms of the living which
+coincide with a crisis in the experience of the person seen, and those
+which do not, it is obviously necessary to reject all evidence of people
+who were ill, or anxious, or overworked, or in poignant grief at the time
+of the hallucination. It will be seen later that neither grief nor amatory
+passion (dominating the association of our ideas as they do) beget many
+phantasms. Our business, however, is with the false perceptions of persons
+trustworthy, as far as we know, sane, healthy, not usually visionary, and
+in an unperturbed state of mind.
+
+There remains a normal cause of subjective hallucinations, expectancy.
+This appears to be a real cause of hallucination or, at least, of
+illusion. Waiting for the sound of a carriage you may hear it often before
+it comes, you taking other sounds for that which you desire. Again, in an
+inquiry embracing 17,000 people, the S.P.R. collected thirteen cases of an
+hallucinatory appearance of one person to another who was _expecting_ his
+arrival. Once more, it is very conceivable that a trifle, the accidental
+opening of a door, a noise of a familiar kind in an unfamiliar place, may
+touch the brain into originating an hallucination of a person passing
+through the door, or of the place where the sound now heard used once to
+be familiar. Expectancy, again, and nervousness, might doubtless cause an
+hallucination to a person who felt uncomfortable in a house with a name to
+be 'haunted,' though, as we have seen, the effect is far less common than
+the cause. All these sorts of causes are undoubtedly more apt to be
+prevalent among superstitious savages than among educated Europeans.
+And it stands to reason that savages, where one man 'thinks he sees
+something,' will be readier than we are to think they 'see something' too.
+Yet collective hallucinations, which are shared by several persons at
+once, are especially puzzling. Even if they occur when all are in a
+strained condition of expectancy, it is odd that all see them in _the same
+way_.[12] Examples will occur later. When there is no excitement, the
+mystery is increased. We may note that, among the expectant multitudes who
+looked on while Bernadette was viewing the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes, not
+one person, however superstitious or hysterical, pretended to share the
+vision. Again, only one person, and he on doubtful evidence, is asserted
+to have shared, once, the visions of Jeanne d'Arc. In both cases all the
+conditions said to produce collective hallucination were present in the
+highest degree. Yet no collective hallucination occurred.
+
+Narratives about hallucinations coincident with a death, narratives well
+attested, are abundant in modern times, so abundant that one need only
+refer the curious to Messrs. Gurney and Myers's two large volumes,
+'Phantasms of the Living,' and to the S.P.R 'Report of Census of
+Hallucinations' (1894). Mr. Tylor says: 'The spiritualistic theory
+specially insists on cases of apparitions, where the person's death
+corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives
+his phantom.' But visionaries, he remarks truly, often see phantoms of
+living persons when nothing occurs. That is the case, and the question
+arises whether more such phantoms are viewed (_not_ by 'visionaries')
+in connection with the death or other crisis of the person whose
+hallucinatory appearance is perceived, than ought to occur, if there be no
+connection of some unknown cause between deaths and appearances. As Mr.
+Tylor observes, 'Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, came to
+associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be
+connected in fact.'[13] Did early man, then, find _in experience_ that
+apparitions of his friends were 'connected in fact' with their deaths?
+And, if so, was that discovered connection in fact the origin of his
+belief that an hallucinatory appearance of an absent person sometimes
+announced his death?
+
+That the belief exists in New Zealand we saw, and find confirmed by this
+instance, one of 'many such relations,' says the author. A Maori chief was
+long absent on the war-path. One day he entered his wife's hut, and sat
+mute by the hearth. She ran to bring witnesses, but on her return the
+phantasm was no longer visible. The woman soon afterwards married again.
+
+Her husband then returned in perfect health, and pardoned the lady, as
+she had acted on what, to a Maori mind, seemed good legal evidence of
+his decease. Of course, even if she fabled, the story is evidence to the
+existence of the belief.[14]
+
+What, then, is the cause of the belief that a phantom of a man is a token
+of his death? On the theory of savage philosophy, as explained by Mr.
+Tylor himself, a man's soul may leave his body and become visible to
+others, not at death only, but on many other occasions, in dream, trance,
+lethargy. All these are much more frequent conditions, in every man's
+career, than the fact of dying. Why, then, is the phantasm supposed by
+savages to announce death? Is it because, in a sufficient ratio of cases
+to provoke remark, early man has found the appearance and the death to be
+'things connected in fact'?
+
+I give an instance in which the philosophy of savages would lead them
+_not_ to connect a phantasm of a living man with his death.
+
+The Woi Worung, an Australian tribe, hold that 'the Murup [wraith] of an
+individual could be sent from him by magic, as, for instance, when a
+hunter incautiously went to sleep when out hunting.'[15] In this case the
+hunter is exposed to the magic of his enemies. But the Murup, or detached
+soul, would be visible to people at a distance when its owner is only
+asleep--according to the savage philosophy. Why, then, when the wraith is
+seen, is the owner believed to be dying? Are the things bound to be
+'connected in fact'?
+
+As is well known, the Society for Psychical Research has attempted a
+little census, for the purpose of discovering whether hallucinations
+representing persons at a distance coincided, within twelve hours, with
+their deaths, in a larger ratio than the laws of chance allow as possible.
+If it be so, the Maori might have some ground for his theory that such
+hallucinations betoken a decease. I do not believe that any such census
+can enable us to reach an affirmative conclusion which science will
+accept. In spite of all precautions taken, all warnings before, and
+'allowances' made later, collectors of evidence will 'select' affirmative
+cases already known, or (which is equally fatal) will be suspected of
+doing so. Again, illusions of memory, increasing the closeness of the
+coincidence, will come in--or it will be easy to say that they came in.
+'Allowances' for them will not be accepted.
+
+Once more, 17,000 cases, though a larger number than is usual in
+biological inquiries, are decidedly not enough for a popular argument on
+probabilities; a million, it will be said, would not be too many.
+Finally, granting honesty, accurate memory, and non-selection (none of
+which will be granted by opponents), it is easy to say that odd things
+_must_ occur, and that the large proportion of affirmative answers as to
+coincidental hallucinations is just a specimen of these odd things.
+
+Other objections are put forward by teachers of popular science who have
+not examined--or, having examined, misreport--the results of the Census in
+detail. I may give an example of their method.
+
+Mr. Edward Clodd is the author of several handbooks of science--'The Story
+of Creation,' 'A Manual of Evolution,' and others. Now, in a signed review
+of a book, a critique published in 'The Sketch' (October 13, 1897), Mr.
+Clodd wrote about the Census: 'Thousands of persons were asked whether
+they had ever seen apparitions, and out of these some hundreds, mostly
+unintelligent foreigners, replied in the affirmative. Some eight or ten of
+the number--envied mortals--had seen "angels," but the majority,
+like the American in the mongoose story, had seen only "snakes."...
+In weighing evidence we have to take into account the competency as
+well as the integrity of the witnesses.' Mr. Clodd has most frankly and
+good-humouredly acknowledged the erroneousness of his remark. Otherwise we
+might ask: Does Mr. Clodd prefer to be considered not 'competent' or not
+'veracious'? He cannot be both on this occasion, for his signed and
+published remarks were absolutely inaccurate. First, thousands of persons
+were _not_ asked 'whether they had seen apparitions.' They were asked:
+'Have you ever, when believing yourself to be perfectly awake, had a vivid
+impression of seeing, or being touched by a living being or inanimate
+object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could
+discover, was not due to any external physical cause?' Secondly, it is not
+the fact that 'some hundreds, _mostly unintelligent foreigners,_ replied
+in the affirmative.' Of English-speaking men and women, 1,499 answered the
+question quoted above in the affirmative. Of foreigners (naturally
+'unintelligent'), 185 returned affirmative answers. Thirdly, when Mr.
+Clodd says, 'The majority had seen only "snakes,"' it is not easy to know
+what precise sense 'snakes' bears in the terminology of popular science.
+If Mr. Clodd means, by 'snakes,' fantastic hallucinations of animals,
+these amounted to 25, as against 830 representing human forms of persons
+recognised, unrecognised, living or dead. But, if by 'snakes' Mr. Clodd
+means purely subjective hallucinations, not known to coincide with any
+event--and this _is_ his meaning--his statement agrees with that of the
+Census. His observations, of course, were purely accidental errors.
+
+The number of hallucinations representing living or dying recognised
+persons in the answers received, was 352. Of first-hand cases, in which
+coincidence of the hallucination with the death of the person apparently
+seen was affirmed, there were 80, of which 26 are given.
+
+The non-coincidental hallucinations were multiplied by four, to allow for
+forgetfulness of 'misses.' The results being compared, it was decided that
+the hallucinations collected coincided with death 440 more often than
+ought to be the case by the law of probabilities. Therefore there was
+proof, or presumption, in favour of some relation of cause and effect
+between A's death and B's hallucination.
+
+If we were to attack the opinion of the Committee on Hallucinations, that
+'Between deaths and apparitions of the dying a connection exists which is
+not due to chance alone,' the assault should be made not only on the
+method, but on the details. The events were never of very recent, and
+often were of remote occurrence. The remoteness was less than it seems,
+however, as the questions were often answered several years before the
+publication of the Report (1894). There was scarcely any documentary
+evidence, any note or letter written between the hallucination and the
+arrival of news of the death. Such letters, the evidence alleged, had in
+some cases existed, but had been lost, burnt, eaten by white ants, or
+written on a sheet of blotting paper or the whitewashed wall of a barrack
+room. If I may judge by my own lifelong success in mislaying, losing, and
+casually destroying papers, from cheques to notes made for literary
+purposes, from interesting letters of friends to the manuscripts of
+novelists, or if I may judge by Sir Walter Scott's triumphs of the same
+kind, I should not think much of the disappearance of documentary evidence
+to death-wraiths. Nobody supposed, when these notes were written, that
+Science would ask for their production; and even if people had guessed at
+this, it is human to lose or destroy old papers.
+
+The remoteness of the occurrences is more remarkable, for, if these things
+happen, why were so few recent cases discovered? Again, the seers were
+sometimes under anxiety, though such cases were excluded from the final
+computation: they frequently knew that the person seen was in bad health:
+they were often very familiar with his personal aspect. Now what are
+called 'subjective hallucinations,' non-coincidental hallucinations,
+usually represent persons very familiar to us, persons much in our minds.
+I know seven cases in which such hallucinations occurred. 1, 2, of husband
+to wife; 3, son to mother; 4, brother to sister; 5, sister to sister;
+6, cousin (living in the same house) to cousin; 7, friend (living a mile
+away) to two friends. In no case was there a death-coincidence. Only in
+case 4 was there any kind of coincidence, the brother having intended to
+do (unknown to the sister) what he was seen doing--driving in a dog-cart
+with a lady. But he had _not_ driven. We cannot, of course, _prove_ that
+these seven cases were _not_ telepathic, but there is no proof that they
+were. Now most of the coincidental cases, on which the Committee relied as
+their choicest examples, represented persons familiarly known to the
+seers. This looks as if they were casual; but, of course, if telepathy
+does exist, it is most likely (as Hegel says) to exist between kinsfolk
+and friends.[16]
+
+The dates might be fresher!
+
+In case 1, percipient knew that his aunt in England (he being in
+Australia) was not very well. No anxiety.
+
+2. Casual acquaintance. No anxiety. Case of accident or suicide.
+
+3. Acquaintance who feared to die in childbed, and did. Percipient not
+much interested, nor at all anxious.
+
+4. Father in England to son in India. No anxiety.
+
+5. Uncle to niece. Sudden death. No anxiety. No knowledge of illness.
+
+6. Brother-in-law to sister-in-law, and her maid. No anxiety reported.
+_Russian_.
+
+7. Father to son. No anxiety reported. _Russian_.
+
+8. Friend to friend. No knowledge of illness or anxiety reported.
+
+9. Grandmother to grandson. No anxiety. No knowledge of illness.
+
+10. Casual acquaintance, to seven people, and apparently to a dog. Illness
+known. _Russian._
+
+11. Step-brother to step-brother. No anxiety. No knowledge of illness.
+
+12. Friend to friend. No anxiety or knowledge of illness.
+
+13. Casual acquaintance. No anxiety.
+
+14. Aunt to nephew and to his wife. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+15. Sister to brother. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+16. Father to daughter. No knowledge of illness. No anxiety.
+
+17. Father to son. Much anxiety. (Uncounted.)
+
+18. Sister to sister. Illness known. 'No immediate danger' surmised.
+
+19. Father to son. Much anxiety. _Russian._ (Uncounted.)
+
+20. Friend to friend. Illness known. Percipient had been nursing patient.
+_Brazilian._ (Very bad case!)
+
+21 Friend to friend. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+22. Brother to brother. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+23. Grandfather to grand-daughter. Illness known. No pressing anxiety.
+
+24. Grandfather to grandson. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+25. Father's _hand._ Illness chronic. No anxiety. Percipient a daughter.
+_Russian._
+
+20. Husband to wife. Anxiety in time of war.
+
+27. Brother to sister. Slightly anxious from receiving no letter.
+
+28. Friend to friend. No anxiety.
+
+Anxiety is only reported, or to be surmised, in two or three cases. In a
+dozen the existence of illness was known.
+
+It may therefore be argued, adversely, that in the selected coincidental
+hallucinations, the persons seen were in the class most usually beheld in
+non-coincidental and, probably, purely subjective hallucinations
+representing real persons; also, that knowledge of their illness, even
+when no anxiety existed, kept them in some cases before the mind; also,
+that several cases are foreign, and that 'most foreigners are fools.' On
+the other hand, affection, familiarity, and knowledge of illness had _not_
+produced hallucinations even in the case of these percipients, till
+within the twelve hours (often much less) of the event of death.
+
+It would have been desirable, of course, to publish all the
+_non_-coincidental cases, and show how far, in these not _veridical_
+cases, the recognised phantasms were those of kindred, dear friends, known
+to be ill, and subjects of anxiety[17].
+
+The Census, in fact, does contain a chapter on 'Mental and Nervous
+Conditions in connection with Hallucinations,' such as anxiety, grief,
+and overwork. Do these produce, or probably produce, many empty
+hallucinations _not_ coincident with death or any great crisis? If they
+do, then all cases in which a coincidental hallucination occurred
+to a person in anxiety, or overstrained, will seem to be, probably,
+fortuitous coincidences like the others. All percipients, of all sorts
+of hallucinations, hits or misses, were asked if they were in grief or
+anxiety. Now, out of 1,622 cases of hallucination of all known kinds
+(coincidental or not), mental strain was reported in 220 instances; of
+which 131 were cases of grief about known deaths or anxiety. These mental
+conditions, therefore, occur only in twelve per cent. of the instances. On
+the whole, it does not seem fair to argue that anxiety produces so much
+hallucination that it will account by itself for those which we have
+analysed as coincidental.
+
+The impression left on my own mind by the Census does pretty closely agree
+with that of its authors. Fairly well persuaded of the possibility of
+telepathy, on other grounds, and even inclined to believe that it does
+produce coincidental hallucinations, the evidence of the Census, by
+itself, would not convince me nor its authors. We want better records; we
+want documentary evidence recording cases before the arrival of news of
+the coincidence. Memories are very adaptive. The authors, however, made a
+gallant effort, at the cost of much labour, and largely allowed for all
+conceivable drawbacks.
+
+I am, personally, illogical enough to agree with Kant, and to be more
+convinced by the cumulative weight of the hundreds of cases in 'Phantasms
+of the Living,' in other sources, in my own circle of acquaintance, and
+even by the coincident traditions of European and savage peoples, than by
+the statistics of the Census. The whole mass, Census and all, is of very
+considerable weight, and there exist individual cases which one feels
+unable to dispute. Thus while I would never regard the hallucinatory
+figure of a friend, perceived by myself, as proof of his death, I
+would entertain some slight anxiety till I heard of his well-being.
+
+On this topic I will offer, in a Kantian spirit, an anecdote of the kind
+which, occurring in great quantities, disposes the mind to a sort of
+belief. It is not given as evidence to go to a jury, for I only received
+it from the lips of a very gallant and distinguished officer and V.C.,
+whose own part in the affair will be described.
+
+This gentleman was in command of a small British force in one of the
+remotest and least accessible of our dependencies, not connected by
+telegraph, at the time of the incident, with the distant mainland. In the
+force was a particularly folly young captain. One night he went to a
+dance, and, as the sleeping accommodation was exhausted, he passed the
+night, like a Homeric hero, on a couch beneath the echoing _loggia_. Next
+day, contrary to his wont, he was in the worst of spirits, and, after
+moping for some time, asked leave to go a three days' voyage to the
+nearest telegraph station. His commanding officer, my informant, was
+good-natured, and gave leave. At the end of a week Captain ---- returned,
+in his usual high spirits. He now admitted that, while lying awake in the
+verandah, after the ball, he had seen a favourite brother of his, then
+in, say, Peru. He could not shake off the impression; he had made the long
+voyage to the nearest telegraph station, and thence had telegraphed to
+another brother in, let us say, Hong Kong, 'Is all well with John?' He
+received a reply, 'All well by last mail,' and so returned, relieved in
+mind, to his duties. But the next mail bringing letters from Peru brought
+news of his Peruvian brother's death on the night of the vision in the
+verandah.
+
+This, of course, is not offered as evidence. For evidence we need
+Captain ----'s account, his Hong Kong brother's account, date of the
+dance, official date of the Peruvian brother's death, and so on. But the
+character of my informant indisposes me to disbelief. The names of places
+are intentionally changed, but the places were as remote from each other
+as those given in the text.
+
+We find ourselves able to understand the Master of Ravenswood's
+cogitations after he saw the best wraith in fiction:
+
+'She died expressing her eager desire to see me. Can it be, then--can
+strong and earnest wishes, formed during the last agony of nature,
+survive its catastrophe, surmount the awful bounds of the spiritual
+world, and place before us its inhabitants in the hues and colouring of
+life? And why was that manifested to the eye, which could not unfold its
+tale to the ear?' ('Her withered lips moved fast, although no sound
+issued from them.') 'And wherefore should a breach be made in the laws
+of nature, yet its purpose remain unknown?'
+
+The Master's reasonings are such as, in hearing similar anecdotes, must
+have occurred to Scott. They no longer represent our views. The death and
+apparition were coincidental almost to the minute: it would be impossible
+to prove that life was utterly extinct, when Alice seemed to die, 'as the
+clock in the distant village tolled one, just before' Ravenswood's
+experience. We do not, like him, postulate 'a breach in the laws of
+nature,' only a possible example of a law. The tale was not 'unfolded to
+the ear,' as the telepathic impact only affected the sense of sight.
+
+Here, perhaps, ought to follow a reply to certain scientific criticisms of
+the theory that telepathy, or the action of one distant mind, or brain,
+upon another, may be the cause of 'coincidental hallucinations,'
+whether among savage or civilised races. But, not to delay the argument
+by controversy, the Reply to Objections has been relegated to the
+Appendix[18].
+
+[Footnote 1: The lady, her husband, and the lawyer, all known to me, gave
+me the story in writing; the servant's sister has been lost sight of.]
+
+[Footnote 2: See three other cases in _Proceedings_, S.P.R., ii. 122, 123.
+Two others are offered by Mr. Henry James and Mr. J. Neville Maskelyne of
+the Egyptian Hall.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See 'Phantasms of the Living' and 'A Theory of Apparitions,'
+_Proceedings_, S.P.R., vol. ii., by Messrs. Gurney and Myers.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Studies in Psychical Research,_ p. 388.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This, at least, scorns to myself a not illogical argument.
+Mr. Leaf has argued on the other side, that 'Darwinism may have done
+something for Totemism, by proving the existence of a great monkey
+kinship. But Totemism can hardly be quoted as evidence for Darwinism.'
+True, but Darwinism and Totemism are matters of opinion, not facts of
+personal experience. To a believer in coincidental hallucinations, at
+least, the alleged parallel experiences of savages must yield some
+confirmation to his own. His belief, he thinks, is warranted by human
+experience. On what does he suppose that the belief of the savage is
+based? Do his experience and their belief coincide by pure chance?]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Prim. Cult._ i. 449.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid. i. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Prim. Cult._ vol. i. p. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 9: From Shortland's _Traditions of New Zealand,_ p. 140.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Gurney and Myers, 'Phantasms of the Living,' vol. ii.
+ch. v. p. 557.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _The 'Adventure' and 'Beagle,'_ iii. 181, cf. 204.]
+
+[Footnote 12: It will, of course, be said that they worked their stories
+into conformity.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Prim. Cult._ i. 116.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Polack's _Manners of the New Zealanders_, i. 268.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Howitt, op. cit. p. 186.]
+
+[Footnote 16: On examining the cases, we find, in 1894, these dates of
+reported occurrences, in twenty-eight cases: 1890, 1882, 1879, 1870, 1863,
+1861, 1888, 1885, 1881, 1880, 1878, 1874, 1869, 1869, 1845, 1887, 1881,
+1877, 1874, 1873, 1860 (?), 1864 (?), 1855, 1830 (?!), 1867, 1862, 1888,
+1870.]
+
+[Footnote 17: On this point see _Report_, p. 260. Fifty phantasms out of
+the whole occurred during anxiety or presumable anxiety. Of these,
+thirty-one coincided (within twelve hours) with the death of the person
+apparently seen. In the remaining nineteen, the person seen recovered in
+eight cases.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Appendix A.]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+DEMONIACAL POSSESSION
+
+There is a kind of hallucinations--namely, Phantasms of the Dead--about
+which it seems better to say nothing in this place. If such phantasms are
+seen by savages when awake, they will doubtless greatly corroborate that
+belief in the endurance of the soul after death, which is undeniably
+suggested to the early reasoner by the phenomena of dreaming. But, while
+it is easy enough to produce evidence to recognised phantasms of the dead
+in civilised life, it would be very difficult indeed to discover many good
+examples in what we know about savages. Some Fijian instances are given by
+Mr. Fison in his and Mr. Howitt's 'Kamilaroi and Kurnai,' Others occur in
+the narrative of John Tanner, a captive from childhood among the Red
+Indians. But the circumstance, already noted, that an Australian lad
+became a wizard on the strength of having seen a phantasm of his dead
+mother, proves that such experiences are not common; and Australian black
+fellows have admitted that they, for their part, never did see a ghost,
+but only heard of ghosts from their old men. Mr. David Leslie, previously
+cited, gives some first-hand Zulu evidence about a haunted wood, where the
+_Esemkofu_, or ghosts of persons killed by a tyrannical chief, were heard
+and felt by his native informant; the percipient was also pelted with
+stones, as by the European _Poltergeist_. The Zulu who dies commonly
+becomes an Ihlozi, and receives his share of sacrifice. The _Esemkofu_ on
+the other hand, are disturbed and haunting spirits[1].
+
+As a rule, so far as our information goes, it is not recognised phantasms
+of the dead, in waking vision, which corroborate the savage belief in the
+persistence of the spirit of the departed. The savage reasoner rather
+rests his faith on the alleged phenomena of noises and physical movements
+of objects apparently untouched, which cause so many houses in civilised
+society to be shut up, or shunned, as 'haunted.' Such disturbances the
+savage naturally ascribes to 'spirits.' Our evidence, therefore, for
+recognised phantasms of the savage dead is very meagre, so it is
+unnecessary to examine the much more copious civilised evidence. The facts
+attested may, of course, be theoretically explained as the result of
+telepathy from a mind no longer incarnate; and, were the evidence as
+copious as that for coincidental hallucinations of the living, or dying,
+it would be of extreme importance. But it is not so copious, and, granting
+even that it is accurate, various explanations not involving anything so
+distasteful to science as the action of a discarnate intelligence may be,
+and have been, put forward.
+
+We turn, therefore, from a theme in which civilised testimony is more
+bulky than that derived from savage life, to a topic in which savage
+evidence is much more full than modern civilised records. This topic is
+the so-called Demoniacal Possession.
+
+In the philosophy of Animism, and in the belief of many peoples, savage
+and civilised, spirits of the dead, or spirits at large, can take up their
+homes in the bodies of living men. Such men, or women, are spoken of as
+'inspired,' or 'possessed.' They speak in voices not their own, they act
+in a manner alien to their natural character, they are said to utter
+prophecies, and to display knowledge which they could not have normally
+acquired, and, in fact, do not consciously possess, in their normal
+condition. All these and similar phenomena the savage explains by the
+hypothesis that an alien spirit--perhaps a demon, perhaps a ghost, or a
+god--has taken possession of the patient. The possessed, being full of the
+spirit, delivers sermons, oracles, prophecies, and what the Americans call
+'inspirational addresses,' before he returns to his normal consciousness.
+Though many such prophets are conscious impostors, others are sincere. Dr.
+Mason mentions a prophet who became converted to Christianity. 'He could
+not account for his former exercises, but said that it certainly appeared
+to him as though a spirit spoke, and he must tell what it communicated.'
+Dr. Mason also gives the following anecdote:
+
+'...Another individual had a familiar spirit that he consulted and with
+which he conversed; but, on hearing the Gospel, he professed to become
+converted, and had no more communication with his spirit. It had left
+him, he said; it spoke to him no more. After a protracted trial I
+baptised him. I watched his case with interest, and for several years he
+led an unimpeachable Christian life; but, on losing his religious zeal,
+and disagreeing with some of the church members, he removed to a distant
+village, where he could not attend the services of the Sabbath, and it
+was soon after reported that he had communications with his familiar
+spirit again. I sent a native preacher to visit him. The man said
+he heard the voice which had conversed with him formerly, but it
+spoke very differently. Its language was exceedingly pleasant to
+hear, and produced great brokenness of heart. It said, "Love each
+other; act righteously--act uprightly," with other exhortations such us
+he had heard from the teachers. An assistant was placed in the village
+near him, when the spirit left him again; and ever since he has
+maintained the character of a consistent Christian.'[2]
+
+This anecdote illustrates what is called by spiritists 'change of
+control.' After receiving, and deserting, Christian doctrine, the patient
+again spoke unconsciously, but under the influence of the faith which he
+had abandoned. In the same way we shall find that a modern American
+'Medium,' after being for a time constantly in the society of educated
+and psychological observers, obtained new 'controls' of a character more
+urbane and civilised than her old 'familiar spirit.'[3]
+
+It is admitted that the possessed sometimes display an eloquence which
+they are incapable of in their normal condition.[4] In China, possessed
+women, who never composed a line of poetry in their normal lives, utter
+their thoughts in verse, and are said to give evidence of clairvoyant
+powers.[5]
+
+The book--_Demon Possession in China_--of Dr. Nevius, for forty years a
+missionary, was violently attacked by the medical journals of his native
+country, the United States. The doctor had the audacity to declare that he
+could find no better explanation of the phenomena than the theory of the
+Apostles--namely, that the patients were possessed. Not having the fear of
+man before his eyes, he also remarked that the current scientific
+explanations had the fault of not explaining anything.
+
+For example, 'Mr. Tylor intimates that all cases of supposed demoniacal
+possession are identical with hysteria, delirium, and mania, and
+suchlike bodily and mental derangements.' Dr. Nevius, however, gave what
+he conceived to be the notes of possession, and, in his diagnosis,
+distinguished them from hysteria (whatever that may mean), delirium, and
+mania. Nor can it honestly be denied that, if the special notes of
+possession actually exist, they do mark quite a distinct species of mental
+affection. Dr. Nevius then observed that, according to Mr. Tylor,
+'scientific physicians now explain the facts on a different principle,'
+but, says Dr. Nevius, 'we search in vain to discover what this principle
+is.'[6] Dr. Nevius, who had the courage of his opinions, then consulted a
+work styled 'Nervous Derangement,' by Dr. Hammond, a Professor in the
+Medical School of the University of New York.[7] He found this scientific
+physician admitting that we know very little about the matter. He knew,
+what is very gratifying, that 'mind is the result of nervous action,'
+and that so-called 'possession' is the result of 'material derangements of
+the organs or functions of the system.'
+
+Dr. Nevius was ready to admit this latter doctrine in cases of idiocy,
+insanity, epilepsy, and hysteria; but then, said he, these are not what I
+call possession. The Chinese have names for all these maladies, 'which
+they ascribe to physical causes,' but for possession they have a different
+name. He expected Dr. Hammond to account for the abnormal conditions in
+so-called possession, but 'he has hardly even attempted to do this.' Dr.
+Nevius next perused the works of Dr. Griesinger, Dr. Baelz, Professor
+William James, M. Ribot, and, generally, the literature of 'alternating
+personality.' He found Mr. James professing his conviction that the
+'alternating personality' (in popular phrase, the demon, or familiar
+spirit) of Mrs. Piper knew a great deal about things which Mrs. Piper, in
+her normal state, did not, and could not know. Thus, after consulting many
+physicians, Dr. Nevius was none the better, and came back to his faith in
+Diabolical Possession. He was therefore informed that he had written 'one
+of the most extraordinarily perverted books of the present day' on the
+evidence of 'transparent ghost stories'--which do not occur in his book.
+
+The attitude of Dr. Nevius cannot be called strictly scientific. Because
+pathologists and psychologists are unable to explain, or give the _modus_
+of a set of phenomena, it does not follow that the devil, or a god, or a
+ghost, is in it.
+
+But this, of course, was precisely the natural inference of savages.
+
+Dr. Nevius catalogues the symptoms of possession thus:
+
+1. The automatic, persistent and consistent acting out of a new
+personality, which calls himself _shieng_ (genius) and calls the patient
+_hiang to_ (incense burner, 'medium').
+
+2. Possession of knowledge and intellectual power not owned by the patient
+(in his normal state), nor explainable on the pathological hypothesis.
+
+3. Complete change of moral character in the patient.
+
+Of these notes, the second would, of course, most confirm the savage
+belief that a new intelligence had entered into the patient. If he
+displayed knowledge of the future, or of the remote, the inference that a
+novel and wiser intelligence had taken possession of the patient's body
+would be, to the savage, irresistible. But the more cautious modern, _even
+if he accepted the facts_, would be reduced to no such extreme conclusion.
+He would say that knowledge of the remote in space, or in the past, might
+be telepathically communicated to the brain of some living person; while,
+for knowledge of the future, he could fly, with Hartmann, to contact with
+the Absolute.
+
+But the question of evidence for the facts is, of course, the only real
+question. Now, in Dr. Nevius's book, this evidence rests almost entirely
+on the written reports of native Christian teachers, for the Chinese were
+strictly reticent when questioned by Europeans. 'My heathen brother, you
+have a sister who is a demoniac?' asks the intelligent European. The reply
+of the heathen brother is best left in the obscurity of a remarkably
+difficult and copious Oriental language. We are thus obliged to fall back
+on the reports of Mr. Leng and other native Christian teachers. They are
+perfectly modest and rational in style. We learn that Mrs. Sen, a lady in
+her normal state incapable of lyrical efforts, lisped in numbers in her
+secondary personality, and detected the circumstance that Mr. Leng was on
+his way to see her, when she could not have learned the fact in any normal
+way.[8] 'They are now crossing the stream, and will be here when the sun
+is about so high;' which was correct. The other witnesses were examined,
+and corroborated.[9] Dr. Nevius himself examined Mrs. Kwo, when possessed,
+talking in verse, and, physically, limp.[10]
+
+The narratives are of this type; the patient, on recovering consciousness,
+knows nothing of what has occurred; Christian prayers are often
+efficacious, and there are many anecdotes of movements of objects
+untouched.[11]
+
+By a happy accident, as this chapter was passing through the press, a
+scientific account of a demoniac and his cure was published by Dr. Pierre
+Janet.[12] Dr. Janet has explained, with complete success, everything in
+the matter of possession, except the facts which, in the opinion of Dr.
+Nevius, were in need of explanation. These facts did not occur in the case
+of the demoniac 'exorcised' by Dr. Janet. Thus the learned essay of that
+eminent authority would not have satisfied Dr. Nevius. The facts in which
+he was interested did not present themselves in Dr. Janet's patient, and
+so Dr. Janet does not explain them.
+
+The simplest plan, here, is to deny that the facts in which Dr. Nevius
+believes ever present themselves at all; but, if they ever do, Dr. Janet's
+explanation does not explain them.
+
+1. His patient, Achille, did _not_ act out a new personality.
+
+2. Achille displayed _no_ knowledge or intellectual power which he did not
+possess in his normal state.
+
+3. His moral character was _not_ completely changed; he was only more
+hypochondriacal and hysterical than usual.
+
+Achille was a poor devil of a French tradesman who, like Captain Booth,
+had infringed the laws of strict chastity and virtue. He brooded on this
+till he became deranged, and thought that Satan had him. He was convulsed,
+anaesthetic, suicidal, involuntarily blasphemous. He was not 'exorcised'
+by a prayer or by a command, but after a long course of mental and
+physical treatment. His cure does not explain the cures in which Dr.
+Nevius believed. His case did not present the features of which Dr.
+Nevius asked science for an explanation. Dr. Janet's essay is the
+_dernier cri_ of science, and leaves Dr. Nevius just where it found him.
+
+Science, therefore, can, and does, tell Dr. Nevius that his evidence for
+his facts is worthless, through the lips of Professor W. Romaine Newbold,
+in 'Proceedings, S.P.R.,' February 1898 (pp. 602-604). And the same
+number of the same periodical shows us Dr. Hodgson accepting facts similar
+to those of Dr. Nevius, and explaining them by--possession! (p. 406).
+
+Dr. Nevius's observations practically cover the whole field of
+'possession' in non-European peoples. But other examples from other areas
+are here included.
+
+A rather impressive example of possession may be selected from
+Livingstone's 'Missionary Travels' (p. 86). The adventurous Sebituane was
+harried by the Matabele in a new land of his choice. He thought of
+descending the Zambesi till he was in touch with white men; but Tlapáne,
+'who held intercourse with gods,' turned his face west-wards. Tlapáne used
+to retire, 'perhaps into some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric
+state' until the moon was full. Then he would return _en prophète_.
+'Stamping, leaping, and shouting in a peculiarly violent manner, or
+beating the ground with a club' (to summon those under earth), 'they
+induce a kind of fit, and while in it pretend that their utterances are
+unknown to themselves,' as they probably are, when the condition is
+genuine. Tlapáne, after inducing the 'possessed' state, pointed east:
+'There, Sebituane, I behold a fire; shun it, it may scorch thee. The gods
+say, Go not thither!' Then, pointing west, he said, 'I see a city and a
+nation of black men, men of the water, their cattle are red, thine own
+tribe are perishing, thou wilt govern black men, spare thy future tribe.'
+
+So far, mere advice; then,
+
+'Thou, Ramosinii, thy village will perish utterly. If Mokari moves first
+from the village, he will perish first; and thou, Ramosinii, wilt be the
+last to die.'
+
+Then,
+
+  'Like some bold seer in a trance,
+  Seeing all his own mischance,'
+
+  'The gods have given other men water to drink, but to me they have given
+  bitter water. They call me away. I go.'[13]
+
+Tlapáne died, Mokari died, Ramosinii died, their village was destroyed
+soon after, and so Sebituane wandered westward, not disobedient to the
+voice, was attacked by the Baloiana, conquered, and spared them.
+
+Such is 'possession' among savages. It is superfluous to multiply
+instances of this world-wide belief, so freely illustrated in the New
+Testament, and in trials for witchcraft. The scientific study of the
+phenomena, as Littré complained, 'had hardly been sketched' forty years
+ago. In the intervening years, psychologists and hypnotists have devoted
+much attention to the theme of these 'secondary personalities,' which
+Animism explains by the theory of possession. The explanations of modern
+philosophers differ, and it is not our business to discuss their
+physiological and pathological ideas.[14] Our affair is to ask whether, in
+the field of experience, there is any evidence that persons thus
+'possessed' really evince knowledge which they could not have acquired
+through normal channels? If such evidence exists, the facts would
+naturally strengthen the conviction that the possessed person was inspired
+by an intelligence not his own, that is, by a spirit. Now it is the firm
+conviction of several men of science that a certain Mrs. Piper, an
+American, does display, in her possessed condition, knowledge which
+she could not normally acquire. The case of this lady is precisely on a
+level with that of certain savage or barbaric seers. Thus: 'The Fijian
+priest sits looking steadily at a whale's tooth ornament, amid dead
+silence. In a few minutes he trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs
+come on, which increase to strong convulsions.... Now the god has
+entered.'[15]
+
+In China, 'the professional woman sits at a table in contemplation, till
+the soul of a deceased person from whom communication is desired enters
+her body and talks through her to the living....'[16]
+
+The latter account exactly describes Mrs. Piper. When consulted she passes
+through convulsions into a trance, after which she talks in a new voice,
+assumes a fresh personality, and affects to be possessed by the spirit of
+a French doctor (who does not know French)--Dr. Phinuit. She then displays
+a varying amount of knowledge of dead and living people connected with her
+clients, who are usually strangers, often introduced under feigned names.
+Mrs. Piper and her husband have been watched by detectives, and have not
+been discovered in any attempts to procure information. She was for some
+months in England under the charge of the S.P.R. Other ghosts, besides
+Dr. Phinuit, ghosts more civilised than he, now influence her, and her
+latest performances are said to exceed her former efforts.[17]
+
+Volumes of evidence about Mrs. Piper have been published by Dr. Hodgson,
+who unmasked Madame Blavatsky and Eusapia Paladino.[18] He was at first
+convinced that Mrs. Piper, in her condition of trance, obtains knowledge
+not otherwise and normally accessible to her. It was admitted that her
+familiar spirit guesses, attempts to extract information from the people
+who sit with her, and tries sophistically to conceal his failures. Here
+follow the statements of Professor James of Harvard.
+
+'The most convincing things said about my own immediate household were
+either very intimate or very trivial. Unfortunately the former things
+cannot well be published. Of the trivial things I have forgotten the
+greater number, but the following, _rarae nantes_, may serve as samples
+of their class. She said that we had lost recently a rug, and I a
+waistcoat. (She wrongly accused a person of stealing the rug, which was
+afterwards found in the house.) She told of my killing a grey-and-white
+cat with ether, and described how it had "spun round and round" before
+dying. She told how my New York aunt had written a letter to my wife,
+warning her against all mediums, and then went off on a most amusing
+criticism, full of _traits vifs_, of the excellent woman's character.
+(Of course, no one but my wife and I knew the existence of the letter in
+question.) She was strong on the events in our nursery, and gave striking
+advice during our first visit to her about the way to deal with certain
+"tantrums" of our second child--"little Billy-boy," as she called him,
+reproducing his nursery name. She told how the crib creaked at night, how
+a certain rocking-chair creaked mysteriously, how my wife had heard
+footsteps on a stair, &c. &c. Insignificant as these things sound when
+read, the accumulation of them has an irresistible effect; and I repeat
+again what I said before, that, taking everything that I know of Mrs.
+Piper into account, the result is to make me feel as absolutely certain as
+I am of any personal fact in the world that she knows things in her
+trances which she cannot possibly have heard in her waking state, and that
+the definitive philosophy of her trances is yet to be found. The
+limitations of her trance information, its discontinuity and fitfulness,
+and its apparent inability to develop beyond a certain point, although
+they end by arousing one's moral and human impatience with the phenomenon,
+yet are, from a scientific point of view, amongst its most interesting
+peculiarities, since where there are limits there are conditions, and the
+discovery of them is always the beginning of an explanation.
+
+'This is all I cam tell you of Mrs. Piper. I wish it were more
+"scientific." But _valcat quantum!_ it is the best I can do.'
+
+Elsewhere Mr. James writes:
+
+'Mr. Hodgson and others have made prolonged study of this lady's trances,
+and are all convinced that supernormal powers of cognition are displayed
+therein. They are, _prima facie_, due to "spirit control." But the
+conditions are so complex that a dogmatic decision either for or against
+the hypothesis must as yet be postponed.'[19]
+
+Again--
+
+'In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that
+knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of
+her eyes, ears, and wits.
+
+'The trances have broken down, for my own mind, the limits of the admitted
+order of nature.'
+
+M. Paul Bourget (who is not superstitious), after consulting Mrs. Piper,
+concludes:
+
+'L'esprit a des procédés de connaître non soupçonnés par notre
+analyse.'[20]
+
+In this treatise I may have shown 'the will to believe' in an unusual
+degree; but, for me, the interest of Mrs. Piper is purely anthropological.
+She exhibits a survival or recrudescence of savage phenomena, real or
+feigned, of convulsion and of secondary personality, and entertains a
+survival of the animistic explanation.
+
+Mrs. Piper's honesty and excellent character, in her normal condition, are
+vouched for by her friends and observers in England and America; nor do I
+impeach her normal character. But 'secondary personalities' have often
+more of Mr. Hyde than of Dr. Jekyll in their composition. It used to be
+admitted that, when 'possessed,' Mrs. Piper would cheat when she
+could--that is to say, she would make guesses, try to worm information out
+of her sitter, describe a friend of his, alive or dead, as 'Ed.,' who may
+be Edgar, Edmund, Edward, Edith, or anybody. She would shuffle, and repeat
+what she had picked up in a former sitting with the same person; and the
+vast majority of her answers started from vague references to probable
+facts (as that an elderly man is an orphan), and so worked on to more
+precise statements. Professor Macalister wrote:
+
+'She is quite wide-awake enough all through to profit by suggestions. I
+let her see a blotch of ink on my finger, and she said that I was a
+writer.... Except the guess about my sister Helen, who is alive, there was
+not a single guess which was nearly right. Mrs. Piper is not anaesthetic
+during the so-called trance, and if you ask my private opinion, it is that
+the whole thing is an imposture, and a poor one.'[21]
+
+Mr. Barkworth said that, as far as his experience went, 'Mrs. Piper's
+powers are of the ordinary thought-reading [i.e. muscle-reading] kind,
+dependent on her hold of the visitor's hand.' Each of these gentlemen had
+only one 'sitting.' M. Paul Bourget also informed me, in conversation,
+that Mrs. Piper held his hand while she told the melancholy tale connected
+with a key in his possession, and that she did not tell the story promptly
+and fluently, but very slowly and hesitatingly. Even so, he declared that
+he did not feel able to account for her performance.
+
+As these pages were passing through the press, Dr. Hodgson's last report
+on Mrs. Piper was published.[22] It is quite impossible, within the space
+allotted, to criticise this work. It would be necessary to examine
+minutely scores of statements, in which many facts are suppressed as too
+intimate, while others are remarkably incoherent. Dr. Hodgson deserves the
+praise of extraordinary patience and industry, displayed in the very
+distasteful task of watching an unfortunate lady in the vagaries of
+'trance.' His reasonings are perfectly calm, perfectly unimpassioned, and
+his bias has not hitherto seemed to make for credulity. We must, in fact,
+regard him as an expert in this branch of psychology. But he himself makes
+it clear that, in his opinion, no written reports can convey the
+impressions produced by several years of personal experience. The results
+of that experience he sums up in these words:
+
+'At the present time I cannot profess to have any doubt but that the chief
+"communicators" to whom I have referred in the foregoing pages are
+veritably the personalities that they claim to be, that they have survived
+the change we call death, and that they have directly communicated with
+us, whom we call living, through Mrs. Piper's entranced organism.'[23]
+
+This means that Dr. Hodgson, at present, in this case, accepts the
+hypothesis of 'possession' as understood by Maoris and Fijians, Chinese
+and Karens.
+
+The published reports do not produce on me any such impression. As a
+personal matter of opinion, I am convinced that those whom I have honoured
+in this life would no more avail themselves of Mrs. Piper's 'entranced
+organism' (if they had the chance) than I would voluntarily find myself in
+a 'sitting' with that lady. It is unnecessary to wax eloquent on this
+head; and the curious can consult the writings of Dr. Hodgson for
+themselves. Meanwhile we have only to notice that an American 'possessed'
+woman produces on a highly educated and sceptical modern intelligence
+the same impression as the Zulu 'possessed' produce on some Zulu
+intelligences.
+
+The Zulus admit 'possession' and divination, but are not the most
+credulous of mankind. The ordinary possessed person is usually consulted
+as to the disease of an absent patient. The inquirers do not assist the
+diviner by holding his hand, but are expected to smite the ground
+violently if the guess made by the diviner is right; gently if it is
+wrong. A sceptical Zulu, named John, having a shilling to expend on
+psychical research, smote violently at _every_ guess. The diviner was
+hopelessly puzzled; John kept his shilling, and laid it out on a much more
+meritorious exhibition of animated sticks.[24]
+
+Uguise gave Dr. Callaway an account of a female possessed person with
+whom Mrs. Piper could not compete. Her spirit spoke, not from her mouth,
+but from high in the roof. It gave forth a kind of questioning remarks
+which were always correct. It then reported correctly a number of singular
+circumstances, ordered some remedies for a diseased child, and offered to
+return the fee, if ample satisfaction was not given.[25]
+
+In China and Zululand, as in Mrs. Piper's case, the spirits are fond of
+diagnosing and prescribing for absent patients.
+
+A good example of savage possession is given in his travels by Captain
+Jonathan Carver (1763).
+
+Carver was waiting impatiently for the arrival of traders with provisions,
+near the Thousand Lakes. A priest, or jossakeed, offered to interview the
+Great Spirit, and obtain information. A large lodge was arranged, and the
+covering drawn up (which is unusual), so that what went on within might be
+observed. In the centre was a chest-shaped arrangement of stakes, so far
+apart from each other 'that whatever lay within them was readily to be
+discerned.' The tent was illuminated 'by a great number of torches.' The
+priest came in, and was first wrapped in an elk's skin, as Highland seers
+were wrapped in a black bull's hide. Forty yards of rope made of elk's
+hide were then coiled about him, till he 'was wound up like an Egyptian
+mummy.'
+
+I have elsewhere shown[26] that this custom of binding with bonds the seer
+who is to be inspired, existed in Graeco-Egyptian spiritualism, among
+Samoyeds, Eskimo, Canadian Hareskin Indians, and among Australian blacks.
+
+'The head, body, and limbs are wound round with stringy bark cords.'[27]
+This is an extraordinary range of diffusion of a ceremony apparently
+meaningless. Is the idea that, by loosing the bonds, the seer demonstrates
+the agency of spirits, after the manner of the Davenport Brothers?[28] But
+the Graeco-Egyptian medium did _not_ undo the swathings of linen, in which
+he was rolled, _like a mummy_. They had to be unswathed for him, by
+others.[29] Again, a dead body, among the Australians, is corded up tight,
+as soon as the breath is out of it, if it is to be buried, or before being
+exposed on a platform, if that is the custom.[30] Again, in the Highlands
+second-sight was thus acquired: the would-be seer 'must run a Tedder
+(tether) of Hair, _which bound a corpse to the Bier_, about his Middle
+from end to end,' and then look between his legs till he sees a funeral
+cross two marches.[31] The Greenland seer is bound 'with his head between
+his legs.'[32]
+
+Can it be possible, judging from Australia, Scotland, Egypt, that the
+binding, as of a corpse or mummy, is a symbolical way of putting the seer
+on a level with the dead, who will then communicate with him? In three
+remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to
+prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the
+seer is tied up--in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in
+North America, a bull's hide in the Highlands.
+
+Binding the seer is not a universal Red Indian custom; it seems to cease
+in Labrador, and elsewhere, southwards, where the prophet enters a magic
+lodge, unbound. Among the Narquapees, he sits cross-legged, and the lodge
+begins to answer questions by leaping about.[33] The Eskimo bounds, though
+he is tied up.
+
+It would be decisive, if we could find that, wherever the sorcerer is
+bound, the dead are bound also. I note the following examples, but the
+Creeks do not, I think, bind the magician.
+
+Among the Creeks,
+
+'The corpse is placed in a hole, with a blanket wrapped about it, and the
+legs bent under it _and tied together_.'[34] The dead Greenlanders were
+'wrapped and sewed up in their best deer-skins.'[35]
+
+Carver could only learn that, among the Indians he knew, dead bodies were
+'wrapped in skins;' that they were also swathed with cords he does not
+allege, but he was not permitted to see all the ceremonies.
+
+My theory is, at least, plausible, for this manner of burying the dead,
+tied tightly up, with the head between the legs (as in the practice of
+Scottish and Greenland seers), is very old and widely diffused. Ellis
+says, of the Tahitians, 'the body of the dead man was ... placed in a
+sitting posture, with the knees elevated, _the face pressed down between
+the knees_,... and the whole body tied with cord or cinet, wound repeatedly
+round.'[36]
+
+The binding may originally have been meant to keep the corpse, or ghost,
+from 'walking.' I do not know that Tahitian prophets were ever tied up, to
+await inspiration. But I submit that the frequency of the savage form of
+burial with the corpse tied up, or swathed, sometimes with the head
+between the legs; and the recurrence of the savage practice of similarly
+binding the sorcerer, probably points to a purpose of introducing the
+seer to the society of the dead. The custom, as applied to prophets, might
+survive, even where the burial rite had altered, or cannot be ascertained,
+and might survive, for corpses, where it had gone out of use, for seers.
+The Scotch used to justify their practice of putting the head between
+the knees when, bound with a corpse's hair tether, they learned to
+be second-sighted, by what Elijah did. The prophet, on the peak of
+Carmel, 'cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his
+knees.'[37] But the cases are not analogous. Elijah had been hearing a
+premonitory 'sound of abundance of rain' in a cloudless sky. He was
+probably engaged in prayer, not in prophecy.
+
+Kirk, by the way, notes that if the wind changes, while the Scottish seer
+is bound, he is in peril of his life. So children are told, in Scotland,
+that, if the wind changes while they are making faces, the grimace will be
+permanent. The seer will, in the same way, become what he pretends to be,
+a corpse.
+
+This desertion of Carver's tale may be pardoned for the curiosity of the
+topic. He goes on:
+
+'Being thus bound up like an Egyptian mummy' (Carver unconsciously making
+my point), 'the seer was lifted into the chest-like enclosure. I could now
+also discern him as plain as I had ever done, and I took care not to turn
+my eyes away a moment'--in which effort he probably failed.
+
+The priest now began to mutter, and finally spoke in a mixed jargon of
+scarcely intelligible dialects. He now yelled, prayed, and foamed at the
+mouth, till in about three quarters of an hour he was exhausted and
+speechless. 'But in an instant he sprang upon his feet, notwithstanding at
+the time he was put in it appeared impossible for him to move either his
+legs or arms, and shaking off his covering, as quick as if the bands with
+which it had been bound were burst asunder,' he prophesied. The Great
+Spirit did not say when the traders would arrive, but, just after high
+noon, next day, a canoe would arrive, and the people in it would tell when
+the traders were to appear.
+
+Next day, just after high noon, a canoe came round a point of land about a
+league away, and the men in it, who had met the traders, said they would
+come in two days, which they did. Carver, professing freedom from any
+tincture of credulity, leaves us 'to draw what conclusions we please.'
+
+The natural inference is 'private information,' about which the only
+difficulty is that Carver, who knew the topography and the chances of a
+secret messenger arriving to prompt the Jossakeed, does not allude to this
+theory.[38] He seems to think such successes not uncommon.
+
+All that psychology can teach anthropology, on this whole topic of
+'possession;' is that secondary or alternating personalities are facts
+_in rerum natura_, that the man or woman in one personality may have no
+conscious memory of what was done or said in the other, and that cases of
+knowledge said to be supernormally gained in the secondary state are worth
+inquiring about, if there be a chance of getting good evidence.
+
+A few fairly respectable savage instances are given in Dr. Gibier's 'Le
+Fakirisme Occidental' and in Mr. Manning's 'Old New Zealand;' but, while
+modern civilised parallels depend on the solitary case of Mrs. Piper (for
+no other case has been well observed), no affirmative conclusion can be
+drawn from Chinese, Maori, Zulu, or Red Indian practice.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Among the Zulus_, p. 120.]
+
+[Footnote 2:_ Burmah_, p. 107.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Hodgson, _Proceedings_, S.P.E., vol. xiii. pt. xxxiii. Dr.
+Hodgson by no means agrees with this view of the case--the case of Mrs.
+Piper.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 184.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Nevius's _Demon Possession in China_, a curious collection of
+examples by an American missionary. The reports of Catholic missionaries
+abound in cases.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Op. cit. p. 169.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Putnam, 1881.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Nevius, p. 33.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Ibid. p. 35.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Op. cit. p. 38.]
+
+[Footnote 11: See 'Fetishism and Spiritualism.']
+
+[Footnote 12: _Nécroses et Idées Fixes_. Alcan, Paris, 1898. This is the
+first of a series of works connected with the Laboratoire de Psychologie,
+at the Salpétritère, in Paris.]
+
+[Footnote 13: 'Macleod shall return, but Macrimmon shall never!']
+
+[Footnote 14: See Ribot, _Les Maladies de la Personnalité,_; Bourru
+et Burot, _Variations de la Personnalité_; Janet, _L'Automatisme
+Psychologique_; James, _Principles of Psychology_; Myers, in _Proceedings_
+of S.P.R., 'The Mechanism of Genius,' 'The Subliminal Self.']
+
+[Footnote 15: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 133.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Doolittle's _Chinese_, i. 143; ii. 110, 320.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., pt. xxxiii.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., vi. 436-650; viii. 1-167; xiii.
+284-582].
+
+[Footnote 19: _The Will to Believe_, p. 814.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Figaro_, January 14, 1895.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Proceedings_, vi. 605, 606.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Proceedings_, S.P.R, part xxxiii. vol. xiii.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Op. cit. part xxxiii. p. 406.]
+
+[Footnote 24: See 'Fetishism.' Compare Callaway, p. 328.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Callaway, pp. 361-374.]
+
+[Footnote 26: _Cock Lane and Common Sense_, p. 66.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Brough Smyth, i. 475. This point is disputed, but I did not
+invent it, and a case appears in Mr. Curr's work on the natives.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Prim. Cult_. i. 152.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Eusebius, _Prap. Evang_. v. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Brough Smyth, i. 100, 113.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Kirk, _Secret Commonwealth_ 1691.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Crantz, p. 209.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Père Arnaud, in Hind's _Labrador_, ii. 102.]
+
+[Footnote 34: Major Swan, 1791, official letter on the Creek Indians,
+Schoolcraft, v. 270.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Crantz, p. 237.]
+
+[Footnote 36: _Polynesian Researches_, i. 519.]
+
+[Footnote 37: 1 Kings xviii. 42.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Carver, pp. 123, 184.]
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FETISHISM AND SPIRITUALISM
+
+It has been shown how the doctrine of souls was developed according to the
+anthropological theory. The hypothesis as to how souls of the dead were
+later elevated to the rank of gods, or supplied models after which such
+gods might be inventively fashioned, will be criticised in a later
+chapter. Here it must suffice to say that the conception of a separable
+surviving soul of a dead man was not only not essential to the savage's
+idea of his supreme god, as it seems to me, but would have been wholly
+inconsistent with that conception. There exist, however, numerous forms of
+savage religion in addition to the creed in a Supreme Being, and these
+contribute their streams to the ocean of faith. Thus among the kinds of
+belief which served in the development of Polytheism, was Fetishism,
+itself an adaptation and extension of the idea of separable souls. In this
+regard, like ancestor-worship, it differs from the belief in a Supreme
+Being, which, as we shall try to demonstrate, is not derived from the
+theory of ghosts or souls at all.
+
+_Fetish_ (_fétiche_) seems to come from Portuguese _feitiço_, a talisman
+or amulet, applied by the Portuguese to various material objects
+regarded by the negroes of the west coast with more or less of religious
+reverence. These objects may be held sacred in some degree for a number of
+incongruous reasons. They may be tokens, or may be of value in sympathetic
+magic, or merely _odd_, and therefore probably endowed with unknown mystic
+qualities. Or they may have been pointed out in a dream, or met in a
+lucky hour and associated with good fortune, or they may (like a tree with
+an unexplained stir in its branches, as reported by Kohl) have seemed to
+show signs of life by spontaneous movements; in fact, a thing may be what
+Europeans call a fetish for scores of reasons. For our present purpose, as
+Mr. Tylor says, 'to class an object as a fetish demands explicit statement
+that a spirit is considered as embodied in it, or acting through it, or
+communicating by it, or, at least, that the people it belongs to do
+habitually think this of such objects; or it must be shown that the object
+is treated as having personal consciousness or power, is talked with,
+worshipped...' and so forth. The in-dwelling spirit may be human, as when
+a fetish is made out of a friend's skull, the spirit in which may even be
+asked for oracles, like the Head of Bran in Welsh legend.
+
+We have tried to show that the belief in human souls may be, in part at
+least, based on supernormal phenomena which Materialism disregards. We
+shall now endeavour to make it probable that Fetishism (the belief in the
+souls tenanting inanimate objects) may also have sources which perhaps are
+not normal, or which at all events seemed supernormal to savages. We say
+'perhaps not normal' because the phenomena now to be discussed are of the
+most puzzling character. We may lean to the belief in a supernormal cause
+of certain hallucinations, but the alleged movements of inanimate objects
+which probably supply one origin of Fetishism, one suggestion of the
+presence of a spirit in things dead, leave the inquiring mind in
+perplexity. In following Mr. Tylor's discussion of the subject, it is
+necessary to combine what he says about Spiritualism in his fourth with
+what he says about Fetishism in his fourteenth and later chapters. For
+some reason his book is so arranged that he criticises 'Spiritualism'
+long before he puts forward his doctrine of the origin and development of
+the belief in spirits.
+
+We have seen a savage reason for supposing that human spirits inhabit
+certain lifeless things, such as skulls and other relics of the dead. But
+how did it come to be thought that a spirit dwelt in a lifeless and
+motionless piece of stone or stick? Mr. Tylor, perhaps, leads us to a
+plausible conjecture by writing: 'Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in
+Keeling Island, who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll:
+this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming
+inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively, like
+a table or a hat at a modern spirit séance.'[1] Now M. Lefébure has
+pointed out (in 'Mélusine') that, according to De Brosses, the African
+conjurers gave an appearance of independent motion to small objects, which
+were then accepted as fetishes, being visibly animated. M. Lefébure
+next compares, like Mr. Tylor, the alleged physical phenomena of
+spiritualism, the flights and movements of inanimate objects apparently
+untouched.
+
+The question thus arises, Is there any truth whatever in these world-wide
+and world-old stories of inanimate objects acting like animated things?
+Has fetishism one of its origins in the actual field of supernormal
+experience in the X region? This question we do not propose to answer,
+as the evidence, though practically universal, may be said to rest on
+imposture and illusion. But we can, at least, give a sketch of the nature
+of the evidence, beginning with that as to the apparently _voluntary_
+movements of objects, _not_ untouched. Mr. Tylor quotes from John Bell's
+'Journey in Asia' (1719) an account of a Mongol Lama who wished to
+discover certain stolen pieces of damask. His method was to sit on a
+bench, when 'he carried it, or, as was commonly believed, it carried him,
+to the very tent' of the thief. Here the bench is innocently believed to
+be self-moving. Again, Mr. Rowley tells how in Manganjah the sorcerer, to
+find out a criminal, placed, with magical ceremonies, two staffs of wood
+in the hands of some young men. 'The sticks whirled and dragged the men
+round like mad,' and finally escaped and rolled to the feet of the
+wife of a chief, who was then denounced as the guilty person.[2]
+
+Mr. Duff Macdonald describes the same practice among the Yaos:[3]
+
+'The sorcerer occasionally makes men take hold of a stick, which, after a
+time, begins to move as if endowed with life, and ultimately carries them
+off bodily and with great speed to the house of the thief.'
+
+The process is just that of Jacques Aymard in the celebrated story of the
+detection of the Lyons murderer.[4]
+
+In Melanesia, far enough away, Dr. Codrington found a similar practice,
+and here the sticks are explicitly said by the natives to be moved by
+_spirits_.[5] The wizard and a friend hold a bamboo stick by each end, and
+ask what man's ghost is afflicting a patient. At the mention of the
+right ghost 'the stick becomes violently agitated.' In the same way, the
+bamboo 'would run about' with a man holding it only on the palms of his
+hands. Again, a hut is built with a partition down the middle. Men sit
+there with their hands _under_ one end of the bamboo, while the other end
+is extended into the empty half of the hut. They then call over the names
+of the recently dead, till 'they feel the bamboo moving in their hands.' A
+bamboo placed on a sacred tree, 'when the name of a ghost is called, moves
+of itself, and will lift and drag people about.' Put up into a tree, it
+would lift them from the ground. In other cases the holding of the sticks
+produces convulsions and trance.[6] The divining sticks of the Maori are
+also 'guided by spirits,'[7] and those of the Zulu sorcerers rise, fall,
+and jump about.[8]
+
+These Zulu performances must be really very curious. In the last chapter
+we told how a Zulu named John, having a shilling to lay out in the
+interests of psychical research, declined to pay a perplexed diviner, and
+reserved his capital far a more meritorious performance. He tried a medium
+named Unomantshintshi, who divined by Umabakula, or dancing sticks--
+
+'If they say "no," they fall suddenly; if they say "yes," they arise and
+jump about very much, and leap on the person who has come to inquire. They
+"fix themselves on the place where the sick man is affected; ... if the
+head, they leap on his head.... Many believe in Umabakula more than in the
+diviner. But there are not many who have the Umabakula."'
+
+Dr. Callaway's informant only knew two Umabakulists, John was quite
+satisfied, paid his shilling, and went home.[9]
+
+The sticks are about a foot long. It is not reported that they are moved
+by spirits, nor do they seem to be regarded as fetishes.
+
+Mr. Tylor also cites a form of the familiar pendulum experiment. Among the
+Karens a ring is suspended by a thread over a metal basin. The relations
+of the dead strike the basin, and when he who was dearest to the ghost
+touches it the spirit twists the thread till it breaks, and the ring falls
+into the basin. With us a ring is held by a thread over a tumbler, and our
+unconscious movements swing it till it strikes the hour. How the Karens
+manage it is less obvious. These savage devices with animated sticks
+clearly correspond to the more modern 'table-turning.' Here, when the
+players are honest, the pushing is certainly _unconscious_.
+
+I have tested this in two ways--first by trying the minimum of _conscious_
+muscular action that would stir a table at which I was alone, and by
+comparing the absolute unconsciousness of muscular action when the table
+began to move in response to no _voluntary_ push. Again, I tried with a
+friend, who said, 'You are pushing,' when I gently removed my hands
+altogether, though they seemed to rest on the table, which still revolved.
+My friend was himself unconsciously pushing. It is undeniable that, to
+a solitary experimenter, the table _seems_ to make little darts of its own
+will in a curious way. Thus, the unconsciousness of muscular action on the
+part of savages engaged in the experiment with sticks would lead them to
+believe that spirits were animating the wood. The same fallacy beset the
+table-turners of 1855-65, and was, to some extent, exposed by Faraday.
+Of course, savages would be even more convinced by the dancing spoon of
+Mr. Darwin's tale, by the dancing sticks of the Zulus, and the rest,
+whether the phenomena were supernormal or merely worked by unseen strings.
+The same remark applies to modern experimenters, when, as they declare,
+various objects move untouched, without physical contact.
+
+Still more analogous than turning tables to the savage use of inspired
+sticks for directing the inquirer to a lost object or to a criminal, is
+the modern employment of the divining-rod--a forked twig which, held by
+the ends, revolves in the hands of the performer when he reaches the
+object of his quest. He, like the savage cited, is occasionally agitated
+in a convulsive manner; and cases are quoted in which the twig writhes
+when held in a pair of tongs! The best-known modern treatise on the
+divining-rod is that of M. Chevreul, 'La Baguette Divinatoire' (1854). We
+have also 'L'Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes,' by M.
+Figuier (1860). In 1781 Thouvenel published his 600 experiments with
+Bleton and others; and Hegel refers to Amoretti's collection of hundreds
+of cases. The case of Jacques Aymard, who in the seventeenth century
+discovered a murderer by the use of the rod in true savage fashion, is
+well known. In modern England the rod is used in the interests of private
+individuals and public bodies (such as Trinity College, Cambridge) for the
+discovery of water.
+
+Professor Barrett has lately published a book of 280 pages, in which
+evidence of failures and successes is collected.[10] Professor Barrett
+gives about one hundred and fifty cases, in which he was only able to
+discover, on good authority, twelve failures. He gives a variety of tests
+calculated to check frauds and chance coincidence, and he publishes
+opinions, hostile or agnostic, by geologists. The evidence, as a general
+rule, is what is called first-hand in other inquiries. The actual
+spectators, and often the owners of the land, or the persons in whose
+interest water was wanted, having been present, give their testimony; and
+it is certain that the 'diviner' is called in by people of sense and
+education, commonly too practical to have a theory, and content with
+getting what they want, especially where scientific experts have
+failed.[11]
+
+In Mr. Barrett's opinion, the subconscious perception of indications of
+the presence of water produces an equally unconscious muscular 'spasm,'
+which twirls the rod till it often breaks. Yet 'it is almost impossible to
+imitate its characteristic movement by any voluntary effort.' I have
+myself held the hands of an amateur performer when the twig was moving,
+and neither by sight nor touch could I detect any muscular movement on his
+part, much less a spasm. The person was bailiff on a large estate, and,
+having accidentally discovered that he possessed the gift, used it when he
+wanted wells dug for the tenants on the property.
+
+The whole topic is obscure; nor am I concerned here with the successes or
+failures of the divining-rod. But the movements of the twig have never, to
+my knowledge, been attributed by modern English performers to the
+operation of spirits. They say 'electricity.' Mr. Tylor merely writes:
+
+'The action of the famous divining-rod, with its curiously versatile
+sensibility to water, ore, treasure, and thieves, seems to belong partly
+to trickery and partly to more or less conscious direction by honester
+operators.'
+
+As the divining-rod is the only instance in which automatism, whatever its
+nature and causes, has been found of practical value by practical men, and
+as it is obviously associated with a number of analogous phenomena, both
+in civilised and savage life, it certainly deserves the attention of
+science. But no advance will be made till scientifically trained inquirers
+themselves arrange and test a large number of experiments. Knowledge of
+the geological ignorance of the dowsers, examples of fraud on their part,
+and cases of failure or reported failure, with a general hostile bias, may
+prevent such experiments from being made by scientific experts on an
+adequate scale. Such experts ought, of course, to avoid working the
+dowsers into a state of irritation.
+
+It is just worth while to notice cases in which the rod acts like those of
+the Melanesians, Africans, and other savages. A Mr. Thomas Welton
+published an English translation of 'La Verge de Jacob' (Lyon, 1693). In
+1651 he asked his servant to bring into the garden 'a stick that stood
+behind the parlour door. In great terror she brought it to the garden, her
+hand firmly clutched on it, nor could she let it go.' When Mrs. Welton
+took the stick, 'it drew her with very considerable velocity to nearly the
+centre of the garden,' where a well was found. Mr. Welton is not likely to
+have known of the lately published savage examples. The coincidence with
+the African and Melanesian cases is, therefore, probably undesigned.
+
+Again, in 1694, the rod was used by le Père Menestrier and others, just as
+it is by savages, to indicate by its movements answers to all sorts of
+questions. Experiments of this kind have not been made by Professor
+Barrett, and other modern inquirers, except by M. Richet, as a mode of
+detecting automatic action. But it would be just as sensible to use the
+twig as to use planchette or any other 'autoscopic' apparatus. If these
+elicit knowledge unconsciously present to the mind, mere water-finding
+ought not to be the sole province of the rod. In the same class as
+these rods is the forked twig which, in China, is held at each end by
+two persons, and made to write in the sand. The little apparatus called
+_planchette_, or the other, the _ouija_, is of course, consciously or
+unconsciously, pushed by the performers. In the case of the twig, as held
+by water-seekers, the difficulty of consciously moving it so as to
+escape close observation is considerable.
+
+In the case of the _ouija_ (a little tripod, which, under the operators'
+hands, runs about a table inscribed with letters at which it points), I
+have known curious successes to be achieved by amateurs. Thus, in the
+house of a lady who owned an old _château_ in another county, the _ouija_,
+operated on by two ladies known to myself, wrote a number of details about
+a visit paid to the _château_ for a certain purpose by Mary Stuart. That
+visit, and its object, a purely personal one, are unknown to history, and
+the _château_ is not spoken of in Mr. Hay Fleming's careful, but
+unavoidably incomplete, itinerary of the Queen's residence in Scotland.
+After the communication had been made, the owner of the _château_
+explained that she was already acquainted with the circumstances
+described, as she had recently read them in documents in her charter
+chest, where they remain.
+
+Of course, the belief we extend to such narratives is entirely conditioned
+by our knowledge of the personal character of the performers. The point
+here is merely the civilised and savage practice of _automatism_, the
+apparent eliciting of knowledge not otherwise accessible, by the
+movements of a stick, or a bit of wood. These movements, made without
+conscious exertion or direction, seem, to savage philosophy, to be caused
+by in-dwelling spirits, the sources of Fetishism.
+
+These examples, then, demonstrating unconscious movement of objects by the
+operators, make it clear that movements even of touched objects, may be
+attributed, by some civilised and by savage amateurs, to 'spirits.' The
+objects so moved may, by savages, be regarded in some cases as fetishes,
+and their movements may have helped to originate the belief that spirits
+can inhabit inanimate objects. When objects apparently quite untouched
+become volatile, the mystery is deeper. This apparent animation and
+frolicsome behaviour of inanimate objects is reported all through history,
+and attested by immense quantities of evidence of every degree. It would
+be tedious to give a full account of the antiquity and diffusion of reports
+about such occurrences. We find them among Neo-Platonists, in the English
+and Continental Middle Ages, among Eskimo, Hurons, Algonkins, Tartars,
+Zulus, Malays, Nasquapees, Maoris, in witch trials, in ancient Peru
+(immediately after the Spanish Conquest), in China, in modern Russia, in
+New England (1680), all through the career of modern spiritualism, in
+Hayti (where they are attributed to 'Obeah'), and, sporadically,
+everywhere.[12]
+
+Among all these cases, we must dismiss whatever the modern paid medium
+does in the dark. The only thing to be done with the ethnographic and
+modern accounts of such marvels is to 'file them for reference.' If a
+spontaneous example occurs, under proper inspection, we can then compare
+our old tales. Professor James says: 'Their mutual resemblances suggest a
+natural type, and I confess that till these records, or others like them,
+are positively explained away, I cannot feel (in spite of such vast
+amounts of detected frauds) as if the case of physical mediumship itself,
+as a freak of nature, were definitely closed.... So long as the stories
+multiply in various lands, and so few are positively explained away, it is
+bad method to ignore them.'[13] Here they are not ignored, because,
+whatever the cause or causes of the phenomena, they would buttress, if
+they did not originate, the savage belief in spirits tenanting inanimate
+matter, whence came Fetishism. As to facts, we cannot, of course, 'explain
+away' events of this kind, which we know only through report. A conjurer
+cannot explain a trick merely from a description, especially a description
+by a non-conjurer. But, as a rule, nothing so much leads to doubt on this
+theme as the 'explanation' given--except, of course, in the case of 'dark
+séances' got up and prepared by paid mediums. We know, sometimes, how the
+'explanation' arose.
+
+Thus, the house of a certain M. Zoller, a lawyer and member of the Swiss
+Federal Council, a house at Stans, in Unterwalden, was made simply
+uninhabitable in 1860-1862. The disturbances, including movements of
+objects, were of a truly odious description, and occurred in full
+daylight. M. Zoller, deeply attached to his home, which had many
+interesting associations with the part his family played in the struggle
+against revolutionary France, was obliged to abandon the place. He had
+made every conceivable sort of research, and had called in the local
+police and _savants_, to no purpose.
+
+But the affair was explained away thus: While the phenomena could still be
+concealed from public curiosity, a client called to see M. Zoller, who was
+out. The client, therefore, remained in the drawing-room. Loud and heavy
+blows resounded through the room. The client, as it chanced, had once felt
+the effects of an electric battery, for some medical reason, apparently.
+M. Zoller writes: 'My eldest son was present at the time, and, when my
+client asked whether there was such a thing as an electrical machine in
+the house (the family having been enjoined to keep the disturbances as
+secret as possible), he allowed S. to think that there was.' Consequently,
+the phenomena were set down to M. Zoller's singular idea of making
+his house untenantable with an 'electric machine'--which he did not
+possess.[14] A number of the most respected citizens, including the
+Superintendent of Police, and the chief magistrate for law, published a
+statement that neither Zoller, nor any of his family, nor any of
+themselves, produced or could have produced the phenomena witnessed by
+them in August 1862. This declaration they put forth in the 'Schwytzer
+Zeitung,' October 5, 1863.[15] No electric machine known to mortals
+could have produced the vast variety of alleged effects, none was ever
+found; and as M. Zoller changed his servants without escaping his
+tribulations, they can hardly be blamed for what, _prima facie_, it seems
+that they could not possibly do. However, 'electricity,' like Mesopotamia,
+is 'a blessed word.'[16]
+
+My own position in this matter of 'physical phenomena' is, I hope, clear.
+They interest me, for my present purpose, as being, whatever their real
+nature and origin, things which would suggest to a savage his theory of
+Fetishism. 'An inanimate object may be tenanted by a spirit, as is proved
+by its extraordinary movements.' Thus the early thinker might reason, and
+go on to revere the object. It is to be wished that competent observers
+would pay more attention to such savage practices as crystal-gazing and
+automatism as illustrated by the sticks of the Melanesians, Zulus, and
+Yaos. Our scanty information we pick up out of stray allusions, but
+it has the advantage of being uncontaminated by theory, the European
+spectator not knowing the wide range of such practices and their value in
+experimental psychology.
+
+We have now finished our study of the less normal and usual phenomena,
+which gave rise to belief in separable, self-existing, conscious, and
+powerful souls. We have shown that the supernormal factors which, when
+reflected on, probably supported this belief, are represented in civilised
+as well as in savage life, while as to their existence among the founders
+of religion we can historically know nothing at all. If we may infer from
+certain considerations, the supernormal experiences were possibly more
+prevalent among the remote ancestors of known savage races than among
+their modern descendants. We have suggested that clairvoyance, thought
+transference, and telepathy cannot be dismissed as mere fables, by a
+cautious inquirer, while even the far more obscure stories of 'physical
+manifestations' are but poorly explained away by those who cannot explain
+them.[17] Again, these faculties have presented--in the acquisition of
+otherwise unattainable knowledge, in coincidental hallucinations, and in
+other ways--just the kind of facts on which the savage doctrine of souls
+might be based, or by which it might be buttressed. Thus, while the
+actuality of the supernormal facts and faculties remains at least an open
+question, the prevalent theory of Materialism cannot be admitted as
+dogmatically certain in its present shape. No more than any other theory,
+nay, less than some other theories, can it account for the psychical facts
+which, at the lowest, we may not honestly leave out of the reckoning.
+
+We have therefore no more to say about the supernormal aspects of the
+origins of religion. We are henceforth concerned with matters of
+verifiable belief and practice. We have to ask whether, when once the
+doctrine of souls was conceived by early men, it took precisely the course
+of development usually indicated by anthropological science.
+
+[Footnote 1: Darwin, _Journal_, p. 458; Tylor, _Prim. Cult_. ii. 152. The
+spoon was not untouched.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Rowley, _Universities' Mission_, p. 217.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Africana_, vol. i. p. 161.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In the author's _Custom and Myth_, 'The Divining Rod.']
+
+[Footnote 5: Codrington's _Melanesia_, p. 210.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Op. cit. pp. 229-325.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Prim. Cult_. vol. i. p. 125.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Callaway, _Amazulu_, p. 330.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Callaway, _Amazulu_, p. 368.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _The So-called Divining-Rod_, S.P.R. 1897.]
+
+[Footnote 11: See especially _The Waterford Experiments_, p. 106.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Authorities and examples are collected in the author's _Cock
+Lane and Common Sense_.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Proceedings_, xii. 7, 8.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Personal Narrative_, by M. Zoller. Hanke, Zurich, 1863.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Daumer, _Reich des Wundersamen_, Regensburg, 1872,
+pp. 265, 266.]
+
+[Footnote 16: A criticism of modern explanations of the phenomena here
+touched upon will be found in Appendix B.]
+
+[Footnote 17: See Appendix B.]
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
+
+To the anthropological philosopher 'a plain man' would naturally put the
+question: 'Having got your idea of spirit or soul--your theory of
+Animism--out of the idea of ghosts, and having got your idea of ghosts out
+of dreams and visions, how do you get at the Idea of God?' Now by 'God'
+the proverbial 'plain man' of controversy means a primal eternal Being,
+author of all things, the father and friend of man, the invisible,
+omniscient guardian of morality.
+
+The usual though not invariable reply of the anthropologist might be given
+in the words of Mr. Im Thurn, author of a most interesting work on the
+Indians of British Guiana:
+
+'From the notion of ghosts,' says Mr. Im Thurn, 'a belief has arisen, but
+very gradually, in higher spirits, and eventually in a Highest Spirit,
+and, keeping pace with the growth of these beliefs, a habit of reverence
+for, and worship of spirits.... The Indians of Guiana know no God.'[1]
+
+As another example of Mr. Im Thurn's hypothesis that God is a late
+development from the idea of spirit may be cited Mr. Payne's learned
+'History of the New World,' a work of much research:[2]
+
+'The lowest savages not only have no gods, but do not even recognise those
+lower beings usually called spirits, the conception of which has
+invariably preceded that of gods in the human mind.'
+
+Mr. Payne here differs, _toto caelo_, from Mr. Tylor, who finds no
+sufficient proof for wholly non-religious savages, and from Roskoff, who
+has disposed of the arguments of Sir John Lubbock. Mr. Payne, then, for
+ethnological purposes, defines a god as 'a benevolent spirit, permanently
+embodied in some tangible object, usually an image, and to whom food,
+drink,' and so on, 'are regularly offered for the purpose of securing
+assistance in the affairs of life.'
+
+On this theory 'the lowest savages' are devoid of the idea of god or of
+spirit. Later they develop the idea of spirit, and when they have secured
+the spirit, as it were, in a tangible object, and kept it on board wages,
+then the spirit has attained to the dignity and the savage to the
+conception of a god. But while a god of this kind is, in Mr. Payne's
+opinion, relatively a late flower of culture, for the hunting races
+generally (with some exceptions) have no gods, yet 'the conception of a
+creator or maker of all things ... obviously a great spirit' is 'one of
+the earliest efforts of primitive logic.'[3]
+
+Mr. Payne's own logic is not very clear. The 'primitive logic' of the
+savage leads him to seek for a cause or maker of things, which he finds in
+a great creative spirit. Yet the lowest savages have no idea even of
+spirit, and the hunting races, as a rule, have no god. Does Mr. Payne mean
+that a great creative spirit is _not_ a god, while a spirit kept on board
+wages in a tangible object is a god? We are unable, by reason of evidence
+later to be given, to agree with Mr. Payne's view of the facts, while his
+reasoning appears somewhat inconsistent, the lowest savages having, in his
+opinion, no idea of spirit, though the idea of a creative spirit is, for
+all that, one of the earliest efforts of primitive logic.
+
+On any such theories as these the belief in a moral Supreme Being is a
+very late (or a very early?) result of evolution, due to the action of
+advancing thought upon the original conception of ghosts. This opinion of
+Mr. Im Thurn's is, roughly stated, the usual theory of anthropologists.
+We wish, on the other hand, to show that the idea of God, as he is
+conceived of by our inquiring plain man, is shadowed forth (among
+contradictory fables) in the lowest-known grades of savagery, and
+therefore cannot arise from the later speculation of men, comparatively
+civilised and advanced, on the original datum of ghosts. We shall
+demonstrate, contrary to the opinion of Mr. Spencer, Mr. Huxley, and even
+Mr. Tylor, that the Supreme Being, and, in one case at least, the casual
+sprites of savage faith, are active moral influences. What is even more
+important, we shall make it undeniable that Anthropology has simplified
+her problem by neglecting or ignoring her facts. While the real problem is
+to account for the evolution out of ghosts of the eternal, creative moral
+god of the 'plain man,' the germ of such a god or being in the creeds of
+the lowest savages is by anthropologists denied, or left out of sight, or
+accounted for by theories contradicted by facts, or, at best, is explained
+away as a result of European or Islamite influences. Now, as the problem
+is to account for the evolution of the highest conception of God, as far
+as that conception exists among the most backward races, the problem can
+never be solved while that highest conception of God is practically
+ignored.
+
+Thus, anthropologists, as a rule, in place of facing and solving their
+problem, have merely evaded it--doubtless unwittingly. This, of course, is
+not the practice of Mr. Tylor, though even his great work is professedly
+much more concerned with the development of the idea of spirit and with
+the lower forms of animism than with the real crux--the evolution of the
+idea (always obscured by mythology) of a moral, uncreated, undying God
+among the lowest savages. This negligence of anthropologists has arisen
+from a single circumstance. They take it for granted that God is always
+(except where the word for God is applied to a living human being)
+regarded as Spirit. Thus, having accounted for the development of the
+idea of spirit, they regard God as that idea carried to its highest
+power, and as the final step in its evolution. But, if we can show that
+the early idea of an undying, moral, creative being does not necessarily
+or logically imply the doctrine of spirit (or ghost), then this idea of an
+eternal, moral, creative being may have existed even before the doctrine
+of spirit was evolved.
+
+We may admit that Mr. Tylor's account of the process by which Gods were
+evolved out of ghosts is a little _touffu_--rather buried in facts. We
+'can scarcely see the wood for the trees.' We want to know how Gods,
+makers of things (or of most things), fathers in heaven, and friends,
+guardians of morality, seeing what is good or bad in the hearts of men,
+were evolved, as is supposed, out of ghosts or surviving souls of the
+dead. That such moral, practically omniscient Gods are known to the very
+lowest savages--Bushmen, Fuegians, Australians--we shall demonstrate.
+
+Here the inquirer must be careful not to adopt the common opinion that
+Gods improve, morally and otherwise, in direct ratio to the rising grades
+in the evolution of culture and civilisation. That is not necessarily the
+case; usually the reverse occurs. Still less must we take it for granted,
+following Mr. Tylor and Mr. Huxley, that the 'alliance [of religion and
+morality] belongs almost, or wholly, to religions above the savage
+level--not to the earlier and lower creeds;' or that 'among the Australian
+savages,' and 'in its simplest condition,' 'theology is wholly independent
+of ethics.'[4] These statements can be proved (by such evidence as
+anthropology is obliged to rely upon) to be erroneous. And, just because
+these statements are put forward, Anthropology has an easier task in
+explaining the origin of religion; while, just because these statements
+are incorrect, her conclusion, being deduced from premises so far false,
+is invalidated.
+
+Given souls, acquired by thinking on the lines already described, Mr.
+Tylor develops Gods out of them. But he is not one of the writers who is
+certain about every detail. He 'scarcely attempts to clear away the haze
+that covers great parts of the subject.'[5]
+
+The human soul, he says, has been the model on which man 'framed his
+ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports
+in the grass up to the heavenly creator and ruler of the world, the
+Great Spirit.' Here it is taken for granted that the Heavenly Ruler was
+from the first envisaged as a '_spiritual_ being'--which is just the
+difficulty. Was He?[6]
+
+The process of framing these ideas is rather obscure. The savage 'lives
+in terror of the souls of the dead as harmful spirits.' This might yield
+a Devil; it would not yield a God who 'makes for righteousness.'
+Happily, 'deified ancestors are regarded, on the whole, as kindly
+spirits.' The dead ancestor is 'now passed into a deity.'[7] Examples of
+ancestor-worship follow. But we are no nearer home. For among the Zulus
+many Amatongo (ancestral spirits) are sacred. 'Yet their father
+[i.e. the father of each actual family] is far before all others when
+they worship the Amatongo.... They do not know the ancients who are dead,
+nor their laud-giving names, nor their names.'[8] Thus, each new
+generation of Zulus must have a new first worshipful object--its own
+father's Itongo. This father, and his very name, are, in a generation or
+two, forgotten. The name of such a man, therefore, cannot survive as that
+of the God or Supreme Being from age to age; and, obviously, such a real
+dead man, while known at all, is much too well known to be taken for the
+creator and ruler of the world, despite some African flattering titles and
+superstitions about kings who control the weather. The Zulus, about
+as 'godless' a people as possible, have a mythical first ancestor,
+Unkulunkulu, but he is 'beyond the reach of rites,' and is a centre of
+myths rather than of worship or of moral ideas.[9]
+
+After other examples of ancestor-worship, Mr. Tylor branches off into a
+long discussion of the theory of 'possession' or inspiration,[10] which
+does not assist the argument at the present point. Thence he passes to
+fetishism (already discussed by us), and the transitions from the
+fetish--(1) to the idol; (2) to the guardian angel ('subliminal self');
+(3) to tree and river spirits, and local spirits which cause volcanoes;
+and (4) to polytheism. A fetish may inhabit a tree; trees being
+generalised, the fetish of one oak becomes the god of the forest. Or,
+again, fetishes rise into 'species gods;' the gods of _all_ bees, owls,
+or rabbits are thus evolved.
+
+Next,[11]
+
+'As chiefs and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser
+spirits.... With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric system of
+religion is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the
+spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe.'
+
+Very good; but whence comes the great God among tribes which have neither
+chief nor king and probably never had, as among the Fuegians, Bushmen, and
+Australians? The maker and ruler of the world known to _these_ races
+cannot be the shadow of king or chief, reflected and magnified on the mist
+of thought; for chief or king these peoples have none. This theory
+(Hume's) will not work where people have a great God but no king or
+chief; nor where they have a king but no Zeus or other supreme King-god,
+as (I conceive) among the Aztecs.
+
+We now reach, in Mr. Tylor's theory, great fetish deities, such as Heaven
+and Earth, Sun and Moon, and 'departmental deities,' gods of Agriculture,
+War, and so forth, unknown to low savages.
+
+Next Mr. Tylor introduces an important personage. 'The theory of family
+Manes, carried back to tribal Gods, leads to the recognition of superior
+deities of the nature of Divine Ancestor, or First Man,' who sometimes
+ranks as Lord of the Dead. As an instance, Mr. Tylor gives the Maori Maui,
+who, like the Indian Yama, trod first of men the path of death. But
+whether Maui and Yama are the Sun, or not, both Maori and Sanskrit
+religion regard these heroes as much later than the Original Gods. In
+Kamschatka the First Man is the 'son' of the Creator, and it is about the
+origin of the idea of the Creator, not of the First Man, that we are
+inquiring. Adam is called 'the son of God' in a Biblical genealogy, but,
+of course, Adam was made, not begotten. The case of the Zulu belief will
+be analysed later. On the whole, we cannot explain away the conception
+of the Creator as a form of the conception of an idealised divine
+First Ancestor, because the conception of a Creator occurs where
+ancestor-worship does not occur; and again, because, supposing that the
+idea of a Creator came first, and that ancestor-worship later grew more
+popular, the popular idea of Ancestor might be transferred to the waning
+idea of Creator. The Creator might be recognised as the First Ancestor,
+_après coup_.
+
+Mr. Tylor next approaches Dualism, the idea of hostile Good and Bad
+Beings. We must, as he says, be careful to discount European teaching,
+still, he admits, the savage has this dualistic belief in a 'primitive'
+form. But the savage conception is not merely that of 'good = friendly
+to me,' 'bad = hostile to me.' Ethics, as we shall show, already come into
+play in his theology.
+
+Mr. Tylor arrives, at last, at the Supreme Being of savage creeds. His
+words, well weighed, must be cited textually--
+
+'To mark off the doctrines of monotheism, closer definition is required
+[than the bare idea of a Supreme Creator], assigning the distinctive
+attributes of Deity to none save the Almighty Creator. It may be declared
+that, in this strict sense, no savage tribe of monotheists has been ever
+known.[12] Nor are any fair representatives of the lower culture in a
+strict sense pantheists. The doctrine which they do widely hold, and
+which opens to them a course tending in one or other of these directions,
+is polytheism culminating in the rule of one supreme divinity. High above
+the doctrine of souls, of divine Manes, of local nature gods, of the great
+gods of class and element, there are to be discerned in barbaric theology,
+shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity,
+henceforth to be traced onward in expanding power and brightening glory
+along the history of Religion. It is no unimportant task, partial as it
+is, to select and group the typical data which show the nature and
+position of the doctrine of supremacy, as it comes into view within the
+lower culture.[13]
+
+We shall show that certain low savages are as monotheistic as some
+Christians. They have a Supreme Being, and the 'distinctive attributes of
+Deity' are not by them assigned to other beings, further than as
+Christianity assigns them to Angels, Saints, the Devil, and, strange as
+it appears, among savages, to mediating 'Sons.'
+
+It is not known that, among the Andamanese and other tribes, this last
+notion is due to missionary influence. But, in regard to the whole chapter
+of savage Supreme Beings, we must, as Mr. Tylor advises, keep watching for
+Christian and Islamite contamination. The savage notions, as Mr. Tylor
+says, even when thus contaminated, may have 'to some extent, a native
+substratum.' We shall select such savage examples of the idea of a
+Supreme Being as are attested by ancient native hymns, or are inculcated
+in the most sacred and secret savage institutions, the religious Mysteries
+(manifestly the last things to be touched by missionary influence), or are
+found among low insular races defended from European contact by the
+jealous ferocity and poisonous jungles of people and soil. We also note
+cases in which missionaries found such native names as 'Father,' 'Ancient
+of Heaven,' 'Maker of All,' ready-made to their hands.
+
+It is to be remarked that, while this branch of the inquiry is practically
+omitted by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Tylor can spare for it but some twenty pages
+out of his large work. He arranges the probable germs of the savage
+idea of a Supreme Being thus: A god of the polytheistic crowd is simply
+raised to the primacy, which, of course, cannot occur where there is no
+polytheism. Or the principle of Manes worship may make a Supreme Deity
+out of 'a primeval ancestor' say Unkulunkulu, who is so far from being
+supreme, that he is abject. Or, again, a great phenomenon or force in
+Nature-worship, say Sun, or Heaven, is raised to supremacy. Or speculative
+philosophy ascends from the Many to the One by trying to discern through
+and beyond the universe a First Cause. Animistic conceptions thus reach
+their utmost limit in the notion of the Anima Mundi. He may accumulate all
+powers of all polytheistic gods, or he may 'loom vast, shadowy, and
+calm ... too benevolent to need human worship ... too merely existent to
+concern himself with the petty race of men.'[14] But he is always
+animistic.
+
+Now, in addition to the objections already noted in passing, how can we
+tell that the Supreme Being of low savages was, in original conception,
+_animistic_ at all? How can we know that he was envisaged, originally, as
+_Spirit_? We shall show that he probably was not, that the question
+'spirit or not spirit' was not raised at all, that the Maker and Father in
+Heaven, prior to Death, was merely regarded as a deathless _Being_, no
+question of 'spirit' being raised. If so, Animism was not needed for
+the earliest idea of a moral Eternal. This hypothesis will be found to
+lead to some very singular conclusions.
+
+It will be more fully stated and illustrated, presently, but I find that
+it had already occurred to Dr. Brinton.[15] He is talking specially of a
+heaven-god; he says 'it came to pass that the idea of God was linked to
+the heavens _long ere man asked himself, Are the heavens material and God
+spiritual_?' Dr. Brinton, however, does not develop his idea, nor am I
+aware that it has been developed previously.
+
+The notion of a God about whose spirituality nobody has inquired is new to
+us. To ourselves, and doubtless or probably to barbarians on a certain
+level of culture, such a Divine Being _must_ be animistic, _must_ be a
+'spirit.' To take only one case, to which we shall return, the Banks
+Islanders (Melanesia) believe in ghosts, 'and in the existence of Beings
+who were not, and never had been, human. All alike might be called
+spirits,' says Dr. Codrington, but, _ex hypothesi_, the Beings 'who
+never were human' are only called 'spirits,' by us, because our habits of
+thought do not enable us to envisage them _except_ as 'spirits.' They
+never were men, 'the natives will always maintain that he (the _Vui_) was
+_something different_, and deny to him the fleshly body of a man,' while
+resolute that he was not a ghost.[16]
+
+This point will be amply illustrated later, as we study that strangely
+neglected chapter, that essential chapter, the Higher beliefs of the
+Lowest savages. Of the existence of a belief in a Supreme Being, not as
+merely 'alleged,' there is as good evidence as we possess for any fact in
+the ethnographic region.
+
+It is certain that savages, when first approached by curious travellers,
+and missionaries, have again and again recognised our God in theirs.
+
+The mythical details and fables about the savage God are, indeed,
+different; the ethical, benevolent, admonishing, rewarding, and creative
+aspects of the Gods are apt to be the same.[17]
+
+'There is no necessity for beginning to tell even the most degraded of
+these people of the existence of God, or of a future state, 'the facts
+being universally admitted.'[18]
+
+'Intelligent men among the Bakwains have scouted the idea of any of them
+ever having been without a tolerably clear conception of good and evil,
+God and the future state; Nothing we indicate as sin ever appeared to
+them as otherwise,' except polygamy, says Livingstone.
+
+Now we may agree with Mr. Tylor that modern theologians, familiar
+with savage creeds, will scarcely argue that 'they are direct or
+nearly direct products of revelation' (vol. ii. p. 356). But we may
+argue that, considering their nascent ethics (denied or minimised by many
+anthropologists) and the distance which separates the high gods of
+savagery from the ghosts out of which they are said to have sprung;
+considering too, that the relatively pure and lofty element which, _ex
+hypothesi_, is most recent in evolution, is also, _not_ the most honoured,
+but often just the reverse; remembering, above all, that we know nothing
+historically of the mental condition of the founders of religion, we may
+hesitate to accept the anthropological hypothesis _en masse_. At best
+it is conjectural, and the facts are such that opponents have more
+justification than is commonly admitted for regarding the bulk of
+savage religion as degenerate, or corrupted, from its own highest
+elements. I am by no means, as yet, arguing positively in favour of that
+hypothesis, but I see what its advocates mean, or ought to mean, and the
+strength of their position. Mr. Tylor, with his unique fairness, says
+'the degeneration theory, no doubt in some instances with justice, may
+claim such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remains of higher religion'
+(vol. ii. p. 336).
+
+I do not pretend to know how the lowest savages evolved the theory of a
+God who reads the heart and 'makes for righteousness,' It is as easy,
+almost, for me to believe that they 'were not left without a witness,'
+as to believe that this God of theirs was evolved out of the maleficent
+ghost of a dirty mischievous medicine-man.
+
+Here one may repeat that while the 'quaint or majestic foreshadowings'
+of a Supreme Being, among very low savages, are only sketched lightly
+by Mr. Tylor; in Mr. Herbert Spencer's system they seem to be almost
+omitted. In his 'Principles of Sociology' and 'Ecclesiastical
+Institutions' one looks in vain for an adequate notice; in vain for almost
+any notice, of this part of his topic. The watcher of conduct, the
+friendly, creative being of low savage faith, whence was he evolved? The
+circumstance of his existence, as far as I can see; the chastity, the
+unselfishness, the pitifulness, the loyalty to plighted word, the
+prohibition of even extra-tribal homicide, enjoined in various places on
+his worshippers, are problems that appear somehow to have escaped
+Mr. Spencer's notice. We are puzzled by endless difficulties in his
+system: for example as to how savages can forget their great-grandfathers'
+very names, and yet remember 'traditional persons from generation to
+generation,' so that 'in time any amount of expansion and idealisation can
+be reached,'[19]
+
+Again, Mr. Spencer will argue that it is a strange thing if 'primitive men
+had, as some think, the consciousness of a Universal Power whence they and
+all other things proceeded,' and yet 'spontaneously performed to that
+Power an act like that performed by them to the dead body of a fellow
+savage'--by offerings of food.[20]
+
+Now, first, there would be nothing strange in the matter if the crude idea
+of 'Universal Power' came _earliest_, and was superseded, in part, by a
+later propitiation of the dead and ghosts. The new religious idea would
+soon refract back on, and influence by its ritual, the older conception.
+And, secondly, it is precisely this 'Universal Power' that is _not_
+propitiated by offerings of food, in Tonga, (despite Mr. Huxley)
+Australia, and Africa, for example. We cannot escape the difficulty by
+saying that there the old ghost of Universal Power is regarded as dead,
+decrepit, or as a _roi-fainéant_ not worth propitiating, for that is not
+true of the punisher of sin, the teacher of generosity, and the solitary
+sanction of faith between men and peoples.
+
+It would appear then, on the whole, that the question of the plain man to
+the anthropologist, 'Having got your idea of spirit into the savage's
+mind, how does he develop out of it what I call God?' has not been
+answered. God cannot be a reflection from human kings where there have
+been no kings; nor a president elected out of a polytheistic society of
+gods where there is as yet no polytheism; nor an ideal first ancestor
+where men do not worship their ancestors; while, again, the spirit of a
+man who died, real or ideal, does not answer to a common savage conception
+of the Creator. All this will become much more obvious as we study in
+detail the highest gods of the lowest races.
+
+Our study, of course, does not pretend to embrace the religion of all the
+savages in the world. We are content with typical, and, as a rule,
+well-observed examples. We range from the creeds of the most backward and
+worst-equipped nomad races, to those of peoples with an aristocracy,
+hereditary kings, houses and agriculture, ending with the Supreme Being of
+the highly civilised Incas, and with the Jehovah of the Hebrews.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Journal Anthrop. Inst._ xi. 874. We shall return to this
+passage.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Vol. i. p. 389, 1892.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Payne, i. 458.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult._ vol. ii. p. 381; _Science and Hebrew
+Tradition_, pp. 346, 372.]
+
+[Footnote 5:  _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. p. 109.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Ibid. vol. ii. p. 110.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid. vol. ii. p. 113.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 115, 116, citing Callaway and
+others.]
+
+[Footnote 9: The Zulu religion will be analysed later.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 130-144.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Ibid. vol. ii. p. 248.]
+
+[Footnote 12: And very few civilised populations, if any, are monotheistic
+in this sense.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 332, 333.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 335, 336.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Myths of the New World_, 1868, p. 47.]
+
+[Footnote 16: I observed this point in _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, while
+I did not see the implication, that the idea of 'spirit' was not
+necessarily present in the savage conception of the primal Beings,
+Creators, or Makers.]
+
+[Footnote 17: See one or two cases in _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. p. 340.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Livingstone, speaking of the Bakwain, _Missionary Travels_,
+p. 168.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. p. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Op. cit. vol. i. p. 302.]
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+HIGH GODS OF LOW RACES
+
+To avoid misconception we must repeat the necessary cautions about
+accepting evidence as to high gods of low races. The missionary who does
+not see in every alien god a devil is apt to welcome traces of an original
+supernatural revelation, darkened by all peoples but the Jews. We shall
+not, however, rely much on missionary evidence, and, when we do, we must
+now be equally on our guard against the anthropological bias in the
+missionary himself. Having read Mr. Spencer and Mr. Tylor, and finding
+himself among ancestor-worshippers (as he sometimes does), he is apt to
+think that ancestor-worship explains any traces of a belief in the Supreme
+Being. Against each and every bias of observers we must be watchful.
+
+It may be needful, too, to point out once again another weak point in all
+reasoning about savage religion, namely that we cannot always tell what
+may have been borrowed from Europeans. Thus, the Fuegians, in 1830-1840,
+were far out of the way, but one tribe, near Magellan's Straits,
+worshipped an image called Cristo. Fitzroy attributes this obvious trace
+of Catholicism to a Captain Pelippa, who visited the district some time
+before his own expedition. It is less probable that Spaniards established
+a belief in a moral Deity in regions where they left no material traces of
+their faith. The Fuegians are not easily proselytised. 'When discovered by
+strangers, the instant impulse of a Fuegian family is to run off into the
+woods.' Occasionally they will emerge to barter, but 'sometimes nothing
+will induce a single individual of the family to appear.' Fitzroy thought
+they had no idea of a future state, because, among other reasons not
+given, 'the evil spirit torments them in _this_ world, if they do wrong,
+by storms, hail, snow, &c.' Why the evil spirit should punish evil deeds
+is not evident. 'A great black man is supposed to be always wandering
+about the woods and mountains, who is certain of knowing every word and
+every action, who cannot be escaped and who influences the weather
+according to men's conduct.'[1]
+
+There are no traces of propitiation by food, or sacrifice, or anything but
+conduct. To regard the Deity as 'a magnified non-natural man' is not
+peculiar to Fuegian theologians, and does not imply Animism, but the
+reverse. But the point is that this ethical judge of perhaps the lowest
+savages 'makes for righteousness' and searches the heart. His morality is
+so much above the ordinary savage standard that he regards the slaying of
+a stranger and an enemy, caught redhanded in robbery, as a sin. York's
+brother (York was a Fuegian brought to England by Fitzroy) killed a 'wild
+man' who was stealing his birds. 'Rain come down, snow come down, hail
+come down, wind blow, blow, very much blow. Very bad to kill man. Big man
+in woods no like it, he very angry.' Here be ethics in savage religion.
+The Sixth Commandment is in force. The Being also prohibits the slaying of
+flappers before they can fly. 'Very bad to shoot little duck, come wind,
+come rain, blow, very much blow.'[2]
+
+Now this big man is not a deified chief, for the Fuegians 'have no
+superiority of one over another ... but the doctor-wizard of each party has
+much influence.' Mr. Spencer disposes of this moral 'big man' of the
+Fuegians as 'evidently a deceased weather-doctor.'[3] But, first, there is
+no evidence that the being is regarded as ever having died. Again, it is
+not shown that Fuegians are ancestor-worshippers. Next, Fitzroy did not
+think that the Fuegians believed in a future life. Lastly, when were
+medicine-men such notable moralists? The worst spirits among the
+neighbouring Patagonians are those of dead medicine-men. As a rule
+everywhere the ghost of a 'doctor-wizard,' shaman, or whatever he may be
+called, is the worst and wickedest of all ghosts. How, then, the Fuegians,
+who are not proved to be ancestor-worshippers, evolved out of the
+malignant ghost of an ancestor a being whose strong point is morality, one
+does not easily conceive. The adjacent Chonos 'have great faith in a good
+spirit, whom they call Yerri Yuppon, and consider to be the author of all
+good; him they invoke in distress or danger.' However starved they do not
+touch food till a short prayer has been muttered over each portion, 'the
+praying man looking upward.'[4] They have magicians, but no details are
+given as to spirits or ghosts. If Fuegian and Chono religion is on this
+level, and if this be the earliest, then the theology of many other higher
+savages (as of the Zulus) is decidedly degenerate. 'The Bantu gives one
+accustomed to the negro the impression that he once had the same set of
+ideas, _but has forgotten half of them_,' says Miss Kingsley.[5]
+
+Of all races now extant, the Australians are probably lowest in culture,
+and, like the fauna of the continent, are nearest to the primitive
+model. They have neither metals, bows, pottery, agriculture, nor fixed
+habitations; and no traces of higher culture have anywhere been found
+above or in the soil of the continent. This is important, for in some
+respects their religious conceptions are so lofty that it would be natural
+to explain them as the result either of European influence, or as relics
+of a higher civilisation in the past. The former notion is discredited
+by the fact that their best religious ideas are imparted in connection
+with their ancient and secret mysteries, while for the second idea, that
+they are degenerate from a loftier civilisation, there is absolutely no
+evidence.
+
+It has been suggested, indeed, by Mr. Spencer that the singularly complex
+marriage customs of the Australian blacks point to a more polite condition
+in their past history. Of this stage, as we said, no material traces have
+ever been discovered, nor can degeneration be recent. Our earliest account
+of the Australians is that of Dampier, who visited New Holland in the
+unhappy year 1688. He found the natives 'the miserablest people in the
+world. The Hodmadods, of Mononamatapa, though a nasty people, yet for
+wealth are gentlemen to these: who have no houses, sheep, poultry, and
+fruits of the earth.... They have no houses, but lie in the open air.'
+Curiously enough, Dampier attests their _unselfishness_: the main ethical
+feature in their religious teaching. 'Be it little or be it much they get,
+every one has his part, as well the young and tender as the old and
+feeble, who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty.' Dampier
+saw no metals used, nor any bows, merely boomerangs ('wooden cutlasses'),
+and lances with points hardened in the fire. 'Their place of dwelling was
+only a fire with a few boughs before it' (the _gunyeh_).
+
+This description remains accurate for most of the unsophisticated
+Australian tribes, but Dampier appears only to have seen ichthyophagous
+coast blacks.
+
+There is one more important point. In the _Bora_, or Australian
+mysteries, at which knowledge of 'The Maker' and of his commandments is
+imparted, the front teeth of the initiated are still knocked out. Now,
+Dampier observed 'the two fore-teeth of their upper jaw are wanting in all
+of them, men and women, old and young.' If this is to be taken quite
+literally, the Bora rite, in 1688, must have included the women, at least
+locally. Dampier was on the north-west coast in latitude 16 degrees,
+longitude 122-1/4 degrees east (Dampier Land, West Australia). The natives
+had neither boats, canoes, nor bark logs; but it seems that they had their
+religious mysteries and their unselfishness, two hundred years ago.[6]
+
+The Australians have been very carefully studied by many observers, and
+the results entirely overthrow Mr. Huxley's bold statement that 'in its
+simplest condition, such as may be met with among the Australian savages,
+theology is a mere belief in the existence, powers, and dispositions
+(usually malignant) of ghost-like entities who may be propitiated or
+scared away; but no cult can properly be said to exist. And in this stage
+theology is wholly independent of ethics.'
+
+Remarks more crudely in defiance of known facts could not be made. The
+Australians, assuredly, believe in 'spirits,' often malicious, and
+probably in most cases regarded as ghosts of men. These aid the wizard,
+and occasionally inspire him. That these ghosts are _worshipped_ does not
+appear, and is denied by Waitz. Again, in the matter of cult, 'there is
+none' in the way of _sacrifice_ to higher gods, as there should be if
+these gods were hungry ghosts. The cult among the Australians is the
+keeping of certain 'laws,' expressed in moral teaching, supposed to be in
+conformity with the institutes of their God. Worship takes the form, as at
+Eleusis, of tribal mysteries, originally instituted, as at Eleusis, by
+the God. The young men are initiated with many ceremonies, some of which
+are cruel and farcical, but the initiation includes ethical instruction,
+in conformity with the supposed commands of a God who watches over
+conduct. As among ourselves, the ethical ideal, with its theological
+sanction, is probably rather above the moral standard of ordinary
+practice. What conclusion we should draw from these facts is uncertain,
+but the facts, at least, cannot be disputed, and precisely contradict the
+statement of Mr. Huxley. He was wholly in the wrong when he said: 'The
+moral code, such as is implied by public opinion, derives no sanction from
+theological dogmas,'[7] It reposes, for its origin and sanction, on such
+dogmas.
+
+The evidence as to Australian religion is abundant, and is being added to
+yearly. I shall here content myself with Mr. Howitt's accounts.[8]
+
+As regards the possible evolution of the Australian God from
+ancestor-worship, it must be noted that Mr. Howitt credits the groups with
+possessing 'headmen,' a kind of chiefs, whereas some inquirers, in Brough
+Smyth's collection, disbelieve in regular chiefs. Mr. Howitt writes:--
+
+'The Supreme Spirit, who is believed in by all the tribes I refer to here
+[in South-Eastern Australia], either as a benevolent, or more frequently
+as a malevolent being, it seems to me represents the defunct headman.'
+
+Now, the traces of 'headmanship' among the tribes are extremely faint; no
+such headman rules large areas of country, none is known to be worshipped
+after death, and the malevolence of the Supreme Spirit is not illustrated
+by the details of Mr. Howitt's own statement, but the reverse. Indeed, he
+goes on at once to remark that '_Darumulun_ was not, it seems to me,
+everywhere thought a malevolent being, but he was dreaded as one who could
+severely punish the trespasses committed against these tribal ordinances
+and customs whose first institution is ascribed to him.'
+
+To punish transgressions of his law is not the essence of a malevolent
+being. Darumulun 'watched the youths from the sky, prompt to punish, by
+disease or death, the breach of his ordinances,' moral or ritual. His name
+is too sacred to be spoken except in whispers, and the anthropologist will
+observe that the names of the human dead are also often tabooed. But the
+divine name is not thus tabooed and sacred when the mere folklore about
+him is narrated. The informants of Mr. Howitt instinctively distinguished
+between the mythology and the religion of Darumulun.[9] This distinction--
+the secrecy about the religion, the candour about the mythology--is
+essential, and accounts for our ignorance about the inner religious
+beliefs of early races. Mr. Howitt himself knew little till he was
+initiated. The grandfather of Mr. Howitt's friend, _before the white men
+came to Melbourne_, took him out at night, and, pointing to a star, said:
+'You will soon be a man; you see _Bunjil_ [Supreme Being of certain
+tribes] up there, and he can see you, and all you do down here.' Mr.
+Palmer, speaking of the Mysteries of Northern Australians (mysteries under
+divine sanction), mentions the nature of the moral instruction. Each lad
+is given, 'by one of the elders, advice so kindly, fatherly, and
+impressive, as often to soften the heart, and draw tears from the youth.'
+He is to avoid adultery, not to take advantage of a woman if he finds her
+alone, he is not to be quarrelsome.[10]
+
+At the Mysteries Darumulun's real name may be uttered, at other times he
+is 'Master' (_Biamban_) or 'Father' (_Papang_), exactly as we say 'Lord'
+and 'Father.'
+
+It is known that all these things are not due to missionaries, whose
+instructions would certainly not be conveyed in the _Bora_, or tribal
+mysteries, which, again, are partly described by Collins as early as 1798,
+and must have been practised in 1688. Mr. Howitt mentions, among moral
+lessons divinely sanctioned, respect for old age, abstinence from lawless
+love, and avoidance of the sins so popular, poetic, and sanctioned by the
+example of Gods, in classical Greece.[11] A representation is made of the
+Master, Biamban; and to make such idols, except at the Mysteries, is
+forbidden 'under pain of death.' Those which are made are destroyed as
+soon as the rites are ended.[12] The future life (apparently) is then
+illustrated by the burial of a living elder, who rises from a grave.
+This may, however, symbolise the 'new life' of the Mystae, 'Worse have I
+fled; better have I found,' as was sung in an Athenian rite. The whole
+result is, by what Mr. Howitt calls 'a quasi-religious element,' to
+'impress upon the mind of the youth, in an indelible manner, those rules
+of conduct which form the moral law of the tribe.'[13]
+
+Many other authorities could be adduced for the religious sanction of
+morals in Australia. A watchful being observes and rewards the conduct or
+men; he is named with reverence, if named at all; his abode is the
+heavens; he is the Master and Lord of things; his lessons 'soften the
+heart,'[14]
+
+  'What wants this Knave
+  That a _God_ should have?'
+
+I shall now demonstrate that the religion patronised by the Australian
+Supreme Being, and inculcated in his Mysteries, is actually used to
+counteract the immoral character which natives acquire by associating with
+Anglo-Saxon Christians.[15]
+
+Mr. Howitt[16] gives an account of the Jeraeil, or Mysteries of the
+Kurnai. The old men deemed that through intercourse with whites 'the lads
+had become selfish and no longer inclined to share that which they
+obtained by their own exertions, or had given them, with their friends.'
+One need not say that selflessness is the very essence of goodness, and
+the central moral doctrine of Christianity. So it is in the religious
+Mysteries of the African Yao; a selfish man, we shall see, is spoken of as
+'uninitiated.' So it is with the Australian Kurnai, whose mysteries and
+ethical teaching are under the sanction of their Supreme Being. So much
+for the anthropological dogma that early theology has no ethics.
+
+The Kurnai began by kneading the stomachs of the lads about to be
+initiated (that is, if they have been associating with Christians), to
+expel selfishness and greed. The chief rite, later, is to blindfold every
+lad, with a blanket closely drawn over his head, to make whirring sounds
+with the _tundun_, or Greek _rhombos_, then to pluck off the blankets, and
+bid the initiate raise their faces to the sky. The initiator points to it,
+calling out, 'Look there, look there, look there!' They have seen in this
+solemn way the home of the Supreme Being, 'Our Father,' Mungan-ngaur
+(Mungan = 'Father,' ngaur = 'our'), whose doctrine is then unfolded by the
+old initiator ('headman') 'in an impressive manner.'[17] 'Long ago there
+was a great Being, Mungan-ngaur, who lived on the earth.' His son Tundun
+is _direct ancestor_ of the Kurnai. Mungan initiated the rites, and
+destroyed earth by water when they were impiously revealed. 'Mungan left
+the earth, and ascended to the sky, where he still remains.'
+
+Here Mungan-ngaur, a Being not defined as spirit, but immortal, and
+dwelling in heaven, is Father, or rather grandfather, not maker,
+of the Kurnai. This _may_ be interpreted as ancestor-worship, but the
+opposite myth, of making or creating, is of frequent occurrence in many
+widely-severed Australian districts, and co-exists with evolutionary
+myths. Mungan-ngaur's precepts are:
+
+  1. _To listen to and obey the old men_.
+  2. _To share everything they have with their friends_.
+  3. _To live peaceably with their friends_.
+
+  4. _Not to interfere with girls or married women_.
+
+  5. _To obey the food restrictions until they are released from them by
+     the old men_.
+
+Mr. Howitt concludes: 'I venture to assert that it can no longer be
+maintained that the Australians have no belief which can be called
+religious, that is, in the sense of beliefs which govern tribal and
+individual morality under a supernatural sanction.' On this topic
+Mr. Hewitt's opinion became more affirmative the more deeply he was
+initiated.[18]
+
+The Australians are the lowest, most primitive savages, yet no
+propitiation by food is made to their moral Ruler, in heaven, as if he
+were a ghost.
+
+The laws of these Australian divine beings apply to ritual as well as to
+ethics, as might naturally be expected. But the moral element is
+conspicuous, the reverence is conspicuous: we have here no mere ghost,
+propitiated by food or sacrifice, or by purely magical rites. His very
+image (modelled on a large scale in earth) is no vulgar idol: to make such
+a thing, except on the rare sacred occasions, is a capital offence.
+Meanwhile the mythology of the God has often, in or out of the rites,
+nothing rational about it.
+
+On the whole it is evident that Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example,
+underrates the nature of Australian religion. He cites a case of
+addressing the ghost of a man recently dead, which is asked not to bring
+sickness, 'or make loud noises in the night,' and says: 'Here we may
+recognise the essential elements of a cult.' But Mr. Spencer does not
+allude to the much more essentially religious elements which he might have
+found in the very authority whom he cites, Mr. Brough Smyth.[19] This
+appears, as far as my scrutiny goes, to be Mr. Spencer's solitary
+reference to Australia in the work on 'Ecclesiastical Institutions.' Yet
+the facts which he and Mr. Huxley ignore throw a light very different from
+theirs on what they consider 'the simplest condition of theology.'
+
+Among the causes of confusion in thought upon religion, Mr. Tylor mentions
+'the partial and one-sided application of the historical method of inquiry
+into theological doctrines.'[20] Here, perhaps, we have examples. In its
+highest aspect that 'simplest theology' of Australia is free from the
+faults of popular theology in Greece. The God discourages sin, though, in
+myth, he is far from impeccable. He is almost too revered to be named
+(except in mythology) and is not to be represented by idols. He is not
+moved by sacrifice; he has not the chance; like Death in Greece, 'he only,
+of all Gods, loves not gifts.' Thus the status of theology does not
+correspond to what we look for in very low culture. It would scarcely be a
+paradox to say that the popular Zeus, or Ares, is degenerate from
+Mungan-ngaur, or the Fuegian being who forbids the slaying of an enemy,
+and almost literally 'marks the sparrow's fall.'
+
+If we knew all the mythology of Darumulun, we should probably find it
+(like much of the myth of Pundjel or Bunjil) on a very different level
+from the theology. There are two currents, the religious and the mythical,
+flowing together through religion. The former current, religious, even
+among very low savages, is pure from the magical ghost-propitiating habit.
+The latter current, mythological, is full of magic, mummery, and
+scandalous legend. Sometimes the latter stream quite pollutes the
+former, sometimes they flow side by side, perfectly distinguishable, as
+in Aztec ethical piety, compared with the bloody Aztec ritualism.
+Anthropology has mainly kept her eyes fixed on the impure stream, the
+lusts, mummeries, conjurings, and frauds of priesthoods, while relatively,
+or altogether, neglecting (as we have shown) what is honest and of good
+report.
+
+The worse side of religion is the less sacred, and therefore the more
+conspicuous. Both elements are found co-existing, in almost all races, and
+nobody, in our total lack of historical information about the beginnings,
+can say which, if either, element is the earlier, or which, if either, is
+derived from the other. To suppose that propitiation of corpses and then
+of ghosts came first is agreeable, and seems logical, to some writers
+who are not without a bias against all religion as an unscientific
+superstition. But we know so little! The first missionaries in Greenland
+supposed that there was not, there, a trace of belief in a Divine Being.
+'But when they came to understand their language better, they found quite
+the reverse to be true ... and not only so, but they could plainly gather
+from a free dialogue they had with some perfectly wild Greenlanders (at
+that time avoiding any direct application to their hearts) that their
+ancestors must have believed in a Supreme Being, and did render him some
+service, which their posterity neglected little by little...'[21] Mr.
+Tylor does not refer to this as a trace of Christian Scandinavian
+influence on the Eskimo.[22]
+
+That line, of course, may be taken. But an Eskimo said to a missionary,
+'Thou must not imagine that no Greenlander thinks about these things'
+(theology). He then stated the argument from design. 'Certainly there
+must be some Being who made all these things. He must be very good too...
+Ah, did I but know him, how I would love and honour him.' As St. Paul
+writes: 'That which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath
+showed it unto them ... being understood by the things which are made ...
+but they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was
+darkened.'[23] In fact, mythology submerged religion. St. Paul's theory of
+the origin of religion is not that of an 'innate idea,' nor of a direct
+revelation. People, he says, reached the belief in a God from the Argument
+for Design. Science conceives herself to have annihilated teleological
+ideas. But they are among the probable origins of religion, and would lead
+to the belief in a Creator, whom the Greenlander thought beneficent, and
+after whom he yearned. This is a very different initial step in religious
+development, if initial it was, from the feeding of a corpse, or a ghost.
+
+From all this evidence it does not appear how non-polytheistic,
+non-monarchical, non-Manes-worshipping savages evolved the idea of a
+relatively supreme, moral, and benevolent Creator, unborn, undying,
+watching men's lives. 'He can go everywhere, and do everything.'[24]
+
+[Footnote 1: Fitzroy, ii. 180. Darwin. _Descent of Man_, p. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Ibid. We seem to have little information about Fuegian
+religion either before or after the cruise of the _Beagle_.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Principles of Sociology_, i. 422.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Fitzroy, ii. 190, 191]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Travels in West Africa_, p. 442.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Early Voyages to Australia_, 102-111 (Hakluyt Society).]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 846.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Journal of the Anthrop. Institute_, 1884. See, for less
+dignified accounts, op. cit. xxiv. xxv.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Journal_, xiii. 193.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Journal_, xiii. 296.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Op. cit. p. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 12: P. 453.]
+
+[Footnote 13: P. 457.]
+
+[Footnote 14: See Brough Smyth, _Aborigines_, i. 426; Taplin, _Native
+Races of Australia_. According to Taplin, Nurrumdere was a deified black
+fellow, who died on earth. This is not the case of Baiame, but is said,
+rather vaguely, to be true of Daramulun. _J.A.I._, xiii. 194, xxv. 297.]
+
+[Footnote 15: From a brief account of the Fire Ceremony, or _Engwurra_ of
+certain tribes in Central Australia, it seems that religious ceremonies
+connected with Totems are the most notable performances. Also 'certain
+mythical ancestors,' of the '_alcheringa_, or dream-times,' were
+celebrated; these real or ideal human beings appear to 'sink their
+identity in that of the object with which they are associated, and from
+which they are supposed to have originated.' There appear also to be
+places haunted by 'spirit individuals,' in some way mixed up with Totems,
+but nothing is said of sacrifice to these Manes. The brief account is by
+Professor Baldwin Spencer and Mr. F.J. Gillen, _Proc. Royal Soc.
+Victoria_, July 1897. This Fire Ceremony is not for lads--not a kind of
+confirmation in the savage church--but is intended for adults.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _J. Anthrop. Inst_. 1886, p. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _J. Anthrop. Inst_. 1885, p. 313.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _J. Anthrop. Inst_. xiii. p. 459.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, p. 674.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Cranz, pp. 198, 199.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Journal Anthrop. Inst_. xiii. 348-356.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Rom. i. 19. Cranz, i. 199.]
+
+[Footnote 24: In Mr. Carr's work, _The Australian Race_, reports of
+'godless' natives are given, for instance, in the Mary River country and
+in Gippsland. These reports are usually the result of the ignorance or
+contempt of white observers, cf. Tylor, i. 419. The reader is referred to
+the Introduction for additional information about Australian beliefs, and
+for replies to objections.]
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+SUPREME GODS NOT NECESSARILY DEVELOPED OUT OF 'SPIRITS'
+
+Before going on to examine the high gods of other low savages, I must here
+again insist on and develop the theory, not easily conceived by us, that
+the Supreme Being of savages belongs to another branch of faith than
+ghosts, or ghost-gods, or fetishes, or Totems, and need not be--probably
+is not--essentially derived from these. We must try to get rid of our
+theory that a powerful, moral, eternal Being was, from the first, _ex
+officio_, conceived as 'spirit;' and so was necessarily derived from a
+ghost.
+
+First, what was the process of development?
+
+We have examined Mr. Tylor's theory. But, to take a practical case: Here
+are the Australians, roaming in small bands, without more formal rulers
+than 'headmen' at most; not ancestor worshippers; not polytheists; with
+no departmental deities to select and aggrandise; not apt to speculate on
+the _Anima Mundi_. How, then, did they bridge the gulf between the ghost
+of a soon-forgotten fighting man, and that conception of a Father above,
+'all-seeing,' moral, which, under various names, is found all over a huge
+continent? I cannot see that this problem has been solved or frankly
+faced.
+
+The distinction between the Australian deity, at his highest power,
+unpropitiated by sacrifice, and the ordinary, waning, easily forgotten,
+cheaply propitiated ghost of a tribesman, is essential. It is not easy to
+show how, in 'the dark backward' of Australian life, the notion of
+Mungan-ngaur grew from the idea of the ghost of a warrior. But there is no
+logical necessity for the belief in the evolution of this god out
+of that ghost. These two factors in religion--ghost and god--seem to
+have perfectly different sources, and it appears extraordinary that
+anthropologists have not (as far as I am aware) observed this circumstance
+before.
+
+Mr. Spencer, indeed, speaks frequently of living human beings adored as
+gods. I do not know that these are found on the lowest levels of savagery,
+and Mr. Jevons has pointed out that, before you can hail a man as a god,
+you must have the idea of God. The murder of Captain Cook notoriously
+resulted from a scientific experiment in theology. 'If he is a god, he
+cannot be killed.' So they tried with a dagger, and found that the honest
+captain was but a mortal British mariner--no god at all. 'There are
+degrees.' Mr. Spencer's men-gods become real gods--after death.[1]
+
+Now the Supreme Being of savage faith, as a rule, never died at all. He
+belonged to a world that knew not Death.
+
+One cause of our blindness to the point appears to be this: We have from
+childhood been taught that 'God is a Spirit.' We, now, can only conceive
+of an eternal being as a 'spirit.' We know that legions of savage gods are
+now regarded as spirits. And therefore we have never remarked that there
+is no reason why we should take it for granted that the earliest deities
+of the earliest men were supposed by them to be 'spirits' at all. These
+gods might most judiciously be spoken of, not as 'spirits,' but as
+'undefined eternal beings.' To us, such a being is necessarily a spirit,
+but he was by no means necessarily so to an early thinker, who may not
+yet have reached the conception of a ghost.
+
+A ghost is said, by anthropologists, to have developed into a god. Now,
+the very idea of a ghost (apart from a wraith or fetch) implies the
+previous _death_ of his proprietor. A ghost is the phantasm of a _dead_
+man. But anthropologists continually tell us, with truth, that the idea
+of death as a universal ordinance is unknown to the savage. Diseases and
+death are things that once did not exist, and that, normally, ought not to
+occur, the savage thinks. They are, in his opinion, supernormally caused
+by magicians and spirits. Death came into the world by a blunder, an
+accident, an error in ritual, a decision of a god who was before Death
+was. Scores of myths are told everywhere on this subject.[2]
+
+The savage Supreme Being, with added power, omniscience, and morality, is
+the idealisation of the savage, as conceived of by himself, _minus_
+fleshly body (as a rule), and _minus_ Death. He is not necessarily a
+'spirit,' though that term may now be applied to him. He was not
+originally differentiated as 'spirit' or 'not spirit.' He is a Being,
+conceived of without the question of 'spirit,' or 'no spirit' being
+raised; perhaps he was originally conceived of before that question could
+be raised by men. When we call the Supreme Being of savages a 'spirit' we
+introduce our own animistic ideas into a conception where it may not have
+originally existed. If the God is 'the savage himself raised to the n^th
+power' so much the less of a spirit is he. Mr. Matthew Arnold might as
+well have said: 'The British Philistine has no knowledge of God. He
+believes that the Creator is a magnified non-natural man, living in the
+sky.' The Gippsland or Fuegian or Blackfoot Supreme Being is just a
+_Being_, anthropomorphic, not a _mrart_, or 'spirit.' The Supreme Being is
+a _wesen_, Being, _Vui_; we have hardly a term for an immortal existence
+so undefined. If the being is an idealised first ancestor (as among the
+Kurnai), he is not, on that account, either man or ghost of man. In the
+original conception he is a powerful intelligence who was from the first:
+who was already active long before, by a breach of his laws, an error in
+the delivery of a message, a breach of ritual, or what not, death entered
+the world. He was not affected by the entry of death, he still exists.
+
+Modern minds need to become familiar with this indeterminate idea of the
+savage Supreme Being, which, logically, may be prior to the evolution of
+the notion of ghost or spirit.
+
+But how does it apply when, as by the Kurnai, the Supreme Being is
+reckoned an ancestor?
+
+It can very readily be shown that, when the Supreme Being of a savage
+people is thus the idealised First Ancestor, he can never have been
+envisaged by his worshippers as at any time a _ghost_; or, at least,
+cannot logically have been so envisaged where the nearly universal
+belief occurs that death came into the world by accident, or needlessly.
+
+Adam is the mythical first ancestor of the Hebrews, but he died, [Greek:
+uper moron], and was not worshipped. Yama, the first of Aryan men who
+died, was worshipped by Vedic Aryans, but _confessedly_ as a ghost-god.
+Mr. Tylor gives a list of first ancestors deified. The Ancestor of the
+Maudans did not die, consequently is no ghost; _emigravit_, he 'moved
+west.' Where the First Ancestor is also the Creator (Dog-rib Indians), he
+can hardly be, and is not, regarded as a mortal. Tamoi, of the Guaranis,
+was 'the ancient of heaven,' clearly no mortal man. The Maori Maui was the
+first who died, but he is not one of the original Maori gods. Haetsh,
+among the Kamchadals, precisely answers to Yama. Unkulunkulu will be
+described later.[3]
+
+This is the list: Where the First Ancestor is equivalent to the Creator,
+and is supreme, he is--from the first--deathless and immortal. When he
+dies he is a confessed ghost-god.
+
+Now, ghost-worship and dead ancestor-worship are impossible before the
+ancestor is dead and is a ghost. But the essential idea of Mungan-ngaur,
+and Baiame, and most of the high gods of Australia, and of other low
+races, is that _they never died at all_. They belong to the period before
+death came into the world, like Qat among the Melanesians. They arise in
+an age that knew not death, and had not reflected on phantasms nor evolved
+ghosts. They could have been conceived of, in the nature of the case, by a
+race of immortals who never dreamed of such a thing as a ghost. For these
+gods, the ghost-theory is not required, and is superfluous, even
+contradictory. The early thinkers who developed these beings did not need
+to know that men die (though, of course, they did know it in practice),
+still less did they need to have conceived by abstract speculation the
+hypothesis of ghosts. Baiame, Cagn, Bunjil, in their adorers' belief, were
+_there_; death later intruded among men, but did not affect these divine
+beings in any way.
+
+The ghost-theory, therefore, by the evidence of anthropology itself, is
+not needed for the evolution of the high gods of savages. It is only
+needed for the evolution of ghost-propitiation and genuine dead-ancestor
+worship. Therefore, the high gods described were not necessarily once
+ghosts--were not idealised _mortal_ ancestors. They were, naturally, from
+the beginning, from before the coming in of death, immortal Fathers, now
+dwelling on high. Between them and apotheosised mortal ancestors there is
+a great gulf fixed--the river of death.
+
+The explicitly stated distinction that the high creative gods never were
+mortal men, while other gods are spirits of mortal men, is made in every
+quarter. 'Ancestors _known_ to be human were _not_ worshipped as
+[original] gods, and ancestors worshipped as [original] gods were not
+believed to have been human.'[4]
+
+Both kinds may have a generic name, such as _kalou_, or _wakan_, but the
+specific distinction is universally made by low savages. On one hand,
+original gods; on the other, non-original gods that were once ghosts. Now,
+this distinction is often calmly ignored; whereas, when any race has
+developed (like late Scandinavians) the Euhemeristic hypothesis ('all gods
+were once men'), that hypothesis is accepted as an historical statement of
+fact by some writers.
+
+It is part of my theory that the more popular ghost-worship of souls of
+people whom men have loved, invaded the possibly older religion of the
+Supreme Father. Mighty beings, whether originally conceived of as
+'spirits' or not, came, later, under the Animistic theory, to be reckoned
+as spirits. They even (but not among the lowest savages) came to be
+propitiated by food and sacrifice. The alternative, for a Supreme Being,
+when once Animism prevailed, was sacrifice (as to more popular ghost
+deities) or neglect. We shall find examples of both alternatives. But
+sacrifice does not prove that a God was, in original conception, a ghost,
+or even a spirit. 'The common doctrine of the Old Testament is not that
+God is spirit, but that the spirit [_rúah_ = 'wind,' 'living breath'] of
+Jehovah, going forth from him, works in the world and among men.'[5]
+
+To resume. The high Gods of savagery--moral, all-seeing directors of
+things and of men--are not explicitly envisaged as spirits at all by their
+adorers. The notion of soul or spirit is here out of place. We can best
+describe Pirnmeheal, and Nápi and Baiame as 'magnified non-natural men,'
+or undefined beings who were from the beginning and are undying. They are,
+like the easy Epicurean Gods, _nihil indiga nostri_. Not being ghosts,
+they crave no food from men, and receive no sacrifice, as do ghosts, or
+gods developed out of ghosts, or gods to whom the ghost-ritual has been
+transferred. For this very reason, apparently, they seem to be spoken of
+by Mr. Grant Allen as 'gods to talk about, not gods to adore; mythological
+conceptions rather than religious beings.'[6] All this is rather hard on
+the lowest savages. If they sacrifice to a god, then the god is a hungry
+ghost; if they don't, then the god is 'a god to talk about, not to adore,'
+Luckily, the facts of the Bora ritual and the instruction given there
+prove that Mungan-nganr and other names _are_ gods to adore, by ethical
+conformity to their will and by solemn ceremony, not merely gods to talk
+about.
+
+Thus, the highest element in the religion of the lowest savages does not
+appear to be derived from their theory of ghosts. As far as we can say, in
+the inevitable absence of historical evidence, the highest gods of savages
+may have been believed in, as Makers and Fathers and Lords of an
+indeterminate nature, before the savage had developed the idea of souls
+out of dreams and phantasms. It is logically conceivable that savages may
+have worshipped deities like Baiame and Darumulun before they had evolved
+the notion that Tom, Dick, or Harry has a separable soul, capable of
+surviving his bodily decease. Deities of the higher sort, by the very
+nature of savage reflections on death and on its non-original casual
+character, are prior, or may be prior, or cannot be shown not to be prior,
+to the ghost theory--the alleged origin of religion. For their evolution
+the ghost theory is not logically demanded; they can do without it. Yet
+_they_, and not the spirits, bogles, Mrarts, _Brewin_, and so forth, are
+the high gods, the gods who have most analogy--as makers, moral guides,
+rewarders, and punishers of conduct (though that duty is also occasionally
+assumed by ancestral spirits)--with our civilised conception of the
+divine. Our conception of God descends not from ghosts, but from the
+Supreme Beings of non-ancestor-worshipping peoples.
+
+As it seems impossible to point out any method by which low, chiefless,
+non-polytheistic, non-metaphysical savages (if any such there be) evolved
+out of ghosts the eternal beings who made the world, and watch over
+morality: as the people themselves unanimously distinguish such beings
+from ghost-gods, I take it that such beings never were ghosts. In this
+case the Animistic theory seems to me to break down completely. Yet these
+high gods of low savages preserve from dimmest ages of the meanest culture
+the sketch of a God which our highest religious thought can but fill up to
+its ideal. Come from what germ he may, Jehovah or Allah does not come from
+a ghost.
+
+It may be retorted that this makes no real difference. If savages did not
+invent gods in consequence of a fallacious belief in spirit and soul,
+still, in some other equally illogical way they came to indulge the
+hypothesis that they had a Judge and Father in heaven. But, if the ghost
+theory of the high Gods is wrong, as it is conspicuously superfluous, that
+_does_ make some difference. It proves that a widely preached scientific
+conclusion may be as spectral as Bathybius. On other more important
+points, therefore, we may differ from the newest scientific opinion
+without too much diffident apprehensiveness.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Principles of Sociology_, i. 417, 421. 'The medicine men
+are treated as gods.... The medicine man becomes a god after death.']
+
+[Footnote 2: I have published a chapter on Myths on the Origin of Death in
+_Modern Mythology_.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 311-316.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Jevons, _Introduction_, p. 197.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Robertson Smith. _The Prophets of Israel_, p. 61.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Evolution of the Idea of God_, p. 170.]
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+
+It is among 'the lowest savages' that the Supreme Beings are most regarded
+as eternal, moral (as the morality of the tribe goes, or above its
+habitual practice), and _powerful_. I have elsewhere described the Bushman
+god Cagn, as he was portrayed to Mr. Orpen by Qing, who 'had never
+before seen a white man except fighting.' Mr. Orpen got the facts from
+Qing by inducing him to explain the natives' pictures on the walls of
+caves. 'Cagn made all things, and we pray to him,' thus: 'O Cagn, O Cagn,
+are we not thy children? Do you not see us hunger? Give us food.' As to
+ethics, 'At first Cagn was very good, but he got spoilt through fighting
+so many things.' 'How came he into the world?' 'Perhaps with those who
+brought the Sun: only the initiated know these things.' It appears that
+Qing was not yet initiated in the dance (answering to a high rite of the
+Australian _Bora_) in which the most esoteric myths were unfolded.[1]
+
+In Mr. Spencer's 'Descriptive Sociology' the religion of the Bushmen is
+thus disposed of. 'Pray to an insect of the caterpillar kind for success
+in the chase.' That is rather meagre. They make arrow-poison out of
+caterpillars,[2] though Dr. Bleek, perhaps correctly, identifies Cagn
+with i-kaggen, the insect.
+
+The case of the Andaman Islanders may be especially recommended to
+believers in the anthropological science of religion. For long these
+natives were the joy of emancipated inquirers as the 'godless Andamanese.'
+They only supply Mr. Spencer's 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' with
+a few instances of the ghost-belief.[3] Yet when the Andamanese are
+scientifically studied _in situ_ by an educated Englishman, Mr. Man, who
+knows their language, has lived with them for eleven years, and presided
+over our benevolent efforts 'to reclaim them from their savage state,'
+the Andamanese turn out to be quite embarrassingly rich in the higher
+elements of faith. They have not only a profoundly philosophical
+_religion_, but an excessively absurd _mythology_, like the Australian
+blacks, the Greeks, and other peoples. If, on the whole, the student of
+the Andamanese despairs of the possibility of an ethnological theory of
+religion, he is hardly to be blamed.
+
+The people are probably Negritos, and probably 'the original inhabitants,
+whose occupation dates from prehistoric times.'[4] They use the bow, they
+make pots, and are considerably above the Australian level. They have
+second-sighted men, who obtain status 'by relating an extraordinary dream,
+the details of which are declared to have been borne out subsequently by
+some unforeseen event, as, for instance, a sudden death or accident.' They
+have to produce fresh evidential dreams from time to time. They see
+phantasms of the dead, and coincidental hallucinations.[5] All this is as
+we should expect it to be.
+
+Their religion is probably not due to missionaries, as they always shot
+all foreigners, and have no traditions of the presence of aliens on the
+islands before our recent arrival.[6] Their God, Puluga, is 'like fire,'
+but invisible. He was never born, and is immortal. By him were all things
+created, except the powers of evil. He knows even the thoughts of the
+heart. He is angered by _yubda_ = sin, or wrong-doing, that is falsehood,
+theft, grave assault, murder, adultery, bad carving of meat, and (as a
+crime of witchcraft) by burning wax.[7] 'To those in pain or distress he
+is pitiful, and sometimes deigns to afford relief.' He is Judge of Souls,
+and the dread of future punishment 'to _some_ extent is said to affect
+their course of action in the present life.'[8]
+
+This Being could not be evolved out of the ordinary ghost of a
+second-sighted man, for I do not find that ancestral ghosts are
+worshipped, nor is there a trace of early missionary influence, while
+Mr. Man consulted elderly and, in native religion, well-instructed
+Andamanese for his facts.
+
+Yet Puluga lives in a large stone house (clearly derived from ours at Port
+Blair), eats and drinks, foraging for himself, and is married to a green
+shrimp.[9] There is the usual story of a Deluge caused by the moral wrath
+of Puluga. The whole theology was scrupulously collected from natives
+unacquainted with other races.
+
+The account of Andamanese religion does not tally with the anthropological
+hypothesis. Foreign influence seems to be more than usually excluded by
+insular conditions and the jealousy of the 'original inhabitants.' The
+evidence ought to make us reflect on the extreme obscurity of the whole
+problem.
+
+Anthropological study of religion has hitherto almost entirely overlooked
+the mysteries of various races, except in so far as they confirm the entry
+of the young people into the ranks of the adult. Their esoteric moral and
+religious teaching is nearly unknown to us, save in a few instances. It is
+certain that the mysteries of Greece were survivals of savage ceremonies,
+because we know that they included specific savage rites, such as the use
+of the _rhombos_ to make a whirring noise, and the custom of ritual
+daubing with dirt; and the sacred _ballets d'action_, in which, as Lucian
+and Qing say, mystic facts are 'danced out.'[10] But, while Greece
+retained these relics of savagery, there was something taught at Eleusis
+which filled minds like Plato's and Pindar's with a happy religious awe.
+Now, similar 'softening of the heart' was the result of the teaching in
+the Australian _Bora_: the Yao mysteries inculcate the victory over self;
+and, till we are admitted to the secrets of all other savage mysteries
+throughout the world, we cannot tell whether, among mummeries,
+frivolities, and even license, high ethical doctrines are not presented
+under the sanction of religion. The New Life, and perhaps the future life,
+are undeniably indicated in the Australian mysteries by the simulated
+Resurrection.
+
+I would therefore no longer say, as in 1887, that the Hellenic genius must
+have added to 'an old medicine dance' all that the Eleusinian mysteries
+possessed of beauty, counsel, and consolation[11]. These elements, as well
+as the barbaric factors in the rites, may have been developed out of such
+savage doctrine as softens the hearts of Australians and Yaos. That this
+kind of doctrine receives religious sanction is certain, where we know the
+secret of savage mysteries. It is therefore quite incorrect, and strangely
+presumptuous, to deny, with almost all anthropologists, the alliance of
+ethics with religion among the most backward races. We must always
+remember their secrecy about their inner religion, their frankness about
+their mythological tales. These we know: the inner religion we ought to
+begin to recognise that we do not know.
+
+The case of the Andamanese has taught us how vague, even now, is our
+knowledge, and how obscure is our problem. The example of the Melanesians
+enforces these lessons. It is hard to bring the Melanesians within any
+theory. Dr. Codrington has made them the subject of a careful study, and
+reports that while the European inquirer can communicate pretty freely on
+common subjects 'the vocabulary of ordinary life in almost useless when
+the region of mysteries and superstitions is approached.'[12] The Banks
+Islanders are most free from an Asiatic element of population on one side,
+and a Polynesian element on the other.
+
+The Banks Islanders 'believe in two orders of intelligent beings different
+from living men.' (1) Ghosts of the dead, (2) 'Beings who were not, and
+never had been, human.' This, as we have shown, and will continue to show,
+is the usual savage doctrine. On the one hand are separable souls of men,
+surviving the death of the body. On the other are beings, creators,
+who were before men were, and before death entered the world. It is
+impossible, logically, to argue that these beings are only ghosts of real
+remote ancestors, or of ideal ancestors. These higher beings are not
+safely to be defined as 'spirits,' their essence is vague, and, we repeat,
+the idea of their existence might have been evolved _before the ghost
+theory was attained by men_. Dr. Codrington says, 'the conception can
+hardly be that of a purely spiritual being, yet, by whatever name the
+natives call them, they are such as in English must be called spirits.'
+
+That is our point. 'God is a spirit,' these beings are Gods, therefore
+'these are spirits.' But to their initial conception our idea of 'spirit'
+is lacking. They are beings who existed before death, and still exist.
+
+The beings which never were human, never died, are _Vui_, the ghosts are
+_Tamate_. Dr. Codrington uses 'ghosts' for _Tamate_, 'spirits' for _Vui_.
+But as to render _Vui_ 'spirits' is to yield the essential point, we shall
+call _Vui_ 'beings,' or, simply, _Vui_. A Vui is not a spirit that has
+been a ghost; the story may represent him as if a man, 'but the native
+will always maintain that he was something different, and deny to him the
+fleshly body of a man.'[13]
+
+This distinction, ghost on one side--original being, not a man, not a
+ghost of a man, on the other--is radical and nearly universal in savage
+religion. Anthropology, neglecting the essential distinction insisted on,
+in this case, by Dr. Codrington, confuses both kinds under the style of
+'spirits,' and derives both from ghosts of the dead. Dr. Codrington, it
+should be said, does not generalise, but confines himself to the savages
+of whom he has made a special study. But, from the other examples of the
+same distinction which we have offered, and the rest which we shall offer,
+we think ourselves justified in regarding the distinction between a
+primeval, eternal, being or beings, on one hand, and ghosts or spirits
+exalted from ghost's estate, on the other, as common, if not universal.
+
+There are corporeal and incorporeal Vuis, but the body of the corporeal
+Vui is '_not_ a human body.'[14] The chief is Qat, 'still at hand to help
+and invoked in prayers.' 'Qat, Marawa, look down upon me, smooth the sea
+for us two, that I may go safely over the sea!' Qat 'created men and
+animals,' though, in a certain district, he is claimed as an _ancestor_
+(p. 268). Two strata of belief have here been confused.
+
+The myth of Qat is a jungle of facetiae and frolic, with one or two
+serious incidents, such as the beginning of Death and the coming of Night.
+His mother was, or became, a stone; stones playing a considerable part in
+the superstitions.
+
+The incorporeal Vuis, 'with nothing like a human life, have a much higher
+place than Qat and his brothers in the religious system.' They have
+neither names, nor shapes, nor legends, they receive sacrifice, and are in
+some uncertain way connected with stones; these stones usually bear a
+fanciful resemblance to fruits or animals (p. 275). The only sacrifice, in
+Banks Islands, is that of shell-money. The mischievous spirits are Tamate,
+ghosts of men. There is a belief in _mana_ (magical _rapport_). Dr.
+Codrington cannot determine the connection of this belief with that in
+spirits. Mana is the uncanny, is X, the unknown. A revived impression of
+sense is _nunuai_, as when a tired fisher, half asleep at night, feels the
+'draw' of a salmon, and automatically strikes.[15] The common ghost is a
+bag of _nunuai_, as living man, in the opinion of some philosophers, is a
+bag of 'sensations.' Ghosts are only seen as spiritual lights, which so
+commonly attend hallucinations among the civilised. Except in the prayers
+to Qat and Marawa, prayer only invokes the dead (p. 285). 'In the western
+islands the offerings are made to ghosts, and consumed by fire; in the
+eastern (Banks) isles they are made to spirits (beings, _Vui_), and
+there is no sacrificial fire.' Now, the worship of ghosts goes, in these
+isles, with the higher culture, 'a more considerable advance in the arts
+of life;' the worship of non-ghosts, _Vui_, goes with the lower material
+culture.[16] This is rather the reverse of what we should expect, in
+accordance with the anthropological theory. According, however, to our
+theory, Animism and ghost-worship may be of later development, and belong
+to a higher level of culture, than worship of a being, or beings, that
+never were ghosts. In Leper's Isle, 'ghosts do not appear to have prayers
+or sacrifices offered to them,' but cause disease, and work magic.[17]
+
+The belief in the soul, in Melanesia, does _not_ appear to proceed 'from
+their dreams or visions in which deceased or absent persons are presented
+to them, for they do not appear to believe that the soul goes out from the
+dreamer, or presents itself as an object in his dreams,' nor does belief
+in other spirits seem to be founded on 'the appearance of life or motion
+in inanimate things.'[18]
+
+To myself it rather looks as if all impressions had their _nunuai_, real,
+bodiless, persistent, after-images; that the soul is the complex of all of
+these _nunuai_; that there is in the universe a kind of magical other,
+called _mana_, possessed, in different proportions, by different men,
+_Vui_, _tamate_, and material objects, and that the _atai_ or _ataro_ of a
+man dead, his ghost, retains its old, and acquires new _mana_.[19] It is an
+odd kind of metaphysic to find among very backward and isolated savages.
+But the lesson of Melanesia teaches us how very little we really know of
+the religion of low races, how complex it is, how hardly it can be forced
+into our theories, if we take it as given in our knowledge, allow for our
+ignorance, and are not content to select facts which suit our hypothesis,
+while ignoring the rest. On a higher level of material culture than the
+Melanesians are the Fijians.
+
+Fijian religion, as far as we understand, resembles the others in drawing
+an impassable line between ghosts and eternal gods. The word _Kalou_ is
+applied to all supernal beings, and mystic or magical things alike. It
+seems to answer to _mana_ in New Zealand and Melanesia, to _wakan_ in
+North America, and to _fée_ in old French, as when Perrault says, about
+Bluebeard's key, 'now the key was _fée_.' All Gods are _Kalou_, but all
+things that are _Kalou_ are not Gods. Gods are _Kalou vu_; deified ghosts
+are _Kalou yalo_. The former are eternal, without beginning of days or end
+of years; the latter are subject to infirmity and even to death.[20]
+
+The Supreme Being, if we can apply the term to him, is Ndengei, or Degei,
+'who seems to be an impersonation of the abstract idea of eternal
+existence.' This idea is not easily developed out of the conception of a
+human soul which has died into a ghost and may die again. His myth
+represents him as a serpent, emblem of eternity, or a body of stone with a
+serpent's head. His one manifestation is given by eating. So neglected is
+he that a song exists about his lack of worshippers and gifts. 'We made
+men,' says Ndengei, 'placed them on earth, and yet they share to us only
+the under shell.'[21] Here is an extreme case of the self-existent
+creative Eternal, mythically lodged in a serpent's body, and reduced to a
+jest.
+
+It is not easy to see any explanation, if we reject the hypothesis that
+this is an old, fallen form of faith, 'with scarcely a temple.' The other
+unborn immortals are mythical warriors and adulterers, like the popular
+deities of Greece. Yet Ndengei receives prayers through two sons of his,
+mediating deities. The priests are possessed, or inspired, by spirits and
+gods. One is not quite clear as to whether Ndengei is an inspiring god or
+not; but that prayers are made to him is inconsistent with the belief in
+his eternal inaction. A priest is represented as speaking for Ndengei,
+probably by inspiration. 'My own mind departs from me, and then, when it
+is truly gone, my god speaks by me,' is the account of this 'alternating
+personality' given by a priest.[22]
+
+After informing us that Ndengei is starved, Mr. Williams next tells about
+offerings to him, in earlier days, of hundreds of hogs.[23] He sends rain
+on earth. Animals, men, stones, may all be _Kalou_. There is a Hades as
+fantastic as that in the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead,' and second sight
+flourishes.
+
+The mysteries include the sham raising of the dead, and appear to be
+directed at propitiatory ghosts rather than at Ndengei. There are scenes
+of license; 'particulars of almost incredible indecency have been
+privately forwarded to Dr. Tylor.'[24]
+
+Suppose a religious reformer were to arise in one of the many savage
+tribes who, as we shall show, possess, but neglect, an Eternal Creator.
+He would do what, in the secular sphere, was done by the Mikado of Japan.
+The Mikado was a political Dendid or Ndengei--an awful, withdrawn,
+impotent potentate. Power was wielded by the Tycoon. A Mikado of genius
+asserted himself; hence arose modern Japan. In the same way, a religious
+reformer like Khuen Ahten in Egypt would preach down minor gods, ghosts
+and sacred beasts, and proclaim the primal Maker, Ndengei, Dendid, Mtanga.
+'The king shall hae his ain again.' Had it not been for the Prophets,
+Israel, by the time that Greece and Rome knew Israel, would have been
+worshipping a horde of little gods, and even beasts and ghosts, while the
+Eternal would have become a mere name--perhaps, like Ndengei and Atahocan
+and Unkulunkulu, a jest. The Old Testament is the story of the prolonged
+effort to keep Jehovah in His supreme place. To make and to succeed in
+that effort was the _differentia_, of Israel. Other peoples, even the
+lowest, had, as we prove, the germinal conception of a God--assuredly not
+demonstrated to be derived from the ghost theory, logically in no need of
+the ghost theory, everywhere explicitly contrasted with the ghost theory.
+'But their foolish heart was darkened.'
+
+It is impossible to prove, historically, which of the two main elements in
+belief--the idea of an Eternal Being or Beings, or the idea of surviving
+ghosts--came first into the minds of men. The idea of primeval Eternal
+Beings, as understood by savages, does not depend on, or require, the
+ghost theory. But, as we almost always find ghosts and a Supreme Being
+together, where we find either, among the lowest savages, we have no
+historical ground for asserting that either is prior to the other. Where
+we have no evidence to the belief in the Maker, we must not conclude that
+no such belief exists. Our knowledge is confused and scanty; often it is
+derived from men who do not know the native language, or the native sacred
+language, or have not been trusted with what the savage treasures as his
+secret. Moreover, if anywhere ghosts are found without gods, it is an
+inference from the argument that an idea familiar to very low savage
+tribes, like the Australians, and falling more and more into the
+background elsewhere, though still extant and traceable, might, in certain
+cases, be lost and forgotten altogether.
+
+To take an example of half-forgotten deity. Mr. Im Thurn, a good observer,
+has written on 'The Animism of the Indians of British Guiana.' Mr. Im
+Thurn justly says: 'The man who above all others has made this study
+possible is Mr. Tylor.' But it is not unfair to remark that Mr. Im Thurn
+naturally sees most distinctly that which Mr. Tylor has taught him to
+see--namely, Animism. He has also been persuaded, by Mr. Dorman, that the
+Great Spirit of North American tribes is 'almost certainly nothing more
+than a figure of European origin, reflected and transmitted almost beyond
+recognition on the mirror of the Indian mind,' That is not my opinion: I
+conceive that the Red Indians had their native Eternal, like the
+Australians, Fijians, Andamanese, Dinkas, Yao, and so forth, as will be
+shown later.
+
+Mr. Im Thurn, however, dilates on the dream origin of the ghost theory,
+giving examples from his own knowledge of the difficulty with which Guiana
+Indians discern the hallucinations of dreams from the facts of waking
+life. Their waking hallucinations are also so vivid as to be taken for
+realities.[25] Mr. Im Thurn adopts the hypothesis that, from ghosts, 'a
+belief has arisen, but very gradually, in higher spirits, and, eventually,
+in a Highest Spirit; and, keeping pace with the growth of these beliefs,
+a habit of reverence for and worship of spirits.' On this hypothesis,
+the spirit latest evolved, and most worshipful, ought, of course, to be
+the 'Highest Spirit.' But the reverse, as usual, is the case. The Guiana
+Indians believe in the continued, but not in the everlasting, existence of
+a man's ghost.[26] They believe in no spirits which were not once tenants
+of material bodies.[27]
+
+The belief in a Supreme Spirit is only attained 'in the highest form of
+religion'--Andamanese, for instance--as Mr. Im Thurn uses 'spirit' where
+we should say 'being.' 'The Indians of Guiana know no god.'[28]
+
+'But it is true that various words have been found in all, or nearly all,
+the languages of Guiana which have been supposed to be names of a Supreme
+Being, God, a Great Spirit, in the sense which those phrases bear in the
+language of the higher religions.'
+
+Being interpreted, these Guiana names mean--
+
+  _The Ancient One,
+  The Ancient One in Sky-land,
+  Our Maker,
+  Our Father,
+  Our Great Father._
+
+'None of those in any way involves the attributes of a god.'
+
+The Ancient of Days, Our Father in Sky-land, Our Maker, do rather convoy
+the sense of God to a European mind. Mr. Im Thurn, however, decides that
+the beings thus designated were supposed ancestors who came into Guiana
+from some other country, 'sometimes said to have been that entirely
+natural country (?) which is separated from Guiana by the ocean of the
+air.'[29]
+
+Mr. Im Thurn casually observed (having said nothing about morals in
+alliance with Animism):
+
+'The fear of unwittingly offending the countless visible and invisible
+beings ... kept the Indians very strictly within their own rights and from
+offending against the rights of others.'
+
+This remark dropped out at a discussion of Mr. Im Thurn's paper, and
+clearly demonstrated that even a very low creed 'makes for
+righteousness.'[30]
+
+Probably few who have followed the facts given here will agree with Mr. Im
+Thurn's theory that 'Our Maker,' 'Our Father,' 'The Ancient One of the
+Heaven,' is merely an idealised human ancestor. He falls naturally into
+his place with the other high gods of low savages. But we need much more
+information on the subject than Mr. Im Thurn was able to give.
+
+His evidence is all the better, because he is a loyal follower of Mr.
+Tylor. And Mr. Tylor says: 'Savage Animism is almost devoid of that
+ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring
+of practical religion.'[31] 'Yet it keeps the Indians very strictly
+within their own rights and from offending the rights of others.' Our own
+religion is rarely so successful.[32]
+
+In the Indians of Guiana we have an alleged case of a people still deep in
+the animistic or ghost-worshipping case, who, by the hypothesis, have not
+yet evolved the idea of a god at all.
+
+When the familiar names for God, such as Maker, Father, Ancient of Days,
+occur in the Indian language, Mr. Im Thurn explains the neglected Being
+who bears these titles as a remote deified ancestor. Of course, when a
+Being with similar titles occurs where ancestors are not worshipped, as in
+Australia and the Andaman Islands, the explanation suggested by Mr. Im
+Thurn for the problem of religion in Guiana, will not fit the facts.
+
+It is plain that, _a priori_, another explanation is conceivable. If a
+people like the Andamanese, or the Australian tribes whom we have studied,
+had such a conception as that of Puluga, or Baiame, or Mungan-ngaur and
+then, _later_, developed ancestor-worship with its propitiatory sacrifices
+and ceremonies, ancestor-worship, as the newest evolved and infinitely the
+most practical form of cult, would gradually thrust the belief in a
+Puluga, or Mungan-ngaur, or Cagn into the shade. The ancestral spirit, to
+speak quite plainly, can be 'squared' by the people in whom he takes a
+special interest for family reasons. The equal Father of all men cannot
+be 'squared,' and declines (till corrupted by the bad example of ancestral
+ghosts) to make himself useful to one man rather than to another. For
+these very intelligible, simple, and practical reasons, if the belief in
+a Mungan-ngaur came first in evolution, and the belief in a practicable
+bribable family ghost came second, the ghost-cult would inevitably crowd
+out the God-cult.[33] The name of the Father and Maker would become a
+mere survival, _nominis umbra_, worship and sacrifice going to the
+ancestral ghost. That explanation would fit the state of religion which
+Mr. Im Thurn has found, rightly or wrongly, in British Guiana.
+
+But, if the idea of a universal Father and Maker came last in evolution,
+as a refinement, then, of course, it ought to be the newest, and therefore
+the most fashionable and potent of Guianese cults. Precisely the reverse
+is said to be the case. Nor can the belief indicated in such names
+as Father and Maker be satisfactorily explained as a refinement of
+ancestor-worship, because, we repeat, it occurs where ancestors are not
+worshipped.
+
+These considerations, however unpleasant to the devotees of Animism, or
+the ghost theory, are not, in themselves, illogical, nor contradictory of
+the theory of evolution, which, on the other hand, fits them perfectly
+well. That god thrives best who is most suited to his environment. Whether
+an easy-going, hungry ghost-god with a liking for his family, or a moral
+Creator not to be bribed, is better suited to an environment of not
+especially scrupulous savages, any man can decide. Whether a set of not
+particularly scrupulous savages will readily evolve a moral unbribable
+Creator, when they have a serviceable family ghost-god eager to oblige, is
+a question as easily resolved.
+
+Beyond all doubt, savages who find themselves under the watchful eye of a
+moral deity whom they cannot 'square' will desert him as soon as they have
+evolved a practicable ghost-god, useful for family purposes, whom they
+_can_ square. No less manifestly, savages, who already possess a throng of
+serviceable ghost-gods, will not enthusiastically evolve a moral Being who
+despises gifts, and only cares for obedience. 'There is a great deal of
+human nature in man,' and, if Mr. Im Thurn's description of the Guianese
+be correct, everything we know of human nature, and of evolution, assures
+us that the Father, or Maker, or Ancient of Days came first; the
+ghost-gods, last. What has here been said about the Indians of Guiana
+(namely, that they are now more ghost and spirit worshippers, with only a
+name surviving to attest a knowledge of a Father and Maker in Heaven)
+applies equally well to the Zulus. The Zulus are the great standing type
+of an animistic or ghost-worshipping race without a God. But, had they a
+God (on the Australian pattern) whom they have forgotten, or have they not
+yet evolved a God out of Animism?
+
+The evidence, collected by Dr. Callaway, is honest, but confused. One
+native, among others, put forward the very theory here proposed by us as
+an alternative to that of Mr. Im Thurn. 'Unkulunkulu' (the idealised but
+despised First Ancestor) 'was not worshipped [by men]. For it is not
+worship when people see things, as rain, or food, or corn, and say,
+"Yes, these things were made by Unkulunkulu.... Afterwards they [men]
+had power to change those things, that they might become the Amatongos"
+[might belong to the ancestral spirits]. _They took them away from
+Unkulunkulu_.'[34]
+
+Animism supplanted Theism. Nothing could be more explicit. But, though we
+have found an authentic Zulu text to suit our provisional theory, the most
+eminent philosophical example must not reduce us into supposing that this
+text settles the question. Dr. Callaway collected great masses of Zulu
+answers to his inquiries, and it is plain that a respondent, like the
+native theologian whom we have cited, may have adapted his reply to what
+he had learned of Christian doctrine. Having now the Christian notion of a
+Divine Creator, and knowing, too, that the unworshipped Unkulunkulu is
+said to have 'made things,' while only ancestral spirits, are worshipped,
+the native may have inferred that worship (by Christians given to the
+Creator) was at some time transferred by the Zulus from Unkulunkulu to the
+Amatongo. The truth is that both the anthropological theory (spirits
+first, Gods last), and our theory (Supreme Being first, spirits next) can
+find warrant in Dr. Callaway's valuable collections. For that reason, the
+problem must be solved after a survey of the whole field of savage and
+barbaric religion; it cannot be settled by the ambiguous case of the
+Zulus alone.
+
+Unkulunkulu is represented as 'the First Man, who broke off in the
+beginning.' 'They are ancestor-worshippers,' says Dr. Callaway, 'and
+believe that their first ancestor, the First Man, was the Creator.'[35]
+But they may, like many other peoples, have had a different original
+tradition, and have altered it, just because they are now such fervent
+ancestor-worshippers. Unkulunkulu was prior to Death, which came among men
+in the usual mythical way.[36] Whether Unkulunkulu still exists, is
+rather a moot question: Dr. Callaway thinks that he does not.[37] If not,
+he is an exception to the rule in Australia, Andaman, among the Bushmen,
+the Fuegians, and savages in general, who are less advanced in culture
+than the Zulus. The idea, then, of a Maker of things who has ceased to
+exist occurs, if at all, not in a relatively primitive, but in a
+relatively late religion. On the analogy of pottery, agriculture, the use
+of iron, villages, hereditary kings, and so on, the notion of a dead Maker
+is late, not early. It occurs where men have iron, cattle, agriculture,
+kings, houses, a disciplined army, _not_ where men have none of these
+things. The Zulu godless ancestor-worship, then, by parity of reasoning,
+is, like their material culture, not an early but a late development. The
+Zulus 'hear of a King which is above'--'the heavenly King.'[38] 'We did
+not hear of him first from white men.... But he is not like Unkulunkulu,
+who, we say, made all things.'
+
+Here may be dimly descried the ideas of a God, and a subordinate demiurge.
+'The King is above, Unkulunkulu is beneath.' The King above punishes sin,
+striking the sinner by lightning. Nor do the Zulus know how they have
+sinned. 'There remained only that word about the heaven,' 'which,' says
+Dr. Callaway, 'implies that there might have been other words which are
+now lost.' There is great confusion of thought. Unkulunkulu made the
+heaven, where the unknown King reigns, a hard task for a
+First Man.[39]
+
+'In process of time we have come to worship the Amadhlozi (spirits) only,
+because we know not what to say about Unkulunkulu.'[40] 'It is on that
+account, then, that we seek out for ourselves the Amadhlozi (spirits),
+that we may not always be thinking about Unkulunkulu.'
+
+All this attests a faint lingering shadow of a belief too ethereal, too
+remote, for a practical conquering race, which prefers intelligible
+serviceable ghosts, with a special regard for their own families.
+
+Ukoto, a very old Zulu, said: 'When we were children it was said "The Lord
+is in heaven." ... They used to point to the Lord on high; we did not hear
+his name.' Unkulunkulu was understood, by this patriarch, to refer to
+immediate ancestors, whose mimes and genealogies he gave.[41] 'We heard it
+said that the Creator of the world was the Lord who is above; people used
+always, when I was growing up, to point towards heaven.'
+
+A very old woman was most reluctant to speak of Unkulunkulu; at last she
+said, 'Ah, it is he in fact who is the Creator, who is in heaven, of whom
+the ancients spoke.' Then the old woman began to babble humorously of how
+the white men made all things. Again, Unkulunkulu is said to have been
+created by Utilexo. Utilexo was invisible, Unkulunkulu was visible, and so
+got credit not really his due.[42] When the heaven is said to be the
+Chief's (the chief being a living Zulu) 'they do not believe what they
+say,' the phrase is a mere hyperbolical compliment.[43]
+
+On this examination of the evidence, it certainly seems as logical to
+conjecture that the Zulus had once such an idea of a Supreme Being as
+lower races entertain, and then nearly lost it; as to say that Zulus,
+though a monarchical race, have not yet developed a King-God out of the
+throng of spirits (Amatongo). The Zulus, the Norsemen of the South, so to
+speak, are a highly practical military race. A Deity at all abstract was
+not to their liking. Serviceable family spirits, who continually provided
+an excuse for a dinner of roast beef, were to their liking. The less
+developed races do not kill their flocks commonly for food. A sacrifice is
+needed as a pretext. To the gods of Andamanese, Bushmen, Australians, no
+sacrifice is offered. To the Supreme Being of most African peoples no
+sacrifice is offered. There is no festivity in the worship of these
+Supreme Beings, no feasting, at all events. They are not to be 'got at' by
+gifts or sacrifices. The Amatongo are to be 'got at,' are bribable, supply
+an excuse for a good dinner, and thus the practical Amatongo are honoured,
+while, in the present generation of Zulus, Unkulunkulu is a joke, and the
+Lord in Heaven is the shadow of a name. Clearly this does not point to the
+recent but to the remote development of the higher ideas, now superseded
+by spirit-worship.
+
+We shall next see how this view, the opposite of the anthropological
+theory, works when applied to other races, especially to other African
+races.
+
+[Footnote 1: When I wrote _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_ (ii. 11-13) I
+regarded Cagn as 'only a successful and idealised medicine man.' But I now
+think that I confused in my mind the religious and the mythological
+aspects of Cagn. One of unknown origin, existing before the sun, a Maker
+of all things, prayed to, but not in receipt of sacrifice, is no medicine
+man, except in his myth.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The omissions in Mr. Spencer's system may possibly be
+explained by the circumstance that, as he tells us, he collected his
+facts 'by proxy.' While we find Waitz much interested in and amazed by the
+benevolent Supreme Being of many African tribes, that personage is only
+alluded to as 'Alleged Benevolent Supreme Being' in Mr. Spencer's
+_Descriptive Sociology_, and is usually left out of sight altogether in
+his _Principles of Sociology_ and _Ecclesiastical Institutions_. Yet we
+have precisely the same kind of evidence of observers for this 'alleged'
+benevolent Supreme Being as we have for the _canaille_ of ghosts and
+fetishes. If he is a deity of a rather lofty moral conception, of course
+he need not be propitiated by human sacrifices or cold chickens. _That_
+kind of material evidence to the faith in him must be absent by the
+nature of the case; but the coincident testimony of travellers to belief
+in a Supreme Being cannot be dismissed as 'alleged.']
+
+[Footnote 3: Pp. 676, 677.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Man, _J.A.I_. xii. 70.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Man, _J.A.I_. xii. 96-98.]
+
+[Footnote 6: xii. 156, 157.]
+
+[Footnote 7: xii. 112.]
+
+[Footnote 8: xii. 158.]
+
+[Footnote 9: xii. 158.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. 281-288.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Lobeck, _Aglaophamus_, 133.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _J.A.I_. x. 263.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _J.A.I_. 267.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _J.A.I_. x. 267.]
+
+[Footnote 15: P. 281. This is a _nunuai_ with which I am familiar. Flying
+fish, in Banks Island, take the _rôle_ of salmon. The natives think it
+real, but without form or substance.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Codrington, _Melanesia_, p. 122.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _J.A.I_. x. 294.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Op. cit. x. 313.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _J.A.I_. x. 300.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Williams's _Fiji_, p. 218. See Mr. Thomson's remarks cited
+later.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Fiji_, p. 217.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Ibid. p. 228.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Ibid. p. 230.]
+
+[Footnote 24: _J.A.I_. xiv. 30.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _J.A.I_. xi. 361-366.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Ibid. xi. 374.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Ibid. xi. 376.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Ibid. xi. 376]
+
+[Footnote 29: _J.A.I_. xi. 378.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Ibid. 382.]
+
+[Footnote 31: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 360.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Conceivably, however, the Guiana spirits who have so much
+moral influence, exert it by magical charms. 'The belief in the power of
+charms for good or evil produces not only honesty, but a great amount of
+gentle dealing,' says Livingstone, of the Africans. However they work, the
+spirits work for righteousness.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Obviously there could be no Family God before there was the
+institution of the Family.]
+
+[Footnote 34: Callaway, _Rel. of Amazulu_, p. 17.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Callaway, p. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 36: Op. cit. p. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Op. cit. p. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Op. cit. p. 19.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Callaway, pp. 20, 21.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Pp. 26, 27.]
+
+[Footnote 41: Pp. 49, 50.]
+
+[Footnote 42: P. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 43: P. 122.]
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+MORE SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+
+If many of the lowest savages known to us entertain ideas of a Supreme
+Being such as we find among Fuegians, Australians, Bushmen, and
+Andamanese, are there examples, besides the Zulus, of tribes higher in
+material culture who seem to have had such notions, but to have partly
+forgotten or neglected them? Miss Kingsley, a lively, observant, and
+unprejudiced, though rambling writer, gives this very account of the Bantu
+races. Oblivion, or neglect, will show itself in leaving the Supreme Being
+alone, as he needs no propitiation, while devoting sacrifice and ritual to
+fetishes and ghosts. That this should be done is perfectly natural if the
+Supreme Being (who wants no sacrifice) were the first evolved in thought,
+while venal fetishes and spirits came in as a result of the ghost theory.
+But if, as a result of the ghost theory, the Supreme Being came last in
+evolution, he ought to be the most fashionable object of worship, the
+latest developed, the most powerful, and most to be propitiated. He is the
+reverse.
+
+To take an example: the Dinkas of the Upper Nile ('godless,' says Sir
+Samuel Baker) 'pay a very theoretical kind of homage to the all-powerful
+Being, dwelling in heaven, whence he sees all things. He is called
+"Dendid" (great rain, that is, universal benediction?).' He is omnipotent,
+but, being all beneficence, can do no evil; so, not being feared, he is
+not addressed in prayer. The evil spirit, on the other hand, receives
+sacrifices. The Dinkas have a strange old chant:
+
+  'At the beginning, when Dendid made all things,
+    He created the Sun,
+  And the Sun is born, and dies, and comes again!
+    He created the Stars,
+  And the Stars are born, and die, and come again!
+    He created Man,
+  And Man is born, and dies, and returns no more!'
+
+It is like the lament of Moschus.[1]
+
+Russegger compares the Dinkas, and all the neighbouring peoples who hold
+the same beliefs, to modern Deists.[2] They are remote from Atheism and
+from cult! Suggestions about an ancient Egyptian influence are made, but
+popular Egyptian religion was not monotheistic, and priestly thought could
+scarcely influence the ancestors of the Dinkas. M. Lejean says these
+peoples are so practical and utilitarian that missionary religion takes no
+hold on them. Mr. Spencer does not give the ideas of the Dinkas, but it is
+not easy to see how the too beneficent Dendid could be evolved out of
+ghost-propitiation, 'the origin of all religions.' Rather the Dinkas, a
+practical people, seem to have simply forgotten to be grateful to
+their Maker; or have decided, more to the credit of the clearness of their
+heads than the warmth of their hearts, that gratitude he does not want.
+Like the French philosopher they cultivate _l'indépendance du coeur_,
+being in this matter strikingly unlike the Pawnees.
+
+Let us now take a case in which ancestor-worship, and no other form of
+religion (beyond mere superstitions), has been declared to be the practice
+of an African people. Mr. Spencer gives the example of natives of the
+south-eastern district of Central Africa described by Mr. Macdonald in
+'Africana.'[3] The dead man becomes a ghost-god, receives prayer and
+sacrifice, is called a Mulungu (= great ancestor or = sky?), is preferred
+above older spirits, now forgotten; such old spirits may, however, have a
+mountain top for home, a great chief being better remembered; the
+mountain god is prayed to for rain; higher gods were probably similar
+local gods in an older habitat of the Yao.[4]
+
+Such is in the main Mr. Spencer's _résumé_ of Mr. Duff Macdonald's report.
+He omits whatever Mr. Macdonald says about a Being among the Yaos,
+analogous to the Dendid of the Dinkas, or the Darumulun of Australia, or
+the Huron Ahone. Yet analysis detects, in Mr. Macdonald's report,
+copious traces of such a Being, though Mr. Macdonald himself believes in
+ancestor-worship as the Source of the local religion. Thus, Mulungu,
+or Mlungu, used as a proper name, 'is said to be the great spirit,
+_msimu_, of all men, a spirit formed by adding all the departed spirits
+together.[5] This is a singular stretch of savage philosophy, and
+indicates (says Mr. Macdonald) 'a grasping after a Being who is the
+totality of all individual existence.... If it fell from the lips of
+civilised men instead of savages, it would be regarded as philosophy.
+Expressions of this kind among the natives are partly traditional, and
+partly dictated by the big thoughts of the moment.' Philosophy it is, but
+a philosophy dependent on the ghost theory.
+
+I go on to show that the Wayao have, though Mr. Spencer omits him, a Being
+who precisely answers to Darumulun, if stripped (perhaps) of his ethical
+aspect. On this point we are left in uncertainty, just because Mr.
+Macdonald could not ascertain the secrets of his mysteries, which, in
+Australia, have been revealed to a few Europeans.
+
+Where Mulungu is used as a proper name, it 'certainly points to a personal
+Being, by the Wayao sometimes said to be the same as Mtanga. At other
+times he is a Being that possesses many powerful servants, but is himself
+kept a good deal beyond the scene of earthly affairs, like the gods of
+Epicurus.'
+
+This is, of course, precisely the feature in African theology which
+interests us. The Supreme Being, in spite of the potency which his
+supposed place as latest evolved out of the ghost-world should naturally
+give him, is neglected, either as half forgotten, or for philosophical
+reasons. For these reasons Epicurus and Lucretius make their gods
+_otiosi_, unconcerned, and the Wayao, with their universal collective
+spirit, are no mean philosophers.
+
+'This Mulungu' or Mtanga, 'in the world beyond the grave, is represented
+as assigning to spirits their proper places,' whether for ethical reasons
+or not we are not informed.[6] Santos (1586) says 'they acknowledge a God
+who, both in this world and the next, measures retribution for the good or
+evil done in this.'
+
+'In the native hypothesis about creation "the people of Mulungu" play a
+very important part.' These ministers of his who do his pleasure are,
+therefore, as is Mulungu himself, regarded as prior to the existing world.
+Therefore they cannot, in Wayao opinion, be ghosts of the dead at all; nor
+can we properly call them 'spirits.' They are _beings_, original,
+creative, but undefined. The word Mulungu, however, is now applied to
+spirits of individuals, but whether it means 'sky' (Salt) or whether it
+means 'ancestor' (Bleek), it cannot be made to prove that Mulungu himself
+was originally envisaged as 'spirit.' For, manifestly, suppose that the
+idea of powerful beings, undefined, came first in evolution, and was
+followed by the ghost idea, that idea might then be applied to explaining
+the pre-existent creative powers.
+
+Mtanga is by 'some' localised as the god of Mangochi, an Olympus left
+behind by the Yao in their wanderings. Here, some hold, his voice is still
+audible. 'Others say that Mtanga never was a man ... he was concerned in
+the first introduction of men into the world. He gets credit for ...
+making mountains and rivers. He is intimately associated with a year of
+plenty. He is called Mchimwene juene, 'a very chief.' He has a kind of
+evil opposite, _Chitowe_, but this being, the Satan of the creed, 'is a
+child or subject of Mtanga,' an evil angel, in fact.[7]
+
+The thunder god, Mpambe, in Yao, Njasi (lightning) is also a minister of
+the Supreme Being. 'He is sent by Mtanga with rain.' Europeans are
+cleverer than natives, because we 'stayed longer with the people of
+God (Mulungu).'
+
+I do not gather that, though associated with good crops, Mtanga or
+Mulungu receives any sacrifice or propitiation. 'The chief addresses
+his own god;'[8] the chief 'will not trouble himself about his
+great-great-grand-father; he will present his offering to his own
+immediate predecessor, saying, 'O father, I do not know all your
+relatives; you know them all: invite them to feast with you.'[9]
+
+'All the offerings are supposed to point to some want of the spirit,'
+Mtanga, on the other hand, is _nihil indiga nostri_.
+
+A village god is given beer to drink, as Indra got Soma. A dead chief is
+propitiated by human sacrifices. I find no trace of any gift to Mtanga.
+His mysteries are really unknown to Mr. Macdonald: they were laughed at
+by a travelled and 'emancipated' Yao.[10]
+
+'These rites are supposed to be inviolably concealed by the initiated, who
+often say that they would die if they revealed them.'[11]
+
+How can we pretend to understand a religion if we do not know its secret?
+That secret, in Australia, yields the certainty of the ethical character
+of the Supreme Being. Mr. Macdonald says about the initiator (a grotesque
+figure):--
+
+'He delivers lectures, and is said to give much good advice ... the
+lectures condemn selfishness, and a selfish person is called _mwisichana_,
+that is, "uninitiated."'
+
+There could not be better evidence of the presence of the ethical element
+in the religious mysteries. Among the Yao, as among the Australian Kurnai,
+the central secret lesson of religion is the lesson of unselfishness.
+
+It is not stated that Mtanga instituted or presides over the mysteries.
+Judging from the analogy of Eleusis, the Bora, the Red Indian initiations,
+and so on, we may expect this to be the belief; but Mr. Macdonald knows
+very little about the matter.
+
+The legendary tales say 'all things in this world were made by "God."'
+'At first there were not people, but "God" and beasts.' 'God' here,
+is Mlungu. The other statement is apparently derived from existing
+ancestor-worship, people who died became 'God' (Mlungu). But God is prior
+to death, for the Yao have a form of the usual myth of the origin of
+death, also of sleep: 'death and sleep are one word, they are of one
+family.' God dwells on high, while a malevolent 'great one,' who disturbed
+the mysteries and slew the initiated, was turned into a mountain.[12]
+
+In spite of information confessedly defective, I have extracted from Mr.
+Spencer's chosen authority a mass of facts, pointing to a Yao belief in a
+primal being, maker of mountains and rivers; existent before men were; not
+liable to death--which came late among them--beneficent; not propitiated
+by sacrifice (as far as the evidence goes); moral (if we may judge by the
+analogy of the mysteries), and yet occupying the religious background,
+while the foreground is held by the most recent ghosts. To prove Mr.
+Spencer's theory, he ought to have given a full account of this being, and
+to have shown how he was developed out of ghosts which are forgotten in
+inverse ratio to their distance from the actual generation. I conceive
+that Mr. Spencer would find a mid-point between a common ghost and Mtanga,
+in a ghost of a chief attached to a mountain, the place and place-name
+preserving the ghost's name and memory. But it is, I think, a far cry from
+such a chief's ghost to the pre-human, angel-served Mtanga.
+
+Of ancestor worship and ghost worship, we have abundant evidence. But the
+position of Mtanga raises one of these delicate and crucial questions
+which cannot be solved by ignoring their existence. Is Mtanga evolved
+out of an ancestral ghost? If so, why, as greatest of divine beings, 'Very
+Chief,' and having powerful ministers under him, is he left unpropitiated,
+unless it be by moral discourses at the mysteries? As a much more advanced
+idea than that of a real father's ghost, he ought to be much later in
+evolution, fresher in conception, and more adored. How do we explain his
+lack of adoration? Was he originally envisaged as a ghost at all, and, if
+so, by what curious but uniform freak of savage logic is he regarded as
+prior to men, and though a ghost, prior to death? Is it not certain that
+such a being could be conceived of by men who had never dreamed of ghosts?
+Is there any logical reason why Mtanga should not be regarded as
+originally on the same footing as Munganngaur, but now half forgotten and
+neglected, for practical or philosophical reasons?
+
+On these problems light is thrown by a successor of Mr. Spencer's
+authority, Mr. Duff Macdonald, in the Blantyre Mission. This gentleman,
+the Rev. David Clement Scott, has published 'A Cyclopaedic Dictionary
+of the Mang'anja Language in British Central Africa.'[13] Looking at
+ancestral spirits first, we find _Mzimu_, 'spirits of the departed,
+supposed to come in dreams.' Though abiding in the spirit world, they also
+haunt thickets, they inspire Mlauli, prophets, and make them rave and
+utter predictions. Offerings are made to them. Here is a prayer: 'Watch
+over me, my ancestor, who died long ago; tell the great spirit at the head
+of my race from whom my mother came.' There are little hut-temples, and
+the chief directs the sacrifices of food, or of animals. There are
+religious pilgrimages, with sacrifice, to mountains. God, like men in this
+region, has various names, as Chiuta, 'God in space and the rainbow sign
+across;' Mpambe, 'God Almighty' (or rather 'pre-excellent'); Mlezi, 'God
+the Sustainer,' and Mulungu, 'God who is spirit.' Mulungu = God, 'not
+spirits or fetish.' 'You can't put the plural, as God is One,' say the
+natives. 'There are no idols called gods, and spirits are spirits of
+people who have died, not gods.' Idols are _Zitunzi-zitunzi_. 'Spirits
+are supposed to be with Mulungu.' God made the world and man. Our author
+says 'when the chief or people sacrifice it is to God,' but he also says
+that they sacrifice to ancestral spirits. There is some confusion of
+ideas here: Mr. Macdonald says nothing of sacrifice to Mtanga.
+
+Mr. Scott does not seem to know more about the Mysteries than Mr.
+Macdonald, and his article on Mulungu does not much enlighten us. Does
+Mulungu, as Creative God, receive sacrifice, or not?[14] Mr. Scott gives
+no instance of this, under _Nsembe_ (sacrifice), where ancestors, or
+hill-dwelling ghosts of chiefs, are offered food; yet, as we have seen,
+under _Mulungu_, he avers that the chiefs and people do sacrifice to God.
+He appears to be confusing the Creator with spirits, and no reliance can
+be placed on this part of his evidence. 'At the back of all this'
+(sacrifice to spirits) 'there is God.' If I understand Mr. Scott,
+sacrifices are really made only to spirits, but he is trying to argue
+that, after all, the theistic conception is at the back of the animistic
+practice, thus importing his theory into his facts. His theory would,
+really, be in a better way, if sacrifice is _not_ offered to the Creator,
+but this had not occurred to Mr. Scott.
+
+It is plain, in any case, that the religion of the Africans in the
+Blantyre region has an element not easily to be derived from ancestral
+spirit-worship, an element not observed by Mr. Spencer.
+
+Nobody who has followed the examples already adduced will be amazed by
+what Waitz calls the 'surprising result' of recent inquiries among the
+great negro race. Among the branches where foreign influence is least to
+be suspected, we discover, behind their more conspicuous fetishisms and
+superstitions, something which we cannot exactly call Monotheism, yet
+which tends in that direction.[15] Waitz quotes Wilson for the fact that,
+their fetishism apart, they adore a Supreme Being as the Creator: and do
+not honour him with sacrifice.
+
+The remarks of Waitz may be cited in full:
+
+'The religion of the negro may be considered by some as a particularly
+rude form of polytheism and may be branded with the special name of
+fetishism. It would follow, from a minute examination of it, that--apart
+from the extravagant and fantastic traits, which are rooted in the
+character of the negro, and which radiate therefrom over all his
+creations--in comparison with the religions of other savages it is neither
+very specially differentiated nor very specially crude in form.
+
+'But this opinion can be held to be quite true only while we look at the
+_outside_ of the negro's religion, or estimate its significance from
+arbitrary pre-suppositions, as is specially the case with Ad. Wuttke.
+
+'By a deeper insight, which of late several scientific investigators have
+succeeded in attaining, we reach, rather, the surprising conclusion that
+several of the negro races--on whom we cannot as yet prove, and can hardly
+conjecture, the influence of a more civilised people--in the embodying of
+their religious conceptions are further advanced than almost all other
+savages, so far that, even if we do not call them monotheists, we may
+still think of them as standing on the boundary of monotheism, seeing that
+their religion is also mixed with a great mass of rude superstition which,
+in turn, among other peoples, seems to overrun completely the purer
+religious conceptions.'
+
+This conclusion as to an element of pure faith in negro religion would not
+have surprised Waitz, had recent evidence as to the same creed among lower
+savages lain before him as he worked.
+
+This volume of his book was composed in 1860. In 1872 he had become well
+aware of the belief in a good Maker among the Australian natives, and of
+the absence among them of ancestor worship.[16]
+
+Waitz's remarks on the Supreme Being of the Negro are well worth noting,
+from his unconcealed astonishment at the discovery.
+
+Wilson's observations on North and South Guinea religion were published in
+1856. After commenting on the delicate task of finding out what a savage
+religion really is, he writes: 'The belief in one great Supreme Being,
+who made and upholds all things, is universal.'[17] The names of the being
+are translated 'Maker,' 'Preserver,' 'Benefactor,' 'Great Friend.' Though
+compact of all good qualities, the being has allowed the world to 'come
+under the control of evil spirits,' who, alone, receive religious worship.
+Though he leaves things uncontrolled, yet the chief being (as in Homer)
+ratifies the Oath, at a treaty, and is invoked to punish criminals when
+ordeal water is to be drunk. So far, then, he has an ethical influence.
+'Grossly wicked people' are buried outside of the regular place. Fetishism
+prevails, with spiritualism, and Wilson thinks that mediums might pick up
+some good tricks in Guinea. He gives no examples. Their inspired men do
+things 'that cannot be accounted for,' by the use of narcotics.
+
+The South Guinea Creator, Anyambia (= good spirit?), is good, but
+capricious. He has a good deputy, Ombwiri (spelled 'Mbuiri' by Miss
+Kingsley); _he alone has no priests_, but communicates directly with men.
+The neighbouring Shekuni have mysteries of the Great Spirit. No details
+are given. This great being, Mwetyi, witnesses covenants and punishes
+perjury. This people are ancestor-worshippers, but their Supreme Being is
+not said to receive sacrifice, as ghosts do, while he is so far from
+being powerless, like Unkulunkulu, that, but for fear of his wrath,
+'their national treaties would have little or no force.'[18] Having no
+information about the mysteries, of course, we know nothing of other moral
+influences which are, or may be exercised by these great, powerful, and
+not wholly otiose beings.
+
+The celebrated traveller, Mungo Park, who visited Africa in 1805, had good
+opportunities of understanding the natives. He did not hurry through the
+land with a large armed force, but alone, or almost alone, paid his way
+with his brass buttons. 'I have conversed with all ranks and conditions
+upon the subject of their faith,' he says, 'and can pronounce, without the
+smallest shadow of doubt, that the belief in one God and in a future state
+of reward and punishment is entire and universal among them.' This cannot
+strictly be called monotheism, as there are many subordinate spirits who
+may be influenced by 'magical ceremonies.' But if monotheism means belief
+in One Spirit alone, or religious regard paid to One Spirit alone, it
+exists nowhere--no, not in Islam.
+
+Park thinks it remarkable that 'the Almighty' only receives prayers at the
+new moon (of sacrifice to the Almighty he says nothing), and that, being
+the creator and preserver of all things, he is 'of so exalted a nature
+that it is idle to imagine the feeble supplications of wretched mortals
+can reverse the decrees and change the purpose of unerring Wisdom.' The
+new moon prayers are mere matters of tradition; 'our fathers did it before
+us.' 'Such is the blindness of unassisted nature,' says Park, who is not
+satirising, in Swift's manner, the prayers of Presbyterians at home on
+Yarrow.
+
+Thus, the African Supreme Being is unpropitiated, while inferior spirits
+are constrained by magic or propitiated with food.
+
+We meet our old problem: How has this God, in the conception of whom there
+is so much philosophy, developed out of these hungry ghosts? The influence
+of Islam can scarcely be suspected, Allah being addressed, of course, in
+endless prayers, while the African god receives none. Indeed, it would be
+more plausible to say that Mahomet borrowed Allah from the widespread
+belief which we are studying, than that the negro's Supreme Being was
+borrowed from Allah.
+
+Park had, as we saw, many opportunities of familiar discussion with the
+people on whose mercies he threw himself.
+
+'But it is not often that the negroes make their religious opinions the
+subject of conversation; when interrogated, in particular, concerning
+their ideas of a future state, they express themselves with great
+reverence, but endeavour to shorten the discussion by saying, _"Mo o mo
+inta allo_" ("No man knows anything about it").'[19]
+
+Park himself, in extreme distress, and almost in despair, chanced to
+observe the delicate beauty of a small moss-plant, and, reflecting that
+the Creator of so frail a thing could not be indifferent to any of His
+creatures, plucked up courage and reached safety.[20] He was not of the
+negro philosophy, and is the less likely to have invented it. The new moon
+prayer, said in a whisper, was reported to Park, 'by many different
+people,' to contain 'thanks to God for his kindness during the existence
+of the past moon, and to solicit a continuation of his favour during the
+new one.' This, of course, may prove Islamite influence, and is at
+variance with the general tendency of the religious philosophy as
+described.
+
+We now arrive at a theory of the Supreme Being among a certain African
+race which would be entirely fatal to my whole hypothesis on this topic,
+if it could be demonstrated correct in fact, and if it could be stretched
+so as to apply to the Australians, Fuegians, Andamanese, and other very
+backward peoples. It is the hypothesis that the Supreme Being is a
+'loan-god,' borrowed from Europeans.
+
+The theory is very lucidly set forth in Major Ellis's 'Tshi-speaking
+Peoples of the Gold Coast.'[21] Major Ellis's opinion coincides with that
+of Waitz in his 'Introduction to Anthropology' (an opinion to which Waitz
+does not seem bigoted)--namely, that 'the original form of all religion is
+a raw, unsystematic polytheism,' nature being peopled by inimical powers
+or spirits, and everyone worshipping what he thinks most dangerous or
+most serviceable. There are few general, many local or personal, objects
+of veneration.[22] Major Ellis only met this passage when he had formed
+his own ideas by observation of the Tshi race. We do not pretend to
+guess what 'the original form of all religion' may have been; but we have
+given, and shall give, abundant evidence for the existence of a loftier
+faith than this, among peoples much lower in material culture than the
+Tshi races, who have metals and an organised priesthood. They occupy, in
+small villages (except Coomassie and Djuabin), the forests of the Gold
+Coast. The mere mention of Coomassie shows how vastly superior in
+civilisation the Tshis (Ashantis and Fantis) are to the naked, houseless
+Australians. Their inland communities, however, are 'mere specks in a vast
+tract of impenetrable forest.' The coast people have for centuries been in
+touch with Europeans, but the 'Tshi-speaking races are now much in the
+same condition, both socially and morally, as they were at the time of the
+Portuguese discovery.'[23]
+
+Nevertheless, Major Ellis explains their Supreme Being as the result of
+European influence! _A priori_ this appears highly improbable. That a
+belief should sweep over all these specks in impenetrable forest, from
+the coast-tribes in contact with Europeans, and that this belief should,
+though the most recent, be infinitely the least powerful, cannot be
+regarded as a plausible hypothesis. Moreover, on Major Ellis's theory the
+Supreme Beings of races which but recently came for the first time in
+contact with Europeans, Supreme Beings kept jealously apart from European
+ken, and revered in the secrecy of ancient mysteries, must also, by
+parity of reason, be the result of European influence. Unfortunately,
+Major Ellis gives no evidence for his statements about the past history of
+Tshi religion. Authorities he must have, and references would be welcome.
+
+'With people in the condition in which the natives of the Gold Coast now
+are, religion is not in any way allied with moral ideas.'[24] We have given
+abundant evidence that among much more backward tribes morals rest on a
+religious sanction. If this be not so on the Gold Coast we cannot accept
+these relatively advanced Fantis and Ashantis as representing the
+'original' state of ethics and religion, any more than those people with
+cities, a king, a priesthood, iron, and gold, represent the 'original'
+material condition of society. Major Ellis also shows that the Gods exact
+chastity from aspirants to the priesthood.[25] The present beliefs
+of the Gold Coast are kept up by organised priesthoods as 'lucrative
+business.'[26] Where there is no lucre and no priesthood, as among more
+backward races, this kind of business cannot be done. On the Gold Coast
+men can only approach gods through priests.[27] This is degeneration.
+
+Obviously, if religion began in a form relatively pure and moral, it
+_must_ degenerate, as civilisation advances, under priests who 'exploit'
+the lucrative, and can see no money in the pure elements of belief and
+practice. That the lucrative elements in Christianity were exploited by
+the clergy, to the neglect of ethics, was precisely the complaint of the
+Reformers. From these lucrative elements the creed of the Apostles was
+free, and a similar freedom marks the religion of Australia or of the
+Pawnees. We cannot possibly, then, expect to find the 'original' state
+of religion among a people subdued to a money-grubbing priesthood, like
+the Tshi races. Let religion begin as pure as snow, it would be corrupted
+by priestly trafficking in its lucrative animistic aspect. And priests are
+developed relatively late.
+
+Major Ellis discriminates Tshi gods as--
+
+  1. General, worshipped by an entire tribe or more tribes.
+  2. Local deities of river, hill, forest, or sea.
+  3. Deities of families or corporations.
+  4. Tutelary deities of individuals.
+
+The second class, according to the natives, were appointed by the first
+class, who are 'too distant or indifferent to interfere ordinarily in
+human affairs.' Thus, the Huron god, Ahone, punishes nobody. He is all
+sweetness and light, but has a deputy god, called Okeus. On our hypothesis
+this indifference of high gods suggests the crowding out of the great
+disinterested God by venal animistic competition. All of class II. 'appear
+to have been originally malignant.' Though, in native belief, class I.
+was prior to, and 'appointed' class II., Major Ellis thinks that malignant
+spirits of class II. were raised to class I. as if to the peerage, while
+classes III. and IV. 'are clearly the product of priesthood'--therefore
+late.
+
+Major Ellis then avers that when Europeans reached the Gold Coast, in the
+fifteenth century, they 'appear to have found' a Northern God, Tando, and
+a Southern God, Bobowissi, still adored. Bobowissi makes thunder and rain,
+lives on a hill, and receives, or received, human sacrifices. But, 'after
+an intercourse of some years with Europeans,' the villagers near European
+forts 'added to their system a new deity, whom they termed Nana Nyankupon.
+This was the God of the Christians, borrowed from them, and adapted under
+a new designation, meaning 'Lord of the sky.' (This is conjectural.
+_Nyankum_ = rain. _Nyansa_ has 'a later meaning, "craft."')[28]
+
+Now Major Ellis, later, has to contrast Bosman's account of fetishism
+(1700) with his own observations. According to Bosman's native source of
+information, men then selected their own fetishes. These are _now_
+selected by priests. Bosman's authority was wrong--or priesthood has
+extended its field of business. Major Ellis argues that the revolution
+from amateur to priestly selection of fetishes could not occur in
+190 years, 'over a vast tract of country, amongst peoples living in
+semi-isolated communities, in the midst of pathless forests, where there
+is but little opportunity for the exchange of ideas, _and where we know
+they have been uninfluenced by any higher race_.'
+
+Yet Major Ellis's theory is that this isolated people _were_ influenced
+by a higher race, to the extent of adopting a totally new Supreme Being,
+from Europeans, a being whom they in no way sought to propitiate, and who
+was of no practical use. And this they did, he says, not under priestly
+influence, but in the face of priestly opposition.[29]
+
+Major Ellis's logic does not appear to be consistent. In any case we ask
+for evidence how, in the 'impenetrable forests' did a new Supreme Deity
+become universally known? Are we certain that travellers (unquoted) did
+not discover a deity with no priests, or ritual, or 'money in the
+concern,' later than they discovered the blood-stained, conspicuous,
+lucrative Bobowissi? Why was Nyankupon, the supposed new god of a new
+powerful set of strangers, left wholly unpropitiated? The reverse was to
+be expected.
+
+Major Ellis writes: 'Almost certainly the addition of one more to an
+already numerous family' of gods, 'was strenuously resisted by the
+priesthood,' who, confessedly, are adding now lower gods every day! Yet
+Nyankupon is universally known, in spite of priestly resistance.
+Nyankupon, I presume = Anzambi, Anyambi, Nyambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, the
+Nzam of the Fans, 'and of all Bantu coast races, the creator of man,
+plants, animals, and the earth; he takes no further interest in the
+affair.'[30] The crowd of _spirits_ take only too much interest; and,
+therefore, are the lucrative element in religion.
+
+It is not very easy to believe that Nyam, under all his names, was picked
+up from the Portuguese, and passed apparently from negroes to Bantu all
+over West Africa, despite the isolation of the groups, and the resistance
+of the priesthood among tribes 'uninfluenced by any higher race.'
+
+Nyam, like Major Ellis's class I., appoints a subordinate god to do his
+work: he is truly good, and governs the malevolent spirits.[31]
+
+The spread of Nyankupon, as described by Major Ellis, is the more
+remarkable, since 'five or six miles from the sea, or even less, the
+country was a _terra incognita_ to Europeans,'[32] Nyankupon was, it is
+alleged, adopted, because our superiority proved Europeans to be
+'protected by a deity of greater power than any of those to which they
+themselves' (the Tshi races) 'offered sacrifices.'
+
+Then, of course, Nyankupon would receive the best sacrifices of all, as
+the most powerful deity? Far from that, Nyankupon received no sacrifice,
+and had no priests. No priest would have a traditional way of serving him.
+As the unlucky man in Voltaire says to his guardian angel, 'It is well
+worth while to have a presiding genius,' so the Tshis and Bantu might
+ironically remark, 'A useful thing, a new Supreme Being!' A quarter of a
+continent or so adopts a new foreign god, and leaves him _planté là_;
+unserved, unhonoured, and unsung. He therefore came to be thought too
+remote, or too indifferent, 'to interfere directly in the affairs of the
+world.' 'This idea was probably caused by the fact that the natives had
+not experienced any material improvement in their condition ... although
+they also had become followers of the god of the whites.'[33]
+
+But that was just what they had not done! Even at Magellan's Straits, the
+Fuegians picked up from a casual Spanish sea-captain and adored an image
+of Cristo. Name and effigy they accepted. The Tshi people took neither
+effigy nor name of a deity from the Portuguese settled among them. They
+neither imitated Catholic rites nor adapted their own; they prayed not,
+nor sacrificed to the 'new' Nyankupon. Only his name and the idea of his
+nature are universally diffused in West African belief. He lives in no
+definite home, or hill, but 'in Nyankupon's country.' Nyankupon, at the
+present day, is 'ignored rather than worshipped,' while Bobowissi has
+priests and offerings.
+
+It is clear that Major Ellis is endeavouring to explain, by a singular
+solution (namely, the borrowing of a God from Europeans), and that
+a solution improbable and inadequate, a phenomenon of very wide
+distribution. Nyankupon cannot be explained apart from Taaroa, Puluga,
+Ahone, Ndengei, Dendid, and Ta-li-y-Tochoo, Gods to be later described,
+who cannot, by any stretch of probabilities, be regarded as of European
+origin. All of these represent the primeval Supreme Being, more or less
+or altogether stripped, under advancing conditions of culture, of his
+ethical influence, and crowded out by the horde of useful greedy ghosts or
+ghost gods, whose business is lucrative. Nyankupon has no pretensions to
+be, or to have been a 'spirit.'[34]
+
+Major Ellis's theory is a natural result of his belief in a tangle of
+polytheism as 'the original state of religion.' If so, there was not much
+room for the natural development of Nyankupon, in whom 'the missionaries
+find a parallel to the Jahveh of the Jews.'[35] On our theory Nyankupon
+takes his place in the regular process of the corruption of theism by
+animism.
+
+The parallel case of Nzambi Mpungu, the Creator among the Fiorts (a Bantu
+stock), is thus stated by Miss Kingsley:
+
+'I have no hesitation in saying I fully believe Nzambi Mpungu to be a
+purely native god, and that he is a great god over all things, but the
+study of him is even more difficult than the study of Nzambi, because the
+Jesuit missionaries who gained so great an influence over the Fiorts in
+the sixteenth century identified him with Jehovah, and worked on the
+native mind from that stand-point. Consequently semi-mythical traces
+of Jesuit teaching linger, even now, in the religious ideas of the
+Fiorts.'[36]
+
+Nzambi Mpungu lives 'behind the firmament.' 'He takes next to no interest
+in human affairs;' which is not a Jesuit idea of God.
+
+In all missionary accounts of savage religion, we have to guard against
+two kinds of bias. One is the bias which makes the observer deny any
+religion to the native race, except devil-worship. The other is the bias
+which lends him to look for traces of a pure primitive religious
+tradition. Yet we cannot but observe this reciprocal phenomenon:
+missionaries often find a native name and idea which answer so nearly to
+their conception of God that they adopt the idea and the name, in
+teaching. Again, on the other side, the savages, when first they hear the
+missionaries' account of God, recognise it, as do the Hurons and Bakwain,
+for what has always been familiar to them. This is recorded in very early
+pre-missionary travels, as in the book of William Strachey on Virginia
+(1612), to which we now turn. The God found by Strachey in Virginia
+cannot, by any latitude of conjecture, be regarded as the result of
+contact with Europeans. Yet he almost exactly answers to the African
+Nyankupon, who is explained away as a 'loan-god.' For the belief in
+relatively pure creative beings, whether they are morally adored, without
+sacrifice, or merely neglected, is so widely diffused, that Anthropology
+must ignore them, or account for them as 'loan-gods'--or give up her
+theory!
+
+[Footnote 1: Lejean, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, April 1862, p. 760. Citing
+for the chant, Beltrame, _Dictionario della lingua denka_, MS.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Waitz, ii. 74.]
+
+[Footnote 3: 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 681.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Africana_, i. 66.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Africana_, i. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Africana_, i. 71, 72_]
+
+[Footnote 8: i 88.]
+
+[Footnote 9: i. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 10: i. 130.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Africana_, i 279-301.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Edinburgh, 1892.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Incidentally Mr. Macdonald shows that, contrary to Mr.
+Spencer's opinion, these savages have words for dreams and dreaming. They
+interpret dreams by a system of symbols, 'a canoe is ill luck,' and 'dreams
+go by contraries.']
+
+[Footnote 15: Waitz, _Anthropologie_, ii. 167.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Waitz and Gerland, _Anthropologie_, vi. 796-799 and 809. In
+1874 Mr. Howitt's evidence on the moral element in the mysteries was not
+published. Waitz scouts the idea that the higher Australian beliefs are of
+European origin. 'Wir schen vielmehr uralte Trümmer ähnlicher Mythologenie
+in ihnen,' (vi. 798) flotsam from ideas of immemorial antiquity.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Wilson, p. 209.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Wilson, p. 392.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Park's _Journey_, i. 274, 275, 1815.]
+
+[Footnote 20: P. 245.]
+
+[Footnote 21: London, 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Ellis, pp. 20, 21.]
+
+[Footnote 23: P. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Ellis, p. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 25: P. 120.]
+
+[Footnote 26: P. 15.]
+
+[Footnote 27: P. 125.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Ellis, pp. 24, 25.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Ellis, p. 189.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Miss Kingsley, p. 442.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Ellis, p. 229.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Ibid. p. 25.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Op. cit. p. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 34: Ellis, p. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Op. cit. p. 28.]
+
+[Footnote 36: 'African Religion and Law,' _National Review_, September
+1897, p. 132.]
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+AHONE. TI-RA-WÁ. NÀ-PI. PACHACAMAC. TUI LAGA. TAA-ROA
+
+In this chapter it is my object to set certain American Creators beside
+the African beings whom we have been examining. We shall range from Hurons
+to Pawnees and Blackfeet, and end with Pachacamac, the supreme being of
+the old Inca civilisation, with Tui Laga and Taa-roa. It will be seen that
+the Hurons have been accidentally deprived of their benevolent Creator by
+a bibliographical accident, while that Creator corresponds very well
+with the Peruvian Pachucamac, often regarded as a mere philosophical
+abstraction. The Pawnees will show us a Creator involved in a sacrificial
+ritual, which is not common, while the Blackfeet present a Creator who is
+not envisaged as a spirit at all, and, on our theory, represents a very
+early stage of the theistic conception.
+
+To continue the argument from analogy against Major Ellis's theory of the
+European origin of Nyankupon, it seems desirable first to produce a
+parallel to his case, and to that of his blood-stained subordinate
+deity, Bobowissi, from a quarter where European influence is absolutely
+out of the question. Virginia was first permanently colonised by
+Englishmen in 1607, and the 'Historie of Travaile into Virginia,' by
+William Strachey, Gent., first Secretary of the Colony, dates from the
+earliest years (1612-1616). It will hardly be suggested, then, that the
+natives had already adopted _our_ Supreme Being, especially as Strachey
+says that the native priests strenuously opposed the Christian God.
+Strachey found a house-inhabiting, agricultural, and settled population,
+under chiefs, one of whom, Powhattan, was a kind of Bretwalda. The temples
+contained the dried bodies of the _weroances_, or aristocracy, beside
+which was their Okeus, or Oki, an image 'ill favouredly carved,' all
+black dressed, 'who doth them all the harm they suffer. He is propitiated
+by sacrifices of their own children' (probably an error) 'and of
+strangers.'
+
+Mr. Tylor quotes a description of this Oki, or Okeus, with his idol and
+bloody rites, from Smith's 'History of Virginia' (1632)[1]. The two books,
+Strachey's and Smith's, are here slightly varying copies of one original.
+But, after censuring Smith's (and Strachey's) hasty theory that Okeus is
+'no other than a devil,' Mr. Tylor did not find in Smith what follows in
+Strachey. Okeus has human sacrifices, like Bobowissi, 'whilst the great
+God (the priests tell them) who governes all the world, and makes
+the son to shine, creatyng the moone and starrs his companyons ... they
+calling (_sic_) Ahone. The good and peaceable God requires no such dutyes,
+nor needs to be sacrificed unto, for he intendeth all good unto them,'
+Okeus, on the contrary, 'looking into all men's accions, and examining the
+same according to the severe scheme of justice, punisheth them.... Such is
+the misery and thraldome under which Sathan hath bound these wretched
+miscreants.'
+
+As if, in Mr. Strachey's own creed, Satan does not punish, in hell, the
+offences of men against God!
+
+Here, then, in addition to a devil (or rather a divine police magistrate),
+and general fetishism and nature worship, we find that the untutored
+Virginian is equipped with a merciful Creator, without idol, temple, or
+sacrifice, as needing nought of ours. It is by the merest accident, the
+use of Smith's book (1632) instead of Strachey's book (1612), that Mr.
+Tylor is unaware of these essential facts[2].
+
+Dr. Brinton, like Mr. Tylor, cites Smith for the nefarious or severe
+Okeus, and omits any mention of Ahone, the benevolent Creator.[3]
+Now, Strachey's evidence is early (1612), is that of a well-educated
+man, fond of airing his Greek, and not prejudiced in favour of these
+worshippers of 'Sathan.' In Virginia he found the unpropitiated loving
+Supreme Being, beside a subordinate, like Nyankupon beside Bobowissi in
+Africa.
+
+Each highest deity, in Virginia or on the Gold Coast, is more or less
+eclipsed in popular esteem by nascent polytheism and nature worship. This
+is precisely what we should expect to find, if Ahone, the Creator, were
+earlier in evolution, while Okeus and the rest were of the usual greedy
+class of animistic corruptible deities, useful to priests. This could not
+be understood while Ahone was left out of the statement.[4]
+
+Probably Mr. Strachey's narrative justifies, by analogy, our suspicion of
+Major Ellis's theory that the African Supreme Being is of European origin.
+The purpose in the Ahone-Okeus creed is clear. God (Ahone) is omnipotent
+and good, yet calamities beset mankind. How are these to be explained?
+Clearly as penalties for men's sins, inflicted, not by Ahone, but by his
+lieutenant, Okeus. But that magistrate can be, and is, appeased by
+sacrifices, which it would be impious, or, at all events, useless, to
+offer to the Supreme Being, Ahone. It is a logical creed, but how was the
+Supreme Being evolved out of the ghost of a 'people-devouring king' like
+Powhattan? The facts, very fairly attested, do not fit the anthropological
+theory. It is to be remarked that Strachey's Ahone is a much less
+mythological conception than that which, on very good evidence, he
+attributes to the Indians of the Patowemeck River. Their Creator is spoken
+of as 'a godly Hare,' who receives their souls into Paradise, whence they
+are reborn on earth again, as in Plato's myth. They also regard the four
+winds as four Gods. How the god took the mythological form of a hare is
+diversely explained.[5]
+
+Meanwhile the Ahone-Okeus creed corresponds to the Nyankupon-Bobowissi
+creed. The American faith is certainly not borrowed from Europe, so it is
+less likely that the African creed is borrowed.
+
+As illustrations of the general theory here presented, we may now take two
+tribal religions among the North American Indians. The first is that of
+the equestrian Pawnees, who, thirty years ago, were dwelling on the Loup
+Fork in Nebraska. The buffaloes have since been destroyed, the lands
+seized, and the Pawnees driven into a 'Reservation,' where they are, or
+lately were, cheated and oppressed in the usual way. They were originally
+known to Europeans in four hordes, the fourth being the Skidi or Wolf
+Pawnees. They seem to have come into Kansas and Nebraska, at a date
+relatively remote, from Mexico, and are allied with the Lipans and
+Tonkaways of that region. The Tonkaways are a tribe who, in a sacred
+mystery, are admonished to 'live like the wolves,' in exactly the same way
+as were the Hirpi (wolf tribe), of Mount Soracte, who practised the feat
+of walking unhurt through fire.[6] The Tonkaways regard the Pawnees, who
+also have a wolf tribe, as a long-separated branch of their race. If,
+then, they are of Mexican origin, we might expect to find traces of Aztec
+ritual among the Pawnees.
+
+Long after they obtained better weapons they used flint-headed arrows for
+slaying the only two beasts which it was lawful to sacrifice, the deer and
+the buffalo. They have long been a hunting and also an agricultural
+people. The corn was given to them originally by the Ruler: their god,
+_Ti-ra-wá_, 'the Spirit Father.' They offer the sacrifice of a deer with
+peculiar solemnity, and are a very prayerful people. The priest 'held a
+relation to the Pawnees and their deity not unlike that occupied by Moses
+to Jehovah and the Israelites.' A feature in ritual is the sacred bundles
+of unknown contents, brought from the original home in Mexico. The Pawnees
+were created by Ti-ra-wá. They believe in a happy future life, while the
+wicked die, and there is an end of them. They cite their dreams of the
+dead as an argument for a life beyond the tomb. 'We see ourselves living
+with Ti-ra-wá!' An evil earlier race, which knew not Ti-ra-wá, was
+destroyed by him in the Deluge; evidence is found in large fossil bones,
+and it would be an interesting inquiry whether such fossils are always
+found where the story of a 'sin-flood' occurs. If so, fossils must be
+universally diffused.
+
+As is common, the future life is attested, not only by dreams, but in the
+experience of men who 'have died' and come back to life, like Secret Pipe
+Chief, who told the story to Mr. Grinnell. These visions in a state of
+apparent death are not peculiar to savages, and, no doubt, have had much
+effect on beliefs about the next world.[7] Ghosts are rarely seen, but
+auditory hallucinations, as of a voice giving good advice in time of
+peril, are regarded as the speech of ghosts. The beasts are also friendly,
+as fellow children with men of Ti-ra-wá. To the Morning Star the Skidi or
+Wolf Pawnees offered on rare occasions a captive man. The ceremony was not
+unlike that of the Aztecs, though less cruel. Curiously enough, the slayer
+of the captive had instantly to make a mock flight, as in the Attic
+_Bouphonia_. This, however, was a rite paid to the Morning Star, not to
+Ti-ra-wá, 'the power above that moves the universe and controls all
+things.' Sacrifice to Ti-ra-wá was made on rare and solemn occasions out
+of his two chief gifts, deer and buffalo. 'Through corn, deer, buffalo,
+and the sacred bundles, we worship _Ti-ra-wá_.'
+
+The flesh was burned in the fire, while prayers were made with great
+earnestness. In the old Skidi rite the women told the fattened captive
+what they desired to gain from the Ruler. It is occasionally said that
+the human sacrifice was made to _Ti-ra-wá_ himself. The sacrificer not
+only fled, but fasted and mourned. It is possible that, as among the
+Aztecs, the victim was regarded as also an embodiment of the God, but this
+is not certain, the rite having long been disused. Mr. Grinnell got the
+description from a very old Skidi. There was also a festival of thanks to
+Ti-ra-wá for corn. During a sacred dance and hymn the corn is held up to
+the Ruler by a woman. Corn is ritually called 'The Mother,' as in Peru.[8]
+'We are like seed, and we worship through the Corn.'
+
+Disease is caused by evil spirits, and many American soldiers were healed
+by Pawnee doctors, though their hurts had refused to yield to the
+treatment of the United States Army Surgeons.[9]
+
+The miracles wrought by Pawnee medicine men, under the eyes of Major
+North, far surpass what is told of Indian jugglery. But this was forty
+years ago, and it is probably too late to learn anything of these
+astounding performances of naked men on the hard floor of a lodge.
+'Major North told me' (Mr. Grinnell) 'that he saw with his own eyes the
+doctors make the corn grow,' the doctor not manipulating the plant, as in
+the Mango trick, but standing apart and singing. Mr. Grinnell says: 'I
+have never found any one who could even suggest an explanation.'
+
+This art places great power in the hands of the doctors, who exhibit many
+other prodigies. It is notable that in this religion we hear nothing of
+ancestor-worship; all that is stated as to ghosts has been reported. We
+find the cult of an all-powerful being, in whose ritual sacrifice is the
+only feature that suggests ghost-worship. The popular tales and historical
+reminiscences of the last generation entirely bear out by their allusions
+Mr. Grinnell's account of the Pawnee faith, in which the ethical element
+chiefly consists in a sense of dependence on and touching gratitude to
+Ti-ra-wá, as shown in fervent prayer. Theft he abhors, he applauds valour,
+he punishes the wicked by annihilation, the good dwell with him in his
+heavenly home. He is addressed as A-ti-us ta-kaw-a, 'Our father in all
+places.'
+
+It is not so easy to see how this Being was developed out of
+ancestor-worship, of which we find no traces among Pawnees. For
+ancestor-worship among the Sioux, it is usual to quote a remark of one
+Prescott, an interpreter: 'Sometimes an Indian will say, "Wah negh on she
+wan da," which means, "Spirits of the dead have mercy on me." Then they
+will add what they want. That is about the amount of an Indian's
+prayer.'[10] Obviously, when we compare Mr. Grinnell's account of Pawnee
+religion, based on his own observations, and those of Major North, and
+Mr. Dunbar, who has written on the language of the tribe, we are on much
+safer ground, than when we follow a contemptuous, half-educated European.
+
+The religion of the Blackfoot Indians appears to be a ruder form of the
+Pawnee faith. Whether the differences arise from tribal character, or from
+decadence, or because the Blackfoot belief is in an earlier and more
+backward condition than that of the Pawnees, it is not easy to be certain.
+As in China, there exists a difficulty in deciding whether the Supreme
+Being is identical with the great nature-god; in China the Heaven, among
+the Blackfeet the Sun; or is prior to him in conception, or has been,
+later, substituted for him, or placed beside him. The Blackfoot mythology
+is low, crude, and, except in tales of Creation, is derisive. As in
+Australia, there is a specific difference of tone between mythology and
+religion.
+
+The Blackfoot country runs east from the summit of the Rocky Mountains, to
+the mouth of the Yellowstone river on the Missouri, then west to the
+Yellowstone sources, across the Rocky Mountains to the Beaverhead, thence
+to their summit.
+
+As to spirits, the Blackfeet believe in, or at least tell stories of,
+ghosts, which conduct themselves much as in our old-fashioned ghost
+stories. They haunt people in a rather sportive and irresponsible way. The
+souls or shadows of respectable persons go to the bleak country called the
+Sand Hills, where they live in a dull, monotonous kind of Sheol. The
+shades of the wicked are 'earth-bound' and mischievous, especially ghosts
+of men slain in battle. They cause paralysis and madness, but dread
+interiors of lodges; they only 'tap on the lodge-skins.' Like many Indian
+tribes, the Blackfeet have the Eurydice legend. A man grieving for his
+dead wife finds his way to Hades, is pitied by the dead, and allowed to
+carry the woman back with him, under certain ritual prohibitions, one of
+which he unhappily infringes. The range of this deeply touching story
+among the Red Men, and its close resemblance to the tale of Orpheus, is
+one of the most curious facts in mythology. Mr. Grinnell's friend Young
+Bear, when lost with his wife in a fog, heard a Voice, 'It is well. Go on,
+you are going right.' 'The top of my head seemed to lift up. It seemed as
+if a lot of needles were running into it.... This must have been a ghost.'
+As the wife also heard the Voice it was probably human, not hallucinatory.
+
+Animals receive the usual amount of friendly respect from the Blackfeet.
+They have also an inchoate polytheism, 'Above Persons, Ground Persons, and
+Under Water Persons.' Of the first, Thunder is most important, and is
+worshipped. There is the Cold Maker, a white figure on a white horse, the
+Wind, and so on.
+
+The Creator is Nà-pi, Old Man; Dr. Brinton thinks he is a personification
+of Light, but Mr. Grinnell reckons it absurd to attribute so abstract a
+conception to the Blackfeet. Nà-pi is simply a primal Being, an Immortal
+Man,[11] who was before Death came into the world, concerning which one of
+the usual tales of the Origin of Death is told. 'All things that he had
+made understood him when he spoke to them--birds, animals, and people,' as
+in the first chapters of Genesis. With Nà-pi, Creation worked on the lines
+of adaptation to environment. He put the bighorn on the prairie. There it
+was awkward, so he set it on rocky places, where it skipped about with
+ease. The antelope fell on the rocks, so he removed it to the level
+prairie. Nà-pi created man and woman, out of clay, but the folly of the
+woman introduced Death. Nà-pi, as a Prometheus, gave fire, and taught the
+forest arts. He inculcated the duty of prayer; his will should be done by
+emissaries in the shape of animals. Then he went to other peoples. The
+misfortunes of the Indians arise from disobedience to his laws.
+
+Chiefs were elective, for conduct, courage, and charity.
+
+Though weapons and utensils were buried with the dead, or exposed on
+platforms, and though great men were left to sleep in their lodges,
+henceforth never to be entered by the living, there is no trace known to
+me of continued ancestor-worship. As many Blackfeet change their names
+yearly, ancestral names are not likely to become those of gods.
+
+The Sun is by many believed to have taken the previous place of Nà-pi in
+religion; or perhaps Nà-pi _is_ the Sun. However, he is still separately
+addressed in prayer. The Sun receives presents of furs and so forth; a
+finger, when the prayer is for life, has been offered to him. Fetishism
+probably shows itself in gifts to a great rock. There is daily prayer,
+both to the Sun and to Nà-pi. Women institute Medicine Lodges, praying,
+'Pity me, Sun. You have seen my life. You know that I am pure.' 'We look
+on the Medicine Lodge woman as you white people do on the Roman Catholic
+Sisters.' Being 'virtuous in deed, serious, and clean-minded,' the Medical
+Lodge woman is in spiritual _rapport_ with Nà-pi and the Sun. To this
+extent, at least, Blackfoot religion is an ethical influence.
+
+The creed seems to be a nascent polytheism, subordinate to Nà-pi as
+supreme Maker, and to the personified Sun. As Blackfoot ghosts are
+'vaporous, ineffectual' for good, there seems to be nothing like ancestor
+worship.
+
+These two cults and beliefs, Pawnee and Blackfoot, may be regarded as
+fairly well authenticated examples of un-Christianised American religion
+among races on the borderland of agriculture and the chase. It would be
+difficult to maintain that ghost-worship or ancestor-worship is a potent
+factor in the evolution of the deathless Ti-ra-wá or the immortal Creator
+Nà-pi, who has nothing of the spirit about him, especially as ghosts are
+not worshipped.[12]
+
+Let us now look at the Supreme Being of a civilised American people. There
+are few more interesting accounts of religion than Garcilasso de la Vega's
+description of faith in Peru. Garcilasso was of Inca parentage on the
+spindle side; he was born in 1540, and his book, taken from the traditions
+of an uncle, and aided by the fragmentary collections of Father Blas
+Valera, was published in 1609. In Garcilasso's theory the original people
+of Peru, Totemists and worshippers of hills and streams, Earth and Sea,
+were converted to Sun worship by the first Inca, a child of the Sun. Even
+the new religion included ancestor-worship and other superstitions. But
+behind Sun worship was the faith in a Being who 'advanced the Sun so far
+above all the stars of heaven.'[13] This Being was Pachacamac, 'the
+sustainer of the world.' The question then arises, Is Pachacamac a form of
+the same creative being whom we find among the lowest savages; or is he
+the result of philosophical reflection? The latter was the opinion
+of Garcilasso. 'The Incas and their Amautas' (learned class) 'were
+philosophers.'[14]
+
+'Pacha,' he says, = universe, and 'cama' = soul. Pachacamac, then, is
+_Anima Mundi_. 'They did not even take the name of Pachacamac into their
+mouths,' or but seldom and reverently, as the Australians will not, in
+religious matters, mention Darumulun. Pachacamac had no temple, 'but they
+worshipped him in their hearts.' That he was the Creator appears in an
+earlier writer, cited by Garcilasso, Agustin de Zarate (ii. ch. 5).
+Garcilasso, after denying the existence of temples to Pachacamac, mentions
+one, but only one. He insists, at length, and with much logic, that He
+whom, as a Christian, he worships, is in Quichua styled Pachacamac.
+Moreover, the one temple to Pachacamac was not built by an Inca, but by
+a race which, having heard of the Inca god, borrowed his name, without
+understanding his nature, that of a Being who dwells not in temples made
+with hands (ii. 186). In the temple this people, the Yuncas, offered even
+human sacrifices. By the Incas to Pachacamac no sacrifice was offered
+(ii. 189). This negative custom they also imposed upon the Yuncas, and
+they removed idols from the Yunca temple of Pachacamac (ii. 190). Yunca
+superstitions, however, infested the temple, and a Voice gave oracles
+therein.[15] The Yuncas also had a talking idol, which the Inca, in
+accordance with a religious treaty, occasionally consulted.
+
+While Pachacamac, without temple or rite, was reckoned the Creator, we
+must understand that Sun-worship and ancestor-worship were the practical
+elements of the Inca cult. This appears to have been distasteful to the
+Inca Huayna Ccapac, for at a Sun feast he gazed hard on the Sun, was
+remonstrated with by a priest, and replied that the restless Sun 'must
+have another Lord more powerful than himself.'[16]
+
+This remark could not have been necessary if Pachacamac were really an
+article of living and universal belief. Perhaps we are to understand that
+this Inca, like his father, who seems to have been the original author of
+the saying, meant to sneer at the elaborate worship bestowed on the Sun,
+while Pachacamac was neglected, as far as ritual went.
+
+In Garcilasso's book we have to allow for his desire to justify the creed
+of his maternal ancestors. His criticism of Spanish versions is acute, and
+he often appeals to his knowledge of Quichua, and to the direct traditions
+received by him from his uncle. Against his theory of Pachacamac as a
+result of philosophical thought, it may be urged that similar conceptions,
+or nearly similar, exist among races not civilised like the Incas, and not
+provided with colleges of learned priests. In fact, the position of
+Pachacamac and the Sun is very nearly that of the Blackfoot Creator Nà-pi,
+and the Sun, or of Shang-ti and the Heaven, in China. We have the Creative
+Being whose creed is invaded by that of a worshipped aspect of nature, and
+whose cult, quite logically, is _nil_, or nearly _nil_. There are also, in
+different strata of the Inca empire, ancestor-worship, or mummy-worship,
+Totemism and polytheism, with a vague mass of _huaca = Elohim, kalou,
+wakan._
+
+Perhaps it would not be too rash to conjecture that Pachacamac is not a
+merely philosophical abstraction, but a survival of a Being like Nà-pi or
+Ahone. Cieza de Leon calls Pachacamac 'a devil,' whose name means
+'creator of the world'![17] The name, when it _was_ uttered, was spoken
+with genuflexions and signs of reverence. So closely did Pachacamac
+resemble the Christian Deity, that Cieza de Leon declares the devil to
+have forged and insisted on the resemblance![18] It was open to Spanish
+missionaries to use Pachacamac, as to the Jesuits among the Bantu to use
+Mpungu, as a fulcrum for the introduction of Christianity. They preferred
+to regard Pachacamac as a fraudulent fiend. Now Nzambi Mpungu, among the
+Bantu, is assuredly not a creation of a learned priesthood, for the Bantu
+have no learned priests, and Mpungu would be useless to the greedy
+conjurers whom they do consult, as he is not propitiated. On grounds of
+analogy, then, Pachacamac may be said to resemble a savage Supreme
+Being, somewhat etherealised either by Garcilasso or by the Amautas, the
+learned class among the subjects of the Incas. He does not seem, even so,
+much superior to the Ahone of the Virginians.
+
+We possess, however, a different account of Inca religion, from which
+Garcilasso strongly dissents. The best version is that of Christoval de
+Molina, who was chaplain of the hospital for natives, and wrote between
+1570 and 1584.[19] Christoval assembled a number of old priests and other
+natives who had taken part in the ancient services, and collected their
+evidence. He calls the Creator ('not born of woman, unchangeable
+and eternal') by the name Pachayachachi. 'Teacher of the world' and
+'Tecsiviracocha,' which Garcilasso dismisses as meaningless.[20] He also
+tells the tale of the Inca Yupanqui and the Lord of the Sun, but
+says that the Incas had already knowledge of the Creator. To Yupanqui he
+attributes the erection of a gold image of the Creator, utterly denied by
+Garcilasso.[21] Christoval declares, again contradicted by Garcilasso,
+that sacrifices were offered to the Creator. Unlike the Sun, Christoval
+says, the Creator had no woman assigned to him, 'because, as he created
+them, they all belonged to him' (p. 26), which, of course, is an idea that
+would also make sacrifice superfluous.
+
+Christoval gives prayers in Quichua, wherein the Creator is addressed as
+_Uiracocha_.
+
+Christoval assigns images, sacrifice, and even human sacrifice, to the
+Creator Uiracocha. Garcilasso denies that the Creator Pachacamac had any
+of these things, he denies that Uiracocha was the name of the Creator,
+and he denies it, knowing that the Spaniards made the assertion.[22] Who
+is right? Uiracocha, says Garcilasso, is one thing, with his sacrifices;
+the Creator, Pachacamac, without sacrifices, is another, is GOD.
+
+Mr. Markham thinks that Garcilasso, writing when he did, and not
+consciously exaggerating, was yet less trustworthy (though 'wonderfully
+accurate') than Christoval. Garcilasso, however, is 'scrupulously
+truthful.'[23] 'The excellence of his memory is perhaps best shown in
+his topographical details.... He does not make a single mistake,' in the
+topography of three hundred and twenty places! A scrupulously truthful
+gentleman, endowed with an amazing memory, and a master of his native
+language, flatly contradicts the version of a Spanish priest, who also
+appears to have been careful and honourable.
+
+I shall now show that Christoval and Garcilasso have different versions of
+the same historical events, and that Garcilasso bases his confutation of
+the Spanish theory of the Inca Creator on his form of this historical
+tradition, which follows:
+
+The Inca Yahuarhuaccac, like George II., was at odds with his Prince of
+Wales. He therefore banished the Prince to Chita, and made him serve as
+shepherd of the llamas of the Sun. Three years later the disgraced
+Prince came to Court, with what the Inca regarded as a cock-and-bull story
+of an apparition of the kind technically styled 'Borderland.' Asleep or
+awake, he knew not, he saw a bearded robed man holding a strange animal.
+The appearance declared himself as Uiracocha (Christoval's name for the
+Creator), a Child of the Sun; by no means as Pachacamac, the Creator of
+the Sun. He announced a distant rebellion, and promised his aid to the
+Prince. The Inca, hearing this narrative, replied in the tones of
+Charles II., when he said about Monmouth, 'Tell James to go to hell!'[24]
+The predicted rebellion, however, broke out, the Inca fled, the Prince
+saved the city, dethroned his father, and sent him into the country. He
+then adopted, from the apparition, the throne-name _Uiracocha,_ grew a
+beard, and dressed like the apparition, to whom he erected a temple,
+roofless, and unique in construction. Therein he had an image of the god,
+for which he himself gave frequent sittings. When the Spaniards arrived,
+bearded men, the Indians called them Uiracochas (as all the Spanish
+historians say), and, to flatter them, declared falsely that Uiracocha was
+their word for the Creator. Garcilasso explodes the Spanish etymology of
+the name, in the language of Cuzco, which he 'sucked in with his mother's
+milk.' 'The Indians said that the chief Spaniards were children of the
+Sun, to make gods of them, just as they said they were children of the
+apparition, Uiracocha.'[25] Moreover, Garcilasso and Cieza de Leon agree
+in their descriptions of the image of Uiracocha, which, both assert,
+the Spaniards conceived to represent a Christian early missionary, perhaps
+St. Bartholomew.[26] Garcilasso had seen the mummy of the Inca Uiracocha,
+and relates the whole tale from the oral version of his uncle, adding many
+native comments on the Court revolution described.
+
+To Garcilasso, then, the invocations of Uiracocha, in Christoval's
+collection of prayers, are a native adaptation to Spanish prejudice: even
+in them Pachacamac occurs.[27]
+
+Now, Christoval has got hold of a variant of Garcilasso's narrative,
+which, in Garcilasso, has plenty of humour and human nature. According to
+Christoval it was not the Prince, later Inca Uiracocha, who beheld the
+apparition, but the Inca Uiracocha's _son,_ Prince of Wales, as it were,
+of the period, later the Inca Yupanqui.
+
+Garcilasso corrects Christoval. Uiracocha saw the apparition, as Père
+Acosta rightly says, and Yupanqui was _not_ the son but the grandson of
+this Inca Uiracocha.[28] Uiracocha's own son was Pachacutec, which simply
+means 'Revolution,' 'they say, by way of by-word _Pachamcutin,_ which
+means "the world changes."'
+
+Christoval's form of the story is peculiarly gratifying in one way.
+Yupanqui saw the apparition _in a piece of crystal_, 'the apparition
+vanished, while the piece of crystal remained. The Inca took care of it,
+and they say that he afterwards saw everything he wanted in it.' The
+apparition, in human form and in Inca dress, gave itself out for the Sun;
+and Yupanqui, when he came to the throne, 'ordered a statue of the Sun to
+be made, as nearly as possible resembling the figure he had seen in the
+crystal.' He bade his subjects to 'reverence the new deity, as they had
+heretofore worshipped the Creator,'[29] who, therefore, was prior to
+Uiracocha.
+
+Interesting as a proof of Inca crystal-gazing, this legend of Christoval's
+cannot compete as evidence with Acosta and Garcilasso. The reader,
+however, must decide as to whether he prefers Garcilasso's unpropitiated
+Pachacamac, or Christoval's Uiracocha, human sacrifices, and all.[30]
+
+Mr. Tylor prefers the version of Christoval, making Pachacamac a title of
+Uiracocha.[31] He thinks that we have, in Inca religion, an example of 'a
+subordinate god' (the Sun) 'usurping the place of the supreme deity,' 'the
+rivalry between the Creator and the divine Sun.' In China, as we shall
+see, Mr. Tylor thinks, on the other hand, that Heaven is the elder god,
+and that Shang-ti, the Supreme Being, is the usurper.
+
+The truth in the Uiracocha _versus_ Pachacamac controversy is difficult to
+ascertain. I confess a leaning toward Garcilasso, so truthful and so
+wonderfully accurate, rather than to the Spanish priest. Christoval, it
+will be remarked, says that 'Chanca-Uiracocha was a _huaca_ (sacred place)
+in Chuqui-chaca.'[32] Now Chuqui-chaca is the very place where, according
+to Garcilasso, the Inca Uiracocha erected a temple to 'his Uncle, the
+Apparition.'[33] Uiracocha, then, the deity who receives human sacrifice,
+would be a late, royally introduced ancestral god, no real rival of the
+Creator, who receives no sacrifice at all, and, as he was bearded, his
+name would be easily transferred to the bearded Spaniards, whose arrival
+the Inca Uiracocha was said to have predicted. But to call several or all
+Spaniards by the name given to the Creator would be absurd. Mr. Tylor and
+Mr. Markham do not refer to the passage in which Christoval obviously gets
+hold of a wrong version of the story of the apparition.
+
+There is yet another version of this historical legend, written forty
+years after Christoval's date by Don Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui
+Salcamayhua. He ranks after Garcilasso and Christoval, but before earlier
+_Spanish_ writers, such as Acosta, who knew not Quichua. According to
+Salcamayhuia, the Inca Uiracocha was like James III., fond of architecture
+and averse to war. He gave the realm to his bastard, Urca, who was
+defeated and killed by the Chancas. Uiracocha meant to abandon the
+contest, but his legitimate son, Yupanqui, saw a fair youth on a rock, who
+promised him success in the name of the Creator, and then vanished. The
+Prince was victorious, and the Inca Uiracocha retired into private
+life. This appears to be a mixture of the stories of Garcilasso and
+Christoval.[34]
+
+It is not, in itself, a point of much importance whether the Creator was
+called Uiracocha (which, if it means anything, means 'sea of grease!'), or
+whether he was called Pachacamac, maker of the world, or by both names.
+The important question is as to whether the Creator received even human
+sacrifices (Christoval) or none at all (Garcilasso). As to Pachacamac, we
+must consult Mr. Payne, who has the advantage of being a Quichua scholar.
+He considers that Pachacamac combines the conception of a general spirit
+of living things with that of a Creator or maker of all things.
+'Pachacamac and the Creator are one and the same,' but the conception of
+Pachayachacic, 'ruler of the world,' 'belongs to the later period of the
+Incas.'[35] Mr. Payne appears to prefer Christoval's legend of the Inca
+crystal-gazer, to the rival version of Garcilasso. The Yunca form of the
+worship of Pachacamac Mr. Payne regards as an example of degradation.[36]
+He disbelieves Garcilasso's statement, that human sacrifices were not
+made to the Sun. Garcilasso must, if Mr. Payne is right, have been a
+deliberate liar, unless, indeed, he was deceived by his Inca kinsfolk.
+The reader can now estimate for himself the difficulty of knowing much
+about Peruvian religion, or, indeed, of any religion. For, if Mr. Payne
+is right about the lowest savages having no conception of God, or even of
+spirit, though the idea of a great Creator, a spirit, is one of the
+earliest efforts of 'primitive logic,' we, of course, have been merely
+fabling throughout.
+
+Garcilasso's evidence, however, seems untainted by Christian attempts to
+find a primitive divine tradition. Garcilasso may possibly be refining on
+facts, but he asks for no theory of divine primitive tradition in the case
+of Pachacamac, whom he attributes to philosophical reflection.
+
+In the following chapter we discuss 'the old Degeneration theory,' and
+contrast it with the scheme provisionally offered in this book. We have
+already observed that the Degeneration theory biasses the accounts of some
+missionaries who are obviously anxious to find traces of a Primitive
+Tradition, originally revealed to all men, but only preserved in a pure
+form by the Jews. To avoid deception by means of this bias we have chosen
+examples of savage creative beings from wide areas, from diverse ages,
+from non-missionary statements, from the least contaminated backward
+peoples, and from their secret mysteries and hymns.
+
+Thus, still confining ourselves to the American continent, we have the
+ancient hymns of the Zuñis, in no way Christianised, and never chanted in
+the presence of the Mexican Spanish, These hymns run thus: 'Before the
+beginning of the New Making, Awonawilona, the Maker and container of All,
+the All-Father, solely had being.' He then evolved all things 'by thinking
+himself outward in space.' Hegelian! but so are the dateless hymns of the
+Maoris, despite the savage mythology which intrudes into both sets of
+traditions. The old fable of Ouranos and Gaia recurs in Zuñi as in
+Maori.[37]
+
+I fail to see how Awonawilona could be developed out of the ghost of chief
+or conjurer. That in which all things potentially existed, yet who was
+more than all, is not the ghost of a conjurer or chief. He certainly is
+not due to missionary influence. No authority can be better than that of
+traditional sacred chants found among a populace which will not sing them
+before one of their Mexican masters.
+
+We have tried to escape from the bias of belief in a primitive divine
+tradition, but bias of every kind exists, and must exist. At present the
+anthropological hypothesis of ancestor-worship as the basis, perhaps (as
+in Mr. Spencer's theory) the only basis of religion, affects observers.
+
+Before treating the theory of Degeneration let us examine a case of the
+anthropological bias. The Fijians, as we learned from Williams, have
+ancestral gods, and also a singular form of the creative being, Ndengei,
+or, as Mr. Basil Thomson calls him, Degei. Mr. Thomson writes: 'It is
+clear that the Fijians humanised their gods, because they had once existed
+on earth in human form.... Like other primitive people, the Fijians
+deified their ancestors.' Yet the Fijians 'may have forgotten the names
+of their ancestors three generations back'! How in the world can you deify
+a person whom you don't remember? Moreover, only malevolent chiefs were
+deified, so apparently a Fijian god is really a well-born human
+scoundrel, so considerable that _he_ for one is not forgotten--just as if
+we worshipped the wicked Lord Lyttelton! Of course a god like Ahone could
+not be made out of such materials as these, and, in fact, we learn from
+Mr. Thomson that there are other Fijian gods of a different origin.
+
+'It is probable that there were here and there, _gods that were the
+creation of the priests that ministered to them, and were not the
+spirits of dead chiefs_. Such was the god of the Bure Tribe on the Ra
+coast, who was called Tui Laga or "Lord of Heaven." When the missionaries
+first went to convert this town they found the heathen priest their
+staunch ally. He declared that they had come to preach the same god that
+he had been preaching, the Tui Laga, and that more had been revealed to
+them than to him of the mysteries of the god.'
+
+Mr. Thomson is reminded of St. Paul at Athens, 'whom then ye ignorantly
+worship, him declare I unto you.'[38]
+
+Mr. Thomson has clearly no bias in favour of a God like our own, known to
+savages, and _not_ derived from ghost-worship. He deduces this god, Tui
+Laga, from priestly reflection and speculation. But we find such a God
+where we find no priests, where a priesthood has not been developed. Such
+a God, being usually unpropitiated by sacrifice and lucrative private
+practice, is precisely the kind of deity who does not suit a priesthood.
+For these reasons--that a priesthood 'sees no money in' a God of this
+kind, and that Gods of this kind, ethical and creative, are found where
+there are no priesthoods--we cannot look on the conception as a late one
+of priestly origin, as Mr. Thomson does, though a learned caste, like the
+Peruvian Amantas, may refine on the idea. Least of all can such a God be
+'the creation of the priests that minister to him,' when, as in Peru, the
+Andaman Isles, and much of Africa, this God is ministered to by no
+priests. Nor, lastly, can we regard the absence of sacrifice to the
+Creative Being as a mere proof that he is an ancestral ghost who 'had
+lived on earth at too remote a time;' for this absence of sacrifice occurs
+where ghosts are dreaded, but are not propitiated by offerings of food (as
+among Australians, Andamanese, and Blackfoot Indians), while the Creative
+Being is not and never was a ghost, according to his worshippers.
+
+At this point criticism may naturally remark that whether the savage
+Supreme Being is fêted, as by the Comanches, who offer puffs of smoke: or
+is apparently half forgotten, as by the Algonquins and Zulus: whether
+he is propitiated by sacrifice (which is very rare indeed), or only by
+conduct, I equally claim him as the probable descendant in evolution of
+the primitive, undifferentiated, not necessarily 'spiritual' Being of such
+creeds as the Australian.
+
+One must reply that this pedigree cannot, indeed, be historically traced,
+but that it presents none of the logical difficulties inherent in the
+animistic pedigree--namely, that the savage Supreme Being is the last and
+highest result of evolution on animistic lines out of ghosts. It does not
+run counter to the evidence universally offered by savages, that their
+Supreme Being never was mortal man. It is consistent, whereas the
+animistic hypothesis is, in this case, inconsistent, with the universal
+savage theory of Death. Finally, as has been said before, granting my
+opinion that there are two streams of religious thought, one rising in the
+conception of an undifferentiated Being, eternal, moral, and creative, the
+other rising in the ghost-doctrine, it stands to reason that the latter,
+as best adapted to everyday needs and experiences, normal and supernormal,
+may contaminate the former, and introduce sacrifice and food-propitiation
+into the ritual of Beings who, by the original conception, 'need nothing
+of ours.' At the same time, the conception of 'spirit,' once attained,
+would inevitably come to be attached to the idea of the Supreme Being,
+even though he was not at first conceived of as a spirit. We know, by our
+own experience, how difficult it has become for us to think of an eternal,
+powerful, and immortal being, except as a spirit. Yet this way of looking
+at the Supreme Being, merely as _being_, not as spirit, must have existed,
+granting that the idea of spirit has ghost for its first expression, as,
+by their very definition, the high gods of savages are not ghosts, and
+never were ghosts, but are prior to death.
+
+Here let me introduce, by way of example, a Supreme Being _not_ of the
+lowest savage level. Metaphysically he is improved on in statement,
+morally he is stained with the worst crimes of the hungry ghost-god, or
+god framed on the lines of animism. This very interesting Supreme Being,
+in a middle barbaric race, is the Polynesian Taa-roa, as described by
+Ellis in that fascinating book 'Polynesian Researches.'[39] 'Several of
+their _taata-paari_, or wise men, pretend that, according to other
+traditions, Taa-roa was only a man who was deified after death.'
+Euhemerism, in fact, is a natural theory of men acquainted with
+ancestor-worship, but a Euhemeristic hypothesis by a Polynesian thinker is
+not a statement of national belief. Taa-roa was 'uncreated, existing from
+the beginning, or from the time he emerges from the _po_, or world of
+darkness.' In the Leeward Isles Taa-roa was _Toivi_, fatherless and
+motherless from all eternity. In the highest heavens he dwells alone. He
+created the gods of polytheism, the gods of war, of peace, and so on. Says
+a native hymn, 'He was: he abode in the void. No earth, _no sky_, no men!
+He became the universe.' In the Windward Isles he has a wife, Papa the
+rock = Papa, Earth, wife of Rangi, Heaven, in Maori mythology. Thus it may
+be argued, Taa-roa is no 'primaeval theistic idea,' but merely the
+Heaven-God (Ouranos in Greece). But we may distinguish: in the Zuñi hymn
+we have the myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, but Heaven is not
+the Eternal, Awonawilona, who 'thought himself out into the void,' before
+which, as in the Polynesian hymn, 'there was no sky.'[40]
+
+Whence came the idea of Taa-roa? The Euhemeristic theory that he was a
+ghost of a dead man is absurd. But as we are now among polytheists it may
+be argued that, given a crowd of gods on the animistic model, an origin
+had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa. This would be more
+plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental
+polytheism to develop them out of. In Tahiti, _Atuas_ are gods, _Oramutuas
+tiis_ are spirits; the chief of the spirits were ghosts of warriors. These
+were mischievous: they, their images, and the skulls of the dead needed
+propitiation, and these ideas (perhaps) were reflected on to Taa-roa, to
+whom human victims were sacrificed.[41]
+
+Now this kind of horror, human sacrifice, is unknown, I think, in early
+savage religions of Supreme Beings, as in Australia, among the Bushmen,
+the Andamanese, and so on. I therefore suggest that in an advanced
+polytheism, such as that of Polynesia, the evil sacrificial rites
+unpractised by low savages come to be attached to the worship even of the
+Supreme Being. Ghosts and ghost-gods demanded food, and food was therefore
+also offered to the Supreme Being.
+
+It was found difficult, or impossible, to induce Christian converts, in
+Polynesia, to repeat the old prayers. They began, trembled, and abstained.
+They had a ritual 'for almost every act of their lives,' a thing
+unfamiliar to low savages. In fact, beyond all doubt, religious criminal
+acts, from human sacrifice to the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, increase as
+religion and culture move away from the stage of Bushmen and Andamanese to
+the stage of Aztec and Polynesian culture. The Supreme Being is succeeded
+in advancing civilisation, and under the influences of animism, by
+ruthless and insatiable ghost-gods, full of the worst human qualities.
+Thus there is what we may really call degeneration, moral and religious,
+inevitably accompanying early progress.
+
+That this is the case, that the first advances in culture _necessarily_
+introduce religious degeneration, we shall now try to demonstrate. But we
+may observe, in passing, that our array of moral or august savage supreme
+beings (the first who came to hand) will, for some reason, not be found in
+anthropological treatises on the Origin of Religion. They appear, somehow,
+to have been overlooked by philosophers. Yet the evidence for them
+is sufficiently good. Its excellence is proved by its very uniformity,
+assuredly undesigned. An old, nay, an obsolete theory--that of
+degeneration in religion--has facts at its basis, which its very
+supporters have ignored, which orthodoxy has overlooked. Thus the Rev.
+Professor Flint informs the audience in the Cathedral of St. Giles's,
+that, in the religions 'at the bottom of the religious scale,' 'it is
+always easy to see how wretchedly the divine is conceived of; how little
+conscious of his own true wants ... is the poor worshipper.' The poor
+worshipper of Baiame wishes to obey His Law, which makes, to some extent,
+for righteousness.[42]
+
+[Footnote 1: In Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13, 39; _Prim. Cult_. ii. 342.]
+
+[Footnote 2: See Preface to this edition for corrected statement.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Myths of the New World_, p. 47.]
+
+[Footnote 4: There is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including
+Smith's remarks, published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this work
+with his own MS. in the British Museum, dedicated to Bacon (Verulam). This
+MS. was edited by Mr. Major, for the Hakluyt Society, in 1849, with a
+glossary, by Strachey, of the native language. The remarks on religion are
+in Chapter VII. The passage on Ahone occurs in Strachey (1612), but _not_
+in Smith (1682), in Pinkerton. I owe to the kindness of Mr. Edmund Gosse
+photographs of the drawings accompanying the MS. Strachey's story of
+sacrifice of children (pp. 94, 95) seems to refer to nothing worse than the
+initiation into the mysteries.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, for a philological
+theory.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Compare 'The Fire Walk' in _Modern Mythology_.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Compare St. Augustine's curious anecdote in _De Cura pro
+Mortuis habenda_ about the dead and revived Curio. The founder of the new
+Sioux religion, based on hypnotism, 'died' and recovered.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Cf. Demeter.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Major North, for long the U.S. Superintendent of the Pawnees.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Schoolcraft, iii. 237.]
+
+[Footnote 11: As envisaged here, Nà-pi is not a spirit. The question
+of spirit or non-spirit has not arisen. So far, Nà-pi answers to
+Marrangarrah, the Creative Being of the Larrakeah tribe of Australians.
+'A very good Man called Marrangarrah lives in the sky; he made all living
+creatures, except black fellows. He made everything.... He never dies, and
+likes all black fellows.' He has a demiurge, Dawed (Mr. Foelsche, _apud_
+Dr. Stirling, _J.A.I_., Nov. 1894, p. 191). It is curious to observe how
+savage creeds often shift the responsibility for evil from the Supreme
+Creator, entirely beneficent, on to a subordinate deity.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Grinnell's _Blackfoot Lodge-Tales_ and _Pawnee Hero
+Stories_.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Garcilasso, i. 101.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Op. cit. i. 106.]
+
+[Footnote 15: From all this we might conjecture, like Mr. Prescott, that
+the Incas borrowed Pachacamac from the Yuncas, and etherealised his
+religion. But Mr. Clements Markham points out that 'Pachacamac is a pure
+Quichua word.']
+
+[Footnote 16: Garcilasso, ii. 446, 447.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Cieza de Leon. p.253]
+
+[Footnote 18: Markham's translation, p. 253.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Rites and Laws of the Yncas_, Markham's translation,
+p. vii.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Rites_, p. 6. Garcilasso, i. 109.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Rites_, p. 11.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Compare _Reports on Discovery of Peru,_ Introduction.]
+
+[Footnote 23: _Rites_, p. xv.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Lord Ailesbury's _Memoirs_.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Garcilasso, ii. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Cieza de Leon, p. 357.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _Rites,_ pp. 28, 29.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Acosta, lib. vi. ch. 21: Garcilasso. ii. 88, 89.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _Rites_, p. 12.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Ibid. p.54.]
+
+[Footnote 31: _Prim. Cult_. ii, 337, 338.]
+
+[Footnote 32: _Rites_, p. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Garcilasso, ii. 69.]
+
+[Footnote 34: _Rites and Laws_, p. 91 _et seq_.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Payne, i. 139.]
+
+[Footnote 36: Op. cit. i. 468. Mr. Payne absolutely rejects
+Ixtlilochitl's story of the monotheism of Nezahualcoyotl; 'Torquemada
+knows nothing of it,' i. 490.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Cushing, _Report, Ethnol. Bureau_, 1891-92, p. 379.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _J.A.I_. May 1895, pp. 341-344.]
+
+[Footnote 39: ii. 191, 1829.]
+
+[Footnote 40: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 345, 346. Ellis, ii. 193.]
+
+[Footnote 41: Ellis, ii. 221.]
+
+[Footnote 42: _The Faiths of The World_, p. 413.]
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE OLD DEGENERATION THEORY
+
+If any partisan of the anthropological theory has read so far into this
+argument, he will often have murmured to himself, 'The old degeneration
+theory!' On this Dr. Brinton remarked in 1868:
+
+'The supposition that in ancient times and in very unenlightened
+conditions, before mythology had grown, a monotheism prevailed which
+afterwards, at various times, was revived by reformers, is a belief that
+should have passed away when the delights of savage life and the praises
+of a state of nature ceased to be the theme of philosophers[1].'
+
+'The old degeneration theory' practically, and fallaciously, resolved
+itself, as Mr. Tylor says, into two assumptions--'first, that the history
+of culture began with the appearance on earth of a semi-civilised race of
+men; and second, that from this stage culture has proceeded in two
+ways--backward to produce savages, and forward to produce civilised
+men[2].' That hypothesis is false to all our knowledge of evolution.
+
+The hypothesis here provisionally advocated makes no assumptions
+at all. It is a positive fact that among some of the lowest savages
+there exists, not a doctrinal and abstract Monotheism, but a belief
+in a moral, powerful, kindly, creative Being, while this faith is found
+in juxtaposition with belief in unworshipped ghosts, totems, fetishes,
+and so on. The powerful creative Being of savage belief sanctions truth,
+unselfishness, loyalty, chastity, and other virtues. I have set forth the
+difficulties involved in the attempt to derive this Being from ghosts and
+other lower forms of belief.
+
+Now, it is mere matter of fact, and not of assumption, that the Supreme
+Being of many rather higher savages differs from the Supreme Being of
+certain lower savages by the neglect in which he is left, by the epicurean
+repose with which he is credited, and by his comparative lack of moral
+control over human conduct. In his place a mob of ghosts and spirits,
+supposed to be potent and helpful in everyday life, attract men's regard
+and adoration, and get paid by sacrifice--even by human sacrifice.
+
+Turning to races yet higher in material culture, we find a crowd of hungry
+and cruel gods.
+
+On this point Mr. Jevons remarks, in accordance with my own observation,
+that 'human sacrifice appears at a much earlier period in the rites for
+the dead than it does in the ritual of the gods.'[3] The dead chief needs
+servants and wives in Hades, who are offered to him. The Australians have
+some elements of cannibalism, but do not, as a general rule, offer any
+human victims. So far, then, ancestor-worship introduced a sadly
+'degenerate' rite, compared with the moral faith in unfed gods.
+
+To gods the human sacrifice was probably extended (in some cases) either
+by a cannibal civilised race, like the Aztecs, or by way of _piacula_, the
+god being conciliated for man's sin by the offering of what man most
+prized, the 'jealousy' of the god being appeased in a similar way.
+But these are relatively advanced conceptions, not to be found, to my
+knowledge, among the lowest and most backward races. Therefore, advance to
+the idea of spirit at one point, meant degeneration at another point, to
+the extent of human sacrifice.
+
+Thus, on looking at relatively advanced races, we find them worshipping
+polytheistic deities and ghosts of the kings just dead, who are often
+propitiated by terrible massacres of human victims, while, as in the case
+of Taa-roa, the blood spurts back even on the uncreated Creator, who was
+before earth was, or sea, sun, or sky.
+
+Undeniably the hungry, cruel gods are degenerate from the Australian
+Father in Heaven, who receives no sacrifice but that of men's lusts and
+selfishness; who desires obedience, not the fat of kangaroos; who needs
+nothing of ours; is unfed and unbribed. Thus, in this particular respect
+the degeneration of religion from the Australian or Andamanese to the
+Dinka standard--and infinitely more to the Polynesian, or Aztec, or
+popular Greek standard--is as undeniable as any fact in human history.
+
+Anthropology has only escaped the knowledge of this circumstance by laying
+down the rule, demonstrably unbased on facts, that 'the divine sanction of
+ethical laws ... belongs almost or wholly to religions above the savage
+level, not to the earlier and lower creeds;' that 'savage Animism is
+almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is
+the very mainspring of practical religion.'[4]
+
+I have argued, indeed, that the God of low savages who imparts the divine
+sanction of ethical laws is _not_ of animistic origin. But even where Mr.
+Im Thurn finds, in Guiana, nothing but Animism of the lowest conceivable
+type, he also finds in that Animism the only or most potent moral
+restraint on the conduct of men.
+
+While Anthropology holds the certainly erroneous idea that the religion of
+the most backward races is always non-moral, of course she cannot know
+that there has, in fact, been great degeneration in religion (if religion
+began on the Australian and Andamanese level, or even higher) wherever
+religion is non-moral or immoral.
+
+Again, Anthropology, while fixing her gaze on totems, on worshipped
+mummies, adored ghosts, and treasured fetishes, has not, to my knowledge,
+made a comparative study of the higher and purer religious ideas of
+savages. These have been passed by, with a word about credulous
+missionaries and Christian influences, except in the brief summary for
+which Mr. Tylor found room. In this work I only take a handful of cases of
+the higher religious opinions of savages, and set them side by side for
+purposes of comparison. Much more remains to be done in this field. But
+the area covered is wide, the evidence is the best attainable, and it
+seems proved beyond doubt that savages have 'felt after' a conception of a
+Creator much higher than that for which they commonly get credit. Now, if
+that conception is original, or is very early (and nothing in it suggests
+lateness of development), then the other elements of their faith and
+practice are degenerate.
+
+'How,' it has been asked, 'could all mankind forget a pure religion?'[5]
+That is what I now try to explain. That degeneration I would account for
+by the attractions which animism, when once developed, possessed for the
+naughty natural man, 'the old Adam.' A moral creator in need of no gifts,
+and opposed to lust and mischief, will not help a man with love-spells, or
+with malevolent 'sendings' of disease by witchcraft; will not favour one
+man above his neighbour, or one tribe above its rivals, as a reward for
+sacrifice which he does not accept, or as constrained by charms which do
+not touch his omnipotence. Ghosts and ghost-gods, on the other hand, in
+need of food and blood, afraid of spells and binding charms,[6] are a
+corrupt, but, to man, a useful constituency. Man being what he is, man was
+certain to 'go a-whoring' after practically useful ghosts, ghost-gods, and
+fetishes which he could keep in his wallet or medicine bag. For these he
+was sure, in the long run, first to neglect his idea of his Creator; next,
+perhaps, to reckon Him as only one, if the highest, of the venal rabble of
+spirits or deities, and to sacrifice to Him, as to them. And this is
+exactly what happened! If we are not to call it 'degeneration,' what are
+we to call it? It may be an old theory, but facts 'winna ding,' and are on
+the side of an old theory. Meanwhile, on the material plane, culture
+kept advancing, the crafts and arts arose; departments arose, each needing
+a god; thought grew clearer; such admirable ethics as those of the Aztecs
+were developed, and while bleeding human hearts smoked on every altar,
+Nezahuatl conceived and erected a bloodless fane to 'The Unknown God,
+Cause of Causes,' without altar or idol; and the Inca, Yupanqui, or
+another, declared that 'Our Father and Master, the Sun, must have a
+Lord.'[7]
+
+But, at this stage of culture, the luck of the state, and the interests of
+a rich and powerful clergy, were involved in the maintenance of the old,
+animistic, relatively non-moral system, as in Cuzco, Greece, and Rome.
+That popular and political regard for the luck of the state, that
+priestly self-interest (quite natural), could only be swept away by the
+moral monotheism of Christianity or of Islam. Nothing else could do it. In
+the case of Christianity, the central and most potent of many combined
+influences, apart from the Life and Death of Our Lord, was the moral
+Monotheism of the Hebrew religion of Jehovah.
+
+Now, it is undeniable that Jehovah, at a certain period of Hebrew history,
+had become degraded and anthropomorphized, far below Darumulun, and
+Puluga, and Pachacamac, and Ahone, as conceived of in their purest form,
+and in the high mood of savage mysteries which yet contain so much that is
+grotesque. Even the Big Black Man of the Fuegians is on a higher level (as
+_we_ reckon morals), when he forbids the slaying of a robber enemy, than
+certain examples of early Hebrew conduct. But our knowledge of the
+Fuegians is lamentably scanty.
+
+Again, traces of human sacrifice appear in the ritual of Israel, and it is
+only relatively late that the great prophets, justly declaring Jehovah to
+be indifferent to the blood of bulls and rams, try to bring back his
+service to that of the unpropitiated, unbought Dendid, or Ahone, or
+Pundjel. Here is degeneration, even in Israel. How the conception of
+Jehovah arose in Israel, whether it was a revival of a half-obliterated
+idea, such as we find among low savages; or whether it was borrowed from
+some foreign creed; or was the result of meditation on the philosophical
+Supreme Being of high Egyptian theology, is another question. The Biblical
+statement leans to the first alternative. Jehovah, not by that name, had
+been the God of Israel's fathers. The question will be discussed later;
+but, unless new facts are discovered, we must accept the version of the
+Pentateuch, or take refuge in conjecture.
+
+Not only is there degeneration from the Australian conception of
+Mungan-gnaur, at its best, to the conception of the Semitic gods in
+general, but, 'humanly speaking,' if religion began in a pure form among
+low savages, degeneration was inevitable. Advancing social conditions
+compelled men into degeneration. Mungan-ngaur is, so far, in line with
+our own ideas of divinity because he is not localised. He dwelleth not in
+temples made with hands; it is not likely that he should, when his
+worshippers have neither house, tent, nor tabernacle. As Mr. Robertson
+Smith says, 'where the God had a house or a temple, we recognise the work
+of men who were no longer pure nomads, but had begun to form fixed homes.'
+By the nature of Australian society, a deity could not be tied to a
+temple, and temple-ritual, and consequent myths to explain that ritual,
+could not arise. Nor could Darumulun be attached to a district, just as
+'the nomad Arabs could not assimilate the conception of a god as a
+land-owner, and apply it to their own tribal deities, for the simple
+reason that in the desert private property in land was unknown.'[8]
+
+Darumulun is thus not capable of degenerating into 'a local god, as
+_Baal_, or lord of the land,' because this 'involves a series of ideas
+unknown to the primitive life of the savage huntsman,' like the widely
+spread Murring tribes.[9]
+
+Nor could Darumulun be tied down to a place in Semitic fashion, first by
+manifesting himself there, therefore by receiving an altar of sacrifice
+there, and in the end a sanctuary, for Darumulun receives no sacrifice
+at all.
+
+Again, the scene of the Bora could not become a permanent home of
+Darumulun, because, when the rites are over, the effigy of the god is
+scrupulously destroyed. Thus Darumulun, in his own abode 'beyond the sky,'
+can 'go everywhere and do everything' (is omnipresent and omnipotent),
+dwells in no earthly places, has no temple, nor tabernacle, nor sacred
+mount, nor, like Jehovah, any limit of land.[10]
+
+The early Hebrew conception of Jehovah, then, is infinitely more
+conditioned, practically, by space, than the Supreme Being, 'The Master,'
+in the conception of some Australian blacks.
+
+'By a prophet like Isaiah the residence of Jehovah in Zion is almost
+wholly dematerialised.... Conceiving Jehovah as the King of Israel, he
+necessarily conceives His kingly activity as going forth from the capital
+of the nation.'[11]
+
+But nomad hunter tribes, with no ancestor-worship, no king and no capital,
+cannot lower their deity by the conditions, or limit him by the
+limitations, of an earthly monarchy.
+
+In precisely the same way, Major Ellis proves the degeneration of deity in
+Africa, so far as being localised in place of being the Universal God,
+implies degeneration, as it certainly does to our minds. By being attached
+to a given hill or river 'the gods, instead of being regarded as being
+interested in the whole of mankind, would eventually come to be regarded
+as being interested in separate tribes or nations alone.'
+
+To us Milton seems nobly Chauvinistic when he talks of what God has done
+by 'His English.' But this localised and essentially degenerate conception
+was inevitable, as soon as, in advancing civilisation, the god who had
+been 'interested in the whole of [known] mankind' was settled on a hill,
+river, or lagoon, amidst a nation of worshippers.
+
+In the course of the education of mankind, this form of degeneration
+(abstractly so considered) was to work, as nothing else could have worked,
+towards the lofty conception of universal Deity. For that conception
+was only brought into practical religion (as apart from philosophic
+speculation) by the union between Israel and the God of Sinai and Zion.
+The Prophets, recognising in the God of Sinai, their nation's God--One
+to whom righteousness was infinitely dearer than even his Chosen
+People--freed the conception of God from local ties, and made it
+overspread the world.
+
+Mr. Robertson Smith has pointed out, again, the manner in which the
+different political development of East and West affected the religion of
+Greece and of the Semites. In Greece, monarchy fell, at an early period,
+before the aristocratic houses. The result was 'a divine aristocracy of
+many gods, only modified by a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the
+not very effective sovereignty' (or _prytany_) 'of Zeus. In the East the
+national god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway.'[12] Australia
+escaped polytheistic degeneracy by having no aristocracy, as in Polynesia,
+where aristocracy, as in early Greece, had developed polytheism. Ghosts
+and spirits the Australians knew, but not polytheistic gods, nor
+departmental deities, as of war, agriculture, art. The savage had no
+agriculture, and his social condition was not departmental. In yet another
+way, political advance produces religious degeneration, if polytheism be
+degeneration from the conception of one relatively supreme moral being.
+To make a nation, several tribes must unite. Each has its god, and the
+nation is apt to receive them all, equally, into its Pantheon. Thus, if
+worshippers of Baiame, Pundjel, and Darumulun coalesced into a nation,
+we might find all three gods living together in a new polytheism. In fact,
+granting a relatively pure starting-point, degeneration from it must
+accompany every step of civilisation, to a certain distance.
+
+Unlike Semitic gods, Darumulun receives no sacrifice. As we have said, he
+has no kin with ghosts, and their sacrifices could not be carried on into
+his cult, if Waitz-Gerland (vi. 811) are right in saying that the
+Australians have no ancestor-worship. The Kurnai ghosts 'were believed to
+live upon plants,'[13] which are not offered to them. Chill ghosts, unfed
+by men, would come to waning camp-fires and batten on the broken meats.
+The Ngarego and Wolgal held, more handsomely, that Tharamulun (Darumulun)
+met the just departed spirit 'and conducted it to its future home beyond
+the sky.'[14] Ghosts might also accompany relics of the body, such as the
+dead hand, carried about by the family, who would wave the black fragment
+at the dreaded Aurora Borealis, crying, 'Send it away!' I am unacquainted
+with any sacrifices to ancestral ghosts among this people who cannot long
+remember their ancestors, consequently the practice has not been refracted
+on their supreme Master's cult. In the cult of Darumulun, and of other
+highest gods of lowest savages, nothing answers to the Hebrew technical
+priestly word for sacrifice, 'food of the deity.'[15] Nobody feeds Puluga,
+nobody fed Ahone. We hear of no Fuegian sacrifices. Mr. Robertson Smith
+says: 'In all religions in which the gods have been developed out of
+totems [worshipped animals and other things regarded as akin to human
+stocks] the ritual act of laying food before the deity is perfectly
+intelligible.' Pundjel, an Australian Supreme Being, is mixed up with
+animals in some myths, but it is not easy to see how such Supreme Beings
+as he could be 'developed out of totems'! I am not aware, again, that any
+Australian tribe feeds the animals who are its totems, so Darumulun could
+not, and did not inherit sacrifice through them. Mr. Robertson Smith had
+a celebrated theory that cereal sacrifice is a tribute to a god, while
+sacrifice of a beast or man is an act of communion with the god.[16] Men
+and gods dined together.[17] 'The god himself was conceived of as a being
+of the same stock as his comrades.' Beasts were also of the same stock,
+one beast, say a lobster, was of the same blood as a lobster kin, and its
+god.[18] Occasionally the sacred beast of the kin, usually not to be slain
+or tasted, is 'eaten as a kind of mystic sacrament a most dubious
+fact.'[19]
+
+Now, there is, I believe, some evidence, lately collected if not
+published, which makes in favour of the eating of totems by Australians,
+at a certain very rare and solemn mystery. It would not even surprise me
+('from information received') if a very deeply initiated person were
+occasionally slain, as the highest degree of initiation, on certain most
+unusual occasions. This remains uncertain, but I have at present no
+evidence that, either by one road or another, either from ghost-feeding or
+totem-feeding, or feeding on totems, any Australian Supreme Being receives
+any sacrifice at all. Much less, as among Pawnees and Semitic peoples (to
+judge from certain traces), is the Australian Supreme Being a cause of and
+partaker in human sacrifice.[20] The horrible idea of the Man who is the
+God, and is eaten in the God's honour, occurs among polytheistic Aztecs,
+on a high level of material culture, not among Australians, Andamanese,
+Bushmen, or Fuegians.[21]
+
+Thus, in religion, the Darumulun, or other Supreme Being of the lowest
+known savages, men roaming wild, when originally met, on a continent
+peopled by older kinds of animals than ours, was (as we regard purity) on
+a higher plane by far than the gods of Greeks and Semites in their
+earliest known myths. Setting mythology aside and looking only at cult,
+the God of the Murring or the Kurnai, whose precepts soften the heart,
+who knows the heart's secrets, who inculcates chastity, respect of age,
+unselfishness, who is not bound by conditions of space or place, who
+receives no blood of slaughtered man or beast, is a conception from which
+the ordinary polytheistic gods of infinitely more polite peoples are
+frankly degenerate. The animistic superstitions wildly based on the belief
+in the soul have not soiled him, and the social conditions of aristocracy,
+agriculture, architecture, have not made him one in a polytheistic
+crowd of rapacious gods, nor fettered him as a Baal to his estate, nor
+localised him in a temple built with hands. He cannot appear as a 'God of
+Battles;' no _Te Deum_ can be sung to him for victory in a cause perhaps
+unjust, for he is the Supreme Being of a certain group of allied local
+tribes. One of these tribes has no more interest with him than another,
+and the whole group do not, as a body, wage war on another alien group.
+The social conditions of his worshippers, then, preserve Darumulun from
+the patent blots on the escutcheon of gods among much more advanced races.
+
+Once more, the idea of Animism admits of endless expansion. A spirit can
+be located anywhere, in any stone, stick, bush, person, hill, or river. A
+god made on the animistic model can be assigned to any department of
+human activity, down to sports, or lusts, or the province of Cloacina.
+Thus religion becomes a mere haunted and pestilential jungle of beliefs.
+But the theistic conception, when not yet envisaged as spiritual, cannot
+be subdivided and _éparpillé_. Thus, from every point of view, and on
+every side, Animism is full of the seeds of religious degeneration, which
+do not and cannot exist in what I take to be the earliest known form of
+the theistic conception: that of a Being about whose metaphysical
+nature--spirit or not spirit--no questions were asked, as Dr. Brinton long
+ago remarked.
+
+That conception alone could neither supply the moral motive of 'a soul to
+be saved,' nor satisfy the metaphysical instinct of advancing mankind. To
+meet these wants, to supply 'soul,' with its moral stimulus, and to
+provide a phrase or idea under which the Deity could be envisaged (i.e. as
+a _spirit_) by advancing thought, Animism was necessary. The blending of
+the theistic and the animistic beliefs was indispensable to religion.
+But, in the process of animistic development under advancing social
+conditions, degeneration was necessarily implied. Degeneration of the
+theistic conception for a while, therefore, occurred. The facts are the
+proofs; and only contradictory facts, in sufficient quantity, can
+annihilate the old theory of Degeneration when it is presented in this
+form.
+
+It mast be repeated that on this theory an explanation is given of what
+the old Degeneration hypothesis does not explain. Granting a primal
+religion relatively pure in its beginnings, why did it degenerate?
+
+Mr. Max Mullet, looking on religion as the development of the sentiment of
+the Infinite, regards fetishism as a secondary and comparatively late form
+of belief. We find it, he observes, in various forms of Christianity;
+Christianity, therefore, is primary there, relic worship is secondary.
+Religion beginning, according to him, in the sense of the infinite, as
+awakened in man by tall trees, high hills, and so on, it advances to the
+infinite of space and sky, and so to the infinitely divine. This is
+primary: fetishism is secondary. Arguing elsewhere against this idea, I
+have asked: What was the _modus_ of degeneration which produced similar
+results in Christianity, and in African and other religions? How did it
+work? I am not aware that Mr. Max Müller has answered this question.
+But how degeneration worked--namely, by Animism supplanting Theism--is
+conspicuously plain on our theory.
+
+Take the early chapters of Genesis, or any savage cosmogonic myth you
+please. Deathless man is face to face with the Creator. He cannot
+degenerate in religion. He cannot offer sacrifice, for the Creator
+obviously needs nothing, and again, as there is no death, he cannot slay
+animals for the Creator. But, in one way or another, usually by breach of
+a taboo, Death enters the world. Then comes, by process of evolution,
+belief in hungry spirits, belief in spirits who may inhabit stones or
+sticks; again there arise priests who know how to propitiate spirits
+and how to tempt them into sticks and stones. These arts become lucrative
+and are backed by the cleverest men, and by the apparent evidence of
+prophecies by convulsionaries. Thus every known kind of degeneration in
+religion is inevitably introduced as a result of the theory of Animism. We
+do not need an hypothesis of Original Sin as a cause of degeneration, and,
+if Mr. Max Müller's doctrine of the Infinite were _viable_, we have
+supplied, in Animism, under advancing social conditions, what he does not
+seem to provide, a cause and _modus_ of degeneration. Fetishism would
+thus be really 'secondary,' _ex hypothesi_, but as we nowhere find
+Fetishism alone, without the other elements of religion, we cannot say,
+historically, whether it is secondary or not. Fetishism logically needs,
+in some of its aspects, the doctrine of spirits, and Theism, in what we
+take to be its earliest known form, does not logically need the doctrine
+of spirits as given matter. So far we can go, but not farther, as to the
+fact of priority in evolution. Nevertheless we meet, among the most
+backward peoples known to us, among men just emerged from the palaeolithic
+stage of culture, men who are involved in dread of ghosts, a religious
+Idea which certainly is not born of ghost-worship, for by these men,
+ancestral ghosts are not worshipped.
+
+In their hearts, on their lips, in their moral training we find (however
+blended with barbarous absurdities, and obscured by rites of another
+origin) the faith in a Being who created or constructed the world; who was
+from time beyond memory or conjecture; who is primal, who makes for
+righteousness, and who loves mankind. This Being has not the notes of
+degeneration; his home is 'among the stars,' not in a hill or in a house.
+To him no altar smokes, and for him no blood is shed.
+
+'God, that made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is lord
+of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is
+worshipped with men's hands, as though He needed any thing ... and hath
+made of one blood all nations of men ... that they should seek the Lord,
+if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far
+from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.'
+
+That the words of St. Paul are literally true, as to the feeling after a
+God who needs not anything at man's hands, the study of anthropology seems
+to us to demonstrate. That in this God 'we have our being,' in so far
+as somewhat of ours may escape, at moments, from the bonds of Time and the
+manacles of Space, the earlier part of this treatise is intended to
+suggest, as a thing by no means necessarily beyond a reasonable man's
+power to conceive. That these two beliefs, however attained (a point on
+which we possess no positive evidence), have commonly been subject to
+degeneration in the religions of the world, is only too obvious.
+
+So far, then, the nature of things and of the reasoning faculty does not
+seem to give the lie to the old Degeneration theory.
+
+To these conclusions, as far as they are matters of scientific opinion, we
+have been led by nothing but the study of anthropology.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Myths of the New World_, p. 44.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Prim. Cult_. i. 35.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Introduction_, p. 199; also p. 161.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 360,361.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Prof. Menzies, _History of Religion_, p. 23.]
+
+[Footnote 6: [Greek: legomenai theion anagchai.] Porphyry.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ixtlilochitl. Balboa, _Hist. du Pérou_, p. 62.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 104, 105.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Op. cit. p. 106.]
+
+[Footnote 10: On the Glenelg some caves and mountain tops are haunted or
+holy. Waitz, vi. 804, No authority cited.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Religion of Semites_, p. 110.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Rel. Sem_. p. 71.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Howitt, _J.A.T_. 1884, p. 187.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Op. cit. p. 188.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Rel. Sem_. p. 207.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Rel. Sem_. p. 225.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Op. cit. p. 247.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Op. cit. p. 269.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Op. cit. p. 277.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Op. cit. p. 343. Citing Gen. xxii 2 Kings xxi. 6, Micah
+vi. 7, 2 Kings iii. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 21: I mean, does not occur to my knowledge. New evidence is
+always upsetting anthropological theories.]
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THEORIES OF JEHOVAH
+
+All speculation on the curly history of religion is apt to end in the
+endeavour to see how far the conclusions can be made to illustrate the
+faith of Israel. Thus, the theorist who believes in ancestor-worship as
+the key of all the creeds will see in Jehovah a developed ancestral
+ghost, or a kind of fetish-god, attached to a stone--perhaps an ancient
+sepulchral stele of some desert sheikh.
+
+The exclusive admirer of the hypothesis of Totemism will find evidence for
+his belief in worship of the golden calf and the bulls. The partisan of
+nature-worship will insist on Jehovah's connection with storm, thunder,
+and the fire of Sinai. On the other hand, whoever accepts our suggestions
+will incline to see, in the early forms of belief in Jehovah, a shape of
+the widely diffused conception of a Moral Supreme Being, at first (or, at
+least, when our information begins) envisaged in anthropomorphic form,
+but gradually purged of all local traits by the unexampled and unique
+inspiration of the great Prophets. They, as far as our knowledge extends,
+were strangely indifferent to the animistic element in religion, to the
+doctrine of surviving human souls, and so, of course, to that element
+of Animism which is priceless--the purification of the soul in the light
+of the hope of eternal life. Just as the hunger after righteousness of the
+Prophets is intense, so their hope of finally sating that hunger
+in an eternity of sinless bliss and enjoyment of God is confessedly
+inconspicuous. In short, they have carried Theism to its austere
+extreme--'though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him'--while unconcerned
+about the rewards of Animism. This is certainly a strange result of a
+religion which, according to the anthropological theory, has Animism for
+its basis.
+
+We therefore examine certain forms of the animistic hypothesis as applied
+to account for the religion of Israel. The topic is one in which special
+knowledge of Hebrew and other Oriental languages seems absolutely
+indispensable; but anthropological speculators have not been Oriental
+scholars (with rare exceptions), while some Oriental scholars have
+borrowed from popular anthropology without much critical discrimination.
+These circumstances must be our excuse for venturing on to this difficult
+ground.
+
+It is probably impossible for us to trace with accuracy the rise of the
+religion of Jehovah. 'The wise and learned' dispute endlessly over dates
+of documents, over the amount of later doctrine interpolated into
+the earlier texts, over the nature, source, and quantity of foreign
+influence--Chaldaean, Accadian, Egyptian, or Assyrian. We know that Israel
+had, in an early age, the conception of the moral Eternal; we know that,
+at an early age, that conception was contaminated and anthropomorphised;
+and we know that it was rescued, in a great degree, from this corruption,
+while always retaining its original ethical aspect and sanction. Why
+matters went thus in Israel and not elsewhere we know not, except that
+such was the will of God in the mysterious education of the world. How
+mysterious that education has been is best known to all who have studied
+the political and social results of Totemism. On the face of it a
+perfectly crazy and degrading belief--on the face of it meant for nothing
+but to make the family a hell of internecine hatred--Totemism rendered
+possible--nay, inevitable--the union of hostile groups into large and
+relatively peaceful tribal societies. Given the materials as we know them,
+we never should have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it
+should thus have been done. But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally
+ignorant of the conditions of the problem.
+
+An example of anthropological theory concerning Jehovah was put forth by
+Mr. Huxley.[1] Mr. Huxley's general idea of religion as it is on the
+lowest known level of material culture--through which the ancestors of
+Israel must have passed like other people--has already been criticised.
+He denied to the most backward races both cult and religious sanction of
+ethics. He was demonstrably, though unconsciously, in error as to the
+facts, and therefore could not start from the idea that Israel, in the
+lowest historically known condition of savagery, possessed, or, like other
+races, might possess, the belief in an Eternal making for righteousness.
+'For my part,' he says, 'I see no reason to doubt that, like the
+rest of the world, the Israelites had passed through a period of mere
+ghost-worship, and had advanced through ancestor-worship and Fetishism and
+Totemism to the theological level at which we find them in the Books of
+Judges and Samuel.'[2]
+
+But why does he think the Israelites did all this? The Hebrew ghosts,
+abiding, according to Mr. Huxley, in a rather torpid condition in Sheol,
+would not be of much practical use to a worshipper. A reference in
+Deuteronomy xxvi. 14 (Deuteronomy being, _ex hypothesi_, a late pious
+imposture) does not prove much. The Hebrew is there bidden to remind
+himself of the stay of his ancestors in Egypt, and to say, 'Of the
+hallowed things I have not given aught for the dead'--namely, of the
+tithes dedicated to the Levites and the poor. A race which abode for
+centuries among the Egyptians, as Israel did--among a people who
+elaborately fed the _kas_ of the departed--might pick up a trace of a
+custom, the giving of food for the dead, still persevered in by St. Monica
+till St. Ambrose admonished her. But Mr. Huxley is hard put to it for
+evidence of ancestor-worship or ghost-worship in Israel when he looks for
+indications of these rites in 'the singular weight attached to the
+veneration of parents in the Fourth Commandment.'[3] The _Fourth_
+Commandment, of course, is a slip of the pen. He adds: 'The Fifth
+Commandment, as it stands, would be an excellent compromise between
+ancestor-worship and Monotheism.' Long may children practise this
+excellent compromise! It is really too far-fetched to reason thus: 'People
+were bidden to honour their parents, as a compromise between Monotheism
+and ghost-worship.' Hard, hard bestead is he who has to reason in that
+fashion! This comes of 'training in the use of the weapons of precision of
+science.'
+
+Mr. Huxley goes on: 'The Ark of the Covenant may have been a relic of
+ancestor-worship;' 'there is a good deal to be said for that speculation.'
+Possibly there is, by way of the valuable hypothesis that Jehovah was a
+fetish stone which had been a grave-stone, or perhaps a _lingam_, and was
+kept in the Ark on the plausible pretext that it was the two Tables of
+the Law!
+
+However, Mr. Huxley really finds it safer to suppose that references to
+ancestor-worship in the Bible were obliterated by late monotheistic
+editors, who, none the less, are so full and minute in their descriptions
+of the various heresies into which Israel was eternally lapsing, and must
+not be allowed to lapse again. Had ancestor-worship been a _péché mignon_
+of Israel, the Prophets would have let Israel hear their mind on it.
+
+The Hebrews' indifference to the departed soul is, in fact, a puzzle,
+especially when we consider their Egyptian education--so important an
+element in Mr. Huxley's theory.
+
+Mr. Herbert Spencer is not more successful than Mr. Huxley in finding
+ancestor-worship among the Hebrews. On the whole subject he writes:
+
+'Where the levels of mental nature and social progress are lowest, we
+usually find, along with an absence of religious ideas generally, an
+absence, or very slight development, of ancestor-worship.... Cook
+[Captain Cook], telling us what the Fuegians were before contact
+with Europeans had introduced foreign ideas, said there were no
+appearances of religion among them; and we are not told by him or others
+that they were ancestor-worshippers.'[4]
+
+Probably they are not; but they do possess a Being who reads their hearts,
+and who certainly shows no traces of European ideas. If the Fuegians
+are not ancestor-worshippers, this Being was not developed out of
+ancestor-worship.
+
+The evidence of Captain Cook, no anthropologist, but a mariner who saw and
+knew little of the Fuegians, is precisely of the sort against which Major
+Ellis warns us.[5] The more a religion consists in fear of a moral
+guardian of conduct, the less does it show itself, by sacrifice or rite,
+to the eyes of Captain Cook, of his Majesty's ship _Endeavour_. Mr.
+Spencer places the Andamanese on the same level as the Fuegians, 'so far
+as the scanty evidence may be trusted.' We have shown that (as known
+to Mr. Spencer in 1876) it may not be trusted at all; the Andamanese
+possessing a moral Supreme Being, though they are not, apparently,
+ancestor-worshippers. The Australians 'show us not much persistence in
+ghost-propitiation,' which, if it exists, ceases when the corpses are tied
+up and buried, or after they are burned, or after the bones, carried about
+for a while, are exposed on platforms. Yet many Australian tribes possess
+a moral Supreme Being.
+
+In fact ghost-worship, in Mr. Spencer's scheme, cannot be fairly well
+developed till society reaches the level of 'settled groups whose
+burial-places are in their midst.' Hence the development of a moral
+Supreme Being among tribes _not_ thus settled, is inconceivable, on
+Mr. Spencer's hypothesis.[6] By that hypothesis, 'worshipped ancestors,
+according to their remoteness, were regarded as divine, semi-divine, and
+human.'[7] Where we find, then, the Divine Being among nomads who do not
+remember their great-grandfathers, the Spencerian theory is refuted by
+facts. We have the effect, the Divine Being, without the cause, worship of
+ancestors.
+
+Coming to the Hebrews, Mr. Spencer argues that 'the silence of their
+legends (as to ancestor-worship) is but a negative fact, which may be as
+misleading as negative facts usually are.' They are, indeed; witness
+Mr. Spencer's own silence about savage Supreme Beings. But we may fairly
+argue that if Israel had been given to ancestor-worship (as might partly
+be surmised from the mystery about the grave of Moses) the Prophets would
+not have spared them for their crying. The Prophets were unusually
+outspoken men, and, as they undeniably do scold Israel for every other
+kind of conceivable heresy, they were not likely to be silent about
+ancestor-worship, if ancestor-worship existed. Mr. Spencer, then, rather
+heedlessly, though correctly, argues that 'nomadic habits are unfavourable
+to evolution of the ghost-theory.'[8] Alas, this gives away the whole
+case! For, if all men began as nomads, and nomadic habits are unfavourable
+even to the ordinary ghost, how did the Australian and other nomads
+develop the Supreme Being, who, _ex hypothesi_, is the final fruit of the
+ghost-flower? If you cannot have 'an established ancestor-worship' till
+you abandon nomadic habits, how, while still nomadic, do you evolve a
+Supreme Being? Obviously not out of ancestor-worship.
+
+Mr. Spencer then assigns, as evidence for ancestor-worship in Israel,
+mourning dresses, fasting, the law against self-bleeding and cutting off
+the hair for the dead, and the text (Deut. xxvi. 14) about 'I have not
+given aught thereof for the dead.' 'Hence, the conclusion must be that
+ancestor-worship had developed as far as nomadic habits allowed, before it
+was repressed by a higher worship.'[9] But whence came that higher worship
+which seems to have intervened immediately after the cessation of nomadic
+habits?
+
+There are obvious traces of grief expressed in a primitive way among the
+Hebrews. 'Ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your
+eyes for the dead' (Deut. xiv. 1). 'Neither shall men lament for them,
+nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them; neither shall men
+tear themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead' (by
+way of counter-irritant to grief); 'neither shall men give them the cup
+of consolation to drink for their father or their mother,' because the
+Jews were to be removed from their homes.[10] 'Ye shall not make any
+cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you.'[11]
+
+It may be usual to regard inflictions, such as cutting, by mourners, as
+sacrifices to the ghost of the dead. But one has seen a man strike himself
+a heavy blow on receiving news of a loss _not_ by death, and I venture to
+fancy that cuttings and gashings at funerals are merely a more violent
+form of appeal to a counter-irritant of grief, and, again, a token of
+recklessness caused by a sorrow which makes void the world. One of John
+Nicholson's native adorers killed himself on news of that warrior's death,
+saying, 'What is left worth living for?' This was not a sacrifice to the
+Manes of Nicholson. The sacrifice of the mourner's hair, as by Achilles,
+argues a similar indifference to personal charm. Once more, the text in
+Psalm cvi. 28, 'They joined themselves unto Baal-Peor, and ate the
+sacrifices of the dead,' is usually taken by commentators as a reference
+to the ritual of gods who are no gods. But it rather seems to indicate an
+acquiescence in foreign burial rites. All this additional evidence does
+not do much to prove ancestor-worship in Israel, though the secrecy of the
+burial of Moses, 'in a valley of the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor;
+but no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day,' may indicate a dread of
+a nascent worship of the great leader.[12] The scene of the defection in
+Psalm cvi., Beth-peor, is indicated in Numbers xxv., where Israel runs
+after the girls and the gods of Moab: 'And Moab called the people unto the
+sacrifices of their gods; and the people did eat, and bowed down to their
+gods. And Israel joined himself unto Baal-peor.' Psalm cvi. is obviously a
+later restatement of this addiction to the Moabite gods, and the Psalm
+adds 'they ate the sacrifices of the dead.'
+
+It is plain that, for whatever reason, ancestor-worship among the Hebrews
+was, at the utmost, rudimentary. Otherwise it must have been clearly
+denounced by the Prophets among the other heresies of Israel. Therefore,
+as being at the most rudimentary, ancestor-worship in Israel could not be
+developed at once into the worship of Jehovah.
+
+Though ancestor-worship among the Hebrews could not be fully developed,
+according to Mr. Spencer, because of their nomadic habits, it _was_ fully
+developed, according to the Rev. A.W. Oxford. 'Every family, like every
+old Roman and Greek family, was firmly held together by the worship of its
+ancestors, the hearth was the altar, the head of the family the priest....
+The bond which kept together the families of a tribe was its common
+religion, the worship of its reputed ancestor. The chief of the tribe was,
+of course, the priest of the cult.' Of course; but what a pity that Mr.
+Huxley and Mr. Spencer omitted facts so invaluable to their theory! And
+how does the Rev. Mr. Oxford know? Well, 'there is no direct proof,'
+oddly enough, of so marked a feature in Hebrew religion but we are
+referred to 1 Sam. xx. 29 and Judges xviii. 19. 1 Sam. xx. 29 makes
+Jonathan say that David wants to go to a family sacrifice, that is, a
+family dinner party. This hardly covers the large assertions made by
+Mr. Oxford. His second citation is so unlucky as to contradict his
+observation that 'of course' the chief of the tribe was the priest of the
+cult. Micah, in Judges xvii., xviii., is _not_ the chief of his tribe
+(Ephraim), neither is he even the priest in his own house. He 'consecrated
+one of his own sons who became his priest,' till he got hold of a casual
+young Levite, and said, 'Be unto me a _father_ and a priest,' for ten
+shekels _per annum_, a suit of clothes, and board and lodging.
+
+In place, then, of any remote reference to a chief's being priest of his
+ancestral ghosts, we have here a man of one tribe who is paid rather
+handsomely to be family chaplain to a member of another tribe. Some
+moss-troopers of the tribe of Dan then kidnapped this valuable young
+Levite, and seized a few idols which Micah had permitted himself to make.
+And all this, according to our clerical authority, is evidence for
+ancestor-worship![13]
+
+All this appears to be derived from some incoherent speculations of Stade.
+For example, that learned German cites the story of Micah as a proof that
+the different tribes or clans had different religions. This _must_ be so,
+because the Danites asked the young Levite whether it was not better to be
+priest to a clan than to an individual? It is as if a patron offered a
+rich living to somebody's private chaplain, saying that the new position
+was more creditable and lucrative. This would hardly prove a difference of
+religion between the individual and the parish.[14]
+
+Mr. Oxford next avers that 'the earliest form of the Israelite religion
+was Fetishism or Totemism.' This is another example of Stade's logic.
+Finding, as he believes, names suggestive of Totemism in Simeon, Levi,
+Rachel, and so on, Stade leaps to the conclusion that Totemism in Israel
+was prior to anything resembling monotheism. For monotheism, he argues,
+could not give the germs of the clan or tribal organisation, while Totemism
+could do so. Certainly it could, but as, in many regions (America,
+Australia), we find Totemism and the belief in a benevolent Supreme Being
+co-existing among savages, when first observed by Europeans, we cannot
+possibly say dogmatically whether a rough monotheism or whether Totemism
+came first in order of evolution. This holds as good of Israel (if once
+totemistic) as it does of Pawnees or Kurnai. Stade has overlooked these
+well-known facts, and his opinion filters into a cheap hand-book, and is
+set in examinations![15]
+
+We also learn from Mr. Oxford's popular manual of German Biblical
+conjecture that 'Jehovah was not represented as a loving Father, but as a
+Being easily roused to wrath,' a thing most incident to loving fathers.
+
+Again, Mr. Oxford avers that 'the old Israelites knew no distinction
+between physical and moral evil.... The conception of Jehovah's holiness
+had nothing moral in it' (p. 90). This rather contradicts Wellhausen: 'In
+all ancient primitive peoples ... religion furnishes a motive for law and
+morals; in the case of none did it become so with such purity and power as
+in that of the Israelites.'[16]
+
+We began by examining Mr. Huxley's endeavours to find traces of
+ancestor-worship (in his opinion the origin of Jehovah-worship) among the
+Israelites. We next criticised Mr. Spencer's efforts in the same quest,
+and the more dogmatic assertions of Mr. Oxford and Stade. We now return to
+Mr. Huxley's account of the evolution from ghost-cult to the cult of
+Jehovah.
+
+From the history of the Witch of Endor, which Mr. Huxley sees no reason to
+regard as other than a sincere statement of what really occurred, he
+gathers that the Witch cried out, 'I see Elohim.' These Elohim proved to
+be the phantasm of the dead Samuel. Moved by this hallucination the Witch
+uttered a veridical premonition, totally adverse to her own interests, and
+uncommonly dangerous to her life. This is, psychically, interesting.
+The point, however, is that _Elohim_ is a term equivalent to Red
+Indian _Wakan_, Fijian _Kahu_, Maori or Melanesian _Mana_, meaning the
+'supernatural,' the vaguely powerful--in fact X. This particular example
+of _Elohim_ was a phantasm of the dead, but _Elohim_ is also used of the
+highest Divine Being, therefore the highest Divine Being is of the same
+genus as a ghost--so Mr. Huxley reasons. 'The difference which was
+supposed to exist between the different Elohim was one of degree, not of
+kind.'[17]
+
+'If Jehovah was thus supposed to differ only in degree from the
+undoubtedly zoomorphic or anthropomorphic "gods of the nations," why is it
+to be assumed that he also was not thought to have a human shape?' He
+_was_ thought to have a human shape, at one time, by some theorists: no
+doubt exists on that head. That, however, is not where we demur. We demur
+when, because an hallucination of the Witch of Endor (probably still
+incompletely developed) is called by her _Elohim_, therefore the highest
+_Elohim_ is said by Mr. Huxley to differ from a ghost only in degree, not
+in kind. _Elohim_, or _El_, the creative, differs from a ghost in kind,
+because he, in Hebrew belief, never was a ghost, he is immortal and
+without beginning.
+
+Mr. Huxley now enforces his theory by a parallel between the religion of
+Tonga and the religion of Israel under the Judges. He quotes Mariner,[18]
+whose statement avers that there is a supreme Tongan being: 'of his
+origin they had no idea, rather supposing him to be eternal. His name is
+Tá-li-y-Tooboo = "Wait-there-Tooboo."' 'He is a great chief from the top
+of the sky down to the bottom of the earth.' He, and other '_original_
+gods' of his making, are carefully and absolutely discriminated from the
+_atua_, which are 'the human soul after its separation from the body.' All
+Tongan gods are _atua_ (_Elohim_), but all _atua_ are not 'original gods,'
+unserved by priests, and unpropitiated by food or libation, like the
+highest God, Tá-li-y-Tooboo, the Eternal of Tonga. 'He occasionally
+inspires the How' (elective King), but often a How is not inspired at all
+by Tá-li-y-Tooboo, any more than Saul, at last, was inspired by Jehovah.
+
+Surely there is a difference _in kind_ between an eternal, immortal God,
+and a ghost, though both are _atua_, or both are _Elohim_--the unknown X.
+
+Many people call a ghost 'supernatural;' they also call God
+'supernatural,' but the difference between a phantasm of a dead man and
+the Deity they would admit, I conceive, to be a difference of kind. We
+have shown, or tried to show, that the conceptions of 'ghost' and 'Supreme
+Being' are different, not only in kind, but in origin. The ghost comes
+from, and depends on, the animistic theory; the Supreme Being, as
+originally thought of, does not. All Gods are _Elohim, kalou, wakan_; all
+_Elohim, kalou, wakan_ are not Gods.
+
+A ghost-god should receive food or libation. Mr. Huxley says that
+Tá-li-y-Tooboo did so. 'If the god, like Tá-li-y-Tooboo, had no priest,
+then the chief place was left vacant, and was supposed to be occupied by
+the god himself. _When the first cup of Kava was filled_, the mataboole
+who acted as master of the ceremonies said, "Give it to your god," and it
+was offered, though only as a matter of form.'[19]
+
+This is incorrect. In the case of Tá-li-y-Tooboo _'there is no cup filled
+for the god.'_[20] _'Before any cup is filled_ the man by the side of the
+bowl says: "The Kava is in the cup"' (which it is not), 'and the mataboole
+answers, "Give it to your god;"' but the Kava is _not_ in the cup, and the
+Tongan Eternal receives no oblation.
+
+The sacrifice, says Mr. Huxley, meant 'that the god was either a deified
+ghost, or, at any rate, a being of like nature to these.'[21] But as
+Tá-li-y-Tooboo had no sacrifice, contrary to Mr. Huxley's averment, he was
+_not_ 'a deified ghost, or a being of like nature to these.' To the lower,
+non-ghostly Tongan gods the animistic habit of sacrifice had been
+extended, but not yet to the Supreme Being.
+
+Ah, if Mr. Gladstone, or the Duke of Argyll, or some bishop had made a
+misstatement of this kind, how Mr. Huxley would have crushed him! But it
+is a mere error of careless reading, such as we all make daily.
+
+It is manifest that we cannot prove Jehovah to be a ghost by the parallel
+of a Tongan god, who, by ritual and by definition, was _not_ a ghost. The
+proof therefore rests on the anthropomorphised pre-prophetic accounts, and
+on the ritual, of Jehovah. But man naturally 'anthropises' his deities: he
+does not thereby demonstrate that they were once ghosts.
+
+As regards the sacrifices to Jehovah, the sweet savour which he was
+supposed to enjoy (contrary to the opinion of the Prophets), these
+sacrifices afford the best presumption that Jehovah was a ghost-god, or a
+god constructed on ghostly lines.
+
+But we have shown that among the lowest races neither are ghosts
+worshipped by sacrifice, nor does the Supreme Being, Darumulun or Puluga,
+receive food offerings. We have also instanced many Supreme Beings
+of more advanced races, Ahone, and Dendid, and Nyankupon, who do not sniff
+the savour of any offerings. If then (as in the case of Taa-roa), a
+Supreme Being _does_ receive sacrifice, we may argue that a piece of
+animistic ritual, not connected with the Supreme Being in Australia or
+Andaman, not connected with his creed in Virginia or Africa (where
+ghost-gods do receive sacrifice), may in other regions be transferred from
+ghost-gods to the Supreme Being, who never was a ghost. There seems to
+be nothing incredible or illogical in the theory of such transference.
+
+On a God who never was a ghost men may come to confer sacrifices (which
+are not made to Baiame and the rest) because, being in the habit of thus
+propitiating one set of bodiless powers, men may not think it civil or
+safe to leave another set of powers out. By his very nature, man must
+clothe all gods with some human passions and attributes, unless, like a
+large number of savages, he leaves his high God severely alone, and is the
+slave of fetishes and spectres. But that practice makes against the
+ghost-theory.
+
+In the attempt to account thus, namely by transference, for the sacrifices
+to Jehovah, we are met by a difficulty of our own making. If the
+Israelites did not sacrifice to ancestors (as we have shown that there is
+very scant reason for supposing that they did), how could they transfer to
+Jehovah the rite which, by our hypothesis, they are not proved to have
+offered to ancestors?
+
+This is certainly a hard problem, harder (or perhaps easier) because we
+know so very little of the early history of the Hebrews. According to
+their own traditions, Israel had been in touch with all manner of races
+much more advanced than themselves in material culture, and steeped in
+highly developed polytheistic Animism. According to their history, the
+Israelites 'went a-whoring' incorrigibly after strange gods. It is
+impossible, perhaps, to disentangle the foreign and the native elements.
+
+It may therefore be tentatively suggested that early Israel had its Ahone
+in a Being perhaps not yet named Jehovah. Israel entertained, however,
+perhaps by reason of 'nomadic habits,' only the scantiest concern about
+ancestral ghosts. We then find an historical tradition of secular contact
+between Israel and Egypt, from which Israel emerges with Jehovah for God,
+and a system of sacrifices. Regarding Jehovah as a revived memory of
+the moral Supreme Being whom Israel must have known in extremely remote
+ages (unless Israel was less favoured than Australians, Bushmen, or
+Andamanese), we might look on the sacrifices to him as an adaptation from
+the practices of religion among races more settled than Israel, and more
+civilised.[22]
+
+Speculation on subjects so remote must be conjectural, but our suggestion
+would, perhaps, account for sacrifices to Jehovah, paid by a race
+which, by reason of 'nomadic habits,' was never much given to
+ancestor-worship, but had been in contact with great sacrificing,
+polytheistic civilisations. Mr. Huxley, however, while he seems to slur
+the essential distinction between ghost-gods and the Eternal, grants,
+later, that 'there are very few people(s?) without additional gods,
+which cannot, with certainty, be accounted for as deified ancestors.'
+Tá-li-y-Tooboo, of course, is one of these gods, as is Jehovah. Mr. Huxley
+gives no theory of _how_ these gods came into belief, except the
+suggestion that 'the polytheistic theology has become modified by the
+selection of the cosmic or tribal god, as the only god to whom worship is
+due on the part of that nation,' without prejudice to the right of other
+nations to worship other gods.[23] This is 'monolatry,' and 'the ethical
+code, often of a very high order, comes into closer relation with the
+theological creed,' _why_, we are not informed. Nor do we learn out of
+what polytheistic deities Jehovah was selected, nor for what reason. The
+hypothesis, as usual, breaks down on the close relation between the
+ethical code and the theological creed, among low savages, with a
+relatively Supreme Being, but without ancestor-worship, and without
+polytheistic gods from whom to select a heavenly chief.
+
+Whence came the moral element in the idea of Jehovah? Mr. Huxley supposes
+that, during their residence in the land of Goshen (and _a fortiori_
+before it), the Israelites 'knew nothing of Jehovah.'[24] They were
+polytheistic idolaters. This follows, apparently, from Ezekiel xx. 5:
+'In the day when I chose Israel, and lifted up mine hand unto the seed of
+the house of Jacob, _and made myself known unto them_ in the land of
+Egypt.' The Biblical account is that the God of Moses's fathers, the God
+of Abraham, enlightened Moses in Sinai, giving his name as 'I am that I
+am' (Exodus iii. 6, 14; translation uncertain). We are to understand that
+Moses, a religious reformer, revived an old, and, in the Egyptian bondage,
+a half-obliterated creed of the ancient nomadic Beni-Israel. They were no
+longer to 'defile themselves with the idols of Egypt,' as they had
+obviously done. We really know no more about the matter. Wellhausen says
+that Jehovah was 'originally a family or tribal god, either of the family
+of Moses or of the tribe of Joseph.' How a family could develop a Supreme
+Being all to itself, we are not informed, and we know of no such analogous
+case in the ethnographic field. Again, Jehovah was 'only a special name of
+El, current within a powerful circle.' And who was El?[25] 'Moses was not
+the first discoverer of the faith.' Probably not, but Mr. Huxley seems to
+think that he was.
+
+Wellhausen's and other German ideas filter into popular traditions, as we
+saw, through 'A Short Introduction to the History of Ancient Israel'
+(pp. 19, 20), by the Rev. A.W. Oxford, M.A., Vicar of St. Luke's, Soho.
+Here follows Mr. Oxford's undeniably 'short way with Jehovah.' 'Moses was
+the founder of the Israelite religion. Jehovah, his family or tribal god,
+perhaps originally the God of the Kenites, was taken as a tribal god by
+all the Israelite tribes.... That Jehovah was not the original god of
+Israel' (as the Bible impudently alleges) 'but was the god of the Kenites,
+we see mainly from Deut. xxxiii. 2, Judges v. 4, 5, and from the history
+of Jethro, who, according to Judges i. 16, was a Kenite.'
+
+The first text says that, according to Moses, 'the Lord came from Sinai,'
+rose up from Seir, and shone from Mount Paran. The second text mentions
+Jehovah's going up out of Seir and Sinai. The third text says that Jethro,
+Moses's Kenite (or Midianite) father-in-law, dwelt among the people of
+Judah; Jethro being a priest of Midian. How all this proves that 'Moses
+was a great impostor,' as the poet says, and that Jehovah was not 'the
+original God of Israel,' but (1) Moses's family or tribal god, or (2) 'the
+god of the Kenites,' I profess my inability to comprehend.
+
+Wellhausen himself had explained Jehovah as 'a family or tribal god,
+either of the family of Moses' (tribe of Levi) 'or of the tribe of
+Joseph.' It seems to be all one to Mr. Oxford whether Jehovah was a god
+of Moses's tribe or quite the reverse, 'a Kenite god.' Yet it really
+makes a good deal of difference! For in a complex of tribes, speaking one
+language, it is to the last degree unexampled (within my knowledge) that
+one tribe, or family, possesses, all to itself, a family god who is also
+the Creator and is later accepted as such by all the other tribes. One may
+ask for instances of such a thing in any known race, in any stage of
+culture. Peru will not help us--not the Creator, Pachacamac, but the Sun,
+is the god of the Inca family. If, on the other hand, Jehovah was a Kenite
+god, the Kenites were a half-Arab Semitic people connected with Israel,
+and may very well have retained traditions of a Supreme Being which, in
+Egypt, were likely to be dimmed, as Exodus asserts, by foreign religions.
+The learned Stade, to be sure, may disbelieve in Israel's sojourn in
+Egypt, but that revolutionary opinion is not necessarily binding on us and
+involves a few difficulties.
+
+Have critics and manual-makers no knowledge of the science of comparative
+religion? Are they unaware that peoples infinitely more backward than
+Israel was at the date supposed have already moral Supreme Beings
+acknowledged over vast tracts of territory? Have they a tittle of positive
+evidence that early Israel was benighted beyond the darkness of Bushmen,
+Andamanese, Pawnees, Blackfeet, Hurons, Indians of British Guiana, Dinkas,
+Negroes, and so forth? Unless Israel had this rare ill-luck (which Israel
+denies) of course Israel must have had a secular tradition, however dim,
+of a Supreme Being. We must ask for a single instance of a family or
+tribe, in a complex of semi-barbaric but not savage tribes of one
+speech, owning a private deity who happened to be the Maker and Ruler of
+the world, and, as such, was accepted by all the tribes. Jehovah came out
+from Sinai, because, there having been a Theophany at Sinai, that mountain
+was regarded as one of his seats.[26]
+
+We have seen that it seemed to make no difference to Mr. Oxford whether
+Jehovah was a god of Moses's family or tribe or a Kenite god. The former
+(with the alternative of _Joseph's_ family or tribal god) is Wellhausen's
+theory. The latter is Stade's.[27] Each is inconsistent with the other;
+Wellhausen's fancy is inconsistent with all that we know of religious
+development: Stade's is hopelessly inconsistent with Exodus iv. 24-26,
+where Moses's Kenite wife reproaches him for a ceremony of his, not of
+her, religion. Therefore the Kenite differed from the Hebrew _sacra_.
+
+The passage is very extraordinary, and is said by critics to be very
+archaic. After the revelation of the Burning Bush, Jehovah met Moses and
+his Kenite wife, Zipporah, and their child, at a khan. Jehovah was
+anxious to slay Moses, nobody ever knew why, so Zipporah appeased
+Jehovah's wrath by circumcising her boy _with a flint_. 'A bloody husband
+art thou to me,' she said, 'because of the circumcision'--an Egyptian,
+but clearly not a Kenite practice. Whatever all this may mean, it does not
+look as if Zipporah expected such rites as circumcision in the faith of a
+Kenite husband, nor does it favour the idea that the _sacra_ of Moses were
+of Kenite origin.
+
+Without being a scholar, or an expert in Biblical criticism, one may
+protest against the presentation to the manual-reading intellectual middle
+classes of a theory so vague, contradictory, and (by all analogy) so
+impossible as Mr. Oxford collects from German writers. Of course, the
+whole subject, so dogmatically handled, is mere matter of dissentient
+opinion among scholars. Thus M. Renan derives the name of Jehovah from
+Assyria, from 'Aramaised Chaldaeanism.'[28] In that case the name was long
+anterior to the residence in Egypt. But again, perhaps Jehovah was a local
+god of Sinai, or a provincial deity in Palestine.[29] He was known to very
+ancient sages, who preferred such names as El Shaddai and Elohim. In
+short, we have no certainty on the subject.[30]
+
+I need hardly say, perhaps, that I have no antiquated prejudice against
+Biblical criticism. Assuredly the Bible must be studied like any other
+collection of documents, linguistically, historically, and in the light of
+the comparative method. The leading ideas of Wellhausen, for example, are
+conspicuous for acumen: the humblest layman can see that. But one may
+protest against criticising the Bible, or Homer, by methods like those
+which prove Shakspeare to have been Bacon. One must protest, too, against
+the presentation of inconsistent and probably baseless critical hypotheses
+in the dogmatic brevity of cheap handbooks.
+
+Yet again, whence comes the moral element in Jehovah? Mr. Huxley thinks
+that it possibly came from the ethical practice and theory of Egypt. In
+the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 'a sort of Guide to Spirit Land,' there
+are moral chapters; the ghost tells his judges in Amenti what sins he has
+_not_ committed. Many of these sins are forbidden in the Ten Commandments.
+
+They are just as much forbidden in the nascent morality of savage peoples.
+Moses did not need the Book of the Dead to teach him elementary morals.
+From the mysteries of Mtanga he might have learned, also, had he been
+present, the virtue of unselfish generosity. If the creed of Jehovah, or
+of El, retained only as much of ethics as is under divine sanction among
+the Kurnai, adaptation from the Book of the Dead was superfluous.
+
+The care for the departed, the ritual of the Ka, the intense
+pre-occupation with the future life, which, far more than its morality,
+are the essential characteristics of the Book of the Dead--Israel cared
+for none of these animistic things, brought none of these, or very little
+of these, out of the land of Egypt. Moses was certainly very eclectic; he
+took only the morality of Egypt. But as Mr. Huxley advances this opinion
+tentatively, as having no secure historical authority about Moses, it
+hardly answers our question, Whence came the moral element in Jehovah? One
+may surmise that it was the survival of the primitive divinely sanctioned
+ethics of the ancient savage ancestors of the Israelite, known to them,
+as to the Kurnai, before they had a pot, or a bronze knife, or seed to
+sow, or sheep to herd, or even a tent over their heads. In the counsels of
+eternity Israel was chosen to keep burning, however obscured with smoke
+of sacrifice, that flame which illumines the darkest places of the earth,
+'a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel'--a
+flame how litten a light whence shining, history cannot inform us, and
+anthropology can but conjecture. Here scientific nescience is wiser than
+the cocksureness of popular science, with her ghosts and fetish-stones,
+and gods that sprang from ghosts, which ghosts, however, could not be
+developed, owing to nomadic habits.
+
+It appears, then, if our general suggestion meets with any acceptance,
+that what occurred in the development of Hebrew religion was precisely
+what the Bible tells us did occur. This must necessarily seem highly
+paradoxical to our generation; but the whole trend of our provisional
+system makes in favour of the paradox. If savage nomadic Israel had the
+higher religious conceptions proved to exist among several of the lowest
+known races, these conceptions might be revived by a leader of genius.
+They might, in a crisis of tribal fortunes, become the rallying point of a
+new national sentiment. Obscured, in some degree, by acquaintance with
+'the idols of Egypt,' and restricted and localised by the very national
+sentiment which they fostered, these conceptions were purified and widened
+far beyond any local, tribal, or national restrictions--widened far as the
+_flammantia moenia mundi_--by the historically unique genius of the
+Prophets. Blended with the doctrine of our Lord, and recommended by the
+addition of Animism in its pure and priceless form--the reward of faith,
+hope, and charity in eternal life--the faith of Israel enlightened the
+world.
+
+All this is precisely what occurred, according to the Old and New
+Testaments. All this is just what, on our hypothesis, might be expected to
+occur if, out of the many races which, in their most backward culture, had
+a rude conception of a Moral Creative Being, relatively supreme, one race
+endured the education of Israel, showed the comparative indifference of
+Israel to Animism and ghost-gods, listened to the Prophets of Israel, and
+gave birth to a greater than Moses and the Prophets.
+
+To this result the Logos, as Socrates says, has led us, by the path of
+anthropology.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Op. cit. p. 361.]
+
+[Footnote 3:_ Science and Hebrew Tradition_. p. 308.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prin. Soc_. p. 306.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _The Tshi-speaking Races_, p. 183.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Some Australian tribes have cemeteries, and I have found one
+native witness, King Billy, to the celebration of the mysteries near one of
+these burying-places. I have not discovered other evidence to this effect,
+though I have looked for it. The spot selected is usually 'near the camp,'
+and the place for so large a camp in chosen, naturally, where the supply
+of food is adequate.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Cf. the Aryans, _Principles of Sociology_, p. 314.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Principles_, p. 316.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Ibid. p. 317.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Jeremiah xvi. 6, 7.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Leviticus xix. 28.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Deuteronomy xxxiv. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Short Introduction to History of Ancient Israel_, pp.
+83, 84.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Stade i 403.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Stade, i. 406.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Wellhausen, _History of Israel_, p. 437. Mr. Oxford's book
+is only noticed here because it is meant for a popular manual. As Mr.
+Henry Foker says, 'it seems a pity that the clergy should interfere in
+these matters.']
+
+[Footnote 17: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 299.]
+
+[Footnote 18: II. 127.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 331.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Mariner, ii. 205.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Op. cit. p. 335.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Of course, it in understood that Israel (in the dark
+backward and abysm of time) may also have been totemistic, like the
+Australians, as texts pointed out by Mr. Robertson Smith seem to hint.
+There was also worship of teraphim, respect paid to stones and trees, and
+so forth.]
+
+[Footnote 23: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 349.]
+
+[Footnote 24: P. 351.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _History of Israel_, p. 443 note.]
+
+[Footnote 26: _Religion of Semites_.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, i. 180.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Histoire du Peuple d'Israel_, citing Schrader, p. 23.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Op. cit. p. 85]
+
+[Footnote 30: See Professor Robertson's _Early Religion of Israel_ for a
+list of these conjectures, and, generally, for criticisms of the
+occasional vagaries of critics.]
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+We may now glance backward at the path which we have tried to cut through
+the jungles of early religions. It is not a highway, but the track
+of a solitary explorer; and this essay pretends to be no more than a
+sketch--not an exhaustive survey of creeds. Its limitations are obvious,
+but may here be stated. The higher and even the lower polytheisms are only
+alluded to in passing, our object being to keep well in view the
+conception of a Supreme, or practically Supreme, Being, from the lowest
+stages of human culture up to Christianity. In polytheism that conception
+is necessarily obscured, showing itself dimly either in the _Prytanis_,
+or President of the Immortals, such as Zeus; or in Fate, behind and above
+the Immortals; or in Mr. Max Müller's _Henotheism_, where the god
+addressed--Indra, or Soma, or Agni--is, for the moment, envisaged as
+supreme, and is adored in something like a monotheistic spirit; or,
+finally, in the etherealised deity of advanced philosophic speculation.
+
+It has not been necessary, for our purpose, to dwell on these civilised
+religions. Granting our hypothesis of an early Supreme Being among
+savages, obscured later by ancestor-worship and ghost-gods, but not
+often absolutely lost to religious tradition, the barbaric and the
+civilised polytheisms easily take their position in line, and are easily
+intelligible. Space forbids a discussion of all known religions; only
+typical specimens have been selected. Thus, nothing has been said of the
+religion of the great Chinese empire. It appears to consist, on its
+higher plane, of the worship of Heaven as a great fetish-god--a worship
+which may well have begun in days, as Dr. Brinton says, 'long ere man had
+asked himself, "Are the heavens material and God spiritual?"'--perhaps,
+for all we know, before the idea of 'spirit' had been evolved. Thus, if it
+contains nothing more august, the Chinese religion is, so far, beneath
+that of the Zuñis, or the creed in Taa-roa, in Beings who are eternal, who
+were before earth was or sky was. The Chinese religion of Heaven is also
+coloured by Chinese political conditions; Heaven (Tien) corresponds to the
+Emperor, and tends to be confounded with Shang-ti, the Emperor above. 'Dr.
+Legge charges Confucius,' says Mr. Tylor, 'with an inclination to
+substitute, in his religious teaching, the name of Tien, Heaven, for that
+known to more ancient religion, and used in more ancient books--Shang-ti,
+the personal ruling deity.' If so, China too has its ancient Supreme
+Being, who is not a divinised aspect of nature.
+
+But Mr. Tylor's reading, in harmony with his general theory, is different:
+
+'It seems, rather, that the sage was, in fact, upholding the tradition of
+the ancient faith, thus acting according to the character on which he
+prided himself--that of a transmitter, not a maker, a preserver of old
+knowledge, not a new revealer.'[1]
+
+This, of course, is purely a question of evidence, to be settled by
+Sinologists. If the personal Supreme Being, Shang-ti, occupies in older
+documents the situation held by Tien (Heaven) in Confucius's later system,
+why are we to say that Confucius, by putting forward Heaven in place of
+Shang-ti, was restoring an older conception? Mr. Tylor's affection for his
+theory leads him, perhaps, to that opinion; while my affection for my
+theory leads me to prefer documentary evidence in its favour.
+
+The question can only be settled by specialists. As matters stand, it
+seems to me probable that ancient China possessed a Supreme Personal
+Being, more remote and original than Heaven, just as the Zuñis do. On
+the lower plane, Chinese religion is overrun, as everyone knows, by
+Animism and ancestor-worship. This is so powerful that it has given rise
+to a native theory of Euhemerism. The departmental deities of Chinese
+polytheism are explained by the Chinese on Euhemeristic principles:
+
+'According to legend, the War God, or Military Sage, was once, in human
+life, a distinguished soldier; the Swine God was a hog-breeder who lost
+his pigs and died of sorrow; the God of Gamblers was _un décavé_.'[2]
+
+These are not statements of fact, but of Chinese Euhemeristic theory. On
+that hypothesis, Confucius should now be a god; but of course he is not;
+his spirit is merely localised in his temple, where the Emperor worships
+him twice a year as ancestral spirits are worshipped.
+
+Every theorist will force facts into harmony with his system, but I do not
+see that the Chinese facts are contrary to mine. On the highest plane is
+either a personal Supreme Being, Shang-ti, or there is Tien, Heaven (with
+Earth, parent of men), neither of them necessarily owing, in origin,
+anything to Animism. Then there is the political reflection of the Emperor
+on Religion (which cannot exist where there is no Emperor, King, or Chief,
+and therefore must be late), there is the animistic rabble of spirits
+ancestral or not, and there is departmental polytheism. The spirits are,
+of course, fed and furnished by men in the usual symbolical way. Nothing
+shows or hints that Shang-ti is merely an imaginary idealised first
+ancestor. Indeed, about all such explanations of the Supreme Being (say
+among the Kurnai) as an idealised imaginary first ancestor, M. Réville
+justly observes as follows: 'Not only have we seen that, in wide regions
+of the uncivilised world, the worship of ancestors has invaded a domain
+previously occupied by "Naturism" and Animism properly so called, that it
+is, therefore, posterior to these; but, farther, we do not understand, in
+Mr. Spencer's system, why, in so many places, the first ancestor is the
+Maker, if not the Creator of the world, Master of life and death, and
+possessor of divine powers, not held by any of his descendants. This
+proves that it was not the first ancestor who became God, in the belief of
+his descendants, but much rather the Divine Maker and Beginner of all,
+who, in the creed of his adorers, became the first ancestor.'[3]
+
+Our task has been limited, in this way, mainly to examination of
+the religion of some of the very lowest races, and of the highest
+world-religions, such as Judaism. The historical aspect of Christianity,
+as arising in the Life, Death, and Resurrection of our Lord, would demand
+a separate treatise. This would, in part, be concerned with the attempts
+to find in the narratives concerning our Lord, a large admixture of the
+mythology and ritual connected with the sacrificed _Rex Nemorensis_, and
+whatever else survives in peasant folk-lore of spring and harvest.[4]
+
+After these apologies for the limitations of this essay, we may survey the
+backward track. We began by showing that savages may stumble, and have
+stumbled, on theories not inconsistent with science, but not till
+recently discovered by science. The electric origin of the Aurora Borealis
+(whether absolutely certain or not) was an example; another was the
+efficacy of 'suggestion,' especially for curative purposes. It was,
+therefore, hinted that, if savages blundered (if you please) into a belief
+in God and the Soul, however obscurely envisaged, these beliefs were not
+therefore necessarily and essentially false. We then stated our purpose of
+examining the alleged supernormal phenomena, savage or civilised, which,
+on Mr. Tylor's hypothesis, help to originate the conception of 'spirits.'
+We defended the nature of our evidence, as before anthropologists, by
+showing that, for the savage belief in the supernormal phenomena, we have
+exactly the kind of evidence on which all anthropological science reposes.
+The relative weakness of that evidence, our need of more and better
+evidence, we would be the very last to deny, indeed it is part of our
+case. Our existing evidence will hardly support any theory of religion.
+Anyone who is in doubt on that head has only to read M. Réville's 'Les
+Religions des Peuples Non-Civilisés,' under the heads 'Mélanésiens,'
+'Mincopies,' 'Les Australiens' (ii. 116-143), when he will observe that
+this eminent French authority is ignorant of the facts about these races
+here produced. In 1883 they had not come within his ken. Such minute and
+careful inquiries by men closely intimate with the peoples concerned, as
+Dr. Codrington's, Mr. Hewitt's, Mr. Man's, and the authorities compiled by
+Mr. Brough Smyth, were unfamiliar to M. Réville, Thus, in turn, new facts,
+or facts unknown to us, may upset my theory. This peril is of the essence
+of scientific theorising on the history of religion.
+
+Having thus justified our evidence for the savage _belief_ in supernormal
+phenomena, as before anthropologists, we turned to a court of
+psychologists in defence of our evidence for the _fact_ of exactly the
+same supernormal phenomena in civilised experience. We pointed out that
+for subjective psychological experiences, say of telepathy, we had
+precisely the same evidence as all non-experimental psychology must and
+does rest upon. Nay, we have even experimental evidence, in experiments in
+thought-transference. We have chiefly, however, statements of subjective
+experience. For the coincidence of such experience with unknown events we
+have such evidence as, in practical life, is admitted by courts of law.
+
+Experimental psychology, of course, relies on experiments conducted under
+the eyes of the expert, for example, by hypnotism or otherwise, under Dr.
+Hack Tuke, Professor James, M. Richet, M. Janet. The evidence is
+the conduct rather than the statements of the subject. There is
+also physiological experiment, by vivisection (I regret to say) and
+post-mortem dissection. But non-experimental psychology reposes on the
+self-examination of the student, and on the statements of psychological
+experiences made to him by persons whom he thinks he can trust. The
+psychologist, however, if he be, as Mr. Galton says, 'unimaginative in the
+strict but unusual sense of that ambiguous word,' needs Mr. Galton's 'word
+of warning.' He is asked 'to resist a too frequent tendency to assume that
+the minds of every other sane and healthy person must be like his own. The
+psychologist should inquire into the minds of others as he should into
+those of animals of different races, and be prepared to find much to which
+his own experience can afford little if any clue.'[5] Mr. Galton had to
+warn the unimaginative psychologist in this way, because he was about to
+unfold his discovery of the faculty which presents numbers to some minds
+as visualised coloured numerals, 'so vivid as to be undistinguishable from
+reality, except by the aid of accidental circumstances.'
+
+Mr. Galton also found in his inquiries that occasional hallucinations of
+the sane are much more prevalent than he had supposed, or than science had
+ever taken into account. All this was entirely new to psychologists,
+many of whom still (at least many popular psychologists of the press)
+appear to be unacquainted with the circumstances. One of them informed me,
+quite gravely, that '_he_ never had an hallucination,' therefore--_his_
+mind being sane and healthy--the inference seemed to be that no sane and
+healthy mind was ever hallucinated. Mr. Galton has replied to _that_
+argument! His reply covers, logically, the whole field of psychological
+faculties little regarded, for example, by Mr. Sully, who is not exactly
+an imaginative psychologist.
+
+It covers the whole field of automatism (as in automatic writing) perhaps
+of the divining rod, certainly of crystal visions and of occasional
+hallucinations, as Mr. Galton, in this last case, expressly declares.
+Psychologists at least need not be told that such faculties cannot,
+any more than other human faculties, be always evoked for study and
+experiment. Our evidence for these faculties and experiences, then, is
+usually of the class on which the psychologist relies. But, when the
+psychologist, following Leibnitz, Sir William Hamilton, and Kant,
+discusses the Subconscious (for example, knowledge, often complex and
+abundant, unconsciously acquired) we demonstrated by examples that the
+psychologist will contentedly repose on evidence which is not evidence at
+all. He will swallow an undated, unlocalised legend of Coleridge, reaching
+Coleridge on the testimony of rumour, and told at least twenty years after
+the unverified occurrences. Nay, the psychologist will never dream of
+procuring contemporary evidence for such a monstrous statement as that
+an ignorant German wench unconsciously acquired and afterwards
+subconsciously reproduced huge cantles of dead languages, by virtue of
+having casually heard a former master recite or read aloud from Hebrew and
+Greek books. This legend do psychologists accept on no evidence at all,
+because it illustrates a theory which is, doubtless, a very good theory,
+though, in this case, carried to an extent 'imagination boggles at.'
+
+Here the psychologist may reply that much less evidence will content him
+for a fact to which he possesses, at least, analogies in accredited
+experience, than for a fact (say telepathic crystal-gazing) to which _he_
+knows, in experience, nothing analogous. Thus, for the mythical German
+handmaid, he has the analogy of languages learned in childhood, or
+passages got up by rote, being forgotten and brought back to ordinary
+conscious memory, or delirious memory, during an illness, or shortly
+before death. Strong in these analogies, the psychologist will venture to
+accept a case of language _not_ learned, but reproduced in delirious
+memory, on no evidence at all. But, not possessing analogies for
+telepathic crystal-gazing, he will probably decline to examine ours.
+
+I would first draw his attention to the difference between revived memory
+of a language once known (Breton and Welsh in known examples), or learned
+by rote (as Greek, in an anecdote of Goethe's), and verbal reproduction
+of a language _not_ known or learned by rote but overheard--each passage
+probably but once--as somebody recited fragments. In this instance (that
+of the mythical maid) 'the difficulty ... is that the original impressions
+had not the strength--that is, the distinctness--of the reproduction. An
+unknown language overheard is a mere sound....'[6]
+
+The distinction here drawn is so great and obvious that for proof of the
+German girl's case we need better evidence than Coleridge's rumour of a
+rumour, cited, as it is, by Hamilton, Maudsley, Carpenter, Du Prel, and
+the common run of manuals.
+
+Not that I deny, _a priori_, the possibility of Coleridge's story. As Mr.
+Huxley says, 'strictly speaking, I am unaware of anything that has a right
+to the title of an "impossibility," except a contradiction in terms.'[7]
+To the horror of some of his admirers, Mr. Huxley would not call the
+existence of demons and demoniacal possession 'impossible.'[8] Mr. Huxley
+was no blind follower of Hume. I, too, do not call Coleridge's tale
+'impossible,' but, unlike the psychologists, I refuse to accept it on
+'Bardolph's security.' And I contrast their conduct, in swallowing
+Coleridge's legend, with their refusal (if they do refuse) to accept the
+evidence for the automatic writing of not-consciously-known languages (as
+of eleventh-century French poetry and prose by Mr. Schiller), or their
+refusal (if they do refuse) to look at the evidence for telepathic
+crystal-gazing, or any other supernormal exhibitions of faculty, attested
+by living and honourable persons.
+
+I wish I saw a way for orthodox unimaginative psychology out of its
+dilemma.
+
+After offering to anthropologists and psychologists these considerations,
+which I purposely reiterate, we examined historically the relations of
+science to 'the marvellous,' showing for example how Hume, following his
+_a priori_ theory of the impossible, would have declined to investigate,
+because they were 'miraculous,' certain occurrences which, to Charcot,
+were ordinary incidents in medical experience.
+
+We next took up and criticised the anthropological theory of religion as
+expounded by Mr. Tylor. We then collected from his work a series of
+alleged supernormal phenomena in savage belief, all making for the
+foundation of animistic religion. Through several chapters we pursued the
+study of these phenomena, choosing savage instances, and setting beside
+them civilised testimony to facts of experience. Our conclusion was that
+such civilised experiences, if they occurred, as they are universally said
+to do, among savages, would help to originate, and would very strongly
+support the savage doctrine of souls, the base of religion in the theory
+of English anthropologists. But apart from the savage doctrine of
+'spirits' (whether they exist or not), the evidence points to the
+existence of human faculties not allowed for in the current systems of
+materialism.
+
+We next turned from the subject of supernormal experiences to the admitted
+facts about early religion. Granting the belief in souls and ghosts and
+spirits, however attained, how was the idea of a Supreme Being to be
+evolved out of that belief? We showed that, taking the creed as found in
+the lowest races, the processes put forward by anthropologists could
+not account for its evolution. The facts would not fit into, but
+contradicted, the anthropological theory. The necessary social conditions
+postulated were not found in places where the belief is found. Nay, the
+necessary social conditions for the evolution even of ancestor-worship
+were confessedly not found where the supposed ultimate result of
+ancestor-worship, the belief in a Supreme Being, flourished abundantly.
+
+Again, the belief in a Supreme Being, _ex hypothesi_ the latest in
+evolution, therefore the most potent, was often shelved and half
+forgotten, or neglected, or ridiculed, where the belief in Animism (_ex
+hypothesi_ the earlier) was in full vigour. We demonstrated by facts that
+Anthropology had simplified her task by ignoring that essential feature,
+_the prevalent alliance of ethics with religion_, in the creed of the
+lowest and least developed races. Here, happily, we have not only the
+evidence of an earnest animist, Mr. Im Thurn, on our side, but that of a
+distinguished Semitic scholar, the late Mr. Robertson Smith. 'We see that
+even in its rudest forms Religion was a moral force, the powers that man
+reveres were on the side of social order and moral law; and the fear of
+the gods was a motive to enforce the laws of society, which were also the
+laws of morality.'[9] Wellhausen has already been cited to the same
+effect.
+
+However, the facts proving that truth, and unselfishness, surely a large
+element of Christian ethics, are divinely sanctioned in savage religion
+are more potent than the most learned opinion on that side.
+
+Our next step was to examine in detail several religions of the most
+remote and backward races, of races least contaminated with Christian or
+Islamite teaching. Our evidence, when possible, was derived from ancient
+and secret tribal mysteries, and sacred native hymns. We found a
+relatively Supreme Being, a Maker, sanctioning morality, and unpropitiated
+by sacrifice, among peoples who go in dread of ghosts and wizards, but do
+not always worship ancestors. We showed that the anthropological theory of
+the evolution of God out of ghosts in no way explains the facts in the
+savage conception of a Supreme Being. We then argued that the notion of
+'spirit,' derived from ghost-belief, was not logically needed for the
+conception of a Supreme Being in its earliest form, was detrimental to
+the conception, and, by much evidence, was denied to be part of the
+conception. The Supreme Being, thus regarded, may be (though he cannot
+historically be shown to be) prior to the first notion of ghost and
+separable souls.
+
+We then traced the idea of such a Supreme Being through the creeds of
+races rising in the scale of material culture, demonstrating that he was
+thrust aside by the competition of ravenous but serviceable ghosts,
+ghost-gods, and shades of kingly ancestors, with their magic and their
+bloody rites. These rites and the animistic conception behind them were
+next, in rare cases, reflected or refracted back on the Supreme Eternal.
+Aristocratic institutions fostered polytheism with the old Supreme Being
+obscured, or superseded, or enthroned as Emperor-God, or King-God. We saw
+how, and in what sense, the old degeneration theory could be defined and
+defended. We observed traces of degeneration in certain archaic aspects of
+the faith in Jehovah; and we proved that (given a tolerably pure low
+savage belief in a Supreme Being) that belief _must_ degenerate, under
+social conditions, as civilisation advanced. Next, studying what we may
+call the restoration of Jehovah, under the great Prophets of Israel, we
+noted that they, and Israel generally, were strangely indifferent to that
+priceless aspect of Animism, the care for the future happiness, as
+conditioned by the conduct of the individual soul. That aspect had been
+neglected neither by the popular instinct nor the priestly and philosophic
+reflection of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Christianity, last, combined what
+was good in Animism, the care for the individual soul as an immortal
+spirit under eternal responsibilities, with the One righteous Eternal of
+prophetic Israel, and so ended the long, intricate, and mysterious
+theological education of humanity. Such is our theory, which does
+not, to us, appear to lack evidence, nor to be inconsistent (as the
+anthropological theory is apparently inconsistent) with the hypothesis of
+evolution.
+
+All this, it must be emphatically insisted on, is propounded 'under all
+reserves.' While these four stages, say (1) the Australian unpropitiated
+Moral Being, (2) the African neglected Being, still somewhat moral,
+(3) the relatively Supreme Being involved in human sacrifice, as in
+Polynesia, and (4) the Moral Being reinstated philosophically, as in
+Israel, do suggest steps in evolution, we desire to base no hard-and-fast
+system of ascending and descending degrees upon our present evidence.
+The real object is to show that facts may be regarded in this light, as
+well as in the light thrown by the anthropological theory, in the hands
+whether of Mr. Tylor, Mr. Spencer, M. Réville, or Mr. Jevons, whose
+interesting work comes nearest to our provisional hypothesis.
+
+We only ask for suspense of judgment, and for hesitation in accepting the
+dogmas of modern manual makers. An exception to them certainly appears to
+be Mr. Clodd, if we may safely attribute to him a review (signed C.) of
+Mr. Grant Allen's 'Evolution of the Idea of God.'
+
+'We fear that all our speculations will remain summaries of probabilities.
+No documents are extant to enlighten us; we have only mobile, complex and
+confused ideas, incarnate in eccentric, often contradictory theories. That
+this character attaches to such ideas should keep us on guard against
+framing theories whose symmetry is sometimes their condemnation' ('Daily
+Chronicle,' December 10, 1897).
+
+Nothing excites my own suspicion of my provisional hypothesis more than
+its symmetry. It really seems to fit the facts, as they appear to me, too
+neatly. I would suggest, however, that ancient savage sacred hymns,
+and practices in the mysteries, are really rather of the nature of
+'documents;' more so, at least, than the casual observations of some
+travellers, or the gossip extracted from natives much in contact with
+Europeans.
+
+Supposing that the arguments in this essay met with some acceptance, what
+effect would they have, if any, on our thoughts about religion? What is
+their practical tendency? The least dubious effect would be, I hope, to
+prevent us from accepting the anthropological theory of religion, or any
+other theory, as a foregone conclusion, I have tried to show how dim is
+our knowledge, how weak, often, is our evidence, and that, finding among
+the lowest savages all the elements of all religions already developed
+in different degrees, we cannot, historically, say that one is earlier
+than another. This point of priority we can never historically settle. If
+we met savages with ghosts and no gods, we could not be sure but that they
+once possessed a God, and forgot him. If we met savages with a God and no
+ghosts, we could not be historically certain that a higher had not
+obliterated a lower creed. For these reasons dogmatic decisions about the
+_origin_ of religion seem unworthy of science. They will appear yet more
+futile to any student who goes so far with me as to doubt whether the
+highest gods of the lowest races could be developed, or can be shown to
+have been developed, by way of the ghost-theory. To him who reaches this
+point the whole animistic doctrine of ghosts as the one germ of religion
+will appear to be imperilled. The main practical result, then, will be
+hesitation about accepting the latest scientific opinion, even when backed
+by great names, and published in little primers.
+
+On the hypothesis here offered to criticism there are two chief sources of
+Religion, (1) the belief, how attained we know not,[10] in a powerful,
+moral, eternal, omniscient Father and Judge of men; (2) the belief
+(probably developed out of experiences normal and supernormal) in
+somewhat of man which may survive the grave. This second belief is not,
+logically, needed as given material for the first, in its apparently
+earliest form. It may, for all we know, be the later of the two beliefs,
+chronologically. But this belief, too, was necessary to religion; first,
+as finally supplying a formula by which advancing intellects could
+conceive of the Mighty Being involved in the former creed; next, as
+elevating man's conception of his own nature. By the second belief he
+becomes the child of the God in whom, perhaps, he already trusted, and in
+whom he has his being, a being not destined to perish with the death of
+the body. Man is thus not only the child but the heir of God, a 'nurseling
+of immortality,' capable of entering into eternal life. On the moral
+influence of this belief it is superfluous to dwell.
+
+From the most backward races historically known to us, to those of our own
+status, all have been more or less washed by the waters of this double
+stream of religion. The Hebrews, as far as our information goes, were
+chiefly influenced by the first belief, the faith in the Eternal, and had
+comparatively slight interest in whatever posthumous fortunes might await
+individual souls. Other civilised peoples, say the Greeks, extended the
+second, or animistic theory, into forms of beautiful fantasy, the
+material of art. Yet both in Greece and Rome, as we learn from the
+'Republic' (Books i. iii.) of Plato, and from the whole scope of the poem
+of Lucretius, and from the Painted Porch at Delphi, answering to the
+frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, there existed, among the people, what
+was unknown to the Hebrews, an extreme anxiety about the posthumous
+fortunes and possible punishment of the individual soul. A kind of
+pardoners and indulgence-sellers made a living out of that anxiety in
+Greece. For the Greek pardoners, who testify to an interest in the
+future happiness of the soul not found in Israel, Mr. Jevons may be cited:
+
+'The _agyrtes_ professed by means of his rites to purify men from the sins
+they had themselves committed ... and so to secure to those whom he
+purified an exemption from the evil lot in the next world which awaited
+those who were not initiated.' 'A magic mirror' (crystal-gazing) 'was
+among his properties.'[11]
+
+In Egypt a moral life did not suffice to secure immortal reward. There
+was also required knowledge of the spells that baffle the demons who, in
+Amenti, as in the Red Indian and Polynesian Hades, lie in wait for souls.
+That knowledge was contained in copies of the Book of the Dead--the
+_gagne-pain_ of priests and scribes.
+
+Early Israel, having, as far as we know, a singular lack of interest in
+the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing,
+undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal.
+
+Polytheism everywhere--in Greece especially--held of the animistic
+conception, with its freakish, corruptible deities. Greek philosophy could
+hardly restore that Eternal for whom the Prophets battled in Israel; whom
+some of the lowest savages know and fear; whom the animistic theory or cult
+everywhere obscures with its crowd of hungry, cruel, interested,
+food-propitiated ghost-gods. In the religion of our Lord and the Apostles
+the two currents of faith in one righteous God and care for the individual
+soul were purified and combined. 'God is a Spirit, and they who worship
+Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' Man also is a spirit, and,
+as such, is in the hands of a God not to be propitiated by man's
+sacrifice or monk's ritual. We know how this doctrine was again disturbed
+by the Animism, in effect, and by the sacrifice and ritual of the
+Mediaeval Church. Too eager 'to be all things to all men,' the august and
+beneficent Mother of Christendom readmitted the earlier Animism in new
+forms of saint-worship, pilgrimage, and popular ceremonial--things apart
+from, but commonly supposed to be substitutes for, righteousness of life
+and the selflessness enjoined in savage mysteries. For the softness, no
+less than for the hardness of men's hearts, these things were ordained:
+such as masses for the beloved dead.
+
+Modern thought has deanthropomorphised what was left of anthropomorphic
+in religion, and, in the end, has left us for God, at most, 'a stream
+of tendency making for righteousness,' or an energy unknown and
+unknowable--the ghost of a ghost. For the soul, by virtue of his
+belief in which man raised himself in his own esteem, and, more or less,
+in ethical standing, is left to us a negation or a wistful doubt.
+
+To this part of modern scientific teaching the earlier position of this
+essay suggests a demurrer. By aid of the tradition of and belief in
+supernormal phenomena among the low races, by attested phenomena of the
+same kinds of experience among the higher races, I have ventured to try to
+suggest that 'we are not merely brain;' that man has his part, we know not
+how, in we know not what--has faculties and vision scarcely conditioned by
+the limits of his normal purview. The evidence of all this deals with
+matters often trivial, like the electric sparks rubbed from the deer's
+hide, which yet are cognate with an illimitable, essential potency of the
+universe. Not being able to explain away these facts, or, in this place,
+to offer what would necessarily be a premature theory of them, I regard
+them, though they seem shadowy, as grounds of hope, or, at least, as
+tokens that men need not yet despair. Not now for the first time have weak
+things of the earth been chosen to confound things strong. Nor have men of
+this opinion been always the weakest; not among the feeblest are Socrates,
+Pascal, Napoleon, Cromwell, Charles Gordon, St. Theresa, and Jeanne d'Arc.
+
+I am perfectly aware that the 'superstitiousness' of the earlier part of
+this essay must injure any effect which the argument of the latter part
+might possibly produce on critical opinion. Yet that argument in no way
+depends on what we think about the phenomena--normal, supernormal, or
+illusory--on which the theory of ghost, soul, or spirit may have been
+based. It exhibits religion as probably beginning in a kind of Theism,
+which is then superseded, in some degree, or even corrupted, by Animism in
+all its varieties. Finally, the exclusive Theism of Israel receives its
+complement in a purified Animism, and emerges as Christianity.
+
+Quite apart, too, from any favourable conclusion which may, by some, be
+drawn from the phenomena, and quite apart from the more general opinion
+that all modern instances are compact of imposture, malobservation,
+mythopoeic memory, and superstitious bias, the systematic comparison of
+civilised and savage beliefs and alleged experiences of this kind cannot
+wisely be neglected by Anthropology. _Humani nihil a se alienum putat._
+
+[Footnote 1: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 352.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Abridged from _Prim. Cult_. ii. 119.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Histoire des Religions_, ii. 237, note. M. Réville's system,
+it will be observed, differs from mine in that he finds the first essays
+of religion in worship of aspects of nature (_naturisme_) and in 'animism
+properly so called,' by which he understands the instinctive, perhaps not
+explicitly formulated, sense that all things whatever are animated and
+personal. I have not remarked this aspect of belief as much prevalent in
+the most backward races, and I do not try to look behind what we know
+historically about early religion. I so far agree with M. Réville as to
+think the belief in ghosts and spirits (Mr. Tylor's 'Animism') not
+necessarily postulated in the original indeterminate conception of
+the Supreme Being, or generally, in 'Original Gods.' But M. Réville
+says, 'L'objet de la religion humaine est nécessairement un esprit'
+(_Prolégoménes_, 107). This does not seem consistent with his own theory.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Compare Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_ with Mr. Grant Allen's
+_Evolution of the Idea of God_.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _J.A.I_. x. 85.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Massey. Note to Du Prel. _Philosophy of mysticism_, ii 10.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Science and Christian Tradition_, p. 197]
+
+[Footnote 8: Op. cit. p. 195.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Religion of the Semites_, p. 53.]
+
+[Footnote 10: The hypothesis of St. Paul seems not the most
+unsatisfactory, Rom. i. 19.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Introd. to Hist. of Rel_. p. 333; Aristoph. _Frogs_, 159.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+OPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE
+
+The most elaborate reply to the arguments for telepathy, based on The
+Report of the Census of Hallucinations, is that of Herr Parish, in his
+'Hallucinations and Illusions.'[1]
+
+Herr Parish is, at present, opposed to the theory that the Census
+establishes a telepathic cause in the so-called 'coincidental' stories,
+'put forward,' as he says, 'with due reserve, and based on an astonishing
+mass of materials, to some extent critically handled.'
+
+He first demurs to an allowance of twelve hours for the coincidence of
+hallucination and death; but, if we reflect that twelve hours is little
+even in a year, coincidences within twelve hours, it may be admitted,
+_donnent à penser_, even if we reject the theory that, granted a real
+telepathic impact, it may need time and quiet for its development into a
+complete hallucination. We need not linger over the very queer cases from
+Munich, as these are not in the selected thirty of the Report. Herr Parish
+then dwells on that _hallucination of memory_, in which we feel as if
+everything that is going on had happened before. It may have occurred to
+most of us to be reminded by some association of ideas during the day, of
+some dream of the previous night, which we had forgotten. For instance,
+looking at a brook from a bridge, and thinking of how I would fish it, I
+remembered that I had dreamed, on the previous night, of casting a fly for
+practice, on a lawn. Nobody would think of disputing the fact that I
+really had such a dream, forgot it and remembered it when reminded of it
+by association of ideas. But if the forgotten dream had been 'fulfilled,'
+and been recalled to memory only in the moment of fulfilment, science
+would deny that I ever had such a dream at all. The alleged dream would be
+described as an 'hallucination of memory.' Something occurring, it would
+be said, I had the not very unusual sensation, 'This has occurred to me
+before,' and the sensation would become a false memory that it _had_
+occurred--in a dream. This theory will be advanced, I think, not when an
+ordinary dream is recalled by a waking experience, but only when the dream
+coincides with and foreruns that experience, which is a thing that dreams
+have no business to do. Such coincidental dreams are necessarily 'false
+memories,' scientifically speaking. Now, how does this theory of false
+memory bear on coincidental hallucinations?
+
+The insane, it seems, are apt to have the false memory 'This occurred
+before,' and _then_ to say that the event was revealed to them in a
+vision.[2] The insane may be recommended to make a note of the vision, and
+have it properly attested, _before_ the event. The same remark applies to
+the 'presentiments' of the sane. But it does _not_ apply if Jones tells me
+'I saw my great aunt last night,' and if news comes _after_ this remark
+that Jones's aunt died, on that night, in Timbuctoo. Yet Herr Parish
+(p. 282) seems to think that the argument of fallacious memory comes in
+part, even when an hallucination has been reported to another person
+_before_ its fulfilment. Of course all depends on the veracity of the
+narrator and the person to whom he told his tale. To take a case given:[3]
+Brown, say, travelling with his wife, dreams that a mad dog bit his boy at
+home on the elbow. He tells his wife. Arriving at home Brown finds that it
+was so. Herr Parish appears to argue thus:
+
+Brown dreamed nothing at all, but he gets excited when he hears the bad
+news at home; he thinks, by false memory, that he has a recollection of
+it, he says to his wife, 'My dear, didn't I tell you, last night, I had
+dreamed all this?' and his equally excited wife replies, 'True, my Brown,
+you did, and I said it was only one of your dreams.' And both now believe
+that the dream occurred. This is very plausible, is it not? only science
+would not say anything about it if the dream had _not_ been fulfilled--if
+Brown had remarked, 'Egad, my dear, seeing that horse reminds me that I
+was dreaming last night of driving in a dog-cart.' For then Brown was not
+excited.
+
+None of this exquisite reasoning as to dreams applies to waking
+hallucinations, reported before the alleged coincidence, unless we accept
+a collective hallucination of memory in seer or seers, and also in the
+persons to whom their story was told.
+
+But, it is obvious, memory is apt to become mythopoeic, so far as to
+exaggerate closeness of coincidence, and to add romantic details. We do
+not need Herr Parish to tell us _that_; we meet the circumstance in all
+narratives from memory, whatever the topic, even in Herr Parish's own
+writings.
+
+We must admit that the public, in ghostly, as in all narratives on all
+topics, is given to 'fanciful addenda.' Therefore, as Herr Parish justly
+remarks, we should 'maintain a very sceptical attitude to all accounts' of
+veridical hallucinations. 'Not that we should dismiss them as old wives'
+fables--an all too common method--or even doubt the narrator's good
+faith.' We should treat them like tales of big fish that get away;
+sometimes there is good corroborative evidence that they really were
+big fish, sometimes not. We shall return to these false memories.
+
+Was there a coincidence at all in the Society's cases printed in the
+Census? Herr Parish thinks three of the selected twenty-six cases very
+dubious. In one case is a _possible_ margin of four days, another
+(wrongly numbered by the way) does not occur at all among the twenty-six.
+In the third, Herr Parish is wrong in his statement.[4] This is a lovely
+example of the sceptical slipshod, and, accompanied by the miscitation of
+the second case, shows that inexactitude is not all on the side of the
+seers. However the case is not very good, the two percipients fancying
+that the date of the event was less remote than it really was. Unluckily
+Herr Parish only criticises these three cases, how accurately we have
+remarked. He had no room for more.
+
+Herr Parish next censures the probable selection of good cases by
+collectors, on which the editors of the Census have already made
+observations, as they have also made large allowances for this cause of
+error. He then offers the astonishing statement that, 'in the view of the
+English authors, a view which is, of course, assumed in all calculations
+of the kind, an hallucination persists equally long in the memory and is
+equally readily recalled in reply to a question, whether the experience
+made but a slight impression on the percipient, or affected him deeply,
+as would be the case, for instance, if the hallucination had been found to
+coincide with the death of a near relative or friend.'[5] This assertion
+of Herr Parish's is so erroneous that the Report expressly says 'as years
+recede into the distance,' the proportion of the hallucinations that are
+remembered in them to those which are forgotten, or at least ignored, 'is
+very large.' Again, 'Hallucinations of the most impressive class will not
+only be better remembered than others, but will, we may reasonably
+suppose, be more often mentioned by the percipients to their friends.'[6]
+
+Yet Herr Parish avers that, in all calculations, it is assumed that
+hallucinations are equally readily recalled whether impressive or not!
+Once more, the Report says (p. 246), '_It is not the case_' that
+coincidental (and impressive) hallucinations are as easily subject to
+oblivion as non-coincidental, and non-impressive ones. The editors
+therefore multiply the non-coincidental cases by four, arguing that no
+coincidental cases (hits) are forgotten, while three out of four
+non-coincidentals (misses) are forgotten, or may be supposed likely to be
+forgotten. Immediately after declaring that the English authors suppose
+all hallucinations to be equally well remembered (which is the precise
+reverse of what they do say), Herr Parish admits that the authors multiply
+the misses by four, 'influenced by other considerations' (p. 289). By what
+other considerations? They give their reason (that very reason which they
+decline to entertain, says Herr Parish), namely, that misses are four
+times as likely to be forgotten as hits. 'To go into the reason for
+adopting this plan would lead us too far,' he writes. Why, it is the
+very reason which, he says, does _not_ find favour with the English
+authors!
+
+How curiously remote from being 'coincidental' with plain facts, or
+'veridical' at all, is this scientific criticism! Herr Parish says that a
+'view' (which does not exist) is 'of course assumed in all calculations;'
+and, on the very same page, he says that it is _not_ assumed! 'The
+witnesses of the report--influenced, it is true, by other considerations'
+(which is not the case), 'have sought to turn the point of this objection
+by multiplying the whole number of (non-coincidental) cases by four.' Then
+the 'view' is _not_ 'assumed in all calculations,' as Herr Parish has just
+asserted.
+
+What led Herr Parish, an honourable and clearheaded critic, into this maze
+of incorrect and contradictory assertions? It is interesting to try to
+trace the causes of such _non-veridical illusions_, to find the _points
+de repère_ of these literary hallucinations. One may suggest that when
+Herr Parish 'recast the chapters' of his German edition, as he says in his
+preface to the English version, he accidentally left in a passage based
+on an earlier paper by Mr. Gurney,[7] not observing that it was no longer
+accurate or appropriate.
+
+After this odd passage, Herr Parish argues that a 'veridical'
+hallucination is regarded by the English authors as 'coincidental,' even
+when external circumstances have made that very hallucination a probable
+occurrence by producing 'tension of the corresponding nerve element
+groups.' That is to say, a person is in a condition--a nervous condition--
+likely, _a priori_, to beget an hallucination. An hallucination _is_
+begotten, quite naturally; and so, if it happens to coincide with an
+event, the coincidence should not count--it is purely fortuitous.[8]
+
+Here is an example. A lady, facing an old sideboard, saw a friend, with no
+coat on, and in a waistcoat with a back of shiny material. Within an hour
+she was taken to where her friend lay dying, without a coat, and in a
+waistcoat with a shiny back.[9] Here is the scientific explanation of Herr
+Parish: 'The shimmer of a reflecting surface [the sideboard?] formed the
+occasion for the hallucinatory emergence of a subconsciously perceived
+_shiny black waistcoat_ [quotation incorrect, of course], and an
+individual subconsciously associated with that impression.[10] I ask any
+lady whether she, consciously or subconsciously, associates the men she
+knows with the backs of their waistcoats. Herr Parish's would be a
+brilliantly satisfactory explanation if it were only true to the printed
+words that lay under his eyes when he wrote. There was no 'shiny black
+waistcoat' in the case, but a waistcoat with a shiny _back_. Gentlemen,
+and especially old gentlemen who go about in bath-chairs (like the man in
+this story), don't habitually take off their coats and show the backs of
+their waistcoats to ladies of nineteen in England. And, if Herr Parish had
+cared to read his case, he would have found it expressly stated that the
+lady 'had never seen the man without his coat' (and so could not associate
+him with an impression of a shiny back to his waistcoat) till _after_ the
+hallucination, when she saw him coatless on his death-bed. In this
+instance Herr Parish had an hallucinatory memory, all wrong, of the page
+under his eyes. The case is got rid of, then, by aid of the 'fanciful
+addenda,' to which Herr Parish justly objects. He first gives the facts
+incorrectly, and then explains an occurrence which, as reported by him,
+did not occur, and was not asserted to occur.
+
+I confess that, if Herr Parish's version were as correct as it is
+essentially inaccurate, his explanation would leave me doubtful. For the
+circumstances were that the old gentleman of the story lunched daily with
+the young lady's mother. Suppose that she was familiar (which she was not)
+with the shiny back of his waistcoat, still, she saw him daily, and daily,
+too, was in the way of seeing the (hypothetically) shiny surface of the
+sideboard. That being the case, she had, every day, the materials,
+subjective and objective, of the hallucination. Yet it only occurred
+_once_, and then it precisely coincided with the death agony of the old
+gentleman, and with his coatless condition. Why only that once? _C'est là
+le miracle!_ 'How much for this little veskit?' as the man asked David
+Copperfield.
+
+Herr Parish next invents a cause for an hallucination, which, I myself
+think, ought not to have been reckoned, because the percipient had been
+sitting up with the sick man. This he would class as a 'suspicious' case.
+But, even granting him his own way of handling the statistics, he would
+still have far too large a proportion of coincidences for the laws of
+chance to allow, if we are to go by these statistics at all.
+
+His next argument practically is that hallucinations are always only a
+kind of dreams.[11] He proves this by the large number of coincidental
+hallucinations which occurred in sleepy circumstances. One man went to bed
+early, and woke up early; another was 'roused from sleep;' two ladies were
+sitting up in bed, giving their babies nourishment; a man was reading a
+newspaper on a sofa; a lady was lying awake at seven in the morning; and
+there are eight other English cases of people 'awake' in bed during an
+hallucination. Now, in Dr. Parish's opinion, we must argue that they were
+_not_ awake, or not much; so the hallucinations were mere dreams.
+Dreams are so numerous that coincidences in dreams can be got rid of as
+pure flukes. People may say, to be sure, 'I am used to dreams, and don't
+regard them; _this_ was something solitary in my experience.' But we must
+not mind what people say.
+
+Yet I fear we must mind what they say. At least, we must remember that
+sleeping dreams are, of all things, most easily forgotten; while a
+full-bodied hallucination, when we, at least, believe ourselves awake,
+seems to us on a perfectly different plane of impressiveness, and
+(_experto crede_) is really very difficult to forget. Herr Parish cannot
+be allowed, therefore, to use the regular eighteenth-century argument--
+'All dreams!' For the two sorts of dreams, in sleep and in apparent
+wakefulness, seem, to the subject, to differ in _kind_. And they really
+do differ in kind. It is the essence of the every night dream that we are
+unconscious of our actual surroundings and conscious of a fantastic
+environment. It is the essence of wideawakeness to be conscious of our
+actual surroundings. In the ordinary dream, nothing actual competes with
+its visions. When we are conscious of our surroundings, everything actual
+does compete with any hallucination. Therefore, an hallucination which,
+when we are conscious of our material environment, does compete with it in
+reality, is different _in kind_ from an ordinary dream. Science gains
+nothing by arbitrarily declaring that two experiences so radically
+different are identical. Anybody would see this if he were not arguing
+under a dominant idea.
+
+Herr Parish next contends that people who see pictures in crystal balls,
+and so on, are not so wide awake as to be in their normal consciousness.
+There is 'dissociation' (practically drowsiness), even if only a
+little. Herr Moll also speaks of crystal-gazing pictures as 'hypnotic
+phenomena.'[12] Possibly neither of these learned men has ever seen a
+person attempt crystal-gazing. Herr Parish never asserts any such personal
+experience as the basis of his opinion about the non-normal state of the
+gazer. He reaches this conclusion from an anecdote reported, as a not
+unfamiliar phenomenon, by a friend of Miss X. But the phenomenon occurred
+when Miss X. was not crystal-gazing at all! She was looking out of a
+window in a brown study. This is a noble example of logic. Some one says
+that Miss X. was not in her normal consciousness on a certain occasion
+when she was _not_ crystal-gazing, and that this condition is familiar to
+the observer. Therefore, argues Herr Parish, nobody is in his normal
+consciousness when he is crystal-gazing.
+
+In vain may 'so good an observer as Miss X. think herself fully awake' (as
+she does think herself) when crystal-gazing, because once, when she
+happened to have 'her eyes _fixed on the window_,' her expression was
+'_associated_' by a friend 'with _something uncanny_,' and she afterwards
+spoke '_in a dreamy, far-away tone_' (p. 297). Miss X., though extremely
+'wide awake,' may have looked dreamily at a window, and may have seen
+mountains and marvels. But the point is that she was not voluntarily
+gazing at a crystal for amusement or experiment--perhaps trying to see how
+a microscope affected the pictures--or to divert a friend.
+
+I appeal to the shades of Aristotle and Bacon against scientific logic in
+the hands of Herr Parish. Here is his syllogism:
+
+  A. is occasionally dreamy when _not_ crystal-gazing.
+  A. is human.
+  Therefore every human being, when crystal-gazing, is more or less
+  asleep.
+
+He infers a general affirmative from a single affirmative which happens
+not to be to the point. It is exactly as if Herr Parish argued:
+
+  Mrs. B. spends hours in shopping.
+  Mrs. B. is human.
+  Therefore every human being is always late for dinner.
+
+Miss X., I think, uplifted her voice in some review, and maintained that,
+when crystal-gazing, she was quite in her normal state, _dans son
+assiette_.
+
+Yet Herr Parish would probably say to any crystal-gazer who argued thus,
+'Oh, no; pardon me, you were _not_ wholly awake--you were a-dream. I know
+better than you.' But, as he has not seen crystal-gazers, while I have,
+many scores of times, I prefer my own opinion. And so, as this assertion
+about the percipient's being 'dissociated,' or asleep, or not awake, is
+certainly untrue of all crystal-gazers in my considerable experience, I
+cannot accept it on the authority of Herr Parish, who makes no claim to
+any personal experience at all.
+
+As to crystal-gazing, when the gazer is talking, laughing, chatting,
+making experiments in turning the ball, changing the light, using prisms
+and magnifying-glasses, dropping matches into the water-jug, and so on,
+how can we possibly say that 'it is impossible to distinguish between
+waking hallucinations and those of sleep' (p. 300)? If so, it is
+impossible to distinguish between sleeping and waking altogether. We are
+all like the dormouse! Herr Parish is reasoning here _a priori_,
+without any personal knowledge of the facts; and, above all, he is under
+the 'dominant idea' of his own theory--that of _dissociation_.
+
+Herr Parish next crushes telepathy by an argument which--like one of the
+reasons why the bells were not rung for Queen Elizabeth, namely, that
+there were no bells to ring--might have come first, and alone. We are
+told (in italics--very impressive to the popular mind): _'No matter how
+great the number of coincidences, they afford not even the shadow of a
+proof for telepathy'_ (p. 301). What, not even if all hallucinations, or
+ninety-nine per cent., coincided with the death of the person seen? In
+heaven's name, why not? Why, because the 'weightiest' cause of all has
+been omitted from our calculations, namely, our good old friend, _the
+association of ideas_ (p. 302). Our side cannot prove the _absence_
+(italics) of _the association of ideas_. Certainly we cannot; but ideas in
+endless millions are being associated all day long. A hundred thousand
+different, unnoticed associations may bring Jones to my mind, or Brown.
+But I don't therefore see Brown, or Jones, who is not there. Still less do
+I see Dr. Parish, or Nebuchadnezzar, or a monkey, or a salmon, or a golf
+ball, or Arthur's Seat (all of which may be brought to my mind by
+association of ideas), when they are not present.
+
+Suppose, then, that once in my life I see the absent Jones, who dies in
+that hour (or within twelve hours). I am puzzled. Why did Association
+choose that day, of all days in my life, for her solitary freak? And,
+if this choice of freaks by Association occurs among other people, say two
+hundred times more often than chance allows, the freak begins to suggest
+that it may have a cause.
+
+Not even the circumstance cited by Herr Parish, that a drowsy tailor,
+'sewing on in a dream,' poor fellow, saw a client in his shop while the
+client was dying, solves the problem. The tailor is not said even once to
+have seen a customer who was _not_ dying; yet he writes, 'I was accustomed
+to work all night frequently.' The tailor thinks he was asleep, because he
+had been making irregular stitches, and perhaps he was. But, out of
+all his vigils and all his customers, association only formed _one_
+hallucination, and that was of a dying client whom he supposed to be
+perfectly well. Why on earth is association so fond of dying people--
+granting the statistics, which are 'another story'? The explanation
+explains nothing. Herr Parish only moves the difficulty back a step, and,
+as we cannot live without association of ideas, they are taken for granted
+by our side. Association of ideas does not cause hallucinations, as Mrs.
+Sidgwick remarks, though it may determine their contents.
+
+The difficult theme of coincidental collective hallucinations, as when two
+or more people at once have, or profess to have, the same false perception
+of a person who is really absent and dying, is next disposed of by Herr
+Parish. The same _points de repère_, the same sound, or flicker of light,
+or arrangement of shadow, may beget the same or a similar false perception
+in two or more people at once. Thus two girls, in different rooms, are
+looking out on different parts of the hall in their house. 'Both heard, at
+the same time, an [objective?] noise' (p. 313). Then, says Herr Parish,
+'_the one sister saw her father cross the hall_ after entering; the other
+saw the dog (the usual companion of his walks) run past her door.' Father
+and dog had not left the dining-room. Herr Parish decides that the same
+_point de repère_ (the apparent noise of a key in the lock of the front
+door) 'acted by way of suggestion on both sisters,' producing, however,
+different hallucinations, 'in virtue of the difference of the connected
+associations.' One girl associated the sound with her honoured sire, the
+other with his faithful hound; so one saw a dog, and the other saw an
+elderly gentleman. Now, first, if so, this should _always_ be occurring,
+for we all have different associations of ideas. Thus, we are in a haunted
+house; there is a noise of a rattling window; I associate it with a
+burglar, Brown with a milkman, Miss Jones with a lady in green, Miss Smith
+with a knight in armour. That collection of phantasms should then be
+simultaneously on view, like the dog and old gentleman; all our reports
+should vary. But this does not occur. Most unluckily for Herr Parish, he
+illustrates his theory by telling a story which happens not to be
+correctly reported. At first I thought that a fallacy of memory, or an
+optical delusion, had betrayed him again, as in his legend of the
+waistcoat. But I am now inclined to believe that what really occurred was
+this: Herr Parish brought out his book in German, before the Report of the
+Census of Hallucinations was published. In his German edition he probably
+quoted a story which precisely suited his theory of the origin of
+collective hallucinations. This anecdote he had found in Prof. Sidgwick's
+Presidential Address of July 1890.[13] As stated by Prof. Sidgwick, the
+case just fitted Herr Parish, who refers to it on p. 190, and again on
+p. 314. He gives no reference, but his version reads like a traditional
+variant of Prof. Sidgwick's. Now Prof. Sidgwick's version was erroneous,
+as is proved by the elaborate account of the case in the Report of the
+Census, which Herr Parish had before him, but neglected when he prepared
+his English edition. The story was wrong, alas! in the very point where,
+for Herr Parish's purpose, it ought to have been right. The hallucination
+is believed not to have been collective, yet Herr Parish uses it to
+explain collective hallucinations. Doubtless he overlooked the accurate
+version in the Report.[14]
+
+The facts, as there reported, were not what he narrates, but as follows:
+
+Miss C.E. was in the breakfast-room, about 6:30 P.M., in January 1883, and
+supposed her father to be taking a walk with his dog. She heard noises,
+which may have had any other cause, but which she took to be the sounds
+of a key in the door lock, a stick tapping the tiles of the hall, and the
+patter of the dog's feet on the tiles. She then saw the dog pass the door.
+Miss C.E. next entered the hall, where she found nobody; but in the pantry
+she met her sisters--Miss E., Miss H.G.E.--and a working-woman. Miss E.
+and the working-woman had been in the hall, and there had heard the sound,
+which they, like Miss C.E., took for that of a key in the lock. They were
+breaking a little household rule in the hall, so they 'ran straightway
+into the pantry, meeting Miss H.G.E. on the way.' Miss C.E. and Miss E.
+and the working-woman all heard the noise as of a key in the lock, but
+nobody is said to have 'seen the father cross the hall' (as Herr Parish
+asserts). 'Miss H.G.E. was of opinion that Miss E. (now dead) saw
+_nothing_, and Miss C.E. was inclined to agree with her.' Miss E. and the
+work-woman (now dead) were 'emphatic as to the father having entered the
+house;' but this the two only _inferred_ from hearing the noise, after
+which they fled to the pantry. Now, granting that some other noise was
+mistaken for that of the key in the lock, we have here, _not_ (as Herr
+Parish declares) a _collective_ yet discrepant hallucination--the
+discrepancy being caused 'by the difference of connected associations'--
+but a _solitary_ hallucination. Herr Parish, however, inadvertently
+converts a solitary into a collective hallucination, and then uses the
+example to explain collective hallucinations in general. He asserts
+that Miss E. 'saw her father cross the hall.' Miss E.'s sisters think that
+she saw no such matter. Now, suppose that Mr. E. had died at the moment,
+and that the case was claimed on our part as a 'collective coincidental
+hallucination,' How righteously Herr Parish might exclaim that all the
+evidence was against its being collective! The sound in the lock, heard by
+three persons, would be, and probably was, another noise misinterpreted.
+And, in any case, there is no evidence for its having produced _two_
+hallucinations; the evidence is in exactly the opposite direction.
+
+Here, then, Herr Parish, with the printed story under his eyes, once more
+illustrates want of attention. In one way his errors improve his case. 'If
+I, a grave man of science, go on telling distorted legends out of my own
+head, while the facts are plain in print before me,' Herr Parish
+may reason, 'how much more are the popular tales about coincidental
+hallucinations likely to be distorted?' It is really a very strong
+argument, but not exactly the argument which Herr Parish conceives
+himself to be presenting.[15]
+
+This unlucky inexactitude is chronic, as we have shown, in Herr Parish's
+work, and is probably to be explained by inattention to facts, by
+'expectation' of suitable facts, and by 'anxiety' to prove a theory. He
+explains the similar or identical reports of witnesses to a collective
+hallucination by 'the case with which such appearances adapt themselves
+in recollection' (p. 313), especially, of course, after lapse of time. And
+then he unconsciously illustrates his case by the case with which
+printed facts under his very eyes adapt themselves, quite erroneously, to
+his own memory and personal bias as he copies them on to his paper.
+
+Finally he argues that even if collective hallucinations are also 'with
+comparative frequency' coincidental, that is to be explained thus:
+'The rarity and the degree of interest compelled by it' (by such an
+hallucination) 'will naturally tend to connect itself with some other
+prominent event; and, conversely, the occurrence of such an event as the
+death or mortal danger of a friend is most calculated to produce memory
+illusions of this kind.'
+
+In the second case, the excitement caused by the death of a friend is
+likely, it seems, to make two or more sane people say, and _believe,_
+that they saw him somewhere else, when he was really dying. The only
+evidence for this fact is that such illusions occasionally occur, _not_
+collectively, in some lunatic asylums. 'It is not, however, a form of
+mnemonic error often observed among the insane.' 'Kraepelin gives two
+cases.' 'The process occurs sporadically in certain sane people, under
+certain exciting conditions.' No examples are given! What is rare as an
+_individual_ folly among lunatics, is supposed by Herr Parish to explain
+the theoretically 'false memory' whereby sane people persuade themselves
+that they had an hallucination, and persuade others that they were told
+of it, when no such thing occurred.
+
+To return to our old example. Jones tells me that he has just seen his
+aunt, whom he knows to be in Timbuctoo. News comes that the lady died when
+Jones beheld her in his smoking-room. 'Oh, nonsense,' Herr Parish would
+argue, 'you, Jones, saw nothing of the kind, nor did you tell Mr. Lang,
+who, I am sorry to find, agrees with you. What happened was _this_: When
+the awful news came to-day of your aunt's death, you were naturally,
+and even creditably, excited, especially as the poor lady was killed by
+being pegged down on an ant-heap. This excitement, rather praiseworthy
+than otherwise, made you _believe_ you had seen your aunt, and _believe_
+you had told Mr. Lang. He also is a most excitable person, though I
+admit he never saw your dear aunt in his life. He, therefore (by virtue of
+his excitement), now _believes_ you told him about seeing your unhappy
+kinswoman. This kind of false memory is very common. Two cases are
+recorded by Kraepelin, among the insane. Surely you quite understand my
+reasoning?'
+
+I quite understand it, but I don't see how it comes to seem good logic to
+Herr Parish.
+
+The other theory is funnier still. Jones never had an hallucination
+before. 'The rarity and the degree of interest compelled by it' made Jones
+'connect it with some other prominent event,' say, the death of his aunt,
+which, really, occurred, say, nine months afterwards. But this is a mere
+case of _evidence_, which it is the affair of the S.P.R. to criticise.
+
+Herr Parish is in the happy position called in American speculative
+circles 'a straddle.' If a man has an hallucination when alone, he was in
+circumstances conducive to the sleeping state. So the hallucination is
+probably a dream. But, if the seer was in company, who all had the same
+hallucination, then they all had the same _points de repère_, and the same
+adaptive memories. So Herr Parish kills with both barrels.
+
+If anything extraneous could encourage a belief in coincidental and
+veridical hallucinations, it would be these 'Oppositions of Science.' If a
+learned and fair opponent can find no better proofs than logic and
+(unconscious) perversions of facts like the logic and the statements of
+Herr Parish, the case for telepathic hallucinations may seem strong
+indeed. But we must grant him the existence of the adaptive and mythopoeic
+powers of memory, which he asserts, and also illustrates. I grant, too,
+that a census of 17,000 inquiries may only have 'skimmed the cream off'
+(p. 87). Another dip of the net, bringing up 17,000 fresh answers, might
+alter the whole aspect of the case, one way or the other. Moreover, we
+cannot get scientific evidence in this way of inquiry. If the public were
+interested in the question, and understood its nature, and if everybody
+who had an hallucination at once recorded it in black and white, duly
+attested on oath before a magistrate, by persons to whom he reported,
+before the coincidence was known, and if all such records, coincidental or
+not, were kept in the British Museum for fifty years, then an examination
+of them might teach us something. But all this is quite impossible.
+We may form a belief, on this point of veridical hallucinations, for
+ourselves, but beyond that it is impossible to advance. Still, Science
+might read her brief!
+
+[Footnote 1: Walter Scott.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Parish, p. 278.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Ibid. pp. 282, 283.]
+
+[Footnote 4: P. 287, Mr. Sims, _Proceedings_, x. 230.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Parish pp. 288, 289.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Report_, p. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 7: P. 274, note 1.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Parish, p. 290.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Report_, p. 297.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Parish, p. 290.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Pp. 291, 292.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Moll, _Hypnotism_, p. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 13 _Proceedings_, vol. vi. p. 433.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Parish, p. 313.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Compare _Report_, pp. 181-83, with Parish, pp. 190 and
+313, 314.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+THE POLTERGEIST AND HIS EXPLAINERS.
+
+In the chapter on 'Fetishism and Spiritualism' it was suggested that the
+movements of inanimate objects, apparently without contact, may have been
+one of the causes leading to fetishism, to the opinion that a spirit may
+inhabit a stick, stone, or what not. We added that, whether such movements
+were caused by trickery or not, was inessential as long as the savage did
+not discover the imposture.
+
+The evidence for the genuine supernormal character of such phenomena was
+not discussed, that we might preserve the continuity of the general
+argument. The history of such phenomena is too long for statement here.
+The same reports are found 'from China to Peru,' from Eskimo to the Cape,
+from Egyptian magical papyri to yesterday's provincial newspaper.[1]
+
+About 1850-1870 phenomena, which had previously been reported as of
+sporadic and spontaneous occurrence, were domesticated and organised by
+Mediums, generally American. These were imitators of the enigmatic David
+Dunglas Home, who was certainly a most oddly gifted man, or a most
+successful impostor. A good deal of scientific attention was given to
+the occurrences; Mr. Darwin, Mr. Tyndall, Dr. Carpenter, Mr. Huxley, had
+all glanced at the phenomena, and been present at _séances_. In most cases
+the exhibitions, in the dark, or in a very bad light, were impudent
+impostures, and were so regarded by the _savants_ who looked into them. A
+series of exposures culminated in the recent detection of Eusapia
+Paladino by Dr. Hodgson and other members of the S.P.R. at Cambridge.
+
+There was, however, an apparent exception. The arch mystagogue, Home,
+though by no means a clever man, was never detected in fraudulent
+productions of fetishistic phenomena. This is asserted here because
+several third-hand stories of detected frauds by Home are in circulation,
+and it is hoped that a well-attested first-hand case of detection may be
+elicited.
+
+Of Home's successes with Sir William Crookes, Lord Crawford, and others,
+something remains to be said; but first we shall look into attempted
+explanations of alleged physical phenomena occurring _not_ in the presence
+of a paid or even of a recognised 'Medium.' It will appear, we think, that
+the explanations of evidence so widely diffused, so uniform, so old, and
+so new, are far from satisfactory. Our inference would be no more than
+that our eyes should be kept on such phenomena, if they are reported to
+recur.
+
+Mr. Tylor says, 'I am well aware that the problem [of these phenomena] is
+one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct
+opinion how far it may be connected with facts insufficiently appreciated
+and explained by science, and how far with superstition, delusion, and
+sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful observation in a
+scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light on some interesting
+psychological questions.'
+
+Acting on Mr. Tylor's hint, Mr. Podmore puts forward as explanations
+(1) fraud; (2) hallucinations caused by excited expectation, and by the
+_Schwärmerei_ consequent on sitting in hushed hope of marvels.
+
+To take fraud first: Mr. Podmore has collected, and analyses, eleven
+recent sporadic cases of volatile objects.[2] His first instance (Worksop,
+1883) yields no proof of fraud, and can only be dismissed by reason of the
+bad character of the other cases, and because Mr. Podmore took the
+evidence five weeks after the events. To this example we confine
+ourselves. This case appears to have been first reported in the 'Retford
+and Gainsborough Times' 'early in March,' 1883 (really March 9). It does
+not seem to have struck Mr. Podmore that he should publish these
+contemporary reports, to show us how far they agree with evidence
+collected by him on the spot five weeks later. To do this was the more
+necessary, as he lays so much stress on failure of memory. I have
+therefore secured the original newspaper report, by the courtesy of the
+editor. To be brief, the phenomena began on February 20 or 21, by the
+table voluntarily tipping up, and upsetting a candle, while Mrs. White
+only saved the wash tub by alacrity and address. 'The whole incident
+struck her as very extraordinary.' It is not in the newspaper report. On
+February 26, Mr. White left his home, and a girl, Eliza Rose, 'child of a
+half-imbecile mother,' was admitted by the kindness of Mrs. White to share
+her bed. The girl was eighteen years of age, was looking for a place as
+servant, and nothing is said in the newspaper about her mother. Mr. White
+returned on Wednesday night, but left on Thursday morning, returning on
+Friday afternoon. On Thursday, in Mr. White's absence, phenomena set in.
+On Thursday night, in Mr. White's presence, they increased in vigour. A
+doctor was called in, also a policeman. On Saturday, at 8 A.M., the row
+recommenced. At 4 P.M. Mr. White sent Eliza Rose away, and peace returned.
+We now offer the
+
+STATEMENT OF POLICE CONSTABLE HIGGS. A man of good intelligence, and
+believed to be entirely honest....
+
+'On the night of Friday, March 2nd, I heard of the disturbances at Joe
+White's house from his young brother, Tom. I went round to the house at
+11.55 P.M., as near as I can judge, and found Joe White in the kitchen
+of his house. There was one candle lighted in the room, and a good fire
+burning, so that one could see things pretty clearly. The cupboard doors
+were open, and White went and shut them, and then came and stood against
+the chest of drawers. I stood near the outer door. No one else was in
+the room at the time. White had hardly shut the cupboard doors when they
+flew open, and a large glass jar came out past me, and pitched in the
+yard outside, smashing itself. I didn't see the jar leave the cupboard,
+or fly through the air; it went too quick. But I am quite sure that it
+wasn't thrown by White or any one else. White couldn't have done it
+without my seeing him. The jar couldn't go in a straight line from the
+cupboard out of the door; but it certainly did go.
+
+'Then White asked me to come and see the things which had been smashed
+in the inner room. He led the way and I followed. As I passed the chest
+of drawers in the kitchen I noticed a tumbler standing on it. Just
+after I passed I heard a crash, and looking round, I saw that the tumbler
+had fallen on the ground in the direction of the fireplace, and was
+broken. I don't know how it happened. There was no one else in the room.
+
+'I went into the inner room, and saw the bits of pots and things on the
+floor, and then I came back with White into the kitchen. The girl Rose
+had come into the kitchen during our absence. She was standing with
+her back against the bin near the fire. There was a cup standing on the
+bin, rather nearer the door. She said to me, "Cup'll go soon; it has
+been down three times already." She then pushed it a little farther on
+the bin, and turned round and stood talking to me by the fire. She had
+hardly done so, when the cup jumped up suddenly about four or five feet
+into the air, and then fell on the floor and smashed itself. White was
+sitting on the other side of the fire.
+
+'Then Mrs. White came in with Dr. Lloyd; also Tom White and Solomon
+Wass. After they had been in two or three minutes, something else
+happened. Tom White and Wass were standing with their backs to the
+fire, just in front of it. Eliza Rose and Dr. Lloyd were near them, with
+their backs turned towards the bin, the doctor nearer to the door. I
+stood by the drawers, and Mrs. White was by me near the inner door. Then
+suddenly a basin, which stood on the end of the bin near the door, got up
+into the air, _turning over and over as it went. It went up not very
+quickly, not as quickly as if it had been thrown_. When it reached the
+ceiling it fell plump and smashed. I called Dr. Lloyd's attention to it,
+and we all saw it. No one was near it, and I don't know how it happened.
+I stayed about ten minutes more, but saw nothing else. I don't know what
+to make of it all. I don't think White or the girl could possibly have
+done the things which I saw.'
+
+This statement was made five weeks after date to Mr. Podmore. We compare
+it with the intelligent constable's statement made between March 3 and
+March 8, that is, immediately after the events, and reported in the local
+paper of March 9.
+
+STATEMENT BY POLICE CONSTABLE HIGGS.--During Friday night, Police
+Constable Higgs visited the house, and concerning the visit he makes the
+following statement.
+
+'About ten minutes past [to?] twelve on Friday night, I was met in Bridge
+Street by Buck Ford, and Joe's brother, Tom White and Dr. Lloyd. Tom said
+to me, "Will you go with us to Joe's, and you will see something you have
+never seen before?" I went; and when I got into the house Joe went and
+shut the cupboard doors. No sooner had he done so than the doors flew
+open again, and an ordinary sized glass jar flew across the kitchen, out
+of the door into the yard. A sugar jar also flew out of the cupboard
+unseen. In fact, we saw nothing and heard nothing until we heard it smash.
+The distance travelled by the articles was about seven yards. I stood
+a minute or two, and then the glass which I noticed on the drawers jumped
+off the drawers a yard away, and broke in about a hundred bits. The next
+thing was a cup, which stood on the flour-bin just beyond the yard
+door. It flew upwards, and then fell to the ground and broke. The girl
+said that this cup had been on the floor three times, and that she had
+picked it up just before it went off the bench. I said, "I suppose the cup
+will be the next." The cup fell a distance of two yards away from the
+flour-bin. Dr. Lloyd had been in the next house lancing the back of a
+little boy who had been removed there. He now came in, and we began
+talking, the doctor saying, "It is a most mysterious thing." He turned
+with his back to the flour-bin, on which stood a basin. The basin flew up
+into the air obliquely, went over the doctor's head, and fell at his feet
+in pieces. The doctor then went out. I stood a short time longer, but
+saw nothing farther. There were six persons in the room while these things
+were going on, and so far as I could see, there was no human agency at
+work. I had not the slightest belief in anything appertaining to the
+super-natural. I left just before one o'clock, having been in the
+house thirty minutes.'
+
+As the policeman says, there was nothing 'super-natural,' but there was an
+appearance of something rather supernormal. On the afternoon of Saturday
+White sent the girl Rose away, and a number of people watched in his house
+till after midnight. Though the sceptical reporter thought that objects
+were placed where they might easily be upset, none were upset. The ghost
+was laid. 'Excited expectation' was so false to its function as to beget
+no phenomena.
+
+The newspaper reports contain no theory that will account for White's
+breaking his furniture and crockery, nor for Rose's securing her own
+dismissal from a house where she was kindly received by wilfully
+destroying the property of her hostess. An amateur published a theory
+of silken threads attached to light articles, and thick cords to heavy
+articles, whereof no trace was found by witnesses who examined the
+volatile objects. An elaborate machinery of pulleys fixed in the ceiling,
+the presence of a trickster in a locked pantry, apparent errors in the
+account of the flight of the objects, and a number of accomplices, were
+all involved in this local explanation, the explainer admitting that he
+could not imagine _why_ the tricks were played. Six or eight pounds' worth
+of goods were destroyed, nor is it singular that poor Mrs. White wept over
+her shattered penates.
+
+The destruction began, of course, in the _absence_ of White. The girl Rose
+gave to the newspaper the same account as the other witnesses, but, as
+White thought _she_ was the agent, so she suspected White, though she
+admitted that he was not at home when the trouble arose.
+
+Mr. Podmore, reviewing the case, says, 'The phenomena described are quite
+inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.[3] Yet he elsewhere[4] suggests
+that Rose herself, 'as the instrument of mysterious agencies, or simply as
+a half-witted girl, gifted with abnormal cunning and love of mischief, may
+have been directly responsible for all that took place.' That is to say, a
+half-witted girl could do (barring 'mysterious agencies') 'what is quite
+inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means,' while, according to the
+policeman, she was not even present on some occasions. But it is not easy
+to make out, in the evidence of White, the other witness, whether this
+girl Rose was present or not when the jar flew circuitously out of the
+cupboard, a thing easily worked by a half-witted girl. Such discrepancies
+are common in all evidence to the most ordinary events. In any case a
+half-witted girl, in Mr. Podmore's theory, can do what 'is quite
+inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.' There is not the shadow of
+evidence that the girl Rose had the inestimable advantage of being
+'half-witted;' she is described by Mr. Podmore as 'the child of an
+imbecile mother.' The phenomena began, in an isolated case (the tilted
+table), _before_ Rose entered the house. She was admitted in kindness,
+acted as a maid, and her interest was _not_ to break the crockery
+and upset furniture. The troubles, which began before the girl's arrival,
+were apparently active when she was not present, and, if she _was_
+present, she could not have caused them 'by ordinary mechanical means,'
+while of extraordinary mechanical means there was confessedly no trace.
+The disturbances ceased after she was dismissed--nothing else connects her
+with them.
+
+Mr. Podmore's attempt at a normal explanation by fraud, therefore, is
+of no weight. He has to exaggerate the value, as disproof, of such
+discrepancies as occur in all human evidence on all subjects. He has to
+lay stress on the interval of five weeks between the events and the
+collection of testimony by himself. But contemporary accounts appeared in
+the local newspapers, and he does not compare the contemporary with the
+later evidence, as we have done. There is one discrepancy which looks as
+if a witness, not here cited, came to think he had seen what he heard
+talked about. Finally, after abandoning the idea that mechanical means can
+possibly have produced the effect, Mr. Podmore falls back on the cunning
+of a half-witted girl whom nothing shows to have been half-witted. The
+alternative is that the girl was 'the instrument of mysterious agencies.'
+
+So much for the hypothesis of a fraud, which has been identical in results
+from China to Peru and from Greenland to the Cape.
+
+We now turn to the other, and concomitantly active cause, in Mr. Podmore's
+theory, hallucination. 'Many of the witnesses described the articles as
+moving slowly through the air, or exhibiting some peculiarity of flight.'
+(See e.g. the Worksop case.) Mr. Podmore adds another English case,
+presently to be noted, and a German one. 'In default of any experimental
+evidence' (how about Mr. William Crookes's?) 'that disturbances of this
+kind are ever due to abnormal agency, I am disposed to explain the
+appearance of moving slowly or flying as a sensory illusion, conditioned
+by the excited state of the percipient.' ('Studies,' 157, 158.)
+
+Before criticising this explanation, let us give the English affair,
+alluded to by Mr. Podmore.
+
+The most curious modern case known to me is not of recent date, but it
+occurred in full daylight, in the presence of many witnesses, and the
+phenomena continued for weeks. The events were of 1849, and the record is
+expanded, by Mr. Bristow, a spectator, from an account written by him in
+1854. The scene was Swanland, near Hull, in a carpenter's shop, where Mr.
+Bristow was employed with two fellow workmen. To be brief, they were
+pelted by odds and ends of wood, about the size of a common matchbox. Each
+blamed the others, till this explanation became untenable. The workrooms
+and space above were searched to no purpose. The bits of wood sometimes
+danced along the floor, more commonly sailed gently along, or "moved as if
+borne on gently heaving waves." This sort of thing was repeated during six
+weeks. One piece of wood "came from a distant corner of the room towards
+me, describing what may be likened to a geometrical square, or corkscrew
+of about eighteen inches diameter.... Never was a piece seen to come in
+at the doorway." Mr. Bristow deems this period 'the most remarkable
+episode in my life.' (June 27, 1891.) The phenomena 'did not depend on the
+presence of any one person or number of persons.'
+
+Going to Swanland, in 1891, Mr. Sidgwick found one surviving witness of
+these occurrences, who averred that the objects could not have been thrown
+because of the eccentricities of their course, which he described in the
+same way as Mr. Bristow. The thrower must certainly have had a native
+genius for 'pitching' at base-ball. This witness, named Andrews, was
+mentioned by Mr. Bristow in his report, but not referred to by him for
+confirmation. Those to whom he referred were found to be dead, or had
+emigrated. The villagers had a superstitious theory about the phenomena
+being provoked by a dead man, whose affairs had not been settled to his
+liking. So Mr. Darwin's spoon danced--on a grave.[5]
+
+This case has a certain interest _à propos_ of Mr. Podmore's surmise that
+all such phenomena arise in trickery, which produces excitement in the
+spectators, while excitement begets hallucination, and hallucination
+takes the form of seeing the thrown objects move in a non-natural way.
+Thus, I keep throwing things about. You, not detecting this stratagem, get
+excited, consequently hallucinated, and you believe you see the things
+move in spirals, or undulate as if on waves, or hop, or float, or glide
+in an impossible way. So close is the uniformity of hallucination
+that these phenomena are described, in similar terms, by witnesses
+(hallucinated, of course) in times old and new, as in cases cited by
+Glanvil, Increase Mather, Telfer (of Rerrick), and, generally, in works of
+the seventeenth century. Nor is this uniform hallucination confined to
+England. Mr. Podmore quotes a German example, and I received a similar
+testimony (to the flight of an object round a corner) from a gentleman who
+employed Esther Teed, 'the Amherst Mystery,' in his service. _He_ was not
+excited, for he was normally engaged in his normal stable, when the
+incident occurred unexpectedly as he was looking after his live stock. One
+may add the case of Cideville (1851) and Sir W. Crookes's evidence, and
+that of Mr. Schhapoff.
+
+Mr. Podmore must, therefore, suppose that, in states of excitement, the
+same peculiar form of hallucination develops itself uniformly in America,
+France, Germany, and England (not to speak of Russia), and persists
+through different ages. This is a novel and valuable psychological law.
+Moreover, Mr. Podmore must hold that 'excitement' lasted for six weeks
+among the carpenters in the shop at Swanland, one of whom writes like a
+man of much intelligence, and has thriven to be a master in his craft.
+It is difficult to believe that he was excited for six weeks, and we still
+marvel that excitement produces the same uniformity of hallucination,
+affecting policemen, carpenters, marquises, and a F.R.S. We allude to Sir
+W. Crookes's case.
+
+Strictly scientific examination of these prodigies has been very rare. The
+best examples are the experiments of Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., with
+Home.[6] He demonstrated, by means of a machine constructed for the
+purpose, and automatically registering, that, in Home's presence, a
+balance was affected to the extent of two pounds when Home was not in
+contact with the table on which the machine was placed. He also saw
+objects float in air, with a motion like that of a piece of wood on small
+waves of the sea (clearly excitement producing hallucination), while Home
+was at a distance, other spectators holding his hands, and his feet being
+visibly enclosed in a kind of cage. All present held each other's hands,
+and all witnessed the phenomena. Sir W. Crookes being, professionally,
+celebrated for the accuracy of his observations, these circumstances are
+difficult to explain, and these are but a few cases among multitudes.
+
+I venture to conceive that, on reflection, Mr. Podmore will doubt whether
+he has discovered an universal law of excited malperception, or whether
+the remarkable, and certainly undesigned, coincidence of testimony to the
+singular flight of objects does not rather point to an 'abnormal agency'
+uniform in its effects. Contagious hallucination cannot affect witnesses
+ignorant of each other's existence in many lands and ages, nor could they
+cook their reports to suit reports of which they never heard.
+
+We now turn to peculiarities in the so-called Medium, such as floating in
+air, change of bulk, and escape from lesion when handling or treading in
+fire. Mr. Tylor says nothing of Sir William Crookes's cases (1871), but
+speaks of the alleged levitation, or floating in air, of savages and
+civilised men. These are recorded in Buddhist and Neoplatonic writings,
+and among Red Indians, in Tonquin (where a Jesuit saw and described the
+phenomena, 1730), in the 'Acta Sanctorum,' and among modern spiritualists.
+In 1760, Lord Elcho, being at Home, was present at the _procès_ for
+canonising a Saint (unnamed), and heard witnesses swear to having seen the
+holy man levitated. Sir W. Crookes attests having seen Home float in air
+on several occasions. In 1871, the Master of Lindsay, now Lord Crawford
+and Balcarres, F.R.S., gave the following evidence, which was corroborated
+by the two other spectators, Lord Adare and Captain Wynne.
+
+'I was sitting with Mr. Home and Lord Adare and a cousin of his. During
+the sitting, Mr. Home went into a trance, and in that state was carried
+out of the window in the room next to where we were, and was brought in
+at our window. The distance between the windows was about seven feet six
+inches, and there was not the slightest foothold between them, nor was
+there more than a twelve-inch projection to each window, which served as
+a ledge to put flowers on. _We heard the window in the next room lifted
+up_, and almost immediately after we saw Home floating in the air outside
+our window. The moon was shining full into the room; my back was to the
+light, and I saw the shadow on the wall of the window sill, and Home's
+feet about six inches above it. He remained in this position for a few
+seconds, then raised the window and glided into the room feet foremost
+and sat down.
+
+'Lord Adare then went into the next room to look at the window from which
+he had been carried. It was raised about eighteen inches, and he expressed
+his wonder how Mr. Home had been taken through so narrow an aperture. Home
+said, still entranced, "I will show you," and then with his back to the
+window he leaned back and was shot out of the aperture, head first, with
+the body rigid, and then returned quite quietly. The window is about
+seventy feet from the ground.' The hypothesis of a mechanical arrangement
+of ropes or supports outside has been suggested, but does not cover the
+facts as described.
+
+Mr. Podmore, who quotes this, offers the explanation that the witnesses
+were excited, and that Home 'thrust his head and shoulders out of the
+window.' But, if he did, they could not see him do it, for he was in the
+next room. A brick wall was between them and him. Their first view of Home
+was 'floating in the air outside our window.' It is not very easy to hold
+that a belief to which the collective evidence is so large and universal,
+as the belief in levitation, was caused by a series of saints, sorcerers,
+and others thrusting their heads and, shoulders, out of windows where the
+observers could not see them. Nor in Lord Crawford's case is it easy
+to suppose that three educated men, if hallucinated, would all be
+hallucinated in the same way.
+
+The argument of excited expectation and consequent hallucination does not
+apply to Mr. Hamilton Aïdé and M. Alphonse Karr, neither of whom was a man
+of science. Both were extremely prejudiced against Home, and at Nice went
+to see, and, if possible, to expose him. Home was a guest at a large
+villa in Nice, M. Karr and Mr. Aïdé were two of a party in a spacious
+brilliantly lighted salon, where Home received them. A large heavy table,
+remote from their group, moved towards them. M. Karr then got under a
+table which rose in air, and carefully examined the space beneath, while
+Mr. Aïdé observed it from above. Neither of them could discover any
+explanation of the phenomenon, and they walked away together, disgusted,
+disappointed, and reviling Home.[7]
+
+In this case there was neither excitement nor desire to believe, but a
+strong wish to disbelieve and to expose Home. If two such witnesses could
+be hallucinated, we must greatly extend our notion of the limits of the
+capacity for entertaining hallucinations.
+
+One singular phenomenon was reported in Home's case, which has, however,
+little to do with any conceivable theory of spirits. He was said to become
+elongated in trance.[8] Mr. Podmore explains that 'perhaps he really
+stretched himself to his full height'--one of the easiest ways conceivable
+of working a miracle, Iamblichus reports the same phenomenon in his
+possessed men.[9] Iamblichus adds that they were sometimes broadened as
+well as lengthened. Now, M. Féré observes that 'any part of the body of an
+hysterical patient may change in volume, simply owing to the fact that the
+patient's attention is fixed on that part.'[10] Conceivably the elongation
+of Home and the ancient Egyptian mediums may have been an extreme case of
+this 'change of volume.' Could this be proved by examples, Home's
+elongation would cease to be a 'miracle.' But it would follow that in this
+case observers were _not_ hallucinated, and the presumption would be
+raised that they were not hallucinated in the other cases. Indeed, this
+argument is of universal application.
+
+There is another class of 'physical phenomena,' which has no direct
+bearing on our subject. Many persons, in many ages, are said to have
+handled or walked through fire, not only without suffering pain, but
+without lesion of the skin. Iamblichus mentions this as among the
+peculiarities of his 'possessed' men; and in 'Modern Mythology' (1897) I
+have collected first-hand evidence for the feat in classical times, and in
+India, Fiji, Bulgaria, Trinidad, the Straits Settlements, and many other
+places. The evidence is that of travellers, officials, missionaries, and
+others, and is backed (for what photographic testimony is worth) by
+photographs of the performance. To hold glowing coals in his hand, and to
+communicate the power of doing so to others, was in Home's _répertoire_.
+Lord Crawford saw it done on eight occasions, and himself received from
+Home's hand the glowing coal unharmed. A friend of my own, however, still
+bears the blister of the hurt received in the process. Sir W. Crookes's
+evidence follows:
+
+'At Mr. Home's request, whilst he was entranced, I went with him to the
+fireplace in the back drawing-room. He said, "We want you to notice
+particularly what Dan is doing." Accordingly I stood close to the
+fire, and stooped down to it when he put his hands in....
+
+'Mr. Home then waved the handkerchief about in the air two or three times,
+held it above his head, and then folded it up and laid it on his hand like
+a cushion. Putting his other hand into the fire, he took out a large
+lump of cinder, red-hot at the lower part, and placed the red part on the
+handkerchief. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been in a blaze.
+In about half a minute he took it off the handkerchief with his hand,
+saying, "As the power is not strong, if we leave the coal longer it will
+burn." He then put it on his hand, and brought it to the table in the
+front room, where all but myself had remained seated.'
+
+Mr. Podmore explains that only two candles and the fire gave light on one
+occasion, and that 'possibly' Home's hands were protected by some
+'non-conducting substance.' He does not explain how this substance was put
+on Lord Crawford's hands, nor tell us what this valuable substance may be.
+None is known to science, though it seems to be known to Fijians, Tongans,
+Klings, and Bulgarians, who walk through fire unhurt.
+
+It is not necessary to believe Sir W. Crookes's assertions that he saw
+Home perform the fire-tricks, for we can fall back on the lack of light
+(only two candles and the fire-light), as also on the law of hallucination
+caused by excitement. But it _is_ necessary to believe this distinguished
+authority's statement about his ignorance of 'some non-conducting
+substance:'
+
+'Schoolboys' books and mediaeval tales describe how this can be done with
+alum and other ingredients. It is possible that the skin may be so
+hardened and thickened by such preparations that superficial charring
+might take place without the pain becoming great; but the surface of the
+skin would certainly suffer severely. After Home had recovered from the
+trance, I examined his hand with care to see if there were any signs of
+burning or of previous preparation. I could detect no trace or injury
+to the skin, which was soft and delicate, like a woman's. Neither were
+there signs of any preparation having been previously applied. I have
+often seen conjurers and others handle red-hot coals and iron, but there
+were always palpable signs of burning.'[11]
+
+In September 1897 a crew of passengers went from New Zealand to see the
+Fijian rites, which, as reported in the 'Fiji Times,' corresponded exactly
+with the description published by Mr. Basil Thomson, himself a witness.
+The interesting point, historically, is the combination in Home of all the
+_répertoire_ of the possessed men in Iamblichus. We certainly cannot get
+rid of the fire-trick by aid of a hypothetical 'non-conducting substance.'
+Till the 'substance' is tested experimentally it is not a _vera causa_. We
+might as well say 'spirits' at once. Both that 'substance' and those
+'spirits' are equally 'in the air.' Yet Mr. Podmore's 'explanations' (not
+satisfactory to himself) are conceived so thoroughly in the spirit of
+popular science--one of them casually discovering a new psychological law,
+a second contradicting the facts it seeks to account for, a third
+generously inventing an unknown substance--that they ought to be welcomed
+by reviewers and lecturers.
+
+It seems wiser to admit our ignorance and suspend our belief.
+
+Here closes the futile chapter of explanations. Fraud is a _vera causa_,
+but an hypothesis difficult of application when it is admitted that the
+effects could not be caused by ordinary mechanical means. Hallucination,
+through excitement, is a _vera causa_, but its remarkable uniformity,
+as described by witnesses from different lands and ages, knowing nothing
+of each other, makes us hesitate to accept a sweeping hypothesis of
+hallucination. The case for it is not confirmed, when we have the same
+reports from witnesses certainly not excited.
+
+This extraordinary bundle, then, of reports, practically identical, of
+facts paralysing to belief, this bundle made up of statements from so many
+ages and countries, can only be 'filed for reference.' But it is manifest
+that any savage who shared the experiences of Sir W. Crookes, Lord
+Crawford, Mr. Hamilton Aïdé, M. Robert de St. Victor at Cideville, and
+Policeman Higgs at Worksop, would believe that a spirit might tenant a
+stick or stone--so believing he would be a Fetishist. Thus even of
+Fetishism the probable origin is in a region of which we know nothing--the
+_X_ region.
+
+[Footnote 1: A sketch of the history will be found in the author's _Cock
+Lane and Common Sense_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The best source is his article on 'Poltergeists.'
+_Proceedings_ xi. 45-116. See, too, his 'Poltergeists' in _Studies in
+Psychical Research_.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Studies in Psychical Research_, p. 140.]
+
+[Footnote 4: See Preface to this edition for correction.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Proceedings_, S.P.R. vii. 383-394.]
+
+[Footnote 6: See Sir W. Crookes's _Researches in Spiritualism_.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Mr. Aïdé has given me this information. He recorded the
+circumstances in his Diary at the time.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Report of Dialectical Society_, p. 209.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See Porphyry, in Parthey's edition (Berlin, 1857), iii. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Bulletin de la Société de Biologie_, 1880, p. 399.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Crookes, _Proceedings_, ix. 308.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+_CRYSTAL-GAZING_
+
+Since the chapter on crystal-gazing was in type, a work by Dr. Pierre
+Janet has appeared, styled 'Les Névroses et les Idées Fixes.'[1] It
+contains a chapter on crystal-gazing. The opinion of Dr. Janet, as that of
+a savant familiar, at the Salpêtrière, with 'neurotic' visionaries,
+cannot but be interesting. Unluckily, the essay must be regarded as
+seriously impaired in value by Dr. Janet's singular treatment of his
+subject. Nothing is more necessary in these researches than accuracy of
+statement. Now, Dr. Janet has taken a set of experiences, or experiments,
+of Miss X.'s from that lady's interesting essay, already cited; has
+attributed them, not to Miss X., but to various people--for example, to
+_une jeune fille, une pauvre voyante, une personne un peu mystique_; has
+altered the facts in the spirit of romance; and has triumphantly given
+that explanation, revival of memory, which was assigned by Miss X.
+herself.
+
+Throughout his paper Dr. Janet appears as the calm man of science
+pronouncing judgment on the visionary vagaries of 'haunted' young girls
+and disappointed seeresses. No such persons were concerned; no such
+hauntings, supposed premonitions, or 'disillusions' occurred; the romantic
+and 'marvellous' circumstances are mythopoeic accretions due to Dr.
+Janet's own memory or fancy; his scientific explanation is that given by
+his trinity of _jeune fille, pauvre voyante_, and _personne un peu
+mystique_.
+
+Being much engaged in the study of 'neurotic' and hysterical patients, Dr.
+Janet thinks that they are most apt to see crystal visions. Perhaps they
+are; and one doubts if their descriptions are more to be trusted than
+the romantic essay of their medical attendant. In citing Miss X.'s paper
+(as he did), Dr. Janet ought to have reported her experiments correctly,
+ought to have attributed them to herself, and should, decidedly, have
+remarked that the explanation he offered was her own hypothesis, verified
+by her own exertions.
+
+Not having any acquaintances in neurotic circles, I am unable to say
+whether such persons supply more cases of the faculty of crystal vision
+than ordinary people; while their word, one would think, is much less to
+be trusted than that of men and women in excellent health. The crystal
+visions which I have cited from my own knowledge (and I could cite scores
+of others) were beheld by men and women engaged in the ordinary duties
+of life. Students, barristers, novelists, lawyers, school-masters,
+school-mistresses, golfers--to all of whom the topic was perfectly
+new--have all exhibited the faculty. It is curious that an Arabian author
+of the thirteenth century, Ibn Khaldoun, cited by M. Lefébure, offers the
+same account of _how_ the visions appear as that given by Miss Angus in
+the _Journal_ of the S.P.R., April 1898. M. Lefébure's citation was sent
+to me in a letter.
+
+I append M. Lefébure's quotation from Ibn Khaldoun. The original is
+translated in 'Notices et Extraits des MSS. de la Bibliothèque Impériale,'
+I. xix. p. 643-645.
+
+'Ibn Kaldoun admet que certains hommes ont la faculté de deviner l'avenir.
+
+'"Ceux, ajoute-t-il, qui regardent dans les corps diaphanes, tels que les
+miroirs, les cuvettes remplies d'eau et les liquides; ceux qui inspectent
+les coeurs, les foies et les os des animaux, ... tous ces gens-là
+appartiennent aussi à la catégorie des devins, mais, à cause de
+l'imperfection de leur nature, ils y occupent un rang inférieur. Pour
+écarter le voile des sens, le vrai devin n'a pas besoin de grands efforts;
+quant aux autres, ils tâchent d'arriver au but en _essayant de concentrer
+en un seul sens toutes leurs perceptions_. Comme la vue est le sens le
+plus noble, ils lui donnent la préférence; fixant leur regard sur on objet
+à superficie unie, ils le considèrent avec attention jusqu'à ce qu'ils y
+aperçoivent la chose qu'ils veulent annoncer. Quelques personnes croient
+que l'image aperçue de cette manière se dessine sur la surface du miroir;
+mais ils se trompent. Le devin regarde fixement cette surface jusqu'à ce
+qu'elle disparaisse et qu'un rideau, semblable à un brouillard,
+s'interpose entre lui et le miroir. Sur ce rideau se dessinent les choses
+_qu'il désira apercevoir_, et cela lui permet de donner des indications
+soit affirmatives, soit négatives, sur ce que l'on désire savoir. Il
+raconte alors les perceptions telles qu'il les reçoit. Les devins,
+pendant qu'ils sont dans cet état, n'aperçoivent pas ce qui se voit
+réellement dans le miroir; c'est un autre mode de perception qui naît
+chez eux et qui s'opère, non pas au moyen de la vue, mais de l'âme. Il
+est vrai que, _pour eux, les perceptions de l'âme ressemblent à celles
+des sens au point de les tromper_; fait qui, du reste, est bien connu. La
+même chose arrive à ceux qui examinent les coeurs et les foies d'animaux.
+Nous avons vu quelques-uns de ces individus _entraver l'opération des
+sens_ par l'emploi de simples _fumigations_, puis se servir
+d'_incantations_[2] afin de donner à l'âme la disposition requise; ensuite
+ils racontent ce qu'ils ont aperçu. Ces formes, disent-ils, se montrent
+dans l'air et représentent des personnages: elles leur apprennent, au
+moyen d'emblèmes et de signes, les choses qu'ils cherchent à savoir. Les
+individus de cette classe se détachent moins de l'influence des sens que
+ceux de la classe précédente."'
+
+[Footnote 1: Lican, Paris, 1898.]
+
+[Footnote 2: L'auteur arabe avait déjà mentionné (p. 209) l'emploi des
+incantations et indiqué qu'elles étuient un simple adjuvant physique
+destiné à donner à certains hommes une exaltation dont ils se servaient
+pour tâcher de découvrir l'avenir.
+
+'Pour arriver au plus haut degré d'inspiration dont il est capable, le
+devin doit avoir recours à l'emploi de certaines phrases qui se
+distinguent par _une cadence et un parallelisme particuliers_. Il
+essaye ce moyen _afin de soustraire son âme aux influences des sens_ et
+de lui donner assez de force pour se mettre dans un contact imparfait
+avec le monde spirituel.[a] Cette agitation d'esprit, jointe à l'emploi
+des moyens intrinsèques dont nous avons parlé, excite dans son coeur
+des idées que cet organe exprime par le ministère de la langne. Les
+paroles qu'il prononce sont tantôt vraies, tantôt fausses. En effet,
+le devin, voulant suppléer à l'imperfection de son naturel, se sert de
+moyens tout à fait étrangers à sa faculté perceptive et qui ne
+s'accordent en aucune façon avec elle. Donc la vérité et l'erreur se
+présentent à lui en même temps, aussi ne doit on mettre aucune
+confiance en ses paroles. Quelquefois même il a recours à des
+suppositions et à des conjectures dans l'espoir de rencontrer la vérité
+et de tromper ceux qui l'interrogent.']
+
+[Footnote a: Compare Tennyson's way of attaining a state of trance by
+repeating to himself his own name.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+_CHIEFS IN AUSTRALIA_
+
+In the remarks on Australian religion, it is argued that chiefs in
+Australia are, at most, very inconspicuous, and that a dead chief cannot
+have thriven into a Supreme Being. Attention should be called, however, to
+Mr. Howitt's remarks on Australian 'Head-men,' in his tract on 'The
+Organisation of Australian Tribes' (pp. 103-113).
+
+He attaches more of the idea of power to 'Head-men' than does Mr. Curr in
+his work, 'The Australian Race.' The Head-men, as a rule, arrive at such
+influence as they possess by seniority, if accompanied by courage, wisdom,
+and, in some cases, by magical acquirements. There are traces of a
+tendency to keep the office (if it may be called one) in the same kinship.
+'But Vich Ian Vohr or Chingahgook are not to be found in Australian
+tribes' (p. 113). I do not observe that the manes or ghost of a dead
+Head-man receives any worship or service calculated to fix him in the
+tribal memory, and so lead to the evolution of a deity, though one
+Head-man was potent through the whole Dieyri tribe over three hundred
+miles of country. Such a person, if propitiated after death, might
+conceivably develop into a hero, if not into a creative being. But we
+must await evidence to the effect that any posthumous reverence was paid
+to this man, Ialina Piramurane (New Moon). Mr. Howitt's essay is in the
+'Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria for 1889.'
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Academy of Medicine, Paris, inquiry into animal magnetism, 34
+
+Achille, the case of, 134
+
+Acosta, Père, cited, 74, 244, 246
+
+Adare, Lord, cited, 335
+
+Addison, cited, 16
+
+Africans, religious faiths of, 212, 218, 221, 222.
+  See under separate tribal names.
+
+Ahone, North-American Indian god, 231-233, 241, 248, 258, 262, 280
+
+Aïdé, Hamilton, cited, 336
+
+Algonquins, the, 250
+
+Allen, Grant, cited, 190
+
+American Creators, 230;
+  parallel with African gods, 230;
+  savage gods of Virginia, 231;
+  the Ahone-Okeus creed, 231-233;
+  Pawnee tribal religions, 233-236;
+  Ti-ra-wá, the Spirit Father, 234, 235;
+  rite to the Morning Star, 234;
+  religion of the Blackfeet, 236;
+  Nà-pi, 237-239;
+  one account of the Inca religion, 239-242;
+  Sun-worship, 239-241;
+  cult of Pachacamac, the Inca deity, 239-247;
+  another account of the Inca religion, 242-246;
+  hymns of the Zuñis, 247;
+  _Awonawilona_, 247
+
+Amoretti, Sig., cited, 30, 152
+
+Ancestor, worship, 164-166, 178, 205, 212, 268, 271-277
+
+Andamanese, the, religious beliefs of,     167, 194-197, 205, 208, 211,
+    249, 252, 256, 272
+'Angus, Miss,' cases in her experience of crystal-gazing, 89-102, 341
+
+Animal magnetism, inquiry into, 29, 34, 35
+
+Animism, nature and influence of,     48, 49, 53, 58, 63, 129, 168, 190,
+    191, 206, 256, 264, 266, 268, 269, 303
+
+Anthropology and hallucinations, 105;
+  sleeping and waking experience, 105, 106;
+  hallucinations in mentally sound people, 107;
+  ghosts, 107;
+  coincidence of hallucinations of the sane with death or other crisis of
+    person seen, 107;
+  morbid hallucinations and coincidental 'flukes,' 108;
+  connection of cause and effect, 108;
+  the emotional effect, 108;
+  illustrative coincidence, 108;
+  hallucinations of sight, 109;
+  causes of hallucinations, 110;
+  collective hallucinations, 110;
+  the properly receptive state, 110;
+  telepathy, 111;
+  phantasms of the living, 112;
+  Maori cases, 113-115;
+  evidence to be rejected, 116;
+  subjective hallucination caused by expectancy, 116;
+  puzzling nature of hallucinations shared by several people at once, 116,
+    117;
+  hallucinations coincident with a death, 117;
+  apparitions and deaths connected in fact, 117;
+  Census of the Society for Psychical Research thereupon, 118;
+  number and character of the instances, 119;
+  weighing evidence, 119;
+  opinion of the Committee on Hallucinations, 121;
+  remoteness of occurrence of instances, 121;
+  want of documentary evidence, 121
+  non-coincidental hallucinations, 121;
+  telepathy existing between kinsfolk and friends, 122;
+  influence of anxiety, 123;
+  existence of illness known, 123;
+  mental and nervous conditions in connection with hallucinations, 134;
+  value of the statistics of the Census, 124;
+  anecdote of an English officer, 125
+
+Anthropology and religion, 30;
+  early scientific prejudice against, 40;
+  evolution and evidence, 40;
+  testing of evidence, 41-43;
+  psychical research, 48;
+  origin of religion, 44;
+  inferences drawn from supernormal phenomena, 41, 53;
+  savage parallels of psychical phenomena, 45;
+  meanings of religion, 45, 40;
+  disproof of godless tribes, 47;
+  Animism, 48, 49;
+  limits of savage tongues, 49;
+  waking and sleeping hallucinations, 60;
+  crystal-gazing, 50;
+  the ghost-soul, 51;
+  savage abstract speculation, 52;
+  analogy of the ideas of children and primitive man, 53;
+  early man's conception of life, 32;
+  ghost-seers, 54;
+  psychical conditions in which savages differ from civilised men, 54;
+  power of producing non-normal psychological conditions, 55;
+  faculties of the lower animals, 56;
+  man's first conception of religion, 56;
+  the suggested hypnotic state, 57;
+  second-sight, 68;
+  savage names for the ghost-soul, 60;
+  the migratory spirit, 60-64
+
+Anynrabia, South Guinea Creator, 220
+
+Apaches, crystal-gazing by, 84, 85
+
+Apollonius of Tyana, 66
+
+Atua, the Tongan Elohim, 279
+
+Aurora Borealis, savage ideas of the, 4, 262, 292
+
+Australians, religious beliefs of, 50, 83, 118, 128, 165, 175-182, 185,
+    188, 190, 205, 208, 211, 215, 219, 224, 240, 249, 253, 266, 261-263
+
+Automatism, 155
+
+Awonawilona, Zuñi deity, 248, 251
+
+Ayinard, Jacques, case of, 150, 182
+
+Aztecs, creed of, 104 _note_, 183, 233, 234, 255, 258, 263
+
+Bealz, Dr., cited, 132
+
+Baiame, deity, 189, 190, 191, 205, 261, 280
+
+Baker, Sir Samuel, cited, 42, 211
+
+Bakwains, the, 169
+
+Balfour, A.J., quoted, 44, 57 _note_
+
+Banks Islanders, their gods, 169, 197-198
+
+Bantus, religious beliefs of, 176, 211, 220, 248
+
+Barkworth, Mr., his opinion of Mrs. Piper, 140
+
+Barrett, Professor, on the divining-rod, 162-154
+
+Bostian, Adolf, cited, 6, 43
+
+Baxter, cited, 15
+
+Beaton, Cardinal, his mistress visualized, 97
+
+Bell, John, cited, 149
+
+Beni-Israel, 282
+
+Berna, magnetiser, 34
+
+Bernadette, case of, 117
+
+Big Black Man, Fuegian deity, 258
+
+Binet and Féré, quoted, 20, 76
+
+Bissett, Mr. and Mrs., experiences of crystal-gazing, 99-102
+
+Blackfeet, beliefs of, 230, 236
+
+Blantyre region, religion in the, 217, 218
+
+Bleck, Dr., cited, 194
+
+Bobowissi, Gold Coast god, 225-227, 230-232
+
+Bodinus, cited, 15
+
+Book of the Dead, 286, 303
+
+Bora, Australian mysteries, 176, 179, 190, 196, 260
+
+Bosman, cited, 225
+
+Bourget, Paul, his opinion of Mrs. Piper, 139, 140
+
+Bourke, Captain J.G., cited, 83
+
+Boyle, cited, 15
+
+Braid, inventor of the word 'hypnotism,' 24, 35, 36
+
+Brewster, Sir David, cited, 33
+
+Brinton, Dr., cited, 67, 168, 232, 236, 254, 264, 290
+
+Bristow, Mr., cited, 332
+
+British Association decline to hear Braid's essay, 24
+  rejection of anthropological papers, 89
+
+Brasses, de, cited, 149
+
+Brown, General Mason, cited, 68, 67
+
+Bunjil, deity, 189
+
+Bushmen, religious beliefs of, 165, 198, 208, 211, 252
+
+Button, Jemmy, the Faegian, case of, 116
+
+Caon, Boshmon deity, 189, 193, 205
+
+Callawoy, Dr., on Zulu beliefs, 72, 85, 106, 142, 151 207, 208
+
+Cardan, cited, 15
+
+Carpenter, Dr., cited, 324
+
+Carver, Captain Jonathan, his instance of savage possession, 142
+  cited, 60, 144, 145
+
+Charcot, Dr., on faith cures, 20-23, 24 _note_
+
+Chevreul, M., cited, 152
+
+Chinese, the, demon possession in, 181, 183
+  divining-rod, 154
+  religious beliefs, 237, 290, 291
+
+Chonos, the, 176
+
+Circumcision, 286
+
+Clairvoyance (vue à distance), 65
+  'opening the Gates at Distance.' 65, 66
+  attested cases among savages, 66
+  conflict with the laws of exact science, 67
+  instances, 67
+  among the Zulus, 68-70
+  among the Lapps, 70
+  the Llarson case, 71
+  seers, 72
+  the element of trickery, 73
+  a Red Indian seeress, 73
+  Peruvian clairvoyants, 75
+  Professor Richet's case, 75
+  Mr. Dobbie's case, 76
+  Scottish tales of second-sight, 78-81
+  visions provoked by various methods, 81
+  See Crystal visions
+
+Clodd, Edward, cited, 119, 120, 300
+
+'Cockburn, Mrs.,' test of crystal-gazing, 99-101
+
+Codrington, Dr., cited, 150, 169, 197-199
+
+Coirin, Mlle., her miraculous cure, 20
+
+Coleridge, cited, 9, 11, 12 _note_, 295, 296
+
+Collins, cited, 179
+
+Comanches, the, 250
+
+Confucius, religious teaching of, 290, 291
+
+Cook, Captain, cited, 271
+
+Corpse-binding, 143, 144
+
+Crawford, Lord, cited, 325, 334, 330, 387
+
+Creeks, the, 143
+
+Croesus, tests the Delphic Oracle, 14
+
+Crookes, Sir William, cited, 325, 331, 333, 334, 337, 338
+
+Crystal visions, 83
+  savage instances, 83-85
+  in later Europe, 85
+  nature of 'Miss X's' experiments, 85
+  attributed to 'dissociation,' 86
+  examples of 'thought-transference,' 87
+  arguments against accepting recognition of objects described by another
+    person, 87
+  coincidence of fact and fiction, 88
+  cases in the experience of 'Miss Angus,' 89-102
+  'Miss Rose's' experience, 91, 92
+  phenomena suggest the savage theory of the wandering soul, 103
+  cited, 7, 44, 50, 314-316, 340
+
+Cumberland, Stuart, 72
+
+Cures by suggestion, 20, 21
+
+Curr, Mr., reports 'godless' savages, 184 _note_
+
+Dampier, cited, 176
+
+Dancing sticks, 149-131
+
+Darumulun, Australian Supreme Being, 178, 179, 183, 186, 191, 213, 240,
+    258-264, 280
+
+Darwin, cited, 115, 149, 174 _note_, 324, 332
+
+Death, savage ideas on, 187
+
+Degeneration theory, the, 254
+  the powerful creative Being of lowest savages, 254
+  differences between the Supreme Being of higher and lower savages, 255
+  human sacrifice, 255
+  hungry, cruel gods degenerate from the Australian Father in Heaven, 256
+  savage Animism, 256
+  a pure religion forgotten, 257
+  an inconvenient moral Creator, 257
+  hankering after useful ghost-gods, 257
+  lowering of the ideal of a Creator, 257
+  maintenance of an immoral system in the interests of the State and the
+    clergy, 258
+  moral monotheism of the Hebrew religion, 258
+  degradation of Jehovah, 258
+  human sacrifice in ritual of Israel, 258
+  origin of conception of Jehovah, 258
+  Semitic gods, 259
+  status of Darumulun, 259
+  conception of Jehovah conditioned by space, 260
+  degeneration of deity in Africa, 260
+  political advance produces religious degeneration, 261
+  sacrificial ideas, 262
+  the savage Supreme Being on a higher plane than the Semitic and
+    Greek gods, 263
+  Animism full of the seeds of religions degeneration, 264
+  falling off in the theistic conception, 265
+  fetishism, 265
+  modus of degeneration by Animism supplanting Theism, 265
+  feeling after a God who needs not anything at man's hands, 267
+
+Demoniacal possession, 128
+  the 'inspired' or 'possessed,' 129
+  'change of control,' 130
+  gift of eloquence and poetry, 131
+  instances in China, 131
+  attempted explanations of the phenomena, 132
+  'alternating personality,' 132
+  symptoms of possession, 132
+  evidence for, 133
+  scientific account of a demoniac and his cure, 134
+  inducing the 'possessed' state, 135
+  exhibition of abnormal knowledge by the possessed, 136
+  Scientific study of the phenomena, 136
+  details of the case of Mrs. Piper, 136-141
+  diagnosing and prescribing for patients, 142
+  Carver's example of savage possession, 142, 157
+  custom of binding the seer with bonds, 142, 145
+  corpse-binding, 143, 144
+
+Dendid, Dinka Supreme Being, 211, 212, 258, 280
+
+Deslon, M., disciple of Mesmer, 24
+
+Dessoir, Dr. Max, quoted, 32, 33, 57
+
+Dinkas, beliefs of the, 42, 211, 212, 256
+
+Divining-rod, use of the, 30, 152-155
+
+Dobbie, Mr., his case of clairvoyance, 76
+
+Dorman, Mr., cited, 203
+
+Dunbar, Mr., cited, 236
+
+Du Pont, cited, 75
+
+Du Prel, cited, 28
+
+Dynois, Jonka, trance of, 65
+
+Ebumtupism, second sight, 73
+
+Egyptians, beliefs of, 83, 302
+
+Elcho, Lord, cited, 334
+
+Eleusinian mysteries, 196
+
+Elliotson, Dr., cited, 24, 35, 37, 40
+
+Ellis, Major, on Polynesian and African religions ideas, 83, 144, 222-228,
+    232, 251, 260, 272
+
+Elohim, savage equivalents to the term, 277
+
+Esemkofu, Zulu ghosts, 128, 129
+
+Eskimo, religious beliefs of, 72, 113, 184
+
+Faith-Cures, 20-22
+
+Fenton, Francis Dart, on Maori ghost-seeing, 114
+
+Ferrand, Mlle., on hallucinations, 32
+
+Fetishism and Spiritualism, 147
+  the fetish, 147
+  sources super-normal to savages, 148
+  independent motion in inanimate objects, 149
+  comparison with physical phenomena of spiritualism, 149
+  Melanesian belief in sticks moved by spirits, 150
+  a sceptical Zulu, 150
+  a form of the pendulum experiment, 151
+  table-turning, 152
+  the divining-rod, 152
+  the civilised and savage practice of automatism, 156
+  dark room manifestations, 156
+  the disturbances in the house of M. Zoller, 156
+  consideration of physical phenomena, 158
+  instanced, 165, 225, 265, 266, 276, 324-339
+
+Figuier, M., cited, 152
+
+Fijians, religious beliefs of, 128, 136, 200, 248, 338
+
+Finns, the, 58
+
+Fire ceremony, the, 180 _note_
+
+Fison, Mr., cited, 128
+
+Fitzroy, Admiral, cited, 115, 173, 174
+
+Flacourt, Sieur de, on crystal-gazing in Madagascar, 84
+
+Flint, Professor, cited, 253
+
+Francis, St., stigmata of, 22
+
+Fuegians, beliefs and customs of, 115, 165, 173-175, 183, 187, 208,
+    211, 227, 258, 262, 272
+
+Galton, Mr., cited, 12, 96, 107, 294, 295
+
+Garcilasso de la Vega, on Inca beliefs, 239-244
+
+'Gates of Distance, Opening the,' 65, 66, 68
+
+Ghost-seers, 54, 63
+
+Ghost-soul, the, 51
+  names for the, 60
+
+Gibert, Dr., on 'willing' sleep, 36
+
+Gibier, Dr., cited, 146
+
+Gippsland tribes, 187
+
+Glanvil, Rev. Joseph, his scientific investigations, 15
+
+God, evolution of the idea of, 160
+  anthropological hypothesis, 160
+  primitive logic of the savage, 161
+  regarded as a spirit, 162
+  idea of spiritual beings framed on the human soul, 164
+  deified ancestors, 164
+  the Zulu first ancestor, 164
+  fetishes, 165
+  great gods in savage systems of religion, 165
+  the Lord of the Dead, 165
+  conception of an idealised divine First Ancestor, 188
+  hostile Good and Bad Beings, 166
+  the Supreme Being of savage creeds, 166
+  mediating 'Sons,' 167
+  Christian and Islamite influence on savage conceptions, 167
+  probable germs of the savage idea of a Supreme Being, 168
+  animistic conceptions, 168
+  ghosts, and Beings who never were human, 169
+  recognition by savages of our God in theirs, 169
+  the hypothesis of degeneracy, 170
+  the moral, friendly creative Being of low savage faith, 171
+  food offerings to a Universal Power, 171
+  the High Gods of low races, 173
+  intrusion of European ideas into savage religions, 173
+  the Fuegian Big Man, 174
+  ghosts of dead medicine man, 175
+  the Bora, or Australian tribal mysteries, 176, 177, 179
+  possible evolution of the Australian god, 178
+  mythology and theology of Darumulun, the highest Australian god, 178,
+    179, 183
+  religious sanction of morals, 179
+  selflessness the very essence of goodness, 180
+  precepts of Darumulan, 181, 182
+  argument from design, 184
+  Supreme Gods not necessarily developed out of 'spirits,' 185
+  distinction between deities and ghosts, 185
+  human beings adored as gods, 186
+  deathlessness of the Supreme Being of savage faith, 186, 188
+  idealisation of the savage himself, 187
+  negation of the ghost-theory, 188, 189
+  high creative gods never wore mortal men, 189
+  low savage distinction between gods, 189
+  propitiation by food and sacrifice, 190
+  'magnified non-natural men,' 190
+  gods to talk about, not to adore, 190
+  higher gods prior to the ghost theory, 191
+  See Supreme Beings; American Creators; Jehovah
+
+Greeks, the, beliefs of, 302
+
+Greenlanders, the, 144, 182
+
+Gregory, Dr., cited, 86
+
+Griesinger, Dr., cited, 132
+
+Grinnell, Mr., on Pawnee beliefs, 234-237
+
+Guiana Indians, religious beliefs of, 202-206, 256
+
+Guinea, North and South, religious beliefs in, 220
+
+Gurney, Mr., his experiments in hypnotism, 85, 86
+  cited, 107, 114, 117
+
+Guyau, M., cited, 12, 24, 25
+
+Hallucinations. See Anthropology and Hallucinations
+
+Hamilton, Sir William, cited, 12
+
+Hammond, Dr., on demoniacal possession, 131
+
+Harteville, Madame, case of, 26
+
+Hearne, on the Aurora Borealis, 3
+  on cure by suggestion, 21, 22
+
+Hebrews. See Israelites
+
+Hegel, cited, 30-34, 50, 56, 58, 78, 111, 152
+
+Higgs, Police Constable, statement of, on the disturbances at Mr.
+  White's house, 326-328
+
+Highland second-sight, 143-145
+
+Hodgson, Dr., report on Mrs. Piper, 137, 140, 141
+  cited, 135, 325
+
+Home, David Dunglas, his powers as a medium, 324, 325, 334-339
+
+Howitt, Mr., cited, 128, 177-182
+
+Hume, David, attitude towards miracles, 16
+  definition of a miracle, 16
+  self-contradictions, 17
+  refuses to examine miracle of the Abbé Paris, 18, 19, 22-25
+  alternative definition of a miracle, 25
+  cited, 297
+
+Huxley, Professor, on savage religious cults, 42, 43, 48, 162, 163, 171,
+    176, 177, 182
+  on the evolution of Jehovah, 270, 271, 277, 279, 282, 286
+  cited, 17 _note_, 296, 324
+
+Hypnotism, 6, 24, 29, 32, 34, 35, 37, 75, 76
+
+Iamblichus, cited, 14, 336, 337, 339
+
+Ibn Khaldoun, cited, 341
+
+Im Thurn, on the religious ideas of the Indians of Guiana, 50, 160,
+    202-207, 256, 298
+
+Incas, the, 85, 240-247, 258
+
+Iroquois, the, 84, 85
+
+Islam, influence of, on African beliefs, 221
+
+Israelites, development of their religious ideas, 258, 260, 268-284, 302
+
+James, Professor William, quoted, 23, 59, 73, 107, 110, 132, 137, 156,
+    294
+
+Janet, Dr. Pierre, on 'willing' sleep, 36
+  on demoniacal possession, 134, 135
+  cited, 73, 294, 340, 341
+
+Jeanne d'Arc, 34, 73, 115, 128, 276
+
+Jehovah, theories of, 258, 260, 268
+  as a Moral Supreme Being, 268
+  anthropological theory of the origin of Jehovah-worship, 270
+  absence of ancestor-worship from the Hebrew tradition, 270-273
+  alleged evidence for ancestor-worship in Israel, 273-277
+  evolution from ghost-cult to the cult of Jehovah, 277
+  the term Elohim, 277
+  human shape assumed, 278
+  considered as a ghost-god, 279
+  sacrifices to, 280
+  suggestion of a Being not yet named Jehovah, 281
+  traditional emergence of Jehovah as the god of Israel, 281
+  as a deified ancestor, 282
+  moral element in the idea of Jehovah, 282, 286
+  a mere tribal god, 283
+  a Kenite god, 283, 284
+  inconsistencies of theorists concerning, 285
+  the moral element a survival of primitive ethics in the savage ancestors
+    of the Israelites, 287
+  verity of the Biblical account, 287
+  cited, 299
+
+Jeraeil, mysteries of the Kurnai, 180
+
+Jevons, Mr., cited, 186, 255, 300, 302
+
+Jugglery, Pawnee, 235
+
+Jung-Stilling, cited, 30, 63
+
+Kaloc, Fijian name for gods, 200, 201
+
+Kamschatkans, 166
+
+Kant, inquires into Swedenborg's visions, 26, 59
+  disappointed with Swedenborg's 'Arcana Coelestia', 26, 27
+  on the metaphysics of 'spirits,' 27
+  discusses the subconscious, 28
+  cited, 125
+
+Karens, beliefs of, 60, 73, 151
+
+Karr, Alphonse, cited, 336
+
+Kelvin, Lord, on hypnotism, 37
+
+Kenites, the, 284
+
+Kingsley, Miss, cited, 175, 211, 220, 328
+
+Kirk, cited, 144
+
+Kohl, cited, 148
+
+Kulin, Australian tribe, 49
+
+Kurnai, Australian tribe, their religious conceptions, 49, 180, 181, 187,
+    215, 262, 263, 287, 291
+
+Laing, Mr. Samuel, cited, 12 _note_
+
+Langlois, M., the case of, 75, 76
+
+Lapps, beliefs of, 58, 71, 81
+
+Latukas, the, 42
+
+Laverterus, telepathic hypothesis of, 15
+
+Le Loyer, cited, 15
+
+Leaf, Mr., cited, 112 _note_
+
+Leeward Isles, ideas of a god in, 251
+
+Lefèbure, M., cited, 84, 149, 341
+
+Legge, Dr., on the teaching of Confucius, 290
+
+Lejean, M., on the Dinkas, 212
+
+Lejeaune, Père, cited, 74, 83
+
+Leng, Mr., cited, 133
+
+Leon, Cieza de, cited, 241, 244
+
+Léonie, the case of her hypnotisation, 75, 76
+
+Leslie, David, on Zulu clairvoyance, 68
+  on ghosts, 128
+
+Levitation, 334
+
+Littré, M., cited, 136
+
+Livingstone, Dr., cited, 6, 135, 170
+
+Lloyd, Dr., cited, 327, 328
+
+Loan-god, a, Tshi theory of, 222-229
+
+Lourdes, cures at, 19
+
+Lubbock, Sir John, cited, 42
+
+Macalister, Professor, his opinion of Mrs. Piper, 140
+
+MacCulloch, Dr., on second-sight, 58
+
+Macdonald, Duff, cited, 150, 213, 215, 218
+
+Macgregor, Dr. Alastair, gives instances of second-sight, 79-81
+
+Madagascar, 84
+
+Magnetism, 29, 34, 35
+
+Malagasies, beliefs of, 84
+
+Malays of Keeling Island, fetishism in, 141
+
+Man, Mr., on Andamanese religion and mythology, 194, 195
+
+Mans, magical rapport, 199, 200
+
+Mandans, the, 188
+
+Manganjah, practice of sorcery in, 149
+
+Manning, Mr., cited, 146
+
+Maoris, religious beliefs of, 83, 113-115, 118, 119, 150, 166, 188
+
+Marawa, Banks Islands deity, 198, 199
+
+Mariner, cited, 278
+
+Markham, Mr., cited, 243, 246
+
+Marson, Madame, case of, 71
+
+Mason, Dr., on familiar spirits, 130
+
+Mather, Cotton, cited, 16, 55
+
+Maudsloy, Dr., cited, 23 _note_
+
+Mani, Maori deity, 166, 188
+
+Mayo, Dr., cited, 86
+
+Medici, Catherine de', cited, 66
+
+Medicine-men, 84
+
+Mediums, 324-339
+
+Melanesians, religious beliefs of, 150, 169, 189, 197, 199, 200
+
+Menestrier, le Père, uses the divining-rod, 154
+
+Menzies, Professor, cited, 257
+
+Mesmer, his theory of magnetism, 29, 34
+
+Millar, cited, 40, 41
+
+Miracles, regarded from the standpoint of science, 14
+  early tests, 14
+  and more modern research, 15
+  witchcraft, 15, 16
+  Hume's essay on, 16
+  and his definitions of a miracle, 16, 25
+  cures at the tomb of the Abbè Paris, 18-20, 23
+  Binet and Fèrè's explanation of these cures, 20
+  cures by suggestion, 20, 21
+  Dr. Charcot's views, 20
+  faith cures, 20-22
+  science opposed to systematic negation, 22
+  refusal to examine evidence, 23-25
+  'marvellous facts,' 24
+  suggestion à distance, 24
+  Kant's researches, 26-29
+  Swedenborg's clairvoyance, 26, 27
+  thought-transference and hypnotic sleep, 29, 30, 32, 35
+  water-finding, 39
+  phenomena of clairvoyance, 31
+  Hegel's 'magic tie,' 31
+  Dr. Max Dessoir's views, 31, 32
+  hallucinations, 32
+  animal magnetism, 34
+  hypnotism, 35
+  'willing,' 36
+  facts and phenomena confronting science, 37
+
+'Miss X,' on crystal-gazing, 87, 315, 316, 340, 341
+
+Mlungu, Central African deity, 213-218
+
+Molina, Christoval de, on Inca beliefs, 242, 243
+
+Moll, Herr, cited, 314
+
+Montgeron, M., cited, 19, 20
+
+More, Henry, cited, 15
+
+Moses, founder of the Hebrew religion, 283-286
+
+Mtanga, African deity, 213-217
+
+Müller, Max, cited, 41, 43, 46, 265, 266, 289
+
+Mungan-ngaur, Kurnai Supreme Being, 181, 188, 190, 205, 217, 259
+
+Mwetyi, Shekuni Great Spirit, 220
+
+Myers, Frederic, on hypnotic slumber, 30, 33
+  cited, 15 _note_
+
+Nana Nyankupon, Gold Coast Supreme Being, 225-228, 232, 280
+
+Nà-pi, American Indian deity, 237-239, 241
+
+Ndengei, Fijian Supreme Being, 200-202, 228, 248
+
+Nevius, Dr., on demoniacal possession, 131-135
+
+Newbold, Professor W. Romaine, 135
+
+Nezahuati, erects a bloodless fane to the Unknown God, 258
+
+Nicaraguans, the, 60
+
+North, Major, on Pawnee jugglery, 235, 236
+
+Nzambi Mpungu, Bantu Supreme Being, 226, 228, 242
+
+Okeus (Oki), American Indian deity, 231, 232
+
+Okey, the sisters, case of, 37 _note_
+
+Ombwiri, South Guinea god, 220
+
+Orpen, Mr., cited, 193
+
+Oxford, Rev. A.W., on ancient Israel, 275-277, 283-285
+
+Pachacamac, Inca, Supreme Being, 230, 239-247, 258
+
+Pachayachachi, Inca god, 242, 246
+
+Paladino, Eusapia, case of, 325
+
+Palmer, Mr., cited, 179
+
+Paris, Abbè miracles wrought at his tomb, 18-20, 23
+
+Parish, Herr, criticism of his reply to the arguments for telepathy,
+    307-323
+  cited, 8, 86, 107
+
+Park, Mungo, on African beliefs, 221, 223
+
+Pawnees, religious beliefs and practices of, 212, 224, 230, 233-236, 263
+
+Payne, Mr., cited, 160, 161, 246
+
+Peden, Rev. Mr., cited, 66
+
+Pelippa, Captain, cited, 173
+
+Pendulum experiment, a form of the, 151
+
+Pepys, cited, 15
+
+Peruvians, religious ideas and practices of, 75, 239-247
+
+Phantasms of the Dead, 128
+
+Phinuit, Dr. See Mrs. Piper
+
+Piper, Mrs., the case of, 132, 136-141
+
+Pliny, cited, 15
+
+Plotinus, cited, 66
+
+Plutarch, cited, 15
+
+Podmore, Mr., on psychical research, 111, 325, 326, 328, 330-336, 338, 339
+
+Poltergeist, the, and his explainers, 334-339
+
+Polynesians, religious beliefs of, 7, 83, 251, 252, 256
+
+Polytheism, 289, 291, 303
+
+Porphyry, cited, 14
+
+Powhattan, Virginian chief, 231, 232
+
+Puluga, Andamanese Supreme Being, 195, 205, 228, 258, 262
+
+Pundjel, Australian god, 258, 261, 262
+
+Puységur, de, his discovery of hypnotic sleep, 29,
+  cited, 76
+
+Qat, Banks Islands deity, 189, 198, 199
+
+Qing, Bushman, his ideas of the god Cang, 193, 196
+
+Ravenwood, Master of, instanced, 126
+
+Red Indians, beliefs and practices of, 3, 5, 6, 21, 22, 83, 104 _note_,
+    128, 142, 143, 203
+
+Regnard, M., cited, 71
+
+Renan, M., cited, 285
+
+Révillo, M., cited, 291, 293
+
+Reynolds, Dr. Russell, cited, 22
+
+Rhombos, use of the, 84
+
+Ribot, M., cited, 132
+
+Richet, Professor Charles, hypnotises Léonie, 75, 76
+  cited, 64, 73, 82, 154, 294
+
+Ritter, Dr., believes in Siderism, 29
+
+Romans, religious ideas of, 302
+
+'Rose, Miss,' her experience of crystal-gazing, 90,91
+
+Rose, Eliza, the case of, 326-330
+
+Roskoff, cited, 42
+
+Rowley, Mr., cited, 149
+
+Russegger, cited, 212
+
+Salcamayhua, cited, 246
+
+Samoyeds, 58, 72
+
+Sand, George, cited, 86
+
+Santos, cited, 214
+
+Saul and the Witch of Endor, 14
+
+Scheffer, cited, 66, 70, 71, 81
+
+Schoolcraft, Mr., cited, 236
+
+Schrenck-Notzing, von, cited, 55 _note_
+
+Scot, Reginald, cited, 15
+
+Scott, Rev. David Clement, cited, 49 _note_, 106, 217, 218
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, his attitude towards clairvoyance, 27
+  cited, 121, 126
+
+Sebituane, case of, 135, 136
+
+Second-sight, 56, 66, 78-81
+
+Seer-binding, 143
+
+Seers, 72
+
+Shang-ti, Chinese Supreme Being, 245, 290, 291
+
+Shortland, Mr., quoted, 113
+
+Sidgwick, Professor, cited, 318, 332
+
+Sioux, the, 236
+
+Skidi or Wolf Pawnees, the, 233, 234
+
+Smith, Mrs. Erminie, on crystal-gazing, 84
+
+Smith, historian of Virginia, cited, 231, 232
+
+Smith, Robertson, cited, 259, 261, 262, 281 _note_, 298
+
+Smyth, Brough, cited, 42, 178, 182, 293
+
+Society for Psychical Research, 116, 118
+
+Spencer, Herbert, on early religious ideas, 42, 43
+  ghosts, 47
+  Animism, 48 _note_, 53, 54
+  limits of savage language, 49
+  the Fuegian Big Man, 174
+  Australian marriage customs, 175
+  Australian religion, 182
+  men-gods, 186
+  religion of Bushmen, 193
+  ancestor-worship, 212, 213, 271-273
+  cited, 162, 167, 170, 216, 218, 292
+
+Spiritualism, 324-339.
+  See Fetishism
+
+Stade, Herr, cited, 276, 284, 285
+
+Stanley, Hans, cited, 12
+
+Starr, cited, 104 _note_
+
+Stoll, cited, 72
+
+Strachey, William, cited, 229-232
+
+Suetonius, cited, 15
+
+Sully, Mr., cited. 295
+
+Sun-worship, 238-245
+
+Supreme Beings of savages, regarded as eternal, moral, and powerful, 193
+  Cagn, the Bushman god, 193
+  Puluga, the Andamanese god, 195
+  savage mysteries and rites, 196
+  alliance of ethics with religion, 196
+  the Banks Islanders' belief in Tamate (ghosts) and Vui (Beings who never
+    had been human), 197
+  corporeal and incorporeal Vuis, 198
+  sacrificial offerings to ghosts and spirits, 199
+  the soul the complex of real bodiless after-images, 200
+  Fijian belief, 200
+  Ndengei, the Fijian chief god, 200, 201
+  the idea of primeval Eternal Beings, 202
+  the Great Spirit of North American tribes, 203
+  dream origin of the ghost theory, 203
+  Guiana Indian names indicating a belief in a Great Spirit, 203-206
+  the God-cult abandoned for the Ghost-cult, 205
+  Unkulunkulu, the Zulu Creator, 207-210
+  the notion of a dead Maker, 208
+  preference for serviceable family spirits, 209
+  the Dinka Creator, 211
+  African ancestor-worship, 212
+  Mlungu, a deity formed by aggregation of departed spirits, 213
+  ethical element in religious mysteries, 215
+  the position of Mtanga, 216
+  religious beliefs in the Blantyre region, 217, 218
+  negro tendency to monotheism, 218
+  beliefs in North and South Guinea, 220
+  Mungo Park's observation of African beliefs, 221
+  Islamic influence, 221
+  the Tshi theory of a loan-god,' borrowed from Europeans, 222-228
+  varieties of Tshi gods, 224, 225
+  fetishes, 225
+  Nana Nyankupon, the 'God of the Christians,' 225-229
+  American Creators (see under), 230-252
+  the Polynesian cult, 251, 252
+  Chinese conceptions, 290-292
+
+Swedenborg, Emanuel, visions of, 26
+  recovers Mme. Harteville's receipt, 26
+  his 'Arcana Coelestia,' 27
+  noticed by Kant, 28, 29, 59
+
+Taa-Roa, Polynesian deity, 251, 252, 256, 280, 308
+
+Table-turning, 151
+
+Tahitians, 251
+
+Taine, M., cited, 57
+
+Ta-li-y-Tooboo, Tongan deity, 278, 279, 282
+
+Tamate, Banks Islands ghosts, 197-199
+
+Tamoi, the 'ancient of heaven,' 188
+
+Tando, Gold Coast god, 225
+
+Tanner, John, case of, 57, 128
+
+Teed, Esther, the Amherst mystery, 333
+
+Telepathy, oppositions of science to, 307
+  hallucination of memory, 307
+  presentiments, 308
+  dreams, 308, 309, 312
+  veridical hallucinations, 309, 311
+  coincidence in S.P.R.'s Census cases, 310
+  non-coincidental cases, 311
+  condition to beget hallucination, 312
+  hallucinations mere dreams, 312
+  crystal-gazing, 314-316
+  number of coincidences no proof, 316
+  association of ideas, 316
+  coincidental collective hallucinations, 317-323
+  See Crystal visions
+
+Thomson, Basil, cited, 200 _note_, 248, 249, 339
+
+Thought-transference, 4, 29-32, 35
+  illustrative cases, 88-103
+
+Thouvenel, M., cited, 152
+
+Thyraeus on ghosts, 15
+
+Tien, Chinese heaven, 290, 291
+
+Ti-ra-wá, American Indian god, 234-236, 239
+
+Tlapané, African wizard, 135
+
+Tongans, religious beliefs of, 278-280
+
+Tonkaways, American tribe, 233
+
+Torfaeus, cited, 71
+
+Totemism, 239, 241, 262, 263, 269, 270, 276
+
+Tregear, Mr., on Maori ghost-seeing, 113
+
+Tshi theory of a loan-god, 223-227
+
+Tuckey, Dr. Lloyd, cited, 36
+
+Tui Laga, Fijian deity, 249
+
+Tundun, ancestor of the Kurnai, 181
+
+Tylor, Mr., his test of recurrence, 41
+  on anthropological origin of religion, 43
+  on savage philosophy of super-normal phenomena, 45, 53
+  disproves the assertion about 'godless' tribes, 47
+  his term Animism, 48, 49
+  theory of metaphysical genius in low savages, 51
+  ghost-seers, 54
+  on psychical conditions of contemporary savages, 54-56
+  on the influence of Swedenborg, 59
+  savage names for the ghost-soul, 60
+  second-sight, 66
+  mediums, 73
+  dreams, 106
+  hallucinations, 110-113, 117, 118
+  demoniacal possession, 131
+  fetishism, 148, 149, 165
+  divining-rod, 153
+  evolution of gods from ghosts, 163, 164
+  fetish deities, 165
+  dualistic idea, 166
+  Supreme Being of savage creeds, 166, 167
+  the degeneration theory, 170, 254
+  confusion of thought upon religion, 182
+  list of first ancestors deified, 188
+  savage mysteries, 201
+  savage Animism, 204
+  Okeus and his rites, 231
+  Pachacamac, 245
+  Confucius's teaching, 290
+  the mystagogue Home, 325
+  levitation, 334
+  cited, 50, 52, 53, 58, 59, 61-63, 78, 151, 161, 162, 170, 173, 184, 185,
+    203, 231, 232, 246, 257, 293, 297
+
+Tyndall, Professor, cited, 324
+
+Uiracocha, Inca Creator, 242-246
+
+Umabakulists, diviners by sticks, 151
+
+Unkulunkulu, Zulu mythical first ancestor, 164, 168, 188, 202, 207, 220
+
+Vincent, Mr., 29
+  on clairvoyance, 34, 36, 37
+
+Virchow, cited, 19
+
+Vui, non-ghost gods, 169, 197-200
+
+Wabose, Catherine, Red Indian seeress, experience of, 73, 74
+
+Waltz, cited, 177, 194 _note_, 218-220, 222, 243
+
+Wallace, Alfred Basset, on Hume's theory of 'miracles,' 17, 18
+  on Ritter, 29
+  on clairvoyance, 31
+
+Wayao, Supreme Being of the, 213, 214
+
+Wellhausen, cited, 277, 283, 285, 286, 298
+
+Welton, Thomas, on the divining-rod, 154
+
+Wesley, John, cited, 16
+
+White, Joseph, spirit manifestations at his house, 326-331
+
+Wierus, cited, 15
+
+Williams, Mr., cited, 201, 248
+
+Wilson, Mr., cited, 50, 219, 220
+
+Windward Isles, ideas of a God in, 251
+
+Witch of Endor, the, 14, 277, 278
+
+Witchcraft, 14-16
+
+Wodrow, Mr., cited, 16
+
+Wolf tribes, 233
+
+Wynne, Captain, cited, 335
+
+Yama, Vedic-Aryan ghost-god, 188
+
+Yaos, religious beliefs of, 150, 213, 214-216
+
+Yerri Yuppon, good spirit of the Chonos, 175
+
+York, a Fuegian, cited, 174
+
+Yuncus, a Peruvian race, worship of, 240, 246
+
+Zarate, Augustin de, cited, 240
+
+Zoller, M., disturbances in the house of, 156, 157
+
+Zulus, religious beliefs and customs of, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 85, 128,
+    141, 142, 150, 152, 207-210
+
+Zuñis, hymns of the, 248, 251
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Making of Religion, by Andrew Lang
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Making of Religion, by Andrew Lang
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Making of Religion
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: May 14, 2004 [EBook #12353]
+[Date last updated: March 30, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAKING OF RELIGION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Connal, William A. Pifer-Foote and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders. This file was produced from images generously made
+available by gallica (Bibliotheque nationale de France) at
+http://gallica.bnf.fr.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAKING OF RELIGION
+
+BY
+ANDREW LANG
+
+M.A., LL.D. ST ANDREWS
+
+HONORARY FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE OXFORD
+SOMETIME GIFFORD LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS
+
+SECOND EDITION
+1900
+
+
+
+
+_TO THE PRINCIPAL
+OF THE
+UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS
+
+
+DEAR PRINCIPAL DONALDSON,
+
+I hope you will permit me to lay at the feet of the University of St.
+Andrews, in acknowledgment of her life-long kindnesses to her old pupil,
+these chapters on the early History of Religion. They may be taken as
+representing the Gifford Lectures delivered by me, though in fact they
+contain very little that was spoken from Lord Gifford's chair. I wish they
+were more worthy of an Alma Mater which fostered in the past the leaders
+of forlorn hopes that were destined to triumph; and the friends of lost
+causes who fought bravely against Fate--Patrick Hamilton, Cargill, and
+Argyll, Beaton and Montrose, and Dundee.
+
+Believe me
+
+Very sincerely yours,
+
+ANDREW LANG_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+By the nature of things this book falls under two divisions. The first
+eight chapters criticise the current anthropological theory of the origins
+of the belief in _spirits._ Chapters ix.-xvii., again, criticise the
+current anthropological theory as to how, the notion of _spirit_ once
+attained, man arrived at the idea of a Supreme Being. These two branches
+of the topic are treated in most modern works concerned with the Origins
+of Religion, such as Mr. Tyler's "Primitive Culture," Mr. Herbert
+Spencer's "Principles of Sociology," Mr. Jevons's "Introduction to the
+History of Religion," the late Mr. Grant Allen's "Evolution of the Idea of
+God," and many others. Yet I have been censured for combining, in this
+work, the two branches of my subject; and the second part has been
+regarded as but faintly connected with the first.
+
+The reason for this criticism seems to be, that while one small set of
+students is interested in, and familiar with the themes examined in the
+first part (namely the psychological characteristics of certain mental
+states from which, in part, the doctrine of spirits is said to have
+arisen), that set of students neither knows nor cares anything about the
+matter handled in the second part. This group of students is busied with
+"Psychical Research," and the obscure human faculties implied in alleged
+cases of hallucination, telepathy, "double personality," human automatism,
+clairvoyance, and so on. Meanwhile anthropological readers are equally
+indifferent as to that branch of psychology which examines the conditions
+of hysteria, hypnotic trance, "double personality," and the like.
+Anthropologists have not hitherto applied to the savage mental conditions,
+out of which, in part, the doctrine of "spirits" arose, the recent
+researches of French, German, and English psychologists of the new school.
+As to whether these researches into abnormal psychological conditions do,
+or do not, indicate the existence of a transcendental region of human
+faculty, anthropologists appear to be unconcerned. The only English
+exception known to me is Mr. Tylor, and his great work, "Primitive
+Culture," was written thirty years ago, before the modern psychological
+studies of Professor William James, Dr. Romaine Newbold, M. Richet, Dr.
+Janet, Professor Sidgwick, Mr. Myers, Mr. Gurney, Dr. Parish, and many
+others had commenced.
+
+Anthropologists have gone on discussing the trances, and visions, and
+so-called "demoniacal possession" of savages, as if no new researches into
+similar facts in the psychology of civilised mankind existed; or, if they
+existed, threw any glimmer of light on the abnormal psychology of savages.
+I have, on the other hand, thought it desirable to sketch out a study of
+savage psychology in the light of recent psychological research. Thanks to
+this daring novelty, the book has been virtually taken as two books;
+anthropologists have criticised the second part, and one or two Psychical
+Researchers have criticised the first part; each school leaving one part
+severely alone. Such are the natural results of a too restricted
+specialism.
+
+Even to Psychical Researchers the earlier division is of scant interest,
+because witnesses to _successful_ abnormal or supernormal faculty in
+savages cannot be brought into court and cross-examined. But I do not give
+anecdotes of such savage successes as evidence to _facts;_ they are only
+illustrations, and evidence to _beliefs and methods_ (as of crystal gazing
+and automatic utterances of "secondary personality"), which, among the
+savages, correspond to the supposed facts examined by Psychical Research
+among the civilised. I only point out, as Bastian had already pointed out,
+the existence of a field that deserves closer study by anthropologists
+who can observe savages in their homes. We need persons trained in
+the psychological laboratories of Europe and America, as members of
+anthropological expeditions. It may be noted that, in his "Letters from
+the South Seas," Mr. Louis Stevenson makes some curious observations,
+especially on a singular form of hypnotism applied to himself with
+fortunate results. The method, used in native medicine, was novel; and
+the results were entirely inexplicable to Mr. Stevenson, who had not been
+amenable to European hypnotic practice. But he was not a trained expert.
+
+Anthropology must remain incomplete while it neglects this field, whether
+among wild or civilised men. In the course of time this will come to be
+acknowledged. It will be seen that we cannot really account for the origin
+of the belief in spirits while we neglect the scientific study of those
+psychical conditions, as of hallucination and the hypnotic trance, in
+which that belief must probably have had some, at least, of its origins.
+
+As to the second part of the book, I have argued that the first dim
+surmises as to a Supreme Being need not have arisen (as on the current
+anthropological theory) in the notion of spirits at all. (See chapter xi.)
+Here I have been said to draw a mere "verbal distinction" but no
+distinction can be more essential. If such a Supreme Being as many savages
+acknowledge is _not_ envisaged by them as a "spirit," then the theories
+and processes by which he is derived from a ghost of a dead man are
+invalid, and remote from the point. As to the origin of a belief in a
+kind of germinal Supreme Being (say the Australian Baiame), I do not, in
+this book, offer any opinion. I again and again decline to offer an
+opinion. Critics, none the less, have said that I attribute the belief to
+revelation! I shall therefore here indicate what I think probable in so
+obscure a field.
+
+As soon as man had the idea of "making" things, he might conjecture as to
+a Maker of things which he himself had not made, and could not make. He
+would regard this unknown Maker as a "magnified non-natural man." These
+speculations appear to me to need less reflection than the long and
+complicated processes of thought by which Mr. Tylor believes, and probably
+believes with justice, the theory of "spirits" to have been evolved. (See
+chapter iii.) This conception of a magnified non-natural man, who is a
+Maker, being given; his Power would be recognised, and fancy would clothe
+one who had made such useful things with certain other moral attributes,
+as of Fatherhood, goodness, and regard for the ethics of his children;
+these ethics having been developed naturally in the evolution of social
+life. In all this there is nothing "mystical," nor anything, as far as I
+can see, beyond the limited mental powers of any beings that deserve to be
+called human.
+
+But I hasten to add that another theory may be entertained. Since this
+book was written there appeared "The Native Tribes of Central Australia,"
+by Professor Spencer and Mr. Gillen, a most valuable study.[1] The
+authors, closely scrutinising the esoteric rites of the Arunta and other
+tribes in Central Australia, found none of the moral precepts and
+attributes which (according to Mr. Howitt, to whom their work is
+dedicated), prevail in the mysteries of the natives of New South Wales and
+Victoria. (See chapter x.) What they found was a belief in 'the great
+spirit, _Twanyirika_,' who is believed 'by uninitiated boys and women'
+(but, apparently, not by adults) to preside over the cruel rites of tribal
+initiation.[2] No more is said, no myths about 'the great spirit' are
+given. He is dismissed in a brief note. Now if these ten lines contain
+_all_ the native lore of Twanyirika, he is a mere bugbear, not believed in
+(apparently) by adults, but invented by them to terrorise the women and
+boys. Next, granting that the information of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen is
+exhaustive, and granting that (as Mr. J.G. Frazer holds, in his essays in
+the 'Fortnightly Review,' April and May, 1899) the Arunta are the most
+primitive of mortals, it will seem to follow that the _moral_ attributes
+of Baiame and other gods of other Australian regions are later accretions
+round the form of an original and confessed bugbear, as among the
+primitive Arunta, 'a bogle of the nursery,' in the phrase repudiated by
+Maitland of Lethington. Though not otherwise conspicuously more civilised
+than the Arunta (except, perhaps, in marriage relations), Mr. Howitt's
+South Eastern natives will have improved the Arunta confessed 'bogle'
+into a beneficent and moral Father and Maker. Religion will have its
+origin in a tribal joke, and will have become not '_diablement_,' but
+'_divinement_,' '_changee en route_.' Readers of Messrs. Spencer and
+Gillen will see that the Arunta philosophy, primitive or not, is of a high
+ingenuity, and so artfully composed that it contains no room either for a
+Supreme Being or for the doctrine of the survival of the soul, with a
+future of rewards and punishments; opinions declared to be extant among
+other Australian tribes. There is no creator, and every soul, after death,
+is reincarnated in a new member of the tribe. On the other hand (granting
+that the brief note on Twanyirika is exhaustive), the Arunta, in their
+isolation, may have degenerated in religion, and may have dropped, in the
+case of Twanyirika, the moral attributes of Baiame. It may be noticed
+that, in South Eastern Australia, the Being who presides, like Twanyirika,
+over initiations is _not_ the supreme being, but a son or deputy of his,
+such as the Kurnai Tundun. We do not know whether the Arunta have, or have
+had and lost, or never possessed, a being superior to Twanyirika.
+
+With regard, to all such moral, and, in certain versions, creative Beings
+as Baiame, criticism has taken various lines. There is the high a priori
+line that savage minds are incapable of originating the notion of a moral
+Maker. I have already said that the notion, in an early form, seems to be
+well within the range of any minds deserving to be called human. Next, the
+facts are disputed. I can only refer readers to the authorities cited.
+They speak for tribes in many quarters of the world, and the witnesses
+are laymen as well as missionaries. I am accused, again, of using a
+misleading rhetoric, and of thereby covertly introducing Christian or
+philosophical ideas into my account of "savages guiltless of Christian
+teaching." As to the latter point, I am also accused of mistaking for
+native opinions the results of "Christian teaching." One or other charge
+must fall to the ground. As to my rhetoric, in the use of such words as
+'Creator,' 'Eternal,' and the like, I shall later qualify and explain it.
+For a long discussion between myself and Mr. Sidney Hartland, involving
+minute detail, I may refer the reader to _Folk-Lore_, the last number of
+1898 and the first of 1899, and to the Introduction to the new edition of
+my 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion' (1899).
+
+Where relatively high moral attributes are assigned to a Being, I have
+called the result 'Religion;' where the same Being acts like Zeus in
+Greek fable, plays silly or obscene tricks, is lustful and false, I have
+spoken of 'Myth.'[3] These distinctions of Myth and Religion may be, and
+indeed are, called arbitrary. The whole complex set of statements about
+the Being, good or bad, sublime or silly, are equally Myths, it may be
+urged. Very well; but one set, the loftier set, is fitter to survive, and
+does survive, in what we still commonly call Religion; while the other
+set, the puerile set of statements, is fairly near to extinction, and is
+usually called Mythology. One set has been the root of a goodly tree: the
+other set is being lopped off, like the parasitic mistletoe.
+
+I am arguing that the two classes of ideas arise from two separate human
+moods; moods as different and distinct as lust and love. I am arguing
+that, as far as our information goes, the nobler set of ideas is as
+ancient as the lower. Personally (though we cannot have direct evidence)
+I find it easy to believe that the loftier notions are the earlier. If man
+began with the conception of a powerful and beneficent Maker or Father,
+then I can see how the humorous savage fancy ran away with the idea of
+Power, and attributed to a potent being just such tricks as a waggish and
+libidinous savage would like to play if he could. Moreover, I have
+actually traced (in 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion') some plausible processes
+of mythical accretion. The early mind was not only religious, in its way,
+but scientific, in its way. It embraced the idea of Evolution as well as
+the idea of Creation. To one mood a Maker seemed to exist. But the
+institution of Totemism (whatever its origin) suggested the idea of
+Evolution; for men, it was held, developed out of their Totems-animals and
+plants. But then, on the other hand, Zeus, or Baiame, or Mungun-ngaur, was
+regarded as their Father. How were these contradictions to be reconciled?
+Easily, thus: Zeus _was_ the Father, but, in each case, was the Father by
+an amour in which he wore the form of the Totem-snake, swan, bull, ant,
+dog, or the like. At once a degraded set of secondary erotic myths cluster
+around Zeus.
+
+Again, it is notoriously the nature of man to attribute every institution
+to a primal inventor or legislator. Men then, find themselves performing
+certain rites, often of a buffooning or scandalous character; and, in
+origin, mainly magical, intended for the increase of game, edible plants,
+or, later, for the benefit of the crops. _Why_ do they perform these
+rites? they ask: and, looking about, as usual, for a primal initiator,
+they attribute what they do to a primal being, the Corn Spirit, Demeter,
+or to Zeus, or to Baiame, or Manabozho, or Punjel. This is man's usual way
+of going back to origins. Instantly, then, a new set of parasitic myths
+crystallises round a Being who, perhaps, was originally moral. The savage
+mind, in short, has not maintained itself on the high level, any more than
+the facetious mediaeval myths maintained themselves, say, on the original
+level of the conception of the character of St. Peter, the keeper of the
+keys of Heaven.
+
+All this appears perfectly natural and human, and in this, and in other
+ways, what we call low Myth may have invaded the higher realms of
+Religion: a lower invaded a higher element. But reverse the hypothesis.
+Conceive that Zeus, or Baiame, was _originally_, not a Father and
+guardian, but a lewd and tricky ghost of a medicine-man, a dancer of
+indecent dances, a wooer of other men's wives, a shape-shifter, a
+burlesque droll, a more jocular bugbear, like Twanyirika. By what means
+did he come to be accredited later with his loftiest attributes, and with
+regard for the tribal ethics, which, in practice, he daily broke and
+despised? Students who argue for the possible priority of the lowest, or,
+as I call them, mythical attributes of the Being, must advance an
+hypothesis of the concretion of the nobler elements around the original
+wanton and mischievous ghost.
+
+Then let us suppose that the Arunta Twanyirika, a confessed bugbear,
+discredited by adults, and only invented to keep women and children in
+order, was the original germ of the moral and fatherly Baiame, of South
+Eastern Australian tribes. How, in that case, did the adults of the tribe
+fall into their own trap, come to believe seriously in their invented
+bugbear, and credit him with the superintendence of such tribal ethics as
+generosity and unselfishness? What were the processes of the conversion of
+Twanyirika? I do not deny that this theory may be correct, but I wish to
+see an hypothesis of the process of elevation.
+
+I fail to frame such an hypothesis. Grant that the adults merely chuckle
+over Twanyirika, whose 'voice' they themselves produce; by whirling the
+wooden tundun, or bull-roarer. Grant that, on initiation, the boys learn
+that 'the great spirit' is a mere bogle, invented to mystify the women,
+and keep them away from the initiatory rites. How, then, did men come to
+believe in _him_ as a terrible, all-seeing, all-knowing, creative, and
+potent moral being? For this, undeniably, is the belief of many Australian
+tribes, where his 'voice' (or rather that of his subordinate) is produced
+by whirling the tundun. That these higher beliefs are of European origin,
+Mr. Howitt denies. How were they evolved out of the notion of a confessed
+artificial bogle? I am unable to frame a theory.
+
+From my point of view, namely, that the higher and simple ideas may well
+be the earlier, I have, at least, offered a theory of the processes by
+which the lower attributes crystallised around a conception supposed
+(_argumenti gratia_) to be originally high. Other processes of degradation
+would come in, as (on my theory) the creed and practice of Animism, or
+worship of human ghosts, often of low character, swamped and invaded the
+prior belief in a fairly moral and beneficent, but not originally
+spiritual, Being. My theory, at least, _is_ a theory, and, rightly or
+wrongly, accounts for the phenomenon, the combination of the highest
+divine and the lowest animal qualities in the same Being. But I have yet
+to learn how, if the lowest myths are the earliest, the highest attributes
+came in time to be conferred on the hero of the lowest myths. Why, or how,
+did a silly buffoon, or a confessed 'bogle' arrive at being regarded as a
+patron of such morality as had been evolved? An hypothesis of the
+processes involved must be indicated. It is not enough to reply, in
+general, that the rudimentary human mind is illogical and confused. That
+is granted; but there must have been a method in its madness. What that
+method was (from my point of view) I have shown, and it must be as easy
+for opponents to set forth what, from their point of view, the method was.
+
+We are here concerned with what, since the time of the earliest Greek
+philosophers, has been the _crux_ of mythology: why are infamous myths
+told about 'the Father of gods and men'? We can easily explain the nature
+of the myths. They are the natural flowers of savage fancy and humour.
+But wherefore do they crystallise round Zeus? I have, at least, shown some
+probable processes in the evolution.
+
+Where criticism has not disputed the facts of the moral attributes, now
+attached to, say, an Australian Being, it has accounted for them by a
+supposed process of borrowing from missionaries and other Europeans. In
+this book I deal with that hypothesis as urged by Sir A.B. Ellis, in West
+Africa (chapter xiii.). I need not have taken the trouble, as this
+distinguished writer had already, in a work which I overlooked, formally
+withdrawn, as regards Africa, his theory of 'loan-gods.' Miss Kingsley,
+too, is no believer in the borrowing hypothesis for West Africa, in
+regard, that is, to the highest divine conception. I was, when I wrote,
+unaware that, especially as concerns America and Australia, Mr. Tylor had
+recently advocated the theory of borrowing ('Journal of Anthrop.
+Institute,' vol. xxi.). To Mr. Tylor's arguments, when I read them, I
+replied in the 'Nineteenth Century,' January 1899: 'Are Savage Gods
+Borrowed from Missionaries?' I do not here repeat my arguments, but await
+the publication of Mr. Tylor's 'Gifford Lectures,' in which his hypothesis
+may be reinforced, and may win my adhesion.
+
+It may here be said, however, that if the Australian higher religious
+ideas are of recent and missionary origin, they would necessarily be known
+to the native women, from whom, in fact, they are absolutely concealed by
+the men, under penalty of death. Again, if the Son, or Sons, of Australian
+chief Beings resemble part of the Christian dogma, they much more closely
+resemble the Apollo and Hermes of Greece.[4] But nobody will say that the
+Australians borrowed them from Greek mythology!
+
+In chapter xiv., owing to a bibliographical error of my own, I have done
+injustice to Mr. Tylor, by supposing him to have overlooked Strachey's
+account of the Virginian god Ahone. He did not overlook Ahone, but
+mistrusted Strachey. In an excursus on Ahone, in the new edition of 'Myth,
+Ritual, and Religion,' I have tried my best to elucidate the bibliography
+and other aspects of Strachey's account, which I cannot regard as
+baseless. Mr. Tylor's opinion is, doubtless, different, and may prove more
+persuasive. As to Australia, Mr. Howitt, our best authority, continues to
+disbelieve in the theory of borrowing.
+
+I have to withdraw in chapters x. xi. the statement that 'Darumulun never
+died at all.' Mr. Hartland has corrected me, and pointed out that, among
+the Wiraijuri, a myth represents him as having been destroyed, for his
+offences, by Baiame. In that tribe, however, Darumulun is not the highest,
+but a subordinate Being. Mr. Hartland has also collected a few myths in
+which Australian Supreme Beings _do_ (contrary to my statement) 'set the
+example of sinning.' Nothing can surprise me less, and I only wonder that,
+in so savage a race, the examples, hitherto collected, are so rare, and so
+easily to be accounted for on the theory of processes of crystallisation
+of myths already suggested.
+
+As to a remark in Appendix B, Mr. Podmore takes a distinction. I quote his
+remark, 'the phenomena described are quite inexplicable by ordinary
+mechanical means,' and I contrast this, as illogical, with his opinion
+that a girl 'may have been directly responsible for all that took place.'
+Mr. Podmore replies that what was 'described' is not necessarily identical
+with what _occurred_. Strictly speaking, he is right; but the evidence was
+copious, was given by many witnesses, and (as offered by me) was in part
+_contemporary_ (being derived from the local newspapers), so that here Mr.
+Podmore's theory of illusions of memory on a large scale, developed in the
+five weeks which elapsed before he examined the spectators, is out of
+court. The evidence was of contemporary published record.
+
+The handling of fire by Home is accounted for by Mr. Podmore, in the same
+chapter, as the result of Home's use of a 'non-conducting substance.'
+Asked, 'what substance?' he answered, 'asbestos.' Sir William Crookes,
+again repeating his account of the performance which he witnessed, says,
+'Home took up a lump of red-hot charcoal about twice the size of an egg
+into his hand, on which certainly no asbestos was visible. He blew into
+his hands, and the flames could be seen coming out between his fingers,
+and he carried the charcoal round the room.'[5] Sir W. Crookes stood close
+beside Home. The light was that of the fire and of two candles. Probably
+Sir William could see a piece of asbestos, if it was covering Home's
+hands, which he was watching.
+
+What I had to say, by way of withdrawal, qualification, explanation, or
+otherwise, I inserted (in order to seize the earliest opportunity) in the
+Introduction to the recent edition of my 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion'
+(1899). The reader will perhaps make his own kind deductions from my
+rhetoric when I talk, for example, about a Creator in the creed of low
+savages. They have no business, anthropologists declare, to entertain so
+large an idea. But in 'The Journal of the Anthropological Institute,'
+N.S. II., Nos. 1, 2, p. 85, Dr. Bennett gives an account of the religion
+of the cannibal Fangs of the Congo, first described by Du Chaillu. 'These
+anthropophagi have some idea of a God, a superior being, their _Tata_
+("Father"), _a bo mam merere_ ("he made all things"), Anyambi is their
+_Tata_ (Father), and ranks above all other Fang gods, because _a'ne yap_
+(literally, "he lives in heaven").' This is inconsiderate in the Fangs. A
+set of native cannibals have no business with a creative Father who is in
+heaven. I say 'creative' because 'he made all things,' and (as the bowler
+said about a 'Yorker') 'what else can you call him?' In all such cases,
+where 'creator' and 'creative' are used by me, readers will allow for the
+imperfections of the English language. As anthropologists say, the savages
+simply cannot have the corresponding ideas; and I must throw the blame on
+people who, knowing the savages and their language, assure us that they
+_have_. This Fang Father or _Tata_ 'is considered indifferent to the wants
+and sufferings of men, women, and children.' Offerings and prayers are
+therefore made, not to him, but to the ghosts of parents, who are more
+accessible. This additional information precisely illustrates my general
+theory, that the chief Being was not evolved out of ghosts, but came to be
+neglected as ghost-worship arose. I am not aware that Dr. Bennett is a
+missionary. Anthropologists distrust missionaries, and most of my evidence
+is from laymen. If the anthropological study of religion is to advance,
+the high and usually indolent chief Beings of savage religions must be
+carefully examined, not consigned to a casual page or paragraph. I have
+found them most potent, and most moral, where ghost-worship has not
+been evolved; least potent, or at all events most indifferent, where
+ghost-worship is most in vogue. The inferences (granting the facts) are
+fatal to the current anthropological theory.
+
+The phrases 'Creator,' 'creative,' as applied to Anyambi, or Baiame,
+have been described, by critics, as rhetorical, covertly introducing
+conceptions of which savages are incapable. I have already shown that I
+only follow my authorities, and their translations of phrases in various
+savage tongues. But the phrase 'eternal,' applied to Anyambi or Baiame,
+may be misleading. I do not wish to assert that, if you talked to a savage
+about 'eternity,' he would understand what you intend. I merely mean what
+Mariner says that the Tongans mean as to the god Ta-li-y Tooboo. 'Of his
+origin they had no idea, rather supposing him to be eternal.' The savage
+theologians assert no beginning for such beings (as a rule), and no end,
+except where Unkulunkulu is by some Zulus thought to be dead, and
+where the Wiraijuris declare that their Darumulun (_not_ supreme) was
+'destroyed' by Baiame. I do not wish to credit savages with thoughts more
+abstract than they possess. But that their thought can be abstract is
+proved, even in the case of the absolutely 'primitive Arunta,' by
+their myth of the _Ungambikula_, 'a word which means "out of nothing,"
+or "self-existing,"' say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.[6] Once more,
+I find that I have spoken of some savage Beings as 'omnipresent'
+and 'omnipotent.' But I have pointed out that this is only a modern
+metaphysical rendering of the actual words attributed to the savage: 'He
+can go everywhere, and do everything.' As to the phrase, also used, that
+Baiame, for example, 'makes for righteousness,' I mean that he sanctions
+the morality of his people; for instance, sanctions veracity and
+unselfishness, as Mr. Howitt distinctly avers. These are examples of
+'righteousness' in conduct. I do not mean that these virtues were
+impressed on savages in some supernatural way, as a critic has daringly
+averred that I do. The strong reaction of some early men against the
+cosmical process by which 'the weakest goes to the wall,' is, indeed, a
+curious moral phenomenon, and deserves the attention of moralists. But I
+never dreamed of supposing that this reaction (which extends beyond the
+limit of the tribe or group) had a 'supernatural' origin! It has been
+argued that 'tribal morality' is only a set of regulations based on the
+convenience of the elders of the tribe: is, in fact, as the Platonic
+Thrasymachus says, 'the interest of the strongest.' That does not appear
+to me to be demonstrated; but this is no place for a discussion of the
+origin of morals. 'The interest of the strongest,' and of the nomadic
+group, would be to knock elderly invalids on the head. But Dampier says,
+of the Australians, in 1688, 'Be it little, or be it much they get, every
+one has his part, as well the young and tender, and the old and feeble,
+who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty.' The origin of
+this fair and generous dealing may be obscure, but it is precisely the
+kind of dealing on which, according to Mr. Howitt, the religion of the
+Kurnai insists (chapter x.). Thus the Being concerned does 'make for
+righteousness.'
+
+With these explanations I trust that my rhetorical use of such phrases as
+'eternal,' 'creative,' 'omniscient,' 'omnipotent,' 'omnipresent,' and
+'moral,' may not be found to mislead, or covertly to import modern or
+Christian ideas into my account of the religious conceptions of savages.
+
+As to the evidence throughout, a learned historian has informed me that
+'no anthropological evidence is of any value.' If so, there can be no
+anthropology (in the realm of institutions). But the evidence that I
+adduce is from such sources as anthropologists, at least, accept, and
+employ in the construction of theories from which, in some points, I
+venture to dissent.
+
+A.L.
+
+[Footnote 1: Macmillans, 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Op. cit. p. 246, note.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See the new edition of _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_,
+especially the new Introduction.]
+
+[Footnote 4: See Introductions to my _Homeric Hymns_. Allen. 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Journal S.P.R._, December 1890, p. 147.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 388.]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+'The only begetter' of this work is Monsieur Lefebure, author of 'Les
+Yeux d'Horus,' and other studies in Egyptology. He suggested the writing
+of the book, but is in no way responsible for the opinions expressed.
+
+The author cannot omit the opportunity of thanking Mr. Frederic Myers for
+his kindness in reading the proof sheets of the earlier chapters and
+suggesting some corrections of statement. Mr. Myers, however, is probably
+not in agreement with the author on certain points; for example, in
+the chapter on 'Possession.' As the second part of the book differs
+considerably from the opinions which have recommended themselves to most
+anthropological writers on early Religion, the author must say here, as he
+says later, that no harm can come of trying how facts look from a new
+point of view, and that he certainly did not expect them to fall into the
+shape which he now presents for criticism.
+
+ST. ANDREWS: _April 3, 1898._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
+II. SCIENCE AND 'MIRACLES'
+
+III. ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION
+IV. 'OPENING THE GATES OF DISTANCE'
+V. CRYSTAL VISIONS, SAVAGE AND CIVILISED
+VI. ANTHROPOLOGY AND HALLUCINATIONS
+VII. DEMONIACAL POSSESSION
+VIII. FETISHISM AND SPIRITUALISM
+IX. EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
+X. HIGH GODS OF LOW RACES
+XI. SUPREME GODS NOT NECESSARILY DEVELOPED OUT OF 'SPIRITS'
+XII. SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+XIII. MORE SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+XIV. AHONE. TI-RA-WA. NA-PI. PACHACAMAC. TUI LAGA. TAA-ROA
+XV. THE OLD DEGENERATION THEORY
+XVI. THEORIES OF JEHOVAH
+XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+APPENDICES.
+
+A. OPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE
+B. THE POLTERGEIST AND HIS EXPLAINERS
+C. CRYSTAL-GAZING
+D. CHIEFS IN AUSTRALIA
+
+INDEX
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MAKING OF RELIGION
+
+I
+
+_INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER_
+
+The modern Science of the History of Religion has attained conclusions
+which already possess an air of being firmly established. These
+conclusions may be briefly stated thus: Man derived the conception of
+'spirit' or 'soul' from his reflections on the phenomena of sleep, dreams,
+death, shadow, and from the experiences of trance and hallucination.
+Worshipping first the departed souls of his kindred, man later extended
+the doctrine of spiritual beings in many directions. Ghosts, or other
+spiritual existences fashioned on the same lines, prospered till they
+became gods. Finally, as the result of a variety of processes, one of
+these gods became supreme, and, at last, was regarded as the one only God.
+Meanwhile man retained his belief in the existence of his own soul,
+surviving after the death of the body, and so reached the conception of
+immortality. Thus the ideas of God and of the soul are the result of early
+fallacious reasonings about misunderstood experiences.
+
+It may seem almost wanton to suggest the desirableness of revising a
+system at once so simple, so logical, and apparently so well bottomed on
+facts. But there can never be any real harm in studying masses of evidence
+from fresh points of view. At worst, the failure of adverse criticism must
+help to establish the doctrines assailed. Now, as we shall show, there are
+two points of view from which the evidence as to religion in its early
+stages has not been steadily contemplated. Therefore we intend to ask,
+first, what, if anything, can be ascertained as to the nature of the
+'visions' and hallucinations which, according to Mr. Tylor in his
+celebrated work 'Primitive Culture,' lent their aid to the formation of
+the idea of 'spirit.' Secondly, we shall collect and compare the accounts
+which we possess of the High Gods and creative beings worshipped or
+believed in, by the most backward races. We shall then ask whether these
+relatively Supreme Beings, so conceived of by men in very rudimentary
+social conditions, can be, as anthropology declares, mere developments
+from the belief in ghosts of the dead.
+
+We shall end by venturing to suggest that the savage theory of the soul
+may be based, at least in part, on experiences which cannot, at present,
+be made to fit into any purely materialistic system of the universe. We
+shall also bring evidence tending to prove that the idea of God, in its
+earliest known shape, need not logically be derived from the idea of
+spirit, however that idea itself may have been attained or evolved. The
+conception of God, then, need not be evolved out of reflections on dreams
+and 'ghosts.'
+
+If these two positions can be defended with any success, it is obvious
+that the whole theory of the Science of Religion will need to be
+reconsidered. But it is no less evident that our two positions do not
+depend on each other. The first may be regarded as fantastic, or
+improbable, or may be 'masked' and left on one side. But the strength of
+the second position, derived from evidence of a different character, will
+not, therefore, be in any way impaired. Our first position can only be
+argued for by dint of evidence highly unpopular in character, and, as a
+general rule, condemned by modern science. The evidence is obtained by
+what is, at all events, a legitimate anthropological proceeding. We may
+follow Mr. Tylor's example, and collect savage _beliefs_ about visions,
+hallucinations, 'clairvoyance,' and the acquisition of knowledge
+apparently not attainable through the normal channels of sense. We may
+then compare these savage beliefs with attested records of similar
+_experiences_ among living and educated civilised men. Even if we attain
+to no conclusion, or a negative conclusion, as to the actuality and
+supernormal character of the alleged experiences, still to compare data of
+savage and civilised psychology, or even of savage and civilised illusions
+and fables, is decidedly part, though a neglected part, of the function of
+anthropological science. The results, whether they do or do not strengthen
+our first position, must be curious and instructive, if only as a chapter
+in the history of human error. That chapter, too, is concerned with no
+mean topic, but with what we may call the X region of our nature. Out of
+that region, out of miracle, prophecy, vision, have certainly come forth
+the great religions, Christianity and Islam; and the great religious
+innovators and leaders, our Lord Himself, St. Francis, John Knox, Jeanne
+d'Arc, down to the founder of the new faith of the Sioux and Arapahoe. It
+cannot, then, be unscientific to compare the barbaric with the civilised
+beliefs and experiences about a region so dimly understood, and so fertile
+in potent influences. Here the topic will be examined rather by the method
+of anthropology than of psychology. We may conceivably have something to
+learn (as has been the case before) from the rough observations and hasty
+inferences of the most backward races.
+
+We may illustrate this by an anecdote:
+
+'The Northern Indians call the _Aurora Borealis_ "Edthin," that is "Deer."
+Their ideas in this respect are founded on a principle one would not
+imagine. Experience has shown them that when a hairy deer-skin is briskly
+stroked with the hand on a dark night, it will emit many sparks of
+electrical fire.'
+
+So says Hearne in his 'Journey,' published in 1795 (p. 346).
+
+This observation of the Red Men is a kind of parable representing a part
+of the purport of the following treatise. The Indians, making a hasty
+inference from a trivial phenomenon, arrived unawares at a probably
+correct conclusion, long unknown to civilised science. They connected the
+Aurora Borealis with electricity, supposing that multitudes of deer
+in the sky rubbed the sparks out of each other! Meanwhile, even in
+the last century, a puzzled populace spoke of the phenomenon as 'Lord
+Derwentwater's Lights.' The cosmic pomp and splendour shone to welcome the
+loyal Derwentwater into heaven, when he had given his life for his exiled
+king.
+
+Now, my purpose in the earlier portion of this essay is to suggest that
+certain phenomena of human nature, apparently as trivial as the sparks
+rubbed out of a deer's hide in a dark night, may indicate, and may be
+allied to a force or forces, which, like the Aurora Borealis, may shine
+from one end of the heavens to the other, strangely illumining the
+darkness of our destiny. Such phenomena science has ignored, as it so long
+ignored the sparks from the stroked deer-skin, and the attractive power of
+rubbed amber. These trivial things were not known to be allied to the
+lightning, or to indicate a force which man could tame and use. But just
+as the Indians, by a rapid careless inference, attributed the Aurora
+Borealis to electric influences, so (as anthropology assures us) savages
+everywhere have inferred the existence of soul or spirit, intelligence
+that
+
+  'Does not know the bond of Time,
+  Nor wear the manacles of Space,'
+
+in part from certain apparently trivial phenomena of human faculty. These
+phenomena, as Mr. Tylor says, 'the great intellectual movement of the last
+two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless.'[1] I refer to alleged
+experiences, merely odd, sporadic, and, for commercial purposes, useless,
+such as the transference of thought from one mind to another by no known
+channel of sense, the occurrence of hallucinations which, _prima facie_,
+correspond coincidentally with unknown events at a distance, all that is
+called 'second sight,' or 'clairvoyance,' and other things even more
+obscure. Reasoning on these real or alleged phenomena, and on other quite
+normal and accepted facts of dream, shadow, sleep, trance, and death,
+savages have inferred the existence of spirit or soul, exactly as the
+Indians arrived at the notion of electricity (not so called by them, of
+course) as the cause of the Aurora Borealis. But, just as the Indians
+thought that the cosmic lights were caused by the rubbing together of
+crowded deer in the heavens (a theory quite childishly absurd), so the
+savage has expressed, in rude fantastic ways, his conclusion as to the
+existence of spirit. He believes in wandering separable souls of men,
+surviving death, and he has peopled with his dreams the whole inanimate
+universe.
+
+My suggestion is that, in spite of his fantasies, the savage had possibly
+drawn from his premises an inference not wholly, or not demonstrably
+erroneous. As the sparks of the deer-skin indicated electricity, so the
+strange lights in the night of human nature may indicate faculties which
+science, till of late and in a few instances, has laughed at, ignored,
+'thrown aside as worthless.'
+
+It should be observed that I am not speaking of 'spiritualism,' a word of
+the worst associations, inextricably entangled with fraud, bad logic, and
+the blindest credulity. Some of the phenomena alluded to have, however,
+been claimed as their own province by 'spiritists,' and need to be rescued
+from them. Mr. Tylor writes:
+
+'The issue raised by the comparison of savage, barbaric, and civilised
+spiritualism is this: Do the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar
+necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer, and the Boston medium, share the
+possession of belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import,
+which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two
+centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless?'
+
+_Distinguo!_ That does not seem to me to be the issue. In my opinion the
+issue is: 'Have the Red Indian, the Tatar, the Highland seer, and the
+Boston medium (the least reputable of the menagerie) observed, and
+reasoned wildly from, and counterfeited, and darkened with imposture,
+certain genuine by-products of human faculty, which do not _prima facie_
+deserve to be thrown aside?'
+
+That, I venture to think, is the real issue. That science may toss aside
+as worthless some valuable observations of savages is now universally
+admitted by people who know the facts. Among these observations is the
+whole topic of Hypnotism, with the use of suggestion for healing purposes,
+and the phenomena, no longer denied, of 'alternating personalities.' For
+the truth of this statement we may appeal to one of the greatest of
+Continental anthropologists, Adolf Bastian.[2] The missionaries, like
+Livingstone, usually supposed that the savage seer's declared ignorance--
+after his so-called fit of inspiration--of what occurred in that state,
+was an imposture. But nobody now doubts the similar oblivion of what has
+passed that sometimes follows the analogous hypnotic sleep. Of a
+remarkable cure, which the school of the Salpetriere or Nancy would
+ascribe, with probable justice, to 'suggestion,' a savage example will be
+given later.
+
+Savage hypnotism and 'suggestion,' among the Sioux and Arapahoe, has been
+thought worthy of a whole volume in the Reports of the Ethnological Bureau
+of the Smithsonian Institute (Washington, U.S., 1892-98). Republican
+Governments publish scientific matter 'regardless of expense,' and the
+essential points might have been put more shortly. They illustrate the
+fact that only certain persons can hypnotise others, and throw light on
+some peculiarities of _rapport._[3] In brief, savages anticipated us in
+the modern science of experimental psychology, as is frankly acknowledged
+by the Society for Experimental Psychology of Berlin. 'That many mystical
+phenomena are much more common and prominent among savages than among
+ourselves is familiar to everyone acquainted with the subject. The
+_ethnological_ side of our inquiry demands penetrative study.'[4]
+
+That study I am about to try to sketch. My object is to examine some
+'superstitious practices' and beliefs of savages by aid of the comparative
+method. I shall compare, as I have already said, the ethnological evidence
+for savage usages and beliefs analogous to thought-transference,
+coincidental hallucinations, alternating personality, and so forth, with
+the best attested modern examples, experimental or spontaneous. This
+raises the question of our evidence, which is all-important. We proceed to
+defend it. The savage accounts are on the level of much anthropological
+evidence; they may, that is, be dismissed by adversaries as 'travellers'
+tales.' But the best testimony for the truth of the reports as to actual
+belief in the facts is the undesigned coincidence of evidence from all
+ages and quarters.[5] When the stories brought by travellers, ancient and
+modern, learned and unlearned, pious or sceptical, agree in the main, we
+have all the certainty that anthropology can offer. Again, when we find
+practically the same strange neglected sparks, not only rumoured of
+in European popular superstition, but attested in many hundreds of
+depositions made at first hand by respectable modern witnesses, educated
+and responsible, we cannot honestly or safely dismiss the coincidence of
+report as indicating a mere 'survival' of savage superstitious belief, and
+nothing more.
+
+We can no longer do so, it is agreed, in the case of hypnotic phenomena. I
+hope to make it seem possible that we should not do so in the matter of
+the hallucinations provoked by gazing in a smooth deep, usually styled
+'crystal-gazing.' Ethnologically, this practice is at least as old as
+classical times, and is of practically world-wide distribution. I shall
+prove its existence in Australia, New Zealand, North America, South
+America, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and among the Incas, not to speak of
+the middle and recent European ages. The universal idea is that such
+visions may be 'clairvoyant.' To take a Polynesian case, 'resembling the
+Hawaiian _wai harru_.' When anyone has been robbed, the priest, after
+praying, has a hole dug in the floor of the house, and filled with water.
+Then he gazes into the water, 'over which the god is supposed to place the
+spirit of the thief.... The image of the thief was, according to their
+account, reflected in the water, and being perceived by the priest, he
+named the individual, or the parties.'[6] Here the statement about the
+'spirit' is a mere savage philosophical explanation. But the fact that
+hallucinatory pictures can really be seen by a fair percentage of educated
+Europeans, in water, glass balls, and so forth, is now confirmed by
+frequent experiment, and accepted by opponents, 'non-mystical writers,'
+like Dr. Parish of Munich.[7] I shall bring evidence to suggest that the
+visions may correctly reflect, as it were, persons and places absolutely
+unknown to the gazer, and that they may even reveal details unknown to
+every one present. Such results among savages, or among the superstitious,
+would be, and are, explained by the theory of 'spirits.' Modern science
+has still to find an explanation consistent with recognised laws of
+nature, but 'spirits' we shall not invoke.
+
+In the same way I mean to examine all or most of the 'so-called mystical
+phenomena of savage life.' I then compare them with the better vouched for
+modern examples. To return to the question of evidence, I confess that I
+do not see how the adverse anthropologist, psychologist, or popular
+agnostic is to evade the following dilemma: To the anthropologist we say,
+'The evidence we adduce is your own evidence, that of books of travel in
+all lands and countries. If _you_ may argue from it, so may we. Some
+of it is evidence to unusual facts, more of it is evidence to singular
+beliefs, which we think not necessarily without foundation. As raising a
+presumption in favour of that opinion, we cite examples in which savage
+observations of abnormal and once rejected facts, are now admitted by
+science to have a large residuum of truth, we argue that what is admitted
+in some cases may come to be admitted in more. No _a priori_ line can here
+be drawn.'
+
+To the psychologist who objects that our modern instances are mere
+anecdotes, we reply by asking, 'Dear sir, what are _your_ modern
+instances? What do you know of "Mrs. A.," whom you still persistently
+cite as an example of morbid recurrent hallucinations? Name the German
+servant girl who, in a fever, talked several learned languages, which she
+had heard her former master, a scholar, declaim! Where did she live? Who
+vouches for her, who heard her, who understood her? There is, you know, no
+evidence at all; the anecdote is told by Coleridge: the phenomena are said
+by him to have been observed "in a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a year
+or two before my arrival at Goettingen.... Many eminent physiologists and
+psychologists visited the town." Why do you not name a few out of the
+distinguished crowd?'[8] This anecdote, a rumour of a rumour of a
+Protestant explanation of a Catholic marvel, was told by Coleridge at
+least twenty years after the possible date. The psychologists copy it,[9]
+one after the other, as a flock of sheep jump where their leader has
+jumped. An example by way of anecdote may be permitted.
+
+According to the current anthropological theory, the idea of soul or
+spirit was suggested to early men by their experiences in dreams. They
+seemed, in sleep, to visit remote places; therefore, they argued,
+something within them was capable of leaving the body and wandering about.
+
+This something was the soul or spirit. Now it is obvious that this opinion
+of early men would be confirmed if they ever chanced to acquire, in
+dreams, knowledge of places which they had never visited, and of facts as
+to which, in their waking state, they could have no information. This
+experience, indeed, would suggest problems even To Mr. Herbert Spencer, if
+it occurred to him.
+
+Conversing on this topic with a friend of acknowledged philosophical
+eminence, I illustrated my meaning by a story of a dream. It was reported
+to me by the dreamer, with whom I am well acquainted, was of very recent
+occurrence, and was corroborated by the evidence of another person, to
+whom the dream was narrated, before its fulfilment was discovered. I am
+not at liberty to publish the details, for good reasons, but the essence
+of the matter was this: A. and B. (the dreamer) had common interests. A.
+had taken certain steps about which B. had only a surmise, and a vague
+one, that steps had probably been taken. A. then died, and B. in an
+extremely vivid dream (a thing unfamiliar to him) seemed to read a mass of
+unknown facts, culminating in two definite results, capable of being
+stated in figures. These results, by the very nature of the case, could
+not be known to A., so that, before he was placed out of B.'s reach by
+death, he could not have stated them to him, and, afterwards, had
+assuredly no means of doing so.
+
+The dream, two days after its occurrence, and after it had been told to
+C., proved to be literally correct. Now I am not asking the reader's
+belief for this anecdote (for that could only be yielded in virtue of
+knowledge of the veracity of B. and C.), but I invite his attention to the
+psychological explanation. My friend suggested that A. had told B. all
+about the affair, that B. had not listened (though his interests were
+vitally concerned), and that the crowd of curious details, naturally
+unfamiliar to B., had reposed in his subconscious memory, and had been
+revived in the dream.
+
+Now B.'s dream was a dream of reading a mass of minute details, including
+names of places entirely unknown to him. It may be admitted, in accordance
+with the psychological theory, that B. might have received all this
+information from A., but, by dint of inattention--'the malady of not
+marking'--might never have been _consciously_ aware of what he heard. Then
+B.'s subconscious memory of what he did not _consciously_ know might break
+upon him in his dream. Instances of similar mental phenomena are not
+uncommon. But the general result of the combined details was one which
+could not possibly be known to A. before his death; nor to B. could it be
+known at all. Yet B.'s dream represented this general result with perfect
+accuracy, which cannot be accounted for by the revival of subconscious
+memory in sleep. Neither asleep nor awake can a man remember what it is
+impossible for him to have known. The dream contained no _prediction_ for
+the results were now fixed; but (granting the good faith of the narrator)
+the dream did contain information not normally accessible.
+
+However, by way of psychological explanation of the dream, my friend cited
+Coleridge's legend, as to the German girl and her unconscious knowledge of
+certain learned languages. 'And what is the evidence for the truth of
+Coleridge's legend?' Of course, there is none, or none known to all the
+psychologists who quote it from Coleridge. Neither, if true, was the
+legend to the point. However, psychology will accept such unauthenticated
+narratives, and yet will scoff at first baud, duly corroborated testimony
+from living and honourable people, about recent events.
+
+Only a great force of prejudice can explain this acceptance, by
+psychologists, of one kind of marvellous tale on no evidence, and this
+rejection of another class of marvellous tale, when supported by first
+hand, signed and corroborated evidence, of living witnesses. I see only
+one escape for psychologists from this dilemma. Their marvellous tales are
+_possible_, though unvouched for, because they have always heard them and
+repeated them in lectures, and read and repeated them in books. _Our_
+marvellous tales are impossible, because the psychologists know that they
+are impossible, which means that they have not been familiar with them,
+from youth upwards, in lectures and manuals. But man has no right to have
+'clear ideas of the possible and impossible,' like Faraday, _a priori_,
+except in the exact sciences. There are other instances of weak evidence
+which satisfies psychologists.
+
+Hamilton has an anecdote, borrowed from Monboddo, who got it from Mr. Hans
+Stanley, who, 'about twenty-six years ago,' heard it from the subject of
+the story, Madame de Laval. 'I have the memorandum somewhere in my
+papers,' says Mr. Stanley, vaguely. Then we have two American anecdotes by
+Dr. Flint and Mr. Rush; and such is Sir William Hamilton's equipment of
+odd facts for discussing the unconscious or subconscious. The least
+credible and worst attested of these narratives still appears in popular
+works on psychology. Moreover, all psychology, except experimental
+psychology, is based on anecdotes which people tell about their own
+subjective experiences. Mr. Galton, whose original researches are well
+known, even offered rewards in money for such narratives about visualised
+rows of coloured figures, and so on.
+
+Clearly the psychologist, then, has no _prima facie_ right to object to
+our anecdotes of experiences, which he regards as purely subjective. As
+evidence, we only accept them at first hand, and, when possible, the
+witnesses have been cross-examined personally. Our evidence then, where it
+consists of travellers' tales, is on a level with that which satisfies the
+anthropologist. Where it consists of modern statements of personal
+experience, our evidence is often infinitely better than much which is
+accepted by the nonexperimental psychologist. As for the agnostic writer
+on the Non-Religion of the Future, M. Guyau actually illustrates the
+Resurrection of our Lord by an American myth about a criminal, of whom a
+hallucinatory phantasm appeared to each of his gaol companions, separately
+and successively, on a day after his execution! For this prodigious fable
+no hint of reference to authority is given.[10] Yet the evidence appears
+to satisfy M. Guyau, and is used by him to reinforce his argument.
+
+The anthropologist and psychologist, then, must either admit that their
+evidence is no better than ours, if as good, or must say that they only
+believe evidence as to 'possible' facts. They thus constitute themselves
+judges of what is possible, and practically regard themselves as
+omniscient. Science has had to accept so many things once scoffed at as
+'impossible,' that this attitude of hers, as we shall show in chapter ii.,
+ceases to command respect.
+
+My suggestion is that the trivial, rejected, or unheeded phenomena
+vouched for by the evidence here defended may, not inconceivably, be of
+considerable importance. But, stating the case at the lowest, if we are
+only concerned with illusions and fables, it cannot but be curious to note
+their persistent uniformity in savage and civilised life.
+
+To make the first of our two main positions clear, and in part to justify
+ourselves in asking any attention for such matters, we now offer an
+historical sketch of the relations between Science and the so-called
+'Miraculous' in the past.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Primitive Culture_, i. 156. London, 1891.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Ueber psychische Beobachiungen bei Naiurvuelkern_. Leipzig,
+Gunther, 1890.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See especially pp. 922-926. The book is interesting in other
+ways, and, indeed, touching, as it describes the founding of a new Red
+Indian religion, on a basis of Hypnotism and Christianity.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Programme of the Society, p. iv.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, i, 9, 10.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, ii. p. 240.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Hallucinations and Illusions_, English edition, pp. 69-70,
+297.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Sir William Hamilton's _Lectures_, i. 345.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Maudsley, Kerner, Carpentor, Du Prel, Zangwill.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Coleridge's mythical maid (p. 10) is set down by Mr. Samuel
+Laing to an experiment of Braid's! No references are given.--Laing:
+_Problems of the Future._]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+SCIENCE AND 'MIRACLES'
+
+_Historical Sketch_
+
+Research in the X region is not a new thing under the sun. When Saul
+disguised himself before his conference with the Witch of Endor, he made
+an elementary attempt at a scientific test of the supernormal. Croesus,
+the king, went much further, when he tested the clairvoyance of the
+oracles of Greece, by sending an embassy to ask what he was doing at a
+given hour on a given day, and by then doing something very _bizarre_. We
+do not know how the Delphic oracle found out the right answer, but various
+easy methods of fraud at once occur to the mind. However, the procedure of
+Croesus, if he took certain precautions, was relatively scientific.
+Relatively scientific also was the inquiry of Porphyry, with whose
+position our own is not unlikely to be compared. Unable, or reluctant, to
+accept Christianity, Porphyry 'sought after a sign' of an element of
+supernormal truth in Paganism. But he began at the wrong end, namely at
+Pagan spiritualistic _seances_, with the usual accompaniments of darkness
+and fraud. His perplexed letter to Anebo, with the reply attributed to
+Iamblichus, reveal Porphyry wandering puzzled among mediums, floating
+lights, odd noises, queer dubious 'physical phenomena.' He did not begin
+with accurate experiments as to the existence of rare, and apparently
+supernormal human faculties, and he seems to have attained no conclusion
+except that 'spirits' are 'deceitful.'[1]
+
+Something more akin to modern research began about the time of the
+Reformation, and lasted till about 1680. The fury for burning witches led
+men of sense, learning, and humanity to ask whether there was any reality
+in witchcraft, and, generally, in the marvels of popular belief. The
+inquiries of Thyraeus, Lavaterus, Bodinus, Wierus, Le Loyer, Reginald
+Scot, and many others, tended on the whole to the negative side as regards
+the wilder fables about witches, but left the problems of ghosts and
+haunted houses pretty much where they were before. It may be observed that
+Lavaterus (circ. 1580) already put forth a form of the hypothesis of
+telepathy (that 'ghosts' are hallucinations produced by the direct action
+of one mind, or brain, upon another), while Thyraeus doubted whether the
+noises heard in 'haunted houses' were not mere hallucinations of the sense
+of hearing. But all these early writers, like Cardan, were very careless
+of first-hand evidence, and, indeed, preferred ghosts vouched for by
+classical authority, Pliny, Plutarch, or Suetonius. With the Rev. Joseph
+Glanvil, F.R.S. (circ. 1666), a more careful examination of evidence came
+into use. Among the marvels of Glanvil's and other tracts usually
+published together in his 'Sadducismus Triumphatus' will be found letters
+which show that he and his friends, like Henry More and Boyle, laboured to
+collect first-hand evidence for second sight, haunted houses, ghosts, and
+wraiths. The confessed object was to procure a 'Whip for the Droll,' a
+reply to the laughing scepticism of the Restoration. The result was to
+bring on Glanvil a throng of bores--he was 'worse haunted than Mr.
+Mompesson's house,' he says-and Mr. Pepys found his arguments 'not very
+convincing.' Mr. Pepys, however, was alarmed by 'our young gib-cat,'
+which he mistook for a 'spright.' With Henry More, Baxter, and Glanvil
+practically died, for the time, the attempt to investigate these topics
+scientifically, though an impression of doubt was left on the mind of
+Addison. Witchcraft ceased to win belief, and was abolished, as a crime,
+in 1736. Some of the Scottish clergy, and John Wesley, clung fondly
+to the old faith, but Wodrow, and Cotton Mather (about 1710-1730) were
+singularly careless and unlucky in producing anything like evidence for
+their narratives. Ghost stories continued to be told, but not to be
+investigated.
+
+Then one of the most acute of philosophers decided that investigation
+ought never to be attempted. This scientific attitude towards X phenomena,
+that of refusing to examine them, and denying them without examination,
+was fixed by David Hume in his celebrated essay on 'Miracles.' Hume
+derided the observation and study of what he called 'Miracles,' in the
+field of experience, and he looked for an _a priori_ argument which would
+for ever settle the question without examination of facts. In an age of
+experimental philosophy, which derided _a priori_ methods, this was Hume's
+great contribution to knowledge. His famous argument, the joy of many an
+honest breast, is a tissue of fallacies which might be given for exposure
+to beginners in logic, as an elementary exercise. In announcing his
+discovery, Hume amusingly displays the self-complacency and the want of
+humour with which we Scots are commonly charged by our critics:
+
+'I flatter myself that I have discovered an argument which, if just,
+will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds
+of superstitious delusions, and consequently will be useful as long as
+the world endures.'
+
+He does not expect, however, to convince the multitude. Till the end of
+the world, 'accounts of miracles and prodigies, I suppose, will be found
+in all histories, sacred and profane.' Without saying here what he
+means by a miracle, Hume argues that 'experience is our only guide in
+reasoning.' He then defines a miracle as 'a violation of the laws
+of nature.' By a 'law of nature' he means a uniformity, not of all
+experience, but of each experience as he will deign to admit; while he
+excludes, without examination, all evidence for experience of the absence
+of such uniformity. That kind of experience cannot be considered. 'There
+must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the
+event would not merit that appellation.' If there be any experience in
+favour of the event, that experience does not count. A miracle is counter
+to universal experience, no event is counter to universal experience,
+therefore no event is a miracle. If you produce evidence to what Hume
+calls a miracle (we shall see examples) he replies that the evidence is
+not valid, unless its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact.
+Now no error of human evidence can be more miraculous than a 'miracle.'
+Therefore there can be no valid evidence for 'miracles.' Fortunately,
+Hume now gives an example of what he means by 'miracles.' He says:--
+
+'For, first, there is _not to be found_, in _all history_, any miracle
+attested by a _sufficient number_ of men, of such unquestioned _good
+sense, education_, and _learning_, as to secure us against all delusion
+in themselves; of such undoubted _integrity_, as to place them beyond
+all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and
+reputation in the eyes of mankind, as to have a great deal to lose in
+case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time
+attesting facts performed in such a _public manner_, and in so
+_celebrated a part of the world_, as to render the detection
+unavoidable; all which circumstances are requisite to give us a full
+assurance in the testimony of men.'[2]
+
+Hume added a note at the end of his book, in which he contradicted every
+assertion which he had made in the passage just cited; indeed, be
+contradicted himself before he had written six pages.
+
+'There surely never was a greater number of miracles ascribed to one person
+than those which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the
+tomb of Abbe Paris, the famous Jansenist, with whose sanctity the people
+were so long deluded. The curing of the sick, giving hearing to the deaf,
+and sight to the blind, were everywhere talked of as the usual effects of
+that holy sepulchre. But what is more extraordinary, many of the miracles
+were _immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned
+integrity_, attested by _witnesses of credit and distinction_, in _a
+learned age_, and on the most _eminent theatre_ that is _now in the
+world_. Nor is this all. A relation of them was published and dispersed
+everywhere; nor were the Jesuits, though a learned body, supported
+by the civil magistrate, and determined enemies to those opinions,
+in whose favour the miracles were said to have been wrought, ever able
+_distinctly to refute or detect them_. Where shall we find such a number
+of circumstances, agreeing to the corroboration of one fact? And what
+have we to oppose to such a cloud of witnesses, but the absolute
+_impossibility, or miraculous nature_ of the events which they relate?
+And this, surely, in the eyes of all reasonable people, will alone be
+regarded as a sufficient refutation.'
+
+Thus Hume, first denies the existence of such evidence, given in such
+circumstances as he demands, and then he produces an example of that very
+kind of evidence. Having done this, he abandons (as Mr. Wallace observes)
+his original assertion that the evidence does not exist, and takes refuge
+in alleging 'the absolute impossibility' of the events which the evidence
+supports. Thus Hume poses as a perfect judge of the possible, in a kind of
+omniscience. He takes his stand on the uniformity of all experience that
+is not hostile to his idea of the possible, and dismisses all testimony to
+other experience, even when it reaches his standard of evidence. He is
+remote indeed from Virchow's position 'that what we call the laws of
+nature must vary according to our frequent new experiences.'[3] In his
+note, Hume buttresses and confirms his evidence for the Jansenist
+miracles. They have even a martyr, M. Montgeron, who wrote an account of
+the events, and, says Hume lightly, 'is now said to be somewhere in a
+dungeon on account of his book.' 'Many of the miracles of the Abbe Paris
+were proved immediately by witnesses before the Bishop's court at Paris,
+under the eye of Cardinal Noailles....' 'His successor was an enemy to the
+Jansenists, yet twenty-two _cures_ of Paris ... pressed him to examine
+these miracles ... _But he wisely forbore_.' Hume adds his testimony to
+the character of these _cures_. Thus it is wisdom, according to Hume, to
+dismiss the most public and well-attested 'miracles' without examination.
+This is experimental science of an odd kind.
+
+The phenomena were cases of healing, many of them surprising, of
+cataleptic rigidity, and of insensibility to pain, among visitors to the
+tomb of the Abbe Paris (1731). Had the cases been judicially examined (all
+medical evidence was in their favour), and had they been proved false, the
+cause of Hume would have profited enormously. A strong presumption would
+have been raised against the miracles of Christianity. But Hume applauds
+the wisdom of not giving his own theory this chance of a triumph. The
+cataleptic seizures were of the sort now familiar to science. These have,
+therefore, emerged from the miraculous. In fact, the phenomena which
+occurred at the tomb of the Abbe Paris have emerged almost too far, and
+now seem in danger of being too readily and too easily accepted. In 1887
+MM. Binet and Fere, of the school of the Salpetriere, published in English
+a popular manual styled 'Animal Magnetism.' These authors write with great
+caution about such alleged phenomena as the reading, by the hypnotised
+patient, of the thoughts in the mind of the hypnotiser. But as to the
+phenomena at the tomb of the Abbe Paris, they say that 'suggestion
+explains them.'[4] That is, in the opinion of MM. Binet and Fere
+the so-called 'miracles' really occurred, and were worked by 'the
+imagination,' by 'self-suggestion.'
+
+The most famous case--that of Mlle. Coirin--has been carefully examined by
+Dr. Charcot.[5]
+
+Mlle. Coirin had a dangerous fall from her horse, in September 1716, in
+her thirty-first year. The medical details may be looked for in Dr.
+Charcot's essay or in Montgeron.[6] 'Her disease was diagnosed as cancer
+of the left breast,' the nipple 'fell off bodily.' Amputation of the
+breast was proposed, but Madame Coirin, believing the disease to be
+radically incurable, refused her consent. Paralysis of the left side set
+in (1718), the left leg shrivelling up. On August 9, 1731, Mlle. Coirin
+'tried the off chance' of a miracle, put on a shift that had touched the
+tomb of Paris, and used some earth from the grave. On August 11, Mlle.
+Coirin could turn herself in bed; on the 12th the horrible wound 'was
+staunched, and began to close up and heal.' The paralysed side recovered
+life and its natural proportions. By September 3, Mlle. Coirin could go
+out for a drive.
+
+All her malady, says Dr. Charcot, paralysis, 'cancer,' and all, was
+'hysterical;' 'hysterical oedema,' for which he quotes many French
+authorities and one American. 'Under the physical [psychical?] influence
+brought to bear by the application of the shift ... the oedema, which was
+due to vaso-motor trouble, disappeared almost instantaneously. The breast
+regained its normal size.'
+
+Dr. Charcot generously adds that shrines, like Lourdes, have cured
+patients in whom he could not 'inspire the operation of the faith cure.'
+He certainly cannot explain everything which claims to be of supernatural
+origin in the faith cure. We have to learn the lesson of patience. I am
+among the first to recognise that Shakespeare's words hold good to-day:
+
+  'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+   Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'
+
+If Dr. Charcot had believed in what the French call _suggestion mentale_--
+suggestion by thought-transference (which I think he did not)--he could
+have explained the healing of the Centurion's servant, 'Say the word,
+Lord, and my servant shall be healed,' by suggestion & distance
+(telepathy), and by premising that the servant's palsy was 'hysterical.'
+But what do we mean by 'hysterical'? Nobody knows. The 'mind,' somehow,
+causes gangrenes, if not cancers, paralysis, shrinking of tissues; the
+mind, somehow, cures them. And what is the 'mind'? As my object is to give
+savage parallels to modern instances better vouched for. I quote a
+singular Red Indian cure by 'suggestion.' Hearne, travelling in Canada, in
+1770, met a native who had 'dead palsy,' affecting the whole of one side.
+He was dragged on a sledge, 'reduced to a mere skeleton,' and so was
+placed in the magic lodge. The first step in his cure was the public
+swallowing by a conjurer of a board of wood, 'about the size of a
+barrel-stave,' twice as wide across as his mouth. Hearne stood beside the
+man, 'naked as he was born,' 'and, notwithstanding I was all attention, I
+could not detect the deceit.' Of course, Hearne believes that this was
+mere legerdemain, and (p. 216) mentions a most suspicious circumstance.
+The account is amusing, and deserves the attention of Mr. Neville
+Maskelyne. The same conjurer had previously swallowed a cradle! Now
+bayonet swallowing, which he also did, is possible, though Hearne denies
+it (p. 217).
+
+The real object of these preliminary feats, however performed, is,
+probably, to inspire _faith_, which Dr. Charcot might have done by
+swallowing a cradle. The Indians explain that the barrel staves apparently
+swallowed are merely dematerialised by 'spirits,' leaving only the forked
+end sticking out of the conjurer's mouth. In fact, Hearne caught the
+conjurer in the act of making a separate forked end.
+
+Faith being thus inspired, the conjurer, for three entire days, blew,
+sang, and danced round 'the poor paralytic, fasting.' 'And it is truly
+wonderful, though the strictest truth, that when the poor man was taken
+from the conjuring house ... he was able to move all the fingers and toes
+of the side that had been so long dead.... At the end of six weeks he went
+a-hunting for his family' (p. 219). Hearne kept up his acquaintance, and
+adds, what is very curious, that he developed almost a secondary
+personality. 'Before that dreadful paralytic stroke, he had been
+distinguished for his good nature and benevolent disposition, was entirely
+free from every appearance of avarice,... but after this event he was the
+most fractious, quarrelsome, discontented, and covetous wretch alive'
+(p. 220).
+
+Dr. Charcot, if he had been acquainted with this case, would probably have
+said that it 'is of the nature of those which Professor Russell Reynolds
+has classified under the head of "paralysis dependent on idea."'[7]
+Unluckily, Hearne does not tell us how his hunter, an untutored Indian,
+became 'paralysed by idea.'
+
+Dr. Charcot adds: 'In every case, science is a foe to systematic negation,
+which the morrow may cause to melt away in the light of its new triumphs.'
+The present 'new triumph' is a mere coincidence with the dicta of our
+Lord, 'Thy faith hath made thee whole.... I have not found so great faith,
+no, not in Israel.' There are cures, as there are maladies, caused 'by
+idea.' So, in fact, we had always understood. But the point is that
+science, wherever it agrees with David Hume, is not a foe, but a friend to
+'systematic negation.'
+
+A parallel case of a 'miracle,' the stigmata of St. Francis, was, of
+course, regarded by science as a fable or a fraud. But, now that blisters
+and other lesions can be produced by suggestion, the fable has become a
+probable fact, and, therefore, not a miracle at all.[8] Mr. James remarks:
+'As so often happens, a fact is denied till a welcome interpretation
+comes with it. Then it is admitted readily enough, and evidence quite
+insufficient to back a claim, so long as the Church had an interest
+in making it, proves to be quite sufficient for modern scientific
+enlightenment the moment it appears that a reputed saint can thereby be
+claimed as a case of "hystero-epilepsy."'[9]
+
+But the Church continues to have an interest in the matter. As the class
+of facts which Hume declined to examine begins to be gradually admitted by
+science, the thing becomes clear. The evidence which could safely convey
+these now admittedly possible facts, say from the time of Christ, is so
+far proved to be not necessarily mythical--proved to be not incapable of
+carrying statements probably correct, which once seemed absolutely
+false. If so, where, precisely, ends its power of carrying facts? Thus
+considered, the kinds of marvellous events recorded in the Gospels,
+for example, are no longer to be dismissed on _a priori_ grounds as
+'mythical.' We cannot now discard evidence as necessarily false because
+it clashes with our present ideas of the possible, when we have to
+acknowledge that the very same evidence may safely convey to us facts
+which clashed with our fathers' notions of what is possible, but which
+are now accepted. Our notions of the possible cease to be a criterion of
+truth or falsehood, and our contempt for the Gospels as myths must
+slowly die, as 'miracle' after 'miracle' is brought within the realm of
+acknowledged law. With each such admission the hypothesis that the Gospel
+evidence is mythical must grow weaker, and weaker must grow the negative
+certainty of popular science.
+
+The occurrences which took place at and near the tomb of Paris were
+attested, as Hume truly avers, by a great body of excellent evidence. But
+the wisdom which declined to make a judicial examination has deprived us
+of the best kind of record. Analogous if not exactly similar events now
+confessedly take place, and are no longer looked upon as miraculous. But
+as long as they were held to be miraculous, not to examine the evidence,
+said Hume, was the policy of 'all reasonable people.' The result was to
+deprive Science of the best sort of record of facts which she welcomes as
+soon as she thinks she can explain them.[10] Examples of the folly of
+_a priori_ negation are common. The British Association refused to hear
+the essay which Braid, the inventor of the word 'hypnotism,' had written
+upon the subject. Braid, Elliotson, and other English inquirers of the
+mid-century, were subjected to such persecutions as official science could
+inflict. We read of M. Deslon, a disciple of Mesmer, about 1783, that he
+was 'condemned by the Faculty of Medicine, without any examination of the
+facts.' The Inquisition proceeded more fairly than these scientific
+obscurantists.
+
+Another curious example may be cited. M. Guyau, in his work 'The
+Non-Religion of the Future,' argues that Religion is doomed. 'Poetic
+genius has withdrawn its services,' witness Tennyson and Browning! 'Among
+orthodox Protestant nations miracles do not happen.'[11] But 'marvellous
+facts' _do_ happen.[12] These 'marvellous facts,' accepted by M. Guyau,
+are what Hume called 'miracles,' and advised the 'wise and learned' to
+laugh at, without examination. They were not facts, and could not be, he
+said. Now to M. Guyau's mind they _are_ facts, and therefore are not
+miracles. He includes 'mental suggestion taking place even at a distance.'
+A man 'can transmit an almost compulsive command, it appears nowadays, by
+a simple tension of his will.' If this be so, if 'will' can affect matter
+from a distance, obviously the relations of will and matter are not what
+popular science tells us that they are. Again, if this truth is now
+established, and won from that region which Hume and popular science
+forbid us to investigate, who knows what other facts may be redeemed from
+that limbo, or how far they may affect our views of possibilities? The
+admission of mental action, operative _a distance_, is, of course,
+personal only to M. Guyau, among friends of the new negative tradition.
+
+We return to Hume. He next argues that the pleasures of wonder make all
+accounts of 'miracles' worthless. He has just given an example of the
+equivalent pleasures of dogmatic disbelief. Then Religion is a disturbing
+force; but so, manifestly, is irreligion. 'The wise and learned are
+content to deride the absurdity, without informing themselves of the
+particular facts.' The wise and learned are applauded for their scientific
+attitude. Again, miracles destroy each other, for all religions have their
+miracles, but all religions cannot be true. This argument is no longer of
+force with people who look on 'miracles' as = 'X phenomena,' not as divine
+evidences to the truth of this or that creed. 'The gazing populace
+receives, without examination, whatever soothes superstition,' and
+Hume's whole purpose is to make the wise and learned imitate the gazing
+populace by rejecting alleged facts 'without examination.' The populace
+investigated more than did the wise and learned.
+
+Hume has an alternative definition of a miracle--'a miracle is a
+transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or
+by the interposition of some invisible agent.' We reply that what
+Hume calls a 'miracle' may result from the operation of some as yet
+unascertained law of nature (say self-suggestion), and that our business,
+at present, is to examine such events, not to account for them.
+
+It may fairly be said that Hume is arguing against men who wished to make
+so-called 'miracles' a test of the truth of Jansenism, for example, and
+that he could not be expected to answer, by anticipation, ideas not
+current in his day. But he remains guilty of denouncing the investigation
+of apparent facts. No attitude can be less scientific than his, or more
+common among many men of science.
+
+According to the humorous wont of things in this world, the whole question
+of the marvellous had no sooner been settled for ever by David Hume than
+it was reopened by Emanuel Swedenborg. Now, Kant was familiar with certain
+of the works of Hume, whether he had read his 'Essay on Miracles' or not.
+Far from declining to examine the portentous 'visions' of Swedenborg, Kant
+interested himself deeply in the topic. As early as 1758 he wrote his
+first remarks on the seer, containing some reports of stories or legends
+about Swedenborg's 'clairvoyance.' In the true spirit of psychical
+research, Kant wrote a letter to Swedenborg, asking for information at
+first hand. The seer got the letter, but he never answered it. Kant,
+however, prints one or two examples of Swedenborg's successes. Madame
+Harteville, widow of the Dutch envoy in Stockholm, was dunned by a
+silversmith for a debt of her late husband's. She believed that it had
+been paid, but could not find the receipt. She therefore asked Swedenborg
+to use his renowned gifts. He promised to see what he could do, and, three
+days later, arrived at the lady's house while she was giving a tea, or
+rather a coffee, party. To the assembled society Swedenborg remarked, 'in
+a cold-blooded way, that he had seen her man, and spoken to him.' The late
+M. Harteville declared to Swedenborg that he had paid the bill, seven
+months before his decease: the receipt was in a cupboard upstairs. Madame
+Harteville replied that the cupboard had been thoroughly searched to no
+purpose. Swedenborg answered that, as he learned from the ghost, there was
+a secret drawer behind the side-plank within the cupboard. The drawer
+contained diplomatic correspondence, and the missing receipt. The whole
+company then went upstairs, found the secret drawer, and the receipt among
+the other papers. Kant adds Swedenborg's clairvoyant vision, from
+Gothenburg, of a great fire at Stockholm (dated September 1756). Kant
+pined to see Swedenborg himself, and waited eagerly for his book, 'Arcana
+Coelestia.' At last he obtained this work, at the ransom, ruinous to Kant
+at that time, of 7L. But he was disappointed with what he read, and in
+'Traeume eines Geistersehers,' made a somewhat sarcastic attempt at a
+metaphysical theory of apparitions.
+
+  'Velut aegri somnia vanae
+  Finguntur species'
+
+is his motto.
+
+Kant's real position about all these matters is, I venture to say, almost
+identical with that of Sir Walter Scott. A Scot himself, by descent, Kant
+may have heard tales of second-sight and bogles. Like Scott, he dearly
+loved a ghost-story; like Scott he was canny enough to laugh, publicly, at
+them and at himself for his interest in them. Yet both would take trouble
+to inquire. As Kant vainly wrote to Swedenborg and others--as he vainly
+spent 7L. on 'Arcana Coelestia,' so Sir Walter was anxious to go to Egypt
+to examine the facts of ink-gazing clairvoyance. Kant confesses that each
+individual ghost-story found him sceptical, whereas the cumulative mass
+made a considerable impression.[13]
+
+The first seventy pages of the 'Tribune' are devoted to a perfectly
+serious discussion of the metaphysics of 'Spirits.' On page 73 he
+pleasantly remarks, 'Now we shall understand that all said hitherto is
+superfluous,' and he will not reproach the reader who regards seers _not_
+as citizens of two worlds (Plotinus), but as candidates for Bedlam.
+
+Kant's irony is peculiarly Scottish. He does not himself know how far he
+is in earnest, and, to save his self-respect and character for canniness,
+he 'jocks wi' deeficulty.' He amuses himself with trying how far he can
+carry speculations on metaphysics (not yet reformed by himself) into the
+realm of the ghostly. He makes admissions about his own tendency to think
+that he has an immaterial soul, and that these points are, or may be, or
+some day will be, scientifically solved. These admissions are eagerly
+welcomed by Du Prel in his 'Philosophy of Mysticism;' but they are only
+part of Kant's joke, and how far they are serious, Kant himself does not
+know. If spiritualists knew their own business, they would translate and
+publish Kant's first seventy pages of 'Traeume.' Something like telepathy,
+action of spirit, even discarnate, on spirit, is alluded to, but the idea
+is as old as Lavaterus at least (p. 52). Kant has a good deal to say, like
+Scott in his 'Demonology,' on the physics of Hallucination, but it is
+antiquated matter. He thinks the whole topic of spiritual being only
+important as bearing on hopes of a future life. As speculation, all is 'in
+the air,' and as in such matters the learned and unlearned are on a level
+of ignorance, science will not discuss them. He then repeats the
+Swedenborg stories, and thinks it would be useful to posterity if some one
+would investigate them while witnesses are alive and memories are fresh.
+
+In fact, Kant asks for psychical research.
+
+As for Swedenborg's so costly book, Kant laughs at it. There is in it no
+evidence, only assertion. Kant ends, having pleased nobody, he says, and
+as ignorant as when he began, by citing _cultivons notre jardin_.
+
+Kant returned to the theme in 'Anthropologische Didaktik.' He discusses
+the unconscious, or sub-conscious, which, till Sir William Hamilton
+lectured, seems to have been an absolutely unknown topic to British
+psychologists. 'So ist das Feld dunkler Vorstellungen das groesste in
+Menschen.' He has a chapter on 'The Divining Faculty' (pp. 89-93). He will
+not hear of presentiments, and, unlike Hegel, he scouts the Highland
+second-sight. The 'possessed' of anthropology are epileptic patients.
+Mystics (Swedenborg) are victims of _Schwaermerei_.
+
+This reference to Swedenborg is remarked upon by Schubert in his preface
+to the essay of Kant. He points out that 'it is interesting to compare the
+circumspection, the almost uncertainty of Kant when he had to deliver a
+judgment on the phenomena described by himself and as to which he had made
+inquiry [i.e. in his letter _re_ Swedenborg to Mlle. de Knobloch], and the
+very decided opinions he expressed forty years later on Swedenborg and
+his companions' [in the work cited, sections 35-37. The opinion in
+paragraph 35 is a general one as to mystics. There is no other mention of
+Swedenborg].
+
+On the whole Kant is interested, but despairing. He wants facts, and no
+facts are given to him but the book of the Prophet Emanuel. But, as it
+happened, a new, or a revived, order of facts was just about to solicit
+scientific attention. Kant had (1766) heard rumours of healing by
+magnetism, and of the alleged effect of the magnet on the human frame. The
+subject was in the air, and had already won the attention of Mesmer, about
+whom Kant had information. It were superfluous to tell again the familiar
+story of Mesmer's performances at Paris. While Mesmer's theory of
+'magnetism' was denounced by contemporary science, the discovery of the
+hypnotic sleep was made by his pupil, Puysegur. This gentleman was
+persuaded that instances of 'thought-transference' (not through known
+channels of sense) occurred between the patient and the magnetiser, and he
+also believed that he had witnessed cases of 'clairvoyance,' 'lucidity,'
+_vue a distance_, in which the patient apparently beheld places and events
+remote in space. These things would now be explained by 'unconscious
+suggestion' in the more sceptical schools of psychological science. The
+Revolution interrupted scientific study in France to a great degree, but
+'somnambulism' (the hypnotic sleep) and 'magnetism' were eagerly examined
+in Germany. Modern manuals, for some reason, are apt to overlook these
+German researches and speculations. (Compare Mr. Vincent's 'Elements of
+Hypnotism,' p. 34.) The Schellings were interested; Ritter thought he had
+detected a new force, 'Siderism.' Mr. Wallace, in his preface to Hegel's
+'Philosophie des Geistes,' speaks as if Ritter had made experiments in
+telepathy. He may have done so, but his 'Siderismus' (Tuebingen, 1808)
+is a Report undertaken for the Academy of Munich, on the doings of an
+Italian water-finder, or 'dowser.' Ritter gives details of seventy-four
+experiments in 'dowsing' for water, metals, or coal. He believes in the
+faculty, but not in 'psychic' explanations, or the Devil. He talks
+about 'electricity' (pp. 170, 190). He describes his precautions to
+avoid vulgar fraud, but he took no precautions against unconscious
+thought-transference. He reckoned the faculty 'temperamental' and useful.
+
+Amoretti, at Milan, examined hundreds of cases of the so-called Divining
+Rod, and Jung Stilling became an early spiritualist and 'full-welling
+fountain head' of ghost stories.
+
+Probably the most important philosophical result of the early German
+researches into the hypnotic slumber is to be found in the writings of
+Hegel. Owing to his peculiar use of a terminology, or scientific language,
+all his own, it is extremely difficult to make Hegel's meaning even
+moderately clear. Perhaps we may partly elucidate it by a similitude of
+Mr. Frederic Myers. Suppose we compare the ordinary everyday consciousness
+of each of us to a _spectrum_, whose ends towards each extremity fade out
+of our view.
+
+Beyond the range of sight there may be imagined a lower or physiological
+end: for our ordinary consciousness, of course, is unaware of many
+physiological processes which are eternally going on within us. Digestion,
+so long as it is healthy, is an obvious example. But hypnotic experiment
+makes it certain that a patient, in the _hypnotic_ condition, can
+consciously, or at least purposefully, affect physiological processes to
+which the _ordinary_ consciousness is blind--for example, by raising a
+blister, when it is suggested that a blister must be raised. Again
+(granting the facts hypothetically and merely for the sake of argument),
+at the _upper_ end of the spectrum, beyond the view of ordinary everyday
+consciousness, knowledge may be acquired of things which are out of the
+view of the consciousness of every day. For example (for the sake of
+argument let us admit it), unknown and remote people and places may be
+seen and described by clairvoyance, or _vue a distance_.
+
+Now Hegel accepted as genuine the facts which we here adduce merely for
+the sake of argument, and by way of illustrations. But he did not regard
+the clairvoyant consciousness (or whatever we call it) which, _ex
+hypothesi_, is untrammelled by space, or even by time, as occupying what
+we style the _upper_ end of the psychical spectrum. On the contrary, he
+placed it at the _lower_ end. Hegel's upper end 'loses itself in light;'
+the lower end, _qui voit tant de choses_, as La Fontaine's shepherd says,
+is _not_ 'a sublime mental phase, and capable of conveying general
+truths.' Time and space do not thwart the consciousness at Hegel's _lower_
+end, which springs from 'the great soul of nature.' But that lower end,
+though it may see for Jeanne d'Arc at Valcouleurs a battle at Rouvray, a
+hundred leagues away, does not communicate any lofty philosophic
+truths.[14] The phenomena of clairvoyance, in Hegel's opinion, merely
+indicate that the 'material' is really 'ideal,' which, perhaps, is as much
+as we can ask from them. 'The somnambulist and clairvoyant see without
+eyes, and carry their visions directly into regions where the waiting
+consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter' (Wallace). Hegel
+admits, however, that 'in ordinary self-possessed conscious life' there
+are traces of the 'magic tie,' 'especially between female friends of
+delicate nerves,' to whom he adds husband and wife, and members of the
+same family. He gives (without date or source) a case of a girl in Germany
+who saw her brother lying dead in a hospital at Valladolid. Her brother
+was at the time in the hospital, but it was another man in the nest bed
+who was dead. 'It is thus impossible to make out whether what the
+clairvoyants really see preponderates over what they deceive themselves
+in.'
+
+As long as the facts which Hegel accepted are not officially welcomed by
+science, it may seem superfluous to dispute as to whether they are
+attained by the lower or the higher stratum of our consciousness. But
+perhaps the question here at issue may be elucidated by some remarks of
+Dr. Max Dessoir. Psychology, he says, has proved that in every conception
+and idea an image or group of images must be present. These mental images
+are the recrudescence or recurrence of perceptions. We see a tree, or a
+man, or a dog, and whenever we have before our minds the conception or
+idea of any of these things the original perception of them returns,
+though of course more faintly. But in Dr. Dessoir's opinion these revived
+mental images would reach the height of actual hallucinations (so that the
+man, dog, or tree would seem visibly present) if other memories and new
+sensations did not compete with them and check their development.
+
+Suppose, to use Mlle. Ferrand's metaphor, a human body, living, but with
+all its channels of sensation hitherto unopened. Open the sense of sight
+to receive a flash of green colour, and close it again. Apparently,
+whenever the mind informing this body had the conception of green (and it
+could have no other) it would also have an hallucination of green, thus
+
+  'Annihilating all that's made,
+  To a green thought in a green shade.'
+
+Now, in sleep or hypnotic trance the competition of new sensations and
+other memories is removed or diminished, and therefore the idea of a man,
+dog, or tree once suggested to the hypnotised patient, does become an
+actual hallucination. The hypnotised patient sees the absent object which
+he is told to see, the sleeper sees things not really present.
+
+Our primitive state, before the enormous competition of other memories and
+new sensations set in, would thus be a state of hallucination. Our normal
+present condition, in which hallucination is checked by competing memories
+and new sensations, is a suppression of our original, primitive, natural
+tendencies. Hallucination represents 'the main trunk of our psychical
+existence.'[15] In Dr. Dessoir's theory this condition of hallucination
+is man's original and most primitive condition, but it is not a _higher_,
+rather a lower state of spiritual activity than the everyday practical
+unhallucinated consciousness.
+
+This is also the opinion of Hegel, who supposes our primitive mental
+condition to be capable of descrying objects remote in space and time. Mr.
+Myers, as we saw, is of the opposite opinion, as to the relative dignity
+and relative reality of the present everyday self, and the old original
+fundamental Self. Dr. Dessoir refrains from pronouncing a decided opinion
+as to whether the original, primitive, hallucinated self within us does
+'preside over powers and actions at a distance,' such as clairvoyance; but
+he believes in hypnotisation at a distance. His theory, like Hegel's, is
+that of 'atavism,' or 'throwing back' to some very remote ancestral
+condition. This will prove of interest later.
+
+Hegel, at all events, believed in the fact of clairvoyance (though deeming
+it of little practical use); he accepted telepathy ('the magic tie'); he
+accepted interchange of sensations between the hypnotiser and the
+hypnotised; he believed in the divining rod, and, unlike Kant, even in
+'Scottish second-sight.' 'The intuitive soul oversteps the conditions of
+time and space; it beholds things remote, things long past, and things to
+come.'[16]
+
+The pendulum of thought has swung back a long way from the point whither
+it was urged by David Hume. Hegel remarks: 'The facts, it might seem,
+first of all call for verification. But such verification would be
+superfluous to those on whose account it was called for, since they
+facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring the narratives,
+infinitely numerous though they be, and accredited by the education and
+character of the witnesses, to be mere deception and imposture. Their _a
+priori_ conceptions are so rooted that no testimony can avail against
+them, and they have even denied what they have seen with their own eyes,'
+and reported under their own hands, like Sir David Brewster. Hegel, it
+will be observed, takes the facts as given, and works them into his
+general theory of the Sensitive Soul (_fuehlende Seele_). He does not try
+to establish the facts; but to establish, or at least to examine them, is
+the first business of Psychical Research. Theorising comes later.
+
+The years which have passed between the date of Hegel's 'Philosophy of
+Mind' and our own time have witnessed the long dispute over the existence,
+the nature, and the causes of the hypnotic condition, and over the reality
+and limitations of the phenomena. Thus the Academy of Medicine in Paris
+appointed a Committee to examine the subject in 1825. The Report on
+'Animal Magnetism,' as it was then styled, was presented in 1831. The
+Academy lacked the courage to publish it, for the Report was favourable
+even to certain of the still disputed phenomena. At that time, in
+accordance with a survival of the theory of Mesmer, the agent in hypnotic
+cases was believed to be a kind of efflux of a cosmic fluid from the
+'magnetiser' to the patient. There was 'a magnetic connection.'
+
+Though no distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is taken in popular
+language, 'mesmerism' is a word implying this theory of 'magnetic' or
+other unknown personal influence. 'Hypnotism,' as will presently be seen,
+implies no such theory. The Academy's Report (1831) attested the
+development, under 'magnetism,' of 'new faculties,' such as clairvoyance
+and intuition, also the production of 'great changes in the physical
+economy,' such as insensibility, and sudden increase of strength. The
+Report declared it to be 'demonstrated' that sleep could be produced
+'without suggestion,' as we say now, though the term was not then in use.
+'Sleep has been produced in circumstances in which the persons could not
+see or were ignorant of the means employed to produce it.'
+
+The Academy did its best to suppress this Report, which attests the
+phenomena that Hegel accepted, phenomena still disputed. Six years later
+(1837), a Committee reported against the pretensions of a certain Berna,
+a 'magnetiser.' No person acted on both Committees, and this Report was
+accepted. Later, a number of people tried to read a letter in a box, and
+failed. 'This,' says Mr. Vincent, 'settled the question with regard to
+clairvoyance;' though it might be more logical to say that it settled the
+pretensions of the competitors on that occasion. The Academy now decided
+that, because certain persons did not satisfy the expectations raised by
+their preliminary advertisements, therefore the question of magnetism was
+definitely closed.
+
+We have often to regret that scientific eminence is not always accompanied
+by scientific logic. Where science neglects a subject, charlatans and
+dupes take it up. In England 'animal magnetism' had been abandoned to this
+class of enthusiasts, till Thackeray's friend, Dr. Elliotson, devoted
+himself to the topic. He was persecuted as doctors know how to persecute;
+but in 1841, Braid, of Manchester, discovered that the so-called 'magnetic
+sleep' could be produced without any 'magnetism,' He made his patients
+stare fixedly at an object, and encouraged them to expect to go to sleep.
+He called his method 'Hypnotism,' a term which begs no question. Seeming
+to cease to be mysterious, hypnotism became all but respectable, and was
+being used in surgical operations, till it was superseded by chloroform.
+In England, the study has been, and remains, rather _suspect_, while on
+The Continent hypnotism is used both for healing purposes and in the
+inquiries of experimental psychology. Wide differences of opinion still
+exist, as to the nature of the hypnotic sleep, as to its physiological
+concomitants, and as to the limits of the faculties exercised in or out of
+the slumber. It is not even absolutely certain that the exercise of the
+stranger faculties--for instance, that the production of anaesthesia and
+rigidity--are the results merely of 'suggestion' and expectancy. A
+hypnotised patient is told that the middle finger of his left hand will
+become rigid and incapable of sensation. This occurs, and is explained by
+'suggestion,' though _how_ 'suggestion' produces the astonishing effect
+is another problem. The late Mr. Gurney, however, made a number of
+experiments in which no suggestion was pronounced, nor did the patients
+know which of their fingers was to become rigid and incapable of pain. The
+patient's hands were thrust through a screen; on the other side of which
+the hypnotist made passes above the finger which was to become rigid. The
+lookers-on selected the finger, and the insensibility was tested by a
+strong electric current. The effect was also produced _without_ passes,
+the operator merely pointing at the selected finger, and 'willing' the
+result. If he did not 'will' it, nothing occurred, nor did anything occur
+if he willed without pointing. The proximity of the operator's hand
+produced no effect if he did not 'will,' nor was his 'willing' successful
+if he did not bring his hand near that of the patient. Other people's
+hands, similarly situated, produced no effect.
+
+Experiments in transferring taste, as of salt, sugar, cayenne pepper, from
+operator to subject, were also successful. Drs. Janet and Gibert also
+produced sleep in a woman at a distance, by 'willing' it, at hours which
+were selected by a system of drawing lots.[17] These facts, of course,
+rather point to an element of truth in the old mesmeric hypothesis of some
+specific influence in the operator. They cannot very well be explained by
+suggestion and expectancy. But these facts and facts of clairvoyance and
+thought-transference will be rejected as superstitious delusions by people
+who have not met them in their own experience. This need not prevent us
+from examining them, because _all_ the facts, including those now
+universally accepted by Continental and scarcely impeached by British
+science, have been noisily rejected again and again on Hume's principles.
+
+The rarer facts, as Mr. Gurney remarks, 'still go through the hollow form
+of taking place.' Here is an example of the mode in which these phenomena
+are treated by popular science. Mr. Vincent says that 'clairvoyance and
+phrenology were Elliotson's constant stock in trade.' (Phrenology was
+also Braid's stock in trade.) 'It is a matter of congratulation to have
+been so soon delivered from what Dr. Lloyd Tuckey has well called "a mass
+of superincumbent rubbish."'[18] Clairvoyance is part of a mass of
+rubbish, on page 57. On page 67, Mr. Vincent says: 'There are many
+interesting questions, such as telepathy, thought-reading, clairvoyance,
+upon which it would be perhaps rash to give any decided opinion.... All
+these strange psychical conditions present problems of great interest,'
+and are only omitted because 'they have not a sufficient bearing on the
+normal states of hypnosis....' Thus what was 'rubbish' in one page
+'presents problems of great interest' ten pages later, and, after offering
+a decided opinion that clairvoyance is rubbish, Mr. Vincent thinks it rash
+to give any decided opinion. It is rather rash to give a decided opinion,
+and then to say that it is rash to do so.[19]
+
+This brief sketch shows that science is confronted by certain facts,
+which, in his time, Hume dismissed as incredible miracles, beneath the
+contempt of the wise and learned. We also see that the stranger and rarer
+phenomena which Hegel accepted as facts, and interwove with his general
+philosophy, are still matters of dispute. Admitted by some men of science,
+they are doubted by others; by others, again, are denied, while most of
+the journalists and authors of cheap primers, who inspire popular
+tradition, regard the phenomena as frauds or fables of superstition. But
+it is plain that these phenomena, like the more ordinary facts of
+hypnotism, _may_ finally be admitted by science. The scientific world
+laughed, not so long ago, at Ogham inscriptions, meteorites, and at
+palaeolithic weapons as impostures, or freaks of nature. Now nobody has
+any doubt on these matters, and clairvoyance, thought-transference, and
+telepathy may, not inconceivably, be as fortunate in the long run as
+meteorites, or as the more usual phenomena of hypnotism.
+
+It is only Lord Kelvin who now maintains, or lately maintained, that in
+hypnotism there is nothing at all but fraud and malobservation. In years
+to come it may be that only some similar belated voice will cry that in
+thought-transference there is nothing but malobservation and fraud. At
+present the serious attention and careful experiment needed for the
+establishment of the facts are more common among French than among English
+men of science. When published, these experiments, if they contain any
+affirmative instances, are denounced as 'superstitious,' or criticized
+after what we must charitably deem to be a very hasty glance, by the
+guides of popular opinion. Examples of this method will be later quoted.
+Meanwhile the disputes as to these alleged facts are noticed here, because
+of their supposed relation to the Origin of Religion.
+
+[Footnote 1: See Mr. Myers's paper on the 'Ancient Oracles,' in _Classical
+Essays_, and the author's 'Ancient Spiritualism,' in _Cock Lane and Common
+Sense_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The italics here are those of Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, in
+his _Miracles and Modern Science_. Mr. Huxley, in his exposure of Hume's
+fallacies (in his Life of Hume), did not examine the Jansenist 'miracles'
+which Hume was criticising.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Moll, _Hypnotism_, p. 357.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Animal Magnetism_, p. 355.]
+
+[Footnote 5: A translation of his work was published in the _New Review_,
+January 1693.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _La Verite des Miracles_, Cologne, 1747, Septiemo
+Demonstration.]
+
+[Footnote 7: See Dr. Russell Reynolds's paper in _British Medical
+Journal_, November 1869.]
+
+[Footnote 8: James, _Principles of Psychology_, ii. 612. Charcot,
+op. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 9: I do not need to be told that Dr. Maudsley denied the fact in
+1886. I am prepared with the evidence, if it is asked for by some savant
+who happens not to know it.]
+
+[Footnote 10: I am not responsible, of course, for the scientific validity
+of Dr. Charcot's theory of healing 'by idea.' My point merely is that
+certain experts of no slight experience or mean reputation do now admit,
+as important certainties within their personal knowledge, exactly the
+phenomena which Hume asks the wise and learned to laugh at, indeed, but
+never to investigate.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Pp. 353-356.]
+
+[Footnote 12: P. 93.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Traeume_, p. 76.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Hegel accepts the clairvoyance of the Pucelle.]
+
+[Footnote 15: See Dr. Dessoir, in _Das Doppel Ich,_ as quoted by Mr.
+Myers, _Proceedings_, vol. vi. 213.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Philosophie des Geistes, Werke,_ vol. vii. 179. Berlin.
+1845. The examples and much of the philosophising are in the _Zusaetze_,
+not translated in Mr. Wallace's version, Oxford, 1894.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., vol. ii. pp. 201-207, 390-392.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Elements of Hypnotism_, p. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Possibly Mr. Vincent only means that Elliotson's
+experiments, 'little more than sober footing' (p. 57), with the sisters
+Okey, were rubbish. But whether the sisters Okey were or were not honest
+is a question on which we cannot enter here.]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION
+
+Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the
+new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough,
+Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of
+the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining. The British
+Association used to reject anthropological papers as 'vain dreams based on
+travellers' tales.' No doubt the British Association would reject a paper
+on clairvoyance as a vain dream based on old wives' fables, or on
+hysterical imposture. Undeniably the study of such themes is hampered by
+fable and fraud, just as anthropology has to be ceaselessly on its guard
+against 'travellers' tales,' against European misunderstandings of savage
+ideas, and against civilised notions and scientific theories unconsciously
+read into barbaric customs, rites, traditions, and usages. Man, _ondoyant
+et divers_, is the subject alike of anthropology and of psychical
+research. Man (especially savage man) cannot be secluded from disturbing
+influences, and watched, like the materials of a chemical experiment in a
+laboratory. Nor can man be caught in a 'primitive' state: his intellectual
+beginnings lie very far behind the stage of culture in which we find the
+lowest known races. Consequently the matter on which anthropology works is
+fluctuating; the evidence on which it rests needs the most sceptical
+criticism, and many of its conclusions, in the necessary absence of
+historical testimony as to times far behind the lowest known savages, must
+be hypothetical.
+
+For these sound reasons official science long looked askance on
+Anthropology. Her followers were not regarded as genuine scholars, and,
+perhaps as a result of this contempt, they were often 'broken men,'
+intellectual outlaws, people of one wild idea. To the scientific mind,
+anthropologists or ethnologists were a horde who darkly muttered of
+serpent worship, phallus worship, Arkite doctrines, and the Ten Lost
+Tribes that kept turning up in the most unexpected places. Anthropologists
+were said to gloat over dirty rites of dirty savages, and to seek reason
+where there was none. The exiled, the outcast, the pariah of Science, is,
+indeed, apt to find himself in odd company. Round the camp-fire of
+Psychical Research too, in the unofficial, unstaked waste of Science,
+hover odd, menacing figures of Esoteric Buddhists, _Satanistes_,
+Occultists, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, and Astrologers, as the
+Arkites and Lost Tribesmen haunted the cradle of anthropology.
+
+But there was found at last to be reason in the thing, and method in the
+madness. Evolution was in it. The acceptance, after long ridicule, of
+palaeolithic weapons as relics of human culture, probably helped to bring
+Anthropology within the sacred circle of permitted knowledge. Her topic
+was full of illustrations of the doctrine of Mr. Darwin. Modern writers on
+the theme had been anticipated by the less systematic students of the
+eighteenth century--Goguet, de Brosses, Millar, Fontenelle, Lafitau,
+Boulanger, or even Hume and Voltaire. As pioneers these writers answer to
+the early mesmerists and magnetists, Puysegur, Amoretti, Ritter,
+Elliotson, Mayo, Gregory, in the history of Psychical Research. They
+were on the same track, in each case, as Lubbock, Tylor, Spencer,
+Bastian, and Frazer, or as Gurney, Richet, Myers, Janet, Dessoir, and Von
+Schrenck-Notzing. But the earlier students were less careful of method and
+evidence.
+
+Evidence! that was the stumbling block of anthropology. We still hear, in
+the later works of Mr. Max Mueller, the echo of the old complaints.
+Anything you please, Mr. Max Mueller says, you may find among your useful
+savages, and (in regard to some anthropologists) his criticism is just.
+You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil in hand, and pick out
+what suits your case. Suppose, as regards our present theme, your theory
+is that savages possess broken lights of the belief in a Supreme Being.
+You can find evidence for that. Or suppose you want to show that they have
+no religious ideas at all; you can find evidence for that also. Your
+testimony is often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the
+people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by one or
+other theory or bias. How can you pretend to raise a science on such
+foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or to
+mystify inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their
+most sacred institutions, or have never paid any attention to the subject?
+
+To all these perfectly natural objections Mr. Tylor has replied.[1]
+Evidence must be collected, sifted, tested, as in any other branch of
+inquiry. A writer, 'of course, is bound to use his best judgment as to
+the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and, if possible, to obtain
+several accounts to certify each point in each locality.' Mr. Tylor then
+adduces 'the test of recurrence,' of undesigned coincidence in testimony,
+as Millar had already argued in the last century.[2] If a mediaeval
+Mahommedan in Tartary, a Jesuit in Brazil, a Wesleyan in Fiji, one may add
+a police magistrate in Australia, a Presbyterian in Central Africa, a
+trapper in Canada, agree in describing some analogous rite or myth in
+these diverse lands and ages, we cannot set down the coincidence to chance
+or fraud. 'Now, the most important facts of ethnography are vouched for in
+this way.'
+
+We may add that even when the ideas of savages are obscure, we can
+often detect them by analysis of the institutions in which they are
+expressed.[3]
+
+Thus anthropological, like psychical or any other evidence, must be
+submitted to conscientious processes of testing and sifting. Contradictory
+instances must be hunted for sedulously. Nothing can be less scientific
+than to snatch up any traveller's tale which makes for our theory, and to
+ignore evidence, perhaps earlier, or later, or better observed, which
+makes against it. Yet this, unfortunately, in certain instances (which
+will be adduced) has been the occasional error of Mr. Huxley and Mr.
+Spencer.[4] Mr. Spencer opens his 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' by the
+remark that 'the implication [from the reported absence of the ideas of
+belief in persons born deaf and dumb] is that the religious ideas of
+civilised men are not innate' (who says they are?), and this implication
+Mr. Spencer supports by 'proofs that among various savages religious ideas
+do not exist.' 'Sir John Lubbock has given many of these.' But it would be
+well to advise the reader to consult Roskoff's confutation of Sir John
+Lubbock, and Mr. Tylor's masterly statement.[5] Mr. Spencer cited Sir
+Samuel Baker for savages without even 'a ray of superstition' or a trace
+of worship. Mr. Tylor, twelve years before Mr. Spencer wrote, had
+demolished Sir Samuel Baker's assertion,[6] as regards many tribes, and so
+shaken it as regards the Latukas, quoted by Mr. Spencer. The godless
+Dinkas have 'a good deity and heaven-dwelling creator,' carefully recorded
+years before Sir Samuel's 'rash denial.' We show later that Mr. Spencer,
+relying on a single isolated sentence in Brough Smyth, omits all his
+essential information about the Australian Supreme Being; while Mr.
+Huxley--overlooking the copious and conclusive evidence as to their
+ethical religion--charges the Australians with having merely a non-moral
+belief in casual spirits. We have also to show that Mr. Huxley, under the
+dominance of his theory, and inadvertently, quotes a good authority as
+saying the precise reverse of what he really does say.
+
+If the facts not fitting their theories are little observed by authorities
+so popular as Mr. Huxley and Mr. Spencer; if _instantiae contradictoriae_
+are ignored by them, or left vague; if these things are done in the green
+tree, we may easily imagine what shall be done in the dry. But we need not
+war with hasty _vulgarisateurs_ and headlong theorists.
+
+Enough has been said to show the position of anthropology as regards
+evidence, and to prove that, if he confines his observations to certain
+anthropologists, the censures of Mr. Max Mueller are justified. It is
+mainly for this reason that the arguments presently to follow are strung
+on the thread of Mr. Tylor's truly learned and accurate book, 'Primitive
+Culture.'
+
+Though but recently crept forth, _vix aut ne vix quidem_, from the chill
+shade of scientific disdain, Anthropology adopts the airs of her elder
+sisters among the sciences, and is as severe as they to the Cinderella of
+the family, Psychical Research. She must murmur of her fairies among the
+cinders of the hearth, while they go forth to the ball, and dance with
+provincial mayors at the festivities of the British Association. This is
+ungenerous, and unfortunate, as the records of anthropology are rich in
+unexamined materials of psychical research. I am unacquainted with any
+work devoted by an anthropologist of renown to the hypnotic and kindred
+practices of the lower races, except Herr Bastian's very meagre tract,
+'Ueber psychische Beobachtungen bei Naturvoelkern.'[7] We possess, none the
+less, a mass of scattered information on this topic, the savage side of
+psychical phenomena, in works of travel, and in Mr. Tylor's monumental
+'Primitive Culture.' Mr. Tylor, however, as we shall see, regards it as a
+matter of indifference, or, at least, as a matter beyond the scope of his
+essay, to decide whether the parallel supernormal phenomena believed
+in by savages, and said to recur in civilisation, are facts of actual
+experience, or not.
+
+Now, this question is not otiose. Mr. Tylor, like other anthropologists,
+Mr. Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and their followers and popularisers,
+constructs on anthropological grounds, a theory of the Origin of Religion.
+
+That origin anthropology explains as the result of early and fallacious
+reasonings on a number of biological and psychological phenomena, both
+normal and (as is alleged by savages) supernormal. These reasonings led to
+the belief in souls and spirits. Now, first, anthropology has taken for
+granted that the Supreme Deities of savages are envisaged by them as
+'spirits.' This, paradoxical as the statement may appear, is just what
+does not seem to be proved, as we shall show. Next, if the supernormal
+phenomena (clairvoyance, thought-transference, phantasms of the dead,
+phantasms of the dying, and others) be real matters of experience, the
+inferences drawn from them by early savage philosophy may be, in some
+degree, erroneous. But the inferences drawn by materialists who reject the
+supernormal phenomena will also, perhaps, be, let us say, incomplete.
+Religion will have been, in part, developed out of facts, perhaps
+inconsistent with materialism in its present dogmatic form. To put it less
+trenchantly, and perhaps more accurately, the alleged facts 'are not
+merely dramatically strange, they are not merely extraordinary and
+striking, but they are "odd" in the sense that they will not easily fit in
+with the views which physicists and men of science generally give us of
+the universe in which we live' (Mr. A.J. Balfour, President's Address,
+'Proceedings,' S.P.R. vol. x. p. 8, 1894).
+
+As this is the case, it might seem to be the business of Anthropology, the
+Science of Man, to examine, among other things, the evidence for the
+actual existence of those alleged unusual and supernormal phenomena,
+belief in which is given as one of the origins of religion.
+
+To make this examination, in the ethnographic field, is almost a new
+labour. As we shall see, anthropologists have not hitherto investigated
+such things as the 'Fire-walk' of savages, uninjured in the flames, like
+the Three Holy Children. The world-wide savage practice of divining by
+hallucinations induced through gazing into a smooth deep (crystal-gazing)
+has been studied, I think, by no anthropologist. The veracity of
+'messages' uttered by savage seers when (as they suppose) 'possessed' or
+'inspired' has not been criticised, and probably cannot be, for lack of
+detailed information. The 'physical phenomena' which answer among savages
+to the use of the 'divining rod,' and to 'spiritist' marvels in modern
+times, have only been glanced at. In short, all the savage parallels
+to the so-called 'psychical phenomena' now under discussion in England,
+America, Germany, Italy, and France, have escaped critical analysis and
+comparison with their civilised counterparts.
+
+An exception among anthropologists is Mr. Tylor. He has not suppressed the
+existence of these barbaric parallels to our modern problems of this kind.
+But his interest in them practically ends when he has shown that the
+phenomena helped to originate the savage belief in 'spirits,' and when he
+has displayed the 'survival' of that belief in later culture. He does not
+ask 'Are the phenomena real?' he is concerned only with the savage
+philosophy of the phenomena and with its relics in modern spiritism and
+religion. My purpose is to do, by way only of _ebauche_, what neither
+anthropology nor psychical research nor psychology has done: to put the
+savage and modern phenomena side by side. Such evidence as we can give for
+the actuality of the modern experiences will, so far as it goes, raise a
+presumption that the savage beliefs, however erroneous, however darkened
+by fraud and fancy, repose on a basis of real observation of actual
+phenomena.
+
+Anthropology is concerned with man and what is in man--_humani nihil
+a se alienum putat_. These researches, therefore, are within the
+anthropological province, especially as they bear on the prevalent
+anthropological theory of the Origin of Religion. By 'religion' we mean,
+for the purpose of this argument, the belief in the existence of an
+Intelligence, or Intelligences not human, and not dependent on a material
+mechanism of brain and nerves, which may, or may not, powerfully control
+men's fortunes and the nature of things. We also mean the additional
+belief that there is, in man, an element so far kindred to these
+Intelligences that it can transcend the knowledge obtained through the
+known bodily senses, and may possibly survive the death of the body. These
+two beliefs at present (though not necessarily in their origin) appear
+chiefly as the faith in God and in the Immortality of the Soul.
+
+It is important, then, to trace, if possible, the origin of these two
+beliefs. If they arose in actual communion with Deity (as the first at
+least did, in the theory of the Hebrew Scriptures), or if they could be
+proved to arise in an unanalysable _sensus numinis_, or even in 'a
+perception of the Infinite' (Max Mueller), religion would have a divine, or
+at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but
+be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained,
+therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is
+true. The atheist, or non-theist, of course draws no such inferences.
+
+But if religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary
+form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a
+blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but
+unessential refinements on that blunder, the inference that religion is
+untrue--that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis--is very easily
+drawn. The inference is not, perhaps, logical, for all our science itself
+is the result of progressive refinements upon hypotheses originally
+erroneous, fashioned to explain facts misconceived. Yet our science is
+true, within its limits, though very far from being exhaustive of the
+truth. In the same way, it might be argued, our religion, even granting
+that it arose out of primitive fallacies and false hypotheses, may yet
+have been refined, as science has been, through a multitude of causes,
+into an approximate truth.
+
+Frequently as I am compelled to differ from Mr. Spencer both as to facts
+and their interpretation, I am happy to find that he has anticipated me
+here. Opponents will urge, he says, that 'if the primitive belief' (in
+ghosts) 'was absolutely false, all derived beliefs from it must be
+absolutely false?' Mr. Spencer replies: 'A germ of truth was contained in
+the primitive conception--the truth, namely, that the power which
+manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of
+the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness.' In fact, we find
+Mr. Spencer, like Faust as described by Marguerite, saying much the same
+thing as the priests, but not quite in the same way. Of course, I allow
+for a much larger 'germ of truth' in the origin of the ghost theory than
+Mr. Spencer does. But we can both say 'the ultimate form of the religious
+consciousness is' (will be?) 'the final development of a consciousness
+which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous
+errors.'[8]
+
+  'One God, one law, one element,
+  And one far-off divine event,
+  To which the whole creation moves.'
+
+Coming at last to Mr. Tylor, we find that he begins by dismissing the idea
+that any known race of men is devoid of religious conceptions. He
+disproves, out of their own mouths, the allegations of several writers who
+have made this exploded assertion about 'godless tribes.' He says:
+'The thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to
+intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the
+very origin of human civilisation, _perhaps even of human existence_.'[9]
+So far we abound in Mr. Tylor's sense. 'As a minimum definition of
+religion' he gives 'the belief in spiritual beings,' which appears
+'among all low races with whom we have attained to thoroughly intimate
+relations.' The existence of this belief at present does not prove that no
+races were ever, at any time, destitute of all belief. But it prevents us
+from positing the existence of such creedless races, in any age, as a
+demonstrated fact. We have thus, in short, no opportunity of observing,
+_historically_, man's development from blank unbelief into even the
+minimum or most rudimentary form of belief. We can only theorise and make
+more or less plausible conjectures as to the first rudiments of human
+faith in God and in spiritual beings. We find no race whose mind, as to
+faith, is a _tabula rasa_.
+
+To the earliest faith Mr. Tylor gives the name of _Animism_, a term not
+wholly free from objection, though 'Spiritualism' is still less desirable,
+having been usurped by a form of modern superstitiousness. This Animism,
+'in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future
+state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits.' In Mr. Tylor's
+opinion, as in Mr. Huxley's, Animism, in its lower (and earlier) forms,
+has scarcely any connection with ethics. Its 'spirits' do not 'make for
+righteousness.' This is a side issue to be examined later, but we may
+provisionally observe, in passing, that the ethical ideas, such as they
+are, even of Australian blacks are reported to be inculcated at the
+religious mysteries (_Bora_) of the tribes, which were instituted by and
+are performed in honour of the gods of their native belief. But this topic
+must be reserved for our closing chapters.
+
+Mr. Tylor, however, is chiefly concerned with Animism as 'an ancient and
+world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory, and worship is the
+practice.' Given Animism, then, or the belief in spiritual beings, as the
+earliest form and minimum of religious faith, what is the origin of
+Animism? It will be seen that, by Animism, Mr. Tylor does not mean the
+alleged early theory, implicitly if not explicitly and consciously held,
+that all things whatsoever are animated and are personalities.[10] Judging
+from the behaviour of little children, and from the myths of savages,
+early man may have half-consciously extended his own sense of personal and
+potent and animated existence to the whole of nature as known to him. Not
+only animals, but vegetables and inorganic objects, may have been looked
+on by him as persons, like what he felt himself to be. The child (perhaps
+merely because _taught_ to do so) beats the naughty chair, and all objects
+are persons in early mythology. But this _feeling_, rather than theory,
+may conceivably have existed among early men, before they developed the
+hypothesis of 'spirits,' 'ghosts,' or souls. It is the origin of _that_
+hypothesis, 'Animism,' which Mr. Tylor investigates.
+
+What, then, is the origin of Animism? It arose in the earliest traceable
+speculations on 'two groups of biological problems:
+
+(1) 'What is it that makes the difference between a living body and a
+dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death?'
+
+(2) 'What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and
+visions?'[11]
+
+Here it should be noted that Mr. Tylor most properly takes a distinction
+between sleeping 'dreams' and waking 'visions,' or 'clear vision.' The
+distinction is made even by the blacks of Australia. Thus one of the
+Kurnai announced that his _Yambo_, or soul, could 'go out' during sleep,
+and see the distant and the dead. But 'while any one might be able to
+communicate with the ghosts, _during sleep_, it was only the wizards who
+were able to do so in waking hours.' A wizard, in fact, is a person
+susceptible (or feigning to be susceptible) when awake to hallucinatory
+perceptions of phantasms of the dead. 'Among the Kulin of Wimmera River a
+man became a wizard who, as a boy, had seen his mother's ghost sitting at
+her grave.'[12] These facts prove that a race of savages at the bottom of
+the scale of culture do take a formal distinction between normal dreams in
+sleep and waking hallucinations--a thing apt to be denied.
+
+Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer offers the massive generalisation that savages do
+not possess a language enabling a man to say 'I dreamed that I saw,'
+instead of 'I saw' ('Principles of Sociology,' p. 150). This could only be
+proved by giving examples of such highly deficient languages, which Mr.
+Spencer does not do.[13] In many savage speculations there occur ideas as
+subtly metaphysical as those of Hegel. Moreover, even the Australian
+languages have the verb 'to see,' and the substantive 'sleep.' Nothing,
+then, prevents a man from saying 'I saw in sleep' (_insomnium_,
+[Greek: enupnion]).
+
+We have shown too, that the Australians take an essential distinction
+between waking hallucinations (ghosts seen by a man when awake) and the
+common hallucinations of slumber. Anybody can have these; the man who sees
+ghosts when awake is marked out for a wizard.
+
+At the same time the vividness of dreams among certain savages, as
+recorded in Mr. Im Thurn's 'Indians of Guiana,' and the consequent
+confusion of dreaming and waking experiences, are certain facts. Wilson
+says the same of some negroes, and Mr. Spencer illustrates from the
+confusion of mind in dreamy children. They, we know, are much more
+addicted to somnambulism than grown-up people. I am unaware that
+spontaneous somnambulism among savages has been studied as it ought to be.
+I have demonstrated, however, that very low savages can and do draw an
+essential distinction between sleeping and waking hallucinations.
+
+Again, the crystal-gazer, whose apparently telepathic crystal pictures are
+discussed later (chap. v.), was introduced to a crystal just because she
+had previously been known to be susceptible to waking and occasionally
+veracious hallucinations.
+
+It was not only on the dreams of sleep, so easily forgotten as they are,
+that the savage pondered, in his early speculations about the life and the
+soul. He included in his materials the much more striking and memorable
+experiences of waking hours, as we and Mr. Tylor agree in holding.
+
+Reflecting on these things, the earliest savage reasoners would decide:
+(1) that man has a 'life' (which leaves him temporarily in sleep, finally
+in death); (2) that man also possesses a 'phantom' (which appears to
+other people in their visions and dreams). The savage philosopher would
+then 'combine his information,' like a celebrated writer on Chinese
+metaphysics. He would merely 'combine the life and the phantom,' as
+'manifestations of one and the same soul.' The result would be 'an
+apparitional soul,' or 'ghost-soul.'
+
+This ghost-soul would be a highly accomplished creature, 'a vapour, film,
+or shadow,' yet conscious, capable of leaving the body, mostly invisible
+and impalpable, 'yet also manifesting physical power,' existing and
+appearing after the death of the body, able to act on the bodies of other
+men, beasts, and things.[14]
+
+When the earliest reasoners, in an age and in mental conditions of which
+we know nothing historically, had evolved the hypothesis of this
+conscious, powerful, separable soul, capable of surviving the death of the
+body, it was not difficult for them to develop the rest of Religion, as
+Mr. Tylor thinks. A powerful ghost of a dead man might thrive till, its
+original owner being long forgotten, it became a God. Again (souls once
+given) it would not be a very difficult logical leap, perhaps, to conceive
+of souls, or spirits, that had never been human at all. It is, we may say,
+only _le premier pas qui coute_, the step to the belief in a surviving
+separable soul. Nevertheless, when we remember that Mr. Tylor is
+theorising about savages in the dim background of human evolution, savages
+whom we know nothing of by experience, savages far behind Australians and
+Bushmen (who possess Gods), we must admit that he credits them with great
+ingenuity, and strong powers of abstract reasoning. He may be right in his
+opinion. In the same way, just as primitive men were keen reasoners, so
+early bees, more clever than modern bees, may have evolved the system of
+hexagonal cells, and only an early fish of genius could first have hit
+on the plan, now hereditary of killing a fly by blowing water at it.
+
+To this theory of metaphysical genius in very low savages I have no
+objection to offer. We shall find, later, astonishing examples of savage
+abstract speculation, certainly not derived from missionary sources,
+because wholly out of the missionary's line of duty and reflection.
+
+As early beasts had genius, so the earliest reasoners appear to have been
+as logically gifted as the lowest savages now known to us, or even as some
+Biblical critics. By Mr. Tylor's hypothesis, they first conceived the
+extremely abstract idea of Life, 'that which makes the difference between
+a living body and a dead one.'[15] This highly abstract conception must
+have been, however, the more difficult to early man, as, to him, all
+things, universally, are 'animated.'[16] Mr. Tylor illustrates this
+theory of early man by the little child's idea that 'chairs, sticks, and
+wooden horses are actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and
+children and kittens.... In such matters the savage mind well represents
+the childish stage.'[17]
+
+Now, nothing can be more certain than that, if children think sticks are
+animated, they don't think so because they have heard, or discovered, that
+they possess souls, and then transfer souls to sticks. We may doubt, then,
+if primitive man came, in this way, by reasoning on souls, to suppose
+that all things, universally, were animated. But if he did think all
+things animated--a corpse, to his mind, was just as much animated as
+anything else. Did he reason: 'All things are animated. A corpse is not
+animated. Therefore a corpse is not a thing (within the meaning of my
+General Law)'?
+
+How, again, did early man conceive of Life, before he identified Life
+(1) with 'that which makes the difference between a living body and a dead
+one' (a difference which, _ex hypothesi_, he did not draw, _all_ things
+being animated to his mind) and (2) with 'those human shapes which appear
+in dreams and visions'? 'The ancient savage philosophers probably reached
+the obvious inference that every man had two things belonging to him, a
+life and a phantom.' But everything was supposed to have 'a life,' as far
+as one makes out, before the idea of separable soul was developed, at
+least if savages arrived at the theory of universal animation as children
+are said to do.
+
+We are dealing here quite conjecturally with facts beyond our experience.
+
+In any case, early man excogitated (by the hypothesis) the abstract idea
+of Life, _before_ he first 'envisaged' it in material terms as 'breath,'
+or 'shadow.' He next decided that mere breath or shadow was not only
+identical with the more abstract conception of Life, but could also take
+on forms as real and full-bodied as, to him, are the hallucinations of
+dream or waking vision. His reasoning appears to have proceeded from the
+more abstract (the idea of Life) to the more concrete, to the life first
+shadowy and vaporous, then clothed in the very aspect of the real man.
+
+Mr. Tylor has thus (whether we follow his logic or not) provided man with
+a theory of active, intelligent, separable souls, which can survive the
+death of the body. At this theory early man arrived by speculations on the
+nature of life, and on the causes of phantasms of the dead or living
+beheld in 'dreams and visions.' But our author by no means leaves out of
+sight the effects of alleged supernormal phenomena believed in by savages,
+with their parallels in modern civilisation. These supernormal phenomena,
+whether real or illusory, are, he conceives, facts in that mass of
+experiences from which savages constructed their belief in separable,
+enduring, intelligent souls or ghosts, the foundation of religion.
+
+While we are, perhaps owing to our own want of capacity, puzzled by what
+seem to be two kinds of early philosophy--(1) a sort of instinctive or
+unreasoned belief in universal animation, which Mr. Spencer calls
+'Animism' and does not believe in, (2) the reasoned belief in separable
+and surviving souls of men (and in things), which Mr. Spencer believes in,
+and Mr. Tylor calls 'Animism'--we must also note another difficulty. Mr.
+Tylor may seem to be taking it for granted that the earliest, remote,
+unknown thinkers on life and the soul were existing on the same psychical
+plane as we ourselves, or, at least, as modern savages. Between modern
+savages and ourselves, in this regard, he takes certain differences, but
+takes none between modern savages and the remote founders of religion.
+
+Thus Mr. Tylor observes:
+
+'The condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on
+such slight excitement into positive hallucination, is rather the rule
+than the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes,
+whose minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a
+gesture, an unaccustomed noise.'[18]
+
+I find evidence that low contemporary savages are _not_ great ghost-seers,
+and, again, I cannot quite accept Mr. Tylor's psychology of the 'modern
+ghost-seer.' Most such favoured persons whom I have known were steady,
+unimaginative, unexcitable people, with just one odd experience. Lord
+Tennyson, too, after sleeping in the bed of his recently lost father on
+purpose to see his ghost, decided that ghosts 'are not seen by imaginative
+people.'
+
+We now examine, at greater length, the psychical conditions in which,
+according to Mr. Tylor, contemporary savages differ from civilised men.
+Later we shall ask what may be said as to possible or presumable psychical
+differences between modern savages and the datelessly distant founders of
+the belief in souls. Mr. Tylor attributes to the lower races, and
+even to races high above their level, 'morbid ecstasy, brought on by
+meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease.' Now, we may
+still 'meditate'--and how far the result is 'morbid' is a matter for
+psychologists and pathologists to determine. Fasting we do not practise
+voluntarily, nor would we easily accept evidence from an Englishman as to
+the veracity of voluntary fasting visions, like those of Cotton Mather.
+The visions of disease we should set aside, as a rule, with those of
+'excitement,' produced, for instance, by 'devil-dances.' Narcotic and
+alcoholic visions are not in question.[19] For our purpose the _induced_
+trances of savages (in whatever way voluntarily brought on) are analogous
+to the modern induced hypnotic trance. Any supernormal acquisitions of
+knowledge in these induced conditions, among savages, would be on a par
+with similar alleged experiences of persons under hypnotism.
+
+We do not differ from known savages in being able to bring on non-normal
+psychological conditions, but we produce these, as a rule, by other
+methods than theirs, and such experiments are not made on _all_ of us, as
+they were on all Red Indian boys and girls in the 'medicine-fast,' at
+the age of puberty.
+
+Further, in their normal state, known savages, or some of them, are more
+'suggestible' than educated Europeans at least.[20] They can be more
+easily hallucinated in their normal waking state by suggestion. Once more,
+their intervals of hunger, followed by gorges of food, and their lack of
+artificial light, combine to make savages more apt to see what is not
+there than are comfortable educated white men. But Mr. Tylor goes too far
+when he says 'where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has
+come to amuse himself with fancies.'[21] The civilised man, beyond all
+doubt, is capable of being _enfantosme_.
+
+In all that he says on this point, the point of psychical condition, Mr.
+Tylor is writing about known savages as they differ from ourselves. But
+the savages who _ex hypothesi_ evolved the doctrine of souls lie beyond
+our ken, far behind the modern savages, among whom we find belief not
+only in souls and ghosts, but in moral gods. About the psychical condition
+of the savages who worked out the theory of souls and founded religion we
+necessarily know nothing. If there be such experiences as clairvoyance,
+telepathy, and so on, these unknown ancestors of ours may (for all that we
+can tell) have been peculiarly open to them, and therefore peculiarly apt
+to believe in separable souls. In fact, when we write about these far-off
+founders of religion, we guess in the dark, or by the flickering light of
+analogy. The lower animals have faculties (as in their power of finding
+their way home through new unknown regions, and in the ants' modes of
+acquiring and communicating knowledge to each other) which are mysteries
+to us. The terror of dogs in 'haunted houses' and of horses in passing
+'haunted' scenes has often been reported, and is alluded to briefly by Mr.
+Tylor. Balaam's ass, and the dogs which crouched and whined before Athene,
+whom Eumaeus could not see, are 'classical' instances.
+
+The weakness of the anthropological argument here is, we must repeat, that
+we know little more about the mental condition and experiences of the
+early thinkers who developed the doctrine of Souls than we know about
+the mental condition and experiences of the lower animals. And the more
+firmly a philosopher believes in the Darwinian hypothesis, the less, he
+must admit, can he suppose himself to know about the twilight ages,
+between the lower animal and the fully evolved man. What kind of creature
+was man when he first conceived the germs, or received the light,
+of Religion? All is guess-work here! We may just allude to Hegel's
+theory that clairvoyance and hypnotic phenomena are produced in a
+kind of temporary _atavism_, or 'throwing hack' to a remotely ancient
+condition of the 'sensitive soul' (_fueklende Seele_). The 'sensitive'
+[unconditioned, clairvoyant] faculty or 'soul' is 'a disease when it
+becomes a state of the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human
+being of civilisation.'[22] 'Second sight,' Hegel thinks, was a product
+of an earlier day and earlier mental condition than ours.
+
+Approaching this almost untouched subject--the early psychical condition
+of man--not from the side of metaphysical speculations like Hegel, but
+with the instruments of modern psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir,
+of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at
+somewhat similar conclusions. 'This fully conscious life of the spirit,'
+in which we moderns now live, 'seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex
+action of a hallucinatory type.' Our actual modern condition is _not_
+'fundamental,' and 'hallucination represents, at least in its nascent
+condition, the main trunk of our psychical existence.'[23]
+
+Now, suppose that the remote and unknown ancestors of ours who first
+developed the doctrine of souls had not yet spread far from 'the main
+trunk of our psychical existence,' far from constant hallucination. In
+that case (at least, according to Dr. Dessoir's theory) their psychical
+experiences would be such as we cannot estimate, yet cannot leave, as a
+possibility influencing religion, out of our calculations.
+
+If early men were ever in a condition in which telepathy and clairvoyance
+(granting their possibility) were prevalent, one might expect that
+faculties so useful would be developed in the struggle for existence. That
+they are deliberately cultivated by modern savages we know. The Indian
+foster-mother of John Tanner used, when food was needed, to suggest
+herself into an hypnotic condition, so that she became _clairvoyante_ as
+to the whereabouts of game. Tanner, an English boy, caught early
+by the Indians, was sceptical, but came to practise the same art, not
+unsuccessfully, himself.[24] His reminiscences, which he dictated on his
+return to civilisation, were certainly not feigned in the interests of any
+theories. But the most telepathic human stocks, it may be said, ought,
+_ceteris paribus_, to have been the most successful in the struggle
+for existence. We may infer that the _cetera_ were not _paria_, the
+clairvoyant state not being precisely the best for the practical business
+of life. But really we know nothing of the psychical state of the earliest
+men. They may have had experiences tending towards a belief in 'spirits,'
+of which we can tell nothing. We are obliged to guess, in considerable
+ignorance of the actual conditions, and this historical ignorance
+inevitably besets all anthropological speculation about the origin of
+religion.
+
+The knowledge of our nescience as to the psychical condition of our first
+thinking ancestors may suggest hesitation as to taking it for granted that
+early man was on our own or on the modern savage level in 'psychical'
+experience. Even savage races, as Mr. Tylor justly says, attribute
+superior psychical knowledge to neighbouring tribes on a yet lower level
+of culture than themselves. The Finn esteems the Lapp sorcerers above his
+own; the Lapp yields to the superior pretensions of the Samoyeds. There
+may be more ways than one of explaining this relative humility: there is
+Hegel's way and there is Mr. Tylor's way. We cannot be certain, _a
+priori_, that the earliest man knew no more of supernormal or apparently
+supernormal experiences than we commonly do, or that these did not
+influence his thoughts on animism.
+
+It is an example of the chameleon-like changes of science (even of
+'science falsely so called' if you please) that when he wrote his book, in
+1871, Mr. Tylor could not possibly have anticipated this line of argument.
+
+'Psychical planes' had not been invented; hypnotism, with its problems,
+had not been much noticed in England. But 'Spiritualism' was flourishing.
+Mr. Tylor did not ignore this revival of savage philosophy. He saw very
+well that the end of the century was beholding the partial rehabilitation
+of beliefs which were scouted from 1660 to 1850. Seventy years ago, as Mr.
+Tylor says, Dr. Macculloch, in his 'Description of the Western Islands of
+Scotland,' wrote of 'the famous Highland second sight' that 'ceasing to be
+believed it has ceased to exist.'[25]
+
+Dr. Macculloch was mistaken in his facts. 'Second sight' has never
+ceased to exist (or to be believed to exist), and it has recently been
+investigated in the 'Journal' of the Caledonian Medical Society. Mr. Tylor
+himself says that it has been 'reinstated in a far larger range of
+society, and under far better circumstances of learning and prosperity.'
+This fact he ascribes generally to 'a direct revival from the regions of
+savage philosophy and peasant folklore,' a revival brought about in great
+part by the writings of Swedenborg. To-day things have altered. The
+students now interested in this whole class of alleged supernormal
+phenomena are seldom believers in the philosophy of Spiritualism in the
+American sense of the word.[26]
+
+Mr. Tylor, as we have seen, attributes the revival of interest in this
+obscure class of subjects to the influence of Swedenborg. It is true, as
+has been shown, that Swedenborg attracted the attention of Kant. But
+modern interest has chiefly been aroused and kept alive by the phenomena
+of hypnotism. The interest is now, among educated students, really
+scientific.
+
+Thus Mr. William James, Professor of Psychology in the University of
+Harvard, writes:
+
+'I was attracted to this subject (Psychical Research) some years ago by
+my love of fair play in Science.'[27]
+
+Mr. Tylor is not incapable of appreciating this attitude. Even the
+so-called 'spirit manifestations,' he says, 'should be discussed on their
+merits,' and the investigation 'would seem apt to throw light on some most
+interesting psychological questions.' Nothing can be more remote from the
+logic of Hume.
+
+The ideas of Mr. Tylor on the causes of the origin of religion are
+now criticised, not from the point of view of spiritualism, but of
+experimental psychology. We hold that very probably there exist human
+faculties of unknown scope; that these conceivably were more powerful
+and prevalent among our very remote ancestors who founded religion; that
+they may still exist in savage as in civilised races, and that they may
+have confirmed, if they did not originate, the doctrine of separable
+souls. If they _do_ exist, the circumstance is important, in view of the
+fact that modern ideas rest on a denial of their existence.
+
+Mr. Tylor next examines the savage and other _names_ for the ghost-soul,
+such as shadow (_umbra_), breath (_spiritus_), and he gives cases in
+which the _shadow_ of a man is regarded as equivalent to his _life_. Of
+course, the shadow in the sunlight does not resemble the phantasm in a
+dream. The two, however, were combined and identified by early thinkers,
+while _breath_ and _heart_ were used as symbols of 'that in men which
+makes them live,' a phrase found among the natives of Nicaragua in 1528.
+The confessedly symbolical character of the phrase, 'it is _not_
+precisely the heart, but that in them which makes them live,' proves that
+to the speaker life was _not_ 'heart' or 'breath,' but that these terms
+were known to be material word-counters for the conception of life.[1]
+Whether the earliest thinkers identified heart, breath, shadow, with life,
+or whether they consciously used words of material origin to denote an
+immaterial conception, of course we do not know. But the word in the
+latter case would react on the thought, till the Roman inhaled (as his
+life?) the last breath of his dying kinsman, he well knowing that the
+Manes of the said kinsman were elsewhere, and not to be inhaled.
+
+Subdivisions and distinctions were then recognised, as of the Egyptian
+_Ka_, the 'double,' the Karen _kelah_, or 'personal life-phantom'
+(_wraith_), on one side, and the Karen _thah_, 'the responsible moral
+soul,' on the other. The Roman _umbra_ hovers about the grave, the _manes_
+go to Orcus, the _spiritus_ seeks the stars.
+
+We are next presented with a crowd of cases in which sickness or lethargy
+is ascribed by savages to the absence of the patient's spirit, or of one
+of his spirits. This idea of migratory spirit is next used by savages to
+explain certain proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer. His soul,
+or one of his souls is thought to go forth to distant places in quest of
+information, while the seer, perhaps, remains lethargic. Probably, in the
+struggle for existence, he lost more by being lethargic than he gained by
+being clairvoyant!
+
+Now, here we touch the first point in Mr. Tylor's theory, where a critic
+may ask, Was this belief in the wandering abroad of the seer's spirit a
+theory not only false in its form (as probably it is), but also wholly
+unbased on experiences which might raise a presumption in favour of the
+existence of phenomena really supernormal? By 'supernormal' experiences I
+here mean such as the acquisition by a human mind of knowledge which could
+not be obtained by it through the recognised channels of sensation. Say,
+for the sake of argument, that a person, savage or civilised, obtains in
+trance information about distant places or events, to him unknown, and,
+through channels of sense, unknowable. The savage will explain this by
+saying that the seer's soul, shadow, or spirit, wandered out of the body
+to the distant scene. This is, at present, an unverified theory. But
+still, for the sake of argument, suppose that the seer did honestly
+obtain this information in trance, lethargy, or hypnotic sleep, or any
+other condition. If so, the modern savage (or his more gifted ancestors)
+would have other grounds for his theory of the wandering soul than any
+ground presented by normal occurrences, ordinary dreams, shadows, and so
+forth. Again, in human nature there would be (if such things occur) a
+potentiality of experiences other and stranger than materialism will admit
+as possible. It will (granting the facts) be impossible to aver that there
+is _nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu_. The soul will be not
+_ce qu'un vain peuple pense_ under the new popular tradition, and the
+savage's theory of the spirit will be, at least in part, based on other
+than normal and every-day facts. That condition in which the seer acquires
+information, not otherwise accessible, about events remote in space, is
+what the mesmerists of the mid-century called 'travelling clairvoyance.'
+
+If such an experience be _in rerum natura_, it will not, of course,
+justify the savage's theory that the soul is a separable entity, capable
+of voyaging, and also capable of existing after the death of the body. But
+it will give the savage a better excuse for his theory than normal
+experiences provide; and will even raise a presumption that reflection on
+mere ordinary experiences--death, shadow, trance--is not the sole origin
+of his theory. For a savage so acute as Mr. Tylor's hypothetical early
+reasoner might decline to believe that his own or a friend's soul had been
+absent on an expedition, unless it brought back information not normally
+to be acquired. However, we cannot reason, _a priori_, as to how far the
+logic of a savage might or might not go on occasion.
+
+In any case, a scientific reasoner might be expected to ask: 'Is this
+alleged acquisition of knowledge, _not_ through the ordinary channels of
+sense, a thing _in rerum natura_?' Because, if it is, we must obviously
+increase our list of the savage's reasons for believing in a soul: we
+must make his reasons include 'psychical' experiences, and there must be
+an X region to investigate.
+
+These considerations did not fail to present themselves to Mr. Tylor. But
+his manner of dealing with them is peculiar. With his unequalled knowledge
+of the lower races, it was easy for him to examine travellers' tales about
+savage seers who beheld distant events in vision, and to allow them what
+weight he thought proper, after discounting possibilities of falsehood and
+collusion. He might then have examined modern narratives of similar
+performances among the civilised, which are abundant. It is obvious and
+undeniable that if the supernormal acquisition of knowledge in trance is a
+_vera causa_, a real process, however rare, Mr. Tylor's theory needs
+modifications; while the character of the savage's reasoning becomes more
+creditable to the savage, and appears as better bottomed than we had been
+asked to suppose. But Mr. Tylor does not examine this large body of
+evidence at all, or, at least, does not offer us the details of his
+examination. He merely writes in this place:
+
+'A typical spiritualistic instance may be quoted from Jung-Stilling, who
+says that examples have come to his knowledge of sick persons who,
+longing to see absent friends, have fallen into a swoon, during which
+they have appeared to the distant objects of their affection.'[29]
+
+Jung-Stilling (though he wrote before modern 'Spiritualism' came in) is
+not a very valid authority; there is plenty of better evidence than his,
+but Mr. Tylor passes it by, merely remarking that 'modern Europe has kept
+closely enough to the lines of early philosophy.' Modern Europe has indeed
+done so, if it explains the supernormal acquisition of knowledge, or the
+hallucinatory appearance of a distant person to his friend by a theory of
+wandering 'spirits.' But facts do not cease to be facts because wrong
+interpretations have been put upon them by savages, by Jung-Stilling, or
+by anyone else. The real question is, Do such events occur among lower and
+higher races, beyond explanation by fraud and fortuitous coincidence? We
+gladly grant that the belief in Animism, when it takes the form of a
+theory of 'wandering spirits,' is probably untenable, as it is assuredly
+of savage origin. But we are not absolutely so sure that in this aspect
+the theory is not based on actual experiences, not of a normal and
+ordinary kind. If so, the savage philosophy and its supposed survivals in
+belief will appear in a new light. And we are inclined to hold that an
+examination of the mass of evidence to which Mr. Tylor offers here so
+slight an allusion will at least make it wise to suspend our judgment,
+not only as to the origins of the savage theory of spirits, but as to the
+materialistic hypothesis of the absence of a psychical element in man.
+
+I may seem to have outrun already the limits of permissible hypothesis. It
+may appear absurd to surmise that there can exist in man, savage or
+civilised, a faculty for acquiring information not accessible by the known
+channels of sense, a faculty attributed by savage philosophers to the
+wandering soul. But one may be permitted to quote the opinion of
+M. Charles Richet, Professor of Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine
+in Paris. It is not cited because M. Richet is a professor of physiology,
+but because he reached his conclusion after six years of minute
+experiment. He says: 'There exists in certain persons, at certain moments,
+a faculty of acquiring knowledge which has no _rapport_ with our normal
+faculties of that kind.'[30]
+
+Instances tending to raise a presumption in favour of M. Richet's idea may
+now be sought in savage and civilised life.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Primitive Culture,_ i. 9, 10.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Origin of Ranks._]
+
+[Footnote 3: I may be permitted to refer to 'Reply to Objections' in the
+appendix to my _Myth, Ritual, and Religion,_ vol. ii.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Spencer, _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, pp. 672, 673.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Primitive Culture_, i. 417-425. Cf. however _Princip. Of
+Sociol._, p. 304.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Op. cit. i. 423, 424.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Published for the Berlin Society of Experimental Psychology,
+Guenther, Leipzig, 1890.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 837-839.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Primitive Culture_, i. 421, chapter xi.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This theory is what Mr. Spencer calls 'Animism,' and does
+not believe in. What Mr. Tylor calls 'Animism' Mr. Spencer believes in,
+but he calls it the 'Ghost Theory.']
+
+[Footnote 11: _Primitive Culture_, i. 428.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Howitt, _Journal of Anthropological Institute_, xiii.
+191-195.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The curious may consult, for savage words for 'dreams,' Mr.
+Scott's _Dictionary of the Mang'anja Language_, s.v. 'Lots,' or any
+glossary of any savage language.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Prim. Cult._ i. 429.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Prim. Cult._ i. 428.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Ibid. i. 285.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Ibid. i. 285, 286.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Primitive Culture_, i. 446.]
+
+[Footnote 19: See, however, Dr. Von Schrenck-Notzing, _Die Beobachtung
+narcolischer Mittel fuer den Hypnotismus_, and S.P.R. _Proceedings_, x.
+292-899.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Primitive Culture_, i. 306-316.]
+
+[Footnote 21: i. 315.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Phil. des Geistes_, pp. 406, 408.]
+
+[Footnote 23: See also Mr. A.J. Balfour's Presidential Address to the
+Society for Psychical Research, _Proceedings_, vol. x. See, too, Taine,
+_De l'Intelligence_, i. 78, 106, 139.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Tanner's _Narrative_, New York, 1830.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _Primitive Culture_, i. 143.]
+
+[Footnote 26: As 'spiritualism' is often used in opposition to
+'materialism,' and with no reference to rapping 'spirits,' the modern
+belief in that class of intelligences may here be called spiritism.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _The Will to Believe_, preface, p. xiv.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Primitive Culture_, i. 432,433. Citing Oviedo, _Hist. De
+Nicaragua,_ pp. 21-51.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _Primitive Culture_, i. 440. Citing Stilling after Dale Owen,
+and quoting Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace's _Scientific Aspect of the
+Supernatural_, p. 43. Mr. Tylor also adds folk-lore practices of
+ghost-seeing, as on St. John's Eve. St. Mark's Eve, too, is in point, as
+far as folk-lore goes.]
+
+[Footnote 30: _Proceedings_, S.P.R. v. 167.]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+'OPENING THE GATES OF DISTANCE'
+
+'To open the Gates of Distance' is the poetical Zulu phrase for what is
+called clairvoyance, or _vue a distance_. This, if it exists, is the
+result of a faculty of undetermined nature, whereby knowledge of remote
+events may be acquired, not through normal channels of sense. As the Zulus
+say: '_Isiyezi_ is a state in which a man becomes slightly insensible. He
+is awake, but still sees things which he would not see if he were not in a
+state of ecstasy (_nasiyesi_).'[1] The Zulu description of _isiyezi_
+includes what is technically styled 'dissociation.' No psychologist or
+pathologist will deny that visions of an hallucinatory sort may occur in
+dissociated states, say in the _petit mal_ of epilepsy. The question,
+however, is whether any such visions convey actual information not
+otherwise to be acquired, beyond the reach of chance coincidence to
+explain.
+
+A Scottish example, from the records of a court of law, exactly
+illustrates the Zulu theory. At the moment when the husband of Jonka
+Dyneis was in danger six miles from her house in his boat, Jonka 'was
+found, and seen standing at her own house wall in a trance, and being
+taken, she could not give answer, but stood as bereft of her senses, and
+when she was asked why she was so moved, she answered, "If our boat be not
+lost, she was in great hazard."' (October 2, 1616.)[2]
+
+The belief in opening the Gates of Distance is, of course, very widely
+diffused. The gift is attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, to Plotinus, to
+many Saints, to Catherine de' Medici, to the Rev. Mr. Peden,[3] and to
+Jeanne d'Arc, while the faculty is the stock in trade of savage seers in
+all regions.[4]
+
+The question, however, on which Mr. Tylor does not touch, is, _Are any of
+the stories true?_ If so, of course they would confirm in the mind
+of the savage his theory of the wandering soul. Now, to find anything
+like attested cases of successful clairvoyance among savages is a
+difficult task. White men either scout the idea, or are afraid of seeming
+superstitious if they give examples, or, if they do give examples, are
+accused of having sunk to the degraded level of Zulus or Red Indians. Even
+where travellers, like Scheffer, have told about their own experiences,
+the narratives are omitted by modern writers on savage divination.[5] We
+must therefore make our own researches, and it is to be noted that
+the stories of successful savage clairvoyance are given as illustrations
+merely, not as evidence to facts, for we cannot cross-examine the
+witnesses.
+
+Mr. Tylor dismisses the topic in a manner rather cavalier:
+
+'Without discussing on their merits the accounts of what is called
+"second sight,"[6] it may be pointed out that they are related among
+savage tribes, as when Captain Jonathan Carver obtained from a Cree
+medicine-man a true prophecy of the arrival of a canoe with news next
+day at noon; or when Mr. J. Mason Brown, travelling with two _voyageurs_
+on the Copper Mine River, was met by Indians of the very band he was
+seeking, these having been sent by their medicine-man, who, on
+enquiry, stated that "he saw them coming, and heard them talk on their
+journey."'[7]
+
+Now, in our opinion, the 'merits' of stories of second sight need
+discussion, because they may, if well attested, raise a presumption that
+the savage's theory has a better foundation than Mr. Tylor supposes. Oddly
+enough, though Mr. Tylor does not say so, Dr. Brinton (from whom he
+borrows his two anecdotes) is more or less of our opinion.
+
+'There are,' says Dr. Brinton, 'statements supported by unquestionable
+testimony, which ought not to be passed over in silence, and yet I cannot
+but approach them with hesitation. They are so revolting to the laws of
+exact science, so alien, I had almost said, to the experience of our
+lives. Yet is this true, or are such experiences only ignored and put
+aside without serious consideration?'
+
+That is exactly what we complain of; the alleged facts are 'put aside
+without serious consideration.'
+
+We, at least, are not slaves to the idea that 'the laws of exact science'
+must be the only laws at work in the world. Science, however exact, does
+not pretend to have discovered all 'laws.'
+
+To return to actual examples of the alleged supernormal acquisition of
+knowledge by savages: Dr. Brinton gives an example from Charlevoix and
+General Mason Brown's anecdote.[8] In General Mason Brown's instance the
+medicine-man, at a great distance, bade his emissaries 'seek three whites,
+whose horses, arms, attire, and personal appearance he minutely described,
+which description was repeated to General Brown by the warriors _before
+they saw his two companions.'_ General Brown assured Dr. Brinton of 'the
+accuracy of this in every particular.' Mr. Tylor has certainly not
+improved the story in his condensed version. Dr. Brinton refers to 'many'
+tales such as these, and some will be found in 'Among the Zulus,' by Mr.
+David Leslie (1875).
+
+Mr. Leslie was a Scottish sportsman, brought up from boyhood in
+familiarity with the Zulus. His knowledge of their language and customs
+was minute, and his book, privately printed, contains much interesting
+matter. He writes:
+
+'I was obliged to proceed to the Zulu country to meet my Kaffir
+elephant-hunters, the time for their return having arrived. They were
+hunting in a very unhealthy country, and I had agreed to wait for them
+on the North-East border, the nearest point I could go to with safety.
+I reached the appointed rendezvous, but could not gain the slightest
+intelligence of my people at the kraal.
+
+'After waiting some time, and becoming very uneasy about them, one of
+my servants recommended me to go to the doctor, and at last, out of
+curiosity and _pour passer le temps_, I did go.
+
+'I stated what I wanted--information about my hunters--and I was met by
+a stern refusal. "I cannot tell anything about white men," said he, "and
+I know nothing of their ways." However, after some persuasion and
+promise of liberal payment, impressing upon him the fact that it was not
+white men but Kaffirs I wanted to know about, he at last consented,
+saying "he would _open the Gate of Distance_, and would travel through
+it, even although his body should lie before me."
+
+'His first proceeding was to ask me the number and names of my hunters.
+To this I demurred, telling him that if he obtained that information
+from me he might easily substitute some news which he may have heard
+from others, instead of the "spiritual telegraphic news" which I
+expected him to get from his "familiar."
+
+'To this he answered: "I told you I did not understand white men's ways;
+but if I am to do anything for you it must be done in my way--not
+yours." On receiving this fillip I felt inclined to give it up, as I
+thought I might receive some rambling statement with a considerable
+dash of truth, it being easy for anyone who knew anything of hunting to
+give a tolerably correct idea of their motions.
+
+'However, I conceded this point also, and otherwise satisfied him.
+
+'The doctor then made eight little fires--that being the number of my
+hunters; on each he cast some roots,[9] which emitted a curious sickly
+odour and thick smoke; into each he cast a small stone, shouting, as he
+did so, the name to which the stone was dedicated; then he ate some
+"medicine," and fell over in what appeared to be a trance for about ten
+minutes, during all which time his limbs kept moving. Then he seemed to
+wake, went to one of the fires, raked the ashes about, looked at the
+stone attentively, described the man faithfully, and said: "This man has
+died of the fever, and your gun is lost."
+
+'To the next fire as before: "This man" (correctly described) "has
+killed four elephants," and then he described the tusks. The next: "This
+man" (again describing him) "has been killed by an elephant, but your
+gun is coming home," and so on through the whole, the men being minutely
+and correctly described; their success or non-success being equally so.
+I was told where the survivors were, and what they were doing, and that
+in three months they would come out, but as they would not expect to
+find me waiting on them there so long after the time appointed, they
+would not pass that way.
+
+'I took a particular note of all this information at the time, and to my
+utter amazement _it turned out correct in every particular_.
+
+'It was scarcely within the bounds of possibility that this man could
+have had ordinary intelligence of the hunters; they were scattered about
+in a country two hundred miles away.'
+
+Mr. Leslie could discover no explanation, nor was any suggested by friends
+familiar with the country and the natives whom he consulted. He gives
+another example, which may be explained by 'suggestion.' A parallel case
+from Central Africa will be found in the 'Journal of the Anthropological
+Institute,' November 1897, p. 320, where 'private information,' as usual,
+would explain the singular facts.
+
+The Zulus themselves lay claim to a kind of clairvoyance which looks like
+the result of intense visualising power, combined with the awakening of
+the subconscious memory.[10]
+
+'There is among black men a something which is divination within them.
+When anything valuable is lost, they look for it at once; when they
+cannot find it, each one begins to practise this inner divination,
+trying to feel where the thing is; for, not being able to see it, he
+feels internally a pointing, which tells him if he will go down to such
+a place it is there, and he will find it. At length it says he will find
+it; at length he sees it, and himself approaching it; before he begins
+to move from where he is, he sees it very clearly indeed, and there is
+an end of doubt. That sight is so clear that it is as though it was not
+an inner sight, but as if he saw the very thing itself, and the place
+where it is; so he quickly arises and goes to the place. If it is a
+hidden place he throws himself into it, as though there was something
+that impelled him to go as swiftly as the wind; and, in fact, he finds
+the thing, if he has not acted by mere head-guessing. If it has been
+done by real inner divination, he really sees it. But if it is done by
+mere head-guessing and knowledge that he has not gone to such a place
+and such a place, and that therefore it must be in such another place,
+he generally misses the mark.'
+
+Other Zulu instances will be given under the heads 'Possession' and
+'Fetishism.'
+
+To take a Northern people: In his 'History of the Lapps'[11] Scheffer
+describes mechanical modes of divination practised by that race, who use a
+drum and other objects for the purpose. These modes depend on more
+traditional rules for interpreting the accidental combinations of lots.
+But a Lapp confessed to Scheffer, with tears, that he could not help
+seeing visions, as he proved by giving Scheffer a minute relation 'of
+whatever particulars had happened to me in my journey to Lapland. And he
+further complained that he know not how to make use of his eyes, since
+things altogether distant were presented to them.' This Lapp was anxious
+to become a Christian, hence his regret at being a 'rare and valuable'
+example of clairvoyance. Torfaeus also was posed by the clairvoyance of a
+Samoyed, as was Regnard by a Lapp seer.[12]
+
+The next case is of old date, and, like the other savage examples, is
+merely given for purposes of illustration.
+
+  '_25e Lettre_.[13]
+
+  '"_Suite des Traditions des Sauvages._"
+
+  'Au Fort de la Riviere de St. Joseph, ce 14 Septembre 1721.
+
+  '"_Des Jongleurs_"-- ... Vous ayez vu a Paris Madame de Marson, & elle
+  y est encore; voici ce que M. le Marquis de Vaudreuil son Gendre,
+  actuellement notre Gouverneur General, me raconta cet Hyver, & qu'il a
+  scu de cette Dame, qui n'est rien moins qu'un esprit foible. Elle etoit
+  un jour fort inquiette an sujet de M. de Marson, son Mari, lequel
+  commandoit dans un Poste, que nous avions en Accadie; et etoit absent, &
+  le tems qu'il avoit marque pour son retour, etoit passe.
+
+  'Une Femme Sauvage, qui vit Madame de Marson en peine, lui en demanda la
+  cause, & l'ayant apprise, lui dit, apres y avoir un peu reve, de ne plus
+  se chagriner, que son Epoux reviendroit tel jour et a telle heure,
+  qu'elle lui marqua, avec un chapeau gris sur la tete. Comme elle
+  s'appercut que la Dame n'ajoutoit point foi a sa prediction, au jour & a
+  l'heure, qu'elle avoit assignee, elle rotourna chez elle, lui demanda si
+  elle ne vouloit pas venir voir arriver son Mari, & la pressa de telle
+  sorte de la suivre, qu'elle l'entraina au bord de la Riviere.
+
+  'A peine y etoient-elles arrivees, que M. de Marson parut dans un Canot,
+  un chapeau gris sur la tete; & ayant appris ce qui s'etoit passe, assura
+  qu'il ne pouvoit pas comprendre comment la Sauvagesse avoit pu scavoir
+  l'heure & le jour de son arrivee.'
+
+It is unusual for European travellers and missionaries to give anecdotes
+which might seem to 'confirm the delusions of benighted savages.' Such
+anecdotes, again, are among the _arcana_ of these wild philosophers, and
+are not readily communicated to strangers. When successful cases are
+reported, it is natural to assert that they come through Europeans who
+have sunk into barbarous superstition, or that they may be explained by
+fraud and collusion. It is certain, however, that savage proficients
+believe in their own powers, though no less certainly they will eke them
+out by imposture. Seers are chosen in Zululand, as among Eskimos and
+Samoyeds, from the class which in Europe supplies the persons who used to
+be, but are no longer the most favourite hypnotic subjects, 'abnormal
+children,' epileptic and hysterical. These are subjected to 'a long and
+methodical course of training.'[14] Stoll, speaking of Guatemala, says
+that 'certainly most of the induced and spontaneous phenomena with which
+we are familiar occur among savages,' and appeals to travellers for
+observations.[15] Information is likely to come in, as educated travellers
+devote attention to the topic.
+
+Dr. Callaway translates some Zulu communications which indicate the
+amount of belief in this very practical and sceptical people. Amusing
+illustrations of their scepticism will be quoted later, under
+'Possession,' but they do accept as seers certain hysterical patients.
+These are tested by their skill in finding objects which have been
+hidden without their knowledge. They then behave much like Mr. Stuart
+Cumberland, but have not the advantage of muscular contact with the
+person who knows where the hidden objects are concealed. The neighbours
+even deny that they have hidden anything at all. 'When they persist in
+their denial ... he finds all the things that they have hidden. They see
+that he is a great _inyanga_ (seer) when he has found all the things they
+have concealed.' No doubt he is guided, perhaps in a super-sensitive
+condition, by the unconscious indications of the excited spectators.
+
+The point is that, while the savage conjurer will doubtless use fraud
+wherever he can, still the experience of low races is in favour of
+employing as seers the class of people who in Europe were, till recently,
+supposed to make the best hypnotic subjects. Thus, in West Africa, 'the
+presiding elders, during your initiation to the secret society of your
+tribe, discover this gift [of Ebumtupism, or second sight], and so select
+you as "a witch doctor."'[15] Among the Karens, the 'Wees,' or prophets,
+'are nervous excitable men, such as would become mediums,'[16] as mediums
+are diagnosed by Mr. Tylor.
+
+In short, not to multiply examples, there is an element of actual
+observation and of _bona fides_ entangled in the trickery of savage
+practice. Though the subjects may be selected partly because of the
+physical phenomena of convulsions which they exhibit, and which
+favourably impress their clients, they are also such subjects as
+occasionally yield that evidence of supernormal faculty which is
+investigated by modern psychologists, like Richet, Janet, and William
+James.
+
+The following example, by no means unique, shows the view taken by savages
+of their own magic, after they have become Christians. Catherine Wabose, a
+converted Red Indian seeress, described her preliminary fast, at the age
+of puberty. After six days of abstention from food she was rapt away to an
+unknown place, where a radiant being welcomed her. Later a dark round
+object promised her the gift of prophecy. She found her natural senses
+greatly sharpened by lack of food. She first exercised her powers when her
+kinsfolk in large numbers were starving, a medicine-lodge, or 'tabernacle'
+as Lufitau calls it, was built for her, and she crawled in. As is well
+known, these lodges are violently shaken during the magician's stay within
+them, which the early Jesuits at first attributed to muscular efforts by
+the seers. In 1637 Pere Lejeune was astonished by the violent motions of a
+large lodge, tenanted by a small man. One sorcerer, with an appearance of
+candour, vowed that 'a great wind entered boisterously,' and the Father
+was assured that, if he went in himself, he would become clairvoyant. He
+did not make the experiment. The Methodist convert, Catherine, gave the
+same description of her own experience: 'The lodge began shaking violently
+by supernatural means. I knew this by the compressed current of air above,
+and the noise of motion.' She had been beating a small drum and singing,
+now she lay quiet. The radiant 'orbicular' spirit then informed her that
+they 'must go westwards for game; how short-sighted you are!' 'The
+advice was taken and crowned by instant success.' This established her
+reputation.[17] Catherine's conversion was led up to by a dream of her
+dying son, who beheld a Sacred Figure, and received from Him white
+raiment. Her magical songs tell how unseen hands shake the magic lodge.
+They invoke the Great Spirit that
+
+    'Illumines earth
+    Illumines heaven!
+  Ah, say what Spirit, or Body, is this Body,
+    That fills the world around,
+    Speak, man, ah say
+  What Spirit, or Body, is this Body?'
+
+It is like a savage hymn to Hegel's _fuehlende Seele_: the all-pervading
+Sensitive Soul. We are reminded, too, of 'the doctrine of the Sanscrit
+Upanishads: There is no limit to the knowing of the Self that knows.'[18]
+
+Unluckily Catherine was not asked to give other examples of what she
+considered her successes.
+
+Acosta, who has not the best possible repute as an authority, informs us
+that Peruvian clairvoyants 'tell what hath passed in the furthest parts
+before news can come. In the distance of two or three hundred leagues
+they would tell what the Spaniards did or suffered in their civil wars.' To
+Du Pont, in 1606, a sorcerer 'rendered a true oracle of the coming of
+Poutrincourt, saying his Devil had told him so.'[19]
+
+We now give a modern case, from a scientific laboratory, of knowledge
+apparently acquired in no normal way, by a person of the sort usually
+chosen to be a prophet, or wizard, by savages.
+
+Professor Richet writes:[20]
+
+'On Monday, July 2, 1888, after having passed all the day in my
+laboratory, I hypnotised Leonie at 8 P.M., and while she tried to make
+out a diagram concealed in an envelope I said to her quite suddenly:
+"What has happened to M. Langlois?" Leonie knows M. Langlois from
+having seen him two or three times some time ago in my physiological
+laboratory, where he acts as my assistant.--"He has burnt himself,"
+Leonie replied,--"Good," I said, "and where has he burnt himself?"--"On
+the left hand. It is not fire: it is--I don't know its name. Why does he
+not take care when he pours it out?"--"Of what colour," I asked, "is the
+stuff which he pours out?"--"It is not red, it is brown; he has hurt
+himself very much--the skin puffed up directly."
+
+'Now, this description is admirably exact. At 4 P.M. that day M.
+Langlois had wished to pour some bromine into a bottle. He had done this
+clumsily, so that some of the bromine flowed on to his left hand, which
+held the funnel, and at once burnt him severely. Although he at once put
+his hand into water, wherever the bromine had touched it a blister was
+formed in a few seconds--a blister which one could not better describe
+than by saying, "the skin puffed up." I need not say that Leonie had not
+left my house, nor seen anyone from my laboratory. Of this I am
+_absolutely certain,_ and I am certain that I had not mentioned the
+incident of the burn to anyone. Moreover, this was the first time for
+nearly a year that M. Langlois had handled bromine, and when Leonie saw
+him six months before at the laboratory he was engaged in experiments
+of quite another kind.'
+
+Here the savage reasoner would infer that Leonie's spirit had visited M.
+Langlois. The modern inquirer will probably say that Leonie became aware
+of what was passing in the mind of M. Richet. This supranormal way of
+acquiring knowledge was observed in the last century by M. de Puysegur in
+one of his earliest cases of somnambulism. MM. Binet and Fere say: 'It is
+not yet admitted that the subject is able to divine the thoughts of the
+magnetiser without any material communication;' while they grant, as a
+minimum, that 'research should be continued in this direction.'[21] They
+appear to think that Leonie may have read 'involuntary signs' in the
+aspect of M. Richet. This is a difficult hypothesis.
+
+Here follows a case recorded in his diary by Mr. Dobbie, of Adelaide,
+Australia, who has practised hypnotism for curative purposes. He explains
+(June 10, 1884) that he had mesmerised Miss ---- on several occasions to
+relieve rheumatic pain and sore throat. He found her to be clairvoyant.
+
+'The following is a verbatim account of the second time I tested her
+powers in this respect, April 12, 1884. There were four persons present
+during the _seance_. One of the company wrote down the replies as they
+were spoken.
+
+'Her father was at the time over fifty miles away, but we did not know
+exactly where, so I questioned her as follows: "Can you find your father
+at the present moment?" At first she replied that she could not see him,
+but in a minute or two she said, "Oh, yes; now I can see him, Mr.
+Dobbie." "Where is he?" "Sitting at a large table in a large room, and
+there are a lot of people going in and out." "What is he doing?"
+"Writing a letter, and there is a book in front of him." "Whom is he
+writing to?" "To the newspaper." Here she paused and laughingly said,
+"Well, I declare, he is writing to the A B" (naming a newspaper). "You
+said there was a book there. Can you tell me what book it is?" "It has
+gilt letters on it." "Can you read them, or tell me the name of the
+author?" She read, or pronounced slowly, "W.L.W." (giving the full
+surname of the author). She answered several minor questions _re_ the
+furniture in the room, and I then said to her, "Is it any effort or
+trouble to you to travel in this way?" "Yes, a little; I have to think."
+
+'I now stood behind her, holding a half-crown in my hand, and asked her
+if she could tell me what I had in my hand, to which she replied, "It is
+a shilling." It seemed as though she could see what was happening miles
+away easier than she could see what was going on in the room.
+
+'Her father returned home nearly a week afterwards, and was perfectly
+astounded when told by his wife and family what he had been doing on
+that particular evening; and, although previous to that date he was a
+thorough sceptic as to clairvoyance, he frankly admitted that my
+clairvoyant was perfectly correct in every particular. He also informed
+us that the book referred to was a new one, which he had purchased after
+he had left his home, so that there was no possibility of his daughter
+guessing that he had the book before him. I may add that the letter in
+due course appeared in the paper; and I saw and handled the book.'
+
+A number of cases of so-called 'clairvoyance' will be found in the
+'Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.'[22] As the authors of
+these essays remark, even after discounting, in each case, fraud,
+malobservation, and misreporting, the residue of cases can seldom justify
+either the savage theory of the wandering soul (which is not here
+seriously proposed) or Hegel's theory that the _fuehlende Seele_ is
+unconditioned by space. For, if thought transference be a fact, the
+apparent clairvoyant may only be reading the mind of a person at a
+distance. The results, however, when successful, would naturally suggest
+to the savage thinker the belief in the wandering soul, or corroborate it
+if it had already been suggested by the common phenomena of dreaming.
+
+To these instances of knowledge acquired otherwise than by the recognised
+channels of sense we might add the Scottish tales of 'second sight.' That
+phrase is merely a local term covering examples of what is called
+'clairvoyance'--views of things remote in space, hallucinations of sight
+that coincide with some notable event, premonitions of things future, and
+so on. The belief and hallucinatory experiences are still very common in
+the Highlands, where I have myself collected many recent instances. Mr.
+Tylor observes that the examples 'prove a little too much; they vouch not
+only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for
+still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found
+no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or
+miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is
+obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena
+misconstrued. Again, funerals are not uncommonly seen where no funeral is
+taking place; it is then alleged that a real funeral, similar and
+similarly situated, soon afterwards occurred. On the hypothesis of
+believers, the percipients somehow behold
+
+  'Such refraction of events
+    As often rises ere they rise.'
+
+Even the savage cannot account for this experience by the wandering of the
+soul in space; nor do I suggest any explanation. I give, however, one or
+two instances. They are published in the 'Journal of the Caledonian
+Medical Society,' 1897, by Dr. Alastair Macgregor, on the authority of the
+MSS. of his father, a minister in the island of Skye.
+
+'He once told me that when he first went to Skye he scoffed at the idea of
+such a power as second sight being genuine; but he said that, after having
+been there for some years as a clergyman, he had been so often consulted
+_beforehand_ by people who said they had seen visions of events which
+subsequently occurred, to my father's knowledge, in exact accordance with
+the form and details of the vision as foretold, that he was compelled to
+confess that some folks had, apparently at least, the unfortunate faculty.
+
+'As my father expressed it, this faculty was "neither voluntary nor
+constant, and was considered rather annoying than agreeable to the
+possessors of it. The gift was possessed by individuals of both sexes, and
+its fits came on within doors and without, sitting and standing, at night
+and by day, and at whatever employment the votary might chance to be
+engaged."'
+
+Here follows a typical example of the vision of a funeral:
+
+'The session clerk at Dull, a small village in Perthshire, was ill, and
+my grandfather, clergyman there at the time, had to do duty for him. One
+fine summer evening, about 7 o'clock, a young man and woman came to get
+some papers filled up, as they were going to be married. My grandfather
+was with the couple in the session clerk's room, no doubt attending to
+the papers, when suddenly _all three_ saw through the window a funeral
+procession passing along the road. From their dress the bulk of the
+mourners seemed to be farm labourers--indeed the young woman recognised
+some of them as natives of Dull, who had gone to live and work near
+Dunkeld. Remarks were naturally made by my grandfather and the young
+couple about the untimely hour for a funeral, and, hastily filling in
+the papers, my grandfather went out to get the key of the churchyard,
+which was kept in the manse, as, without the key, the procession
+could not get into God's acre. Wondering how it was that he had received
+no intimation of the funeral, he went to the manse by a short cut, got
+the key, and hurried down to the churchyard gate, where, of course, he
+expected to find the cortege waiting. _Not a soul was there_ except the
+young couple, who were as amazed as my grandfather!
+
+'Well, at the same hour in the evening of the same day in the following
+week the funeral, this time in reality, arrived quite unexpectedly. The
+facts were that a boy, a native of Dull, had got gored by a bull at
+Dunkeld, and was so shockingly mangled that his remains were picked
+up and put into a coffin and taken without delay to Dull. A grave was
+dug as quickly as possible--the poor lad having no relatives--and the
+remains were interred. My grandfather and the young couple recognised
+several of the mourners as being among those whom they had seen out of
+the session clerk's room, exactly a week previously, in the phantom
+cortege. The young woman knew some of them personally, and related to
+them what she had seen, but they of course denied all knowledge of the
+affair, having been then in Dunkeld.'
+
+I give another example, because the experience was auditory, as well as
+visual, and the prediction was announced before the event.
+
+'The parishioners in Skye were evidently largely imbued with the
+Romanist-like belief in the powers of intercession vested in their
+clergyman; so when they had a "warning" or "vision" they usually consulted
+my father as to what they could do to prevent the coming disaster
+befalling their relatives or friends. In this way my father had the
+opportunity of noting down the minutiae of the "warning" or "vision"
+directly it was told him. Having had the advantage of a medical, previous
+to his theological, training, he was able to note down sound facts,
+unembellished by superadded imagination. Entering into this method of
+case-taking with a mind perfectly open, except for a slight touch of
+scepticism, he was greatly surprised to discover how very frequently
+realisations occurred exactly in conformance with the minutiae of the
+vision as detailed in his note-book. Finally, he was compelled to
+discard his scepticism, and to admit that some people had undoubtedly
+the uncanny gift. Almost the first case he took (Case X.) was that of a
+woman who had one day a vision of her son falling over a high rock at Uig,
+in Skye, with a sheep or lamb.
+
+'CASE X.--She heard her son exclaim in Gaelic, "This is a fatal lamb for
+me." As her son lived several miles from Uig, and was a fisherman,
+realisation seemed to my father very unlikely, but one month afterwards
+the realisation occurred only too true. Unknown to his mother, who had
+warned him against having anything to do with sheep or lambs, the son
+one day, instead of going out in his boat, thought he would take a
+holiday inland, and went off to Uig, where a farmer enlisted his
+services in separating some lambs from the ewes. One of the lambs ran
+away, and the fisher lad ran headlong after it, and not looking where he
+was going, on catching the lamb was pulled by it to the edge of one of
+the very picturesque but exceedingly dangerous rocks at Uig. Too late
+realizing his critical position, he exclaimed, "This is a fatal lamb for
+me," but going with such an impetus he was unable to bring himself up in
+time, and, along with the lamb, fell over into the ravine below, and
+was, of course, killed on the spot. The farmer, when he saw the lad's
+danger, ran to his assistance, but was only in time to hear him cry out
+in Gaelic before disappearing over the brink of the precipice. This was
+predicted by the mother a month before. Was this simply a coincidence?'
+
+Dr. Macgregor's remarks on the involuntary and unwelcome nature of the
+visions is borne out by what Scheffer, as already quoted, says concerning
+the Lapps.
+
+In addition to visions which thus come unsought, contributing knowledge of
+things remote or even future, we may glance at visions which are provoked
+by various methods. Drugs (_impepo_) are used, seers whirl in a wild
+dance till they fall senseless, or trance is induced by various kinds of
+self-suggestion or 'auto-hypnotism.' Fasting is also practised. In modern
+life the self-induced trance is common among 'mediums'--a subject to which
+we recur later.
+
+So far, it will be observed, our evidence proves that precisely similar
+_beliefs_ as to man's occasional power of opening the gates of distance
+have been entertained in a great variety of lands and ages, and by races
+in every condition of culture.[23] The alleged experiences are still
+said to occur, and have been investigated by physiologists of the eminence
+of M. Richet. The question cannot but arise as to the residuum of fact in
+these narrations, and it keeps on arising.
+
+In the following chapter we discuss a mode of inducing hallucinations
+which has for anthropologists the interest of universal diffusion. The
+width of its range in savage races has not, we believe, been previously
+observed. We then add facts of modern experience, about the authenticity
+of which we, personally, entertain no doubt; and the provisional
+conclusion appears to be that savages have observed a psychological
+circumstance which has been ignored by professed psychologists, and which,
+certainly, does not fit into the ordinary materialistic hypothesis.
+
+[Footnote 1: Callaway, _Religion of the Zulus_, p. 232.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Graham Dalzell, _Darker Superstitions of Scotland_, p. 481.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See good evidence in _Ker of Kersland's Memoirs_.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Autus Gellius, xv. 18, Dio Cassius, lxvii., Crespet, _De la
+Haine du Diable, Proces de Jeanne d'Arc_.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See 'Shamanism in Siberia,' _J.A.I._, November 1894,
+pp. 147-149, and compare Scheffer. The article is very learned and
+interesting.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Williams mentions second sight in Fiji, but gives no
+examples.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Primitive Culture,_ i. 447. Mr. Tylor cites Dr. Brinton's
+_Myths of the New World,_ p. 269. The reference in the recent edition is
+p. 289. Carver's case is given under the head 'Possession' later.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Journal Historique_ p. 362; _Atlantic Monthly_, July 1866.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Probably _impepo_, eaten by seers, according to Callaway.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Callaway's _Religion of the Amazulu_, p. 358.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Oxford, 1674.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Voyages_.]
+
+[Footnote 13: From Charlevoix, _Journal Historique_, p. 362.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Bastian, _Ueber psych. Beobacht_. p.21.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Op. cit. p.26.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Miss Kingsley, _Travels in West Africa_, p. 460.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Primitive Culture_, ii, 181; Mason's _Burmah_, p. 107.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Schoolcraft, i. 394.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Brinton's _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, p. 57.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Purchas, p. 629.]
+
+[Footnote 20: S.P.R. _Proceedings_, vol. vi. 69.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Binet and Fere, _Animal Magnetism_, p. 64.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Vol. vii. Mrs. Sidgwick, pp. 30, 356; vol. vi. p. 66,
+Professor Richet, p. 407, Drs. Dufay and Azam.]
+
+[Footnote 23: The examples in the Old Testament, and in the _Life of St.
+Columba_ by Adamnan, need only be alluded to as too familiar for
+quotation.]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CRYSTAL VISIONS, SAVAGE AND CIVILISED
+
+Among savage methods of provoking hallucinations whence knowledge may be
+supernormally obtained, various forms of 'crystal-gazing' are the most
+curious. We find the habit of looking into water, usually in a vessel,
+preferably a glass vessel, among Red Indians (Lejeune), Romans (Varro,
+cited in _Civitas Dei_, iii. 457), Africans of Fez (Leo Africanus); while
+Maoris use a drop of blood (Taylor), Egyptians use ink (Lane), and
+Australian savages employ a ball of polished stone, into which the seer
+'puts himself' to descry the results of an expedition.[1]
+
+I have already given, in the Introduction, Ellis's record of the
+Polynesian case. A hole being dug in the door of his house, and filled
+with water, the priest looks for a vision of the thief who has carried off
+stolen goods. The Polynesian theory is that the god carries the spirit of
+the thief over the water, in which it is reflected. Lejeune's Red Indians
+make their patients gaze into the water, in which they will see the
+pictures of the things in the way of food or medicine that will do them
+good. In modern language, the instinctive knowledge existing implicitly
+in the patient's subconsciousness is thus brought into the range of his
+ordinary consciousness.
+
+In 1887 the late Captain J. T. Bourke, of the U.S. Cavalry, an original
+and careful observer, visited the Apaches in the interests of the
+Ethnological Bureau. He learned that one of the chief duties of the
+medicine-men was to find out the whereabouts of lost or stolen property.
+Na-a-cha, one of these _jossakeeds_, possessed a magic quartz crystal,
+which he greatly valued. Captain Bourke presented him with a still finer
+crystal. 'He could not give me an explanation of its magical use, except
+that by looking into it he could see everything he wanted to see,'
+Captain Bourke appears never to have heard of the modern experiments in
+crystal-gazing. Captain Bourke also discovered that the Apaches, like the
+Greeks, Australians, Africans, Maoris, and many other, races, use the
+bull-roarer, turndun, or _rhombos_--a piece of wood which, being whirled
+round, causes a strange windy roar--in their mystic ceremonies. The wide
+use of the rhombos was known to Captain Bourke; that of the crystal was
+not.
+
+For the Iroquois, Mrs. Erminie Smith supplies information about the
+crystal. 'Placed in a gourd of water, it could render visible the
+apparition of a person who has bewitched another.' She gives a case in
+European times of a medicine-man who found the witch's habitat, but
+got only an indistinct view of her face. On a second trial he was
+successful.[2] One may add that treasure-seekers among the Huille-che
+'look earnestly' for what they want to find 'into a smooth slab of black
+stone, which I suppose to be basalt.'[3]
+
+The kindness of Monsieur Lefebure enables me to give another example from
+Madagascar.[4] Flacourt, describing the Malagasies, says that they
+_squillent_ (a word not in Littre), that is, divine by crystals, which
+'fall from heaven when it thunders,' Of course the rain reveals the
+crystals, as it does the flint instruments called 'thunderbolts' in many
+countries. 'Lorsqu'ils squillent, ils ont une de ces pierres au coing de
+leurs tablettes, disans qu'elle a la vertu de faire faire operation a leur
+figure de geomance.' Probably they used the crystals as do the Apaches. On
+July 15 a Malagasy woman viewed, whether in her crystal or otherwise, two
+French vessels which, like the Spanish fleet, were 'not in sight,' also
+officers, and doctors, and others aboard, whom she had seen, before their
+return to France, in Madagascar. The earliest of the ships did not arrive
+till August 11.
+
+Dr. Callaway gives the Zulu practice, where the chief 'sees what will
+happen by looking into the vessel.'[5] The Shamans of Siberia and Eastern
+Russia employ the same method.[6] The case of the Inca, Yupanqui, is very
+curious. 'As he came up to a fountain he saw a piece of crystal fall into
+it, within which he beheld a figure of an Indian in the following
+shape ... The apparition then vanished, while the crystal remained. The
+Inca took care of it, and they say that he afterwards saw everything he
+wanted in it.'[7]
+
+Here, then, we find the belief that hallucinations can be induced by one
+or other form of crystal-gazing, in ancient Peru, on the other side of the
+continent among the Huille-che, in Fez, in Madagascar, in Siberia, among
+Apaches, Hurons, Iroquois, Australian black fellows, Maoris, and in
+Polynesia. This is assuredly a wide range of geographical distribution. We
+also find the practice in Greece (Pausanias, VII. xxi. 12), in Rome
+(Varro), in Egypt, and in India.
+
+Though anthropologists have paid no attention to the subject, it was of
+course familiar to later Europe. 'Miss X' has traced it among early
+Christians, in early Councils, in episcopal condemnations of _specularii_,
+and so to Dr. Dee, under James VI.; Aubrey; the Regent d'Orleans
+in St. Simon's Memoirs; the modern mesmerists (Gregory, Mayo) and the
+mid-Victorian spiritualists, who, as usual, explained the phenomena, in
+their prehistoric way, by 'spirits[8].' Till this lady examined the
+subject, nobody had thought of remarking that a belief so universal had
+probably some basis of facts, or nobody if we except two professors of
+chemistry and physiology, Drs. Gregory and Mayo. Miss X made experiments,
+beginning by accident, like George Sand, when a child.
+
+The hallucinations which appear to her eyes in ink, or crystal, are:
+
+  1. Revived memories 'arising thus, and thus only, from the subconscious
+  strata;'
+
+  '2. Objectivation of ideas or images--(a) consciously or (b)
+  unconsciously--in the mind of the percipient;
+
+  '3. Visions, possibly telepathic or clairvoyant, implying acquirement of
+  knowledge by supernormal means.'[9]
+
+The examples given of the last class, the class which would be so useful
+to a priest or medicine-man asked to discover things lost, are of very
+slight interest.[10]
+
+Since Miss X drew attention to this subject, experiments have proved
+beyond doubt that a fair percentage of people, sane and healthy, can see
+vivid landscapes, and figures of persons in motion, in glass balls and
+other vehicles. This faculty Dr. Parish attributes to 'dissociation,'
+practically to drowsiness. But he speaks by conjecture, and without
+having witnessed experiments, as will be shown later. I now offer a series
+of experiments with a glass ball, coming under my own observation, in
+which knowledge was apparently acquired in no ordinary way. Of the absence
+of fraud I am personally convinced, not only by the characters of all
+concerned, but by the nature of the circumstances. That adaptive memory
+did not later alter the narratives, as originally told, I feel certain,
+because they were reported to me, when I was not present, within less than
+a week, precisely as they are now given, except in cases specially noted.
+
+Early in the present year (1897) I met a young lady who told me of three
+or four curious hallucinatory experiences of her own, which were
+sufficiently corroborated. She was innocent of psychical studies, and
+personally was, and is, in perfect health; the pale cast of thought being
+remote from her. I got a glass ball, and was present when she first looked
+into it. She saw, I remember, the interior of a house, with a full-length
+portrait of a person unknown. There were, I think, one or two other fancy
+pictures of the familiar kind. But she presently (living as she was, among
+strangers) developed a power of 'seeing' persons and places unknown to
+her, but familiar to them. These experiences do seem to me to be good
+examples of what is called 'thought transference;' indeed, I never before
+could get out of a level balance of doubt on that subject, a balance which
+now leans considerably to the affirmative side. There may be abundance of
+better evidence, but, knowing the persons and circumstances, and being
+present once at what seemed to me a crucial example, I was more inclined
+to be convinced. This attitude appears, to myself, illogical, but it is
+natural and usual.
+
+We cannot tell what indications may be accidentally given in experiments
+in thought transference. But, in these cases of crystal-gazing, the detail
+was too copious to be conveyed, by a looker-on, in a wink or a cough. I do
+not mean to say that success was invariable. I thought of Dr. W.G. Grace,
+and the scryer saw an old man crawling along with a stick. But I doubt if
+Dr. Grace is very deeply seated in that mystic entity, my subconscious
+self. The 'scries' which came right were sometimes, but not always, those
+of which the 'agent' (or person scried for) was consciously thinking. But
+the examples will illustrate the various kinds of occurrences.
+
+Here one should first consider the arguments against accepting recognition
+of objects merely described by another person. The crystal-gazer may know
+the inquirer so intimately as to have a very good guess at the subject of
+his meditation. Again, a man is likely to be thinking of a woman, and a
+woman of a man, so the field of conjecture is limited. In answer to the
+first objection I may say that the crystal-gazer was among strangers, all
+of whom, myself included, she now saw for the first time. Nor could she
+have studied their histories beforehand, for she could not know (normally)
+when she left home, that she was about to be shown a glass ball, or whom
+she would meet. The second objection is met by the circumstance that
+ladies were _not_ usually picked out for men, nor men for women. Indeed,
+these choices were the exceptions, and in each case were marked by
+minutely particular details. A third objection is that credulity, or the
+love of strange novelties, or desire to oblige, biases the inquirers, and
+makes them anxious to recognise something familiar in the scryer's
+descriptions. In the same way we know how people recognise faces
+in the most blurred and vague of spiritist photographs, or see family
+resemblances in the most rudimentary doughfaced babies. Take descriptions
+of persons in a passport, or in a proclamation sketching the personal
+appearance of a criminal. These fit the men or women intended, but they
+also fit a crowd of other people. The description given by the scryer then
+may come right by a fortuitous coincidence, or may be too credulously
+recognised.
+
+The complex of coincidences, however, could not be attributed to chance
+selection out of the whole possible field of conjecture. We must remember,
+too, that a series of such hits increases, at an enormous rate, the odds
+against accidental conjecture. Of such mere luck I may give an example. I
+was writing a story of which the hero was George Kelly, one of the 'Seven
+Men of Moidart.' A year after composing my tale, I found the Government
+description of Mr. Kelly (1736). It exactly tallied with my purely
+fanciful sketch, down to eyes, and teeth, and face, except that I made my
+hero 'about six feet,' whereas the Government gave him five feet ten. But
+I knew beforehand that Mr. Kelly was a clergyman; his curious career
+proved him to be a person of great activity and geniality--and he was of
+Irish birth. Even a dozen such guesses, equally correct, could not
+suggest any powers of 'vision,' when so much was known beforehand about
+the person guessed at. I now give cases in the experience of Miss Angus,
+as one may call the crystal-gazer. The first occurred the day after she
+got the glass ball for the first time. She writes:
+
+'I.--A lady one day asked me to scry out a friend of whom she would
+think. Almost immediately I exclaimed "Here is an old, old lady looking
+at me with a triumphant smile on her face. She has a prominent nose and
+nut-cracker chin. Her face is very much wrinkled, especially at the
+sides of her eyes, as if she were always smiling. She is wearing a
+little white shawl with a black edge. _But!_ ... she _can't_ be old as
+her hair is quite brown! although her face looks so very very old." The
+picture then vanished, and the lady said that I had accurately described
+her friend's _mother_ instead of himself; that it was a family joke that
+the mother must dye her hair, it was so brown and she was eighty-two
+years old. The lady asked me if the vision were distinct enough for me
+to recognise a likeness in the son's photograph; next day she laid
+several photographs before me, and in a moment, without the slightest
+hesitation I picked him out from his wonderful likeness to my vision!'
+
+The inquirer verbally corroborated all the facts to me, within a week, but
+leaned to a theory of 'electricity.' She has read and confirms this
+account.
+
+'II.--One afternoon I was sitting beside a young lady whom I had never
+seen or heard of before. She asked if she might look into my crystal,
+and while she did so I happened to look over her shoulder and saw a ship
+tossing on a very heavy choppy sea, although land was still visible in
+the dim distance. That vanished, and, as suddenly, a little house
+appeared with five or six (I forget now the exact number I then counted)
+steps leading up to the door. On the second step stood an old man
+reading a newspaper. In front of the house was a field of thick
+stubbly grass where some _lambs_, I was going to say, but they were more
+like very small sheep.. were grazing.
+
+'When the scene vanished, the young lady told me I had vividly described
+a spot in Shetland where she and her mother were soon going to spend a
+few weeks.'
+
+I heard of this case from Miss Angus within a day or two of its
+occurrence, and it was then confirmed to me, verbally, by the other lady.
+She again confirms it (December 21, 1897). Both ladies had hitherto been
+perfect strangers to each other. The old man was the schoolmaster,
+apparently. In her MS., Miss Angus writes 'Skye,' but at the time both she
+and the other lady said Shetland (which I have restored). In Shetland the
+sheep, like the ponies, are small. Fortuitous coincidence, of course, may
+be invoked. The next account is by another lady, say Miss Rose.
+
+'III.--Writes Miss Rose--My first experience of crystal gazing was not
+a pleasant one, as will be seen from the following which I now relate as
+exactly as I can remember. I asked my friend, Miss Angus, to allow me to
+look in her crystal, and, after doing so for a short time, gave up,
+saying it was very unsatisfactory, as, although I saw a room with a
+bright fire in it and a bed all curtained and people coming and going,
+I could not make out who they were, so I returned the crystal to Miss
+Angus, with the request that she might look for me. She said at once,
+"I see a bed with a man in it looking very ill and a lady in black
+beside it." Without saying any more Miss Angus still kept looking, and,
+after some time, I asked to have one more look, and on her passing the
+ball back to me, I received quite a shock, for there, perfectly clearly
+in a bright light, I saw stretched out in bed an old man apparently
+dead; for a few minutes I could not look, and on doing so once more
+there appeared a lady in black and out of dense darkness a long black
+object was being carried and it stopped before a dark opening overhung
+with rocks. At the time I saw this I was staying with cousins,
+and it was a Friday evening. On Sunday we heard of the death of the
+father-in-law of one of my cousins; of course I knew the old gentleman
+was very ill, but my thoughts were not in the least about him when
+looking in the crystal. I may also say I did not recognise in the
+features of the dead man those of the old gentleman whose death I
+mention. On looking again on Sunday, I once more saw the curtained bed
+and some people.'
+
+I now give Miss Angus's version of this case, as originally received from
+her (December 1897). I had previously received an oral version, from a
+person present at the scrying. It differed, in one respect, from what Miss
+Angus writes. Her version is offered because it is made independently,
+without consultation, or attempt to reconcile recollections.
+
+'At a recent experience of gazing, for the first time I was able to make
+another see what _I_ saw in the crystal. Miss Rose called one afternoon,
+and begged me to look in the ball for her. I did so, and immediately
+exclaimed, "Oh! here is a bed, with a man in it looking very ill [I saw
+he was dead, but refrained from saying so], and there is a lady dressed
+in black sitting beside the bed." I did not recognise the man to be
+anyone I knew, so I told her to look. In a very short time she called
+out, "Oh! I see the bed too! But, oh! take it away, the man is _dead_!"
+She got quite a shock, and said she would never look in it again. Soon,
+however, curiosity prompted her to have one more look, and the scene at
+once came back again, and slowly, from a misty object at the side of the
+bed, the lady in black became quite distinct. Then she described
+several people in the room, and said they were carrying something all
+draped in black. When she saw this, she put the ball down and would not
+look at it again. She called again on Sunday (this had been on Friday)
+with her cousin, and we teased her about being _afraid_ of the crystal,
+so she said she would just look in it once more. She took the ball, but
+immediately laid it down again, saying, "No, I won't look, as the bed
+with the awful man in it is there again!"
+
+'When they went home, they heard that the cousin's father-in-law had
+died that afternoon,[11] but to show he had never been in our thoughts,
+although we _all_ knew he had not been well, _no one_ suggested him; his
+name was never mentioned in connection with the vision.'
+
+'Clairvoyance,' of course, is not illustrated here, the corpse being
+unrecognised, and the coincidence, doubtless, accidental.
+
+The next case is attested by a civilian, a slight acquaintance of Miss
+Angus's, who now saw him for the second time only, but better known to her
+family.
+
+'IV.--On Thursday, March --? 1897, I was lunching with my friends the
+Anguses, and during luncheon the conversation turned upon crystal balls
+and the visions that, by some people, can be seen in them. The subject
+arose owing to Miss Angus having just been presented with a crystal ball
+by Mr. Andrew Lang. I asked her to let me see it, and then to try and
+see if she could conjure up a vision of any person of whom I might
+think.... I fixed my mind upon a friend, a young trooper in the
+[regiment named], as I thought his would be a striking and peculiar
+personality, owing to his uniform, and also because I felt sure that
+Miss Angus could not possibly know of his existence. I fixed my mind
+steadily upon my friend, and presently Miss Angus, who had already seen
+two cloudy visions of faces and people, called out, "Now I see a man on
+a horse most distinctly; he is dressed most queerly, and glitters all
+over--why, it's a soldier! a soldier in uniform, but it's not an
+officer." My excitement on hearing this was so great that I ceased to
+concentrate my attention upon the thought of my friend, and the vision
+faded away and could not afterwards be recalled.--December 2, 1897.'
+
+The witness gives the name of the trooper, whom he had befriended in a
+severe illness. Miss Angus's own account follows: she had told me the
+story in June 1897.
+
+'Shortly after I became the happy possessor of a "crystal" I managed to
+convert several very decided "sceptics," and I will here give a short
+account of my experiences with two or three of them.
+
+'One was with a Mr. ----, who was so determined to baffle me, he said he
+would think of a friend it would not be _possible_ for me to describe!
+
+'I had only met Mr. ---- the day before, and knew utmost nothing about
+him or his personal friends.
+
+'I took up the ball, which immediately became misty, and out of this
+mist gradually a crowd of people appeared, but too indistinctly for me
+to recognise anyone, until suddenly a man on horseback came galloping
+along. I remember saying, "I can't describe what he is like, but he is
+dressed in a very queer way--in something so bright that the sun shining
+on him quite dazzles me, and I cannot make him out!" As he came nearer I
+exclaimed. "Why, it's a _soldier_ in shining armour, but it's not an
+_officer_, only a soldier!" Two friends who were in the room said
+Mr. ----'s excitement was intense, and my attention was drawn from the
+ball by hearing him call out, "It's wonderful! it's perfectly true! I
+was thinking of a young boy, a son of a crofter, in whom I am deeply
+interested, and who is a trooper in the ---- in London, which would
+account for the crowd of people round him in the street!"'
+
+The next case is given, first in the version of the lady who was
+unconsciously scried for, and next in that of Miss Angus. The other lady
+writes:
+
+'V.--I met Miss A. for the first time in a friend's house in the south
+of England, and one evening mention was made of a crystal ball, and our
+hostess asked Miss A. to look in it, and, if possible, tell her what was
+happening to a friend of hers. Miss A. took the crystal, and our hostess
+put her hand on Miss A.'s forehead to "will her." I, not believing in
+this, took up a book and went to the other side of the room. I was
+suddenly very much startled to hear Miss A., in quite an agitated way,
+describe a scene that had most certainly been very often in my thoughts,
+but of which I had never mentioned a word, She accurately described a
+race-course in Scotland, and an accident which happened to a friend of
+mine only a week or two before, and she was evidently going through the
+same doubt and anxiety that I did at the time as to whether he was
+actually killed or only very much hurt. It really was a most wonderful
+revelation to me, as it was the very first time I had seen a crystal.
+Our hostess, of course, was very much annoyed that she had not been able
+to influence Miss A., while I, who had appeared so very indifferent,
+should have affected her.--November 28, 1897.'
+
+Miss Angus herself writes:
+
+'Another case was a rather interesting one, as I somehow got inside the
+thoughts of _one_ lady while _another_ was doing her best to influence
+me!
+
+'Miss ----, a friend in Brighton, has strange "magnetic" powers, and
+felt quite sure of success with me and the ball.
+
+'Another lady, Miss H., who was present, laughed at the whole thing,
+especially when Miss ---- insisted on holding my hand and patting her
+other hand on my forehead! Miss H. in a scornful manner took up a book,
+and, crossing to the other side of the room, left us to our folly.
+
+'In a very short time I felt myself getting excited, which had never
+happened before, when I looked in the crystal. I saw a crowd of people,
+and in some strange way I felt I was in it, and we all seemed to be
+waiting for something. Soon a rider came past, young, dressed for
+racing. His horse ambled past, and he smiled and nodded to those he
+knew in the crowd, and then was lost to sight.
+
+'In a moment we all seemed to feel as if something had happened, and I
+went through great agony of suspense trying to see what seemed _just_
+beyond my view. Soon, however, two or three men approached, and carried
+him past before my eyes, and again my anxiety was intense to discover if
+he were only very badly hurt or if life were really extinct. All this
+happened in a few moments, but long enough to have left me so agitated
+that I could not realise it had only been a vision in a glass ball.
+
+'By this time Miss H. had laid aside her book, and came forward quite
+startled, and told me that I had accurately described a scene on a
+race-course in Scotland which she had witnessed just a week or two
+before--a scene that had very often been in her thoughts, but, as we
+were strangers to each other, she had never mentioned. She also said I
+had exactly described her own feelings at the time, and had brought it
+all back in a most vivid manner.
+
+'The other lady was rather disappointed that, after she had concentrated
+her thoughts so hard, I should have been influenced instead by one who
+had jeered at the whole affair.'
+
+[This anecdote was also told to me, within a few days of the occurrence,
+by Miss Angus. Her version was that she first saw a gentleman rider going
+to the post and nodding to his friends. Then she saw him carried on a
+stretcher through the crowd. She seemed, she said, to be actually present,
+and felt somewhat agitated. The fact of the accident was, later, mentioned
+to me in Scotland by another lady, a stranger to all the persons.--A.L.]
+
+VI.--I may briefly add an experiment of December 21, 1897. A gentleman had
+recently come from England to the Scottish town where Miss Angus lives. He
+dined with her family, and about 10.15 to 10.30 P.M. she proposed to look
+in the glass for a scene or person of whom he was to think. He called up a
+mental picture of a ball at which he had recently been, and of a young
+lady to whom he had there been introduced. The lady's face, however, he
+could not clearly visualise, and Miss Angus reported nothing but a view of
+an empty ball-room, with polished floor and many lights. The gentleman
+made another effort, and remembered his partner with some distinctness.
+Miss Angus then described another room, not a ball-room, comfortably
+furnished, in which a girl with brown hair drawn back from her forehead,
+and attired in a high-necked white blouse, was reading, or writing
+letters, under a bright light in an unshaded glass globe. The description
+of the features, figure, and height tallied with Mr. ----'s recollection;
+but he had never seen this Geraldine of an hour except in ball dress. He
+and Miss Angus noted the time by their watches (it was 10.30), and
+Mr. ---- said that on the first opportunity he would ask the young lady
+how she had been dressed and how employed at that hour on December 21. On
+December 22 he met her at another dance, and her reply corroborated the
+crystal picture. She had been writing letters, in a high-necked white
+blouse, under an incandescent gas lamp with an unshaded glass globe. She
+was entirely unknown to Miss Angus, and had only been seen once by
+Mr. ----. Mr. ---- and the lady of the crystal picture corroborated all
+this in writing.
+
+I now suggested an experiment to Miss Angus, which, after all, was clearly
+not of a nature to establish a 'test' for sceptics. The inquirer was to
+write down, and inclose in an envelope, a statement of his thoughts; Miss
+Angus was to do the same with her description of the picture seen by her;
+and these documents were to be sent to me, without communication between
+the inquirer and the crystal-gazer. Of course, this could in no way prove
+absence of collusion, as the two parties might arrange privately
+beforehand what the vision was to be.
+
+Indeed, nobody is apt to be convinced, or shaken, unless he is himself the
+inquirer and a stranger to the seeress, as the people in these experiments
+were. Evidence interesting to _them_--and, in a secondary degree, to
+others who know them--can thus be procured; but strangers are left to the
+same choice of doubts as in all reports of psychological experiences,
+'chromatic audition,' views of coloured numerals, and the other topics
+illustrated by Mr. Galton's interesting researches.
+
+In this affair of the envelopes the inquirer was a Mr. Pembroke, who had
+just made Miss Angus's acquaintance, and was but a sojourner in the land.
+He wrote, before knowing what Miss Angus had seen in the ball:
+
+'VII.--On Sunday, January 23, 1898, whilst Miss Angus was looking in the
+crystal ball, I was thinking of my brother, who was, I believe, at that
+time, somewhere between Sabathu (Punjab, India) and Egypt. I was anxious
+to know what stage of his journey he had reached.'
+
+Miss Angus saw, and wrote, before telling Mr. Pembroke:
+
+'A long and very white road, with tall trees at one side; on the other,
+a river or lake of greyish water. Blue sky, with a crimson sunset. A
+great black ship is anchored near, and on the deck I see a man lying,
+apparently very ill. He is a powerful-looking man, fair, and very much
+bronzed. Seven or eight Englishmen, in very light clothes, are standing
+on the road beside the boat.
+
+'January 28, 1898.'
+
+'A great black ship,' anchored in 'a river or lake,' naturally suggests
+the Suez Canal, where, in fact, Mr. Pembroke's brother was just arriving,
+as was proved by a letter received from him eight days after the
+experiment was recorded, on January 31. At that date Mr. Pembroke had not
+yet been told the nature of Miss Angus's crystal picture, nor had she any
+knowledge of his brother's whereabouts.
+
+In February 1898, Miss Angus again came to the place where I was residing.
+We visited together the scene of an historical crime, and Miss Angus
+looked into the glass ball. It was easy for her to 'visualise' the
+incidents of the crime (the murder of Cardinal Beaton), for they are
+familiar enough to many people. What she did see in the ball was a tall,
+pale lady, 'about forty, but looking thirty-five,' with hair drawn
+back from the brows, standing beside a high chair, dressed in a wide
+farthingale of stiff grey brocade, without a ruff. The costume corresponds
+well (as we found) with that of 1546, and I said, 'I suppose it is
+Mariotte Ogilvy'--to whom Miss Angus's historical knowledge (and perhaps
+that of the general public) did not extend. Mariotte was the Cardinal's
+lady-love, and was in the Castle on the night before the murder,
+according to Knox. She had been in my mind, whence (on the theory of
+thought transference) she may have passed to Miss Angus's mind; but I had
+never speculated on Mariotte's costume. Nothing but conjecture, of course,
+comes of these apparently 'retrospective' pictures; though a most singular
+and picturesque coincidence occurred, which may be told in a very
+different connection.
+
+The next example was noted at the same town. The lady who furnishes it is
+well known to me, and it was verbally corroborated by Miss Angus, to whom
+the lady, her absent nephew, and all about her, were entirely strange.
+
+'VIII.--I was very anxious to know whether my nephew would be sent to
+India this year, so I told Miss Angus that I had thought of something,
+and asked her to look in the glass ball. She did so, but almost
+immediately turned round and looked out of the window at the sea, and
+said, "I saw a ship so distinctly I thought it must be a reflection."
+She looked in the ball again, and said, "It is a large ship, and it is
+passing a huge rock with a lighthouse on it. I can't see who are on the
+ship, but the sky is very clear and blue. Now I see a large building,
+something like a club, and in front there are a great many people
+sitting and walking about. I think it must be some place abroad, for the
+people are all dressed in very light clothes, and it seems to be very
+sunny and warm. I see a young man sitting on a chair, with his feet
+straight out before him. He is not talking to anyone, but seems to be
+listening to something. He is dark and slight, and not very tall; and
+his eyebrows are dark and very distinctly marked."
+
+'I had not had the pleasure of meeting Miss Angus before, and she knew
+nothing whatever about my nephew; but the young man described was
+exactly like him, both in his appearance and in the way he was sitting.'
+
+In this case thought transference may be appealed to. The lady was
+thinking of her nephew in connection with India. It is not maintained, of
+course, that the picture was of a prophetic character.
+
+The following examples have some curious and unusual features. On
+Wednesday, February 2, 1897, Miss Angus was looking in the crystal,
+to amuse six or seven people whose acquaintance she had that day made.
+A gentleman, Mr. Bissett, asked her 'what letter was in his pocket,'
+She then saw, under a bright sky, and, as it were, a long way off,
+a large building, in and out of which many men were coming and going.
+Her impression was that the scene must be abroad. In the little company
+present, it should be added, was a lady, Mrs. Cockburn, who had
+considerable reason to think of her young married daughter, then at a
+place about fifty miles away. After Miss Angus had described the large
+building and crowds of men, some one asked, 'Is it an exchange?' 'It
+might be,' she said. 'Now comes a man in a great hurry. He has a broad
+brow, and short, curly hair;[12] hat pressed low down on his eyes. The
+face is very serious; but he has a delightful smile.' Mr. and Mrs.
+Bissett now both recognised their friend and stockbroker, whose letter was
+in Mr. Bissett's pocket.
+
+The vision, which interested Miss Angus, passed away, and was interrupted
+by that of a hospital nurse, and of a lady in a _peignoir_, lying on a
+sofa, _with bare feet_.[13] Miss Angus mentioned this vision as a bore,
+she being more interested in the stockbroker, who seems to have inherited
+what was once in the possession of another stockbroker--'the smile of
+Charles Lamb.' Mrs. Cockburn, for whom no pictures appeared, was rather
+vexed, and privately expressed with freedom a very sceptical opinion
+about the whole affair. But, on Saturday, February 5, 1897, Miss Angus was
+again with Mr. and Mrs. Bissett. When Mrs. Bissett announced that she had
+'thought of something,' Miss Angus saw a walk in a wood or garden, beside
+a river, under a brilliant blue sky. Here was a lady, very well dressed,
+twirling a white parasol on her shoulder as she walked, in a curious
+'stumpy' way, beside a gentleman in light clothes, such as are worn in
+India. He was broad-shouldered, had a short neck and a straight nose, and
+seemed to listen, laughing, but indifferent, to his obviously vivacious
+companion. The lady had a 'drawn' face, indicative of ill health. Then
+followed a scene in which the man, without the lady, was looking on at a
+number of Orientals busy in the felling of trees. Mrs. Bissett recognised,
+in the lady, her sister, Mrs. Clifton, in India--above all, when Miss
+Angus gave a realistic imitation of Mrs. Clifton's walk, the peculiarity
+of which was caused by an illness some years ago. Mrs. and Mr. Bissett
+also recognised their brother-in-law in the gentleman seen in both
+pictures. On being shown a portrait of Mrs. Clifton as a girl, Miss Angus
+said it was 'like, but too pretty.' A photograph done recently, however,
+showed her 'the drawn face' of the crystal picture.[14]
+
+Next day, Sunday, February 6, Mrs. Bissett received, what was not
+usual--a letter from her sister in India, Mrs. Clifton, dated January 20.
+Mrs. Clifton described a place in a native State, where she had been at a
+great 'function,' in certain gardens beside a river. She added that they
+were going to another place for a certain purpose, 'and then we go into
+camp till the end of February.' One of Mr. Clifton's duties is to direct
+the clearing of wood preparatory to the formation of the camp, as in Miss
+Angus's crystal picture.[15] The sceptical Mrs. Cockburn heard of these
+coincidences, and an idea occurred to her. She wrote to her daughter, who
+has been mentioned, and asked whether, on Wednesday, February 2, she had
+been lying on a sofa in her bed-room, with bare feet. The young lady
+confessed that it was indeed so;[16] and, when she heard how the fact came
+to be known, expressed herself with some warmth on the abuse of glass
+balls, which tend to rob life of its privacy.
+
+In this case the _prima facie_ aspect of things is that a thought
+of Mr. Bissett's about his stockbroker, _dulce ridentem_, somehow
+reflected itself into Miss Angus's mind by way of the glass ball, and
+was interrupted by a thought of Mrs. Cockburn's, as to her daughter. But
+how these thoughts came to display the unknown facts concerning the
+garden by the river, the felling of trees for a camp, and the bare feet,
+is a question about which it is vain to theorise.[17]
+
+On the vanishing of the jungle scene there appeared a picture of a man in
+a dark undress uniform, beside a great bay, in which were ships of war.
+Wooden huts, as in a plague district, were on shore. Mr. Bissett asked,
+'What is the man's expression?' 'He looks as if he had been giving a lot
+of last orders.' Then appeared 'a place like a hospital, with five or six
+beds--no, berths: it is a ship. Here is the man again.' He was minutely
+described, one peculiarity being the way in which his hair grew--or,
+rather, did not grow--on his temples.
+
+Miss Angus now asked, 'Where is my little lady?'--meaning the lady of the
+twirling parasol and _staccato_ walk. 'Oh, I've left off thinking of her,'
+said Mrs. Bissett, who had been thinking of, and recognised in the
+officer in undress uniform, her brother, the man with the singular hair,
+whose face, in fact, had been scarred in that way by an encounter with a
+tiger. He was expected to sail from Bombay, but news of his setting
+forth has not been received (February 10) at the moment when this is
+written.[18]
+
+In these Indian cases, 'thought transference' may account for the
+correspondence between the figures seen by Miss Angus and the ideas in the
+mind of Mr. and Mrs. Bissett. But the hypothesis of thought transference,
+while it would cover the wooden huts at Bombay (Mrs. Bissett knowing that
+her brother was about to leave that place), can scarcely explain the scene
+in the garden by the river and the scene with the trees. The incident of
+the bare feet may be regarded as a fortuitous coincidence, since Miss
+Angus saw the young lady foreshortened, and could not describe her face.
+
+In the Introductory Chapter it was observed that the phenomena which
+apparently point to some unaccountable supernormal faculty of acquiring
+knowledge are 'trivial.' These anecdotes illustrate the triviality; but
+the facts certainly left a number of people, wholly unfamiliar with such
+experiments, under the impression that Miss Angus's glass ball was like
+Prince Ali's magical telescope in the 'Arabian Nights.'[19] These
+experiments, however, occasionally touch on intimate personal matters,
+and cannot be reported in such instances.
+
+It will be remarked that the faculty is freakish, and does not always
+respond to conscious exertion of thought in the mind of the inquirer.
+Thus, in Case I. a connection of the person thought of is discerned; in
+another the mind of a stranger present seems to be read. In another
+case (not given here) the inquirer tried to visualise a card for a
+person present to guess, while Miss Angus was asked to describe an object
+which the inquirer was acquainted with, but which he banished from his
+conscious thought. The double experiment was a double-barrelled success.
+
+It seems hardly necessary to point out that chance coincidence will not
+cover this set of cases, where in each 'guess' the field of conjecture
+is boundless, and is not even narrowed by the crystal-gazer's knowledge
+of the persons for whose diversion she makes the experiment. As
+'muscle-reading' is not in question (in the one case of contact between
+inquirer and crystal-gazer the results were unexpected), and as no
+unconsciously made signs could convey, for example, the idea of a cavalry
+soldier in uniform, or an accident on a race-course in two _tableaux_, I
+do not at present see any more plausible explanation than that of thought
+transference, though how that is to account for some of the cases given I
+do not precisely understand.
+
+Any one who can accept the assurance of my personal belief in the
+good faith of all concerned will see how very useful this faculty of
+crystal-gazing must be to the Apache or Australian medicine-man or
+Polynesian priest. Freakish as the faculty is, a few real successes, well
+exploited and eked out by fraud, would set up a wizard's reputation. That
+a faculty of being thus affected is genuine seems proved, apart from
+modern evidence, by the world-wide prevalence of crystal-gazing in the
+ethnographic region. But the discovery of this prevalence had not been
+made, to my knowledge, before modern instances induced me to notice the
+circumstances, sporadically recorded in books of travel.
+
+The phenomena are certainly of a kind to encourage the savage theory of
+the wandering soul. How else, thinkers would say, can the seer visit the
+distant place or person, and correctly describe men and scenes which, in
+the body, he never saw? Or they would encourage the Polynesian belief
+that the 'spirit' of the thing or person looked for is suspended by a god
+over the water, crystal, blood, ink, or whatever it may be. Thus, to
+anthropologists, the discovery of crystal-gazing as a thing widely
+diffused and still flourishing ought to be grateful, however much they
+may blame my childish credulity. I may add that I have no ground to
+suppose that crystal-gazing will ever be of practical service to the
+police or to persons who have lost articles of portable property. But I
+have no objection to experiments being made at Scotland Yard.[20]
+
+[Footnote 1: Information, with a photograph of the stones, from a
+correspondent in West Maitland, Australia.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Report Ethnol. Bureau_, 1887-88, p. 460; vol. ii. p. 69.
+Captain Bourke's volume on _The Medicine Men of the Apaches_ may also be
+consulted.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Fitzroy, _Adventure_, vol. ii. p. 389.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _L'Histoire de la grand Ile Madagascar_, par le Sieur de
+Flacourt. Paris, 1661, ch. 76. Veue de deux Navires de France predite par
+les Negres, avant que l'on en peust scavoir des Nouvelles, &c.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Religion of the Amazulu_, p. 341.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _J.A.I_., November 1894, p. 155. Ryckov is cited; _Zhurnal_,
+p. 86.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Rites and Laws of the Yncas_, Christoval de Molina, p. 12.]
+
+[Footnote 8: See Miss X's article, S.P.R. _Proceedings_, v. 486.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Op. cit. v. 505.]
+
+[Footnote 10: If any reader wishes to make experiments, he, or she, should
+not be astonished if the first crystal figure represents 'the sheeted
+dead,' or a person ill in bed. For some reason, or no reason, this is
+rather a usual prelude, signifying nothing.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Sunday afternoon. It is not implied that the pictures on
+Friday were prophetic. Probably Miss Rose saw what Miss Angus had seen by
+aid of 'suggestion.']
+
+[Footnote 12: Miss Angus could not be sure of the colour of the hair.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The position was such that Miss Angus could not see the face
+of the lady.]
+
+[Footnote 14: I saw the photographs.]
+
+[Footnote 15: I have been shown the letter of January 20, which confirmed
+the evidence of the crystal pictures. The camp was formed for official
+purposes in which Mr. Clifton was concerned. A letter of February 9
+unconsciously corroborates.]
+
+[Footnote 16: The incident of the feet occurred at 4.30 to 7.30 P.M. The
+crystal picture was about 10 P.M.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Miss Angus had only within the week made the acquaintance of
+Mrs. Cockburn and the Bissetts. Of these relations of theirs at a distance
+she had no knowledge.]
+
+[Footnote 18: I have seen a photograph of this gentleman, Major Hamilton,
+which tallies with the full description given by Miss Angus, as reported
+by Mrs. Bissett. All the proper names here, as throughout, are altered.
+
+This account I wrote from the verbal statement of Mrs. Bissett. It
+was then read and corroborated by herself, Mr. Bissett, Mr. Cockburn,
+Mrs. Cockburn, and Miss Angus, who added dates and signatures.]
+
+[Footnote 19: The letters attesting each of these experiments are in my
+possession. The real names are in no case given in this account, by my own
+desire, but (with permission of the persona concerned) can be communicated
+privately.]
+
+[Footnote 20: The faculty of seeing 'fancy pictures' in the glass is
+far from uncommon. I have only met with three other persons besides
+Miss Angus, two of them men, who had any success in 'telepathic'
+crystal-gazing. In correcting 'revises' (March 16), I leant that the
+brother of Mr. Pembroke (p. 105) wrote from Cairo on January 27. The
+'scry' of January 23 represented his ship in the Suez Canal. He was, as
+his letter shows, in quarantine at Suez, at Moses's Wells, from January 25
+to January 26. Major Hamilton (pp. 109, 110), on the other hand, left
+Bombay, indeed, but not by sea, as in the crystal-picture. See Appendix C.
+Mr. Starr, an American critic, adds Cherokees, Aztecs, and Tonkaways to
+the ranks of crystal gazers.]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ANTHROPOLOGY AND HALLUCINATIONS
+
+We have been examining cases, savage or civilised, in which knowledge is
+believed to be acquired through no known channel of sense. All such
+instances among savages, whether of the nature of clairvoyance simple,
+or by aid of gazing in a smooth surface, or in dreams, or in trance, or
+through second sight, would confirm if they did not originate the belief
+in the separable soul. The soul, if it is to visit distant places and
+collect information, must leave the body, it would be argued, and must so
+far be capable of leading an independent life. Perhaps we ought next to
+study cases of 'possession,' when knowledge is supposed to be conveyed by
+an alien soul, ghost, spirit, or god, taking up its abode in a man, and
+speaking out of his lips. But it seems better first to consider the
+alleged super-normal phenomena which may have led the savage reasoner to
+believe that _he_ was not the only owner of a separable soul: that other
+people were equally gifted.
+
+The sense, as of separation, which a savage dreamer or seer would feel
+after a dream or vision in which he visited remote places, would satisfy
+him that _his_ soul, at least, was volatile. But some experience of what
+he would take to be visits from the spirits of others, would be needed
+before he recognised that other men, as well as he, had the faculty of
+sending their souls a journeying.
+
+Now, ordinary dreams, in which the dreamer seemed to see persons who were
+really remote; would supply to the savage reasoner a certain amount of
+affirmative evidence. It is part of Mr. Tylor's contention that savages
+(like some children) are subject to the difficulty which most of us may
+have occasionally felt in deciding 'Did this really happen, or did I dream
+it?' Thus, ordinary dreams would offer to the early thinker some
+evidence that other men's souls could visit his, as he believes that his
+can visit them.
+
+But men, we may assume, were not, at the assumed stage of thought, so
+besotted as not to take a great practical distinction between sleeping
+and waking experience on the whole. As has been shown, the distinction
+is made by the lowest savages of our acquaintance. One clear _waking_
+hallucination, on the other hand, of the presence of a person really
+absent, could not but tell more with the early philosopher than a score of
+dreams, for to be easily forgotten is of the essence of a dream. Savages,
+indeed, oddly enough, have hit on our theory, 'dreams go by contraries.'
+Dr. Callaway illustrates this for the Zulus, and Mr. Scott for the
+Mang'anza. Thus they _do_ discriminate between sleeping and waking. We
+must therefore examine _waking_ hallucinations in the field of actual
+experience, and on such recent evidence as may be accessible. If these
+hallucinations agree, in a certain ratio, beyond what fortuitous
+coincidence can explain, with real but unknown events, then such
+hallucinations would greatly strengthen, in the mind of an early
+thinker, the savage theory that a man at a distance may, voluntarily or
+involuntarily, project his spirit on a journey, and be seen where he is
+not present.
+
+When Mr. Tylor wrote his book, the study of the occasional waking
+hallucinations of the sane and healthy was in its infancy. Much, indeed,
+had been written about hallucinations, but these were mainly the chronic
+false perceptions of maniacs, of drunkards, and of persons in bad
+health such as Nicolai and Mrs. A. The hallucinations of persons of
+genius--Jeanne d'Arc, Luther, Socrates, Pascal, were by some attributed
+to lunacy in these famous people. Scarcely any writers before Mr. Galton
+had recognised the occurrence of hallucinations once in a life, perhaps,
+among healthy, sober, and mentally sound people. If these were known to
+occur, they were dismissed as dreams of an unconscious sleep. This is
+still practically the hypothesis of Dr. Parish, as we shall see later.
+But in the last twenty years the infrequent hallucinations of the sane
+have been recognised by Mr. Galton, and discussed by Professor James,
+Mr. Gurney, Dr. Parish, and many other writers.
+
+Two results have followed. First, 'ghosts' are shown to be, when not
+illusions caused by mistaking one object for another, then hallucinations.
+As these most frequently represent a living person who is not present, by
+parity of reason the appearance of a dead person is on the same level, is
+not a space-filling 'ghost,' but merely an hallucination. Such an
+appearance can, _prima facie_, suggest no reasonable inference as to the
+continued existence of the dead. On the other hand, the new studies have
+raised the perhaps insoluble question, 'Do not hallucinations of the sane,
+representing the living, coincide more frequently than mere luck can
+account for, with the death or other crisis of the person apparently
+seen?' If this could be proved, then there would seem to be a causal
+_nexus_, a relation of cause and effect between the hallucination and the
+coincident crisis. That connection would be provisionally explained by
+some not understood action of the mind or brain of the person in the
+crisis, on that of the person who has the hallucination. This is no new
+idea; only the name, Telepathy, is modern. Of course, if all this were
+accepted, it would be the next step to ask whether hallucinations
+representing the dead show any signs of being caused by some action on the
+side of the departed. That is a topic on which the little that we have to
+say must be said later.
+
+In the meantime the reader who has persevered so far is apt to go no
+further. The prejudice against 'wraiths' and 'ghosts' is very strong; but,
+then, our innocent phantasms are neither (as we understand their nature)
+ghosts nor wraiths. Kant broke the edges of his metaphysical tools
+against, not these phantasms, but the logically inconceivable entities
+which were at once material and non-material, at once 'spiritual' and
+'space-filling.' There is no such difficulty about hallucinations, which,
+whatever else may be said about them, are familiar facts of experience.
+The only real objections are the statements that hallucinations are
+always _morbid_ (which is no longer the universal belief of physiologists
+and psychologists), and that the alleged coincidences of a phantasm of a
+person with the unknown death of that person at a distance are 'pure
+flukes.' That is the question to which we recur later.
+
+In the meantime, the defenders of the theory, that there is some not
+understood connection of cause and effect between the death or other
+crisis at one end and the perception representing the person affected by
+the crisis at the other end, point out that such hallucinations, or other
+effects on the percipient, exist in a regular rising scale of potency and
+perceptibility. Suppose that 'A's' death in Yorkshire is to affect the
+consciousness of 'B' in Surrey before he knows anything about the fact
+(suppose it for the sake of argument), then the effect may take place
+(1) on 'B's' emotions, producing a vague _malaise_ and gloom; (2) on his
+motor nerves, urging him to some act; (3) or may translate itself into his
+senses, as a touch felt, a voice heard, a figure seen; or (4) may render
+itself as a phrase or an idea.
+
+Of these, (1) the emotional effect is, of course, the vaguest. We may all
+have had a sudden fit of gloom which we could not explain. People rarely
+act on such impressions, and, when they do, are often wrong. Thus a
+friend of my own was suddenly so overwhelmed, at golf, with inexplicable
+misery (though winning his match) that he apologised to his opponent and
+walked home from the ninth hole. Nothing was wrong at home. Probably some
+real ground of apprehension had obscurely occurred to his mind and
+expressed itself in his emotion.
+
+But one may illustrate what did look like a coincidence by the experience
+of the same friend. He inhabited, as a young married man, a flat in a
+house belonging to an acquaintance. The hall was covered by a kind of
+glass roof, over part of its extent. He was staying in the country
+with his wife, and as they travelled home the lady was beset with an
+irresistible conviction that something terrible had occurred, _not_ to her
+children. On reaching their house they found that one of their maids had
+fallen through the glass roof and killed herself. They also learned that
+the girl's sister had arrived at the house, immediately after the
+accident, explaining that she was driven to come by a sense that something
+dreadful had happened. The lawyer, too, who represented the owner of the
+house, had appeared, unsummoned, from a conviction, which he could not
+resist, that for some reason unknown he was wanted there.[1] Here, then,
+was not an hallucination, but an emotional effect simultaneously reaching
+the consciousness of three persons, and coinciding with an unknown
+crisis.[2]
+
+Cases in which a person feels urged to an act (2) are also recorded.
+Indeed, the lawyer's in our anecdote is such an instance. Not to trouble
+ourselves (3) with 'voices,' hallucinations of sight, coinciding with a
+distant unknown crisis, are traced from a mere feeling that somebody is in
+the room, followed by a _mental_, or _mind's eye_ picture of a person
+dying at a distance, up to a kind of 'vision' of a person or scene, and so
+on to hallucinations appealing, at once, to touch, sight, and hearing. As
+some hundreds of these narratives of coincidental hallucinations in every
+degree have been collected from witnesses at first hand, often personally
+known, and usually personally cross-questioned, by the student, it is
+difficult to deny that there is a _prima facie_ case for inquiry.[3]
+
+There is here no question of 'spirits,' with all their physical and
+metaphysical difficulties. Nor is there any desire to shirk the fact that
+many 'presentiments' and hallucinations of the sane coincide with no
+ascertainable fact. We only provisionally posit the possibility of an
+influence, in its nature unknown, of one mind on another at a distance,
+such influence translating itself into an hallucination. An inquiry into
+this subject, in the ethnographic and modern fields, may be new but
+involves no 'superstition.'
+
+We now return to Mr. Tylor, who treats of hallucinations among other
+experiences which led early savage thinkers to believe in ghosts or
+separable souls, the origin of religion.
+
+As to the causes of hallucinations in general, Mr. Tylor has something to
+say, but it is nothing systematic. 'Sickness, exhaustion, and excitement'
+cause savages to behold 'human spectres,' in 'the objective reality' of
+which they believe. But if an educated modern, not sick, nor exhausted,
+nor excited, has an hallucination of a friend's presence, he, too,
+believes that it is 'objective,' is his friend in flesh and blood, till
+he finds out his mistake, by examination or reflection. As Professor
+William James remarks, in his 'Principles of Psychology,' such solitary
+hallucinations of the sane and healthy, once in a life-time, are difficult
+to account for, and are by no means rare. 'Sometimes,' Mr. Tylor observes,
+'the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all of
+an assembled company,' and he adds 'to assert or imply that they are
+visible sometimes, and to some persons, but not always, or to everyone,
+is to lay down an explanation of facts which is not, indeed, our usual
+modern explanation, but which is a perfectly rational and intelligible
+product of early science.'
+
+It is, indeed, nor has later science produced any rational and
+intelligible explanation of collective hallucinations, shared by several
+persons at once, and perhaps not perceived by others who are present. Mr.
+Tylor, it is true, asserts that 'in civilised countries a rumour of some
+one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a sight of it to others whose
+minds are in a properly receptive state.' But this is arguing in a circle;
+What is 'a properly receptive state'? If illness, overwork, 'expectant
+attention,' make 'a properly receptive state,' I should have seen several
+phantoms in several 'haunted houses.' But the only thing of the sort I
+ever saw occurred when I was thinking of nothing less, when I was in good
+health, and when I did not know (nor did I learn till long after) that it
+was the right and usual phantom to see. Mr. Podmore remarks that various
+members of the Psychical Society have sojourned in various 'haunted
+houses,' 'some of them in a state of expectancy and nervous excitement,'
+which never caused them to see phantoms, for they saw none.[4]
+
+Mr. Tylor treats of waking hallucinations in much the same manner as he
+deals with 'travelling clairvoyance.' He does not study them 'in the field
+of experience.' He is not concerned with the truth of the facts, important
+as we think it would be, but with his theory that hallucinations, among
+other causes, would naturally give rise to the belief in spirits, and thus
+to the early philosophy of Animism. Now, certainly, the hallucination of a
+person's presence, say at the moment of his death at a distance, would
+suggest to a savage that something of the dying man's, something
+symbolised in the word 'shadow,' or 'breath' _(spiritus)_, had come to say
+farewell. The modern 'spiritualistic' theory, again, that the dead man's
+'spirit' is actually present to the percipient, in space, corresponds to,
+and is derived from, the animistic philosophy of the savage. But we may
+believe in such 'death-wraiths,' or hallucinatory appearances of
+the dying, without being either savages or spiritualists. We may
+believe without pretending to explain, or we may advance the theory of
+'Telepathy,' Hegel's 'magical tie,' according to which the distant mind
+somehow impresses itself, in a more or less perfect hallucination, on the
+mind of the person who perceives the wraith. If this be so, or even if no
+explanation be offered, the truth of the stories of coincidental
+apparitions becomes important, as pointing to a new region of psychical
+inquiry. Then the evidence of savages as to hallucinations of their own,
+coincident with the death of their absent friends, will confirm,
+_quantum valeat_, the evidence of many modern observers in all ranks of
+life, and all degrees of culture, from Lord Brougham to an old nurse.[5]
+
+As to hallucinations coincident with the death of the person apparently
+seen, Mr. Tylor says: 'Narratives of this class I can here only specify
+without arguing on them, they are abundantly in circulation.'[6] Now, the
+modern hallucinations themselves can scarcely, perhaps, be called
+'survivals from savagery,' though the opinion that an hallucination of a
+person must be his 'spirit' is really such a survival. It is with that
+opinion, with Animism in its hallucinatory origins, that Mr. Tylor is
+concerned, not with the hallucinations themselves or with the evidence
+for their veridical existence.
+
+Mr. Tylor gives three anecdotes, narrated to him, in two cases, by the
+seers, of phantasms of the living beheld by them (and in one case by a
+companion also) when the real person was dying at a distance. He adds: 'My
+own view is that nothing but dreams and visions could have ever put into
+men's minds such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of
+bodies.'[7] The idea may be perfectly erroneous; but if the occurrence
+of such coincidental appearances as Mr. Tylor tells us about could be
+shown to be too frequent for mere chance to produce, then there would be
+a presumption in favour of some unknown faculties in our nature--a proper
+theme for anthropology.
+
+The hallucinations of which we hear most are those in which a person
+sees the phantom of another person, who, unknown to him, is in or near
+the hour of death. Mr. Tylor, in addition to his three instances in
+civilised life, alludes to one in savage life, with references to other
+cases.[8] We turn to his savage instance, offering it at full length from
+the original.[9]
+
+'Among the Maoris' (says Mr. Shortland) 'it is always ominous to see the
+figure of an absent person. If the figure is very shadowy, and its face is
+not seen, death, although he may ere long be expected, has not seized his
+prey. If the face of the absent person is seen, the omen forewarns the
+beholder that he is already dead.'
+
+The following statement is from the mouth of an eyewitness:
+
+'A party of natives left their village, with the intention of being
+absent some time, on a pig-hunting expedition. One night, while they
+were seated in the open air around a blazing fire, the figure of a
+relative who had been left ill at home was seen to approach. The
+apparition appeared to two of the party only, and vanished immediately
+on their making an exclamation of surprise. When they returned to the
+village they inquired for the sick man, and then learnt that he had
+died about the time he was said to have been seen.'
+
+I now give Maori cases, communicated to me by Mr. Tregear, F.R.G.S.,
+author of a 'Maori Comparative Dictionary.'
+
+A very intelligent Maori chief said to me, 'I have seen but two ghosts.
+I was a boy at school in Auckland, and one morning was asleep in bed
+when I found myself aroused by some one shaking me by the shoulder. I
+looked up, and saw bending over me the well-known form of my uncle, whom
+I supposed to be at the Bay of Islands. I spoke to him, but the form
+became dim and vanished. The next mail brought me the news of his
+death. Years passed away, and I saw no ghost or spirit--not even when
+my father and mother died, and I was absent in each case. Then one day I
+was sitting reading, when a dark shadow fell across my book. I looked
+up, and saw a man standing between me and the window. His back was
+turned towards me. I saw from his figure that he was a Maori, and I
+called out to him, "Oh friend!" He turned round, and I saw my other
+uncle, Ihaka. The form faded away as the other had done. I had not
+expected to hear of my uncle's death, for I had seen him hale and strong
+a few hours before. However, he had gone into the house of a missionary,
+and he (with several white people) was poisoned by eating of a pie made
+from tinned meat, the tin having been opened and the meat left in it all
+night. That is all I myself had seen of spirits.'
+
+One more Maori example may be offered:[10]
+
+From Mr. Francis Dart Fenton, formerly in the Native Department of the
+Government, Auckland, New Zealand. He gave the account in writing to his
+friend, Captain J.H. Crosse, of Monkstown, Cork, from whom we received
+it. In 1852, when the incident occurred, Mr. Fenton was 'engaged in
+forming a settlement on the banks of the Waikato.'
+
+'March 25, 1860
+
+'Two sawyers, Frank Philps and Jack Mulholland, were engaged cutting
+timber for the Rev. R. Maunsell at the mouth of the Awaroa creek--a very
+lonely place, a vast swamp, no people within miles of them. As usual,
+they had a Maori with them to assist in felling trees. He came from
+Tihorewam, a village on the other side of the river, about six miles
+off. As Frank and the native were cross-cutting a tree, the native
+stopped suddenly, and said, "What are you come for?" looking in the
+direction of Frank. Frank replied, "What do you mean?" He said, "I am
+not speaking to you; I am speaking to my brother." Frank said, "Where is
+he?" The native replied, "Behind you. What do you want?" (to the other
+Maori), Frank looked round and saw nobody. The native no longer saw
+anyone, but bid down the saw and said, "I shall go across the river; my
+brother is dead."
+
+'Frank laughed at him, and reminded him that be had left him quite well
+on Sunday (five days before), and there had been no communication since.
+The Maori spoke no more, but got into his canoe and pulled across. When
+he arrived at the landing-place, he met people coming to fetch him. His
+brother had just died. I knew him well.'
+
+In answer to inquiries as to his authority for this narrative, Mr. Fenton
+writes:
+
+'December 18, 1883.
+
+'I knew all the parties concerned well, and it is quite true, _valeat
+quantum_, as the lawyers say. Incidents of this sort are not infrequent
+among the Maoris.
+
+'F.D. FENTON,
+ _'Late Chief Judge, Native Law-Court of N.Z.'_
+
+Here is a somewhat analogous example from Tierra del Fuego:
+
+'Jemmy Button was very superstitious' (says Admiral Fitzroy, speaking of
+a Fuegian brought to England). 'While at sea, on board the "Beagle," he
+said one morning to Mr. Bynoe that in the night some man came to the
+side of his hammock and whispered in his ear that his father was dead.
+He fully believed that such was the case,' and he was perfectly
+right.... 'He reminded Bennett of the dream.'[11]
+
+Mr. Darwin also mentions this case, a coincidental auditory hallucination.
+
+I have found no other savage cases quite to the point. This is,
+undeniably, 'a puir show for Kirkintilloch,' a meagre collection of savage
+death-wraiths, but it may be so meagre by reason of want of research, or
+of lack of records, travellers usually pooh-poohing the benighted
+superstitions of the heathen, or fearing to seem superstitious if they
+chronicle instances. However few the instances, they are, undeniably,
+exact parallels to those recorded in civilised life.
+
+In filling up the lacuna in Mr. Tylor's anthropological work, in asking
+questions as to the proportion between phantasms of the living which
+coincide with a crisis in the experience of the person seen, and those
+which do not, it is obviously necessary to reject all evidence of people
+who were ill, or anxious, or overworked, or in poignant grief at the time
+of the hallucination. It will be seen later that neither grief nor amatory
+passion (dominating the association of our ideas as they do) beget many
+phantasms. Our business, however, is with the false perceptions of persons
+trustworthy, as far as we know, sane, healthy, not usually visionary, and
+in an unperturbed state of mind.
+
+There remains a normal cause of subjective hallucinations, expectancy.
+This appears to be a real cause of hallucination or, at least, of
+illusion. Waiting for the sound of a carriage you may hear it often before
+it comes, you taking other sounds for that which you desire. Again, in an
+inquiry embracing 17,000 people, the S.P.R. collected thirteen cases of an
+hallucinatory appearance of one person to another who was _expecting_ his
+arrival. Once more, it is very conceivable that a trifle, the accidental
+opening of a door, a noise of a familiar kind in an unfamiliar place, may
+touch the brain into originating an hallucination of a person passing
+through the door, or of the place where the sound now heard used once to
+be familiar. Expectancy, again, and nervousness, might doubtless cause an
+hallucination to a person who felt uncomfortable in a house with a name to
+be 'haunted,' though, as we have seen, the effect is far less common than
+the cause. All these sorts of causes are undoubtedly more apt to be
+prevalent among superstitious savages than among educated Europeans.
+And it stands to reason that savages, where one man 'thinks he sees
+something,' will be readier than we are to think they 'see something' too.
+Yet collective hallucinations, which are shared by several persons at
+once, are especially puzzling. Even if they occur when all are in a
+strained condition of expectancy, it is odd that all see them in _the same
+way_.[12] Examples will occur later. When there is no excitement, the
+mystery is increased. We may note that, among the expectant multitudes who
+looked on while Bernadette was viewing the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes, not
+one person, however superstitious or hysterical, pretended to share the
+vision. Again, only one person, and he on doubtful evidence, is asserted
+to have shared, once, the visions of Jeanne d'Arc. In both cases all the
+conditions said to produce collective hallucination were present in the
+highest degree. Yet no collective hallucination occurred.
+
+Narratives about hallucinations coincident with a death, narratives well
+attested, are abundant in modern times, so abundant that one need only
+refer the curious to Messrs. Gurney and Myers's two large volumes,
+'Phantasms of the Living,' and to the S.P.R 'Report of Census of
+Hallucinations' (1894). Mr. Tylor says: 'The spiritualistic theory
+specially insists on cases of apparitions, where the person's death
+corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives
+his phantom.' But visionaries, he remarks truly, often see phantoms of
+living persons when nothing occurs. That is the case, and the question
+arises whether more such phantoms are viewed (_not_ by 'visionaries')
+in connection with the death or other crisis of the person whose
+hallucinatory appearance is perceived, than ought to occur, if there be no
+connection of some unknown cause between deaths and appearances. As Mr.
+Tylor observes, 'Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, came to
+associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be
+connected in fact.'[13] Did early man, then, find _in experience_ that
+apparitions of his friends were 'connected in fact' with their deaths?
+And, if so, was that discovered connection in fact the origin of his
+belief that an hallucinatory appearance of an absent person sometimes
+announced his death?
+
+That the belief exists in New Zealand we saw, and find confirmed by this
+instance, one of 'many such relations,' says the author. A Maori chief was
+long absent on the war-path. One day he entered his wife's hut, and sat
+mute by the hearth. She ran to bring witnesses, but on her return the
+phantasm was no longer visible. The woman soon afterwards married again.
+
+Her husband then returned in perfect health, and pardoned the lady, as
+she had acted on what, to a Maori mind, seemed good legal evidence of
+his decease. Of course, even if she fabled, the story is evidence to the
+existence of the belief.[14]
+
+What, then, is the cause of the belief that a phantom of a man is a token
+of his death? On the theory of savage philosophy, as explained by Mr.
+Tylor himself, a man's soul may leave his body and become visible to
+others, not at death only, but on many other occasions, in dream, trance,
+lethargy. All these are much more frequent conditions, in every man's
+career, than the fact of dying. Why, then, is the phantasm supposed by
+savages to announce death? Is it because, in a sufficient ratio of cases
+to provoke remark, early man has found the appearance and the death to be
+'things connected in fact'?
+
+I give an instance in which the philosophy of savages would lead them
+_not_ to connect a phantasm of a living man with his death.
+
+The Woi Worung, an Australian tribe, hold that 'the Murup [wraith] of an
+individual could be sent from him by magic, as, for instance, when a
+hunter incautiously went to sleep when out hunting.'[15] In this case the
+hunter is exposed to the magic of his enemies. But the Murup, or detached
+soul, would be visible to people at a distance when its owner is only
+asleep--according to the savage philosophy. Why, then, when the wraith is
+seen, is the owner believed to be dying? Are the things bound to be
+'connected in fact'?
+
+As is well known, the Society for Psychical Research has attempted a
+little census, for the purpose of discovering whether hallucinations
+representing persons at a distance coincided, within twelve hours, with
+their deaths, in a larger ratio than the laws of chance allow as possible.
+If it be so, the Maori might have some ground for his theory that such
+hallucinations betoken a decease. I do not believe that any such census
+can enable us to reach an affirmative conclusion which science will
+accept. In spite of all precautions taken, all warnings before, and
+'allowances' made later, collectors of evidence will 'select' affirmative
+cases already known, or (which is equally fatal) will be suspected of
+doing so. Again, illusions of memory, increasing the closeness of the
+coincidence, will come in--or it will be easy to say that they came in.
+'Allowances' for them will not be accepted.
+
+Once more, 17,000 cases, though a larger number than is usual in
+biological inquiries, are decidedly not enough for a popular argument on
+probabilities; a million, it will be said, would not be too many.
+Finally, granting honesty, accurate memory, and non-selection (none of
+which will be granted by opponents), it is easy to say that odd things
+_must_ occur, and that the large proportion of affirmative answers as to
+coincidental hallucinations is just a specimen of these odd things.
+
+Other objections are put forward by teachers of popular science who have
+not examined--or, having examined, misreport--the results of the Census in
+detail. I may give an example of their method.
+
+Mr. Edward Clodd is the author of several handbooks of science--'The Story
+of Creation,' 'A Manual of Evolution,' and others. Now, in a signed review
+of a book, a critique published in 'The Sketch' (October 13, 1897), Mr.
+Clodd wrote about the Census: 'Thousands of persons were asked whether
+they had ever seen apparitions, and out of these some hundreds, mostly
+unintelligent foreigners, replied in the affirmative. Some eight or ten of
+the number--envied mortals--had seen "angels," but the majority,
+like the American in the mongoose story, had seen only "snakes."...
+In weighing evidence we have to take into account the competency as
+well as the integrity of the witnesses.' Mr. Clodd has most frankly and
+good-humouredly acknowledged the erroneousness of his remark. Otherwise we
+might ask: Does Mr. Clodd prefer to be considered not 'competent' or not
+'veracious'? He cannot be both on this occasion, for his signed and
+published remarks were absolutely inaccurate. First, thousands of persons
+were _not_ asked 'whether they had seen apparitions.' They were asked:
+'Have you ever, when believing yourself to be perfectly awake, had a vivid
+impression of seeing, or being touched by a living being or inanimate
+object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could
+discover, was not due to any external physical cause?' Secondly, it is not
+the fact that 'some hundreds, _mostly unintelligent foreigners,_ replied
+in the affirmative.' Of English-speaking men and women, 1,499 answered the
+question quoted above in the affirmative. Of foreigners (naturally
+'unintelligent'), 185 returned affirmative answers. Thirdly, when Mr.
+Clodd says, 'The majority had seen only "snakes,"' it is not easy to know
+what precise sense 'snakes' bears in the terminology of popular science.
+If Mr. Clodd means, by 'snakes,' fantastic hallucinations of animals,
+these amounted to 25, as against 830 representing human forms of persons
+recognised, unrecognised, living or dead. But, if by 'snakes' Mr. Clodd
+means purely subjective hallucinations, not known to coincide with any
+event--and this _is_ his meaning--his statement agrees with that of the
+Census. His observations, of course, were purely accidental errors.
+
+The number of hallucinations representing living or dying recognised
+persons in the answers received, was 352. Of first-hand cases, in which
+coincidence of the hallucination with the death of the person apparently
+seen was affirmed, there were 80, of which 26 are given.
+
+The non-coincidental hallucinations were multiplied by four, to allow for
+forgetfulness of 'misses.' The results being compared, it was decided that
+the hallucinations collected coincided with death 440 more often than
+ought to be the case by the law of probabilities. Therefore there was
+proof, or presumption, in favour of some relation of cause and effect
+between A's death and B's hallucination.
+
+If we were to attack the opinion of the Committee on Hallucinations, that
+'Between deaths and apparitions of the dying a connection exists which is
+not due to chance alone,' the assault should be made not only on the
+method, but on the details. The events were never of very recent, and
+often were of remote occurrence. The remoteness was less than it seems,
+however, as the questions were often answered several years before the
+publication of the Report (1894). There was scarcely any documentary
+evidence, any note or letter written between the hallucination and the
+arrival of news of the death. Such letters, the evidence alleged, had in
+some cases existed, but had been lost, burnt, eaten by white ants, or
+written on a sheet of blotting paper or the whitewashed wall of a barrack
+room. If I may judge by my own lifelong success in mislaying, losing, and
+casually destroying papers, from cheques to notes made for literary
+purposes, from interesting letters of friends to the manuscripts of
+novelists, or if I may judge by Sir Walter Scott's triumphs of the same
+kind, I should not think much of the disappearance of documentary evidence
+to death-wraiths. Nobody supposed, when these notes were written, that
+Science would ask for their production; and even if people had guessed at
+this, it is human to lose or destroy old papers.
+
+The remoteness of the occurrences is more remarkable, for, if these things
+happen, why were so few recent cases discovered? Again, the seers were
+sometimes under anxiety, though such cases were excluded from the final
+computation: they frequently knew that the person seen was in bad health:
+they were often very familiar with his personal aspect. Now what are
+called 'subjective hallucinations,' non-coincidental hallucinations,
+usually represent persons very familiar to us, persons much in our minds.
+I know seven cases in which such hallucinations occurred. 1, 2, of husband
+to wife; 3, son to mother; 4, brother to sister; 5, sister to sister;
+6, cousin (living in the same house) to cousin; 7, friend (living a mile
+away) to two friends. In no case was there a death-coincidence. Only in
+case 4 was there any kind of coincidence, the brother having intended to
+do (unknown to the sister) what he was seen doing--driving in a dog-cart
+with a lady. But he had _not_ driven. We cannot, of course, _prove_ that
+these seven cases were _not_ telepathic, but there is no proof that they
+were. Now most of the coincidental cases, on which the Committee relied as
+their choicest examples, represented persons familiarly known to the
+seers. This looks as if they were casual; but, of course, if telepathy
+does exist, it is most likely (as Hegel says) to exist between kinsfolk
+and friends.[16]
+
+The dates might be fresher!
+
+In case 1, percipient knew that his aunt in England (he being in
+Australia) was not very well. No anxiety.
+
+2. Casual acquaintance. No anxiety. Case of accident or suicide.
+
+3. Acquaintance who feared to die in childbed, and did. Percipient not
+much interested, nor at all anxious.
+
+4. Father in England to son in India. No anxiety.
+
+5. Uncle to niece. Sudden death. No anxiety. No knowledge of illness.
+
+6. Brother-in-law to sister-in-law, and her maid. No anxiety reported.
+_Russian_.
+
+7. Father to son. No anxiety reported. _Russian_.
+
+8. Friend to friend. No knowledge of illness or anxiety reported.
+
+9. Grandmother to grandson. No anxiety. No knowledge of illness.
+
+10. Casual acquaintance, to seven people, and apparently to a dog. Illness
+known. _Russian._
+
+11. Step-brother to step-brother. No anxiety. No knowledge of illness.
+
+12. Friend to friend. No anxiety or knowledge of illness.
+
+13. Casual acquaintance. No anxiety.
+
+14. Aunt to nephew and to his wife. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+15. Sister to brother. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+16. Father to daughter. No knowledge of illness. No anxiety.
+
+17. Father to son. Much anxiety. (Uncounted.)
+
+18. Sister to sister. Illness known. 'No immediate danger' surmised.
+
+19. Father to son. Much anxiety. _Russian._ (Uncounted.)
+
+20. Friend to friend. Illness known. Percipient had been nursing patient.
+_Brazilian._ (Very bad case!)
+
+21 Friend to friend. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+22. Brother to brother. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+23. Grandfather to grand-daughter. Illness known. No pressing anxiety.
+
+24. Grandfather to grandson. Illness known. No anxiety.
+
+25. Father's _hand._ Illness chronic. No anxiety. Percipient a daughter.
+_Russian._
+
+20. Husband to wife. Anxiety in time of war.
+
+27. Brother to sister. Slightly anxious from receiving no letter.
+
+28. Friend to friend. No anxiety.
+
+Anxiety is only reported, or to be surmised, in two or three cases. In a
+dozen the existence of illness was known.
+
+It may therefore be argued, adversely, that in the selected coincidental
+hallucinations, the persons seen were in the class most usually beheld in
+non-coincidental and, probably, purely subjective hallucinations
+representing real persons; also, that knowledge of their illness, even
+when no anxiety existed, kept them in some cases before the mind; also,
+that several cases are foreign, and that 'most foreigners are fools.' On
+the other hand, affection, familiarity, and knowledge of illness had _not_
+produced hallucinations even in the case of these percipients, till
+within the twelve hours (often much less) of the event of death.
+
+It would have been desirable, of course, to publish all the
+_non_-coincidental cases, and show how far, in these not _veridical_
+cases, the recognised phantasms were those of kindred, dear friends, known
+to be ill, and subjects of anxiety[17].
+
+The Census, in fact, does contain a chapter on 'Mental and Nervous
+Conditions in connection with Hallucinations,' such as anxiety, grief,
+and overwork. Do these produce, or probably produce, many empty
+hallucinations _not_ coincident with death or any great crisis? If they
+do, then all cases in which a coincidental hallucination occurred
+to a person in anxiety, or overstrained, will seem to be, probably,
+fortuitous coincidences like the others. All percipients, of all sorts
+of hallucinations, hits or misses, were asked if they were in grief or
+anxiety. Now, out of 1,622 cases of hallucination of all known kinds
+(coincidental or not), mental strain was reported in 220 instances; of
+which 131 were cases of grief about known deaths or anxiety. These mental
+conditions, therefore, occur only in twelve per cent. of the instances. On
+the whole, it does not seem fair to argue that anxiety produces so much
+hallucination that it will account by itself for those which we have
+analysed as coincidental.
+
+The impression left on my own mind by the Census does pretty closely agree
+with that of its authors. Fairly well persuaded of the possibility of
+telepathy, on other grounds, and even inclined to believe that it does
+produce coincidental hallucinations, the evidence of the Census, by
+itself, would not convince me nor its authors. We want better records; we
+want documentary evidence recording cases before the arrival of news of
+the coincidence. Memories are very adaptive. The authors, however, made a
+gallant effort, at the cost of much labour, and largely allowed for all
+conceivable drawbacks.
+
+I am, personally, illogical enough to agree with Kant, and to be more
+convinced by the cumulative weight of the hundreds of cases in 'Phantasms
+of the Living,' in other sources, in my own circle of acquaintance, and
+even by the coincident traditions of European and savage peoples, than by
+the statistics of the Census. The whole mass, Census and all, is of very
+considerable weight, and there exist individual cases which one feels
+unable to dispute. Thus while I would never regard the hallucinatory
+figure of a friend, perceived by myself, as proof of his death, I
+would entertain some slight anxiety till I heard of his well-being.
+
+On this topic I will offer, in a Kantian spirit, an anecdote of the kind
+which, occurring in great quantities, disposes the mind to a sort of
+belief. It is not given as evidence to go to a jury, for I only received
+it from the lips of a very gallant and distinguished officer and V.C.,
+whose own part in the affair will be described.
+
+This gentleman was in command of a small British force in one of the
+remotest and least accessible of our dependencies, not connected by
+telegraph, at the time of the incident, with the distant mainland. In the
+force was a particularly folly young captain. One night he went to a
+dance, and, as the sleeping accommodation was exhausted, he passed the
+night, like a Homeric hero, on a couch beneath the echoing _loggia_. Next
+day, contrary to his wont, he was in the worst of spirits, and, after
+moping for some time, asked leave to go a three days' voyage to the
+nearest telegraph station. His commanding officer, my informant, was
+good-natured, and gave leave. At the end of a week Captain ---- returned,
+in his usual high spirits. He now admitted that, while lying awake in the
+verandah, after the ball, he had seen a favourite brother of his, then
+in, say, Peru. He could not shake off the impression; he had made the long
+voyage to the nearest telegraph station, and thence had telegraphed to
+another brother in, let us say, Hong Kong, 'Is all well with John?' He
+received a reply, 'All well by last mail,' and so returned, relieved in
+mind, to his duties. But the next mail bringing letters from Peru brought
+news of his Peruvian brother's death on the night of the vision in the
+verandah.
+
+This, of course, is not offered as evidence. For evidence we need
+Captain ----'s account, his Hong Kong brother's account, date of the
+dance, official date of the Peruvian brother's death, and so on. But the
+character of my informant indisposes me to disbelief. The names of places
+are intentionally changed, but the places were as remote from each other
+as those given in the text.
+
+We find ourselves able to understand the Master of Ravenswood's
+cogitations after he saw the best wraith in fiction:
+
+'She died expressing her eager desire to see me. Can it be, then--can
+strong and earnest wishes, formed during the last agony of nature,
+survive its catastrophe, surmount the awful bounds of the spiritual
+world, and place before us its inhabitants in the hues and colouring of
+life? And why was that manifested to the eye, which could not unfold its
+tale to the ear?' ('Her withered lips moved fast, although no sound
+issued from them.') 'And wherefore should a breach be made in the laws
+of nature, yet its purpose remain unknown?'
+
+The Master's reasonings are such as, in hearing similar anecdotes, must
+have occurred to Scott. They no longer represent our views. The death and
+apparition were coincidental almost to the minute: it would be impossible
+to prove that life was utterly extinct, when Alice seemed to die, 'as the
+clock in the distant village tolled one, just before' Ravenswood's
+experience. We do not, like him, postulate 'a breach in the laws of
+nature,' only a possible example of a law. The tale was not 'unfolded to
+the ear,' as the telepathic impact only affected the sense of sight.
+
+Here, perhaps, ought to follow a reply to certain scientific criticisms of
+the theory that telepathy, or the action of one distant mind, or brain,
+upon another, may be the cause of 'coincidental hallucinations,'
+whether among savage or civilised races. But, not to delay the argument
+by controversy, the Reply to Objections has been relegated to the
+Appendix[18].
+
+[Footnote 1: The lady, her husband, and the lawyer, all known to me, gave
+me the story in writing; the servant's sister has been lost sight of.]
+
+[Footnote 2: See three other cases in _Proceedings_, S.P.R., ii. 122, 123.
+Two others are offered by Mr. Henry James and Mr. J. Neville Maskelyne of
+the Egyptian Hall.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See 'Phantasms of the Living' and 'A Theory of Apparitions,'
+_Proceedings_, S.P.R., vol. ii., by Messrs. Gurney and Myers.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Studies in Psychical Research,_ p. 388.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This, at least, scorns to myself a not illogical argument.
+Mr. Leaf has argued on the other side, that 'Darwinism may have done
+something for Totemism, by proving the existence of a great monkey
+kinship. But Totemism can hardly be quoted as evidence for Darwinism.'
+True, but Darwinism and Totemism are matters of opinion, not facts of
+personal experience. To a believer in coincidental hallucinations, at
+least, the alleged parallel experiences of savages must yield some
+confirmation to his own. His belief, he thinks, is warranted by human
+experience. On what does he suppose that the belief of the savage is
+based? Do his experience and their belief coincide by pure chance?]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Prim. Cult._ i. 449.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid. i. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Prim. Cult._ vol. i. p. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 9: From Shortland's _Traditions of New Zealand,_ p. 140.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Gurney and Myers, 'Phantasms of the Living,' vol. ii.
+ch. v. p. 557.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _The 'Adventure' and 'Beagle,'_ iii. 181, cf. 204.]
+
+[Footnote 12: It will, of course, be said that they worked their stories
+into conformity.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Prim. Cult._ i. 116.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Polack's _Manners of the New Zealanders_, i. 268.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Howitt, op. cit. p. 186.]
+
+[Footnote 16: On examining the cases, we find, in 1894, these dates of
+reported occurrences, in twenty-eight cases: 1890, 1882, 1879, 1870, 1863,
+1861, 1888, 1885, 1881, 1880, 1878, 1874, 1869, 1869, 1845, 1887, 1881,
+1877, 1874, 1873, 1860 (?), 1864 (?), 1855, 1830 (?!), 1867, 1862, 1888,
+1870.]
+
+[Footnote 17: On this point see _Report_, p. 260. Fifty phantasms out of
+the whole occurred during anxiety or presumable anxiety. Of these,
+thirty-one coincided (within twelve hours) with the death of the person
+apparently seen. In the remaining nineteen, the person seen recovered in
+eight cases.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Appendix A.]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+DEMONIACAL POSSESSION
+
+There is a kind of hallucinations--namely, Phantasms of the Dead--about
+which it seems better to say nothing in this place. If such phantasms are
+seen by savages when awake, they will doubtless greatly corroborate that
+belief in the endurance of the soul after death, which is undeniably
+suggested to the early reasoner by the phenomena of dreaming. But, while
+it is easy enough to produce evidence to recognised phantasms of the dead
+in civilised life, it would be very difficult indeed to discover many good
+examples in what we know about savages. Some Fijian instances are given by
+Mr. Fison in his and Mr. Howitt's 'Kamilaroi and Kurnai,' Others occur in
+the narrative of John Tanner, a captive from childhood among the Red
+Indians. But the circumstance, already noted, that an Australian lad
+became a wizard on the strength of having seen a phantasm of his dead
+mother, proves that such experiences are not common; and Australian black
+fellows have admitted that they, for their part, never did see a ghost,
+but only heard of ghosts from their old men. Mr. David Leslie, previously
+cited, gives some first-hand Zulu evidence about a haunted wood, where the
+_Esemkofu_, or ghosts of persons killed by a tyrannical chief, were heard
+and felt by his native informant; the percipient was also pelted with
+stones, as by the European _Poltergeist_. The Zulu who dies commonly
+becomes an Ihlozi, and receives his share of sacrifice. The _Esemkofu_ on
+the other hand, are disturbed and haunting spirits[1].
+
+As a rule, so far as our information goes, it is not recognised phantasms
+of the dead, in waking vision, which corroborate the savage belief in the
+persistence of the spirit of the departed. The savage reasoner rather
+rests his faith on the alleged phenomena of noises and physical movements
+of objects apparently untouched, which cause so many houses in civilised
+society to be shut up, or shunned, as 'haunted.' Such disturbances the
+savage naturally ascribes to 'spirits.' Our evidence, therefore, for
+recognised phantasms of the savage dead is very meagre, so it is
+unnecessary to examine the much more copious civilised evidence. The facts
+attested may, of course, be theoretically explained as the result of
+telepathy from a mind no longer incarnate; and, were the evidence as
+copious as that for coincidental hallucinations of the living, or dying,
+it would be of extreme importance. But it is not so copious, and, granting
+even that it is accurate, various explanations not involving anything so
+distasteful to science as the action of a discarnate intelligence may be,
+and have been, put forward.
+
+We turn, therefore, from a theme in which civilised testimony is more
+bulky than that derived from savage life, to a topic in which savage
+evidence is much more full than modern civilised records. This topic is
+the so-called Demoniacal Possession.
+
+In the philosophy of Animism, and in the belief of many peoples, savage
+and civilised, spirits of the dead, or spirits at large, can take up their
+homes in the bodies of living men. Such men, or women, are spoken of as
+'inspired,' or 'possessed.' They speak in voices not their own, they act
+in a manner alien to their natural character, they are said to utter
+prophecies, and to display knowledge which they could not have normally
+acquired, and, in fact, do not consciously possess, in their normal
+condition. All these and similar phenomena the savage explains by the
+hypothesis that an alien spirit--perhaps a demon, perhaps a ghost, or a
+god--has taken possession of the patient. The possessed, being full of the
+spirit, delivers sermons, oracles, prophecies, and what the Americans call
+'inspirational addresses,' before he returns to his normal consciousness.
+Though many such prophets are conscious impostors, others are sincere. Dr.
+Mason mentions a prophet who became converted to Christianity. 'He could
+not account for his former exercises, but said that it certainly appeared
+to him as though a spirit spoke, and he must tell what it communicated.'
+Dr. Mason also gives the following anecdote:
+
+'...Another individual had a familiar spirit that he consulted and with
+which he conversed; but, on hearing the Gospel, he professed to become
+converted, and had no more communication with his spirit. It had left
+him, he said; it spoke to him no more. After a protracted trial I
+baptised him. I watched his case with interest, and for several years he
+led an unimpeachable Christian life; but, on losing his religious zeal,
+and disagreeing with some of the church members, he removed to a distant
+village, where he could not attend the services of the Sabbath, and it
+was soon after reported that he had communications with his familiar
+spirit again. I sent a native preacher to visit him. The man said
+he heard the voice which had conversed with him formerly, but it
+spoke very differently. Its language was exceedingly pleasant to
+hear, and produced great brokenness of heart. It said, "Love each
+other; act righteously--act uprightly," with other exhortations such us
+he had heard from the teachers. An assistant was placed in the village
+near him, when the spirit left him again; and ever since he has
+maintained the character of a consistent Christian.'[2]
+
+This anecdote illustrates what is called by spiritists 'change of
+control.' After receiving, and deserting, Christian doctrine, the patient
+again spoke unconsciously, but under the influence of the faith which he
+had abandoned. In the same way we shall find that a modern American
+'Medium,' after being for a time constantly in the society of educated
+and psychological observers, obtained new 'controls' of a character more
+urbane and civilised than her old 'familiar spirit.'[3]
+
+It is admitted that the possessed sometimes display an eloquence which
+they are incapable of in their normal condition.[4] In China, possessed
+women, who never composed a line of poetry in their normal lives, utter
+their thoughts in verse, and are said to give evidence of clairvoyant
+powers.[5]
+
+The book--_Demon Possession in China_--of Dr. Nevius, for forty years a
+missionary, was violently attacked by the medical journals of his native
+country, the United States. The doctor had the audacity to declare that he
+could find no better explanation of the phenomena than the theory of the
+Apostles--namely, that the patients were possessed. Not having the fear of
+man before his eyes, he also remarked that the current scientific
+explanations had the fault of not explaining anything.
+
+For example, 'Mr. Tylor intimates that all cases of supposed demoniacal
+possession are identical with hysteria, delirium, and mania, and
+suchlike bodily and mental derangements.' Dr. Nevius, however, gave what
+he conceived to be the notes of possession, and, in his diagnosis,
+distinguished them from hysteria (whatever that may mean), delirium, and
+mania. Nor can it honestly be denied that, if the special notes of
+possession actually exist, they do mark quite a distinct species of mental
+affection. Dr. Nevius then observed that, according to Mr. Tylor,
+'scientific physicians now explain the facts on a different principle,'
+but, says Dr. Nevius, 'we search in vain to discover what this principle
+is.'[6] Dr. Nevius, who had the courage of his opinions, then consulted a
+work styled 'Nervous Derangement,' by Dr. Hammond, a Professor in the
+Medical School of the University of New York.[7] He found this scientific
+physician admitting that we know very little about the matter. He knew,
+what is very gratifying, that 'mind is the result of nervous action,'
+and that so-called 'possession' is the result of 'material derangements of
+the organs or functions of the system.'
+
+Dr. Nevius was ready to admit this latter doctrine in cases of idiocy,
+insanity, epilepsy, and hysteria; but then, said he, these are not what I
+call possession. The Chinese have names for all these maladies, 'which
+they ascribe to physical causes,' but for possession they have a different
+name. He expected Dr. Hammond to account for the abnormal conditions in
+so-called possession, but 'he has hardly even attempted to do this.' Dr.
+Nevius next perused the works of Dr. Griesinger, Dr. Baelz, Professor
+William James, M. Ribot, and, generally, the literature of 'alternating
+personality.' He found Mr. James professing his conviction that the
+'alternating personality' (in popular phrase, the demon, or familiar
+spirit) of Mrs. Piper knew a great deal about things which Mrs. Piper, in
+her normal state, did not, and could not know. Thus, after consulting many
+physicians, Dr. Nevius was none the better, and came back to his faith in
+Diabolical Possession. He was therefore informed that he had written 'one
+of the most extraordinarily perverted books of the present day' on the
+evidence of 'transparent ghost stories'--which do not occur in his book.
+
+The attitude of Dr. Nevius cannot be called strictly scientific. Because
+pathologists and psychologists are unable to explain, or give the _modus_
+of a set of phenomena, it does not follow that the devil, or a god, or a
+ghost, is in it.
+
+But this, of course, was precisely the natural inference of savages.
+
+Dr. Nevius catalogues the symptoms of possession thus:
+
+1. The automatic, persistent and consistent acting out of a new
+personality, which calls himself _shieng_ (genius) and calls the patient
+_hiang to_ (incense burner, 'medium').
+
+2. Possession of knowledge and intellectual power not owned by the patient
+(in his normal state), nor explainable on the pathological hypothesis.
+
+3. Complete change of moral character in the patient.
+
+Of these notes, the second would, of course, most confirm the savage
+belief that a new intelligence had entered into the patient. If he
+displayed knowledge of the future, or of the remote, the inference that a
+novel and wiser intelligence had taken possession of the patient's body
+would be, to the savage, irresistible. But the more cautious modern, _even
+if he accepted the facts_, would be reduced to no such extreme conclusion.
+He would say that knowledge of the remote in space, or in the past, might
+be telepathically communicated to the brain of some living person; while,
+for knowledge of the future, he could fly, with Hartmann, to contact with
+the Absolute.
+
+But the question of evidence for the facts is, of course, the only real
+question. Now, in Dr. Nevius's book, this evidence rests almost entirely
+on the written reports of native Christian teachers, for the Chinese were
+strictly reticent when questioned by Europeans. 'My heathen brother, you
+have a sister who is a demoniac?' asks the intelligent European. The reply
+of the heathen brother is best left in the obscurity of a remarkably
+difficult and copious Oriental language. We are thus obliged to fall back
+on the reports of Mr. Leng and other native Christian teachers. They are
+perfectly modest and rational in style. We learn that Mrs. Sen, a lady in
+her normal state incapable of lyrical efforts, lisped in numbers in her
+secondary personality, and detected the circumstance that Mr. Leng was on
+his way to see her, when she could not have learned the fact in any normal
+way.[8] 'They are now crossing the stream, and will be here when the sun
+is about so high;' which was correct. The other witnesses were examined,
+and corroborated.[9] Dr. Nevius himself examined Mrs. Kwo, when possessed,
+talking in verse, and, physically, limp.[10]
+
+The narratives are of this type; the patient, on recovering consciousness,
+knows nothing of what has occurred; Christian prayers are often
+efficacious, and there are many anecdotes of movements of objects
+untouched.[11]
+
+By a happy accident, as this chapter was passing through the press, a
+scientific account of a demoniac and his cure was published by Dr. Pierre
+Janet.[12] Dr. Janet has explained, with complete success, everything in
+the matter of possession, except the facts which, in the opinion of Dr.
+Nevius, were in need of explanation. These facts did not occur in the case
+of the demoniac 'exorcised' by Dr. Janet. Thus the learned essay of that
+eminent authority would not have satisfied Dr. Nevius. The facts in which
+he was interested did not present themselves in Dr. Janet's patient, and
+so Dr. Janet does not explain them.
+
+The simplest plan, here, is to deny that the facts in which Dr. Nevius
+believes ever present themselves at all; but, if they ever do, Dr. Janet's
+explanation does not explain them.
+
+1. His patient, Achille, did _not_ act out a new personality.
+
+2. Achille displayed _no_ knowledge or intellectual power which he did not
+possess in his normal state.
+
+3. His moral character was _not_ completely changed; he was only more
+hypochondriacal and hysterical than usual.
+
+Achille was a poor devil of a French tradesman who, like Captain Booth,
+had infringed the laws of strict chastity and virtue. He brooded on this
+till he became deranged, and thought that Satan had him. He was convulsed,
+anaesthetic, suicidal, involuntarily blasphemous. He was not 'exorcised'
+by a prayer or by a command, but after a long course of mental and
+physical treatment. His cure does not explain the cures in which Dr.
+Nevius believed. His case did not present the features of which Dr.
+Nevius asked science for an explanation. Dr. Janet's essay is the
+_dernier cri_ of science, and leaves Dr. Nevius just where it found him.
+
+Science, therefore, can, and does, tell Dr. Nevius that his evidence for
+his facts is worthless, through the lips of Professor W. Romaine Newbold,
+in 'Proceedings, S.P.R.,' February 1898 (pp. 602-604). And the same
+number of the same periodical shows us Dr. Hodgson accepting facts similar
+to those of Dr. Nevius, and explaining them by--possession! (p. 406).
+
+Dr. Nevius's observations practically cover the whole field of
+'possession' in non-European peoples. But other examples from other areas
+are here included.
+
+A rather impressive example of possession may be selected from
+Livingstone's 'Missionary Travels' (p. 86). The adventurous Sebituane was
+harried by the Matabele in a new land of his choice. He thought of
+descending the Zambesi till he was in touch with white men; but Tlapane,
+'who held intercourse with gods,' turned his face west-wards. Tlapane used
+to retire, 'perhaps into some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric
+state' until the moon was full. Then he would return _en prophete_.
+'Stamping, leaping, and shouting in a peculiarly violent manner, or
+beating the ground with a club' (to summon those under earth), 'they
+induce a kind of fit, and while in it pretend that their utterances are
+unknown to themselves,' as they probably are, when the condition is
+genuine. Tlapane, after inducing the 'possessed' state, pointed east:
+'There, Sebituane, I behold a fire; shun it, it may scorch thee. The gods
+say, Go not thither!' Then, pointing west, he said, 'I see a city and a
+nation of black men, men of the water, their cattle are red, thine own
+tribe are perishing, thou wilt govern black men, spare thy future tribe.'
+
+So far, mere advice; then,
+
+'Thou, Ramosinii, thy village will perish utterly. If Mokari moves first
+from the village, he will perish first; and thou, Ramosinii, wilt be the
+last to die.'
+
+Then,
+
+  'Like some bold seer in a trance,
+  Seeing all his own mischance,'
+
+  'The gods have given other men water to drink, but to me they have given
+  bitter water. They call me away. I go.'[13]
+
+Tlapane died, Mokari died, Ramosinii died, their village was destroyed
+soon after, and so Sebituane wandered westward, not disobedient to the
+voice, was attacked by the Baloiana, conquered, and spared them.
+
+Such is 'possession' among savages. It is superfluous to multiply
+instances of this world-wide belief, so freely illustrated in the New
+Testament, and in trials for witchcraft. The scientific study of the
+phenomena, as Littre complained, 'had hardly been sketched' forty years
+ago. In the intervening years, psychologists and hypnotists have devoted
+much attention to the theme of these 'secondary personalities,' which
+Animism explains by the theory of possession. The explanations of modern
+philosophers differ, and it is not our business to discuss their
+physiological and pathological ideas.[14] Our affair is to ask whether, in
+the field of experience, there is any evidence that persons thus
+'possessed' really evince knowledge which they could not have acquired
+through normal channels? If such evidence exists, the facts would
+naturally strengthen the conviction that the possessed person was inspired
+by an intelligence not his own, that is, by a spirit. Now it is the firm
+conviction of several men of science that a certain Mrs. Piper, an
+American, does display, in her possessed condition, knowledge which
+she could not normally acquire. The case of this lady is precisely on a
+level with that of certain savage or barbaric seers. Thus: 'The Fijian
+priest sits looking steadily at a whale's tooth ornament, amid dead
+silence. In a few minutes he trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs
+come on, which increase to strong convulsions.... Now the god has
+entered.'[15]
+
+In China, 'the professional woman sits at a table in contemplation, till
+the soul of a deceased person from whom communication is desired enters
+her body and talks through her to the living....'[16]
+
+The latter account exactly describes Mrs. Piper. When consulted she passes
+through convulsions into a trance, after which she talks in a new voice,
+assumes a fresh personality, and affects to be possessed by the spirit of
+a French doctor (who does not know French)--Dr. Phinuit. She then displays
+a varying amount of knowledge of dead and living people connected with her
+clients, who are usually strangers, often introduced under feigned names.
+Mrs. Piper and her husband have been watched by detectives, and have not
+been discovered in any attempts to procure information. She was for some
+months in England under the charge of the S.P.R. Other ghosts, besides
+Dr. Phinuit, ghosts more civilised than he, now influence her, and her
+latest performances are said to exceed her former efforts.[17]
+
+Volumes of evidence about Mrs. Piper have been published by Dr. Hodgson,
+who unmasked Madame Blavatsky and Eusapia Paladino.[18] He was at first
+convinced that Mrs. Piper, in her condition of trance, obtains knowledge
+not otherwise and normally accessible to her. It was admitted that her
+familiar spirit guesses, attempts to extract information from the people
+who sit with her, and tries sophistically to conceal his failures. Here
+follow the statements of Professor James of Harvard.
+
+'The most convincing things said about my own immediate household were
+either very intimate or very trivial. Unfortunately the former things
+cannot well be published. Of the trivial things I have forgotten the
+greater number, but the following, _rarae nantes_, may serve as samples
+of their class. She said that we had lost recently a rug, and I a
+waistcoat. (She wrongly accused a person of stealing the rug, which was
+afterwards found in the house.) She told of my killing a grey-and-white
+cat with ether, and described how it had "spun round and round" before
+dying. She told how my New York aunt had written a letter to my wife,
+warning her against all mediums, and then went off on a most amusing
+criticism, full of _traits vifs_, of the excellent woman's character.
+(Of course, no one but my wife and I knew the existence of the letter in
+question.) She was strong on the events in our nursery, and gave striking
+advice during our first visit to her about the way to deal with certain
+"tantrums" of our second child--"little Billy-boy," as she called him,
+reproducing his nursery name. She told how the crib creaked at night, how
+a certain rocking-chair creaked mysteriously, how my wife had heard
+footsteps on a stair, &c. &c. Insignificant as these things sound when
+read, the accumulation of them has an irresistible effect; and I repeat
+again what I said before, that, taking everything that I know of Mrs.
+Piper into account, the result is to make me feel as absolutely certain as
+I am of any personal fact in the world that she knows things in her
+trances which she cannot possibly have heard in her waking state, and that
+the definitive philosophy of her trances is yet to be found. The
+limitations of her trance information, its discontinuity and fitfulness,
+and its apparent inability to develop beyond a certain point, although
+they end by arousing one's moral and human impatience with the phenomenon,
+yet are, from a scientific point of view, amongst its most interesting
+peculiarities, since where there are limits there are conditions, and the
+discovery of them is always the beginning of an explanation.
+
+'This is all I cam tell you of Mrs. Piper. I wish it were more
+"scientific." But _valcat quantum!_ it is the best I can do.'
+
+Elsewhere Mr. James writes:
+
+'Mr. Hodgson and others have made prolonged study of this lady's trances,
+and are all convinced that supernormal powers of cognition are displayed
+therein. They are, _prima facie_, due to "spirit control." But the
+conditions are so complex that a dogmatic decision either for or against
+the hypothesis must as yet be postponed.'[19]
+
+Again--
+
+'In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that
+knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of
+her eyes, ears, and wits.
+
+'The trances have broken down, for my own mind, the limits of the admitted
+order of nature.'
+
+M. Paul Bourget (who is not superstitious), after consulting Mrs. Piper,
+concludes:
+
+'L'esprit a des procedes de connaitre non soupconnes par notre
+analyse.'[20]
+
+In this treatise I may have shown 'the will to believe' in an unusual
+degree; but, for me, the interest of Mrs. Piper is purely anthropological.
+She exhibits a survival or recrudescence of savage phenomena, real or
+feigned, of convulsion and of secondary personality, and entertains a
+survival of the animistic explanation.
+
+Mrs. Piper's honesty and excellent character, in her normal condition, are
+vouched for by her friends and observers in England and America; nor do I
+impeach her normal character. But 'secondary personalities' have often
+more of Mr. Hyde than of Dr. Jekyll in their composition. It used to be
+admitted that, when 'possessed,' Mrs. Piper would cheat when she
+could--that is to say, she would make guesses, try to worm information out
+of her sitter, describe a friend of his, alive or dead, as 'Ed.,' who may
+be Edgar, Edmund, Edward, Edith, or anybody. She would shuffle, and repeat
+what she had picked up in a former sitting with the same person; and the
+vast majority of her answers started from vague references to probable
+facts (as that an elderly man is an orphan), and so worked on to more
+precise statements. Professor Macalister wrote:
+
+'She is quite wide-awake enough all through to profit by suggestions. I
+let her see a blotch of ink on my finger, and she said that I was a
+writer.... Except the guess about my sister Helen, who is alive, there was
+not a single guess which was nearly right. Mrs. Piper is not anaesthetic
+during the so-called trance, and if you ask my private opinion, it is that
+the whole thing is an imposture, and a poor one.'[21]
+
+Mr. Barkworth said that, as far as his experience went, 'Mrs. Piper's
+powers are of the ordinary thought-reading [i.e. muscle-reading] kind,
+dependent on her hold of the visitor's hand.' Each of these gentlemen had
+only one 'sitting.' M. Paul Bourget also informed me, in conversation,
+that Mrs. Piper held his hand while she told the melancholy tale connected
+with a key in his possession, and that she did not tell the story promptly
+and fluently, but very slowly and hesitatingly. Even so, he declared that
+he did not feel able to account for her performance.
+
+As these pages were passing through the press, Dr. Hodgson's last report
+on Mrs. Piper was published.[22] It is quite impossible, within the space
+allotted, to criticise this work. It would be necessary to examine
+minutely scores of statements, in which many facts are suppressed as too
+intimate, while others are remarkably incoherent. Dr. Hodgson deserves the
+praise of extraordinary patience and industry, displayed in the very
+distasteful task of watching an unfortunate lady in the vagaries of
+'trance.' His reasonings are perfectly calm, perfectly unimpassioned, and
+his bias has not hitherto seemed to make for credulity. We must, in fact,
+regard him as an expert in this branch of psychology. But he himself makes
+it clear that, in his opinion, no written reports can convey the
+impressions produced by several years of personal experience. The results
+of that experience he sums up in these words:
+
+'At the present time I cannot profess to have any doubt but that the chief
+"communicators" to whom I have referred in the foregoing pages are
+veritably the personalities that they claim to be, that they have survived
+the change we call death, and that they have directly communicated with
+us, whom we call living, through Mrs. Piper's entranced organism.'[23]
+
+This means that Dr. Hodgson, at present, in this case, accepts the
+hypothesis of 'possession' as understood by Maoris and Fijians, Chinese
+and Karens.
+
+The published reports do not produce on me any such impression. As a
+personal matter of opinion, I am convinced that those whom I have honoured
+in this life would no more avail themselves of Mrs. Piper's 'entranced
+organism' (if they had the chance) than I would voluntarily find myself in
+a 'sitting' with that lady. It is unnecessary to wax eloquent on this
+head; and the curious can consult the writings of Dr. Hodgson for
+themselves. Meanwhile we have only to notice that an American 'possessed'
+woman produces on a highly educated and sceptical modern intelligence
+the same impression as the Zulu 'possessed' produce on some Zulu
+intelligences.
+
+The Zulus admit 'possession' and divination, but are not the most
+credulous of mankind. The ordinary possessed person is usually consulted
+as to the disease of an absent patient. The inquirers do not assist the
+diviner by holding his hand, but are expected to smite the ground
+violently if the guess made by the diviner is right; gently if it is
+wrong. A sceptical Zulu, named John, having a shilling to expend on
+psychical research, smote violently at _every_ guess. The diviner was
+hopelessly puzzled; John kept his shilling, and laid it out on a much more
+meritorious exhibition of animated sticks.[24]
+
+Uguise gave Dr. Callaway an account of a female possessed person with
+whom Mrs. Piper could not compete. Her spirit spoke, not from her mouth,
+but from high in the roof. It gave forth a kind of questioning remarks
+which were always correct. It then reported correctly a number of singular
+circumstances, ordered some remedies for a diseased child, and offered to
+return the fee, if ample satisfaction was not given.[25]
+
+In China and Zululand, as in Mrs. Piper's case, the spirits are fond of
+diagnosing and prescribing for absent patients.
+
+A good example of savage possession is given in his travels by Captain
+Jonathan Carver (1763).
+
+Carver was waiting impatiently for the arrival of traders with provisions,
+near the Thousand Lakes. A priest, or jossakeed, offered to interview the
+Great Spirit, and obtain information. A large lodge was arranged, and the
+covering drawn up (which is unusual), so that what went on within might be
+observed. In the centre was a chest-shaped arrangement of stakes, so far
+apart from each other 'that whatever lay within them was readily to be
+discerned.' The tent was illuminated 'by a great number of torches.' The
+priest came in, and was first wrapped in an elk's skin, as Highland seers
+were wrapped in a black bull's hide. Forty yards of rope made of elk's
+hide were then coiled about him, till he 'was wound up like an Egyptian
+mummy.'
+
+I have elsewhere shown[26] that this custom of binding with bonds the seer
+who is to be inspired, existed in Graeco-Egyptian spiritualism, among
+Samoyeds, Eskimo, Canadian Hareskin Indians, and among Australian blacks.
+
+'The head, body, and limbs are wound round with stringy bark cords.'[27]
+This is an extraordinary range of diffusion of a ceremony apparently
+meaningless. Is the idea that, by loosing the bonds, the seer demonstrates
+the agency of spirits, after the manner of the Davenport Brothers?[28] But
+the Graeco-Egyptian medium did _not_ undo the swathings of linen, in which
+he was rolled, _like a mummy_. They had to be unswathed for him, by
+others.[29] Again, a dead body, among the Australians, is corded up tight,
+as soon as the breath is out of it, if it is to be buried, or before being
+exposed on a platform, if that is the custom.[30] Again, in the Highlands
+second-sight was thus acquired: the would-be seer 'must run a Tedder
+(tether) of Hair, _which bound a corpse to the Bier_, about his Middle
+from end to end,' and then look between his legs till he sees a funeral
+cross two marches.[31] The Greenland seer is bound 'with his head between
+his legs.'[32]
+
+Can it be possible, judging from Australia, Scotland, Egypt, that the
+binding, as of a corpse or mummy, is a symbolical way of putting the seer
+on a level with the dead, who will then communicate with him? In three
+remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to
+prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the
+seer is tied up--in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in
+North America, a bull's hide in the Highlands.
+
+Binding the seer is not a universal Red Indian custom; it seems to cease
+in Labrador, and elsewhere, southwards, where the prophet enters a magic
+lodge, unbound. Among the Narquapees, he sits cross-legged, and the lodge
+begins to answer questions by leaping about.[33] The Eskimo bounds, though
+he is tied up.
+
+It would be decisive, if we could find that, wherever the sorcerer is
+bound, the dead are bound also. I note the following examples, but the
+Creeks do not, I think, bind the magician.
+
+Among the Creeks,
+
+'The corpse is placed in a hole, with a blanket wrapped about it, and the
+legs bent under it _and tied together_.'[34] The dead Greenlanders were
+'wrapped and sewed up in their best deer-skins.'[35]
+
+Carver could only learn that, among the Indians he knew, dead bodies were
+'wrapped in skins;' that they were also swathed with cords he does not
+allege, but he was not permitted to see all the ceremonies.
+
+My theory is, at least, plausible, for this manner of burying the dead,
+tied tightly up, with the head between the legs (as in the practice of
+Scottish and Greenland seers), is very old and widely diffused. Ellis
+says, of the Tahitians, 'the body of the dead man was ... placed in a
+sitting posture, with the knees elevated, _the face pressed down between
+the knees_,... and the whole body tied with cord or cinet, wound repeatedly
+round.'[36]
+
+The binding may originally have been meant to keep the corpse, or ghost,
+from 'walking.' I do not know that Tahitian prophets were ever tied up, to
+await inspiration. But I submit that the frequency of the savage form of
+burial with the corpse tied up, or swathed, sometimes with the head
+between the legs; and the recurrence of the savage practice of similarly
+binding the sorcerer, probably points to a purpose of introducing the
+seer to the society of the dead. The custom, as applied to prophets, might
+survive, even where the burial rite had altered, or cannot be ascertained,
+and might survive, for corpses, where it had gone out of use, for seers.
+The Scotch used to justify their practice of putting the head between
+the knees when, bound with a corpse's hair tether, they learned to
+be second-sighted, by what Elijah did. The prophet, on the peak of
+Carmel, 'cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his
+knees.'[37] But the cases are not analogous. Elijah had been hearing a
+premonitory 'sound of abundance of rain' in a cloudless sky. He was
+probably engaged in prayer, not in prophecy.
+
+Kirk, by the way, notes that if the wind changes, while the Scottish seer
+is bound, he is in peril of his life. So children are told, in Scotland,
+that, if the wind changes while they are making faces, the grimace will be
+permanent. The seer will, in the same way, become what he pretends to be,
+a corpse.
+
+This desertion of Carver's tale may be pardoned for the curiosity of the
+topic. He goes on:
+
+'Being thus bound up like an Egyptian mummy' (Carver unconsciously making
+my point), 'the seer was lifted into the chest-like enclosure. I could now
+also discern him as plain as I had ever done, and I took care not to turn
+my eyes away a moment'--in which effort he probably failed.
+
+The priest now began to mutter, and finally spoke in a mixed jargon of
+scarcely intelligible dialects. He now yelled, prayed, and foamed at the
+mouth, till in about three quarters of an hour he was exhausted and
+speechless. 'But in an instant he sprang upon his feet, notwithstanding at
+the time he was put in it appeared impossible for him to move either his
+legs or arms, and shaking off his covering, as quick as if the bands with
+which it had been bound were burst asunder,' he prophesied. The Great
+Spirit did not say when the traders would arrive, but, just after high
+noon, next day, a canoe would arrive, and the people in it would tell when
+the traders were to appear.
+
+Next day, just after high noon, a canoe came round a point of land about a
+league away, and the men in it, who had met the traders, said they would
+come in two days, which they did. Carver, professing freedom from any
+tincture of credulity, leaves us 'to draw what conclusions we please.'
+
+The natural inference is 'private information,' about which the only
+difficulty is that Carver, who knew the topography and the chances of a
+secret messenger arriving to prompt the Jossakeed, does not allude to this
+theory.[38] He seems to think such successes not uncommon.
+
+All that psychology can teach anthropology, on this whole topic of
+'possession;' is that secondary or alternating personalities are facts
+_in rerum natura_, that the man or woman in one personality may have no
+conscious memory of what was done or said in the other, and that cases of
+knowledge said to be supernormally gained in the secondary state are worth
+inquiring about, if there be a chance of getting good evidence.
+
+A few fairly respectable savage instances are given in Dr. Gibier's 'Le
+Fakirisme Occidental' and in Mr. Manning's 'Old New Zealand;' but, while
+modern civilised parallels depend on the solitary case of Mrs. Piper (for
+no other case has been well observed), no affirmative conclusion can be
+drawn from Chinese, Maori, Zulu, or Red Indian practice.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Among the Zulus_, p. 120.]
+
+[Footnote 2:_ Burmah_, p. 107.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Hodgson, _Proceedings_, S.P.E., vol. xiii. pt. xxxiii. Dr.
+Hodgson by no means agrees with this view of the case--the case of Mrs.
+Piper.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 184.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Nevius's _Demon Possession in China_, a curious collection of
+examples by an American missionary. The reports of Catholic missionaries
+abound in cases.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Op. cit. p. 169.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Putnam, 1881.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Nevius, p. 33.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Ibid. p. 35.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Op. cit. p. 38.]
+
+[Footnote 11: See 'Fetishism and Spiritualism.']
+
+[Footnote 12: _Necroses et Idees Fixes_. Alcan, Paris, 1898. This is the
+first of a series of works connected with the Laboratoire de Psychologie,
+at the Salpetritere, in Paris.]
+
+[Footnote 13: 'Macleod shall return, but Macrimmon shall never!']
+
+[Footnote 14: See Ribot, _Les Maladies de la Personnalite,_; Bourru
+et Burot, _Variations de la Personnalite_; Janet, _L'Automatisme
+Psychologique_; James, _Principles of Psychology_; Myers, in _Proceedings_
+of S.P.R., 'The Mechanism of Genius,' 'The Subliminal Self.']
+
+[Footnote 15: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 133.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Doolittle's _Chinese_, i. 143; ii. 110, 320.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., pt. xxxiii.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., vi. 436-650; viii. 1-167; xiii.
+284-582].
+
+[Footnote 19: _The Will to Believe_, p. 814.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Figaro_, January 14, 1895.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Proceedings_, vi. 605, 606.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Proceedings_, S.P.R, part xxxiii. vol. xiii.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Op. cit. part xxxiii. p. 406.]
+
+[Footnote 24: See 'Fetishism.' Compare Callaway, p. 328.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Callaway, pp. 361-374.]
+
+[Footnote 26: _Cock Lane and Common Sense_, p. 66.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Brough Smyth, i. 475. This point is disputed, but I did not
+invent it, and a case appears in Mr. Curr's work on the natives.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Prim. Cult_. i. 152.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Eusebius, _Prap. Evang_. v. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Brough Smyth, i. 100, 113.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Kirk, _Secret Commonwealth_ 1691.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Crantz, p. 209.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Pere Arnaud, in Hind's _Labrador_, ii. 102.]
+
+[Footnote 34: Major Swan, 1791, official letter on the Creek Indians,
+Schoolcraft, v. 270.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Crantz, p. 237.]
+
+[Footnote 36: _Polynesian Researches_, i. 519.]
+
+[Footnote 37: 1 Kings xviii. 42.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Carver, pp. 123, 184.]
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FETISHISM AND SPIRITUALISM
+
+It has been shown how the doctrine of souls was developed according to the
+anthropological theory. The hypothesis as to how souls of the dead were
+later elevated to the rank of gods, or supplied models after which such
+gods might be inventively fashioned, will be criticised in a later
+chapter. Here it must suffice to say that the conception of a separable
+surviving soul of a dead man was not only not essential to the savage's
+idea of his supreme god, as it seems to me, but would have been wholly
+inconsistent with that conception. There exist, however, numerous forms of
+savage religion in addition to the creed in a Supreme Being, and these
+contribute their streams to the ocean of faith. Thus among the kinds of
+belief which served in the development of Polytheism, was Fetishism,
+itself an adaptation and extension of the idea of separable souls. In this
+regard, like ancestor-worship, it differs from the belief in a Supreme
+Being, which, as we shall try to demonstrate, is not derived from the
+theory of ghosts or souls at all.
+
+_Fetish_ (_fetiche_) seems to come from Portuguese _feitico_, a talisman
+or amulet, applied by the Portuguese to various material objects
+regarded by the negroes of the west coast with more or less of religious
+reverence. These objects may be held sacred in some degree for a number of
+incongruous reasons. They may be tokens, or may be of value in sympathetic
+magic, or merely _odd_, and therefore probably endowed with unknown mystic
+qualities. Or they may have been pointed out in a dream, or met in a
+lucky hour and associated with good fortune, or they may (like a tree with
+an unexplained stir in its branches, as reported by Kohl) have seemed to
+show signs of life by spontaneous movements; in fact, a thing may be what
+Europeans call a fetish for scores of reasons. For our present purpose, as
+Mr. Tylor says, 'to class an object as a fetish demands explicit statement
+that a spirit is considered as embodied in it, or acting through it, or
+communicating by it, or, at least, that the people it belongs to do
+habitually think this of such objects; or it must be shown that the object
+is treated as having personal consciousness or power, is talked with,
+worshipped...' and so forth. The in-dwelling spirit may be human, as when
+a fetish is made out of a friend's skull, the spirit in which may even be
+asked for oracles, like the Head of Bran in Welsh legend.
+
+We have tried to show that the belief in human souls may be, in part at
+least, based on supernormal phenomena which Materialism disregards. We
+shall now endeavour to make it probable that Fetishism (the belief in the
+souls tenanting inanimate objects) may also have sources which perhaps are
+not normal, or which at all events seemed supernormal to savages. We say
+'perhaps not normal' because the phenomena now to be discussed are of the
+most puzzling character. We may lean to the belief in a supernormal cause
+of certain hallucinations, but the alleged movements of inanimate objects
+which probably supply one origin of Fetishism, one suggestion of the
+presence of a spirit in things dead, leave the inquiring mind in
+perplexity. In following Mr. Tylor's discussion of the subject, it is
+necessary to combine what he says about Spiritualism in his fourth with
+what he says about Fetishism in his fourteenth and later chapters. For
+some reason his book is so arranged that he criticises 'Spiritualism'
+long before he puts forward his doctrine of the origin and development of
+the belief in spirits.
+
+We have seen a savage reason for supposing that human spirits inhabit
+certain lifeless things, such as skulls and other relics of the dead. But
+how did it come to be thought that a spirit dwelt in a lifeless and
+motionless piece of stone or stick? Mr. Tylor, perhaps, leads us to a
+plausible conjecture by writing: 'Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in
+Keeling Island, who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll:
+this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming
+inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively, like
+a table or a hat at a modern spirit seance.'[1] Now M. Lefebure has
+pointed out (in 'Melusine') that, according to De Brosses, the African
+conjurers gave an appearance of independent motion to small objects, which
+were then accepted as fetishes, being visibly animated. M. Lefebure
+next compares, like Mr. Tylor, the alleged physical phenomena of
+spiritualism, the flights and movements of inanimate objects apparently
+untouched.
+
+The question thus arises, Is there any truth whatever in these world-wide
+and world-old stories of inanimate objects acting like animated things?
+Has fetishism one of its origins in the actual field of supernormal
+experience in the X region? This question we do not propose to answer,
+as the evidence, though practically universal, may be said to rest on
+imposture and illusion. But we can, at least, give a sketch of the nature
+of the evidence, beginning with that as to the apparently _voluntary_
+movements of objects, _not_ untouched. Mr. Tylor quotes from John Bell's
+'Journey in Asia' (1719) an account of a Mongol Lama who wished to
+discover certain stolen pieces of damask. His method was to sit on a
+bench, when 'he carried it, or, as was commonly believed, it carried him,
+to the very tent' of the thief. Here the bench is innocently believed to
+be self-moving. Again, Mr. Rowley tells how in Manganjah the sorcerer, to
+find out a criminal, placed, with magical ceremonies, two staffs of wood
+in the hands of some young men. 'The sticks whirled and dragged the men
+round like mad,' and finally escaped and rolled to the feet of the
+wife of a chief, who was then denounced as the guilty person.[2]
+
+Mr. Duff Macdonald describes the same practice among the Yaos:[3]
+
+'The sorcerer occasionally makes men take hold of a stick, which, after a
+time, begins to move as if endowed with life, and ultimately carries them
+off bodily and with great speed to the house of the thief.'
+
+The process is just that of Jacques Aymard in the celebrated story of the
+detection of the Lyons murderer.[4]
+
+In Melanesia, far enough away, Dr. Codrington found a similar practice,
+and here the sticks are explicitly said by the natives to be moved by
+_spirits_.[5] The wizard and a friend hold a bamboo stick by each end, and
+ask what man's ghost is afflicting a patient. At the mention of the
+right ghost 'the stick becomes violently agitated.' In the same way, the
+bamboo 'would run about' with a man holding it only on the palms of his
+hands. Again, a hut is built with a partition down the middle. Men sit
+there with their hands _under_ one end of the bamboo, while the other end
+is extended into the empty half of the hut. They then call over the names
+of the recently dead, till 'they feel the bamboo moving in their hands.' A
+bamboo placed on a sacred tree, 'when the name of a ghost is called, moves
+of itself, and will lift and drag people about.' Put up into a tree, it
+would lift them from the ground. In other cases the holding of the sticks
+produces convulsions and trance.[6] The divining sticks of the Maori are
+also 'guided by spirits,'[7] and those of the Zulu sorcerers rise, fall,
+and jump about.[8]
+
+These Zulu performances must be really very curious. In the last chapter
+we told how a Zulu named John, having a shilling to lay out in the
+interests of psychical research, declined to pay a perplexed diviner, and
+reserved his capital far a more meritorious performance. He tried a medium
+named Unomantshintshi, who divined by Umabakula, or dancing sticks--
+
+'If they say "no," they fall suddenly; if they say "yes," they arise and
+jump about very much, and leap on the person who has come to inquire. They
+"fix themselves on the place where the sick man is affected; ... if the
+head, they leap on his head.... Many believe in Umabakula more than in the
+diviner. But there are not many who have the Umabakula."'
+
+Dr. Callaway's informant only knew two Umabakulists, John was quite
+satisfied, paid his shilling, and went home.[9]
+
+The sticks are about a foot long. It is not reported that they are moved
+by spirits, nor do they seem to be regarded as fetishes.
+
+Mr. Tylor also cites a form of the familiar pendulum experiment. Among the
+Karens a ring is suspended by a thread over a metal basin. The relations
+of the dead strike the basin, and when he who was dearest to the ghost
+touches it the spirit twists the thread till it breaks, and the ring falls
+into the basin. With us a ring is held by a thread over a tumbler, and our
+unconscious movements swing it till it strikes the hour. How the Karens
+manage it is less obvious. These savage devices with animated sticks
+clearly correspond to the more modern 'table-turning.' Here, when the
+players are honest, the pushing is certainly _unconscious_.
+
+I have tested this in two ways--first by trying the minimum of _conscious_
+muscular action that would stir a table at which I was alone, and by
+comparing the absolute unconsciousness of muscular action when the table
+began to move in response to no _voluntary_ push. Again, I tried with a
+friend, who said, 'You are pushing,' when I gently removed my hands
+altogether, though they seemed to rest on the table, which still revolved.
+My friend was himself unconsciously pushing. It is undeniable that, to
+a solitary experimenter, the table _seems_ to make little darts of its own
+will in a curious way. Thus, the unconsciousness of muscular action on the
+part of savages engaged in the experiment with sticks would lead them to
+believe that spirits were animating the wood. The same fallacy beset the
+table-turners of 1855-65, and was, to some extent, exposed by Faraday.
+Of course, savages would be even more convinced by the dancing spoon of
+Mr. Darwin's tale, by the dancing sticks of the Zulus, and the rest,
+whether the phenomena were supernormal or merely worked by unseen strings.
+The same remark applies to modern experimenters, when, as they declare,
+various objects move untouched, without physical contact.
+
+Still more analogous than turning tables to the savage use of inspired
+sticks for directing the inquirer to a lost object or to a criminal, is
+the modern employment of the divining-rod--a forked twig which, held by
+the ends, revolves in the hands of the performer when he reaches the
+object of his quest. He, like the savage cited, is occasionally agitated
+in a convulsive manner; and cases are quoted in which the twig writhes
+when held in a pair of tongs! The best-known modern treatise on the
+divining-rod is that of M. Chevreul, 'La Baguette Divinatoire' (1854). We
+have also 'L'Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes,' by M.
+Figuier (1860). In 1781 Thouvenel published his 600 experiments with
+Bleton and others; and Hegel refers to Amoretti's collection of hundreds
+of cases. The case of Jacques Aymard, who in the seventeenth century
+discovered a murderer by the use of the rod in true savage fashion, is
+well known. In modern England the rod is used in the interests of private
+individuals and public bodies (such as Trinity College, Cambridge) for the
+discovery of water.
+
+Professor Barrett has lately published a book of 280 pages, in which
+evidence of failures and successes is collected.[10] Professor Barrett
+gives about one hundred and fifty cases, in which he was only able to
+discover, on good authority, twelve failures. He gives a variety of tests
+calculated to check frauds and chance coincidence, and he publishes
+opinions, hostile or agnostic, by geologists. The evidence, as a general
+rule, is what is called first-hand in other inquiries. The actual
+spectators, and often the owners of the land, or the persons in whose
+interest water was wanted, having been present, give their testimony; and
+it is certain that the 'diviner' is called in by people of sense and
+education, commonly too practical to have a theory, and content with
+getting what they want, especially where scientific experts have
+failed.[11]
+
+In Mr. Barrett's opinion, the subconscious perception of indications of
+the presence of water produces an equally unconscious muscular 'spasm,'
+which twirls the rod till it often breaks. Yet 'it is almost impossible to
+imitate its characteristic movement by any voluntary effort.' I have
+myself held the hands of an amateur performer when the twig was moving,
+and neither by sight nor touch could I detect any muscular movement on his
+part, much less a spasm. The person was bailiff on a large estate, and,
+having accidentally discovered that he possessed the gift, used it when he
+wanted wells dug for the tenants on the property.
+
+The whole topic is obscure; nor am I concerned here with the successes or
+failures of the divining-rod. But the movements of the twig have never, to
+my knowledge, been attributed by modern English performers to the
+operation of spirits. They say 'electricity.' Mr. Tylor merely writes:
+
+'The action of the famous divining-rod, with its curiously versatile
+sensibility to water, ore, treasure, and thieves, seems to belong partly
+to trickery and partly to more or less conscious direction by honester
+operators.'
+
+As the divining-rod is the only instance in which automatism, whatever its
+nature and causes, has been found of practical value by practical men, and
+as it is obviously associated with a number of analogous phenomena, both
+in civilised and savage life, it certainly deserves the attention of
+science. But no advance will be made till scientifically trained inquirers
+themselves arrange and test a large number of experiments. Knowledge of
+the geological ignorance of the dowsers, examples of fraud on their part,
+and cases of failure or reported failure, with a general hostile bias, may
+prevent such experiments from being made by scientific experts on an
+adequate scale. Such experts ought, of course, to avoid working the
+dowsers into a state of irritation.
+
+It is just worth while to notice cases in which the rod acts like those of
+the Melanesians, Africans, and other savages. A Mr. Thomas Welton
+published an English translation of 'La Verge de Jacob' (Lyon, 1693). In
+1651 he asked his servant to bring into the garden 'a stick that stood
+behind the parlour door. In great terror she brought it to the garden, her
+hand firmly clutched on it, nor could she let it go.' When Mrs. Welton
+took the stick, 'it drew her with very considerable velocity to nearly the
+centre of the garden,' where a well was found. Mr. Welton is not likely to
+have known of the lately published savage examples. The coincidence with
+the African and Melanesian cases is, therefore, probably undesigned.
+
+Again, in 1694, the rod was used by le Pere Menestrier and others, just as
+it is by savages, to indicate by its movements answers to all sorts of
+questions. Experiments of this kind have not been made by Professor
+Barrett, and other modern inquirers, except by M. Richet, as a mode of
+detecting automatic action. But it would be just as sensible to use the
+twig as to use planchette or any other 'autoscopic' apparatus. If these
+elicit knowledge unconsciously present to the mind, mere water-finding
+ought not to be the sole province of the rod. In the same class as
+these rods is the forked twig which, in China, is held at each end by
+two persons, and made to write in the sand. The little apparatus called
+_planchette_, or the other, the _ouija_, is of course, consciously or
+unconsciously, pushed by the performers. In the case of the twig, as held
+by water-seekers, the difficulty of consciously moving it so as to
+escape close observation is considerable.
+
+In the case of the _ouija_ (a little tripod, which, under the operators'
+hands, runs about a table inscribed with letters at which it points), I
+have known curious successes to be achieved by amateurs. Thus, in the
+house of a lady who owned an old _chateau_ in another county, the _ouija_,
+operated on by two ladies known to myself, wrote a number of details about
+a visit paid to the _chateau_ for a certain purpose by Mary Stuart. That
+visit, and its object, a purely personal one, are unknown to history, and
+the _chateau_ is not spoken of in Mr. Hay Fleming's careful, but
+unavoidably incomplete, itinerary of the Queen's residence in Scotland.
+After the communication had been made, the owner of the _chateau_
+explained that she was already acquainted with the circumstances
+described, as she had recently read them in documents in her charter
+chest, where they remain.
+
+Of course, the belief we extend to such narratives is entirely conditioned
+by our knowledge of the personal character of the performers. The point
+here is merely the civilised and savage practice of _automatism_, the
+apparent eliciting of knowledge not otherwise accessible, by the
+movements of a stick, or a bit of wood. These movements, made without
+conscious exertion or direction, seem, to savage philosophy, to be caused
+by in-dwelling spirits, the sources of Fetishism.
+
+These examples, then, demonstrating unconscious movement of objects by the
+operators, make it clear that movements even of touched objects, may be
+attributed, by some civilised and by savage amateurs, to 'spirits.' The
+objects so moved may, by savages, be regarded in some cases as fetishes,
+and their movements may have helped to originate the belief that spirits
+can inhabit inanimate objects. When objects apparently quite untouched
+become volatile, the mystery is deeper. This apparent animation and
+frolicsome behaviour of inanimate objects is reported all through history,
+and attested by immense quantities of evidence of every degree. It would
+be tedious to give a full account of the antiquity and diffusion of reports
+about such occurrences. We find them among Neo-Platonists, in the English
+and Continental Middle Ages, among Eskimo, Hurons, Algonkins, Tartars,
+Zulus, Malays, Nasquapees, Maoris, in witch trials, in ancient Peru
+(immediately after the Spanish Conquest), in China, in modern Russia, in
+New England (1680), all through the career of modern spiritualism, in
+Hayti (where they are attributed to 'Obeah'), and, sporadically,
+everywhere.[12]
+
+Among all these cases, we must dismiss whatever the modern paid medium
+does in the dark. The only thing to be done with the ethnographic and
+modern accounts of such marvels is to 'file them for reference.' If a
+spontaneous example occurs, under proper inspection, we can then compare
+our old tales. Professor James says: 'Their mutual resemblances suggest a
+natural type, and I confess that till these records, or others like them,
+are positively explained away, I cannot feel (in spite of such vast
+amounts of detected frauds) as if the case of physical mediumship itself,
+as a freak of nature, were definitely closed.... So long as the stories
+multiply in various lands, and so few are positively explained away, it is
+bad method to ignore them.'[13] Here they are not ignored, because,
+whatever the cause or causes of the phenomena, they would buttress, if
+they did not originate, the savage belief in spirits tenanting inanimate
+matter, whence came Fetishism. As to facts, we cannot, of course, 'explain
+away' events of this kind, which we know only through report. A conjurer
+cannot explain a trick merely from a description, especially a description
+by a non-conjurer. But, as a rule, nothing so much leads to doubt on this
+theme as the 'explanation' given--except, of course, in the case of 'dark
+seances' got up and prepared by paid mediums. We know, sometimes, how the
+'explanation' arose.
+
+Thus, the house of a certain M. Zoller, a lawyer and member of the Swiss
+Federal Council, a house at Stans, in Unterwalden, was made simply
+uninhabitable in 1860-1862. The disturbances, including movements of
+objects, were of a truly odious description, and occurred in full
+daylight. M. Zoller, deeply attached to his home, which had many
+interesting associations with the part his family played in the struggle
+against revolutionary France, was obliged to abandon the place. He had
+made every conceivable sort of research, and had called in the local
+police and _savants_, to no purpose.
+
+But the affair was explained away thus: While the phenomena could still be
+concealed from public curiosity, a client called to see M. Zoller, who was
+out. The client, therefore, remained in the drawing-room. Loud and heavy
+blows resounded through the room. The client, as it chanced, had once felt
+the effects of an electric battery, for some medical reason, apparently.
+M. Zoller writes: 'My eldest son was present at the time, and, when my
+client asked whether there was such a thing as an electrical machine in
+the house (the family having been enjoined to keep the disturbances as
+secret as possible), he allowed S. to think that there was.' Consequently,
+the phenomena were set down to M. Zoller's singular idea of making
+his house untenantable with an 'electric machine'--which he did not
+possess.[14] A number of the most respected citizens, including the
+Superintendent of Police, and the chief magistrate for law, published a
+statement that neither Zoller, nor any of his family, nor any of
+themselves, produced or could have produced the phenomena witnessed by
+them in August 1862. This declaration they put forth in the 'Schwytzer
+Zeitung,' October 5, 1863.[15] No electric machine known to mortals
+could have produced the vast variety of alleged effects, none was ever
+found; and as M. Zoller changed his servants without escaping his
+tribulations, they can hardly be blamed for what, _prima facie_, it seems
+that they could not possibly do. However, 'electricity,' like Mesopotamia,
+is 'a blessed word.'[16]
+
+My own position in this matter of 'physical phenomena' is, I hope, clear.
+They interest me, for my present purpose, as being, whatever their real
+nature and origin, things which would suggest to a savage his theory of
+Fetishism. 'An inanimate object may be tenanted by a spirit, as is proved
+by its extraordinary movements.' Thus the early thinker might reason, and
+go on to revere the object. It is to be wished that competent observers
+would pay more attention to such savage practices as crystal-gazing and
+automatism as illustrated by the sticks of the Melanesians, Zulus, and
+Yaos. Our scanty information we pick up out of stray allusions, but
+it has the advantage of being uncontaminated by theory, the European
+spectator not knowing the wide range of such practices and their value in
+experimental psychology.
+
+We have now finished our study of the less normal and usual phenomena,
+which gave rise to belief in separable, self-existing, conscious, and
+powerful souls. We have shown that the supernormal factors which, when
+reflected on, probably supported this belief, are represented in civilised
+as well as in savage life, while as to their existence among the founders
+of religion we can historically know nothing at all. If we may infer from
+certain considerations, the supernormal experiences were possibly more
+prevalent among the remote ancestors of known savage races than among
+their modern descendants. We have suggested that clairvoyance, thought
+transference, and telepathy cannot be dismissed as mere fables, by a
+cautious inquirer, while even the far more obscure stories of 'physical
+manifestations' are but poorly explained away by those who cannot explain
+them.[17] Again, these faculties have presented--in the acquisition of
+otherwise unattainable knowledge, in coincidental hallucinations, and in
+other ways--just the kind of facts on which the savage doctrine of souls
+might be based, or by which it might be buttressed. Thus, while the
+actuality of the supernormal facts and faculties remains at least an open
+question, the prevalent theory of Materialism cannot be admitted as
+dogmatically certain in its present shape. No more than any other theory,
+nay, less than some other theories, can it account for the psychical facts
+which, at the lowest, we may not honestly leave out of the reckoning.
+
+We have therefore no more to say about the supernormal aspects of the
+origins of religion. We are henceforth concerned with matters of
+verifiable belief and practice. We have to ask whether, when once the
+doctrine of souls was conceived by early men, it took precisely the course
+of development usually indicated by anthropological science.
+
+[Footnote 1: Darwin, _Journal_, p. 458; Tylor, _Prim. Cult_. ii. 152. The
+spoon was not untouched.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Rowley, _Universities' Mission_, p. 217.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Africana_, vol. i. p. 161.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In the author's _Custom and Myth_, 'The Divining Rod.']
+
+[Footnote 5: Codrington's _Melanesia_, p. 210.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Op. cit. pp. 229-325.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Prim. Cult_. vol. i. p. 125.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Callaway, _Amazulu_, p. 330.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Callaway, _Amazulu_, p. 368.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _The So-called Divining-Rod_, S.P.R. 1897.]
+
+[Footnote 11: See especially _The Waterford Experiments_, p. 106.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Authorities and examples are collected in the author's _Cock
+Lane and Common Sense_.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Proceedings_, xii. 7, 8.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Personal Narrative_, by M. Zoller. Hanke, Zurich, 1863.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Daumer, _Reich des Wundersamen_, Regensburg, 1872,
+pp. 265, 266.]
+
+[Footnote 16: A criticism of modern explanations of the phenomena here
+touched upon will be found in Appendix B.]
+
+[Footnote 17: See Appendix B.]
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
+
+To the anthropological philosopher 'a plain man' would naturally put the
+question: 'Having got your idea of spirit or soul--your theory of
+Animism--out of the idea of ghosts, and having got your idea of ghosts out
+of dreams and visions, how do you get at the Idea of God?' Now by 'God'
+the proverbial 'plain man' of controversy means a primal eternal Being,
+author of all things, the father and friend of man, the invisible,
+omniscient guardian of morality.
+
+The usual though not invariable reply of the anthropologist might be given
+in the words of Mr. Im Thurn, author of a most interesting work on the
+Indians of British Guiana:
+
+'From the notion of ghosts,' says Mr. Im Thurn, 'a belief has arisen, but
+very gradually, in higher spirits, and eventually in a Highest Spirit,
+and, keeping pace with the growth of these beliefs, a habit of reverence
+for, and worship of spirits.... The Indians of Guiana know no God.'[1]
+
+As another example of Mr. Im Thurn's hypothesis that God is a late
+development from the idea of spirit may be cited Mr. Payne's learned
+'History of the New World,' a work of much research:[2]
+
+'The lowest savages not only have no gods, but do not even recognise those
+lower beings usually called spirits, the conception of which has
+invariably preceded that of gods in the human mind.'
+
+Mr. Payne here differs, _toto caelo_, from Mr. Tylor, who finds no
+sufficient proof for wholly non-religious savages, and from Roskoff, who
+has disposed of the arguments of Sir John Lubbock. Mr. Payne, then, for
+ethnological purposes, defines a god as 'a benevolent spirit, permanently
+embodied in some tangible object, usually an image, and to whom food,
+drink,' and so on, 'are regularly offered for the purpose of securing
+assistance in the affairs of life.'
+
+On this theory 'the lowest savages' are devoid of the idea of god or of
+spirit. Later they develop the idea of spirit, and when they have secured
+the spirit, as it were, in a tangible object, and kept it on board wages,
+then the spirit has attained to the dignity and the savage to the
+conception of a god. But while a god of this kind is, in Mr. Payne's
+opinion, relatively a late flower of culture, for the hunting races
+generally (with some exceptions) have no gods, yet 'the conception of a
+creator or maker of all things ... obviously a great spirit' is 'one of
+the earliest efforts of primitive logic.'[3]
+
+Mr. Payne's own logic is not very clear. The 'primitive logic' of the
+savage leads him to seek for a cause or maker of things, which he finds in
+a great creative spirit. Yet the lowest savages have no idea even of
+spirit, and the hunting races, as a rule, have no god. Does Mr. Payne mean
+that a great creative spirit is _not_ a god, while a spirit kept on board
+wages in a tangible object is a god? We are unable, by reason of evidence
+later to be given, to agree with Mr. Payne's view of the facts, while his
+reasoning appears somewhat inconsistent, the lowest savages having, in his
+opinion, no idea of spirit, though the idea of a creative spirit is, for
+all that, one of the earliest efforts of primitive logic.
+
+On any such theories as these the belief in a moral Supreme Being is a
+very late (or a very early?) result of evolution, due to the action of
+advancing thought upon the original conception of ghosts. This opinion of
+Mr. Im Thurn's is, roughly stated, the usual theory of anthropologists.
+We wish, on the other hand, to show that the idea of God, as he is
+conceived of by our inquiring plain man, is shadowed forth (among
+contradictory fables) in the lowest-known grades of savagery, and
+therefore cannot arise from the later speculation of men, comparatively
+civilised and advanced, on the original datum of ghosts. We shall
+demonstrate, contrary to the opinion of Mr. Spencer, Mr. Huxley, and even
+Mr. Tylor, that the Supreme Being, and, in one case at least, the casual
+sprites of savage faith, are active moral influences. What is even more
+important, we shall make it undeniable that Anthropology has simplified
+her problem by neglecting or ignoring her facts. While the real problem is
+to account for the evolution out of ghosts of the eternal, creative moral
+god of the 'plain man,' the germ of such a god or being in the creeds of
+the lowest savages is by anthropologists denied, or left out of sight, or
+accounted for by theories contradicted by facts, or, at best, is explained
+away as a result of European or Islamite influences. Now, as the problem
+is to account for the evolution of the highest conception of God, as far
+as that conception exists among the most backward races, the problem can
+never be solved while that highest conception of God is practically
+ignored.
+
+Thus, anthropologists, as a rule, in place of facing and solving their
+problem, have merely evaded it--doubtless unwittingly. This, of course, is
+not the practice of Mr. Tylor, though even his great work is professedly
+much more concerned with the development of the idea of spirit and with
+the lower forms of animism than with the real crux--the evolution of the
+idea (always obscured by mythology) of a moral, uncreated, undying God
+among the lowest savages. This negligence of anthropologists has arisen
+from a single circumstance. They take it for granted that God is always
+(except where the word for God is applied to a living human being)
+regarded as Spirit. Thus, having accounted for the development of the
+idea of spirit, they regard God as that idea carried to its highest
+power, and as the final step in its evolution. But, if we can show that
+the early idea of an undying, moral, creative being does not necessarily
+or logically imply the doctrine of spirit (or ghost), then this idea of an
+eternal, moral, creative being may have existed even before the doctrine
+of spirit was evolved.
+
+We may admit that Mr. Tylor's account of the process by which Gods were
+evolved out of ghosts is a little _touffu_--rather buried in facts. We
+'can scarcely see the wood for the trees.' We want to know how Gods,
+makers of things (or of most things), fathers in heaven, and friends,
+guardians of morality, seeing what is good or bad in the hearts of men,
+were evolved, as is supposed, out of ghosts or surviving souls of the
+dead. That such moral, practically omniscient Gods are known to the very
+lowest savages--Bushmen, Fuegians, Australians--we shall demonstrate.
+
+Here the inquirer must be careful not to adopt the common opinion that
+Gods improve, morally and otherwise, in direct ratio to the rising grades
+in the evolution of culture and civilisation. That is not necessarily the
+case; usually the reverse occurs. Still less must we take it for granted,
+following Mr. Tylor and Mr. Huxley, that the 'alliance [of religion and
+morality] belongs almost, or wholly, to religions above the savage
+level--not to the earlier and lower creeds;' or that 'among the Australian
+savages,' and 'in its simplest condition,' 'theology is wholly independent
+of ethics.'[4] These statements can be proved (by such evidence as
+anthropology is obliged to rely upon) to be erroneous. And, just because
+these statements are put forward, Anthropology has an easier task in
+explaining the origin of religion; while, just because these statements
+are incorrect, her conclusion, being deduced from premises so far false,
+is invalidated.
+
+Given souls, acquired by thinking on the lines already described, Mr.
+Tylor develops Gods out of them. But he is not one of the writers who is
+certain about every detail. He 'scarcely attempts to clear away the haze
+that covers great parts of the subject.'[5]
+
+The human soul, he says, has been the model on which man 'framed his
+ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports
+in the grass up to the heavenly creator and ruler of the world, the
+Great Spirit.' Here it is taken for granted that the Heavenly Ruler was
+from the first envisaged as a '_spiritual_ being'--which is just the
+difficulty. Was He?[6]
+
+The process of framing these ideas is rather obscure. The savage 'lives
+in terror of the souls of the dead as harmful spirits.' This might yield
+a Devil; it would not yield a God who 'makes for righteousness.'
+Happily, 'deified ancestors are regarded, on the whole, as kindly
+spirits.' The dead ancestor is 'now passed into a deity.'[7] Examples of
+ancestor-worship follow. But we are no nearer home. For among the Zulus
+many Amatongo (ancestral spirits) are sacred. 'Yet their father
+[i.e. the father of each actual family] is far before all others when
+they worship the Amatongo.... They do not know the ancients who are dead,
+nor their laud-giving names, nor their names.'[8] Thus, each new
+generation of Zulus must have a new first worshipful object--its own
+father's Itongo. This father, and his very name, are, in a generation or
+two, forgotten. The name of such a man, therefore, cannot survive as that
+of the God or Supreme Being from age to age; and, obviously, such a real
+dead man, while known at all, is much too well known to be taken for the
+creator and ruler of the world, despite some African flattering titles and
+superstitions about kings who control the weather. The Zulus, about
+as 'godless' a people as possible, have a mythical first ancestor,
+Unkulunkulu, but he is 'beyond the reach of rites,' and is a centre of
+myths rather than of worship or of moral ideas.[9]
+
+After other examples of ancestor-worship, Mr. Tylor branches off into a
+long discussion of the theory of 'possession' or inspiration,[10] which
+does not assist the argument at the present point. Thence he passes to
+fetishism (already discussed by us), and the transitions from the
+fetish--(1) to the idol; (2) to the guardian angel ('subliminal self');
+(3) to tree and river spirits, and local spirits which cause volcanoes;
+and (4) to polytheism. A fetish may inhabit a tree; trees being
+generalised, the fetish of one oak becomes the god of the forest. Or,
+again, fetishes rise into 'species gods;' the gods of _all_ bees, owls,
+or rabbits are thus evolved.
+
+Next,[11]
+
+'As chiefs and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser
+spirits.... With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric system of
+religion is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the
+spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe.'
+
+Very good; but whence comes the great God among tribes which have neither
+chief nor king and probably never had, as among the Fuegians, Bushmen, and
+Australians? The maker and ruler of the world known to _these_ races
+cannot be the shadow of king or chief, reflected and magnified on the mist
+of thought; for chief or king these peoples have none. This theory
+(Hume's) will not work where people have a great God but no king or
+chief; nor where they have a king but no Zeus or other supreme King-god,
+as (I conceive) among the Aztecs.
+
+We now reach, in Mr. Tylor's theory, great fetish deities, such as Heaven
+and Earth, Sun and Moon, and 'departmental deities,' gods of Agriculture,
+War, and so forth, unknown to low savages.
+
+Next Mr. Tylor introduces an important personage. 'The theory of family
+Manes, carried back to tribal Gods, leads to the recognition of superior
+deities of the nature of Divine Ancestor, or First Man,' who sometimes
+ranks as Lord of the Dead. As an instance, Mr. Tylor gives the Maori Maui,
+who, like the Indian Yama, trod first of men the path of death. But
+whether Maui and Yama are the Sun, or not, both Maori and Sanskrit
+religion regard these heroes as much later than the Original Gods. In
+Kamschatka the First Man is the 'son' of the Creator, and it is about the
+origin of the idea of the Creator, not of the First Man, that we are
+inquiring. Adam is called 'the son of God' in a Biblical genealogy, but,
+of course, Adam was made, not begotten. The case of the Zulu belief will
+be analysed later. On the whole, we cannot explain away the conception
+of the Creator as a form of the conception of an idealised divine
+First Ancestor, because the conception of a Creator occurs where
+ancestor-worship does not occur; and again, because, supposing that the
+idea of a Creator came first, and that ancestor-worship later grew more
+popular, the popular idea of Ancestor might be transferred to the waning
+idea of Creator. The Creator might be recognised as the First Ancestor,
+_apres coup_.
+
+Mr. Tylor next approaches Dualism, the idea of hostile Good and Bad
+Beings. We must, as he says, be careful to discount European teaching,
+still, he admits, the savage has this dualistic belief in a 'primitive'
+form. But the savage conception is not merely that of 'good = friendly
+to me,' 'bad = hostile to me.' Ethics, as we shall show, already come into
+play in his theology.
+
+Mr. Tylor arrives, at last, at the Supreme Being of savage creeds. His
+words, well weighed, must be cited textually--
+
+'To mark off the doctrines of monotheism, closer definition is required
+[than the bare idea of a Supreme Creator], assigning the distinctive
+attributes of Deity to none save the Almighty Creator. It may be declared
+that, in this strict sense, no savage tribe of monotheists has been ever
+known.[12] Nor are any fair representatives of the lower culture in a
+strict sense pantheists. The doctrine which they do widely hold, and
+which opens to them a course tending in one or other of these directions,
+is polytheism culminating in the rule of one supreme divinity. High above
+the doctrine of souls, of divine Manes, of local nature gods, of the great
+gods of class and element, there are to be discerned in barbaric theology,
+shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity,
+henceforth to be traced onward in expanding power and brightening glory
+along the history of Religion. It is no unimportant task, partial as it
+is, to select and group the typical data which show the nature and
+position of the doctrine of supremacy, as it comes into view within the
+lower culture.[13]
+
+We shall show that certain low savages are as monotheistic as some
+Christians. They have a Supreme Being, and the 'distinctive attributes of
+Deity' are not by them assigned to other beings, further than as
+Christianity assigns them to Angels, Saints, the Devil, and, strange as
+it appears, among savages, to mediating 'Sons.'
+
+It is not known that, among the Andamanese and other tribes, this last
+notion is due to missionary influence. But, in regard to the whole chapter
+of savage Supreme Beings, we must, as Mr. Tylor advises, keep watching for
+Christian and Islamite contamination. The savage notions, as Mr. Tylor
+says, even when thus contaminated, may have 'to some extent, a native
+substratum.' We shall select such savage examples of the idea of a
+Supreme Being as are attested by ancient native hymns, or are inculcated
+in the most sacred and secret savage institutions, the religious Mysteries
+(manifestly the last things to be touched by missionary influence), or are
+found among low insular races defended from European contact by the
+jealous ferocity and poisonous jungles of people and soil. We also note
+cases in which missionaries found such native names as 'Father,' 'Ancient
+of Heaven,' 'Maker of All,' ready-made to their hands.
+
+It is to be remarked that, while this branch of the inquiry is practically
+omitted by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Tylor can spare for it but some twenty pages
+out of his large work. He arranges the probable germs of the savage
+idea of a Supreme Being thus: A god of the polytheistic crowd is simply
+raised to the primacy, which, of course, cannot occur where there is no
+polytheism. Or the principle of Manes worship may make a Supreme Deity
+out of 'a primeval ancestor' say Unkulunkulu, who is so far from being
+supreme, that he is abject. Or, again, a great phenomenon or force in
+Nature-worship, say Sun, or Heaven, is raised to supremacy. Or speculative
+philosophy ascends from the Many to the One by trying to discern through
+and beyond the universe a First Cause. Animistic conceptions thus reach
+their utmost limit in the notion of the Anima Mundi. He may accumulate all
+powers of all polytheistic gods, or he may 'loom vast, shadowy, and
+calm ... too benevolent to need human worship ... too merely existent to
+concern himself with the petty race of men.'[14] But he is always
+animistic.
+
+Now, in addition to the objections already noted in passing, how can we
+tell that the Supreme Being of low savages was, in original conception,
+_animistic_ at all? How can we know that he was envisaged, originally, as
+_Spirit_? We shall show that he probably was not, that the question
+'spirit or not spirit' was not raised at all, that the Maker and Father in
+Heaven, prior to Death, was merely regarded as a deathless _Being_, no
+question of 'spirit' being raised. If so, Animism was not needed for
+the earliest idea of a moral Eternal. This hypothesis will be found to
+lead to some very singular conclusions.
+
+It will be more fully stated and illustrated, presently, but I find that
+it had already occurred to Dr. Brinton.[15] He is talking specially of a
+heaven-god; he says 'it came to pass that the idea of God was linked to
+the heavens _long ere man asked himself, Are the heavens material and God
+spiritual_?' Dr. Brinton, however, does not develop his idea, nor am I
+aware that it has been developed previously.
+
+The notion of a God about whose spirituality nobody has inquired is new to
+us. To ourselves, and doubtless or probably to barbarians on a certain
+level of culture, such a Divine Being _must_ be animistic, _must_ be a
+'spirit.' To take only one case, to which we shall return, the Banks
+Islanders (Melanesia) believe in ghosts, 'and in the existence of Beings
+who were not, and never had been, human. All alike might be called
+spirits,' says Dr. Codrington, but, _ex hypothesi_, the Beings 'who
+never were human' are only called 'spirits,' by us, because our habits of
+thought do not enable us to envisage them _except_ as 'spirits.' They
+never were men, 'the natives will always maintain that he (the _Vui_) was
+_something different_, and deny to him the fleshly body of a man,' while
+resolute that he was not a ghost.[16]
+
+This point will be amply illustrated later, as we study that strangely
+neglected chapter, that essential chapter, the Higher beliefs of the
+Lowest savages. Of the existence of a belief in a Supreme Being, not as
+merely 'alleged,' there is as good evidence as we possess for any fact in
+the ethnographic region.
+
+It is certain that savages, when first approached by curious travellers,
+and missionaries, have again and again recognised our God in theirs.
+
+The mythical details and fables about the savage God are, indeed,
+different; the ethical, benevolent, admonishing, rewarding, and creative
+aspects of the Gods are apt to be the same.[17]
+
+'There is no necessity for beginning to tell even the most degraded of
+these people of the existence of God, or of a future state, 'the facts
+being universally admitted.'[18]
+
+'Intelligent men among the Bakwains have scouted the idea of any of them
+ever having been without a tolerably clear conception of good and evil,
+God and the future state; Nothing we indicate as sin ever appeared to
+them as otherwise,' except polygamy, says Livingstone.
+
+Now we may agree with Mr. Tylor that modern theologians, familiar
+with savage creeds, will scarcely argue that 'they are direct or
+nearly direct products of revelation' (vol. ii. p. 356). But we may
+argue that, considering their nascent ethics (denied or minimised by many
+anthropologists) and the distance which separates the high gods of
+savagery from the ghosts out of which they are said to have sprung;
+considering too, that the relatively pure and lofty element which, _ex
+hypothesi_, is most recent in evolution, is also, _not_ the most honoured,
+but often just the reverse; remembering, above all, that we know nothing
+historically of the mental condition of the founders of religion, we may
+hesitate to accept the anthropological hypothesis _en masse_. At best
+it is conjectural, and the facts are such that opponents have more
+justification than is commonly admitted for regarding the bulk of
+savage religion as degenerate, or corrupted, from its own highest
+elements. I am by no means, as yet, arguing positively in favour of that
+hypothesis, but I see what its advocates mean, or ought to mean, and the
+strength of their position. Mr. Tylor, with his unique fairness, says
+'the degeneration theory, no doubt in some instances with justice, may
+claim such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remains of higher religion'
+(vol. ii. p. 336).
+
+I do not pretend to know how the lowest savages evolved the theory of a
+God who reads the heart and 'makes for righteousness,' It is as easy,
+almost, for me to believe that they 'were not left without a witness,'
+as to believe that this God of theirs was evolved out of the maleficent
+ghost of a dirty mischievous medicine-man.
+
+Here one may repeat that while the 'quaint or majestic foreshadowings'
+of a Supreme Being, among very low savages, are only sketched lightly
+by Mr. Tylor; in Mr. Herbert Spencer's system they seem to be almost
+omitted. In his 'Principles of Sociology' and 'Ecclesiastical
+Institutions' one looks in vain for an adequate notice; in vain for almost
+any notice, of this part of his topic. The watcher of conduct, the
+friendly, creative being of low savage faith, whence was he evolved? The
+circumstance of his existence, as far as I can see; the chastity, the
+unselfishness, the pitifulness, the loyalty to plighted word, the
+prohibition of even extra-tribal homicide, enjoined in various places on
+his worshippers, are problems that appear somehow to have escaped
+Mr. Spencer's notice. We are puzzled by endless difficulties in his
+system: for example as to how savages can forget their great-grandfathers'
+very names, and yet remember 'traditional persons from generation to
+generation,' so that 'in time any amount of expansion and idealisation can
+be reached,'[19]
+
+Again, Mr. Spencer will argue that it is a strange thing if 'primitive men
+had, as some think, the consciousness of a Universal Power whence they and
+all other things proceeded,' and yet 'spontaneously performed to that
+Power an act like that performed by them to the dead body of a fellow
+savage'--by offerings of food.[20]
+
+Now, first, there would be nothing strange in the matter if the crude idea
+of 'Universal Power' came _earliest_, and was superseded, in part, by a
+later propitiation of the dead and ghosts. The new religious idea would
+soon refract back on, and influence by its ritual, the older conception.
+And, secondly, it is precisely this 'Universal Power' that is _not_
+propitiated by offerings of food, in Tonga, (despite Mr. Huxley)
+Australia, and Africa, for example. We cannot escape the difficulty by
+saying that there the old ghost of Universal Power is regarded as dead,
+decrepit, or as a _roi-faineant_ not worth propitiating, for that is not
+true of the punisher of sin, the teacher of generosity, and the solitary
+sanction of faith between men and peoples.
+
+It would appear then, on the whole, that the question of the plain man to
+the anthropologist, 'Having got your idea of spirit into the savage's
+mind, how does he develop out of it what I call God?' has not been
+answered. God cannot be a reflection from human kings where there have
+been no kings; nor a president elected out of a polytheistic society of
+gods where there is as yet no polytheism; nor an ideal first ancestor
+where men do not worship their ancestors; while, again, the spirit of a
+man who died, real or ideal, does not answer to a common savage conception
+of the Creator. All this will become much more obvious as we study in
+detail the highest gods of the lowest races.
+
+Our study, of course, does not pretend to embrace the religion of all the
+savages in the world. We are content with typical, and, as a rule,
+well-observed examples. We range from the creeds of the most backward and
+worst-equipped nomad races, to those of peoples with an aristocracy,
+hereditary kings, houses and agriculture, ending with the Supreme Being of
+the highly civilised Incas, and with the Jehovah of the Hebrews.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Journal Anthrop. Inst._ xi. 874. We shall return to this
+passage.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Vol. i. p. 389, 1892.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Payne, i. 458.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult._ vol. ii. p. 381; _Science and Hebrew
+Tradition_, pp. 346, 372.]
+
+[Footnote 5:  _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. p. 109.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Ibid. vol. ii. p. 110.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid. vol. ii. p. 113.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 115, 116, citing Callaway and
+others.]
+
+[Footnote 9: The Zulu religion will be analysed later.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 130-144.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Ibid. vol. ii. p. 248.]
+
+[Footnote 12: And very few civilised populations, if any, are monotheistic
+in this sense.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 332, 333.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. pp. 335, 336.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Myths of the New World_, 1868, p. 47.]
+
+[Footnote 16: I observed this point in _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, while
+I did not see the implication, that the idea of 'spirit' was not
+necessarily present in the savage conception of the primal Beings,
+Creators, or Makers.]
+
+[Footnote 17: See one or two cases in _Prim. Cult_. vol. ii. p. 340.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Livingstone, speaking of the Bakwain, _Missionary Travels_,
+p. 168.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. p. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Op. cit. vol. i. p. 302.]
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+HIGH GODS OF LOW RACES
+
+To avoid misconception we must repeat the necessary cautions about
+accepting evidence as to high gods of low races. The missionary who does
+not see in every alien god a devil is apt to welcome traces of an original
+supernatural revelation, darkened by all peoples but the Jews. We shall
+not, however, rely much on missionary evidence, and, when we do, we must
+now be equally on our guard against the anthropological bias in the
+missionary himself. Having read Mr. Spencer and Mr. Tylor, and finding
+himself among ancestor-worshippers (as he sometimes does), he is apt to
+think that ancestor-worship explains any traces of a belief in the Supreme
+Being. Against each and every bias of observers we must be watchful.
+
+It may be needful, too, to point out once again another weak point in all
+reasoning about savage religion, namely that we cannot always tell what
+may have been borrowed from Europeans. Thus, the Fuegians, in 1830-1840,
+were far out of the way, but one tribe, near Magellan's Straits,
+worshipped an image called Cristo. Fitzroy attributes this obvious trace
+of Catholicism to a Captain Pelippa, who visited the district some time
+before his own expedition. It is less probable that Spaniards established
+a belief in a moral Deity in regions where they left no material traces of
+their faith. The Fuegians are not easily proselytised. 'When discovered by
+strangers, the instant impulse of a Fuegian family is to run off into the
+woods.' Occasionally they will emerge to barter, but 'sometimes nothing
+will induce a single individual of the family to appear.' Fitzroy thought
+they had no idea of a future state, because, among other reasons not
+given, 'the evil spirit torments them in _this_ world, if they do wrong,
+by storms, hail, snow, &c.' Why the evil spirit should punish evil deeds
+is not evident. 'A great black man is supposed to be always wandering
+about the woods and mountains, who is certain of knowing every word and
+every action, who cannot be escaped and who influences the weather
+according to men's conduct.'[1]
+
+There are no traces of propitiation by food, or sacrifice, or anything but
+conduct. To regard the Deity as 'a magnified non-natural man' is not
+peculiar to Fuegian theologians, and does not imply Animism, but the
+reverse. But the point is that this ethical judge of perhaps the lowest
+savages 'makes for righteousness' and searches the heart. His morality is
+so much above the ordinary savage standard that he regards the slaying of
+a stranger and an enemy, caught redhanded in robbery, as a sin. York's
+brother (York was a Fuegian brought to England by Fitzroy) killed a 'wild
+man' who was stealing his birds. 'Rain come down, snow come down, hail
+come down, wind blow, blow, very much blow. Very bad to kill man. Big man
+in woods no like it, he very angry.' Here be ethics in savage religion.
+The Sixth Commandment is in force. The Being also prohibits the slaying of
+flappers before they can fly. 'Very bad to shoot little duck, come wind,
+come rain, blow, very much blow.'[2]
+
+Now this big man is not a deified chief, for the Fuegians 'have no
+superiority of one over another ... but the doctor-wizard of each party has
+much influence.' Mr. Spencer disposes of this moral 'big man' of the
+Fuegians as 'evidently a deceased weather-doctor.'[3] But, first, there is
+no evidence that the being is regarded as ever having died. Again, it is
+not shown that Fuegians are ancestor-worshippers. Next, Fitzroy did not
+think that the Fuegians believed in a future life. Lastly, when were
+medicine-men such notable moralists? The worst spirits among the
+neighbouring Patagonians are those of dead medicine-men. As a rule
+everywhere the ghost of a 'doctor-wizard,' shaman, or whatever he may be
+called, is the worst and wickedest of all ghosts. How, then, the Fuegians,
+who are not proved to be ancestor-worshippers, evolved out of the
+malignant ghost of an ancestor a being whose strong point is morality, one
+does not easily conceive. The adjacent Chonos 'have great faith in a good
+spirit, whom they call Yerri Yuppon, and consider to be the author of all
+good; him they invoke in distress or danger.' However starved they do not
+touch food till a short prayer has been muttered over each portion, 'the
+praying man looking upward.'[4] They have magicians, but no details are
+given as to spirits or ghosts. If Fuegian and Chono religion is on this
+level, and if this be the earliest, then the theology of many other higher
+savages (as of the Zulus) is decidedly degenerate. 'The Bantu gives one
+accustomed to the negro the impression that he once had the same set of
+ideas, _but has forgotten half of them_,' says Miss Kingsley.[5]
+
+Of all races now extant, the Australians are probably lowest in culture,
+and, like the fauna of the continent, are nearest to the primitive
+model. They have neither metals, bows, pottery, agriculture, nor fixed
+habitations; and no traces of higher culture have anywhere been found
+above or in the soil of the continent. This is important, for in some
+respects their religious conceptions are so lofty that it would be natural
+to explain them as the result either of European influence, or as relics
+of a higher civilisation in the past. The former notion is discredited
+by the fact that their best religious ideas are imparted in connection
+with their ancient and secret mysteries, while for the second idea, that
+they are degenerate from a loftier civilisation, there is absolutely no
+evidence.
+
+It has been suggested, indeed, by Mr. Spencer that the singularly complex
+marriage customs of the Australian blacks point to a more polite condition
+in their past history. Of this stage, as we said, no material traces have
+ever been discovered, nor can degeneration be recent. Our earliest account
+of the Australians is that of Dampier, who visited New Holland in the
+unhappy year 1688. He found the natives 'the miserablest people in the
+world. The Hodmadods, of Mononamatapa, though a nasty people, yet for
+wealth are gentlemen to these: who have no houses, sheep, poultry, and
+fruits of the earth.... They have no houses, but lie in the open air.'
+Curiously enough, Dampier attests their _unselfishness_: the main ethical
+feature in their religious teaching. 'Be it little or be it much they get,
+every one has his part, as well the young and tender as the old and
+feeble, who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty.' Dampier
+saw no metals used, nor any bows, merely boomerangs ('wooden cutlasses'),
+and lances with points hardened in the fire. 'Their place of dwelling was
+only a fire with a few boughs before it' (the _gunyeh_).
+
+This description remains accurate for most of the unsophisticated
+Australian tribes, but Dampier appears only to have seen ichthyophagous
+coast blacks.
+
+There is one more important point. In the _Bora_, or Australian
+mysteries, at which knowledge of 'The Maker' and of his commandments is
+imparted, the front teeth of the initiated are still knocked out. Now,
+Dampier observed 'the two fore-teeth of their upper jaw are wanting in all
+of them, men and women, old and young.' If this is to be taken quite
+literally, the Bora rite, in 1688, must have included the women, at least
+locally. Dampier was on the north-west coast in latitude 16 degrees,
+longitude 122-1/4 degrees east (Dampier Land, West Australia). The natives
+had neither boats, canoes, nor bark logs; but it seems that they had their
+religious mysteries and their unselfishness, two hundred years ago.[6]
+
+The Australians have been very carefully studied by many observers, and
+the results entirely overthrow Mr. Huxley's bold statement that 'in its
+simplest condition, such as may be met with among the Australian savages,
+theology is a mere belief in the existence, powers, and dispositions
+(usually malignant) of ghost-like entities who may be propitiated or
+scared away; but no cult can properly be said to exist. And in this stage
+theology is wholly independent of ethics.'
+
+Remarks more crudely in defiance of known facts could not be made. The
+Australians, assuredly, believe in 'spirits,' often malicious, and
+probably in most cases regarded as ghosts of men. These aid the wizard,
+and occasionally inspire him. That these ghosts are _worshipped_ does not
+appear, and is denied by Waitz. Again, in the matter of cult, 'there is
+none' in the way of _sacrifice_ to higher gods, as there should be if
+these gods were hungry ghosts. The cult among the Australians is the
+keeping of certain 'laws,' expressed in moral teaching, supposed to be in
+conformity with the institutes of their God. Worship takes the form, as at
+Eleusis, of tribal mysteries, originally instituted, as at Eleusis, by
+the God. The young men are initiated with many ceremonies, some of which
+are cruel and farcical, but the initiation includes ethical instruction,
+in conformity with the supposed commands of a God who watches over
+conduct. As among ourselves, the ethical ideal, with its theological
+sanction, is probably rather above the moral standard of ordinary
+practice. What conclusion we should draw from these facts is uncertain,
+but the facts, at least, cannot be disputed, and precisely contradict the
+statement of Mr. Huxley. He was wholly in the wrong when he said: 'The
+moral code, such as is implied by public opinion, derives no sanction from
+theological dogmas,'[7] It reposes, for its origin and sanction, on such
+dogmas.
+
+The evidence as to Australian religion is abundant, and is being added to
+yearly. I shall here content myself with Mr. Howitt's accounts.[8]
+
+As regards the possible evolution of the Australian God from
+ancestor-worship, it must be noted that Mr. Howitt credits the groups with
+possessing 'headmen,' a kind of chiefs, whereas some inquirers, in Brough
+Smyth's collection, disbelieve in regular chiefs. Mr. Howitt writes:--
+
+'The Supreme Spirit, who is believed in by all the tribes I refer to here
+[in South-Eastern Australia], either as a benevolent, or more frequently
+as a malevolent being, it seems to me represents the defunct headman.'
+
+Now, the traces of 'headmanship' among the tribes are extremely faint; no
+such headman rules large areas of country, none is known to be worshipped
+after death, and the malevolence of the Supreme Spirit is not illustrated
+by the details of Mr. Howitt's own statement, but the reverse. Indeed, he
+goes on at once to remark that '_Darumulun_ was not, it seems to me,
+everywhere thought a malevolent being, but he was dreaded as one who could
+severely punish the trespasses committed against these tribal ordinances
+and customs whose first institution is ascribed to him.'
+
+To punish transgressions of his law is not the essence of a malevolent
+being. Darumulun 'watched the youths from the sky, prompt to punish, by
+disease or death, the breach of his ordinances,' moral or ritual. His name
+is too sacred to be spoken except in whispers, and the anthropologist will
+observe that the names of the human dead are also often tabooed. But the
+divine name is not thus tabooed and sacred when the mere folklore about
+him is narrated. The informants of Mr. Howitt instinctively distinguished
+between the mythology and the religion of Darumulun.[9] This distinction--
+the secrecy about the religion, the candour about the mythology--is
+essential, and accounts for our ignorance about the inner religious
+beliefs of early races. Mr. Howitt himself knew little till he was
+initiated. The grandfather of Mr. Howitt's friend, _before the white men
+came to Melbourne_, took him out at night, and, pointing to a star, said:
+'You will soon be a man; you see _Bunjil_ [Supreme Being of certain
+tribes] up there, and he can see you, and all you do down here.' Mr.
+Palmer, speaking of the Mysteries of Northern Australians (mysteries under
+divine sanction), mentions the nature of the moral instruction. Each lad
+is given, 'by one of the elders, advice so kindly, fatherly, and
+impressive, as often to soften the heart, and draw tears from the youth.'
+He is to avoid adultery, not to take advantage of a woman if he finds her
+alone, he is not to be quarrelsome.[10]
+
+At the Mysteries Darumulun's real name may be uttered, at other times he
+is 'Master' (_Biamban_) or 'Father' (_Papang_), exactly as we say 'Lord'
+and 'Father.'
+
+It is known that all these things are not due to missionaries, whose
+instructions would certainly not be conveyed in the _Bora_, or tribal
+mysteries, which, again, are partly described by Collins as early as 1798,
+and must have been practised in 1688. Mr. Howitt mentions, among moral
+lessons divinely sanctioned, respect for old age, abstinence from lawless
+love, and avoidance of the sins so popular, poetic, and sanctioned by the
+example of Gods, in classical Greece.[11] A representation is made of the
+Master, Biamban; and to make such idols, except at the Mysteries, is
+forbidden 'under pain of death.' Those which are made are destroyed as
+soon as the rites are ended.[12] The future life (apparently) is then
+illustrated by the burial of a living elder, who rises from a grave.
+This may, however, symbolise the 'new life' of the Mystae, 'Worse have I
+fled; better have I found,' as was sung in an Athenian rite. The whole
+result is, by what Mr. Howitt calls 'a quasi-religious element,' to
+'impress upon the mind of the youth, in an indelible manner, those rules
+of conduct which form the moral law of the tribe.'[13]
+
+Many other authorities could be adduced for the religious sanction of
+morals in Australia. A watchful being observes and rewards the conduct or
+men; he is named with reverence, if named at all; his abode is the
+heavens; he is the Master and Lord of things; his lessons 'soften the
+heart,'[14]
+
+  'What wants this Knave
+  That a _God_ should have?'
+
+I shall now demonstrate that the religion patronised by the Australian
+Supreme Being, and inculcated in his Mysteries, is actually used to
+counteract the immoral character which natives acquire by associating with
+Anglo-Saxon Christians.[15]
+
+Mr. Howitt[16] gives an account of the Jeraeil, or Mysteries of the
+Kurnai. The old men deemed that through intercourse with whites 'the lads
+had become selfish and no longer inclined to share that which they
+obtained by their own exertions, or had given them, with their friends.'
+One need not say that selflessness is the very essence of goodness, and
+the central moral doctrine of Christianity. So it is in the religious
+Mysteries of the African Yao; a selfish man, we shall see, is spoken of as
+'uninitiated.' So it is with the Australian Kurnai, whose mysteries and
+ethical teaching are under the sanction of their Supreme Being. So much
+for the anthropological dogma that early theology has no ethics.
+
+The Kurnai began by kneading the stomachs of the lads about to be
+initiated (that is, if they have been associating with Christians), to
+expel selfishness and greed. The chief rite, later, is to blindfold every
+lad, with a blanket closely drawn over his head, to make whirring sounds
+with the _tundun_, or Greek _rhombos_, then to pluck off the blankets, and
+bid the initiate raise their faces to the sky. The initiator points to it,
+calling out, 'Look there, look there, look there!' They have seen in this
+solemn way the home of the Supreme Being, 'Our Father,' Mungan-ngaur
+(Mungan = 'Father,' ngaur = 'our'), whose doctrine is then unfolded by the
+old initiator ('headman') 'in an impressive manner.'[17] 'Long ago there
+was a great Being, Mungan-ngaur, who lived on the earth.' His son Tundun
+is _direct ancestor_ of the Kurnai. Mungan initiated the rites, and
+destroyed earth by water when they were impiously revealed. 'Mungan left
+the earth, and ascended to the sky, where he still remains.'
+
+Here Mungan-ngaur, a Being not defined as spirit, but immortal, and
+dwelling in heaven, is Father, or rather grandfather, not maker,
+of the Kurnai. This _may_ be interpreted as ancestor-worship, but the
+opposite myth, of making or creating, is of frequent occurrence in many
+widely-severed Australian districts, and co-exists with evolutionary
+myths. Mungan-ngaur's precepts are:
+
+  1. _To listen to and obey the old men_.
+  2. _To share everything they have with their friends_.
+  3. _To live peaceably with their friends_.
+
+  4. _Not to interfere with girls or married women_.
+
+  5. _To obey the food restrictions until they are released from them by
+     the old men_.
+
+Mr. Howitt concludes: 'I venture to assert that it can no longer be
+maintained that the Australians have no belief which can be called
+religious, that is, in the sense of beliefs which govern tribal and
+individual morality under a supernatural sanction.' On this topic
+Mr. Hewitt's opinion became more affirmative the more deeply he was
+initiated.[18]
+
+The Australians are the lowest, most primitive savages, yet no
+propitiation by food is made to their moral Ruler, in heaven, as if he
+were a ghost.
+
+The laws of these Australian divine beings apply to ritual as well as to
+ethics, as might naturally be expected. But the moral element is
+conspicuous, the reverence is conspicuous: we have here no mere ghost,
+propitiated by food or sacrifice, or by purely magical rites. His very
+image (modelled on a large scale in earth) is no vulgar idol: to make such
+a thing, except on the rare sacred occasions, is a capital offence.
+Meanwhile the mythology of the God has often, in or out of the rites,
+nothing rational about it.
+
+On the whole it is evident that Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example,
+underrates the nature of Australian religion. He cites a case of
+addressing the ghost of a man recently dead, which is asked not to bring
+sickness, 'or make loud noises in the night,' and says: 'Here we may
+recognise the essential elements of a cult.' But Mr. Spencer does not
+allude to the much more essentially religious elements which he might have
+found in the very authority whom he cites, Mr. Brough Smyth.[19] This
+appears, as far as my scrutiny goes, to be Mr. Spencer's solitary
+reference to Australia in the work on 'Ecclesiastical Institutions.' Yet
+the facts which he and Mr. Huxley ignore throw a light very different from
+theirs on what they consider 'the simplest condition of theology.'
+
+Among the causes of confusion in thought upon religion, Mr. Tylor mentions
+'the partial and one-sided application of the historical method of inquiry
+into theological doctrines.'[20] Here, perhaps, we have examples. In its
+highest aspect that 'simplest theology' of Australia is free from the
+faults of popular theology in Greece. The God discourages sin, though, in
+myth, he is far from impeccable. He is almost too revered to be named
+(except in mythology) and is not to be represented by idols. He is not
+moved by sacrifice; he has not the chance; like Death in Greece, 'he only,
+of all Gods, loves not gifts.' Thus the status of theology does not
+correspond to what we look for in very low culture. It would scarcely be a
+paradox to say that the popular Zeus, or Ares, is degenerate from
+Mungan-ngaur, or the Fuegian being who forbids the slaying of an enemy,
+and almost literally 'marks the sparrow's fall.'
+
+If we knew all the mythology of Darumulun, we should probably find it
+(like much of the myth of Pundjel or Bunjil) on a very different level
+from the theology. There are two currents, the religious and the mythical,
+flowing together through religion. The former current, religious, even
+among very low savages, is pure from the magical ghost-propitiating habit.
+The latter current, mythological, is full of magic, mummery, and
+scandalous legend. Sometimes the latter stream quite pollutes the
+former, sometimes they flow side by side, perfectly distinguishable, as
+in Aztec ethical piety, compared with the bloody Aztec ritualism.
+Anthropology has mainly kept her eyes fixed on the impure stream, the
+lusts, mummeries, conjurings, and frauds of priesthoods, while relatively,
+or altogether, neglecting (as we have shown) what is honest and of good
+report.
+
+The worse side of religion is the less sacred, and therefore the more
+conspicuous. Both elements are found co-existing, in almost all races, and
+nobody, in our total lack of historical information about the beginnings,
+can say which, if either, element is the earlier, or which, if either, is
+derived from the other. To suppose that propitiation of corpses and then
+of ghosts came first is agreeable, and seems logical, to some writers
+who are not without a bias against all religion as an unscientific
+superstition. But we know so little! The first missionaries in Greenland
+supposed that there was not, there, a trace of belief in a Divine Being.
+'But when they came to understand their language better, they found quite
+the reverse to be true ... and not only so, but they could plainly gather
+from a free dialogue they had with some perfectly wild Greenlanders (at
+that time avoiding any direct application to their hearts) that their
+ancestors must have believed in a Supreme Being, and did render him some
+service, which their posterity neglected little by little...'[21] Mr.
+Tylor does not refer to this as a trace of Christian Scandinavian
+influence on the Eskimo.[22]
+
+That line, of course, may be taken. But an Eskimo said to a missionary,
+'Thou must not imagine that no Greenlander thinks about these things'
+(theology). He then stated the argument from design. 'Certainly there
+must be some Being who made all these things. He must be very good too...
+Ah, did I but know him, how I would love and honour him.' As St. Paul
+writes: 'That which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath
+showed it unto them ... being understood by the things which are made ...
+but they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was
+darkened.'[23] In fact, mythology submerged religion. St. Paul's theory of
+the origin of religion is not that of an 'innate idea,' nor of a direct
+revelation. People, he says, reached the belief in a God from the Argument
+for Design. Science conceives herself to have annihilated teleological
+ideas. But they are among the probable origins of religion, and would lead
+to the belief in a Creator, whom the Greenlander thought beneficent, and
+after whom he yearned. This is a very different initial step in religious
+development, if initial it was, from the feeding of a corpse, or a ghost.
+
+From all this evidence it does not appear how non-polytheistic,
+non-monarchical, non-Manes-worshipping savages evolved the idea of a
+relatively supreme, moral, and benevolent Creator, unborn, undying,
+watching men's lives. 'He can go everywhere, and do everything.'[24]
+
+[Footnote 1: Fitzroy, ii. 180. Darwin. _Descent of Man_, p. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Ibid. We seem to have little information about Fuegian
+religion either before or after the cruise of the _Beagle_.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Principles of Sociology_, i. 422.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Fitzroy, ii. 190, 191]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Travels in West Africa_, p. 442.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Early Voyages to Australia_, 102-111 (Hakluyt Society).]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 846.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Journal of the Anthrop. Institute_, 1884. See, for less
+dignified accounts, op. cit. xxiv. xxv.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Journal_, xiii. 193.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Journal_, xiii. 296.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Op. cit. p. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 12: P. 453.]
+
+[Footnote 13: P. 457.]
+
+[Footnote 14: See Brough Smyth, _Aborigines_, i. 426; Taplin, _Native
+Races of Australia_. According to Taplin, Nurrumdere was a deified black
+fellow, who died on earth. This is not the case of Baiame, but is said,
+rather vaguely, to be true of Daramulun. _J.A.I._, xiii. 194, xxv. 297.]
+
+[Footnote 15: From a brief account of the Fire Ceremony, or _Engwurra_ of
+certain tribes in Central Australia, it seems that religious ceremonies
+connected with Totems are the most notable performances. Also 'certain
+mythical ancestors,' of the '_alcheringa_, or dream-times,' were
+celebrated; these real or ideal human beings appear to 'sink their
+identity in that of the object with which they are associated, and from
+which they are supposed to have originated.' There appear also to be
+places haunted by 'spirit individuals,' in some way mixed up with Totems,
+but nothing is said of sacrifice to these Manes. The brief account is by
+Professor Baldwin Spencer and Mr. F.J. Gillen, _Proc. Royal Soc.
+Victoria_, July 1897. This Fire Ceremony is not for lads--not a kind of
+confirmation in the savage church--but is intended for adults.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _J. Anthrop. Inst_. 1886, p. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _J. Anthrop. Inst_. 1885, p. 313.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _J. Anthrop. Inst_. xiii. p. 459.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, p. 674.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 450.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Cranz, pp. 198, 199.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Journal Anthrop. Inst_. xiii. 348-356.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Rom. i. 19. Cranz, i. 199.]
+
+[Footnote 24: In Mr. Carr's work, _The Australian Race_, reports of
+'godless' natives are given, for instance, in the Mary River country and
+in Gippsland. These reports are usually the result of the ignorance or
+contempt of white observers, cf. Tylor, i. 419. The reader is referred to
+the Introduction for additional information about Australian beliefs, and
+for replies to objections.]
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+SUPREME GODS NOT NECESSARILY DEVELOPED OUT OF 'SPIRITS'
+
+Before going on to examine the high gods of other low savages, I must here
+again insist on and develop the theory, not easily conceived by us, that
+the Supreme Being of savages belongs to another branch of faith than
+ghosts, or ghost-gods, or fetishes, or Totems, and need not be--probably
+is not--essentially derived from these. We must try to get rid of our
+theory that a powerful, moral, eternal Being was, from the first, _ex
+officio_, conceived as 'spirit;' and so was necessarily derived from a
+ghost.
+
+First, what was the process of development?
+
+We have examined Mr. Tylor's theory. But, to take a practical case: Here
+are the Australians, roaming in small bands, without more formal rulers
+than 'headmen' at most; not ancestor worshippers; not polytheists; with
+no departmental deities to select and aggrandise; not apt to speculate on
+the _Anima Mundi_. How, then, did they bridge the gulf between the ghost
+of a soon-forgotten fighting man, and that conception of a Father above,
+'all-seeing,' moral, which, under various names, is found all over a huge
+continent? I cannot see that this problem has been solved or frankly
+faced.
+
+The distinction between the Australian deity, at his highest power,
+unpropitiated by sacrifice, and the ordinary, waning, easily forgotten,
+cheaply propitiated ghost of a tribesman, is essential. It is not easy to
+show how, in 'the dark backward' of Australian life, the notion of
+Mungan-ngaur grew from the idea of the ghost of a warrior. But there is no
+logical necessity for the belief in the evolution of this god out
+of that ghost. These two factors in religion--ghost and god--seem to
+have perfectly different sources, and it appears extraordinary that
+anthropologists have not (as far as I am aware) observed this circumstance
+before.
+
+Mr. Spencer, indeed, speaks frequently of living human beings adored as
+gods. I do not know that these are found on the lowest levels of savagery,
+and Mr. Jevons has pointed out that, before you can hail a man as a god,
+you must have the idea of God. The murder of Captain Cook notoriously
+resulted from a scientific experiment in theology. 'If he is a god, he
+cannot be killed.' So they tried with a dagger, and found that the honest
+captain was but a mortal British mariner--no god at all. 'There are
+degrees.' Mr. Spencer's men-gods become real gods--after death.[1]
+
+Now the Supreme Being of savage faith, as a rule, never died at all. He
+belonged to a world that knew not Death.
+
+One cause of our blindness to the point appears to be this: We have from
+childhood been taught that 'God is a Spirit.' We, now, can only conceive
+of an eternal being as a 'spirit.' We know that legions of savage gods are
+now regarded as spirits. And therefore we have never remarked that there
+is no reason why we should take it for granted that the earliest deities
+of the earliest men were supposed by them to be 'spirits' at all. These
+gods might most judiciously be spoken of, not as 'spirits,' but as
+'undefined eternal beings.' To us, such a being is necessarily a spirit,
+but he was by no means necessarily so to an early thinker, who may not
+yet have reached the conception of a ghost.
+
+A ghost is said, by anthropologists, to have developed into a god. Now,
+the very idea of a ghost (apart from a wraith or fetch) implies the
+previous _death_ of his proprietor. A ghost is the phantasm of a _dead_
+man. But anthropologists continually tell us, with truth, that the idea
+of death as a universal ordinance is unknown to the savage. Diseases and
+death are things that once did not exist, and that, normally, ought not to
+occur, the savage thinks. They are, in his opinion, supernormally caused
+by magicians and spirits. Death came into the world by a blunder, an
+accident, an error in ritual, a decision of a god who was before Death
+was. Scores of myths are told everywhere on this subject.[2]
+
+The savage Supreme Being, with added power, omniscience, and morality, is
+the idealisation of the savage, as conceived of by himself, _minus_
+fleshly body (as a rule), and _minus_ Death. He is not necessarily a
+'spirit,' though that term may now be applied to him. He was not
+originally differentiated as 'spirit' or 'not spirit.' He is a Being,
+conceived of without the question of 'spirit,' or 'no spirit' being
+raised; perhaps he was originally conceived of before that question could
+be raised by men. When we call the Supreme Being of savages a 'spirit' we
+introduce our own animistic ideas into a conception where it may not have
+originally existed. If the God is 'the savage himself raised to the n^th
+power' so much the less of a spirit is he. Mr. Matthew Arnold might as
+well have said: 'The British Philistine has no knowledge of God. He
+believes that the Creator is a magnified non-natural man, living in the
+sky.' The Gippsland or Fuegian or Blackfoot Supreme Being is just a
+_Being_, anthropomorphic, not a _mrart_, or 'spirit.' The Supreme Being is
+a _wesen_, Being, _Vui_; we have hardly a term for an immortal existence
+so undefined. If the being is an idealised first ancestor (as among the
+Kurnai), he is not, on that account, either man or ghost of man. In the
+original conception he is a powerful intelligence who was from the first:
+who was already active long before, by a breach of his laws, an error in
+the delivery of a message, a breach of ritual, or what not, death entered
+the world. He was not affected by the entry of death, he still exists.
+
+Modern minds need to become familiar with this indeterminate idea of the
+savage Supreme Being, which, logically, may be prior to the evolution of
+the notion of ghost or spirit.
+
+But how does it apply when, as by the Kurnai, the Supreme Being is
+reckoned an ancestor?
+
+It can very readily be shown that, when the Supreme Being of a savage
+people is thus the idealised First Ancestor, he can never have been
+envisaged by his worshippers as at any time a _ghost_; or, at least,
+cannot logically have been so envisaged where the nearly universal
+belief occurs that death came into the world by accident, or needlessly.
+
+Adam is the mythical first ancestor of the Hebrews, but he died, [Greek:
+uper moron], and was not worshipped. Yama, the first of Aryan men who
+died, was worshipped by Vedic Aryans, but _confessedly_ as a ghost-god.
+Mr. Tylor gives a list of first ancestors deified. The Ancestor of the
+Maudans did not die, consequently is no ghost; _emigravit_, he 'moved
+west.' Where the First Ancestor is also the Creator (Dog-rib Indians), he
+can hardly be, and is not, regarded as a mortal. Tamoi, of the Guaranis,
+was 'the ancient of heaven,' clearly no mortal man. The Maori Maui was the
+first who died, but he is not one of the original Maori gods. Haetsh,
+among the Kamchadals, precisely answers to Yama. Unkulunkulu will be
+described later.[3]
+
+This is the list: Where the First Ancestor is equivalent to the Creator,
+and is supreme, he is--from the first--deathless and immortal. When he
+dies he is a confessed ghost-god.
+
+Now, ghost-worship and dead ancestor-worship are impossible before the
+ancestor is dead and is a ghost. But the essential idea of Mungan-ngaur,
+and Baiame, and most of the high gods of Australia, and of other low
+races, is that _they never died at all_. They belong to the period before
+death came into the world, like Qat among the Melanesians. They arise in
+an age that knew not death, and had not reflected on phantasms nor evolved
+ghosts. They could have been conceived of, in the nature of the case, by a
+race of immortals who never dreamed of such a thing as a ghost. For these
+gods, the ghost-theory is not required, and is superfluous, even
+contradictory. The early thinkers who developed these beings did not need
+to know that men die (though, of course, they did know it in practice),
+still less did they need to have conceived by abstract speculation the
+hypothesis of ghosts. Baiame, Cagn, Bunjil, in their adorers' belief, were
+_there_; death later intruded among men, but did not affect these divine
+beings in any way.
+
+The ghost-theory, therefore, by the evidence of anthropology itself, is
+not needed for the evolution of the high gods of savages. It is only
+needed for the evolution of ghost-propitiation and genuine dead-ancestor
+worship. Therefore, the high gods described were not necessarily once
+ghosts--were not idealised _mortal_ ancestors. They were, naturally, from
+the beginning, from before the coming in of death, immortal Fathers, now
+dwelling on high. Between them and apotheosised mortal ancestors there is
+a great gulf fixed--the river of death.
+
+The explicitly stated distinction that the high creative gods never were
+mortal men, while other gods are spirits of mortal men, is made in every
+quarter. 'Ancestors _known_ to be human were _not_ worshipped as
+[original] gods, and ancestors worshipped as [original] gods were not
+believed to have been human.'[4]
+
+Both kinds may have a generic name, such as _kalou_, or _wakan_, but the
+specific distinction is universally made by low savages. On one hand,
+original gods; on the other, non-original gods that were once ghosts. Now,
+this distinction is often calmly ignored; whereas, when any race has
+developed (like late Scandinavians) the Euhemeristic hypothesis ('all gods
+were once men'), that hypothesis is accepted as an historical statement of
+fact by some writers.
+
+It is part of my theory that the more popular ghost-worship of souls of
+people whom men have loved, invaded the possibly older religion of the
+Supreme Father. Mighty beings, whether originally conceived of as
+'spirits' or not, came, later, under the Animistic theory, to be reckoned
+as spirits. They even (but not among the lowest savages) came to be
+propitiated by food and sacrifice. The alternative, for a Supreme Being,
+when once Animism prevailed, was sacrifice (as to more popular ghost
+deities) or neglect. We shall find examples of both alternatives. But
+sacrifice does not prove that a God was, in original conception, a ghost,
+or even a spirit. 'The common doctrine of the Old Testament is not that
+God is spirit, but that the spirit [_ruah_ = 'wind,' 'living breath'] of
+Jehovah, going forth from him, works in the world and among men.'[5]
+
+To resume. The high Gods of savagery--moral, all-seeing directors of
+things and of men--are not explicitly envisaged as spirits at all by their
+adorers. The notion of soul or spirit is here out of place. We can best
+describe Pirnmeheal, and Napi and Baiame as 'magnified non-natural men,'
+or undefined beings who were from the beginning and are undying. They are,
+like the easy Epicurean Gods, _nihil indiga nostri_. Not being ghosts,
+they crave no food from men, and receive no sacrifice, as do ghosts, or
+gods developed out of ghosts, or gods to whom the ghost-ritual has been
+transferred. For this very reason, apparently, they seem to be spoken of
+by Mr. Grant Allen as 'gods to talk about, not gods to adore; mythological
+conceptions rather than religious beings.'[6] All this is rather hard on
+the lowest savages. If they sacrifice to a god, then the god is a hungry
+ghost; if they don't, then the god is 'a god to talk about, not to adore,'
+Luckily, the facts of the Bora ritual and the instruction given there
+prove that Mungan-nganr and other names _are_ gods to adore, by ethical
+conformity to their will and by solemn ceremony, not merely gods to talk
+about.
+
+Thus, the highest element in the religion of the lowest savages does not
+appear to be derived from their theory of ghosts. As far as we can say, in
+the inevitable absence of historical evidence, the highest gods of savages
+may have been believed in, as Makers and Fathers and Lords of an
+indeterminate nature, before the savage had developed the idea of souls
+out of dreams and phantasms. It is logically conceivable that savages may
+have worshipped deities like Baiame and Darumulun before they had evolved
+the notion that Tom, Dick, or Harry has a separable soul, capable of
+surviving his bodily decease. Deities of the higher sort, by the very
+nature of savage reflections on death and on its non-original casual
+character, are prior, or may be prior, or cannot be shown not to be prior,
+to the ghost theory--the alleged origin of religion. For their evolution
+the ghost theory is not logically demanded; they can do without it. Yet
+_they_, and not the spirits, bogles, Mrarts, _Brewin_, and so forth, are
+the high gods, the gods who have most analogy--as makers, moral guides,
+rewarders, and punishers of conduct (though that duty is also occasionally
+assumed by ancestral spirits)--with our civilised conception of the
+divine. Our conception of God descends not from ghosts, but from the
+Supreme Beings of non-ancestor-worshipping peoples.
+
+As it seems impossible to point out any method by which low, chiefless,
+non-polytheistic, non-metaphysical savages (if any such there be) evolved
+out of ghosts the eternal beings who made the world, and watch over
+morality: as the people themselves unanimously distinguish such beings
+from ghost-gods, I take it that such beings never were ghosts. In this
+case the Animistic theory seems to me to break down completely. Yet these
+high gods of low savages preserve from dimmest ages of the meanest culture
+the sketch of a God which our highest religious thought can but fill up to
+its ideal. Come from what germ he may, Jehovah or Allah does not come from
+a ghost.
+
+It may be retorted that this makes no real difference. If savages did not
+invent gods in consequence of a fallacious belief in spirit and soul,
+still, in some other equally illogical way they came to indulge the
+hypothesis that they had a Judge and Father in heaven. But, if the ghost
+theory of the high Gods is wrong, as it is conspicuously superfluous, that
+_does_ make some difference. It proves that a widely preached scientific
+conclusion may be as spectral as Bathybius. On other more important
+points, therefore, we may differ from the newest scientific opinion
+without too much diffident apprehensiveness.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Principles of Sociology_, i. 417, 421. 'The medicine men
+are treated as gods.... The medicine man becomes a god after death.']
+
+[Footnote 2: I have published a chapter on Myths on the Origin of Death in
+_Modern Mythology_.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 311-316.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Jevons, _Introduction_, p. 197.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Robertson Smith. _The Prophets of Israel_, p. 61.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Evolution of the Idea of God_, p. 170.]
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+
+It is among 'the lowest savages' that the Supreme Beings are most regarded
+as eternal, moral (as the morality of the tribe goes, or above its
+habitual practice), and _powerful_. I have elsewhere described the Bushman
+god Cagn, as he was portrayed to Mr. Orpen by Qing, who 'had never
+before seen a white man except fighting.' Mr. Orpen got the facts from
+Qing by inducing him to explain the natives' pictures on the walls of
+caves. 'Cagn made all things, and we pray to him,' thus: 'O Cagn, O Cagn,
+are we not thy children? Do you not see us hunger? Give us food.' As to
+ethics, 'At first Cagn was very good, but he got spoilt through fighting
+so many things.' 'How came he into the world?' 'Perhaps with those who
+brought the Sun: only the initiated know these things.' It appears that
+Qing was not yet initiated in the dance (answering to a high rite of the
+Australian _Bora_) in which the most esoteric myths were unfolded.[1]
+
+In Mr. Spencer's 'Descriptive Sociology' the religion of the Bushmen is
+thus disposed of. 'Pray to an insect of the caterpillar kind for success
+in the chase.' That is rather meagre. They make arrow-poison out of
+caterpillars,[2] though Dr. Bleek, perhaps correctly, identifies Cagn
+with i-kaggen, the insect.
+
+The case of the Andaman Islanders may be especially recommended to
+believers in the anthropological science of religion. For long these
+natives were the joy of emancipated inquirers as the 'godless Andamanese.'
+They only supply Mr. Spencer's 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' with
+a few instances of the ghost-belief.[3] Yet when the Andamanese are
+scientifically studied _in situ_ by an educated Englishman, Mr. Man, who
+knows their language, has lived with them for eleven years, and presided
+over our benevolent efforts 'to reclaim them from their savage state,'
+the Andamanese turn out to be quite embarrassingly rich in the higher
+elements of faith. They have not only a profoundly philosophical
+_religion_, but an excessively absurd _mythology_, like the Australian
+blacks, the Greeks, and other peoples. If, on the whole, the student of
+the Andamanese despairs of the possibility of an ethnological theory of
+religion, he is hardly to be blamed.
+
+The people are probably Negritos, and probably 'the original inhabitants,
+whose occupation dates from prehistoric times.'[4] They use the bow, they
+make pots, and are considerably above the Australian level. They have
+second-sighted men, who obtain status 'by relating an extraordinary dream,
+the details of which are declared to have been borne out subsequently by
+some unforeseen event, as, for instance, a sudden death or accident.' They
+have to produce fresh evidential dreams from time to time. They see
+phantasms of the dead, and coincidental hallucinations.[5] All this is as
+we should expect it to be.
+
+Their religion is probably not due to missionaries, as they always shot
+all foreigners, and have no traditions of the presence of aliens on the
+islands before our recent arrival.[6] Their God, Puluga, is 'like fire,'
+but invisible. He was never born, and is immortal. By him were all things
+created, except the powers of evil. He knows even the thoughts of the
+heart. He is angered by _yubda_ = sin, or wrong-doing, that is falsehood,
+theft, grave assault, murder, adultery, bad carving of meat, and (as a
+crime of witchcraft) by burning wax.[7] 'To those in pain or distress he
+is pitiful, and sometimes deigns to afford relief.' He is Judge of Souls,
+and the dread of future punishment 'to _some_ extent is said to affect
+their course of action in the present life.'[8]
+
+This Being could not be evolved out of the ordinary ghost of a
+second-sighted man, for I do not find that ancestral ghosts are
+worshipped, nor is there a trace of early missionary influence, while
+Mr. Man consulted elderly and, in native religion, well-instructed
+Andamanese for his facts.
+
+Yet Puluga lives in a large stone house (clearly derived from ours at Port
+Blair), eats and drinks, foraging for himself, and is married to a green
+shrimp.[9] There is the usual story of a Deluge caused by the moral wrath
+of Puluga. The whole theology was scrupulously collected from natives
+unacquainted with other races.
+
+The account of Andamanese religion does not tally with the anthropological
+hypothesis. Foreign influence seems to be more than usually excluded by
+insular conditions and the jealousy of the 'original inhabitants.' The
+evidence ought to make us reflect on the extreme obscurity of the whole
+problem.
+
+Anthropological study of religion has hitherto almost entirely overlooked
+the mysteries of various races, except in so far as they confirm the entry
+of the young people into the ranks of the adult. Their esoteric moral and
+religious teaching is nearly unknown to us, save in a few instances. It is
+certain that the mysteries of Greece were survivals of savage ceremonies,
+because we know that they included specific savage rites, such as the use
+of the _rhombos_ to make a whirring noise, and the custom of ritual
+daubing with dirt; and the sacred _ballets d'action_, in which, as Lucian
+and Qing say, mystic facts are 'danced out.'[10] But, while Greece
+retained these relics of savagery, there was something taught at Eleusis
+which filled minds like Plato's and Pindar's with a happy religious awe.
+Now, similar 'softening of the heart' was the result of the teaching in
+the Australian _Bora_: the Yao mysteries inculcate the victory over self;
+and, till we are admitted to the secrets of all other savage mysteries
+throughout the world, we cannot tell whether, among mummeries,
+frivolities, and even license, high ethical doctrines are not presented
+under the sanction of religion. The New Life, and perhaps the future life,
+are undeniably indicated in the Australian mysteries by the simulated
+Resurrection.
+
+I would therefore no longer say, as in 1887, that the Hellenic genius must
+have added to 'an old medicine dance' all that the Eleusinian mysteries
+possessed of beauty, counsel, and consolation[11]. These elements, as well
+as the barbaric factors in the rites, may have been developed out of such
+savage doctrine as softens the hearts of Australians and Yaos. That this
+kind of doctrine receives religious sanction is certain, where we know the
+secret of savage mysteries. It is therefore quite incorrect, and strangely
+presumptuous, to deny, with almost all anthropologists, the alliance of
+ethics with religion among the most backward races. We must always
+remember their secrecy about their inner religion, their frankness about
+their mythological tales. These we know: the inner religion we ought to
+begin to recognise that we do not know.
+
+The case of the Andamanese has taught us how vague, even now, is our
+knowledge, and how obscure is our problem. The example of the Melanesians
+enforces these lessons. It is hard to bring the Melanesians within any
+theory. Dr. Codrington has made them the subject of a careful study, and
+reports that while the European inquirer can communicate pretty freely on
+common subjects 'the vocabulary of ordinary life in almost useless when
+the region of mysteries and superstitions is approached.'[12] The Banks
+Islanders are most free from an Asiatic element of population on one side,
+and a Polynesian element on the other.
+
+The Banks Islanders 'believe in two orders of intelligent beings different
+from living men.' (1) Ghosts of the dead, (2) 'Beings who were not, and
+never had been, human.' This, as we have shown, and will continue to show,
+is the usual savage doctrine. On the one hand are separable souls of men,
+surviving the death of the body. On the other are beings, creators,
+who were before men were, and before death entered the world. It is
+impossible, logically, to argue that these beings are only ghosts of real
+remote ancestors, or of ideal ancestors. These higher beings are not
+safely to be defined as 'spirits,' their essence is vague, and, we repeat,
+the idea of their existence might have been evolved _before the ghost
+theory was attained by men_. Dr. Codrington says, 'the conception can
+hardly be that of a purely spiritual being, yet, by whatever name the
+natives call them, they are such as in English must be called spirits.'
+
+That is our point. 'God is a spirit,' these beings are Gods, therefore
+'these are spirits.' But to their initial conception our idea of 'spirit'
+is lacking. They are beings who existed before death, and still exist.
+
+The beings which never were human, never died, are _Vui_, the ghosts are
+_Tamate_. Dr. Codrington uses 'ghosts' for _Tamate_, 'spirits' for _Vui_.
+But as to render _Vui_ 'spirits' is to yield the essential point, we shall
+call _Vui_ 'beings,' or, simply, _Vui_. A Vui is not a spirit that has
+been a ghost; the story may represent him as if a man, 'but the native
+will always maintain that he was something different, and deny to him the
+fleshly body of a man.'[13]
+
+This distinction, ghost on one side--original being, not a man, not a
+ghost of a man, on the other--is radical and nearly universal in savage
+religion. Anthropology, neglecting the essential distinction insisted on,
+in this case, by Dr. Codrington, confuses both kinds under the style of
+'spirits,' and derives both from ghosts of the dead. Dr. Codrington, it
+should be said, does not generalise, but confines himself to the savages
+of whom he has made a special study. But, from the other examples of the
+same distinction which we have offered, and the rest which we shall offer,
+we think ourselves justified in regarding the distinction between a
+primeval, eternal, being or beings, on one hand, and ghosts or spirits
+exalted from ghost's estate, on the other, as common, if not universal.
+
+There are corporeal and incorporeal Vuis, but the body of the corporeal
+Vui is '_not_ a human body.'[14] The chief is Qat, 'still at hand to help
+and invoked in prayers.' 'Qat, Marawa, look down upon me, smooth the sea
+for us two, that I may go safely over the sea!' Qat 'created men and
+animals,' though, in a certain district, he is claimed as an _ancestor_
+(p. 268). Two strata of belief have here been confused.
+
+The myth of Qat is a jungle of facetiae and frolic, with one or two
+serious incidents, such as the beginning of Death and the coming of Night.
+His mother was, or became, a stone; stones playing a considerable part in
+the superstitions.
+
+The incorporeal Vuis, 'with nothing like a human life, have a much higher
+place than Qat and his brothers in the religious system.' They have
+neither names, nor shapes, nor legends, they receive sacrifice, and are in
+some uncertain way connected with stones; these stones usually bear a
+fanciful resemblance to fruits or animals (p. 275). The only sacrifice, in
+Banks Islands, is that of shell-money. The mischievous spirits are Tamate,
+ghosts of men. There is a belief in _mana_ (magical _rapport_). Dr.
+Codrington cannot determine the connection of this belief with that in
+spirits. Mana is the uncanny, is X, the unknown. A revived impression of
+sense is _nunuai_, as when a tired fisher, half asleep at night, feels the
+'draw' of a salmon, and automatically strikes.[15] The common ghost is a
+bag of _nunuai_, as living man, in the opinion of some philosophers, is a
+bag of 'sensations.' Ghosts are only seen as spiritual lights, which so
+commonly attend hallucinations among the civilised. Except in the prayers
+to Qat and Marawa, prayer only invokes the dead (p. 285). 'In the western
+islands the offerings are made to ghosts, and consumed by fire; in the
+eastern (Banks) isles they are made to spirits (beings, _Vui_), and
+there is no sacrificial fire.' Now, the worship of ghosts goes, in these
+isles, with the higher culture, 'a more considerable advance in the arts
+of life;' the worship of non-ghosts, _Vui_, goes with the lower material
+culture.[16] This is rather the reverse of what we should expect, in
+accordance with the anthropological theory. According, however, to our
+theory, Animism and ghost-worship may be of later development, and belong
+to a higher level of culture, than worship of a being, or beings, that
+never were ghosts. In Leper's Isle, 'ghosts do not appear to have prayers
+or sacrifices offered to them,' but cause disease, and work magic.[17]
+
+The belief in the soul, in Melanesia, does _not_ appear to proceed 'from
+their dreams or visions in which deceased or absent persons are presented
+to them, for they do not appear to believe that the soul goes out from the
+dreamer, or presents itself as an object in his dreams,' nor does belief
+in other spirits seem to be founded on 'the appearance of life or motion
+in inanimate things.'[18]
+
+To myself it rather looks as if all impressions had their _nunuai_, real,
+bodiless, persistent, after-images; that the soul is the complex of all of
+these _nunuai_; that there is in the universe a kind of magical other,
+called _mana_, possessed, in different proportions, by different men,
+_Vui_, _tamate_, and material objects, and that the _atai_ or _ataro_ of a
+man dead, his ghost, retains its old, and acquires new _mana_.[19] It is an
+odd kind of metaphysic to find among very backward and isolated savages.
+But the lesson of Melanesia teaches us how very little we really know of
+the religion of low races, how complex it is, how hardly it can be forced
+into our theories, if we take it as given in our knowledge, allow for our
+ignorance, and are not content to select facts which suit our hypothesis,
+while ignoring the rest. On a higher level of material culture than the
+Melanesians are the Fijians.
+
+Fijian religion, as far as we understand, resembles the others in drawing
+an impassable line between ghosts and eternal gods. The word _Kalou_ is
+applied to all supernal beings, and mystic or magical things alike. It
+seems to answer to _mana_ in New Zealand and Melanesia, to _wakan_ in
+North America, and to _fee_ in old French, as when Perrault says, about
+Bluebeard's key, 'now the key was _fee_.' All Gods are _Kalou_, but all
+things that are _Kalou_ are not Gods. Gods are _Kalou vu_; deified ghosts
+are _Kalou yalo_. The former are eternal, without beginning of days or end
+of years; the latter are subject to infirmity and even to death.[20]
+
+The Supreme Being, if we can apply the term to him, is Ndengei, or Degei,
+'who seems to be an impersonation of the abstract idea of eternal
+existence.' This idea is not easily developed out of the conception of a
+human soul which has died into a ghost and may die again. His myth
+represents him as a serpent, emblem of eternity, or a body of stone with a
+serpent's head. His one manifestation is given by eating. So neglected is
+he that a song exists about his lack of worshippers and gifts. 'We made
+men,' says Ndengei, 'placed them on earth, and yet they share to us only
+the under shell.'[21] Here is an extreme case of the self-existent
+creative Eternal, mythically lodged in a serpent's body, and reduced to a
+jest.
+
+It is not easy to see any explanation, if we reject the hypothesis that
+this is an old, fallen form of faith, 'with scarcely a temple.' The other
+unborn immortals are mythical warriors and adulterers, like the popular
+deities of Greece. Yet Ndengei receives prayers through two sons of his,
+mediating deities. The priests are possessed, or inspired, by spirits and
+gods. One is not quite clear as to whether Ndengei is an inspiring god or
+not; but that prayers are made to him is inconsistent with the belief in
+his eternal inaction. A priest is represented as speaking for Ndengei,
+probably by inspiration. 'My own mind departs from me, and then, when it
+is truly gone, my god speaks by me,' is the account of this 'alternating
+personality' given by a priest.[22]
+
+After informing us that Ndengei is starved, Mr. Williams next tells about
+offerings to him, in earlier days, of hundreds of hogs.[23] He sends rain
+on earth. Animals, men, stones, may all be _Kalou_. There is a Hades as
+fantastic as that in the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead,' and second sight
+flourishes.
+
+The mysteries include the sham raising of the dead, and appear to be
+directed at propitiatory ghosts rather than at Ndengei. There are scenes
+of license; 'particulars of almost incredible indecency have been
+privately forwarded to Dr. Tylor.'[24]
+
+Suppose a religious reformer were to arise in one of the many savage
+tribes who, as we shall show, possess, but neglect, an Eternal Creator.
+He would do what, in the secular sphere, was done by the Mikado of Japan.
+The Mikado was a political Dendid or Ndengei--an awful, withdrawn,
+impotent potentate. Power was wielded by the Tycoon. A Mikado of genius
+asserted himself; hence arose modern Japan. In the same way, a religious
+reformer like Khuen Ahten in Egypt would preach down minor gods, ghosts
+and sacred beasts, and proclaim the primal Maker, Ndengei, Dendid, Mtanga.
+'The king shall hae his ain again.' Had it not been for the Prophets,
+Israel, by the time that Greece and Rome knew Israel, would have been
+worshipping a horde of little gods, and even beasts and ghosts, while the
+Eternal would have become a mere name--perhaps, like Ndengei and Atahocan
+and Unkulunkulu, a jest. The Old Testament is the story of the prolonged
+effort to keep Jehovah in His supreme place. To make and to succeed in
+that effort was the _differentia_, of Israel. Other peoples, even the
+lowest, had, as we prove, the germinal conception of a God--assuredly not
+demonstrated to be derived from the ghost theory, logically in no need of
+the ghost theory, everywhere explicitly contrasted with the ghost theory.
+'But their foolish heart was darkened.'
+
+It is impossible to prove, historically, which of the two main elements in
+belief--the idea of an Eternal Being or Beings, or the idea of surviving
+ghosts--came first into the minds of men. The idea of primeval Eternal
+Beings, as understood by savages, does not depend on, or require, the
+ghost theory. But, as we almost always find ghosts and a Supreme Being
+together, where we find either, among the lowest savages, we have no
+historical ground for asserting that either is prior to the other. Where
+we have no evidence to the belief in the Maker, we must not conclude that
+no such belief exists. Our knowledge is confused and scanty; often it is
+derived from men who do not know the native language, or the native sacred
+language, or have not been trusted with what the savage treasures as his
+secret. Moreover, if anywhere ghosts are found without gods, it is an
+inference from the argument that an idea familiar to very low savage
+tribes, like the Australians, and falling more and more into the
+background elsewhere, though still extant and traceable, might, in certain
+cases, be lost and forgotten altogether.
+
+To take an example of half-forgotten deity. Mr. Im Thurn, a good observer,
+has written on 'The Animism of the Indians of British Guiana.' Mr. Im
+Thurn justly says: 'The man who above all others has made this study
+possible is Mr. Tylor.' But it is not unfair to remark that Mr. Im Thurn
+naturally sees most distinctly that which Mr. Tylor has taught him to
+see--namely, Animism. He has also been persuaded, by Mr. Dorman, that the
+Great Spirit of North American tribes is 'almost certainly nothing more
+than a figure of European origin, reflected and transmitted almost beyond
+recognition on the mirror of the Indian mind,' That is not my opinion: I
+conceive that the Red Indians had their native Eternal, like the
+Australians, Fijians, Andamanese, Dinkas, Yao, and so forth, as will be
+shown later.
+
+Mr. Im Thurn, however, dilates on the dream origin of the ghost theory,
+giving examples from his own knowledge of the difficulty with which Guiana
+Indians discern the hallucinations of dreams from the facts of waking
+life. Their waking hallucinations are also so vivid as to be taken for
+realities.[25] Mr. Im Thurn adopts the hypothesis that, from ghosts, 'a
+belief has arisen, but very gradually, in higher spirits, and, eventually,
+in a Highest Spirit; and, keeping pace with the growth of these beliefs,
+a habit of reverence for and worship of spirits.' On this hypothesis,
+the spirit latest evolved, and most worshipful, ought, of course, to be
+the 'Highest Spirit.' But the reverse, as usual, is the case. The Guiana
+Indians believe in the continued, but not in the everlasting, existence of
+a man's ghost.[26] They believe in no spirits which were not once tenants
+of material bodies.[27]
+
+The belief in a Supreme Spirit is only attained 'in the highest form of
+religion'--Andamanese, for instance--as Mr. Im Thurn uses 'spirit' where
+we should say 'being.' 'The Indians of Guiana know no god.'[28]
+
+'But it is true that various words have been found in all, or nearly all,
+the languages of Guiana which have been supposed to be names of a Supreme
+Being, God, a Great Spirit, in the sense which those phrases bear in the
+language of the higher religions.'
+
+Being interpreted, these Guiana names mean--
+
+  _The Ancient One,
+  The Ancient One in Sky-land,
+  Our Maker,
+  Our Father,
+  Our Great Father._
+
+'None of those in any way involves the attributes of a god.'
+
+The Ancient of Days, Our Father in Sky-land, Our Maker, do rather convoy
+the sense of God to a European mind. Mr. Im Thurn, however, decides that
+the beings thus designated were supposed ancestors who came into Guiana
+from some other country, 'sometimes said to have been that entirely
+natural country (?) which is separated from Guiana by the ocean of the
+air.'[29]
+
+Mr. Im Thurn casually observed (having said nothing about morals in
+alliance with Animism):
+
+'The fear of unwittingly offending the countless visible and invisible
+beings ... kept the Indians very strictly within their own rights and from
+offending against the rights of others.'
+
+This remark dropped out at a discussion of Mr. Im Thurn's paper, and
+clearly demonstrated that even a very low creed 'makes for
+righteousness.'[30]
+
+Probably few who have followed the facts given here will agree with Mr. Im
+Thurn's theory that 'Our Maker,' 'Our Father,' 'The Ancient One of the
+Heaven,' is merely an idealised human ancestor. He falls naturally into
+his place with the other high gods of low savages. But we need much more
+information on the subject than Mr. Im Thurn was able to give.
+
+His evidence is all the better, because he is a loyal follower of Mr.
+Tylor. And Mr. Tylor says: 'Savage Animism is almost devoid of that
+ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring
+of practical religion.'[31] 'Yet it keeps the Indians very strictly
+within their own rights and from offending the rights of others.' Our own
+religion is rarely so successful.[32]
+
+In the Indians of Guiana we have an alleged case of a people still deep in
+the animistic or ghost-worshipping case, who, by the hypothesis, have not
+yet evolved the idea of a god at all.
+
+When the familiar names for God, such as Maker, Father, Ancient of Days,
+occur in the Indian language, Mr. Im Thurn explains the neglected Being
+who bears these titles as a remote deified ancestor. Of course, when a
+Being with similar titles occurs where ancestors are not worshipped, as in
+Australia and the Andaman Islands, the explanation suggested by Mr. Im
+Thurn for the problem of religion in Guiana, will not fit the facts.
+
+It is plain that, _a priori_, another explanation is conceivable. If a
+people like the Andamanese, or the Australian tribes whom we have studied,
+had such a conception as that of Puluga, or Baiame, or Mungan-ngaur and
+then, _later_, developed ancestor-worship with its propitiatory sacrifices
+and ceremonies, ancestor-worship, as the newest evolved and infinitely the
+most practical form of cult, would gradually thrust the belief in a
+Puluga, or Mungan-ngaur, or Cagn into the shade. The ancestral spirit, to
+speak quite plainly, can be 'squared' by the people in whom he takes a
+special interest for family reasons. The equal Father of all men cannot
+be 'squared,' and declines (till corrupted by the bad example of ancestral
+ghosts) to make himself useful to one man rather than to another. For
+these very intelligible, simple, and practical reasons, if the belief in
+a Mungan-ngaur came first in evolution, and the belief in a practicable
+bribable family ghost came second, the ghost-cult would inevitably crowd
+out the God-cult.[33] The name of the Father and Maker would become a
+mere survival, _nominis umbra_, worship and sacrifice going to the
+ancestral ghost. That explanation would fit the state of religion which
+Mr. Im Thurn has found, rightly or wrongly, in British Guiana.
+
+But, if the idea of a universal Father and Maker came last in evolution,
+as a refinement, then, of course, it ought to be the newest, and therefore
+the most fashionable and potent of Guianese cults. Precisely the reverse
+is said to be the case. Nor can the belief indicated in such names
+as Father and Maker be satisfactorily explained as a refinement of
+ancestor-worship, because, we repeat, it occurs where ancestors are not
+worshipped.
+
+These considerations, however unpleasant to the devotees of Animism, or
+the ghost theory, are not, in themselves, illogical, nor contradictory of
+the theory of evolution, which, on the other hand, fits them perfectly
+well. That god thrives best who is most suited to his environment. Whether
+an easy-going, hungry ghost-god with a liking for his family, or a moral
+Creator not to be bribed, is better suited to an environment of not
+especially scrupulous savages, any man can decide. Whether a set of not
+particularly scrupulous savages will readily evolve a moral unbribable
+Creator, when they have a serviceable family ghost-god eager to oblige, is
+a question as easily resolved.
+
+Beyond all doubt, savages who find themselves under the watchful eye of a
+moral deity whom they cannot 'square' will desert him as soon as they have
+evolved a practicable ghost-god, useful for family purposes, whom they
+_can_ square. No less manifestly, savages, who already possess a throng of
+serviceable ghost-gods, will not enthusiastically evolve a moral Being who
+despises gifts, and only cares for obedience. 'There is a great deal of
+human nature in man,' and, if Mr. Im Thurn's description of the Guianese
+be correct, everything we know of human nature, and of evolution, assures
+us that the Father, or Maker, or Ancient of Days came first; the
+ghost-gods, last. What has here been said about the Indians of Guiana
+(namely, that they are now more ghost and spirit worshippers, with only a
+name surviving to attest a knowledge of a Father and Maker in Heaven)
+applies equally well to the Zulus. The Zulus are the great standing type
+of an animistic or ghost-worshipping race without a God. But, had they a
+God (on the Australian pattern) whom they have forgotten, or have they not
+yet evolved a God out of Animism?
+
+The evidence, collected by Dr. Callaway, is honest, but confused. One
+native, among others, put forward the very theory here proposed by us as
+an alternative to that of Mr. Im Thurn. 'Unkulunkulu' (the idealised but
+despised First Ancestor) 'was not worshipped [by men]. For it is not
+worship when people see things, as rain, or food, or corn, and say,
+"Yes, these things were made by Unkulunkulu.... Afterwards they [men]
+had power to change those things, that they might become the Amatongos"
+[might belong to the ancestral spirits]. _They took them away from
+Unkulunkulu_.'[34]
+
+Animism supplanted Theism. Nothing could be more explicit. But, though we
+have found an authentic Zulu text to suit our provisional theory, the most
+eminent philosophical example must not reduce us into supposing that this
+text settles the question. Dr. Callaway collected great masses of Zulu
+answers to his inquiries, and it is plain that a respondent, like the
+native theologian whom we have cited, may have adapted his reply to what
+he had learned of Christian doctrine. Having now the Christian notion of a
+Divine Creator, and knowing, too, that the unworshipped Unkulunkulu is
+said to have 'made things,' while only ancestral spirits, are worshipped,
+the native may have inferred that worship (by Christians given to the
+Creator) was at some time transferred by the Zulus from Unkulunkulu to the
+Amatongo. The truth is that both the anthropological theory (spirits
+first, Gods last), and our theory (Supreme Being first, spirits next) can
+find warrant in Dr. Callaway's valuable collections. For that reason, the
+problem must be solved after a survey of the whole field of savage and
+barbaric religion; it cannot be settled by the ambiguous case of the
+Zulus alone.
+
+Unkulunkulu is represented as 'the First Man, who broke off in the
+beginning.' 'They are ancestor-worshippers,' says Dr. Callaway, 'and
+believe that their first ancestor, the First Man, was the Creator.'[35]
+But they may, like many other peoples, have had a different original
+tradition, and have altered it, just because they are now such fervent
+ancestor-worshippers. Unkulunkulu was prior to Death, which came among men
+in the usual mythical way.[36] Whether Unkulunkulu still exists, is
+rather a moot question: Dr. Callaway thinks that he does not.[37] If not,
+he is an exception to the rule in Australia, Andaman, among the Bushmen,
+the Fuegians, and savages in general, who are less advanced in culture
+than the Zulus. The idea, then, of a Maker of things who has ceased to
+exist occurs, if at all, not in a relatively primitive, but in a
+relatively late religion. On the analogy of pottery, agriculture, the use
+of iron, villages, hereditary kings, and so on, the notion of a dead Maker
+is late, not early. It occurs where men have iron, cattle, agriculture,
+kings, houses, a disciplined army, _not_ where men have none of these
+things. The Zulu godless ancestor-worship, then, by parity of reasoning,
+is, like their material culture, not an early but a late development. The
+Zulus 'hear of a King which is above'--'the heavenly King.'[38] 'We did
+not hear of him first from white men.... But he is not like Unkulunkulu,
+who, we say, made all things.'
+
+Here may be dimly descried the ideas of a God, and a subordinate demiurge.
+'The King is above, Unkulunkulu is beneath.' The King above punishes sin,
+striking the sinner by lightning. Nor do the Zulus know how they have
+sinned. 'There remained only that word about the heaven,' 'which,' says
+Dr. Callaway, 'implies that there might have been other words which are
+now lost.' There is great confusion of thought. Unkulunkulu made the
+heaven, where the unknown King reigns, a hard task for a
+First Man.[39]
+
+'In process of time we have come to worship the Amadhlozi (spirits) only,
+because we know not what to say about Unkulunkulu.'[40] 'It is on that
+account, then, that we seek out for ourselves the Amadhlozi (spirits),
+that we may not always be thinking about Unkulunkulu.'
+
+All this attests a faint lingering shadow of a belief too ethereal, too
+remote, for a practical conquering race, which prefers intelligible
+serviceable ghosts, with a special regard for their own families.
+
+Ukoto, a very old Zulu, said: 'When we were children it was said "The Lord
+is in heaven." ... They used to point to the Lord on high; we did not hear
+his name.' Unkulunkulu was understood, by this patriarch, to refer to
+immediate ancestors, whose mimes and genealogies he gave.[41] 'We heard it
+said that the Creator of the world was the Lord who is above; people used
+always, when I was growing up, to point towards heaven.'
+
+A very old woman was most reluctant to speak of Unkulunkulu; at last she
+said, 'Ah, it is he in fact who is the Creator, who is in heaven, of whom
+the ancients spoke.' Then the old woman began to babble humorously of how
+the white men made all things. Again, Unkulunkulu is said to have been
+created by Utilexo. Utilexo was invisible, Unkulunkulu was visible, and so
+got credit not really his due.[42] When the heaven is said to be the
+Chief's (the chief being a living Zulu) 'they do not believe what they
+say,' the phrase is a mere hyperbolical compliment.[43]
+
+On this examination of the evidence, it certainly seems as logical to
+conjecture that the Zulus had once such an idea of a Supreme Being as
+lower races entertain, and then nearly lost it; as to say that Zulus,
+though a monarchical race, have not yet developed a King-God out of the
+throng of spirits (Amatongo). The Zulus, the Norsemen of the South, so to
+speak, are a highly practical military race. A Deity at all abstract was
+not to their liking. Serviceable family spirits, who continually provided
+an excuse for a dinner of roast beef, were to their liking. The less
+developed races do not kill their flocks commonly for food. A sacrifice is
+needed as a pretext. To the gods of Andamanese, Bushmen, Australians, no
+sacrifice is offered. To the Supreme Being of most African peoples no
+sacrifice is offered. There is no festivity in the worship of these
+Supreme Beings, no feasting, at all events. They are not to be 'got at' by
+gifts or sacrifices. The Amatongo are to be 'got at,' are bribable, supply
+an excuse for a good dinner, and thus the practical Amatongo are honoured,
+while, in the present generation of Zulus, Unkulunkulu is a joke, and the
+Lord in Heaven is the shadow of a name. Clearly this does not point to the
+recent but to the remote development of the higher ideas, now superseded
+by spirit-worship.
+
+We shall next see how this view, the opposite of the anthropological
+theory, works when applied to other races, especially to other African
+races.
+
+[Footnote 1: When I wrote _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_ (ii. 11-13) I
+regarded Cagn as 'only a successful and idealised medicine man.' But I now
+think that I confused in my mind the religious and the mythological
+aspects of Cagn. One of unknown origin, existing before the sun, a Maker
+of all things, prayed to, but not in receipt of sacrifice, is no medicine
+man, except in his myth.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The omissions in Mr. Spencer's system may possibly be
+explained by the circumstance that, as he tells us, he collected his
+facts 'by proxy.' While we find Waitz much interested in and amazed by the
+benevolent Supreme Being of many African tribes, that personage is only
+alluded to as 'Alleged Benevolent Supreme Being' in Mr. Spencer's
+_Descriptive Sociology_, and is usually left out of sight altogether in
+his _Principles of Sociology_ and _Ecclesiastical Institutions_. Yet we
+have precisely the same kind of evidence of observers for this 'alleged'
+benevolent Supreme Being as we have for the _canaille_ of ghosts and
+fetishes. If he is a deity of a rather lofty moral conception, of course
+he need not be propitiated by human sacrifices or cold chickens. _That_
+kind of material evidence to the faith in him must be absent by the
+nature of the case; but the coincident testimony of travellers to belief
+in a Supreme Being cannot be dismissed as 'alleged.']
+
+[Footnote 3: Pp. 676, 677.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Man, _J.A.I_. xii. 70.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Man, _J.A.I_. xii. 96-98.]
+
+[Footnote 6: xii. 156, 157.]
+
+[Footnote 7: xii. 112.]
+
+[Footnote 8: xii. 158.]
+
+[Footnote 9: xii. 158.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. 281-288.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Lobeck, _Aglaophamus_, 133.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _J.A.I_. x. 263.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _J.A.I_. 267.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _J.A.I_. x. 267.]
+
+[Footnote 15: P. 281. This is a _nunuai_ with which I am familiar. Flying
+fish, in Banks Island, take the _role_ of salmon. The natives think it
+real, but without form or substance.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Codrington, _Melanesia_, p. 122.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _J.A.I_. x. 294.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Op. cit. x. 313.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _J.A.I_. x. 300.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Williams's _Fiji_, p. 218. See Mr. Thomson's remarks cited
+later.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Fiji_, p. 217.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Ibid. p. 228.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Ibid. p. 230.]
+
+[Footnote 24: _J.A.I_. xiv. 30.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _J.A.I_. xi. 361-366.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Ibid. xi. 374.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Ibid. xi. 376.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Ibid. xi. 376]
+
+[Footnote 29: _J.A.I_. xi. 378.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Ibid. 382.]
+
+[Footnote 31: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 360.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Conceivably, however, the Guiana spirits who have so much
+moral influence, exert it by magical charms. 'The belief in the power of
+charms for good or evil produces not only honesty, but a great amount of
+gentle dealing,' says Livingstone, of the Africans. However they work, the
+spirits work for righteousness.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Obviously there could be no Family God before there was the
+institution of the Family.]
+
+[Footnote 34: Callaway, _Rel. of Amazulu_, p. 17.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Callaway, p. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 36: Op. cit. p. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Op. cit. p. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Op. cit. p. 19.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Callaway, pp. 20, 21.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Pp. 26, 27.]
+
+[Footnote 41: Pp. 49, 50.]
+
+[Footnote 42: P. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 43: P. 122.]
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+MORE SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
+
+If many of the lowest savages known to us entertain ideas of a Supreme
+Being such as we find among Fuegians, Australians, Bushmen, and
+Andamanese, are there examples, besides the Zulus, of tribes higher in
+material culture who seem to have had such notions, but to have partly
+forgotten or neglected them? Miss Kingsley, a lively, observant, and
+unprejudiced, though rambling writer, gives this very account of the Bantu
+races. Oblivion, or neglect, will show itself in leaving the Supreme Being
+alone, as he needs no propitiation, while devoting sacrifice and ritual to
+fetishes and ghosts. That this should be done is perfectly natural if the
+Supreme Being (who wants no sacrifice) were the first evolved in thought,
+while venal fetishes and spirits came in as a result of the ghost theory.
+But if, as a result of the ghost theory, the Supreme Being came last in
+evolution, he ought to be the most fashionable object of worship, the
+latest developed, the most powerful, and most to be propitiated. He is the
+reverse.
+
+To take an example: the Dinkas of the Upper Nile ('godless,' says Sir
+Samuel Baker) 'pay a very theoretical kind of homage to the all-powerful
+Being, dwelling in heaven, whence he sees all things. He is called
+"Dendid" (great rain, that is, universal benediction?).' He is omnipotent,
+but, being all beneficence, can do no evil; so, not being feared, he is
+not addressed in prayer. The evil spirit, on the other hand, receives
+sacrifices. The Dinkas have a strange old chant:
+
+  'At the beginning, when Dendid made all things,
+    He created the Sun,
+  And the Sun is born, and dies, and comes again!
+    He created the Stars,
+  And the Stars are born, and die, and come again!
+    He created Man,
+  And Man is born, and dies, and returns no more!'
+
+It is like the lament of Moschus.[1]
+
+Russegger compares the Dinkas, and all the neighbouring peoples who hold
+the same beliefs, to modern Deists.[2] They are remote from Atheism and
+from cult! Suggestions about an ancient Egyptian influence are made, but
+popular Egyptian religion was not monotheistic, and priestly thought could
+scarcely influence the ancestors of the Dinkas. M. Lejean says these
+peoples are so practical and utilitarian that missionary religion takes no
+hold on them. Mr. Spencer does not give the ideas of the Dinkas, but it is
+not easy to see how the too beneficent Dendid could be evolved out of
+ghost-propitiation, 'the origin of all religions.' Rather the Dinkas, a
+practical people, seem to have simply forgotten to be grateful to
+their Maker; or have decided, more to the credit of the clearness of their
+heads than the warmth of their hearts, that gratitude he does not want.
+Like the French philosopher they cultivate _l'independance du coeur_,
+being in this matter strikingly unlike the Pawnees.
+
+Let us now take a case in which ancestor-worship, and no other form of
+religion (beyond mere superstitions), has been declared to be the practice
+of an African people. Mr. Spencer gives the example of natives of the
+south-eastern district of Central Africa described by Mr. Macdonald in
+'Africana.'[3] The dead man becomes a ghost-god, receives prayer and
+sacrifice, is called a Mulungu (= great ancestor or = sky?), is preferred
+above older spirits, now forgotten; such old spirits may, however, have a
+mountain top for home, a great chief being better remembered; the
+mountain god is prayed to for rain; higher gods were probably similar
+local gods in an older habitat of the Yao.[4]
+
+Such is in the main Mr. Spencer's _resume_ of Mr. Duff Macdonald's report.
+He omits whatever Mr. Macdonald says about a Being among the Yaos,
+analogous to the Dendid of the Dinkas, or the Darumulun of Australia, or
+the Huron Ahone. Yet analysis detects, in Mr. Macdonald's report,
+copious traces of such a Being, though Mr. Macdonald himself believes in
+ancestor-worship as the Source of the local religion. Thus, Mulungu,
+or Mlungu, used as a proper name, 'is said to be the great spirit,
+_msimu_, of all men, a spirit formed by adding all the departed spirits
+together.[5] This is a singular stretch of savage philosophy, and
+indicates (says Mr. Macdonald) 'a grasping after a Being who is the
+totality of all individual existence.... If it fell from the lips of
+civilised men instead of savages, it would be regarded as philosophy.
+Expressions of this kind among the natives are partly traditional, and
+partly dictated by the big thoughts of the moment.' Philosophy it is, but
+a philosophy dependent on the ghost theory.
+
+I go on to show that the Wayao have, though Mr. Spencer omits him, a Being
+who precisely answers to Darumulun, if stripped (perhaps) of his ethical
+aspect. On this point we are left in uncertainty, just because Mr.
+Macdonald could not ascertain the secrets of his mysteries, which, in
+Australia, have been revealed to a few Europeans.
+
+Where Mulungu is used as a proper name, it 'certainly points to a personal
+Being, by the Wayao sometimes said to be the same as Mtanga. At other
+times he is a Being that possesses many powerful servants, but is himself
+kept a good deal beyond the scene of earthly affairs, like the gods of
+Epicurus.'
+
+This is, of course, precisely the feature in African theology which
+interests us. The Supreme Being, in spite of the potency which his
+supposed place as latest evolved out of the ghost-world should naturally
+give him, is neglected, either as half forgotten, or for philosophical
+reasons. For these reasons Epicurus and Lucretius make their gods
+_otiosi_, unconcerned, and the Wayao, with their universal collective
+spirit, are no mean philosophers.
+
+'This Mulungu' or Mtanga, 'in the world beyond the grave, is represented
+as assigning to spirits their proper places,' whether for ethical reasons
+or not we are not informed.[6] Santos (1586) says 'they acknowledge a God
+who, both in this world and the next, measures retribution for the good or
+evil done in this.'
+
+'In the native hypothesis about creation "the people of Mulungu" play a
+very important part.' These ministers of his who do his pleasure are,
+therefore, as is Mulungu himself, regarded as prior to the existing world.
+Therefore they cannot, in Wayao opinion, be ghosts of the dead at all; nor
+can we properly call them 'spirits.' They are _beings_, original,
+creative, but undefined. The word Mulungu, however, is now applied to
+spirits of individuals, but whether it means 'sky' (Salt) or whether it
+means 'ancestor' (Bleek), it cannot be made to prove that Mulungu himself
+was originally envisaged as 'spirit.' For, manifestly, suppose that the
+idea of powerful beings, undefined, came first in evolution, and was
+followed by the ghost idea, that idea might then be applied to explaining
+the pre-existent creative powers.
+
+Mtanga is by 'some' localised as the god of Mangochi, an Olympus left
+behind by the Yao in their wanderings. Here, some hold, his voice is still
+audible. 'Others say that Mtanga never was a man ... he was concerned in
+the first introduction of men into the world. He gets credit for ...
+making mountains and rivers. He is intimately associated with a year of
+plenty. He is called Mchimwene juene, 'a very chief.' He has a kind of
+evil opposite, _Chitowe_, but this being, the Satan of the creed, 'is a
+child or subject of Mtanga,' an evil angel, in fact.[7]
+
+The thunder god, Mpambe, in Yao, Njasi (lightning) is also a minister of
+the Supreme Being. 'He is sent by Mtanga with rain.' Europeans are
+cleverer than natives, because we 'stayed longer with the people of
+God (Mulungu).'
+
+I do not gather that, though associated with good crops, Mtanga or
+Mulungu receives any sacrifice or propitiation. 'The chief addresses
+his own god;'[8] the chief 'will not trouble himself about his
+great-great-grand-father; he will present his offering to his own
+immediate predecessor, saying, 'O father, I do not know all your
+relatives; you know them all: invite them to feast with you.'[9]
+
+'All the offerings are supposed to point to some want of the spirit,'
+Mtanga, on the other hand, is _nihil indiga nostri_.
+
+A village god is given beer to drink, as Indra got Soma. A dead chief is
+propitiated by human sacrifices. I find no trace of any gift to Mtanga.
+His mysteries are really unknown to Mr. Macdonald: they were laughed at
+by a travelled and 'emancipated' Yao.[10]
+
+'These rites are supposed to be inviolably concealed by the initiated, who
+often say that they would die if they revealed them.'[11]
+
+How can we pretend to understand a religion if we do not know its secret?
+That secret, in Australia, yields the certainty of the ethical character
+of the Supreme Being. Mr. Macdonald says about the initiator (a grotesque
+figure):--
+
+'He delivers lectures, and is said to give much good advice ... the
+lectures condemn selfishness, and a selfish person is called _mwisichana_,
+that is, "uninitiated."'
+
+There could not be better evidence of the presence of the ethical element
+in the religious mysteries. Among the Yao, as among the Australian Kurnai,
+the central secret lesson of religion is the lesson of unselfishness.
+
+It is not stated that Mtanga instituted or presides over the mysteries.
+Judging from the analogy of Eleusis, the Bora, the Red Indian initiations,
+and so on, we may expect this to be the belief; but Mr. Macdonald knows
+very little about the matter.
+
+The legendary tales say 'all things in this world were made by "God."'
+'At first there were not people, but "God" and beasts.' 'God' here,
+is Mlungu. The other statement is apparently derived from existing
+ancestor-worship, people who died became 'God' (Mlungu). But God is prior
+to death, for the Yao have a form of the usual myth of the origin of
+death, also of sleep: 'death and sleep are one word, they are of one
+family.' God dwells on high, while a malevolent 'great one,' who disturbed
+the mysteries and slew the initiated, was turned into a mountain.[12]
+
+In spite of information confessedly defective, I have extracted from Mr.
+Spencer's chosen authority a mass of facts, pointing to a Yao belief in a
+primal being, maker of mountains and rivers; existent before men were; not
+liable to death--which came late among them--beneficent; not propitiated
+by sacrifice (as far as the evidence goes); moral (if we may judge by the
+analogy of the mysteries), and yet occupying the religious background,
+while the foreground is held by the most recent ghosts. To prove Mr.
+Spencer's theory, he ought to have given a full account of this being, and
+to have shown how he was developed out of ghosts which are forgotten in
+inverse ratio to their distance from the actual generation. I conceive
+that Mr. Spencer would find a mid-point between a common ghost and Mtanga,
+in a ghost of a chief attached to a mountain, the place and place-name
+preserving the ghost's name and memory. But it is, I think, a far cry from
+such a chief's ghost to the pre-human, angel-served Mtanga.
+
+Of ancestor worship and ghost worship, we have abundant evidence. But the
+position of Mtanga raises one of these delicate and crucial questions
+which cannot be solved by ignoring their existence. Is Mtanga evolved
+out of an ancestral ghost? If so, why, as greatest of divine beings, 'Very
+Chief,' and having powerful ministers under him, is he left unpropitiated,
+unless it be by moral discourses at the mysteries? As a much more advanced
+idea than that of a real father's ghost, he ought to be much later in
+evolution, fresher in conception, and more adored. How do we explain his
+lack of adoration? Was he originally envisaged as a ghost at all, and, if
+so, by what curious but uniform freak of savage logic is he regarded as
+prior to men, and though a ghost, prior to death? Is it not certain that
+such a being could be conceived of by men who had never dreamed of ghosts?
+Is there any logical reason why Mtanga should not be regarded as
+originally on the same footing as Munganngaur, but now half forgotten and
+neglected, for practical or philosophical reasons?
+
+On these problems light is thrown by a successor of Mr. Spencer's
+authority, Mr. Duff Macdonald, in the Blantyre Mission. This gentleman,
+the Rev. David Clement Scott, has published 'A Cyclopaedic Dictionary
+of the Mang'anja Language in British Central Africa.'[13] Looking at
+ancestral spirits first, we find _Mzimu_, 'spirits of the departed,
+supposed to come in dreams.' Though abiding in the spirit world, they also
+haunt thickets, they inspire Mlauli, prophets, and make them rave and
+utter predictions. Offerings are made to them. Here is a prayer: 'Watch
+over me, my ancestor, who died long ago; tell the great spirit at the head
+of my race from whom my mother came.' There are little hut-temples, and
+the chief directs the sacrifices of food, or of animals. There are
+religious pilgrimages, with sacrifice, to mountains. God, like men in this
+region, has various names, as Chiuta, 'God in space and the rainbow sign
+across;' Mpambe, 'God Almighty' (or rather 'pre-excellent'); Mlezi, 'God
+the Sustainer,' and Mulungu, 'God who is spirit.' Mulungu = God, 'not
+spirits or fetish.' 'You can't put the plural, as God is One,' say the
+natives. 'There are no idols called gods, and spirits are spirits of
+people who have died, not gods.' Idols are _Zitunzi-zitunzi_. 'Spirits
+are supposed to be with Mulungu.' God made the world and man. Our author
+says 'when the chief or people sacrifice it is to God,' but he also says
+that they sacrifice to ancestral spirits. There is some confusion of
+ideas here: Mr. Macdonald says nothing of sacrifice to Mtanga.
+
+Mr. Scott does not seem to know more about the Mysteries than Mr.
+Macdonald, and his article on Mulungu does not much enlighten us. Does
+Mulungu, as Creative God, receive sacrifice, or not?[14] Mr. Scott gives
+no instance of this, under _Nsembe_ (sacrifice), where ancestors, or
+hill-dwelling ghosts of chiefs, are offered food; yet, as we have seen,
+under _Mulungu_, he avers that the chiefs and people do sacrifice to God.
+He appears to be confusing the Creator with spirits, and no reliance can
+be placed on this part of his evidence. 'At the back of all this'
+(sacrifice to spirits) 'there is God.' If I understand Mr. Scott,
+sacrifices are really made only to spirits, but he is trying to argue
+that, after all, the theistic conception is at the back of the animistic
+practice, thus importing his theory into his facts. His theory would,
+really, be in a better way, if sacrifice is _not_ offered to the Creator,
+but this had not occurred to Mr. Scott.
+
+It is plain, in any case, that the religion of the Africans in the
+Blantyre region has an element not easily to be derived from ancestral
+spirit-worship, an element not observed by Mr. Spencer.
+
+Nobody who has followed the examples already adduced will be amazed by
+what Waitz calls the 'surprising result' of recent inquiries among the
+great negro race. Among the branches where foreign influence is least to
+be suspected, we discover, behind their more conspicuous fetishisms and
+superstitions, something which we cannot exactly call Monotheism, yet
+which tends in that direction.[15] Waitz quotes Wilson for the fact that,
+their fetishism apart, they adore a Supreme Being as the Creator: and do
+not honour him with sacrifice.
+
+The remarks of Waitz may be cited in full:
+
+'The religion of the negro may be considered by some as a particularly
+rude form of polytheism and may be branded with the special name of
+fetishism. It would follow, from a minute examination of it, that--apart
+from the extravagant and fantastic traits, which are rooted in the
+character of the negro, and which radiate therefrom over all his
+creations--in comparison with the religions of other savages it is neither
+very specially differentiated nor very specially crude in form.
+
+'But this opinion can be held to be quite true only while we look at the
+_outside_ of the negro's religion, or estimate its significance from
+arbitrary pre-suppositions, as is specially the case with Ad. Wuttke.
+
+'By a deeper insight, which of late several scientific investigators have
+succeeded in attaining, we reach, rather, the surprising conclusion that
+several of the negro races--on whom we cannot as yet prove, and can hardly
+conjecture, the influence of a more civilised people--in the embodying of
+their religious conceptions are further advanced than almost all other
+savages, so far that, even if we do not call them monotheists, we may
+still think of them as standing on the boundary of monotheism, seeing that
+their religion is also mixed with a great mass of rude superstition which,
+in turn, among other peoples, seems to overrun completely the purer
+religious conceptions.'
+
+This conclusion as to an element of pure faith in negro religion would not
+have surprised Waitz, had recent evidence as to the same creed among lower
+savages lain before him as he worked.
+
+This volume of his book was composed in 1860. In 1872 he had become well
+aware of the belief in a good Maker among the Australian natives, and of
+the absence among them of ancestor worship.[16]
+
+Waitz's remarks on the Supreme Being of the Negro are well worth noting,
+from his unconcealed astonishment at the discovery.
+
+Wilson's observations on North and South Guinea religion were published in
+1856. After commenting on the delicate task of finding out what a savage
+religion really is, he writes: 'The belief in one great Supreme Being,
+who made and upholds all things, is universal.'[17] The names of the being
+are translated 'Maker,' 'Preserver,' 'Benefactor,' 'Great Friend.' Though
+compact of all good qualities, the being has allowed the world to 'come
+under the control of evil spirits,' who, alone, receive religious worship.
+Though he leaves things uncontrolled, yet the chief being (as in Homer)
+ratifies the Oath, at a treaty, and is invoked to punish criminals when
+ordeal water is to be drunk. So far, then, he has an ethical influence.
+'Grossly wicked people' are buried outside of the regular place. Fetishism
+prevails, with spiritualism, and Wilson thinks that mediums might pick up
+some good tricks in Guinea. He gives no examples. Their inspired men do
+things 'that cannot be accounted for,' by the use of narcotics.
+
+The South Guinea Creator, Anyambia (= good spirit?), is good, but
+capricious. He has a good deputy, Ombwiri (spelled 'Mbuiri' by Miss
+Kingsley); _he alone has no priests_, but communicates directly with men.
+The neighbouring Shekuni have mysteries of the Great Spirit. No details
+are given. This great being, Mwetyi, witnesses covenants and punishes
+perjury. This people are ancestor-worshippers, but their Supreme Being is
+not said to receive sacrifice, as ghosts do, while he is so far from
+being powerless, like Unkulunkulu, that, but for fear of his wrath,
+'their national treaties would have little or no force.'[18] Having no
+information about the mysteries, of course, we know nothing of other moral
+influences which are, or may be exercised by these great, powerful, and
+not wholly otiose beings.
+
+The celebrated traveller, Mungo Park, who visited Africa in 1805, had good
+opportunities of understanding the natives. He did not hurry through the
+land with a large armed force, but alone, or almost alone, paid his way
+with his brass buttons. 'I have conversed with all ranks and conditions
+upon the subject of their faith,' he says, 'and can pronounce, without the
+smallest shadow of doubt, that the belief in one God and in a future state
+of reward and punishment is entire and universal among them.' This cannot
+strictly be called monotheism, as there are many subordinate spirits who
+may be influenced by 'magical ceremonies.' But if monotheism means belief
+in One Spirit alone, or religious regard paid to One Spirit alone, it
+exists nowhere--no, not in Islam.
+
+Park thinks it remarkable that 'the Almighty' only receives prayers at the
+new moon (of sacrifice to the Almighty he says nothing), and that, being
+the creator and preserver of all things, he is 'of so exalted a nature
+that it is idle to imagine the feeble supplications of wretched mortals
+can reverse the decrees and change the purpose of unerring Wisdom.' The
+new moon prayers are mere matters of tradition; 'our fathers did it before
+us.' 'Such is the blindness of unassisted nature,' says Park, who is not
+satirising, in Swift's manner, the prayers of Presbyterians at home on
+Yarrow.
+
+Thus, the African Supreme Being is unpropitiated, while inferior spirits
+are constrained by magic or propitiated with food.
+
+We meet our old problem: How has this God, in the conception of whom there
+is so much philosophy, developed out of these hungry ghosts? The influence
+of Islam can scarcely be suspected, Allah being addressed, of course, in
+endless prayers, while the African god receives none. Indeed, it would be
+more plausible to say that Mahomet borrowed Allah from the widespread
+belief which we are studying, than that the negro's Supreme Being was
+borrowed from Allah.
+
+Park had, as we saw, many opportunities of familiar discussion with the
+people on whose mercies he threw himself.
+
+'But it is not often that the negroes make their religious opinions the
+subject of conversation; when interrogated, in particular, concerning
+their ideas of a future state, they express themselves with great
+reverence, but endeavour to shorten the discussion by saying, _"Mo o mo
+inta allo_" ("No man knows anything about it").'[19]
+
+Park himself, in extreme distress, and almost in despair, chanced to
+observe the delicate beauty of a small moss-plant, and, reflecting that
+the Creator of so frail a thing could not be indifferent to any of His
+creatures, plucked up courage and reached safety.[20] He was not of the
+negro philosophy, and is the less likely to have invented it. The new moon
+prayer, said in a whisper, was reported to Park, 'by many different
+people,' to contain 'thanks to God for his kindness during the existence
+of the past moon, and to solicit a continuation of his favour during the
+new one.' This, of course, may prove Islamite influence, and is at
+variance with the general tendency of the religious philosophy as
+described.
+
+We now arrive at a theory of the Supreme Being among a certain African
+race which would be entirely fatal to my whole hypothesis on this topic,
+if it could be demonstrated correct in fact, and if it could be stretched
+so as to apply to the Australians, Fuegians, Andamanese, and other very
+backward peoples. It is the hypothesis that the Supreme Being is a
+'loan-god,' borrowed from Europeans.
+
+The theory is very lucidly set forth in Major Ellis's 'Tshi-speaking
+Peoples of the Gold Coast.'[21] Major Ellis's opinion coincides with that
+of Waitz in his 'Introduction to Anthropology' (an opinion to which Waitz
+does not seem bigoted)--namely, that 'the original form of all religion is
+a raw, unsystematic polytheism,' nature being peopled by inimical powers
+or spirits, and everyone worshipping what he thinks most dangerous or
+most serviceable. There are few general, many local or personal, objects
+of veneration.[22] Major Ellis only met this passage when he had formed
+his own ideas by observation of the Tshi race. We do not pretend to
+guess what 'the original form of all religion' may have been; but we have
+given, and shall give, abundant evidence for the existence of a loftier
+faith than this, among peoples much lower in material culture than the
+Tshi races, who have metals and an organised priesthood. They occupy, in
+small villages (except Coomassie and Djuabin), the forests of the Gold
+Coast. The mere mention of Coomassie shows how vastly superior in
+civilisation the Tshis (Ashantis and Fantis) are to the naked, houseless
+Australians. Their inland communities, however, are 'mere specks in a vast
+tract of impenetrable forest.' The coast people have for centuries been in
+touch with Europeans, but the 'Tshi-speaking races are now much in the
+same condition, both socially and morally, as they were at the time of the
+Portuguese discovery.'[23]
+
+Nevertheless, Major Ellis explains their Supreme Being as the result of
+European influence! _A priori_ this appears highly improbable. That a
+belief should sweep over all these specks in impenetrable forest, from
+the coast-tribes in contact with Europeans, and that this belief should,
+though the most recent, be infinitely the least powerful, cannot be
+regarded as a plausible hypothesis. Moreover, on Major Ellis's theory the
+Supreme Beings of races which but recently came for the first time in
+contact with Europeans, Supreme Beings kept jealously apart from European
+ken, and revered in the secrecy of ancient mysteries, must also, by
+parity of reason, be the result of European influence. Unfortunately,
+Major Ellis gives no evidence for his statements about the past history of
+Tshi religion. Authorities he must have, and references would be welcome.
+
+'With people in the condition in which the natives of the Gold Coast now
+are, religion is not in any way allied with moral ideas.'[24] We have given
+abundant evidence that among much more backward tribes morals rest on a
+religious sanction. If this be not so on the Gold Coast we cannot accept
+these relatively advanced Fantis and Ashantis as representing the
+'original' state of ethics and religion, any more than those people with
+cities, a king, a priesthood, iron, and gold, represent the 'original'
+material condition of society. Major Ellis also shows that the Gods exact
+chastity from aspirants to the priesthood.[25] The present beliefs
+of the Gold Coast are kept up by organised priesthoods as 'lucrative
+business.'[26] Where there is no lucre and no priesthood, as among more
+backward races, this kind of business cannot be done. On the Gold Coast
+men can only approach gods through priests.[27] This is degeneration.
+
+Obviously, if religion began in a form relatively pure and moral, it
+_must_ degenerate, as civilisation advances, under priests who 'exploit'
+the lucrative, and can see no money in the pure elements of belief and
+practice. That the lucrative elements in Christianity were exploited by
+the clergy, to the neglect of ethics, was precisely the complaint of the
+Reformers. From these lucrative elements the creed of the Apostles was
+free, and a similar freedom marks the religion of Australia or of the
+Pawnees. We cannot possibly, then, expect to find the 'original' state
+of religion among a people subdued to a money-grubbing priesthood, like
+the Tshi races. Let religion begin as pure as snow, it would be corrupted
+by priestly trafficking in its lucrative animistic aspect. And priests are
+developed relatively late.
+
+Major Ellis discriminates Tshi gods as--
+
+  1. General, worshipped by an entire tribe or more tribes.
+  2. Local deities of river, hill, forest, or sea.
+  3. Deities of families or corporations.
+  4. Tutelary deities of individuals.
+
+The second class, according to the natives, were appointed by the first
+class, who are 'too distant or indifferent to interfere ordinarily in
+human affairs.' Thus, the Huron god, Ahone, punishes nobody. He is all
+sweetness and light, but has a deputy god, called Okeus. On our hypothesis
+this indifference of high gods suggests the crowding out of the great
+disinterested God by venal animistic competition. All of class II. 'appear
+to have been originally malignant.' Though, in native belief, class I.
+was prior to, and 'appointed' class II., Major Ellis thinks that malignant
+spirits of class II. were raised to class I. as if to the peerage, while
+classes III. and IV. 'are clearly the product of priesthood'--therefore
+late.
+
+Major Ellis then avers that when Europeans reached the Gold Coast, in the
+fifteenth century, they 'appear to have found' a Northern God, Tando, and
+a Southern God, Bobowissi, still adored. Bobowissi makes thunder and rain,
+lives on a hill, and receives, or received, human sacrifices. But, 'after
+an intercourse of some years with Europeans,' the villagers near European
+forts 'added to their system a new deity, whom they termed Nana Nyankupon.
+This was the God of the Christians, borrowed from them, and adapted under
+a new designation, meaning 'Lord of the sky.' (This is conjectural.
+_Nyankum_ = rain. _Nyansa_ has 'a later meaning, "craft."')[28]
+
+Now Major Ellis, later, has to contrast Bosman's account of fetishism
+(1700) with his own observations. According to Bosman's native source of
+information, men then selected their own fetishes. These are _now_
+selected by priests. Bosman's authority was wrong--or priesthood has
+extended its field of business. Major Ellis argues that the revolution
+from amateur to priestly selection of fetishes could not occur in
+190 years, 'over a vast tract of country, amongst peoples living in
+semi-isolated communities, in the midst of pathless forests, where there
+is but little opportunity for the exchange of ideas, _and where we know
+they have been uninfluenced by any higher race_.'
+
+Yet Major Ellis's theory is that this isolated people _were_ influenced
+by a higher race, to the extent of adopting a totally new Supreme Being,
+from Europeans, a being whom they in no way sought to propitiate, and who
+was of no practical use. And this they did, he says, not under priestly
+influence, but in the face of priestly opposition.[29]
+
+Major Ellis's logic does not appear to be consistent. In any case we ask
+for evidence how, in the 'impenetrable forests' did a new Supreme Deity
+become universally known? Are we certain that travellers (unquoted) did
+not discover a deity with no priests, or ritual, or 'money in the
+concern,' later than they discovered the blood-stained, conspicuous,
+lucrative Bobowissi? Why was Nyankupon, the supposed new god of a new
+powerful set of strangers, left wholly unpropitiated? The reverse was to
+be expected.
+
+Major Ellis writes: 'Almost certainly the addition of one more to an
+already numerous family' of gods, 'was strenuously resisted by the
+priesthood,' who, confessedly, are adding now lower gods every day! Yet
+Nyankupon is universally known, in spite of priestly resistance.
+Nyankupon, I presume = Anzambi, Anyambi, Nyambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, the
+Nzam of the Fans, 'and of all Bantu coast races, the creator of man,
+plants, animals, and the earth; he takes no further interest in the
+affair.'[30] The crowd of _spirits_ take only too much interest; and,
+therefore, are the lucrative element in religion.
+
+It is not very easy to believe that Nyam, under all his names, was picked
+up from the Portuguese, and passed apparently from negroes to Bantu all
+over West Africa, despite the isolation of the groups, and the resistance
+of the priesthood among tribes 'uninfluenced by any higher race.'
+
+Nyam, like Major Ellis's class I., appoints a subordinate god to do his
+work: he is truly good, and governs the malevolent spirits.[31]
+
+The spread of Nyankupon, as described by Major Ellis, is the more
+remarkable, since 'five or six miles from the sea, or even less, the
+country was a _terra incognita_ to Europeans,'[32] Nyankupon was, it is
+alleged, adopted, because our superiority proved Europeans to be
+'protected by a deity of greater power than any of those to which they
+themselves' (the Tshi races) 'offered sacrifices.'
+
+Then, of course, Nyankupon would receive the best sacrifices of all, as
+the most powerful deity? Far from that, Nyankupon received no sacrifice,
+and had no priests. No priest would have a traditional way of serving him.
+As the unlucky man in Voltaire says to his guardian angel, 'It is well
+worth while to have a presiding genius,' so the Tshis and Bantu might
+ironically remark, 'A useful thing, a new Supreme Being!' A quarter of a
+continent or so adopts a new foreign god, and leaves him _plante la_;
+unserved, unhonoured, and unsung. He therefore came to be thought too
+remote, or too indifferent, 'to interfere directly in the affairs of the
+world.' 'This idea was probably caused by the fact that the natives had
+not experienced any material improvement in their condition ... although
+they also had become followers of the god of the whites.'[33]
+
+But that was just what they had not done! Even at Magellan's Straits, the
+Fuegians picked up from a casual Spanish sea-captain and adored an image
+of Cristo. Name and effigy they accepted. The Tshi people took neither
+effigy nor name of a deity from the Portuguese settled among them. They
+neither imitated Catholic rites nor adapted their own; they prayed not,
+nor sacrificed to the 'new' Nyankupon. Only his name and the idea of his
+nature are universally diffused in West African belief. He lives in no
+definite home, or hill, but 'in Nyankupon's country.' Nyankupon, at the
+present day, is 'ignored rather than worshipped,' while Bobowissi has
+priests and offerings.
+
+It is clear that Major Ellis is endeavouring to explain, by a singular
+solution (namely, the borrowing of a God from Europeans), and that
+a solution improbable and inadequate, a phenomenon of very wide
+distribution. Nyankupon cannot be explained apart from Taaroa, Puluga,
+Ahone, Ndengei, Dendid, and Ta-li-y-Tochoo, Gods to be later described,
+who cannot, by any stretch of probabilities, be regarded as of European
+origin. All of these represent the primeval Supreme Being, more or less
+or altogether stripped, under advancing conditions of culture, of his
+ethical influence, and crowded out by the horde of useful greedy ghosts or
+ghost gods, whose business is lucrative. Nyankupon has no pretensions to
+be, or to have been a 'spirit.'[34]
+
+Major Ellis's theory is a natural result of his belief in a tangle of
+polytheism as 'the original state of religion.' If so, there was not much
+room for the natural development of Nyankupon, in whom 'the missionaries
+find a parallel to the Jahveh of the Jews.'[35] On our theory Nyankupon
+takes his place in the regular process of the corruption of theism by
+animism.
+
+The parallel case of Nzambi Mpungu, the Creator among the Fiorts (a Bantu
+stock), is thus stated by Miss Kingsley:
+
+'I have no hesitation in saying I fully believe Nzambi Mpungu to be a
+purely native god, and that he is a great god over all things, but the
+study of him is even more difficult than the study of Nzambi, because the
+Jesuit missionaries who gained so great an influence over the Fiorts in
+the sixteenth century identified him with Jehovah, and worked on the
+native mind from that stand-point. Consequently semi-mythical traces
+of Jesuit teaching linger, even now, in the religious ideas of the
+Fiorts.'[36]
+
+Nzambi Mpungu lives 'behind the firmament.' 'He takes next to no interest
+in human affairs;' which is not a Jesuit idea of God.
+
+In all missionary accounts of savage religion, we have to guard against
+two kinds of bias. One is the bias which makes the observer deny any
+religion to the native race, except devil-worship. The other is the bias
+which lends him to look for traces of a pure primitive religious
+tradition. Yet we cannot but observe this reciprocal phenomenon:
+missionaries often find a native name and idea which answer so nearly to
+their conception of God that they adopt the idea and the name, in
+teaching. Again, on the other side, the savages, when first they hear the
+missionaries' account of God, recognise it, as do the Hurons and Bakwain,
+for what has always been familiar to them. This is recorded in very early
+pre-missionary travels, as in the book of William Strachey on Virginia
+(1612), to which we now turn. The God found by Strachey in Virginia
+cannot, by any latitude of conjecture, be regarded as the result of
+contact with Europeans. Yet he almost exactly answers to the African
+Nyankupon, who is explained away as a 'loan-god.' For the belief in
+relatively pure creative beings, whether they are morally adored, without
+sacrifice, or merely neglected, is so widely diffused, that Anthropology
+must ignore them, or account for them as 'loan-gods'--or give up her
+theory!
+
+[Footnote 1: Lejean, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, April 1862, p. 760. Citing
+for the chant, Beltrame, _Dictionario della lingua denka_, MS.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Waitz, ii. 74.]
+
+[Footnote 3: 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 681.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Africana_, i. 66.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Africana_, i. 67.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Africana_, i. 71, 72_]
+
+[Footnote 8: i 88.]
+
+[Footnote 9: i. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 10: i. 130.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Africana_, i 279-301.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Edinburgh, 1892.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Incidentally Mr. Macdonald shows that, contrary to Mr.
+Spencer's opinion, these savages have words for dreams and dreaming. They
+interpret dreams by a system of symbols, 'a canoe is ill luck,' and 'dreams
+go by contraries.']
+
+[Footnote 15: Waitz, _Anthropologie_, ii. 167.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Waitz and Gerland, _Anthropologie_, vi. 796-799 and 809. In
+1874 Mr. Howitt's evidence on the moral element in the mysteries was not
+published. Waitz scouts the idea that the higher Australian beliefs are of
+European origin. 'Wir schen vielmehr uralte Truemmer aehnlicher Mythologenie
+in ihnen,' (vi. 798) flotsam from ideas of immemorial antiquity.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Wilson, p. 209.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Wilson, p. 392.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Park's _Journey_, i. 274, 275, 1815.]
+
+[Footnote 20: P. 245.]
+
+[Footnote 21: London, 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Ellis, pp. 20, 21.]
+
+[Footnote 23: P. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Ellis, p. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 25: P. 120.]
+
+[Footnote 26: P. 15.]
+
+[Footnote 27: P. 125.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Ellis, pp. 24, 25.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Ellis, p. 189.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Miss Kingsley, p. 442.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Ellis, p. 229.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Ibid. p. 25.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Op. cit. p. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 34: Ellis, p. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Op. cit. p. 28.]
+
+[Footnote 36: 'African Religion and Law,' _National Review_, September
+1897, p. 132.]
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+AHONE. TI-RA-WA. NA-PI. PACHACAMAC. TUI LAGA. TAA-ROA
+
+In this chapter it is my object to set certain American Creators beside
+the African beings whom we have been examining. We shall range from Hurons
+to Pawnees and Blackfeet, and end with Pachacamac, the supreme being of
+the old Inca civilisation, with Tui Laga and Taa-roa. It will be seen that
+the Hurons have been accidentally deprived of their benevolent Creator by
+a bibliographical accident, while that Creator corresponds very well
+with the Peruvian Pachucamac, often regarded as a mere philosophical
+abstraction. The Pawnees will show us a Creator involved in a sacrificial
+ritual, which is not common, while the Blackfeet present a Creator who is
+not envisaged as a spirit at all, and, on our theory, represents a very
+early stage of the theistic conception.
+
+To continue the argument from analogy against Major Ellis's theory of the
+European origin of Nyankupon, it seems desirable first to produce a
+parallel to his case, and to that of his blood-stained subordinate
+deity, Bobowissi, from a quarter where European influence is absolutely
+out of the question. Virginia was first permanently colonised by
+Englishmen in 1607, and the 'Historie of Travaile into Virginia,' by
+William Strachey, Gent., first Secretary of the Colony, dates from the
+earliest years (1612-1616). It will hardly be suggested, then, that the
+natives had already adopted _our_ Supreme Being, especially as Strachey
+says that the native priests strenuously opposed the Christian God.
+Strachey found a house-inhabiting, agricultural, and settled population,
+under chiefs, one of whom, Powhattan, was a kind of Bretwalda. The temples
+contained the dried bodies of the _weroances_, or aristocracy, beside
+which was their Okeus, or Oki, an image 'ill favouredly carved,' all
+black dressed, 'who doth them all the harm they suffer. He is propitiated
+by sacrifices of their own children' (probably an error) 'and of
+strangers.'
+
+Mr. Tylor quotes a description of this Oki, or Okeus, with his idol and
+bloody rites, from Smith's 'History of Virginia' (1632)[1]. The two books,
+Strachey's and Smith's, are here slightly varying copies of one original.
+But, after censuring Smith's (and Strachey's) hasty theory that Okeus is
+'no other than a devil,' Mr. Tylor did not find in Smith what follows in
+Strachey. Okeus has human sacrifices, like Bobowissi, 'whilst the great
+God (the priests tell them) who governes all the world, and makes
+the son to shine, creatyng the moone and starrs his companyons ... they
+calling (_sic_) Ahone. The good and peaceable God requires no such dutyes,
+nor needs to be sacrificed unto, for he intendeth all good unto them,'
+Okeus, on the contrary, 'looking into all men's accions, and examining the
+same according to the severe scheme of justice, punisheth them.... Such is
+the misery and thraldome under which Sathan hath bound these wretched
+miscreants.'
+
+As if, in Mr. Strachey's own creed, Satan does not punish, in hell, the
+offences of men against God!
+
+Here, then, in addition to a devil (or rather a divine police magistrate),
+and general fetishism and nature worship, we find that the untutored
+Virginian is equipped with a merciful Creator, without idol, temple, or
+sacrifice, as needing nought of ours. It is by the merest accident, the
+use of Smith's book (1632) instead of Strachey's book (1612), that Mr.
+Tylor is unaware of these essential facts[2].
+
+Dr. Brinton, like Mr. Tylor, cites Smith for the nefarious or severe
+Okeus, and omits any mention of Ahone, the benevolent Creator.[3]
+Now, Strachey's evidence is early (1612), is that of a well-educated
+man, fond of airing his Greek, and not prejudiced in favour of these
+worshippers of 'Sathan.' In Virginia he found the unpropitiated loving
+Supreme Being, beside a subordinate, like Nyankupon beside Bobowissi in
+Africa.
+
+Each highest deity, in Virginia or on the Gold Coast, is more or less
+eclipsed in popular esteem by nascent polytheism and nature worship. This
+is precisely what we should expect to find, if Ahone, the Creator, were
+earlier in evolution, while Okeus and the rest were of the usual greedy
+class of animistic corruptible deities, useful to priests. This could not
+be understood while Ahone was left out of the statement.[4]
+
+Probably Mr. Strachey's narrative justifies, by analogy, our suspicion of
+Major Ellis's theory that the African Supreme Being is of European origin.
+The purpose in the Ahone-Okeus creed is clear. God (Ahone) is omnipotent
+and good, yet calamities beset mankind. How are these to be explained?
+Clearly as penalties for men's sins, inflicted, not by Ahone, but by his
+lieutenant, Okeus. But that magistrate can be, and is, appeased by
+sacrifices, which it would be impious, or, at all events, useless, to
+offer to the Supreme Being, Ahone. It is a logical creed, but how was the
+Supreme Being evolved out of the ghost of a 'people-devouring king' like
+Powhattan? The facts, very fairly attested, do not fit the anthropological
+theory. It is to be remarked that Strachey's Ahone is a much less
+mythological conception than that which, on very good evidence, he
+attributes to the Indians of the Patowemeck River. Their Creator is spoken
+of as 'a godly Hare,' who receives their souls into Paradise, whence they
+are reborn on earth again, as in Plato's myth. They also regard the four
+winds as four Gods. How the god took the mythological form of a hare is
+diversely explained.[5]
+
+Meanwhile the Ahone-Okeus creed corresponds to the Nyankupon-Bobowissi
+creed. The American faith is certainly not borrowed from Europe, so it is
+less likely that the African creed is borrowed.
+
+As illustrations of the general theory here presented, we may now take two
+tribal religions among the North American Indians. The first is that of
+the equestrian Pawnees, who, thirty years ago, were dwelling on the Loup
+Fork in Nebraska. The buffaloes have since been destroyed, the lands
+seized, and the Pawnees driven into a 'Reservation,' where they are, or
+lately were, cheated and oppressed in the usual way. They were originally
+known to Europeans in four hordes, the fourth being the Skidi or Wolf
+Pawnees. They seem to have come into Kansas and Nebraska, at a date
+relatively remote, from Mexico, and are allied with the Lipans and
+Tonkaways of that region. The Tonkaways are a tribe who, in a sacred
+mystery, are admonished to 'live like the wolves,' in exactly the same way
+as were the Hirpi (wolf tribe), of Mount Soracte, who practised the feat
+of walking unhurt through fire.[6] The Tonkaways regard the Pawnees, who
+also have a wolf tribe, as a long-separated branch of their race. If,
+then, they are of Mexican origin, we might expect to find traces of Aztec
+ritual among the Pawnees.
+
+Long after they obtained better weapons they used flint-headed arrows for
+slaying the only two beasts which it was lawful to sacrifice, the deer and
+the buffalo. They have long been a hunting and also an agricultural
+people. The corn was given to them originally by the Ruler: their god,
+_Ti-ra-wa_, 'the Spirit Father.' They offer the sacrifice of a deer with
+peculiar solemnity, and are a very prayerful people. The priest 'held a
+relation to the Pawnees and their deity not unlike that occupied by Moses
+to Jehovah and the Israelites.' A feature in ritual is the sacred bundles
+of unknown contents, brought from the original home in Mexico. The Pawnees
+were created by Ti-ra-wa. They believe in a happy future life, while the
+wicked die, and there is an end of them. They cite their dreams of the
+dead as an argument for a life beyond the tomb. 'We see ourselves living
+with Ti-ra-wa!' An evil earlier race, which knew not Ti-ra-wa, was
+destroyed by him in the Deluge; evidence is found in large fossil bones,
+and it would be an interesting inquiry whether such fossils are always
+found where the story of a 'sin-flood' occurs. If so, fossils must be
+universally diffused.
+
+As is common, the future life is attested, not only by dreams, but in the
+experience of men who 'have died' and come back to life, like Secret Pipe
+Chief, who told the story to Mr. Grinnell. These visions in a state of
+apparent death are not peculiar to savages, and, no doubt, have had much
+effect on beliefs about the next world.[7] Ghosts are rarely seen, but
+auditory hallucinations, as of a voice giving good advice in time of
+peril, are regarded as the speech of ghosts. The beasts are also friendly,
+as fellow children with men of Ti-ra-wa. To the Morning Star the Skidi or
+Wolf Pawnees offered on rare occasions a captive man. The ceremony was not
+unlike that of the Aztecs, though less cruel. Curiously enough, the slayer
+of the captive had instantly to make a mock flight, as in the Attic
+_Bouphonia_. This, however, was a rite paid to the Morning Star, not to
+Ti-ra-wa, 'the power above that moves the universe and controls all
+things.' Sacrifice to Ti-ra-wa was made on rare and solemn occasions out
+of his two chief gifts, deer and buffalo. 'Through corn, deer, buffalo,
+and the sacred bundles, we worship _Ti-ra-wa_.'
+
+The flesh was burned in the fire, while prayers were made with great
+earnestness. In the old Skidi rite the women told the fattened captive
+what they desired to gain from the Ruler. It is occasionally said that
+the human sacrifice was made to _Ti-ra-wa_ himself. The sacrificer not
+only fled, but fasted and mourned. It is possible that, as among the
+Aztecs, the victim was regarded as also an embodiment of the God, but this
+is not certain, the rite having long been disused. Mr. Grinnell got the
+description from a very old Skidi. There was also a festival of thanks to
+Ti-ra-wa for corn. During a sacred dance and hymn the corn is held up to
+the Ruler by a woman. Corn is ritually called 'The Mother,' as in Peru.[8]
+'We are like seed, and we worship through the Corn.'
+
+Disease is caused by evil spirits, and many American soldiers were healed
+by Pawnee doctors, though their hurts had refused to yield to the
+treatment of the United States Army Surgeons.[9]
+
+The miracles wrought by Pawnee medicine men, under the eyes of Major
+North, far surpass what is told of Indian jugglery. But this was forty
+years ago, and it is probably too late to learn anything of these
+astounding performances of naked men on the hard floor of a lodge.
+'Major North told me' (Mr. Grinnell) 'that he saw with his own eyes the
+doctors make the corn grow,' the doctor not manipulating the plant, as in
+the Mango trick, but standing apart and singing. Mr. Grinnell says: 'I
+have never found any one who could even suggest an explanation.'
+
+This art places great power in the hands of the doctors, who exhibit many
+other prodigies. It is notable that in this religion we hear nothing of
+ancestor-worship; all that is stated as to ghosts has been reported. We
+find the cult of an all-powerful being, in whose ritual sacrifice is the
+only feature that suggests ghost-worship. The popular tales and historical
+reminiscences of the last generation entirely bear out by their allusions
+Mr. Grinnell's account of the Pawnee faith, in which the ethical element
+chiefly consists in a sense of dependence on and touching gratitude to
+Ti-ra-wa, as shown in fervent prayer. Theft he abhors, he applauds valour,
+he punishes the wicked by annihilation, the good dwell with him in his
+heavenly home. He is addressed as A-ti-us ta-kaw-a, 'Our father in all
+places.'
+
+It is not so easy to see how this Being was developed out of
+ancestor-worship, of which we find no traces among Pawnees. For
+ancestor-worship among the Sioux, it is usual to quote a remark of one
+Prescott, an interpreter: 'Sometimes an Indian will say, "Wah negh on she
+wan da," which means, "Spirits of the dead have mercy on me." Then they
+will add what they want. That is about the amount of an Indian's
+prayer.'[10] Obviously, when we compare Mr. Grinnell's account of Pawnee
+religion, based on his own observations, and those of Major North, and
+Mr. Dunbar, who has written on the language of the tribe, we are on much
+safer ground, than when we follow a contemptuous, half-educated European.
+
+The religion of the Blackfoot Indians appears to be a ruder form of the
+Pawnee faith. Whether the differences arise from tribal character, or from
+decadence, or because the Blackfoot belief is in an earlier and more
+backward condition than that of the Pawnees, it is not easy to be certain.
+As in China, there exists a difficulty in deciding whether the Supreme
+Being is identical with the great nature-god; in China the Heaven, among
+the Blackfeet the Sun; or is prior to him in conception, or has been,
+later, substituted for him, or placed beside him. The Blackfoot mythology
+is low, crude, and, except in tales of Creation, is derisive. As in
+Australia, there is a specific difference of tone between mythology and
+religion.
+
+The Blackfoot country runs east from the summit of the Rocky Mountains, to
+the mouth of the Yellowstone river on the Missouri, then west to the
+Yellowstone sources, across the Rocky Mountains to the Beaverhead, thence
+to their summit.
+
+As to spirits, the Blackfeet believe in, or at least tell stories of,
+ghosts, which conduct themselves much as in our old-fashioned ghost
+stories. They haunt people in a rather sportive and irresponsible way. The
+souls or shadows of respectable persons go to the bleak country called the
+Sand Hills, where they live in a dull, monotonous kind of Sheol. The
+shades of the wicked are 'earth-bound' and mischievous, especially ghosts
+of men slain in battle. They cause paralysis and madness, but dread
+interiors of lodges; they only 'tap on the lodge-skins.' Like many Indian
+tribes, the Blackfeet have the Eurydice legend. A man grieving for his
+dead wife finds his way to Hades, is pitied by the dead, and allowed to
+carry the woman back with him, under certain ritual prohibitions, one of
+which he unhappily infringes. The range of this deeply touching story
+among the Red Men, and its close resemblance to the tale of Orpheus, is
+one of the most curious facts in mythology. Mr. Grinnell's friend Young
+Bear, when lost with his wife in a fog, heard a Voice, 'It is well. Go on,
+you are going right.' 'The top of my head seemed to lift up. It seemed as
+if a lot of needles were running into it.... This must have been a ghost.'
+As the wife also heard the Voice it was probably human, not hallucinatory.
+
+Animals receive the usual amount of friendly respect from the Blackfeet.
+They have also an inchoate polytheism, 'Above Persons, Ground Persons, and
+Under Water Persons.' Of the first, Thunder is most important, and is
+worshipped. There is the Cold Maker, a white figure on a white horse, the
+Wind, and so on.
+
+The Creator is Na-pi, Old Man; Dr. Brinton thinks he is a personification
+of Light, but Mr. Grinnell reckons it absurd to attribute so abstract a
+conception to the Blackfeet. Na-pi is simply a primal Being, an Immortal
+Man,[11] who was before Death came into the world, concerning which one of
+the usual tales of the Origin of Death is told. 'All things that he had
+made understood him when he spoke to them--birds, animals, and people,' as
+in the first chapters of Genesis. With Na-pi, Creation worked on the lines
+of adaptation to environment. He put the bighorn on the prairie. There it
+was awkward, so he set it on rocky places, where it skipped about with
+ease. The antelope fell on the rocks, so he removed it to the level
+prairie. Na-pi created man and woman, out of clay, but the folly of the
+woman introduced Death. Na-pi, as a Prometheus, gave fire, and taught the
+forest arts. He inculcated the duty of prayer; his will should be done by
+emissaries in the shape of animals. Then he went to other peoples. The
+misfortunes of the Indians arise from disobedience to his laws.
+
+Chiefs were elective, for conduct, courage, and charity.
+
+Though weapons and utensils were buried with the dead, or exposed on
+platforms, and though great men were left to sleep in their lodges,
+henceforth never to be entered by the living, there is no trace known to
+me of continued ancestor-worship. As many Blackfeet change their names
+yearly, ancestral names are not likely to become those of gods.
+
+The Sun is by many believed to have taken the previous place of Na-pi in
+religion; or perhaps Na-pi _is_ the Sun. However, he is still separately
+addressed in prayer. The Sun receives presents of furs and so forth; a
+finger, when the prayer is for life, has been offered to him. Fetishism
+probably shows itself in gifts to a great rock. There is daily prayer,
+both to the Sun and to Na-pi. Women institute Medicine Lodges, praying,
+'Pity me, Sun. You have seen my life. You know that I am pure.' 'We look
+on the Medicine Lodge woman as you white people do on the Roman Catholic
+Sisters.' Being 'virtuous in deed, serious, and clean-minded,' the Medical
+Lodge woman is in spiritual _rapport_ with Na-pi and the Sun. To this
+extent, at least, Blackfoot religion is an ethical influence.
+
+The creed seems to be a nascent polytheism, subordinate to Na-pi as
+supreme Maker, and to the personified Sun. As Blackfoot ghosts are
+'vaporous, ineffectual' for good, there seems to be nothing like ancestor
+worship.
+
+These two cults and beliefs, Pawnee and Blackfoot, may be regarded as
+fairly well authenticated examples of un-Christianised American religion
+among races on the borderland of agriculture and the chase. It would be
+difficult to maintain that ghost-worship or ancestor-worship is a potent
+factor in the evolution of the deathless Ti-ra-wa or the immortal Creator
+Na-pi, who has nothing of the spirit about him, especially as ghosts are
+not worshipped.[12]
+
+Let us now look at the Supreme Being of a civilised American people. There
+are few more interesting accounts of religion than Garcilasso de la Vega's
+description of faith in Peru. Garcilasso was of Inca parentage on the
+spindle side; he was born in 1540, and his book, taken from the traditions
+of an uncle, and aided by the fragmentary collections of Father Blas
+Valera, was published in 1609. In Garcilasso's theory the original people
+of Peru, Totemists and worshippers of hills and streams, Earth and Sea,
+were converted to Sun worship by the first Inca, a child of the Sun. Even
+the new religion included ancestor-worship and other superstitions. But
+behind Sun worship was the faith in a Being who 'advanced the Sun so far
+above all the stars of heaven.'[13] This Being was Pachacamac, 'the
+sustainer of the world.' The question then arises, Is Pachacamac a form of
+the same creative being whom we find among the lowest savages; or is he
+the result of philosophical reflection? The latter was the opinion
+of Garcilasso. 'The Incas and their Amautas' (learned class) 'were
+philosophers.'[14]
+
+'Pacha,' he says, = universe, and 'cama' = soul. Pachacamac, then, is
+_Anima Mundi_. 'They did not even take the name of Pachacamac into their
+mouths,' or but seldom and reverently, as the Australians will not, in
+religious matters, mention Darumulun. Pachacamac had no temple, 'but they
+worshipped him in their hearts.' That he was the Creator appears in an
+earlier writer, cited by Garcilasso, Agustin de Zarate (ii. ch. 5).
+Garcilasso, after denying the existence of temples to Pachacamac, mentions
+one, but only one. He insists, at length, and with much logic, that He
+whom, as a Christian, he worships, is in Quichua styled Pachacamac.
+Moreover, the one temple to Pachacamac was not built by an Inca, but by
+a race which, having heard of the Inca god, borrowed his name, without
+understanding his nature, that of a Being who dwells not in temples made
+with hands (ii. 186). In the temple this people, the Yuncas, offered even
+human sacrifices. By the Incas to Pachacamac no sacrifice was offered
+(ii. 189). This negative custom they also imposed upon the Yuncas, and
+they removed idols from the Yunca temple of Pachacamac (ii. 190). Yunca
+superstitions, however, infested the temple, and a Voice gave oracles
+therein.[15] The Yuncas also had a talking idol, which the Inca, in
+accordance with a religious treaty, occasionally consulted.
+
+While Pachacamac, without temple or rite, was reckoned the Creator, we
+must understand that Sun-worship and ancestor-worship were the practical
+elements of the Inca cult. This appears to have been distasteful to the
+Inca Huayna Ccapac, for at a Sun feast he gazed hard on the Sun, was
+remonstrated with by a priest, and replied that the restless Sun 'must
+have another Lord more powerful than himself.'[16]
+
+This remark could not have been necessary if Pachacamac were really an
+article of living and universal belief. Perhaps we are to understand that
+this Inca, like his father, who seems to have been the original author of
+the saying, meant to sneer at the elaborate worship bestowed on the Sun,
+while Pachacamac was neglected, as far as ritual went.
+
+In Garcilasso's book we have to allow for his desire to justify the creed
+of his maternal ancestors. His criticism of Spanish versions is acute, and
+he often appeals to his knowledge of Quichua, and to the direct traditions
+received by him from his uncle. Against his theory of Pachacamac as a
+result of philosophical thought, it may be urged that similar conceptions,
+or nearly similar, exist among races not civilised like the Incas, and not
+provided with colleges of learned priests. In fact, the position of
+Pachacamac and the Sun is very nearly that of the Blackfoot Creator Na-pi,
+and the Sun, or of Shang-ti and the Heaven, in China. We have the Creative
+Being whose creed is invaded by that of a worshipped aspect of nature, and
+whose cult, quite logically, is _nil_, or nearly _nil_. There are also, in
+different strata of the Inca empire, ancestor-worship, or mummy-worship,
+Totemism and polytheism, with a vague mass of _huaca = Elohim, kalou,
+wakan._
+
+Perhaps it would not be too rash to conjecture that Pachacamac is not a
+merely philosophical abstraction, but a survival of a Being like Na-pi or
+Ahone. Cieza de Leon calls Pachacamac 'a devil,' whose name means
+'creator of the world'![17] The name, when it _was_ uttered, was spoken
+with genuflexions and signs of reverence. So closely did Pachacamac
+resemble the Christian Deity, that Cieza de Leon declares the devil to
+have forged and insisted on the resemblance![18] It was open to Spanish
+missionaries to use Pachacamac, as to the Jesuits among the Bantu to use
+Mpungu, as a fulcrum for the introduction of Christianity. They preferred
+to regard Pachacamac as a fraudulent fiend. Now Nzambi Mpungu, among the
+Bantu, is assuredly not a creation of a learned priesthood, for the Bantu
+have no learned priests, and Mpungu would be useless to the greedy
+conjurers whom they do consult, as he is not propitiated. On grounds of
+analogy, then, Pachacamac may be said to resemble a savage Supreme
+Being, somewhat etherealised either by Garcilasso or by the Amautas, the
+learned class among the subjects of the Incas. He does not seem, even so,
+much superior to the Ahone of the Virginians.
+
+We possess, however, a different account of Inca religion, from which
+Garcilasso strongly dissents. The best version is that of Christoval de
+Molina, who was chaplain of the hospital for natives, and wrote between
+1570 and 1584.[19] Christoval assembled a number of old priests and other
+natives who had taken part in the ancient services, and collected their
+evidence. He calls the Creator ('not born of woman, unchangeable
+and eternal') by the name Pachayachachi. 'Teacher of the world' and
+'Tecsiviracocha,' which Garcilasso dismisses as meaningless.[20] He also
+tells the tale of the Inca Yupanqui and the Lord of the Sun, but
+says that the Incas had already knowledge of the Creator. To Yupanqui he
+attributes the erection of a gold image of the Creator, utterly denied by
+Garcilasso.[21] Christoval declares, again contradicted by Garcilasso,
+that sacrifices were offered to the Creator. Unlike the Sun, Christoval
+says, the Creator had no woman assigned to him, 'because, as he created
+them, they all belonged to him' (p. 26), which, of course, is an idea that
+would also make sacrifice superfluous.
+
+Christoval gives prayers in Quichua, wherein the Creator is addressed as
+_Uiracocha_.
+
+Christoval assigns images, sacrifice, and even human sacrifice, to the
+Creator Uiracocha. Garcilasso denies that the Creator Pachacamac had any
+of these things, he denies that Uiracocha was the name of the Creator,
+and he denies it, knowing that the Spaniards made the assertion.[22] Who
+is right? Uiracocha, says Garcilasso, is one thing, with his sacrifices;
+the Creator, Pachacamac, without sacrifices, is another, is GOD.
+
+Mr. Markham thinks that Garcilasso, writing when he did, and not
+consciously exaggerating, was yet less trustworthy (though 'wonderfully
+accurate') than Christoval. Garcilasso, however, is 'scrupulously
+truthful.'[23] 'The excellence of his memory is perhaps best shown in
+his topographical details.... He does not make a single mistake,' in the
+topography of three hundred and twenty places! A scrupulously truthful
+gentleman, endowed with an amazing memory, and a master of his native
+language, flatly contradicts the version of a Spanish priest, who also
+appears to have been careful and honourable.
+
+I shall now show that Christoval and Garcilasso have different versions of
+the same historical events, and that Garcilasso bases his confutation of
+the Spanish theory of the Inca Creator on his form of this historical
+tradition, which follows:
+
+The Inca Yahuarhuaccac, like George II., was at odds with his Prince of
+Wales. He therefore banished the Prince to Chita, and made him serve as
+shepherd of the llamas of the Sun. Three years later the disgraced
+Prince came to Court, with what the Inca regarded as a cock-and-bull story
+of an apparition of the kind technically styled 'Borderland.' Asleep or
+awake, he knew not, he saw a bearded robed man holding a strange animal.
+The appearance declared himself as Uiracocha (Christoval's name for the
+Creator), a Child of the Sun; by no means as Pachacamac, the Creator of
+the Sun. He announced a distant rebellion, and promised his aid to the
+Prince. The Inca, hearing this narrative, replied in the tones of
+Charles II., when he said about Monmouth, 'Tell James to go to hell!'[24]
+The predicted rebellion, however, broke out, the Inca fled, the Prince
+saved the city, dethroned his father, and sent him into the country. He
+then adopted, from the apparition, the throne-name _Uiracocha,_ grew a
+beard, and dressed like the apparition, to whom he erected a temple,
+roofless, and unique in construction. Therein he had an image of the god,
+for which he himself gave frequent sittings. When the Spaniards arrived,
+bearded men, the Indians called them Uiracochas (as all the Spanish
+historians say), and, to flatter them, declared falsely that Uiracocha was
+their word for the Creator. Garcilasso explodes the Spanish etymology of
+the name, in the language of Cuzco, which he 'sucked in with his mother's
+milk.' 'The Indians said that the chief Spaniards were children of the
+Sun, to make gods of them, just as they said they were children of the
+apparition, Uiracocha.'[25] Moreover, Garcilasso and Cieza de Leon agree
+in their descriptions of the image of Uiracocha, which, both assert,
+the Spaniards conceived to represent a Christian early missionary, perhaps
+St. Bartholomew.[26] Garcilasso had seen the mummy of the Inca Uiracocha,
+and relates the whole tale from the oral version of his uncle, adding many
+native comments on the Court revolution described.
+
+To Garcilasso, then, the invocations of Uiracocha, in Christoval's
+collection of prayers, are a native adaptation to Spanish prejudice: even
+in them Pachacamac occurs.[27]
+
+Now, Christoval has got hold of a variant of Garcilasso's narrative,
+which, in Garcilasso, has plenty of humour and human nature. According to
+Christoval it was not the Prince, later Inca Uiracocha, who beheld the
+apparition, but the Inca Uiracocha's _son,_ Prince of Wales, as it were,
+of the period, later the Inca Yupanqui.
+
+Garcilasso corrects Christoval. Uiracocha saw the apparition, as Pere
+Acosta rightly says, and Yupanqui was _not_ the son but the grandson of
+this Inca Uiracocha.[28] Uiracocha's own son was Pachacutec, which simply
+means 'Revolution,' 'they say, by way of by-word _Pachamcutin,_ which
+means "the world changes."'
+
+Christoval's form of the story is peculiarly gratifying in one way.
+Yupanqui saw the apparition _in a piece of crystal_, 'the apparition
+vanished, while the piece of crystal remained. The Inca took care of it,
+and they say that he afterwards saw everything he wanted in it.' The
+apparition, in human form and in Inca dress, gave itself out for the Sun;
+and Yupanqui, when he came to the throne, 'ordered a statue of the Sun to
+be made, as nearly as possible resembling the figure he had seen in the
+crystal.' He bade his subjects to 'reverence the new deity, as they had
+heretofore worshipped the Creator,'[29] who, therefore, was prior to
+Uiracocha.
+
+Interesting as a proof of Inca crystal-gazing, this legend of Christoval's
+cannot compete as evidence with Acosta and Garcilasso. The reader,
+however, must decide as to whether he prefers Garcilasso's unpropitiated
+Pachacamac, or Christoval's Uiracocha, human sacrifices, and all.[30]
+
+Mr. Tylor prefers the version of Christoval, making Pachacamac a title of
+Uiracocha.[31] He thinks that we have, in Inca religion, an example of 'a
+subordinate god' (the Sun) 'usurping the place of the supreme deity,' 'the
+rivalry between the Creator and the divine Sun.' In China, as we shall
+see, Mr. Tylor thinks, on the other hand, that Heaven is the elder god,
+and that Shang-ti, the Supreme Being, is the usurper.
+
+The truth in the Uiracocha _versus_ Pachacamac controversy is difficult to
+ascertain. I confess a leaning toward Garcilasso, so truthful and so
+wonderfully accurate, rather than to the Spanish priest. Christoval, it
+will be remarked, says that 'Chanca-Uiracocha was a _huaca_ (sacred place)
+in Chuqui-chaca.'[32] Now Chuqui-chaca is the very place where, according
+to Garcilasso, the Inca Uiracocha erected a temple to 'his Uncle, the
+Apparition.'[33] Uiracocha, then, the deity who receives human sacrifice,
+would be a late, royally introduced ancestral god, no real rival of the
+Creator, who receives no sacrifice at all, and, as he was bearded, his
+name would be easily transferred to the bearded Spaniards, whose arrival
+the Inca Uiracocha was said to have predicted. But to call several or all
+Spaniards by the name given to the Creator would be absurd. Mr. Tylor and
+Mr. Markham do not refer to the passage in which Christoval obviously gets
+hold of a wrong version of the story of the apparition.
+
+There is yet another version of this historical legend, written forty
+years after Christoval's date by Don Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui
+Salcamayhua. He ranks after Garcilasso and Christoval, but before earlier
+_Spanish_ writers, such as Acosta, who knew not Quichua. According to
+Salcamayhuia, the Inca Uiracocha was like James III., fond of architecture
+and averse to war. He gave the realm to his bastard, Urca, who was
+defeated and killed by the Chancas. Uiracocha meant to abandon the
+contest, but his legitimate son, Yupanqui, saw a fair youth on a rock, who
+promised him success in the name of the Creator, and then vanished. The
+Prince was victorious, and the Inca Uiracocha retired into private
+life. This appears to be a mixture of the stories of Garcilasso and
+Christoval.[34]
+
+It is not, in itself, a point of much importance whether the Creator was
+called Uiracocha (which, if it means anything, means 'sea of grease!'), or
+whether he was called Pachacamac, maker of the world, or by both names.
+The important question is as to whether the Creator received even human
+sacrifices (Christoval) or none at all (Garcilasso). As to Pachacamac, we
+must consult Mr. Payne, who has the advantage of being a Quichua scholar.
+He considers that Pachacamac combines the conception of a general spirit
+of living things with that of a Creator or maker of all things.
+'Pachacamac and the Creator are one and the same,' but the conception of
+Pachayachacic, 'ruler of the world,' 'belongs to the later period of the
+Incas.'[35] Mr. Payne appears to prefer Christoval's legend of the Inca
+crystal-gazer, to the rival version of Garcilasso. The Yunca form of the
+worship of Pachacamac Mr. Payne regards as an example of degradation.[36]
+He disbelieves Garcilasso's statement, that human sacrifices were not
+made to the Sun. Garcilasso must, if Mr. Payne is right, have been a
+deliberate liar, unless, indeed, he was deceived by his Inca kinsfolk.
+The reader can now estimate for himself the difficulty of knowing much
+about Peruvian religion, or, indeed, of any religion. For, if Mr. Payne
+is right about the lowest savages having no conception of God, or even of
+spirit, though the idea of a great Creator, a spirit, is one of the
+earliest efforts of 'primitive logic,' we, of course, have been merely
+fabling throughout.
+
+Garcilasso's evidence, however, seems untainted by Christian attempts to
+find a primitive divine tradition. Garcilasso may possibly be refining on
+facts, but he asks for no theory of divine primitive tradition in the case
+of Pachacamac, whom he attributes to philosophical reflection.
+
+In the following chapter we discuss 'the old Degeneration theory,' and
+contrast it with the scheme provisionally offered in this book. We have
+already observed that the Degeneration theory biasses the accounts of some
+missionaries who are obviously anxious to find traces of a Primitive
+Tradition, originally revealed to all men, but only preserved in a pure
+form by the Jews. To avoid deception by means of this bias we have chosen
+examples of savage creative beings from wide areas, from diverse ages,
+from non-missionary statements, from the least contaminated backward
+peoples, and from their secret mysteries and hymns.
+
+Thus, still confining ourselves to the American continent, we have the
+ancient hymns of the Zunis, in no way Christianised, and never chanted in
+the presence of the Mexican Spanish, These hymns run thus: 'Before the
+beginning of the New Making, Awonawilona, the Maker and container of All,
+the All-Father, solely had being.' He then evolved all things 'by thinking
+himself outward in space.' Hegelian! but so are the dateless hymns of the
+Maoris, despite the savage mythology which intrudes into both sets of
+traditions. The old fable of Ouranos and Gaia recurs in Zuni as in
+Maori.[37]
+
+I fail to see how Awonawilona could be developed out of the ghost of chief
+or conjurer. That in which all things potentially existed, yet who was
+more than all, is not the ghost of a conjurer or chief. He certainly is
+not due to missionary influence. No authority can be better than that of
+traditional sacred chants found among a populace which will not sing them
+before one of their Mexican masters.
+
+We have tried to escape from the bias of belief in a primitive divine
+tradition, but bias of every kind exists, and must exist. At present the
+anthropological hypothesis of ancestor-worship as the basis, perhaps (as
+in Mr. Spencer's theory) the only basis of religion, affects observers.
+
+Before treating the theory of Degeneration let us examine a case of the
+anthropological bias. The Fijians, as we learned from Williams, have
+ancestral gods, and also a singular form of the creative being, Ndengei,
+or, as Mr. Basil Thomson calls him, Degei. Mr. Thomson writes: 'It is
+clear that the Fijians humanised their gods, because they had once existed
+on earth in human form.... Like other primitive people, the Fijians
+deified their ancestors.' Yet the Fijians 'may have forgotten the names
+of their ancestors three generations back'! How in the world can you deify
+a person whom you don't remember? Moreover, only malevolent chiefs were
+deified, so apparently a Fijian god is really a well-born human
+scoundrel, so considerable that _he_ for one is not forgotten--just as if
+we worshipped the wicked Lord Lyttelton! Of course a god like Ahone could
+not be made out of such materials as these, and, in fact, we learn from
+Mr. Thomson that there are other Fijian gods of a different origin.
+
+'It is probable that there were here and there, _gods that were the
+creation of the priests that ministered to them, and were not the
+spirits of dead chiefs_. Such was the god of the Bure Tribe on the Ra
+coast, who was called Tui Laga or "Lord of Heaven." When the missionaries
+first went to convert this town they found the heathen priest their
+staunch ally. He declared that they had come to preach the same god that
+he had been preaching, the Tui Laga, and that more had been revealed to
+them than to him of the mysteries of the god.'
+
+Mr. Thomson is reminded of St. Paul at Athens, 'whom then ye ignorantly
+worship, him declare I unto you.'[38]
+
+Mr. Thomson has clearly no bias in favour of a God like our own, known to
+savages, and _not_ derived from ghost-worship. He deduces this god, Tui
+Laga, from priestly reflection and speculation. But we find such a God
+where we find no priests, where a priesthood has not been developed. Such
+a God, being usually unpropitiated by sacrifice and lucrative private
+practice, is precisely the kind of deity who does not suit a priesthood.
+For these reasons--that a priesthood 'sees no money in' a God of this
+kind, and that Gods of this kind, ethical and creative, are found where
+there are no priesthoods--we cannot look on the conception as a late one
+of priestly origin, as Mr. Thomson does, though a learned caste, like the
+Peruvian Amantas, may refine on the idea. Least of all can such a God be
+'the creation of the priests that minister to him,' when, as in Peru, the
+Andaman Isles, and much of Africa, this God is ministered to by no
+priests. Nor, lastly, can we regard the absence of sacrifice to the
+Creative Being as a mere proof that he is an ancestral ghost who 'had
+lived on earth at too remote a time;' for this absence of sacrifice occurs
+where ghosts are dreaded, but are not propitiated by offerings of food (as
+among Australians, Andamanese, and Blackfoot Indians), while the Creative
+Being is not and never was a ghost, according to his worshippers.
+
+At this point criticism may naturally remark that whether the savage
+Supreme Being is feted, as by the Comanches, who offer puffs of smoke: or
+is apparently half forgotten, as by the Algonquins and Zulus: whether
+he is propitiated by sacrifice (which is very rare indeed), or only by
+conduct, I equally claim him as the probable descendant in evolution of
+the primitive, undifferentiated, not necessarily 'spiritual' Being of such
+creeds as the Australian.
+
+One must reply that this pedigree cannot, indeed, be historically traced,
+but that it presents none of the logical difficulties inherent in the
+animistic pedigree--namely, that the savage Supreme Being is the last and
+highest result of evolution on animistic lines out of ghosts. It does not
+run counter to the evidence universally offered by savages, that their
+Supreme Being never was mortal man. It is consistent, whereas the
+animistic hypothesis is, in this case, inconsistent, with the universal
+savage theory of Death. Finally, as has been said before, granting my
+opinion that there are two streams of religious thought, one rising in the
+conception of an undifferentiated Being, eternal, moral, and creative, the
+other rising in the ghost-doctrine, it stands to reason that the latter,
+as best adapted to everyday needs and experiences, normal and supernormal,
+may contaminate the former, and introduce sacrifice and food-propitiation
+into the ritual of Beings who, by the original conception, 'need nothing
+of ours.' At the same time, the conception of 'spirit,' once attained,
+would inevitably come to be attached to the idea of the Supreme Being,
+even though he was not at first conceived of as a spirit. We know, by our
+own experience, how difficult it has become for us to think of an eternal,
+powerful, and immortal being, except as a spirit. Yet this way of looking
+at the Supreme Being, merely as _being_, not as spirit, must have existed,
+granting that the idea of spirit has ghost for its first expression, as,
+by their very definition, the high gods of savages are not ghosts, and
+never were ghosts, but are prior to death.
+
+Here let me introduce, by way of example, a Supreme Being _not_ of the
+lowest savage level. Metaphysically he is improved on in statement,
+morally he is stained with the worst crimes of the hungry ghost-god, or
+god framed on the lines of animism. This very interesting Supreme Being,
+in a middle barbaric race, is the Polynesian Taa-roa, as described by
+Ellis in that fascinating book 'Polynesian Researches.'[39] 'Several of
+their _taata-paari_, or wise men, pretend that, according to other
+traditions, Taa-roa was only a man who was deified after death.'
+Euhemerism, in fact, is a natural theory of men acquainted with
+ancestor-worship, but a Euhemeristic hypothesis by a Polynesian thinker is
+not a statement of national belief. Taa-roa was 'uncreated, existing from
+the beginning, or from the time he emerges from the _po_, or world of
+darkness.' In the Leeward Isles Taa-roa was _Toivi_, fatherless and
+motherless from all eternity. In the highest heavens he dwells alone. He
+created the gods of polytheism, the gods of war, of peace, and so on. Says
+a native hymn, 'He was: he abode in the void. No earth, _no sky_, no men!
+He became the universe.' In the Windward Isles he has a wife, Papa the
+rock = Papa, Earth, wife of Rangi, Heaven, in Maori mythology. Thus it may
+be argued, Taa-roa is no 'primaeval theistic idea,' but merely the
+Heaven-God (Ouranos in Greece). But we may distinguish: in the Zuni hymn
+we have the myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, but Heaven is not
+the Eternal, Awonawilona, who 'thought himself out into the void,' before
+which, as in the Polynesian hymn, 'there was no sky.'[40]
+
+Whence came the idea of Taa-roa? The Euhemeristic theory that he was a
+ghost of a dead man is absurd. But as we are now among polytheists it may
+be argued that, given a crowd of gods on the animistic model, an origin
+had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa. This would be more
+plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental
+polytheism to develop them out of. In Tahiti, _Atuas_ are gods, _Oramutuas
+tiis_ are spirits; the chief of the spirits were ghosts of warriors. These
+were mischievous: they, their images, and the skulls of the dead needed
+propitiation, and these ideas (perhaps) were reflected on to Taa-roa, to
+whom human victims were sacrificed.[41]
+
+Now this kind of horror, human sacrifice, is unknown, I think, in early
+savage religions of Supreme Beings, as in Australia, among the Bushmen,
+the Andamanese, and so on. I therefore suggest that in an advanced
+polytheism, such as that of Polynesia, the evil sacrificial rites
+unpractised by low savages come to be attached to the worship even of the
+Supreme Being. Ghosts and ghost-gods demanded food, and food was therefore
+also offered to the Supreme Being.
+
+It was found difficult, or impossible, to induce Christian converts, in
+Polynesia, to repeat the old prayers. They began, trembled, and abstained.
+They had a ritual 'for almost every act of their lives,' a thing
+unfamiliar to low savages. In fact, beyond all doubt, religious criminal
+acts, from human sacrifice to the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, increase as
+religion and culture move away from the stage of Bushmen and Andamanese to
+the stage of Aztec and Polynesian culture. The Supreme Being is succeeded
+in advancing civilisation, and under the influences of animism, by
+ruthless and insatiable ghost-gods, full of the worst human qualities.
+Thus there is what we may really call degeneration, moral and religious,
+inevitably accompanying early progress.
+
+That this is the case, that the first advances in culture _necessarily_
+introduce religious degeneration, we shall now try to demonstrate. But we
+may observe, in passing, that our array of moral or august savage supreme
+beings (the first who came to hand) will, for some reason, not be found in
+anthropological treatises on the Origin of Religion. They appear, somehow,
+to have been overlooked by philosophers. Yet the evidence for them
+is sufficiently good. Its excellence is proved by its very uniformity,
+assuredly undesigned. An old, nay, an obsolete theory--that of
+degeneration in religion--has facts at its basis, which its very
+supporters have ignored, which orthodoxy has overlooked. Thus the Rev.
+Professor Flint informs the audience in the Cathedral of St. Giles's,
+that, in the religions 'at the bottom of the religious scale,' 'it is
+always easy to see how wretchedly the divine is conceived of; how little
+conscious of his own true wants ... is the poor worshipper.' The poor
+worshipper of Baiame wishes to obey His Law, which makes, to some extent,
+for righteousness.[42]
+
+[Footnote 1: In Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13, 39; _Prim. Cult_. ii. 342.]
+
+[Footnote 2: See Preface to this edition for corrected statement.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Myths of the New World_, p. 47.]
+
+[Footnote 4: There is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including
+Smith's remarks, published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this work
+with his own MS. in the British Museum, dedicated to Bacon (Verulam). This
+MS. was edited by Mr. Major, for the Hakluyt Society, in 1849, with a
+glossary, by Strachey, of the native language. The remarks on religion are
+in Chapter VII. The passage on Ahone occurs in Strachey (1612), but _not_
+in Smith (1682), in Pinkerton. I owe to the kindness of Mr. Edmund Gosse
+photographs of the drawings accompanying the MS. Strachey's story of
+sacrifice of children (pp. 94, 95) seems to refer to nothing worse than the
+initiation into the mysteries.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, for a philological
+theory.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Compare 'The Fire Walk' in _Modern Mythology_.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Compare St. Augustine's curious anecdote in _De Cura pro
+Mortuis habenda_ about the dead and revived Curio. The founder of the new
+Sioux religion, based on hypnotism, 'died' and recovered.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Cf. Demeter.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Major North, for long the U.S. Superintendent of the Pawnees.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Schoolcraft, iii. 237.]
+
+[Footnote 11: As envisaged here, Na-pi is not a spirit. The question
+of spirit or non-spirit has not arisen. So far, Na-pi answers to
+Marrangarrah, the Creative Being of the Larrakeah tribe of Australians.
+'A very good Man called Marrangarrah lives in the sky; he made all living
+creatures, except black fellows. He made everything.... He never dies, and
+likes all black fellows.' He has a demiurge, Dawed (Mr. Foelsche, _apud_
+Dr. Stirling, _J.A.I_., Nov. 1894, p. 191). It is curious to observe how
+savage creeds often shift the responsibility for evil from the Supreme
+Creator, entirely beneficent, on to a subordinate deity.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Grinnell's _Blackfoot Lodge-Tales_ and _Pawnee Hero
+Stories_.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Garcilasso, i. 101.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Op. cit. i. 106.]
+
+[Footnote 15: From all this we might conjecture, like Mr. Prescott, that
+the Incas borrowed Pachacamac from the Yuncas, and etherealised his
+religion. But Mr. Clements Markham points out that 'Pachacamac is a pure
+Quichua word.']
+
+[Footnote 16: Garcilasso, ii. 446, 447.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Cieza de Leon. p.253]
+
+[Footnote 18: Markham's translation, p. 253.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Rites and Laws of the Yncas_, Markham's translation,
+p. vii.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Rites_, p. 6. Garcilasso, i. 109.]
+
+[Footnote 21: _Rites_, p. 11.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Compare _Reports on Discovery of Peru,_ Introduction.]
+
+[Footnote 23: _Rites_, p. xv.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Lord Ailesbury's _Memoirs_.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Garcilasso, ii. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Cieza de Leon, p. 357.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _Rites,_ pp. 28, 29.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Acosta, lib. vi. ch. 21: Garcilasso. ii. 88, 89.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _Rites_, p. 12.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Ibid. p.54.]
+
+[Footnote 31: _Prim. Cult_. ii, 337, 338.]
+
+[Footnote 32: _Rites_, p. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Garcilasso, ii. 69.]
+
+[Footnote 34: _Rites and Laws_, p. 91 _et seq_.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Payne, i. 139.]
+
+[Footnote 36: Op. cit. i. 468. Mr. Payne absolutely rejects
+Ixtlilochitl's story of the monotheism of Nezahualcoyotl; 'Torquemada
+knows nothing of it,' i. 490.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Cushing, _Report, Ethnol. Bureau_, 1891-92, p. 379.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _J.A.I_. May 1895, pp. 341-344.]
+
+[Footnote 39: ii. 191, 1829.]
+
+[Footnote 40: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 345, 346. Ellis, ii. 193.]
+
+[Footnote 41: Ellis, ii. 221.]
+
+[Footnote 42: _The Faiths of The World_, p. 413.]
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE OLD DEGENERATION THEORY
+
+If any partisan of the anthropological theory has read so far into this
+argument, he will often have murmured to himself, 'The old degeneration
+theory!' On this Dr. Brinton remarked in 1868:
+
+'The supposition that in ancient times and in very unenlightened
+conditions, before mythology had grown, a monotheism prevailed which
+afterwards, at various times, was revived by reformers, is a belief that
+should have passed away when the delights of savage life and the praises
+of a state of nature ceased to be the theme of philosophers[1].'
+
+'The old degeneration theory' practically, and fallaciously, resolved
+itself, as Mr. Tylor says, into two assumptions--'first, that the history
+of culture began with the appearance on earth of a semi-civilised race of
+men; and second, that from this stage culture has proceeded in two
+ways--backward to produce savages, and forward to produce civilised
+men[2].' That hypothesis is false to all our knowledge of evolution.
+
+The hypothesis here provisionally advocated makes no assumptions
+at all. It is a positive fact that among some of the lowest savages
+there exists, not a doctrinal and abstract Monotheism, but a belief
+in a moral, powerful, kindly, creative Being, while this faith is found
+in juxtaposition with belief in unworshipped ghosts, totems, fetishes,
+and so on. The powerful creative Being of savage belief sanctions truth,
+unselfishness, loyalty, chastity, and other virtues. I have set forth the
+difficulties involved in the attempt to derive this Being from ghosts and
+other lower forms of belief.
+
+Now, it is mere matter of fact, and not of assumption, that the Supreme
+Being of many rather higher savages differs from the Supreme Being of
+certain lower savages by the neglect in which he is left, by the epicurean
+repose with which he is credited, and by his comparative lack of moral
+control over human conduct. In his place a mob of ghosts and spirits,
+supposed to be potent and helpful in everyday life, attract men's regard
+and adoration, and get paid by sacrifice--even by human sacrifice.
+
+Turning to races yet higher in material culture, we find a crowd of hungry
+and cruel gods.
+
+On this point Mr. Jevons remarks, in accordance with my own observation,
+that 'human sacrifice appears at a much earlier period in the rites for
+the dead than it does in the ritual of the gods.'[3] The dead chief needs
+servants and wives in Hades, who are offered to him. The Australians have
+some elements of cannibalism, but do not, as a general rule, offer any
+human victims. So far, then, ancestor-worship introduced a sadly
+'degenerate' rite, compared with the moral faith in unfed gods.
+
+To gods the human sacrifice was probably extended (in some cases) either
+by a cannibal civilised race, like the Aztecs, or by way of _piacula_, the
+god being conciliated for man's sin by the offering of what man most
+prized, the 'jealousy' of the god being appeased in a similar way.
+But these are relatively advanced conceptions, not to be found, to my
+knowledge, among the lowest and most backward races. Therefore, advance to
+the idea of spirit at one point, meant degeneration at another point, to
+the extent of human sacrifice.
+
+Thus, on looking at relatively advanced races, we find them worshipping
+polytheistic deities and ghosts of the kings just dead, who are often
+propitiated by terrible massacres of human victims, while, as in the case
+of Taa-roa, the blood spurts back even on the uncreated Creator, who was
+before earth was, or sea, sun, or sky.
+
+Undeniably the hungry, cruel gods are degenerate from the Australian
+Father in Heaven, who receives no sacrifice but that of men's lusts and
+selfishness; who desires obedience, not the fat of kangaroos; who needs
+nothing of ours; is unfed and unbribed. Thus, in this particular respect
+the degeneration of religion from the Australian or Andamanese to the
+Dinka standard--and infinitely more to the Polynesian, or Aztec, or
+popular Greek standard--is as undeniable as any fact in human history.
+
+Anthropology has only escaped the knowledge of this circumstance by laying
+down the rule, demonstrably unbased on facts, that 'the divine sanction of
+ethical laws ... belongs almost or wholly to religions above the savage
+level, not to the earlier and lower creeds;' that 'savage Animism is
+almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is
+the very mainspring of practical religion.'[4]
+
+I have argued, indeed, that the God of low savages who imparts the divine
+sanction of ethical laws is _not_ of animistic origin. But even where Mr.
+Im Thurn finds, in Guiana, nothing but Animism of the lowest conceivable
+type, he also finds in that Animism the only or most potent moral
+restraint on the conduct of men.
+
+While Anthropology holds the certainly erroneous idea that the religion of
+the most backward races is always non-moral, of course she cannot know
+that there has, in fact, been great degeneration in religion (if religion
+began on the Australian and Andamanese level, or even higher) wherever
+religion is non-moral or immoral.
+
+Again, Anthropology, while fixing her gaze on totems, on worshipped
+mummies, adored ghosts, and treasured fetishes, has not, to my knowledge,
+made a comparative study of the higher and purer religious ideas of
+savages. These have been passed by, with a word about credulous
+missionaries and Christian influences, except in the brief summary for
+which Mr. Tylor found room. In this work I only take a handful of cases of
+the higher religious opinions of savages, and set them side by side for
+purposes of comparison. Much more remains to be done in this field. But
+the area covered is wide, the evidence is the best attainable, and it
+seems proved beyond doubt that savages have 'felt after' a conception of a
+Creator much higher than that for which they commonly get credit. Now, if
+that conception is original, or is very early (and nothing in it suggests
+lateness of development), then the other elements of their faith and
+practice are degenerate.
+
+'How,' it has been asked, 'could all mankind forget a pure religion?'[5]
+That is what I now try to explain. That degeneration I would account for
+by the attractions which animism, when once developed, possessed for the
+naughty natural man, 'the old Adam.' A moral creator in need of no gifts,
+and opposed to lust and mischief, will not help a man with love-spells, or
+with malevolent 'sendings' of disease by witchcraft; will not favour one
+man above his neighbour, or one tribe above its rivals, as a reward for
+sacrifice which he does not accept, or as constrained by charms which do
+not touch his omnipotence. Ghosts and ghost-gods, on the other hand, in
+need of food and blood, afraid of spells and binding charms,[6] are a
+corrupt, but, to man, a useful constituency. Man being what he is, man was
+certain to 'go a-whoring' after practically useful ghosts, ghost-gods, and
+fetishes which he could keep in his wallet or medicine bag. For these he
+was sure, in the long run, first to neglect his idea of his Creator; next,
+perhaps, to reckon Him as only one, if the highest, of the venal rabble of
+spirits or deities, and to sacrifice to Him, as to them. And this is
+exactly what happened! If we are not to call it 'degeneration,' what are
+we to call it? It may be an old theory, but facts 'winna ding,' and are on
+the side of an old theory. Meanwhile, on the material plane, culture
+kept advancing, the crafts and arts arose; departments arose, each needing
+a god; thought grew clearer; such admirable ethics as those of the Aztecs
+were developed, and while bleeding human hearts smoked on every altar,
+Nezahuatl conceived and erected a bloodless fane to 'The Unknown God,
+Cause of Causes,' without altar or idol; and the Inca, Yupanqui, or
+another, declared that 'Our Father and Master, the Sun, must have a
+Lord.'[7]
+
+But, at this stage of culture, the luck of the state, and the interests of
+a rich and powerful clergy, were involved in the maintenance of the old,
+animistic, relatively non-moral system, as in Cuzco, Greece, and Rome.
+That popular and political regard for the luck of the state, that
+priestly self-interest (quite natural), could only be swept away by the
+moral monotheism of Christianity or of Islam. Nothing else could do it. In
+the case of Christianity, the central and most potent of many combined
+influences, apart from the Life and Death of Our Lord, was the moral
+Monotheism of the Hebrew religion of Jehovah.
+
+Now, it is undeniable that Jehovah, at a certain period of Hebrew history,
+had become degraded and anthropomorphized, far below Darumulun, and
+Puluga, and Pachacamac, and Ahone, as conceived of in their purest form,
+and in the high mood of savage mysteries which yet contain so much that is
+grotesque. Even the Big Black Man of the Fuegians is on a higher level (as
+_we_ reckon morals), when he forbids the slaying of a robber enemy, than
+certain examples of early Hebrew conduct. But our knowledge of the
+Fuegians is lamentably scanty.
+
+Again, traces of human sacrifice appear in the ritual of Israel, and it is
+only relatively late that the great prophets, justly declaring Jehovah to
+be indifferent to the blood of bulls and rams, try to bring back his
+service to that of the unpropitiated, unbought Dendid, or Ahone, or
+Pundjel. Here is degeneration, even in Israel. How the conception of
+Jehovah arose in Israel, whether it was a revival of a half-obliterated
+idea, such as we find among low savages; or whether it was borrowed from
+some foreign creed; or was the result of meditation on the philosophical
+Supreme Being of high Egyptian theology, is another question. The Biblical
+statement leans to the first alternative. Jehovah, not by that name, had
+been the God of Israel's fathers. The question will be discussed later;
+but, unless new facts are discovered, we must accept the version of the
+Pentateuch, or take refuge in conjecture.
+
+Not only is there degeneration from the Australian conception of
+Mungan-gnaur, at its best, to the conception of the Semitic gods in
+general, but, 'humanly speaking,' if religion began in a pure form among
+low savages, degeneration was inevitable. Advancing social conditions
+compelled men into degeneration. Mungan-ngaur is, so far, in line with
+our own ideas of divinity because he is not localised. He dwelleth not in
+temples made with hands; it is not likely that he should, when his
+worshippers have neither house, tent, nor tabernacle. As Mr. Robertson
+Smith says, 'where the God had a house or a temple, we recognise the work
+of men who were no longer pure nomads, but had begun to form fixed homes.'
+By the nature of Australian society, a deity could not be tied to a
+temple, and temple-ritual, and consequent myths to explain that ritual,
+could not arise. Nor could Darumulun be attached to a district, just as
+'the nomad Arabs could not assimilate the conception of a god as a
+land-owner, and apply it to their own tribal deities, for the simple
+reason that in the desert private property in land was unknown.'[8]
+
+Darumulun is thus not capable of degenerating into 'a local god, as
+_Baal_, or lord of the land,' because this 'involves a series of ideas
+unknown to the primitive life of the savage huntsman,' like the widely
+spread Murring tribes.[9]
+
+Nor could Darumulun be tied down to a place in Semitic fashion, first by
+manifesting himself there, therefore by receiving an altar of sacrifice
+there, and in the end a sanctuary, for Darumulun receives no sacrifice
+at all.
+
+Again, the scene of the Bora could not become a permanent home of
+Darumulun, because, when the rites are over, the effigy of the god is
+scrupulously destroyed. Thus Darumulun, in his own abode 'beyond the sky,'
+can 'go everywhere and do everything' (is omnipresent and omnipotent),
+dwells in no earthly places, has no temple, nor tabernacle, nor sacred
+mount, nor, like Jehovah, any limit of land.[10]
+
+The early Hebrew conception of Jehovah, then, is infinitely more
+conditioned, practically, by space, than the Supreme Being, 'The Master,'
+in the conception of some Australian blacks.
+
+'By a prophet like Isaiah the residence of Jehovah in Zion is almost
+wholly dematerialised.... Conceiving Jehovah as the King of Israel, he
+necessarily conceives His kingly activity as going forth from the capital
+of the nation.'[11]
+
+But nomad hunter tribes, with no ancestor-worship, no king and no capital,
+cannot lower their deity by the conditions, or limit him by the
+limitations, of an earthly monarchy.
+
+In precisely the same way, Major Ellis proves the degeneration of deity in
+Africa, so far as being localised in place of being the Universal God,
+implies degeneration, as it certainly does to our minds. By being attached
+to a given hill or river 'the gods, instead of being regarded as being
+interested in the whole of mankind, would eventually come to be regarded
+as being interested in separate tribes or nations alone.'
+
+To us Milton seems nobly Chauvinistic when he talks of what God has done
+by 'His English.' But this localised and essentially degenerate conception
+was inevitable, as soon as, in advancing civilisation, the god who had
+been 'interested in the whole of [known] mankind' was settled on a hill,
+river, or lagoon, amidst a nation of worshippers.
+
+In the course of the education of mankind, this form of degeneration
+(abstractly so considered) was to work, as nothing else could have worked,
+towards the lofty conception of universal Deity. For that conception
+was only brought into practical religion (as apart from philosophic
+speculation) by the union between Israel and the God of Sinai and Zion.
+The Prophets, recognising in the God of Sinai, their nation's God--One
+to whom righteousness was infinitely dearer than even his Chosen
+People--freed the conception of God from local ties, and made it
+overspread the world.
+
+Mr. Robertson Smith has pointed out, again, the manner in which the
+different political development of East and West affected the religion of
+Greece and of the Semites. In Greece, monarchy fell, at an early period,
+before the aristocratic houses. The result was 'a divine aristocracy of
+many gods, only modified by a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the
+not very effective sovereignty' (or _prytany_) 'of Zeus. In the East the
+national god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway.'[12] Australia
+escaped polytheistic degeneracy by having no aristocracy, as in Polynesia,
+where aristocracy, as in early Greece, had developed polytheism. Ghosts
+and spirits the Australians knew, but not polytheistic gods, nor
+departmental deities, as of war, agriculture, art. The savage had no
+agriculture, and his social condition was not departmental. In yet another
+way, political advance produces religious degeneration, if polytheism be
+degeneration from the conception of one relatively supreme moral being.
+To make a nation, several tribes must unite. Each has its god, and the
+nation is apt to receive them all, equally, into its Pantheon. Thus, if
+worshippers of Baiame, Pundjel, and Darumulun coalesced into a nation,
+we might find all three gods living together in a new polytheism. In fact,
+granting a relatively pure starting-point, degeneration from it must
+accompany every step of civilisation, to a certain distance.
+
+Unlike Semitic gods, Darumulun receives no sacrifice. As we have said, he
+has no kin with ghosts, and their sacrifices could not be carried on into
+his cult, if Waitz-Gerland (vi. 811) are right in saying that the
+Australians have no ancestor-worship. The Kurnai ghosts 'were believed to
+live upon plants,'[13] which are not offered to them. Chill ghosts, unfed
+by men, would come to waning camp-fires and batten on the broken meats.
+The Ngarego and Wolgal held, more handsomely, that Tharamulun (Darumulun)
+met the just departed spirit 'and conducted it to its future home beyond
+the sky.'[14] Ghosts might also accompany relics of the body, such as the
+dead hand, carried about by the family, who would wave the black fragment
+at the dreaded Aurora Borealis, crying, 'Send it away!' I am unacquainted
+with any sacrifices to ancestral ghosts among this people who cannot long
+remember their ancestors, consequently the practice has not been refracted
+on their supreme Master's cult. In the cult of Darumulun, and of other
+highest gods of lowest savages, nothing answers to the Hebrew technical
+priestly word for sacrifice, 'food of the deity.'[15] Nobody feeds Puluga,
+nobody fed Ahone. We hear of no Fuegian sacrifices. Mr. Robertson Smith
+says: 'In all religions in which the gods have been developed out of
+totems [worshipped animals and other things regarded as akin to human
+stocks] the ritual act of laying food before the deity is perfectly
+intelligible.' Pundjel, an Australian Supreme Being, is mixed up with
+animals in some myths, but it is not easy to see how such Supreme Beings
+as he could be 'developed out of totems'! I am not aware, again, that any
+Australian tribe feeds the animals who are its totems, so Darumulun could
+not, and did not inherit sacrifice through them. Mr. Robertson Smith had
+a celebrated theory that cereal sacrifice is a tribute to a god, while
+sacrifice of a beast or man is an act of communion with the god.[16] Men
+and gods dined together.[17] 'The god himself was conceived of as a being
+of the same stock as his comrades.' Beasts were also of the same stock,
+one beast, say a lobster, was of the same blood as a lobster kin, and its
+god.[18] Occasionally the sacred beast of the kin, usually not to be slain
+or tasted, is 'eaten as a kind of mystic sacrament a most dubious
+fact.'[19]
+
+Now, there is, I believe, some evidence, lately collected if not
+published, which makes in favour of the eating of totems by Australians,
+at a certain very rare and solemn mystery. It would not even surprise me
+('from information received') if a very deeply initiated person were
+occasionally slain, as the highest degree of initiation, on certain most
+unusual occasions. This remains uncertain, but I have at present no
+evidence that, either by one road or another, either from ghost-feeding or
+totem-feeding, or feeding on totems, any Australian Supreme Being receives
+any sacrifice at all. Much less, as among Pawnees and Semitic peoples (to
+judge from certain traces), is the Australian Supreme Being a cause of and
+partaker in human sacrifice.[20] The horrible idea of the Man who is the
+God, and is eaten in the God's honour, occurs among polytheistic Aztecs,
+on a high level of material culture, not among Australians, Andamanese,
+Bushmen, or Fuegians.[21]
+
+Thus, in religion, the Darumulun, or other Supreme Being of the lowest
+known savages, men roaming wild, when originally met, on a continent
+peopled by older kinds of animals than ours, was (as we regard purity) on
+a higher plane by far than the gods of Greeks and Semites in their
+earliest known myths. Setting mythology aside and looking only at cult,
+the God of the Murring or the Kurnai, whose precepts soften the heart,
+who knows the heart's secrets, who inculcates chastity, respect of age,
+unselfishness, who is not bound by conditions of space or place, who
+receives no blood of slaughtered man or beast, is a conception from which
+the ordinary polytheistic gods of infinitely more polite peoples are
+frankly degenerate. The animistic superstitions wildly based on the belief
+in the soul have not soiled him, and the social conditions of aristocracy,
+agriculture, architecture, have not made him one in a polytheistic
+crowd of rapacious gods, nor fettered him as a Baal to his estate, nor
+localised him in a temple built with hands. He cannot appear as a 'God of
+Battles;' no _Te Deum_ can be sung to him for victory in a cause perhaps
+unjust, for he is the Supreme Being of a certain group of allied local
+tribes. One of these tribes has no more interest with him than another,
+and the whole group do not, as a body, wage war on another alien group.
+The social conditions of his worshippers, then, preserve Darumulun from
+the patent blots on the escutcheon of gods among much more advanced races.
+
+Once more, the idea of Animism admits of endless expansion. A spirit can
+be located anywhere, in any stone, stick, bush, person, hill, or river. A
+god made on the animistic model can be assigned to any department of
+human activity, down to sports, or lusts, or the province of Cloacina.
+Thus religion becomes a mere haunted and pestilential jungle of beliefs.
+But the theistic conception, when not yet envisaged as spiritual, cannot
+be subdivided and _eparpille_. Thus, from every point of view, and on
+every side, Animism is full of the seeds of religious degeneration, which
+do not and cannot exist in what I take to be the earliest known form of
+the theistic conception: that of a Being about whose metaphysical
+nature--spirit or not spirit--no questions were asked, as Dr. Brinton long
+ago remarked.
+
+That conception alone could neither supply the moral motive of 'a soul to
+be saved,' nor satisfy the metaphysical instinct of advancing mankind. To
+meet these wants, to supply 'soul,' with its moral stimulus, and to
+provide a phrase or idea under which the Deity could be envisaged (i.e. as
+a _spirit_) by advancing thought, Animism was necessary. The blending of
+the theistic and the animistic beliefs was indispensable to religion.
+But, in the process of animistic development under advancing social
+conditions, degeneration was necessarily implied. Degeneration of the
+theistic conception for a while, therefore, occurred. The facts are the
+proofs; and only contradictory facts, in sufficient quantity, can
+annihilate the old theory of Degeneration when it is presented in this
+form.
+
+It mast be repeated that on this theory an explanation is given of what
+the old Degeneration hypothesis does not explain. Granting a primal
+religion relatively pure in its beginnings, why did it degenerate?
+
+Mr. Max Mullet, looking on religion as the development of the sentiment of
+the Infinite, regards fetishism as a secondary and comparatively late form
+of belief. We find it, he observes, in various forms of Christianity;
+Christianity, therefore, is primary there, relic worship is secondary.
+Religion beginning, according to him, in the sense of the infinite, as
+awakened in man by tall trees, high hills, and so on, it advances to the
+infinite of space and sky, and so to the infinitely divine. This is
+primary: fetishism is secondary. Arguing elsewhere against this idea, I
+have asked: What was the _modus_ of degeneration which produced similar
+results in Christianity, and in African and other religions? How did it
+work? I am not aware that Mr. Max Mueller has answered this question.
+But how degeneration worked--namely, by Animism supplanting Theism--is
+conspicuously plain on our theory.
+
+Take the early chapters of Genesis, or any savage cosmogonic myth you
+please. Deathless man is face to face with the Creator. He cannot
+degenerate in religion. He cannot offer sacrifice, for the Creator
+obviously needs nothing, and again, as there is no death, he cannot slay
+animals for the Creator. But, in one way or another, usually by breach of
+a taboo, Death enters the world. Then comes, by process of evolution,
+belief in hungry spirits, belief in spirits who may inhabit stones or
+sticks; again there arise priests who know how to propitiate spirits
+and how to tempt them into sticks and stones. These arts become lucrative
+and are backed by the cleverest men, and by the apparent evidence of
+prophecies by convulsionaries. Thus every known kind of degeneration in
+religion is inevitably introduced as a result of the theory of Animism. We
+do not need an hypothesis of Original Sin as a cause of degeneration, and,
+if Mr. Max Mueller's doctrine of the Infinite were _viable_, we have
+supplied, in Animism, under advancing social conditions, what he does not
+seem to provide, a cause and _modus_ of degeneration. Fetishism would
+thus be really 'secondary,' _ex hypothesi_, but as we nowhere find
+Fetishism alone, without the other elements of religion, we cannot say,
+historically, whether it is secondary or not. Fetishism logically needs,
+in some of its aspects, the doctrine of spirits, and Theism, in what we
+take to be its earliest known form, does not logically need the doctrine
+of spirits as given matter. So far we can go, but not farther, as to the
+fact of priority in evolution. Nevertheless we meet, among the most
+backward peoples known to us, among men just emerged from the palaeolithic
+stage of culture, men who are involved in dread of ghosts, a religious
+Idea which certainly is not born of ghost-worship, for by these men,
+ancestral ghosts are not worshipped.
+
+In their hearts, on their lips, in their moral training we find (however
+blended with barbarous absurdities, and obscured by rites of another
+origin) the faith in a Being who created or constructed the world; who was
+from time beyond memory or conjecture; who is primal, who makes for
+righteousness, and who loves mankind. This Being has not the notes of
+degeneration; his home is 'among the stars,' not in a hill or in a house.
+To him no altar smokes, and for him no blood is shed.
+
+'God, that made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is lord
+of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is
+worshipped with men's hands, as though He needed any thing ... and hath
+made of one blood all nations of men ... that they should seek the Lord,
+if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far
+from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.'
+
+That the words of St. Paul are literally true, as to the feeling after a
+God who needs not anything at man's hands, the study of anthropology seems
+to us to demonstrate. That in this God 'we have our being,' in so far
+as somewhat of ours may escape, at moments, from the bonds of Time and the
+manacles of Space, the earlier part of this treatise is intended to
+suggest, as a thing by no means necessarily beyond a reasonable man's
+power to conceive. That these two beliefs, however attained (a point on
+which we possess no positive evidence), have commonly been subject to
+degeneration in the religions of the world, is only too obvious.
+
+So far, then, the nature of things and of the reasoning faculty does not
+seem to give the lie to the old Degeneration theory.
+
+To these conclusions, as far as they are matters of scientific opinion, we
+have been led by nothing but the study of anthropology.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Myths of the New World_, p. 44.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Prim. Cult_. i. 35.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Introduction_, p. 199; also p. 161.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 360,361.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Prof. Menzies, _History of Religion_, p. 23.]
+
+[Footnote 6: [Greek: legomenai theion anagchai.] Porphyry.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ixtlilochitl. Balboa, _Hist. du Perou_, p. 62.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 104, 105.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Op. cit. p. 106.]
+
+[Footnote 10: On the Glenelg some caves and mountain tops are haunted or
+holy. Waitz, vi. 804, No authority cited.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Religion of Semites_, p. 110.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Rel. Sem_. p. 71.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Howitt, _J.A.T_. 1884, p. 187.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Op. cit. p. 188.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Rel. Sem_. p. 207.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Rel. Sem_. p. 225.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Op. cit. p. 247.]
+
+[Footnote 18: Op. cit. p. 269.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Op. cit. p. 277.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Op. cit. p. 343. Citing Gen. xxii 2 Kings xxi. 6, Micah
+vi. 7, 2 Kings iii. 27.]
+
+[Footnote 21: I mean, does not occur to my knowledge. New evidence is
+always upsetting anthropological theories.]
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THEORIES OF JEHOVAH
+
+All speculation on the curly history of religion is apt to end in the
+endeavour to see how far the conclusions can be made to illustrate the
+faith of Israel. Thus, the theorist who believes in ancestor-worship as
+the key of all the creeds will see in Jehovah a developed ancestral
+ghost, or a kind of fetish-god, attached to a stone--perhaps an ancient
+sepulchral stele of some desert sheikh.
+
+The exclusive admirer of the hypothesis of Totemism will find evidence for
+his belief in worship of the golden calf and the bulls. The partisan of
+nature-worship will insist on Jehovah's connection with storm, thunder,
+and the fire of Sinai. On the other hand, whoever accepts our suggestions
+will incline to see, in the early forms of belief in Jehovah, a shape of
+the widely diffused conception of a Moral Supreme Being, at first (or, at
+least, when our information begins) envisaged in anthropomorphic form,
+but gradually purged of all local traits by the unexampled and unique
+inspiration of the great Prophets. They, as far as our knowledge extends,
+were strangely indifferent to the animistic element in religion, to the
+doctrine of surviving human souls, and so, of course, to that element
+of Animism which is priceless--the purification of the soul in the light
+of the hope of eternal life. Just as the hunger after righteousness of the
+Prophets is intense, so their hope of finally sating that hunger
+in an eternity of sinless bliss and enjoyment of God is confessedly
+inconspicuous. In short, they have carried Theism to its austere
+extreme--'though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him'--while unconcerned
+about the rewards of Animism. This is certainly a strange result of a
+religion which, according to the anthropological theory, has Animism for
+its basis.
+
+We therefore examine certain forms of the animistic hypothesis as applied
+to account for the religion of Israel. The topic is one in which special
+knowledge of Hebrew and other Oriental languages seems absolutely
+indispensable; but anthropological speculators have not been Oriental
+scholars (with rare exceptions), while some Oriental scholars have
+borrowed from popular anthropology without much critical discrimination.
+These circumstances must be our excuse for venturing on to this difficult
+ground.
+
+It is probably impossible for us to trace with accuracy the rise of the
+religion of Jehovah. 'The wise and learned' dispute endlessly over dates
+of documents, over the amount of later doctrine interpolated into
+the earlier texts, over the nature, source, and quantity of foreign
+influence--Chaldaean, Accadian, Egyptian, or Assyrian. We know that Israel
+had, in an early age, the conception of the moral Eternal; we know that,
+at an early age, that conception was contaminated and anthropomorphised;
+and we know that it was rescued, in a great degree, from this corruption,
+while always retaining its original ethical aspect and sanction. Why
+matters went thus in Israel and not elsewhere we know not, except that
+such was the will of God in the mysterious education of the world. How
+mysterious that education has been is best known to all who have studied
+the political and social results of Totemism. On the face of it a
+perfectly crazy and degrading belief--on the face of it meant for nothing
+but to make the family a hell of internecine hatred--Totemism rendered
+possible--nay, inevitable--the union of hostile groups into large and
+relatively peaceful tribal societies. Given the materials as we know them,
+we never should have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it
+should thus have been done. But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally
+ignorant of the conditions of the problem.
+
+An example of anthropological theory concerning Jehovah was put forth by
+Mr. Huxley.[1] Mr. Huxley's general idea of religion as it is on the
+lowest known level of material culture--through which the ancestors of
+Israel must have passed like other people--has already been criticised.
+He denied to the most backward races both cult and religious sanction of
+ethics. He was demonstrably, though unconsciously, in error as to the
+facts, and therefore could not start from the idea that Israel, in the
+lowest historically known condition of savagery, possessed, or, like other
+races, might possess, the belief in an Eternal making for righteousness.
+'For my part,' he says, 'I see no reason to doubt that, like the
+rest of the world, the Israelites had passed through a period of mere
+ghost-worship, and had advanced through ancestor-worship and Fetishism and
+Totemism to the theological level at which we find them in the Books of
+Judges and Samuel.'[2]
+
+But why does he think the Israelites did all this? The Hebrew ghosts,
+abiding, according to Mr. Huxley, in a rather torpid condition in Sheol,
+would not be of much practical use to a worshipper. A reference in
+Deuteronomy xxvi. 14 (Deuteronomy being, _ex hypothesi_, a late pious
+imposture) does not prove much. The Hebrew is there bidden to remind
+himself of the stay of his ancestors in Egypt, and to say, 'Of the
+hallowed things I have not given aught for the dead'--namely, of the
+tithes dedicated to the Levites and the poor. A race which abode for
+centuries among the Egyptians, as Israel did--among a people who
+elaborately fed the _kas_ of the departed--might pick up a trace of a
+custom, the giving of food for the dead, still persevered in by St. Monica
+till St. Ambrose admonished her. But Mr. Huxley is hard put to it for
+evidence of ancestor-worship or ghost-worship in Israel when he looks for
+indications of these rites in 'the singular weight attached to the
+veneration of parents in the Fourth Commandment.'[3] The _Fourth_
+Commandment, of course, is a slip of the pen. He adds: 'The Fifth
+Commandment, as it stands, would be an excellent compromise between
+ancestor-worship and Monotheism.' Long may children practise this
+excellent compromise! It is really too far-fetched to reason thus: 'People
+were bidden to honour their parents, as a compromise between Monotheism
+and ghost-worship.' Hard, hard bestead is he who has to reason in that
+fashion! This comes of 'training in the use of the weapons of precision of
+science.'
+
+Mr. Huxley goes on: 'The Ark of the Covenant may have been a relic of
+ancestor-worship;' 'there is a good deal to be said for that speculation.'
+Possibly there is, by way of the valuable hypothesis that Jehovah was a
+fetish stone which had been a grave-stone, or perhaps a _lingam_, and was
+kept in the Ark on the plausible pretext that it was the two Tables of
+the Law!
+
+However, Mr. Huxley really finds it safer to suppose that references to
+ancestor-worship in the Bible were obliterated by late monotheistic
+editors, who, none the less, are so full and minute in their descriptions
+of the various heresies into which Israel was eternally lapsing, and must
+not be allowed to lapse again. Had ancestor-worship been a _peche mignon_
+of Israel, the Prophets would have let Israel hear their mind on it.
+
+The Hebrews' indifference to the departed soul is, in fact, a puzzle,
+especially when we consider their Egyptian education--so important an
+element in Mr. Huxley's theory.
+
+Mr. Herbert Spencer is not more successful than Mr. Huxley in finding
+ancestor-worship among the Hebrews. On the whole subject he writes:
+
+'Where the levels of mental nature and social progress are lowest, we
+usually find, along with an absence of religious ideas generally, an
+absence, or very slight development, of ancestor-worship.... Cook
+[Captain Cook], telling us what the Fuegians were before contact
+with Europeans had introduced foreign ideas, said there were no
+appearances of religion among them; and we are not told by him or others
+that they were ancestor-worshippers.'[4]
+
+Probably they are not; but they do possess a Being who reads their hearts,
+and who certainly shows no traces of European ideas. If the Fuegians
+are not ancestor-worshippers, this Being was not developed out of
+ancestor-worship.
+
+The evidence of Captain Cook, no anthropologist, but a mariner who saw and
+knew little of the Fuegians, is precisely of the sort against which Major
+Ellis warns us.[5] The more a religion consists in fear of a moral
+guardian of conduct, the less does it show itself, by sacrifice or rite,
+to the eyes of Captain Cook, of his Majesty's ship _Endeavour_. Mr.
+Spencer places the Andamanese on the same level as the Fuegians, 'so far
+as the scanty evidence may be trusted.' We have shown that (as known
+to Mr. Spencer in 1876) it may not be trusted at all; the Andamanese
+possessing a moral Supreme Being, though they are not, apparently,
+ancestor-worshippers. The Australians 'show us not much persistence in
+ghost-propitiation,' which, if it exists, ceases when the corpses are tied
+up and buried, or after they are burned, or after the bones, carried about
+for a while, are exposed on platforms. Yet many Australian tribes possess
+a moral Supreme Being.
+
+In fact ghost-worship, in Mr. Spencer's scheme, cannot be fairly well
+developed till society reaches the level of 'settled groups whose
+burial-places are in their midst.' Hence the development of a moral
+Supreme Being among tribes _not_ thus settled, is inconceivable, on
+Mr. Spencer's hypothesis.[6] By that hypothesis, 'worshipped ancestors,
+according to their remoteness, were regarded as divine, semi-divine, and
+human.'[7] Where we find, then, the Divine Being among nomads who do not
+remember their great-grandfathers, the Spencerian theory is refuted by
+facts. We have the effect, the Divine Being, without the cause, worship of
+ancestors.
+
+Coming to the Hebrews, Mr. Spencer argues that 'the silence of their
+legends (as to ancestor-worship) is but a negative fact, which may be as
+misleading as negative facts usually are.' They are, indeed; witness
+Mr. Spencer's own silence about savage Supreme Beings. But we may fairly
+argue that if Israel had been given to ancestor-worship (as might partly
+be surmised from the mystery about the grave of Moses) the Prophets would
+not have spared them for their crying. The Prophets were unusually
+outspoken men, and, as they undeniably do scold Israel for every other
+kind of conceivable heresy, they were not likely to be silent about
+ancestor-worship, if ancestor-worship existed. Mr. Spencer, then, rather
+heedlessly, though correctly, argues that 'nomadic habits are unfavourable
+to evolution of the ghost-theory.'[8] Alas, this gives away the whole
+case! For, if all men began as nomads, and nomadic habits are unfavourable
+even to the ordinary ghost, how did the Australian and other nomads
+develop the Supreme Being, who, _ex hypothesi_, is the final fruit of the
+ghost-flower? If you cannot have 'an established ancestor-worship' till
+you abandon nomadic habits, how, while still nomadic, do you evolve a
+Supreme Being? Obviously not out of ancestor-worship.
+
+Mr. Spencer then assigns, as evidence for ancestor-worship in Israel,
+mourning dresses, fasting, the law against self-bleeding and cutting off
+the hair for the dead, and the text (Deut. xxvi. 14) about 'I have not
+given aught thereof for the dead.' 'Hence, the conclusion must be that
+ancestor-worship had developed as far as nomadic habits allowed, before it
+was repressed by a higher worship.'[9] But whence came that higher worship
+which seems to have intervened immediately after the cessation of nomadic
+habits?
+
+There are obvious traces of grief expressed in a primitive way among the
+Hebrews. 'Ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your
+eyes for the dead' (Deut. xiv. 1). 'Neither shall men lament for them,
+nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them; neither shall men
+tear themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead' (by
+way of counter-irritant to grief); 'neither shall men give them the cup
+of consolation to drink for their father or their mother,' because the
+Jews were to be removed from their homes.[10] 'Ye shall not make any
+cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you.'[11]
+
+It may be usual to regard inflictions, such as cutting, by mourners, as
+sacrifices to the ghost of the dead. But one has seen a man strike himself
+a heavy blow on receiving news of a loss _not_ by death, and I venture to
+fancy that cuttings and gashings at funerals are merely a more violent
+form of appeal to a counter-irritant of grief, and, again, a token of
+recklessness caused by a sorrow which makes void the world. One of John
+Nicholson's native adorers killed himself on news of that warrior's death,
+saying, 'What is left worth living for?' This was not a sacrifice to the
+Manes of Nicholson. The sacrifice of the mourner's hair, as by Achilles,
+argues a similar indifference to personal charm. Once more, the text in
+Psalm cvi. 28, 'They joined themselves unto Baal-Peor, and ate the
+sacrifices of the dead,' is usually taken by commentators as a reference
+to the ritual of gods who are no gods. But it rather seems to indicate an
+acquiescence in foreign burial rites. All this additional evidence does
+not do much to prove ancestor-worship in Israel, though the secrecy of the
+burial of Moses, 'in a valley of the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor;
+but no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day,' may indicate a dread of
+a nascent worship of the great leader.[12] The scene of the defection in
+Psalm cvi., Beth-peor, is indicated in Numbers xxv., where Israel runs
+after the girls and the gods of Moab: 'And Moab called the people unto the
+sacrifices of their gods; and the people did eat, and bowed down to their
+gods. And Israel joined himself unto Baal-peor.' Psalm cvi. is obviously a
+later restatement of this addiction to the Moabite gods, and the Psalm
+adds 'they ate the sacrifices of the dead.'
+
+It is plain that, for whatever reason, ancestor-worship among the Hebrews
+was, at the utmost, rudimentary. Otherwise it must have been clearly
+denounced by the Prophets among the other heresies of Israel. Therefore,
+as being at the most rudimentary, ancestor-worship in Israel could not be
+developed at once into the worship of Jehovah.
+
+Though ancestor-worship among the Hebrews could not be fully developed,
+according to Mr. Spencer, because of their nomadic habits, it _was_ fully
+developed, according to the Rev. A.W. Oxford. 'Every family, like every
+old Roman and Greek family, was firmly held together by the worship of its
+ancestors, the hearth was the altar, the head of the family the priest....
+The bond which kept together the families of a tribe was its common
+religion, the worship of its reputed ancestor. The chief of the tribe was,
+of course, the priest of the cult.' Of course; but what a pity that Mr.
+Huxley and Mr. Spencer omitted facts so invaluable to their theory! And
+how does the Rev. Mr. Oxford know? Well, 'there is no direct proof,'
+oddly enough, of so marked a feature in Hebrew religion but we are
+referred to 1 Sam. xx. 29 and Judges xviii. 19. 1 Sam. xx. 29 makes
+Jonathan say that David wants to go to a family sacrifice, that is, a
+family dinner party. This hardly covers the large assertions made by
+Mr. Oxford. His second citation is so unlucky as to contradict his
+observation that 'of course' the chief of the tribe was the priest of the
+cult. Micah, in Judges xvii., xviii., is _not_ the chief of his tribe
+(Ephraim), neither is he even the priest in his own house. He 'consecrated
+one of his own sons who became his priest,' till he got hold of a casual
+young Levite, and said, 'Be unto me a _father_ and a priest,' for ten
+shekels _per annum_, a suit of clothes, and board and lodging.
+
+In place, then, of any remote reference to a chief's being priest of his
+ancestral ghosts, we have here a man of one tribe who is paid rather
+handsomely to be family chaplain to a member of another tribe. Some
+moss-troopers of the tribe of Dan then kidnapped this valuable young
+Levite, and seized a few idols which Micah had permitted himself to make.
+And all this, according to our clerical authority, is evidence for
+ancestor-worship![13]
+
+All this appears to be derived from some incoherent speculations of Stade.
+For example, that learned German cites the story of Micah as a proof that
+the different tribes or clans had different religions. This _must_ be so,
+because the Danites asked the young Levite whether it was not better to be
+priest to a clan than to an individual? It is as if a patron offered a
+rich living to somebody's private chaplain, saying that the new position
+was more creditable and lucrative. This would hardly prove a difference of
+religion between the individual and the parish.[14]
+
+Mr. Oxford next avers that 'the earliest form of the Israelite religion
+was Fetishism or Totemism.' This is another example of Stade's logic.
+Finding, as he believes, names suggestive of Totemism in Simeon, Levi,
+Rachel, and so on, Stade leaps to the conclusion that Totemism in Israel
+was prior to anything resembling monotheism. For monotheism, he argues,
+could not give the germs of the clan or tribal organisation, while Totemism
+could do so. Certainly it could, but as, in many regions (America,
+Australia), we find Totemism and the belief in a benevolent Supreme Being
+co-existing among savages, when first observed by Europeans, we cannot
+possibly say dogmatically whether a rough monotheism or whether Totemism
+came first in order of evolution. This holds as good of Israel (if once
+totemistic) as it does of Pawnees or Kurnai. Stade has overlooked these
+well-known facts, and his opinion filters into a cheap hand-book, and is
+set in examinations![15]
+
+We also learn from Mr. Oxford's popular manual of German Biblical
+conjecture that 'Jehovah was not represented as a loving Father, but as a
+Being easily roused to wrath,' a thing most incident to loving fathers.
+
+Again, Mr. Oxford avers that 'the old Israelites knew no distinction
+between physical and moral evil.... The conception of Jehovah's holiness
+had nothing moral in it' (p. 90). This rather contradicts Wellhausen: 'In
+all ancient primitive peoples ... religion furnishes a motive for law and
+morals; in the case of none did it become so with such purity and power as
+in that of the Israelites.'[16]
+
+We began by examining Mr. Huxley's endeavours to find traces of
+ancestor-worship (in his opinion the origin of Jehovah-worship) among the
+Israelites. We next criticised Mr. Spencer's efforts in the same quest,
+and the more dogmatic assertions of Mr. Oxford and Stade. We now return to
+Mr. Huxley's account of the evolution from ghost-cult to the cult of
+Jehovah.
+
+From the history of the Witch of Endor, which Mr. Huxley sees no reason to
+regard as other than a sincere statement of what really occurred, he
+gathers that the Witch cried out, 'I see Elohim.' These Elohim proved to
+be the phantasm of the dead Samuel. Moved by this hallucination the Witch
+uttered a veridical premonition, totally adverse to her own interests, and
+uncommonly dangerous to her life. This is, psychically, interesting.
+The point, however, is that _Elohim_ is a term equivalent to Red
+Indian _Wakan_, Fijian _Kahu_, Maori or Melanesian _Mana_, meaning the
+'supernatural,' the vaguely powerful--in fact X. This particular example
+of _Elohim_ was a phantasm of the dead, but _Elohim_ is also used of the
+highest Divine Being, therefore the highest Divine Being is of the same
+genus as a ghost--so Mr. Huxley reasons. 'The difference which was
+supposed to exist between the different Elohim was one of degree, not of
+kind.'[17]
+
+'If Jehovah was thus supposed to differ only in degree from the
+undoubtedly zoomorphic or anthropomorphic "gods of the nations," why is it
+to be assumed that he also was not thought to have a human shape?' He
+_was_ thought to have a human shape, at one time, by some theorists: no
+doubt exists on that head. That, however, is not where we demur. We demur
+when, because an hallucination of the Witch of Endor (probably still
+incompletely developed) is called by her _Elohim_, therefore the highest
+_Elohim_ is said by Mr. Huxley to differ from a ghost only in degree, not
+in kind. _Elohim_, or _El_, the creative, differs from a ghost in kind,
+because he, in Hebrew belief, never was a ghost, he is immortal and
+without beginning.
+
+Mr. Huxley now enforces his theory by a parallel between the religion of
+Tonga and the religion of Israel under the Judges. He quotes Mariner,[18]
+whose statement avers that there is a supreme Tongan being: 'of his
+origin they had no idea, rather supposing him to be eternal. His name is
+Ta-li-y-Tooboo = "Wait-there-Tooboo."' 'He is a great chief from the top
+of the sky down to the bottom of the earth.' He, and other '_original_
+gods' of his making, are carefully and absolutely discriminated from the
+_atua_, which are 'the human soul after its separation from the body.' All
+Tongan gods are _atua_ (_Elohim_), but all _atua_ are not 'original gods,'
+unserved by priests, and unpropitiated by food or libation, like the
+highest God, Ta-li-y-Tooboo, the Eternal of Tonga. 'He occasionally
+inspires the How' (elective King), but often a How is not inspired at all
+by Ta-li-y-Tooboo, any more than Saul, at last, was inspired by Jehovah.
+
+Surely there is a difference _in kind_ between an eternal, immortal God,
+and a ghost, though both are _atua_, or both are _Elohim_--the unknown X.
+
+Many people call a ghost 'supernatural;' they also call God
+'supernatural,' but the difference between a phantasm of a dead man and
+the Deity they would admit, I conceive, to be a difference of kind. We
+have shown, or tried to show, that the conceptions of 'ghost' and 'Supreme
+Being' are different, not only in kind, but in origin. The ghost comes
+from, and depends on, the animistic theory; the Supreme Being, as
+originally thought of, does not. All Gods are _Elohim, kalou, wakan_; all
+_Elohim, kalou, wakan_ are not Gods.
+
+A ghost-god should receive food or libation. Mr. Huxley says that
+Ta-li-y-Tooboo did so. 'If the god, like Ta-li-y-Tooboo, had no priest,
+then the chief place was left vacant, and was supposed to be occupied by
+the god himself. _When the first cup of Kava was filled_, the mataboole
+who acted as master of the ceremonies said, "Give it to your god," and it
+was offered, though only as a matter of form.'[19]
+
+This is incorrect. In the case of Ta-li-y-Tooboo _'there is no cup filled
+for the god.'_[20] _'Before any cup is filled_ the man by the side of the
+bowl says: "The Kava is in the cup"' (which it is not), 'and the mataboole
+answers, "Give it to your god;"' but the Kava is _not_ in the cup, and the
+Tongan Eternal receives no oblation.
+
+The sacrifice, says Mr. Huxley, meant 'that the god was either a deified
+ghost, or, at any rate, a being of like nature to these.'[21] But as
+Ta-li-y-Tooboo had no sacrifice, contrary to Mr. Huxley's averment, he was
+_not_ 'a deified ghost, or a being of like nature to these.' To the lower,
+non-ghostly Tongan gods the animistic habit of sacrifice had been
+extended, but not yet to the Supreme Being.
+
+Ah, if Mr. Gladstone, or the Duke of Argyll, or some bishop had made a
+misstatement of this kind, how Mr. Huxley would have crushed him! But it
+is a mere error of careless reading, such as we all make daily.
+
+It is manifest that we cannot prove Jehovah to be a ghost by the parallel
+of a Tongan god, who, by ritual and by definition, was _not_ a ghost. The
+proof therefore rests on the anthropomorphised pre-prophetic accounts, and
+on the ritual, of Jehovah. But man naturally 'anthropises' his deities: he
+does not thereby demonstrate that they were once ghosts.
+
+As regards the sacrifices to Jehovah, the sweet savour which he was
+supposed to enjoy (contrary to the opinion of the Prophets), these
+sacrifices afford the best presumption that Jehovah was a ghost-god, or a
+god constructed on ghostly lines.
+
+But we have shown that among the lowest races neither are ghosts
+worshipped by sacrifice, nor does the Supreme Being, Darumulun or Puluga,
+receive food offerings. We have also instanced many Supreme Beings
+of more advanced races, Ahone, and Dendid, and Nyankupon, who do not sniff
+the savour of any offerings. If then (as in the case of Taa-roa), a
+Supreme Being _does_ receive sacrifice, we may argue that a piece of
+animistic ritual, not connected with the Supreme Being in Australia or
+Andaman, not connected with his creed in Virginia or Africa (where
+ghost-gods do receive sacrifice), may in other regions be transferred from
+ghost-gods to the Supreme Being, who never was a ghost. There seems to
+be nothing incredible or illogical in the theory of such transference.
+
+On a God who never was a ghost men may come to confer sacrifices (which
+are not made to Baiame and the rest) because, being in the habit of thus
+propitiating one set of bodiless powers, men may not think it civil or
+safe to leave another set of powers out. By his very nature, man must
+clothe all gods with some human passions and attributes, unless, like a
+large number of savages, he leaves his high God severely alone, and is the
+slave of fetishes and spectres. But that practice makes against the
+ghost-theory.
+
+In the attempt to account thus, namely by transference, for the sacrifices
+to Jehovah, we are met by a difficulty of our own making. If the
+Israelites did not sacrifice to ancestors (as we have shown that there is
+very scant reason for supposing that they did), how could they transfer to
+Jehovah the rite which, by our hypothesis, they are not proved to have
+offered to ancestors?
+
+This is certainly a hard problem, harder (or perhaps easier) because we
+know so very little of the early history of the Hebrews. According to
+their own traditions, Israel had been in touch with all manner of races
+much more advanced than themselves in material culture, and steeped in
+highly developed polytheistic Animism. According to their history, the
+Israelites 'went a-whoring' incorrigibly after strange gods. It is
+impossible, perhaps, to disentangle the foreign and the native elements.
+
+It may therefore be tentatively suggested that early Israel had its Ahone
+in a Being perhaps not yet named Jehovah. Israel entertained, however,
+perhaps by reason of 'nomadic habits,' only the scantiest concern about
+ancestral ghosts. We then find an historical tradition of secular contact
+between Israel and Egypt, from which Israel emerges with Jehovah for God,
+and a system of sacrifices. Regarding Jehovah as a revived memory of
+the moral Supreme Being whom Israel must have known in extremely remote
+ages (unless Israel was less favoured than Australians, Bushmen, or
+Andamanese), we might look on the sacrifices to him as an adaptation from
+the practices of religion among races more settled than Israel, and more
+civilised.[22]
+
+Speculation on subjects so remote must be conjectural, but our suggestion
+would, perhaps, account for sacrifices to Jehovah, paid by a race
+which, by reason of 'nomadic habits,' was never much given to
+ancestor-worship, but had been in contact with great sacrificing,
+polytheistic civilisations. Mr. Huxley, however, while he seems to slur
+the essential distinction between ghost-gods and the Eternal, grants,
+later, that 'there are very few people(s?) without additional gods,
+which cannot, with certainty, be accounted for as deified ancestors.'
+Ta-li-y-Tooboo, of course, is one of these gods, as is Jehovah. Mr. Huxley
+gives no theory of _how_ these gods came into belief, except the
+suggestion that 'the polytheistic theology has become modified by the
+selection of the cosmic or tribal god, as the only god to whom worship is
+due on the part of that nation,' without prejudice to the right of other
+nations to worship other gods.[23] This is 'monolatry,' and 'the ethical
+code, often of a very high order, comes into closer relation with the
+theological creed,' _why_, we are not informed. Nor do we learn out of
+what polytheistic deities Jehovah was selected, nor for what reason. The
+hypothesis, as usual, breaks down on the close relation between the
+ethical code and the theological creed, among low savages, with a
+relatively Supreme Being, but without ancestor-worship, and without
+polytheistic gods from whom to select a heavenly chief.
+
+Whence came the moral element in the idea of Jehovah? Mr. Huxley supposes
+that, during their residence in the land of Goshen (and _a fortiori_
+before it), the Israelites 'knew nothing of Jehovah.'[24] They were
+polytheistic idolaters. This follows, apparently, from Ezekiel xx. 5:
+'In the day when I chose Israel, and lifted up mine hand unto the seed of
+the house of Jacob, _and made myself known unto them_ in the land of
+Egypt.' The Biblical account is that the God of Moses's fathers, the God
+of Abraham, enlightened Moses in Sinai, giving his name as 'I am that I
+am' (Exodus iii. 6, 14; translation uncertain). We are to understand that
+Moses, a religious reformer, revived an old, and, in the Egyptian bondage,
+a half-obliterated creed of the ancient nomadic Beni-Israel. They were no
+longer to 'defile themselves with the idols of Egypt,' as they had
+obviously done. We really know no more about the matter. Wellhausen says
+that Jehovah was 'originally a family or tribal god, either of the family
+of Moses or of the tribe of Joseph.' How a family could develop a Supreme
+Being all to itself, we are not informed, and we know of no such analogous
+case in the ethnographic field. Again, Jehovah was 'only a special name of
+El, current within a powerful circle.' And who was El?[25] 'Moses was not
+the first discoverer of the faith.' Probably not, but Mr. Huxley seems to
+think that he was.
+
+Wellhausen's and other German ideas filter into popular traditions, as we
+saw, through 'A Short Introduction to the History of Ancient Israel'
+(pp. 19, 20), by the Rev. A.W. Oxford, M.A., Vicar of St. Luke's, Soho.
+Here follows Mr. Oxford's undeniably 'short way with Jehovah.' 'Moses was
+the founder of the Israelite religion. Jehovah, his family or tribal god,
+perhaps originally the God of the Kenites, was taken as a tribal god by
+all the Israelite tribes.... That Jehovah was not the original god of
+Israel' (as the Bible impudently alleges) 'but was the god of the Kenites,
+we see mainly from Deut. xxxiii. 2, Judges v. 4, 5, and from the history
+of Jethro, who, according to Judges i. 16, was a Kenite.'
+
+The first text says that, according to Moses, 'the Lord came from Sinai,'
+rose up from Seir, and shone from Mount Paran. The second text mentions
+Jehovah's going up out of Seir and Sinai. The third text says that Jethro,
+Moses's Kenite (or Midianite) father-in-law, dwelt among the people of
+Judah; Jethro being a priest of Midian. How all this proves that 'Moses
+was a great impostor,' as the poet says, and that Jehovah was not 'the
+original God of Israel,' but (1) Moses's family or tribal god, or (2) 'the
+god of the Kenites,' I profess my inability to comprehend.
+
+Wellhausen himself had explained Jehovah as 'a family or tribal god,
+either of the family of Moses' (tribe of Levi) 'or of the tribe of
+Joseph.' It seems to be all one to Mr. Oxford whether Jehovah was a god
+of Moses's tribe or quite the reverse, 'a Kenite god.' Yet it really
+makes a good deal of difference! For in a complex of tribes, speaking one
+language, it is to the last degree unexampled (within my knowledge) that
+one tribe, or family, possesses, all to itself, a family god who is also
+the Creator and is later accepted as such by all the other tribes. One may
+ask for instances of such a thing in any known race, in any stage of
+culture. Peru will not help us--not the Creator, Pachacamac, but the Sun,
+is the god of the Inca family. If, on the other hand, Jehovah was a Kenite
+god, the Kenites were a half-Arab Semitic people connected with Israel,
+and may very well have retained traditions of a Supreme Being which, in
+Egypt, were likely to be dimmed, as Exodus asserts, by foreign religions.
+The learned Stade, to be sure, may disbelieve in Israel's sojourn in
+Egypt, but that revolutionary opinion is not necessarily binding on us and
+involves a few difficulties.
+
+Have critics and manual-makers no knowledge of the science of comparative
+religion? Are they unaware that peoples infinitely more backward than
+Israel was at the date supposed have already moral Supreme Beings
+acknowledged over vast tracts of territory? Have they a tittle of positive
+evidence that early Israel was benighted beyond the darkness of Bushmen,
+Andamanese, Pawnees, Blackfeet, Hurons, Indians of British Guiana, Dinkas,
+Negroes, and so forth? Unless Israel had this rare ill-luck (which Israel
+denies) of course Israel must have had a secular tradition, however dim,
+of a Supreme Being. We must ask for a single instance of a family or
+tribe, in a complex of semi-barbaric but not savage tribes of one
+speech, owning a private deity who happened to be the Maker and Ruler of
+the world, and, as such, was accepted by all the tribes. Jehovah came out
+from Sinai, because, there having been a Theophany at Sinai, that mountain
+was regarded as one of his seats.[26]
+
+We have seen that it seemed to make no difference to Mr. Oxford whether
+Jehovah was a god of Moses's family or tribe or a Kenite god. The former
+(with the alternative of _Joseph's_ family or tribal god) is Wellhausen's
+theory. The latter is Stade's.[27] Each is inconsistent with the other;
+Wellhausen's fancy is inconsistent with all that we know of religious
+development: Stade's is hopelessly inconsistent with Exodus iv. 24-26,
+where Moses's Kenite wife reproaches him for a ceremony of his, not of
+her, religion. Therefore the Kenite differed from the Hebrew _sacra_.
+
+The passage is very extraordinary, and is said by critics to be very
+archaic. After the revelation of the Burning Bush, Jehovah met Moses and
+his Kenite wife, Zipporah, and their child, at a khan. Jehovah was
+anxious to slay Moses, nobody ever knew why, so Zipporah appeased
+Jehovah's wrath by circumcising her boy _with a flint_. 'A bloody husband
+art thou to me,' she said, 'because of the circumcision'--an Egyptian,
+but clearly not a Kenite practice. Whatever all this may mean, it does not
+look as if Zipporah expected such rites as circumcision in the faith of a
+Kenite husband, nor does it favour the idea that the _sacra_ of Moses were
+of Kenite origin.
+
+Without being a scholar, or an expert in Biblical criticism, one may
+protest against the presentation to the manual-reading intellectual middle
+classes of a theory so vague, contradictory, and (by all analogy) so
+impossible as Mr. Oxford collects from German writers. Of course, the
+whole subject, so dogmatically handled, is mere matter of dissentient
+opinion among scholars. Thus M. Renan derives the name of Jehovah from
+Assyria, from 'Aramaised Chaldaeanism.'[28] In that case the name was long
+anterior to the residence in Egypt. But again, perhaps Jehovah was a local
+god of Sinai, or a provincial deity in Palestine.[29] He was known to very
+ancient sages, who preferred such names as El Shaddai and Elohim. In
+short, we have no certainty on the subject.[30]
+
+I need hardly say, perhaps, that I have no antiquated prejudice against
+Biblical criticism. Assuredly the Bible must be studied like any other
+collection of documents, linguistically, historically, and in the light of
+the comparative method. The leading ideas of Wellhausen, for example, are
+conspicuous for acumen: the humblest layman can see that. But one may
+protest against criticising the Bible, or Homer, by methods like those
+which prove Shakspeare to have been Bacon. One must protest, too, against
+the presentation of inconsistent and probably baseless critical hypotheses
+in the dogmatic brevity of cheap handbooks.
+
+Yet again, whence comes the moral element in Jehovah? Mr. Huxley thinks
+that it possibly came from the ethical practice and theory of Egypt. In
+the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 'a sort of Guide to Spirit Land,' there
+are moral chapters; the ghost tells his judges in Amenti what sins he has
+_not_ committed. Many of these sins are forbidden in the Ten Commandments.
+
+They are just as much forbidden in the nascent morality of savage peoples.
+Moses did not need the Book of the Dead to teach him elementary morals.
+From the mysteries of Mtanga he might have learned, also, had he been
+present, the virtue of unselfish generosity. If the creed of Jehovah, or
+of El, retained only as much of ethics as is under divine sanction among
+the Kurnai, adaptation from the Book of the Dead was superfluous.
+
+The care for the departed, the ritual of the Ka, the intense
+pre-occupation with the future life, which, far more than its morality,
+are the essential characteristics of the Book of the Dead--Israel cared
+for none of these animistic things, brought none of these, or very little
+of these, out of the land of Egypt. Moses was certainly very eclectic; he
+took only the morality of Egypt. But as Mr. Huxley advances this opinion
+tentatively, as having no secure historical authority about Moses, it
+hardly answers our question, Whence came the moral element in Jehovah? One
+may surmise that it was the survival of the primitive divinely sanctioned
+ethics of the ancient savage ancestors of the Israelite, known to them,
+as to the Kurnai, before they had a pot, or a bronze knife, or seed to
+sow, or sheep to herd, or even a tent over their heads. In the counsels of
+eternity Israel was chosen to keep burning, however obscured with smoke
+of sacrifice, that flame which illumines the darkest places of the earth,
+'a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel'--a
+flame how litten a light whence shining, history cannot inform us, and
+anthropology can but conjecture. Here scientific nescience is wiser than
+the cocksureness of popular science, with her ghosts and fetish-stones,
+and gods that sprang from ghosts, which ghosts, however, could not be
+developed, owing to nomadic habits.
+
+It appears, then, if our general suggestion meets with any acceptance,
+that what occurred in the development of Hebrew religion was precisely
+what the Bible tells us did occur. This must necessarily seem highly
+paradoxical to our generation; but the whole trend of our provisional
+system makes in favour of the paradox. If savage nomadic Israel had the
+higher religious conceptions proved to exist among several of the lowest
+known races, these conceptions might be revived by a leader of genius.
+They might, in a crisis of tribal fortunes, become the rallying point of a
+new national sentiment. Obscured, in some degree, by acquaintance with
+'the idols of Egypt,' and restricted and localised by the very national
+sentiment which they fostered, these conceptions were purified and widened
+far beyond any local, tribal, or national restrictions--widened far as the
+_flammantia moenia mundi_--by the historically unique genius of the
+Prophets. Blended with the doctrine of our Lord, and recommended by the
+addition of Animism in its pure and priceless form--the reward of faith,
+hope, and charity in eternal life--the faith of Israel enlightened the
+world.
+
+All this is precisely what occurred, according to the Old and New
+Testaments. All this is just what, on our hypothesis, might be expected to
+occur if, out of the many races which, in their most backward culture, had
+a rude conception of a Moral Creative Being, relatively supreme, one race
+endured the education of Israel, showed the comparative indifference of
+Israel to Animism and ghost-gods, listened to the Prophets of Israel, and
+gave birth to a greater than Moses and the Prophets.
+
+To this result the Logos, as Socrates says, has led us, by the path of
+anthropology.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Op. cit. p. 361.]
+
+[Footnote 3:_ Science and Hebrew Tradition_. p. 308.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Prin. Soc_. p. 306.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _The Tshi-speaking Races_, p. 183.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Some Australian tribes have cemeteries, and I have found one
+native witness, King Billy, to the celebration of the mysteries near one of
+these burying-places. I have not discovered other evidence to this effect,
+though I have looked for it. The spot selected is usually 'near the camp,'
+and the place for so large a camp in chosen, naturally, where the supply
+of food is adequate.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Cf. the Aryans, _Principles of Sociology_, p. 314.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Principles_, p. 316.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Ibid. p. 317.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Jeremiah xvi. 6, 7.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Leviticus xix. 28.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Deuteronomy xxxiv. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Short Introduction to History of Ancient Israel_, pp.
+83, 84.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Stade i 403.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Stade, i. 406.]
+
+[Footnote 16: Wellhausen, _History of Israel_, p. 437. Mr. Oxford's book
+is only noticed here because it is meant for a popular manual. As Mr.
+Henry Foker says, 'it seems a pity that the clergy should interfere in
+these matters.']
+
+[Footnote 17: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 299.]
+
+[Footnote 18: II. 127.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 331.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Mariner, ii. 205.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Op. cit. p. 335.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Of course, it in understood that Israel (in the dark
+backward and abysm of time) may also have been totemistic, like the
+Australians, as texts pointed out by Mr. Robertson Smith seem to hint.
+There was also worship of teraphim, respect paid to stones and trees, and
+so forth.]
+
+[Footnote 23: _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 349.]
+
+[Footnote 24: P. 351.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _History of Israel_, p. 443 note.]
+
+[Footnote 26: _Religion of Semites_.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, i. 180.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Histoire du Peuple d'Israel_, citing Schrader, p. 23.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Op. cit. p. 85]
+
+[Footnote 30: See Professor Robertson's _Early Religion of Israel_ for a
+list of these conjectures, and, generally, for criticisms of the
+occasional vagaries of critics.]
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+We may now glance backward at the path which we have tried to cut through
+the jungles of early religions. It is not a highway, but the track
+of a solitary explorer; and this essay pretends to be no more than a
+sketch--not an exhaustive survey of creeds. Its limitations are obvious,
+but may here be stated. The higher and even the lower polytheisms are only
+alluded to in passing, our object being to keep well in view the
+conception of a Supreme, or practically Supreme, Being, from the lowest
+stages of human culture up to Christianity. In polytheism that conception
+is necessarily obscured, showing itself dimly either in the _Prytanis_,
+or President of the Immortals, such as Zeus; or in Fate, behind and above
+the Immortals; or in Mr. Max Mueller's _Henotheism_, where the god
+addressed--Indra, or Soma, or Agni--is, for the moment, envisaged as
+supreme, and is adored in something like a monotheistic spirit; or,
+finally, in the etherealised deity of advanced philosophic speculation.
+
+It has not been necessary, for our purpose, to dwell on these civilised
+religions. Granting our hypothesis of an early Supreme Being among
+savages, obscured later by ancestor-worship and ghost-gods, but not
+often absolutely lost to religious tradition, the barbaric and the
+civilised polytheisms easily take their position in line, and are easily
+intelligible. Space forbids a discussion of all known religions; only
+typical specimens have been selected. Thus, nothing has been said of the
+religion of the great Chinese empire. It appears to consist, on its
+higher plane, of the worship of Heaven as a great fetish-god--a worship
+which may well have begun in days, as Dr. Brinton says, 'long ere man had
+asked himself, "Are the heavens material and God spiritual?"'--perhaps,
+for all we know, before the idea of 'spirit' had been evolved. Thus, if it
+contains nothing more august, the Chinese religion is, so far, beneath
+that of the Zunis, or the creed in Taa-roa, in Beings who are eternal, who
+were before earth was or sky was. The Chinese religion of Heaven is also
+coloured by Chinese political conditions; Heaven (Tien) corresponds to the
+Emperor, and tends to be confounded with Shang-ti, the Emperor above. 'Dr.
+Legge charges Confucius,' says Mr. Tylor, 'with an inclination to
+substitute, in his religious teaching, the name of Tien, Heaven, for that
+known to more ancient religion, and used in more ancient books--Shang-ti,
+the personal ruling deity.' If so, China too has its ancient Supreme
+Being, who is not a divinised aspect of nature.
+
+But Mr. Tylor's reading, in harmony with his general theory, is different:
+
+'It seems, rather, that the sage was, in fact, upholding the tradition of
+the ancient faith, thus acting according to the character on which he
+prided himself--that of a transmitter, not a maker, a preserver of old
+knowledge, not a new revealer.'[1]
+
+This, of course, is purely a question of evidence, to be settled by
+Sinologists. If the personal Supreme Being, Shang-ti, occupies in older
+documents the situation held by Tien (Heaven) in Confucius's later system,
+why are we to say that Confucius, by putting forward Heaven in place of
+Shang-ti, was restoring an older conception? Mr. Tylor's affection for his
+theory leads him, perhaps, to that opinion; while my affection for my
+theory leads me to prefer documentary evidence in its favour.
+
+The question can only be settled by specialists. As matters stand, it
+seems to me probable that ancient China possessed a Supreme Personal
+Being, more remote and original than Heaven, just as the Zunis do. On
+the lower plane, Chinese religion is overrun, as everyone knows, by
+Animism and ancestor-worship. This is so powerful that it has given rise
+to a native theory of Euhemerism. The departmental deities of Chinese
+polytheism are explained by the Chinese on Euhemeristic principles:
+
+'According to legend, the War God, or Military Sage, was once, in human
+life, a distinguished soldier; the Swine God was a hog-breeder who lost
+his pigs and died of sorrow; the God of Gamblers was _un decave_.'[2]
+
+These are not statements of fact, but of Chinese Euhemeristic theory. On
+that hypothesis, Confucius should now be a god; but of course he is not;
+his spirit is merely localised in his temple, where the Emperor worships
+him twice a year as ancestral spirits are worshipped.
+
+Every theorist will force facts into harmony with his system, but I do not
+see that the Chinese facts are contrary to mine. On the highest plane is
+either a personal Supreme Being, Shang-ti, or there is Tien, Heaven (with
+Earth, parent of men), neither of them necessarily owing, in origin,
+anything to Animism. Then there is the political reflection of the Emperor
+on Religion (which cannot exist where there is no Emperor, King, or Chief,
+and therefore must be late), there is the animistic rabble of spirits
+ancestral or not, and there is departmental polytheism. The spirits are,
+of course, fed and furnished by men in the usual symbolical way. Nothing
+shows or hints that Shang-ti is merely an imaginary idealised first
+ancestor. Indeed, about all such explanations of the Supreme Being (say
+among the Kurnai) as an idealised imaginary first ancestor, M. Reville
+justly observes as follows: 'Not only have we seen that, in wide regions
+of the uncivilised world, the worship of ancestors has invaded a domain
+previously occupied by "Naturism" and Animism properly so called, that it
+is, therefore, posterior to these; but, farther, we do not understand, in
+Mr. Spencer's system, why, in so many places, the first ancestor is the
+Maker, if not the Creator of the world, Master of life and death, and
+possessor of divine powers, not held by any of his descendants. This
+proves that it was not the first ancestor who became God, in the belief of
+his descendants, but much rather the Divine Maker and Beginner of all,
+who, in the creed of his adorers, became the first ancestor.'[3]
+
+Our task has been limited, in this way, mainly to examination of
+the religion of some of the very lowest races, and of the highest
+world-religions, such as Judaism. The historical aspect of Christianity,
+as arising in the Life, Death, and Resurrection of our Lord, would demand
+a separate treatise. This would, in part, be concerned with the attempts
+to find in the narratives concerning our Lord, a large admixture of the
+mythology and ritual connected with the sacrificed _Rex Nemorensis_, and
+whatever else survives in peasant folk-lore of spring and harvest.[4]
+
+After these apologies for the limitations of this essay, we may survey the
+backward track. We began by showing that savages may stumble, and have
+stumbled, on theories not inconsistent with science, but not till
+recently discovered by science. The electric origin of the Aurora Borealis
+(whether absolutely certain or not) was an example; another was the
+efficacy of 'suggestion,' especially for curative purposes. It was,
+therefore, hinted that, if savages blundered (if you please) into a belief
+in God and the Soul, however obscurely envisaged, these beliefs were not
+therefore necessarily and essentially false. We then stated our purpose of
+examining the alleged supernormal phenomena, savage or civilised, which,
+on Mr. Tylor's hypothesis, help to originate the conception of 'spirits.'
+We defended the nature of our evidence, as before anthropologists, by
+showing that, for the savage belief in the supernormal phenomena, we have
+exactly the kind of evidence on which all anthropological science reposes.
+The relative weakness of that evidence, our need of more and better
+evidence, we would be the very last to deny, indeed it is part of our
+case. Our existing evidence will hardly support any theory of religion.
+Anyone who is in doubt on that head has only to read M. Reville's 'Les
+Religions des Peuples Non-Civilises,' under the heads 'Melanesiens,'
+'Mincopies,' 'Les Australiens' (ii. 116-143), when he will observe that
+this eminent French authority is ignorant of the facts about these races
+here produced. In 1883 they had not come within his ken. Such minute and
+careful inquiries by men closely intimate with the peoples concerned, as
+Dr. Codrington's, Mr. Hewitt's, Mr. Man's, and the authorities compiled by
+Mr. Brough Smyth, were unfamiliar to M. Reville, Thus, in turn, new facts,
+or facts unknown to us, may upset my theory. This peril is of the essence
+of scientific theorising on the history of religion.
+
+Having thus justified our evidence for the savage _belief_ in supernormal
+phenomena, as before anthropologists, we turned to a court of
+psychologists in defence of our evidence for the _fact_ of exactly the
+same supernormal phenomena in civilised experience. We pointed out that
+for subjective psychological experiences, say of telepathy, we had
+precisely the same evidence as all non-experimental psychology must and
+does rest upon. Nay, we have even experimental evidence, in experiments in
+thought-transference. We have chiefly, however, statements of subjective
+experience. For the coincidence of such experience with unknown events we
+have such evidence as, in practical life, is admitted by courts of law.
+
+Experimental psychology, of course, relies on experiments conducted under
+the eyes of the expert, for example, by hypnotism or otherwise, under Dr.
+Hack Tuke, Professor James, M. Richet, M. Janet. The evidence is
+the conduct rather than the statements of the subject. There is
+also physiological experiment, by vivisection (I regret to say) and
+post-mortem dissection. But non-experimental psychology reposes on the
+self-examination of the student, and on the statements of psychological
+experiences made to him by persons whom he thinks he can trust. The
+psychologist, however, if he be, as Mr. Galton says, 'unimaginative in the
+strict but unusual sense of that ambiguous word,' needs Mr. Galton's 'word
+of warning.' He is asked 'to resist a too frequent tendency to assume that
+the minds of every other sane and healthy person must be like his own. The
+psychologist should inquire into the minds of others as he should into
+those of animals of different races, and be prepared to find much to which
+his own experience can afford little if any clue.'[5] Mr. Galton had to
+warn the unimaginative psychologist in this way, because he was about to
+unfold his discovery of the faculty which presents numbers to some minds
+as visualised coloured numerals, 'so vivid as to be undistinguishable from
+reality, except by the aid of accidental circumstances.'
+
+Mr. Galton also found in his inquiries that occasional hallucinations of
+the sane are much more prevalent than he had supposed, or than science had
+ever taken into account. All this was entirely new to psychologists,
+many of whom still (at least many popular psychologists of the press)
+appear to be unacquainted with the circumstances. One of them informed me,
+quite gravely, that '_he_ never had an hallucination,' therefore--_his_
+mind being sane and healthy--the inference seemed to be that no sane and
+healthy mind was ever hallucinated. Mr. Galton has replied to _that_
+argument! His reply covers, logically, the whole field of psychological
+faculties little regarded, for example, by Mr. Sully, who is not exactly
+an imaginative psychologist.
+
+It covers the whole field of automatism (as in automatic writing) perhaps
+of the divining rod, certainly of crystal visions and of occasional
+hallucinations, as Mr. Galton, in this last case, expressly declares.
+Psychologists at least need not be told that such faculties cannot,
+any more than other human faculties, be always evoked for study and
+experiment. Our evidence for these faculties and experiences, then, is
+usually of the class on which the psychologist relies. But, when the
+psychologist, following Leibnitz, Sir William Hamilton, and Kant,
+discusses the Subconscious (for example, knowledge, often complex and
+abundant, unconsciously acquired) we demonstrated by examples that the
+psychologist will contentedly repose on evidence which is not evidence at
+all. He will swallow an undated, unlocalised legend of Coleridge, reaching
+Coleridge on the testimony of rumour, and told at least twenty years after
+the unverified occurrences. Nay, the psychologist will never dream of
+procuring contemporary evidence for such a monstrous statement as that
+an ignorant German wench unconsciously acquired and afterwards
+subconsciously reproduced huge cantles of dead languages, by virtue of
+having casually heard a former master recite or read aloud from Hebrew and
+Greek books. This legend do psychologists accept on no evidence at all,
+because it illustrates a theory which is, doubtless, a very good theory,
+though, in this case, carried to an extent 'imagination boggles at.'
+
+Here the psychologist may reply that much less evidence will content him
+for a fact to which he possesses, at least, analogies in accredited
+experience, than for a fact (say telepathic crystal-gazing) to which _he_
+knows, in experience, nothing analogous. Thus, for the mythical German
+handmaid, he has the analogy of languages learned in childhood, or
+passages got up by rote, being forgotten and brought back to ordinary
+conscious memory, or delirious memory, during an illness, or shortly
+before death. Strong in these analogies, the psychologist will venture to
+accept a case of language _not_ learned, but reproduced in delirious
+memory, on no evidence at all. But, not possessing analogies for
+telepathic crystal-gazing, he will probably decline to examine ours.
+
+I would first draw his attention to the difference between revived memory
+of a language once known (Breton and Welsh in known examples), or learned
+by rote (as Greek, in an anecdote of Goethe's), and verbal reproduction
+of a language _not_ known or learned by rote but overheard--each passage
+probably but once--as somebody recited fragments. In this instance (that
+of the mythical maid) 'the difficulty ... is that the original impressions
+had not the strength--that is, the distinctness--of the reproduction. An
+unknown language overheard is a mere sound....'[6]
+
+The distinction here drawn is so great and obvious that for proof of the
+German girl's case we need better evidence than Coleridge's rumour of a
+rumour, cited, as it is, by Hamilton, Maudsley, Carpenter, Du Prel, and
+the common run of manuals.
+
+Not that I deny, _a priori_, the possibility of Coleridge's story. As Mr.
+Huxley says, 'strictly speaking, I am unaware of anything that has a right
+to the title of an "impossibility," except a contradiction in terms.'[7]
+To the horror of some of his admirers, Mr. Huxley would not call the
+existence of demons and demoniacal possession 'impossible.'[8] Mr. Huxley
+was no blind follower of Hume. I, too, do not call Coleridge's tale
+'impossible,' but, unlike the psychologists, I refuse to accept it on
+'Bardolph's security.' And I contrast their conduct, in swallowing
+Coleridge's legend, with their refusal (if they do refuse) to accept the
+evidence for the automatic writing of not-consciously-known languages (as
+of eleventh-century French poetry and prose by Mr. Schiller), or their
+refusal (if they do refuse) to look at the evidence for telepathic
+crystal-gazing, or any other supernormal exhibitions of faculty, attested
+by living and honourable persons.
+
+I wish I saw a way for orthodox unimaginative psychology out of its
+dilemma.
+
+After offering to anthropologists and psychologists these considerations,
+which I purposely reiterate, we examined historically the relations of
+science to 'the marvellous,' showing for example how Hume, following his
+_a priori_ theory of the impossible, would have declined to investigate,
+because they were 'miraculous,' certain occurrences which, to Charcot,
+were ordinary incidents in medical experience.
+
+We next took up and criticised the anthropological theory of religion as
+expounded by Mr. Tylor. We then collected from his work a series of
+alleged supernormal phenomena in savage belief, all making for the
+foundation of animistic religion. Through several chapters we pursued the
+study of these phenomena, choosing savage instances, and setting beside
+them civilised testimony to facts of experience. Our conclusion was that
+such civilised experiences, if they occurred, as they are universally said
+to do, among savages, would help to originate, and would very strongly
+support the savage doctrine of souls, the base of religion in the theory
+of English anthropologists. But apart from the savage doctrine of
+'spirits' (whether they exist or not), the evidence points to the
+existence of human faculties not allowed for in the current systems of
+materialism.
+
+We next turned from the subject of supernormal experiences to the admitted
+facts about early religion. Granting the belief in souls and ghosts and
+spirits, however attained, how was the idea of a Supreme Being to be
+evolved out of that belief? We showed that, taking the creed as found in
+the lowest races, the processes put forward by anthropologists could
+not account for its evolution. The facts would not fit into, but
+contradicted, the anthropological theory. The necessary social conditions
+postulated were not found in places where the belief is found. Nay, the
+necessary social conditions for the evolution even of ancestor-worship
+were confessedly not found where the supposed ultimate result of
+ancestor-worship, the belief in a Supreme Being, flourished abundantly.
+
+Again, the belief in a Supreme Being, _ex hypothesi_ the latest in
+evolution, therefore the most potent, was often shelved and half
+forgotten, or neglected, or ridiculed, where the belief in Animism (_ex
+hypothesi_ the earlier) was in full vigour. We demonstrated by facts that
+Anthropology had simplified her task by ignoring that essential feature,
+_the prevalent alliance of ethics with religion_, in the creed of the
+lowest and least developed races. Here, happily, we have not only the
+evidence of an earnest animist, Mr. Im Thurn, on our side, but that of a
+distinguished Semitic scholar, the late Mr. Robertson Smith. 'We see that
+even in its rudest forms Religion was a moral force, the powers that man
+reveres were on the side of social order and moral law; and the fear of
+the gods was a motive to enforce the laws of society, which were also the
+laws of morality.'[9] Wellhausen has already been cited to the same
+effect.
+
+However, the facts proving that truth, and unselfishness, surely a large
+element of Christian ethics, are divinely sanctioned in savage religion
+are more potent than the most learned opinion on that side.
+
+Our next step was to examine in detail several religions of the most
+remote and backward races, of races least contaminated with Christian or
+Islamite teaching. Our evidence, when possible, was derived from ancient
+and secret tribal mysteries, and sacred native hymns. We found a
+relatively Supreme Being, a Maker, sanctioning morality, and unpropitiated
+by sacrifice, among peoples who go in dread of ghosts and wizards, but do
+not always worship ancestors. We showed that the anthropological theory of
+the evolution of God out of ghosts in no way explains the facts in the
+savage conception of a Supreme Being. We then argued that the notion of
+'spirit,' derived from ghost-belief, was not logically needed for the
+conception of a Supreme Being in its earliest form, was detrimental to
+the conception, and, by much evidence, was denied to be part of the
+conception. The Supreme Being, thus regarded, may be (though he cannot
+historically be shown to be) prior to the first notion of ghost and
+separable souls.
+
+We then traced the idea of such a Supreme Being through the creeds of
+races rising in the scale of material culture, demonstrating that he was
+thrust aside by the competition of ravenous but serviceable ghosts,
+ghost-gods, and shades of kingly ancestors, with their magic and their
+bloody rites. These rites and the animistic conception behind them were
+next, in rare cases, reflected or refracted back on the Supreme Eternal.
+Aristocratic institutions fostered polytheism with the old Supreme Being
+obscured, or superseded, or enthroned as Emperor-God, or King-God. We saw
+how, and in what sense, the old degeneration theory could be defined and
+defended. We observed traces of degeneration in certain archaic aspects of
+the faith in Jehovah; and we proved that (given a tolerably pure low
+savage belief in a Supreme Being) that belief _must_ degenerate, under
+social conditions, as civilisation advanced. Next, studying what we may
+call the restoration of Jehovah, under the great Prophets of Israel, we
+noted that they, and Israel generally, were strangely indifferent to that
+priceless aspect of Animism, the care for the future happiness, as
+conditioned by the conduct of the individual soul. That aspect had been
+neglected neither by the popular instinct nor the priestly and philosophic
+reflection of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Christianity, last, combined what
+was good in Animism, the care for the individual soul as an immortal
+spirit under eternal responsibilities, with the One righteous Eternal of
+prophetic Israel, and so ended the long, intricate, and mysterious
+theological education of humanity. Such is our theory, which does
+not, to us, appear to lack evidence, nor to be inconsistent (as the
+anthropological theory is apparently inconsistent) with the hypothesis of
+evolution.
+
+All this, it must be emphatically insisted on, is propounded 'under all
+reserves.' While these four stages, say (1) the Australian unpropitiated
+Moral Being, (2) the African neglected Being, still somewhat moral,
+(3) the relatively Supreme Being involved in human sacrifice, as in
+Polynesia, and (4) the Moral Being reinstated philosophically, as in
+Israel, do suggest steps in evolution, we desire to base no hard-and-fast
+system of ascending and descending degrees upon our present evidence.
+The real object is to show that facts may be regarded in this light, as
+well as in the light thrown by the anthropological theory, in the hands
+whether of Mr. Tylor, Mr. Spencer, M. Reville, or Mr. Jevons, whose
+interesting work comes nearest to our provisional hypothesis.
+
+We only ask for suspense of judgment, and for hesitation in accepting the
+dogmas of modern manual makers. An exception to them certainly appears to
+be Mr. Clodd, if we may safely attribute to him a review (signed C.) of
+Mr. Grant Allen's 'Evolution of the Idea of God.'
+
+'We fear that all our speculations will remain summaries of probabilities.
+No documents are extant to enlighten us; we have only mobile, complex and
+confused ideas, incarnate in eccentric, often contradictory theories. That
+this character attaches to such ideas should keep us on guard against
+framing theories whose symmetry is sometimes their condemnation' ('Daily
+Chronicle,' December 10, 1897).
+
+Nothing excites my own suspicion of my provisional hypothesis more than
+its symmetry. It really seems to fit the facts, as they appear to me, too
+neatly. I would suggest, however, that ancient savage sacred hymns,
+and practices in the mysteries, are really rather of the nature of
+'documents;' more so, at least, than the casual observations of some
+travellers, or the gossip extracted from natives much in contact with
+Europeans.
+
+Supposing that the arguments in this essay met with some acceptance, what
+effect would they have, if any, on our thoughts about religion? What is
+their practical tendency? The least dubious effect would be, I hope, to
+prevent us from accepting the anthropological theory of religion, or any
+other theory, as a foregone conclusion, I have tried to show how dim is
+our knowledge, how weak, often, is our evidence, and that, finding among
+the lowest savages all the elements of all religions already developed
+in different degrees, we cannot, historically, say that one is earlier
+than another. This point of priority we can never historically settle. If
+we met savages with ghosts and no gods, we could not be sure but that they
+once possessed a God, and forgot him. If we met savages with a God and no
+ghosts, we could not be historically certain that a higher had not
+obliterated a lower creed. For these reasons dogmatic decisions about the
+_origin_ of religion seem unworthy of science. They will appear yet more
+futile to any student who goes so far with me as to doubt whether the
+highest gods of the lowest races could be developed, or can be shown to
+have been developed, by way of the ghost-theory. To him who reaches this
+point the whole animistic doctrine of ghosts as the one germ of religion
+will appear to be imperilled. The main practical result, then, will be
+hesitation about accepting the latest scientific opinion, even when backed
+by great names, and published in little primers.
+
+On the hypothesis here offered to criticism there are two chief sources of
+Religion, (1) the belief, how attained we know not,[10] in a powerful,
+moral, eternal, omniscient Father and Judge of men; (2) the belief
+(probably developed out of experiences normal and supernormal) in
+somewhat of man which may survive the grave. This second belief is not,
+logically, needed as given material for the first, in its apparently
+earliest form. It may, for all we know, be the later of the two beliefs,
+chronologically. But this belief, too, was necessary to religion; first,
+as finally supplying a formula by which advancing intellects could
+conceive of the Mighty Being involved in the former creed; next, as
+elevating man's conception of his own nature. By the second belief he
+becomes the child of the God in whom, perhaps, he already trusted, and in
+whom he has his being, a being not destined to perish with the death of
+the body. Man is thus not only the child but the heir of God, a 'nurseling
+of immortality,' capable of entering into eternal life. On the moral
+influence of this belief it is superfluous to dwell.
+
+From the most backward races historically known to us, to those of our own
+status, all have been more or less washed by the waters of this double
+stream of religion. The Hebrews, as far as our information goes, were
+chiefly influenced by the first belief, the faith in the Eternal, and had
+comparatively slight interest in whatever posthumous fortunes might await
+individual souls. Other civilised peoples, say the Greeks, extended the
+second, or animistic theory, into forms of beautiful fantasy, the
+material of art. Yet both in Greece and Rome, as we learn from the
+'Republic' (Books i. iii.) of Plato, and from the whole scope of the poem
+of Lucretius, and from the Painted Porch at Delphi, answering to the
+frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, there existed, among the people, what
+was unknown to the Hebrews, an extreme anxiety about the posthumous
+fortunes and possible punishment of the individual soul. A kind of
+pardoners and indulgence-sellers made a living out of that anxiety in
+Greece. For the Greek pardoners, who testify to an interest in the
+future happiness of the soul not found in Israel, Mr. Jevons may be cited:
+
+'The _agyrtes_ professed by means of his rites to purify men from the sins
+they had themselves committed ... and so to secure to those whom he
+purified an exemption from the evil lot in the next world which awaited
+those who were not initiated.' 'A magic mirror' (crystal-gazing) 'was
+among his properties.'[11]
+
+In Egypt a moral life did not suffice to secure immortal reward. There
+was also required knowledge of the spells that baffle the demons who, in
+Amenti, as in the Red Indian and Polynesian Hades, lie in wait for souls.
+That knowledge was contained in copies of the Book of the Dead--the
+_gagne-pain_ of priests and scribes.
+
+Early Israel, having, as far as we know, a singular lack of interest in
+the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing,
+undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal.
+
+Polytheism everywhere--in Greece especially--held of the animistic
+conception, with its freakish, corruptible deities. Greek philosophy could
+hardly restore that Eternal for whom the Prophets battled in Israel; whom
+some of the lowest savages know and fear; whom the animistic theory or cult
+everywhere obscures with its crowd of hungry, cruel, interested,
+food-propitiated ghost-gods. In the religion of our Lord and the Apostles
+the two currents of faith in one righteous God and care for the individual
+soul were purified and combined. 'God is a Spirit, and they who worship
+Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' Man also is a spirit, and,
+as such, is in the hands of a God not to be propitiated by man's
+sacrifice or monk's ritual. We know how this doctrine was again disturbed
+by the Animism, in effect, and by the sacrifice and ritual of the
+Mediaeval Church. Too eager 'to be all things to all men,' the august and
+beneficent Mother of Christendom readmitted the earlier Animism in new
+forms of saint-worship, pilgrimage, and popular ceremonial--things apart
+from, but commonly supposed to be substitutes for, righteousness of life
+and the selflessness enjoined in savage mysteries. For the softness, no
+less than for the hardness of men's hearts, these things were ordained:
+such as masses for the beloved dead.
+
+Modern thought has deanthropomorphised what was left of anthropomorphic
+in religion, and, in the end, has left us for God, at most, 'a stream
+of tendency making for righteousness,' or an energy unknown and
+unknowable--the ghost of a ghost. For the soul, by virtue of his
+belief in which man raised himself in his own esteem, and, more or less,
+in ethical standing, is left to us a negation or a wistful doubt.
+
+To this part of modern scientific teaching the earlier position of this
+essay suggests a demurrer. By aid of the tradition of and belief in
+supernormal phenomena among the low races, by attested phenomena of the
+same kinds of experience among the higher races, I have ventured to try to
+suggest that 'we are not merely brain;' that man has his part, we know not
+how, in we know not what--has faculties and vision scarcely conditioned by
+the limits of his normal purview. The evidence of all this deals with
+matters often trivial, like the electric sparks rubbed from the deer's
+hide, which yet are cognate with an illimitable, essential potency of the
+universe. Not being able to explain away these facts, or, in this place,
+to offer what would necessarily be a premature theory of them, I regard
+them, though they seem shadowy, as grounds of hope, or, at least, as
+tokens that men need not yet despair. Not now for the first time have weak
+things of the earth been chosen to confound things strong. Nor have men of
+this opinion been always the weakest; not among the feeblest are Socrates,
+Pascal, Napoleon, Cromwell, Charles Gordon, St. Theresa, and Jeanne d'Arc.
+
+I am perfectly aware that the 'superstitiousness' of the earlier part of
+this essay must injure any effect which the argument of the latter part
+might possibly produce on critical opinion. Yet that argument in no way
+depends on what we think about the phenomena--normal, supernormal, or
+illusory--on which the theory of ghost, soul, or spirit may have been
+based. It exhibits religion as probably beginning in a kind of Theism,
+which is then superseded, in some degree, or even corrupted, by Animism in
+all its varieties. Finally, the exclusive Theism of Israel receives its
+complement in a purified Animism, and emerges as Christianity.
+
+Quite apart, too, from any favourable conclusion which may, by some, be
+drawn from the phenomena, and quite apart from the more general opinion
+that all modern instances are compact of imposture, malobservation,
+mythopoeic memory, and superstitious bias, the systematic comparison of
+civilised and savage beliefs and alleged experiences of this kind cannot
+wisely be neglected by Anthropology. _Humani nihil a se alienum putat._
+
+[Footnote 1: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 352.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Abridged from _Prim. Cult_. ii. 119.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Histoire des Religions_, ii. 237, note. M. Reville's system,
+it will be observed, differs from mine in that he finds the first essays
+of religion in worship of aspects of nature (_naturisme_) and in 'animism
+properly so called,' by which he understands the instinctive, perhaps not
+explicitly formulated, sense that all things whatever are animated and
+personal. I have not remarked this aspect of belief as much prevalent in
+the most backward races, and I do not try to look behind what we know
+historically about early religion. I so far agree with M. Reville as to
+think the belief in ghosts and spirits (Mr. Tylor's 'Animism') not
+necessarily postulated in the original indeterminate conception of
+the Supreme Being, or generally, in 'Original Gods.' But M. Reville
+says, 'L'objet de la religion humaine est necessairement un esprit'
+(_Prolegomenes_, 107). This does not seem consistent with his own theory.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Compare Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_ with Mr. Grant Allen's
+_Evolution of the Idea of God_.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _J.A.I_. x. 85.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Massey. Note to Du Prel. _Philosophy of mysticism_, ii 10.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Science and Christian Tradition_, p. 197]
+
+[Footnote 8: Op. cit. p. 195.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Religion of the Semites_, p. 53.]
+
+[Footnote 10: The hypothesis of St. Paul seems not the most
+unsatisfactory, Rom. i. 19.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Introd. to Hist. of Rel_. p. 333; Aristoph. _Frogs_, 159.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+OPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE
+
+The most elaborate reply to the arguments for telepathy, based on The
+Report of the Census of Hallucinations, is that of Herr Parish, in his
+'Hallucinations and Illusions.'[1]
+
+Herr Parish is, at present, opposed to the theory that the Census
+establishes a telepathic cause in the so-called 'coincidental' stories,
+'put forward,' as he says, 'with due reserve, and based on an astonishing
+mass of materials, to some extent critically handled.'
+
+He first demurs to an allowance of twelve hours for the coincidence of
+hallucination and death; but, if we reflect that twelve hours is little
+even in a year, coincidences within twelve hours, it may be admitted,
+_donnent a penser_, even if we reject the theory that, granted a real
+telepathic impact, it may need time and quiet for its development into a
+complete hallucination. We need not linger over the very queer cases from
+Munich, as these are not in the selected thirty of the Report. Herr Parish
+then dwells on that _hallucination of memory_, in which we feel as if
+everything that is going on had happened before. It may have occurred to
+most of us to be reminded by some association of ideas during the day, of
+some dream of the previous night, which we had forgotten. For instance,
+looking at a brook from a bridge, and thinking of how I would fish it, I
+remembered that I had dreamed, on the previous night, of casting a fly for
+practice, on a lawn. Nobody would think of disputing the fact that I
+really had such a dream, forgot it and remembered it when reminded of it
+by association of ideas. But if the forgotten dream had been 'fulfilled,'
+and been recalled to memory only in the moment of fulfilment, science
+would deny that I ever had such a dream at all. The alleged dream would be
+described as an 'hallucination of memory.' Something occurring, it would
+be said, I had the not very unusual sensation, 'This has occurred to me
+before,' and the sensation would become a false memory that it _had_
+occurred--in a dream. This theory will be advanced, I think, not when an
+ordinary dream is recalled by a waking experience, but only when the dream
+coincides with and foreruns that experience, which is a thing that dreams
+have no business to do. Such coincidental dreams are necessarily 'false
+memories,' scientifically speaking. Now, how does this theory of false
+memory bear on coincidental hallucinations?
+
+The insane, it seems, are apt to have the false memory 'This occurred
+before,' and _then_ to say that the event was revealed to them in a
+vision.[2] The insane may be recommended to make a note of the vision, and
+have it properly attested, _before_ the event. The same remark applies to
+the 'presentiments' of the sane. But it does _not_ apply if Jones tells me
+'I saw my great aunt last night,' and if news comes _after_ this remark
+that Jones's aunt died, on that night, in Timbuctoo. Yet Herr Parish
+(p. 282) seems to think that the argument of fallacious memory comes in
+part, even when an hallucination has been reported to another person
+_before_ its fulfilment. Of course all depends on the veracity of the
+narrator and the person to whom he told his tale. To take a case given:[3]
+Brown, say, travelling with his wife, dreams that a mad dog bit his boy at
+home on the elbow. He tells his wife. Arriving at home Brown finds that it
+was so. Herr Parish appears to argue thus:
+
+Brown dreamed nothing at all, but he gets excited when he hears the bad
+news at home; he thinks, by false memory, that he has a recollection of
+it, he says to his wife, 'My dear, didn't I tell you, last night, I had
+dreamed all this?' and his equally excited wife replies, 'True, my Brown,
+you did, and I said it was only one of your dreams.' And both now believe
+that the dream occurred. This is very plausible, is it not? only science
+would not say anything about it if the dream had _not_ been fulfilled--if
+Brown had remarked, 'Egad, my dear, seeing that horse reminds me that I
+was dreaming last night of driving in a dog-cart.' For then Brown was not
+excited.
+
+None of this exquisite reasoning as to dreams applies to waking
+hallucinations, reported before the alleged coincidence, unless we accept
+a collective hallucination of memory in seer or seers, and also in the
+persons to whom their story was told.
+
+But, it is obvious, memory is apt to become mythopoeic, so far as to
+exaggerate closeness of coincidence, and to add romantic details. We do
+not need Herr Parish to tell us _that_; we meet the circumstance in all
+narratives from memory, whatever the topic, even in Herr Parish's own
+writings.
+
+We must admit that the public, in ghostly, as in all narratives on all
+topics, is given to 'fanciful addenda.' Therefore, as Herr Parish justly
+remarks, we should 'maintain a very sceptical attitude to all accounts' of
+veridical hallucinations. 'Not that we should dismiss them as old wives'
+fables--an all too common method--or even doubt the narrator's good
+faith.' We should treat them like tales of big fish that get away;
+sometimes there is good corroborative evidence that they really were
+big fish, sometimes not. We shall return to these false memories.
+
+Was there a coincidence at all in the Society's cases printed in the
+Census? Herr Parish thinks three of the selected twenty-six cases very
+dubious. In one case is a _possible_ margin of four days, another
+(wrongly numbered by the way) does not occur at all among the twenty-six.
+In the third, Herr Parish is wrong in his statement.[4] This is a lovely
+example of the sceptical slipshod, and, accompanied by the miscitation of
+the second case, shows that inexactitude is not all on the side of the
+seers. However the case is not very good, the two percipients fancying
+that the date of the event was less remote than it really was. Unluckily
+Herr Parish only criticises these three cases, how accurately we have
+remarked. He had no room for more.
+
+Herr Parish next censures the probable selection of good cases by
+collectors, on which the editors of the Census have already made
+observations, as they have also made large allowances for this cause of
+error. He then offers the astonishing statement that, 'in the view of the
+English authors, a view which is, of course, assumed in all calculations
+of the kind, an hallucination persists equally long in the memory and is
+equally readily recalled in reply to a question, whether the experience
+made but a slight impression on the percipient, or affected him deeply,
+as would be the case, for instance, if the hallucination had been found to
+coincide with the death of a near relative or friend.'[5] This assertion
+of Herr Parish's is so erroneous that the Report expressly says 'as years
+recede into the distance,' the proportion of the hallucinations that are
+remembered in them to those which are forgotten, or at least ignored, 'is
+very large.' Again, 'Hallucinations of the most impressive class will not
+only be better remembered than others, but will, we may reasonably
+suppose, be more often mentioned by the percipients to their friends.'[6]
+
+Yet Herr Parish avers that, in all calculations, it is assumed that
+hallucinations are equally readily recalled whether impressive or not!
+Once more, the Report says (p. 246), '_It is not the case_' that
+coincidental (and impressive) hallucinations are as easily subject to
+oblivion as non-coincidental, and non-impressive ones. The editors
+therefore multiply the non-coincidental cases by four, arguing that no
+coincidental cases (hits) are forgotten, while three out of four
+non-coincidentals (misses) are forgotten, or may be supposed likely to be
+forgotten. Immediately after declaring that the English authors suppose
+all hallucinations to be equally well remembered (which is the precise
+reverse of what they do say), Herr Parish admits that the authors multiply
+the misses by four, 'influenced by other considerations' (p. 289). By what
+other considerations? They give their reason (that very reason which they
+decline to entertain, says Herr Parish), namely, that misses are four
+times as likely to be forgotten as hits. 'To go into the reason for
+adopting this plan would lead us too far,' he writes. Why, it is the
+very reason which, he says, does _not_ find favour with the English
+authors!
+
+How curiously remote from being 'coincidental' with plain facts, or
+'veridical' at all, is this scientific criticism! Herr Parish says that a
+'view' (which does not exist) is 'of course assumed in all calculations;'
+and, on the very same page, he says that it is _not_ assumed! 'The
+witnesses of the report--influenced, it is true, by other considerations'
+(which is not the case), 'have sought to turn the point of this objection
+by multiplying the whole number of (non-coincidental) cases by four.' Then
+the 'view' is _not_ 'assumed in all calculations,' as Herr Parish has just
+asserted.
+
+What led Herr Parish, an honourable and clearheaded critic, into this maze
+of incorrect and contradictory assertions? It is interesting to try to
+trace the causes of such _non-veridical illusions_, to find the _points
+de repere_ of these literary hallucinations. One may suggest that when
+Herr Parish 'recast the chapters' of his German edition, as he says in his
+preface to the English version, he accidentally left in a passage based
+on an earlier paper by Mr. Gurney,[7] not observing that it was no longer
+accurate or appropriate.
+
+After this odd passage, Herr Parish argues that a 'veridical'
+hallucination is regarded by the English authors as 'coincidental,' even
+when external circumstances have made that very hallucination a probable
+occurrence by producing 'tension of the corresponding nerve element
+groups.' That is to say, a person is in a condition--a nervous condition--
+likely, _a priori_, to beget an hallucination. An hallucination _is_
+begotten, quite naturally; and so, if it happens to coincide with an
+event, the coincidence should not count--it is purely fortuitous.[8]
+
+Here is an example. A lady, facing an old sideboard, saw a friend, with no
+coat on, and in a waistcoat with a back of shiny material. Within an hour
+she was taken to where her friend lay dying, without a coat, and in a
+waistcoat with a shiny back.[9] Here is the scientific explanation of Herr
+Parish: 'The shimmer of a reflecting surface [the sideboard?] formed the
+occasion for the hallucinatory emergence of a subconsciously perceived
+_shiny black waistcoat_ [quotation incorrect, of course], and an
+individual subconsciously associated with that impression.[10] I ask any
+lady whether she, consciously or subconsciously, associates the men she
+knows with the backs of their waistcoats. Herr Parish's would be a
+brilliantly satisfactory explanation if it were only true to the printed
+words that lay under his eyes when he wrote. There was no 'shiny black
+waistcoat' in the case, but a waistcoat with a shiny _back_. Gentlemen,
+and especially old gentlemen who go about in bath-chairs (like the man in
+this story), don't habitually take off their coats and show the backs of
+their waistcoats to ladies of nineteen in England. And, if Herr Parish had
+cared to read his case, he would have found it expressly stated that the
+lady 'had never seen the man without his coat' (and so could not associate
+him with an impression of a shiny back to his waistcoat) till _after_ the
+hallucination, when she saw him coatless on his death-bed. In this
+instance Herr Parish had an hallucinatory memory, all wrong, of the page
+under his eyes. The case is got rid of, then, by aid of the 'fanciful
+addenda,' to which Herr Parish justly objects. He first gives the facts
+incorrectly, and then explains an occurrence which, as reported by him,
+did not occur, and was not asserted to occur.
+
+I confess that, if Herr Parish's version were as correct as it is
+essentially inaccurate, his explanation would leave me doubtful. For the
+circumstances were that the old gentleman of the story lunched daily with
+the young lady's mother. Suppose that she was familiar (which she was not)
+with the shiny back of his waistcoat, still, she saw him daily, and daily,
+too, was in the way of seeing the (hypothetically) shiny surface of the
+sideboard. That being the case, she had, every day, the materials,
+subjective and objective, of the hallucination. Yet it only occurred
+_once_, and then it precisely coincided with the death agony of the old
+gentleman, and with his coatless condition. Why only that once? _C'est la
+le miracle!_ 'How much for this little veskit?' as the man asked David
+Copperfield.
+
+Herr Parish next invents a cause for an hallucination, which, I myself
+think, ought not to have been reckoned, because the percipient had been
+sitting up with the sick man. This he would class as a 'suspicious' case.
+But, even granting him his own way of handling the statistics, he would
+still have far too large a proportion of coincidences for the laws of
+chance to allow, if we are to go by these statistics at all.
+
+His next argument practically is that hallucinations are always only a
+kind of dreams.[11] He proves this by the large number of coincidental
+hallucinations which occurred in sleepy circumstances. One man went to bed
+early, and woke up early; another was 'roused from sleep;' two ladies were
+sitting up in bed, giving their babies nourishment; a man was reading a
+newspaper on a sofa; a lady was lying awake at seven in the morning; and
+there are eight other English cases of people 'awake' in bed during an
+hallucination. Now, in Dr. Parish's opinion, we must argue that they were
+_not_ awake, or not much; so the hallucinations were mere dreams.
+Dreams are so numerous that coincidences in dreams can be got rid of as
+pure flukes. People may say, to be sure, 'I am used to dreams, and don't
+regard them; _this_ was something solitary in my experience.' But we must
+not mind what people say.
+
+Yet I fear we must mind what they say. At least, we must remember that
+sleeping dreams are, of all things, most easily forgotten; while a
+full-bodied hallucination, when we, at least, believe ourselves awake,
+seems to us on a perfectly different plane of impressiveness, and
+(_experto crede_) is really very difficult to forget. Herr Parish cannot
+be allowed, therefore, to use the regular eighteenth-century argument--
+'All dreams!' For the two sorts of dreams, in sleep and in apparent
+wakefulness, seem, to the subject, to differ in _kind_. And they really
+do differ in kind. It is the essence of the every night dream that we are
+unconscious of our actual surroundings and conscious of a fantastic
+environment. It is the essence of wideawakeness to be conscious of our
+actual surroundings. In the ordinary dream, nothing actual competes with
+its visions. When we are conscious of our surroundings, everything actual
+does compete with any hallucination. Therefore, an hallucination which,
+when we are conscious of our material environment, does compete with it in
+reality, is different _in kind_ from an ordinary dream. Science gains
+nothing by arbitrarily declaring that two experiences so radically
+different are identical. Anybody would see this if he were not arguing
+under a dominant idea.
+
+Herr Parish next contends that people who see pictures in crystal balls,
+and so on, are not so wide awake as to be in their normal consciousness.
+There is 'dissociation' (practically drowsiness), even if only a
+little. Herr Moll also speaks of crystal-gazing pictures as 'hypnotic
+phenomena.'[12] Possibly neither of these learned men has ever seen a
+person attempt crystal-gazing. Herr Parish never asserts any such personal
+experience as the basis of his opinion about the non-normal state of the
+gazer. He reaches this conclusion from an anecdote reported, as a not
+unfamiliar phenomenon, by a friend of Miss X. But the phenomenon occurred
+when Miss X. was not crystal-gazing at all! She was looking out of a
+window in a brown study. This is a noble example of logic. Some one says
+that Miss X. was not in her normal consciousness on a certain occasion
+when she was _not_ crystal-gazing, and that this condition is familiar to
+the observer. Therefore, argues Herr Parish, nobody is in his normal
+consciousness when he is crystal-gazing.
+
+In vain may 'so good an observer as Miss X. think herself fully awake' (as
+she does think herself) when crystal-gazing, because once, when she
+happened to have 'her eyes _fixed on the window_,' her expression was
+'_associated_' by a friend 'with _something uncanny_,' and she afterwards
+spoke '_in a dreamy, far-away tone_' (p. 297). Miss X., though extremely
+'wide awake,' may have looked dreamily at a window, and may have seen
+mountains and marvels. But the point is that she was not voluntarily
+gazing at a crystal for amusement or experiment--perhaps trying to see how
+a microscope affected the pictures--or to divert a friend.
+
+I appeal to the shades of Aristotle and Bacon against scientific logic in
+the hands of Herr Parish. Here is his syllogism:
+
+  A. is occasionally dreamy when _not_ crystal-gazing.
+  A. is human.
+  Therefore every human being, when crystal-gazing, is more or less
+  asleep.
+
+He infers a general affirmative from a single affirmative which happens
+not to be to the point. It is exactly as if Herr Parish argued:
+
+  Mrs. B. spends hours in shopping.
+  Mrs. B. is human.
+  Therefore every human being is always late for dinner.
+
+Miss X., I think, uplifted her voice in some review, and maintained that,
+when crystal-gazing, she was quite in her normal state, _dans son
+assiette_.
+
+Yet Herr Parish would probably say to any crystal-gazer who argued thus,
+'Oh, no; pardon me, you were _not_ wholly awake--you were a-dream. I know
+better than you.' But, as he has not seen crystal-gazers, while I have,
+many scores of times, I prefer my own opinion. And so, as this assertion
+about the percipient's being 'dissociated,' or asleep, or not awake, is
+certainly untrue of all crystal-gazers in my considerable experience, I
+cannot accept it on the authority of Herr Parish, who makes no claim to
+any personal experience at all.
+
+As to crystal-gazing, when the gazer is talking, laughing, chatting,
+making experiments in turning the ball, changing the light, using prisms
+and magnifying-glasses, dropping matches into the water-jug, and so on,
+how can we possibly say that 'it is impossible to distinguish between
+waking hallucinations and those of sleep' (p. 300)? If so, it is
+impossible to distinguish between sleeping and waking altogether. We are
+all like the dormouse! Herr Parish is reasoning here _a priori_,
+without any personal knowledge of the facts; and, above all, he is under
+the 'dominant idea' of his own theory--that of _dissociation_.
+
+Herr Parish next crushes telepathy by an argument which--like one of the
+reasons why the bells were not rung for Queen Elizabeth, namely, that
+there were no bells to ring--might have come first, and alone. We are
+told (in italics--very impressive to the popular mind): _'No matter how
+great the number of coincidences, they afford not even the shadow of a
+proof for telepathy'_ (p. 301). What, not even if all hallucinations, or
+ninety-nine per cent., coincided with the death of the person seen? In
+heaven's name, why not? Why, because the 'weightiest' cause of all has
+been omitted from our calculations, namely, our good old friend, _the
+association of ideas_ (p. 302). Our side cannot prove the _absence_
+(italics) of _the association of ideas_. Certainly we cannot; but ideas in
+endless millions are being associated all day long. A hundred thousand
+different, unnoticed associations may bring Jones to my mind, or Brown.
+But I don't therefore see Brown, or Jones, who is not there. Still less do
+I see Dr. Parish, or Nebuchadnezzar, or a monkey, or a salmon, or a golf
+ball, or Arthur's Seat (all of which may be brought to my mind by
+association of ideas), when they are not present.
+
+Suppose, then, that once in my life I see the absent Jones, who dies in
+that hour (or within twelve hours). I am puzzled. Why did Association
+choose that day, of all days in my life, for her solitary freak? And,
+if this choice of freaks by Association occurs among other people, say two
+hundred times more often than chance allows, the freak begins to suggest
+that it may have a cause.
+
+Not even the circumstance cited by Herr Parish, that a drowsy tailor,
+'sewing on in a dream,' poor fellow, saw a client in his shop while the
+client was dying, solves the problem. The tailor is not said even once to
+have seen a customer who was _not_ dying; yet he writes, 'I was accustomed
+to work all night frequently.' The tailor thinks he was asleep, because he
+had been making irregular stitches, and perhaps he was. But, out of
+all his vigils and all his customers, association only formed _one_
+hallucination, and that was of a dying client whom he supposed to be
+perfectly well. Why on earth is association so fond of dying people--
+granting the statistics, which are 'another story'? The explanation
+explains nothing. Herr Parish only moves the difficulty back a step, and,
+as we cannot live without association of ideas, they are taken for granted
+by our side. Association of ideas does not cause hallucinations, as Mrs.
+Sidgwick remarks, though it may determine their contents.
+
+The difficult theme of coincidental collective hallucinations, as when two
+or more people at once have, or profess to have, the same false perception
+of a person who is really absent and dying, is next disposed of by Herr
+Parish. The same _points de repere_, the same sound, or flicker of light,
+or arrangement of shadow, may beget the same or a similar false perception
+in two or more people at once. Thus two girls, in different rooms, are
+looking out on different parts of the hall in their house. 'Both heard, at
+the same time, an [objective?] noise' (p. 313). Then, says Herr Parish,
+'_the one sister saw her father cross the hall_ after entering; the other
+saw the dog (the usual companion of his walks) run past her door.' Father
+and dog had not left the dining-room. Herr Parish decides that the same
+_point de repere_ (the apparent noise of a key in the lock of the front
+door) 'acted by way of suggestion on both sisters,' producing, however,
+different hallucinations, 'in virtue of the difference of the connected
+associations.' One girl associated the sound with her honoured sire, the
+other with his faithful hound; so one saw a dog, and the other saw an
+elderly gentleman. Now, first, if so, this should _always_ be occurring,
+for we all have different associations of ideas. Thus, we are in a haunted
+house; there is a noise of a rattling window; I associate it with a
+burglar, Brown with a milkman, Miss Jones with a lady in green, Miss Smith
+with a knight in armour. That collection of phantasms should then be
+simultaneously on view, like the dog and old gentleman; all our reports
+should vary. But this does not occur. Most unluckily for Herr Parish, he
+illustrates his theory by telling a story which happens not to be
+correctly reported. At first I thought that a fallacy of memory, or an
+optical delusion, had betrayed him again, as in his legend of the
+waistcoat. But I am now inclined to believe that what really occurred was
+this: Herr Parish brought out his book in German, before the Report of the
+Census of Hallucinations was published. In his German edition he probably
+quoted a story which precisely suited his theory of the origin of
+collective hallucinations. This anecdote he had found in Prof. Sidgwick's
+Presidential Address of July 1890.[13] As stated by Prof. Sidgwick, the
+case just fitted Herr Parish, who refers to it on p. 190, and again on
+p. 314. He gives no reference, but his version reads like a traditional
+variant of Prof. Sidgwick's. Now Prof. Sidgwick's version was erroneous,
+as is proved by the elaborate account of the case in the Report of the
+Census, which Herr Parish had before him, but neglected when he prepared
+his English edition. The story was wrong, alas! in the very point where,
+for Herr Parish's purpose, it ought to have been right. The hallucination
+is believed not to have been collective, yet Herr Parish uses it to
+explain collective hallucinations. Doubtless he overlooked the accurate
+version in the Report.[14]
+
+The facts, as there reported, were not what he narrates, but as follows:
+
+Miss C.E. was in the breakfast-room, about 6:30 P.M., in January 1883, and
+supposed her father to be taking a walk with his dog. She heard noises,
+which may have had any other cause, but which she took to be the sounds
+of a key in the door lock, a stick tapping the tiles of the hall, and the
+patter of the dog's feet on the tiles. She then saw the dog pass the door.
+Miss C.E. next entered the hall, where she found nobody; but in the pantry
+she met her sisters--Miss E., Miss H.G.E.--and a working-woman. Miss E.
+and the working-woman had been in the hall, and there had heard the sound,
+which they, like Miss C.E., took for that of a key in the lock. They were
+breaking a little household rule in the hall, so they 'ran straightway
+into the pantry, meeting Miss H.G.E. on the way.' Miss C.E. and Miss E.
+and the working-woman all heard the noise as of a key in the lock, but
+nobody is said to have 'seen the father cross the hall' (as Herr Parish
+asserts). 'Miss H.G.E. was of opinion that Miss E. (now dead) saw
+_nothing_, and Miss C.E. was inclined to agree with her.' Miss E. and the
+work-woman (now dead) were 'emphatic as to the father having entered the
+house;' but this the two only _inferred_ from hearing the noise, after
+which they fled to the pantry. Now, granting that some other noise was
+mistaken for that of the key in the lock, we have here, _not_ (as Herr
+Parish declares) a _collective_ yet discrepant hallucination--the
+discrepancy being caused 'by the difference of connected associations'--
+but a _solitary_ hallucination. Herr Parish, however, inadvertently
+converts a solitary into a collective hallucination, and then uses the
+example to explain collective hallucinations in general. He asserts
+that Miss E. 'saw her father cross the hall.' Miss E.'s sisters think that
+she saw no such matter. Now, suppose that Mr. E. had died at the moment,
+and that the case was claimed on our part as a 'collective coincidental
+hallucination,' How righteously Herr Parish might exclaim that all the
+evidence was against its being collective! The sound in the lock, heard by
+three persons, would be, and probably was, another noise misinterpreted.
+And, in any case, there is no evidence for its having produced _two_
+hallucinations; the evidence is in exactly the opposite direction.
+
+Here, then, Herr Parish, with the printed story under his eyes, once more
+illustrates want of attention. In one way his errors improve his case. 'If
+I, a grave man of science, go on telling distorted legends out of my own
+head, while the facts are plain in print before me,' Herr Parish
+may reason, 'how much more are the popular tales about coincidental
+hallucinations likely to be distorted?' It is really a very strong
+argument, but not exactly the argument which Herr Parish conceives
+himself to be presenting.[15]
+
+This unlucky inexactitude is chronic, as we have shown, in Herr Parish's
+work, and is probably to be explained by inattention to facts, by
+'expectation' of suitable facts, and by 'anxiety' to prove a theory. He
+explains the similar or identical reports of witnesses to a collective
+hallucination by 'the case with which such appearances adapt themselves
+in recollection' (p. 313), especially, of course, after lapse of time. And
+then he unconsciously illustrates his case by the case with which
+printed facts under his very eyes adapt themselves, quite erroneously, to
+his own memory and personal bias as he copies them on to his paper.
+
+Finally he argues that even if collective hallucinations are also 'with
+comparative frequency' coincidental, that is to be explained thus:
+'The rarity and the degree of interest compelled by it' (by such an
+hallucination) 'will naturally tend to connect itself with some other
+prominent event; and, conversely, the occurrence of such an event as the
+death or mortal danger of a friend is most calculated to produce memory
+illusions of this kind.'
+
+In the second case, the excitement caused by the death of a friend is
+likely, it seems, to make two or more sane people say, and _believe,_
+that they saw him somewhere else, when he was really dying. The only
+evidence for this fact is that such illusions occasionally occur, _not_
+collectively, in some lunatic asylums. 'It is not, however, a form of
+mnemonic error often observed among the insane.' 'Kraepelin gives two
+cases.' 'The process occurs sporadically in certain sane people, under
+certain exciting conditions.' No examples are given! What is rare as an
+_individual_ folly among lunatics, is supposed by Herr Parish to explain
+the theoretically 'false memory' whereby sane people persuade themselves
+that they had an hallucination, and persuade others that they were told
+of it, when no such thing occurred.
+
+To return to our old example. Jones tells me that he has just seen his
+aunt, whom he knows to be in Timbuctoo. News comes that the lady died when
+Jones beheld her in his smoking-room. 'Oh, nonsense,' Herr Parish would
+argue, 'you, Jones, saw nothing of the kind, nor did you tell Mr. Lang,
+who, I am sorry to find, agrees with you. What happened was _this_: When
+the awful news came to-day of your aunt's death, you were naturally,
+and even creditably, excited, especially as the poor lady was killed by
+being pegged down on an ant-heap. This excitement, rather praiseworthy
+than otherwise, made you _believe_ you had seen your aunt, and _believe_
+you had told Mr. Lang. He also is a most excitable person, though I
+admit he never saw your dear aunt in his life. He, therefore (by virtue of
+his excitement), now _believes_ you told him about seeing your unhappy
+kinswoman. This kind of false memory is very common. Two cases are
+recorded by Kraepelin, among the insane. Surely you quite understand my
+reasoning?'
+
+I quite understand it, but I don't see how it comes to seem good logic to
+Herr Parish.
+
+The other theory is funnier still. Jones never had an hallucination
+before. 'The rarity and the degree of interest compelled by it' made Jones
+'connect it with some other prominent event,' say, the death of his aunt,
+which, really, occurred, say, nine months afterwards. But this is a mere
+case of _evidence_, which it is the affair of the S.P.R. to criticise.
+
+Herr Parish is in the happy position called in American speculative
+circles 'a straddle.' If a man has an hallucination when alone, he was in
+circumstances conducive to the sleeping state. So the hallucination is
+probably a dream. But, if the seer was in company, who all had the same
+hallucination, then they all had the same _points de repere_, and the same
+adaptive memories. So Herr Parish kills with both barrels.
+
+If anything extraneous could encourage a belief in coincidental and
+veridical hallucinations, it would be these 'Oppositions of Science.' If a
+learned and fair opponent can find no better proofs than logic and
+(unconscious) perversions of facts like the logic and the statements of
+Herr Parish, the case for telepathic hallucinations may seem strong
+indeed. But we must grant him the existence of the adaptive and mythopoeic
+powers of memory, which he asserts, and also illustrates. I grant, too,
+that a census of 17,000 inquiries may only have 'skimmed the cream off'
+(p. 87). Another dip of the net, bringing up 17,000 fresh answers, might
+alter the whole aspect of the case, one way or the other. Moreover, we
+cannot get scientific evidence in this way of inquiry. If the public were
+interested in the question, and understood its nature, and if everybody
+who had an hallucination at once recorded it in black and white, duly
+attested on oath before a magistrate, by persons to whom he reported,
+before the coincidence was known, and if all such records, coincidental or
+not, were kept in the British Museum for fifty years, then an examination
+of them might teach us something. But all this is quite impossible.
+We may form a belief, on this point of veridical hallucinations, for
+ourselves, but beyond that it is impossible to advance. Still, Science
+might read her brief!
+
+[Footnote 1: Walter Scott.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Parish, p. 278.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Ibid. pp. 282, 283.]
+
+[Footnote 4: P. 287, Mr. Sims, _Proceedings_, x. 230.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Parish pp. 288, 289.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Report_, p. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 7: P. 274, note 1.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Parish, p. 290.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Report_, p. 297.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Parish, p. 290.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Pp. 291, 292.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Moll, _Hypnotism_, p. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 13 _Proceedings_, vol. vi. p. 433.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Parish, p. 313.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Compare _Report_, pp. 181-83, with Parish, pp. 190 and
+313, 314.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+THE POLTERGEIST AND HIS EXPLAINERS.
+
+In the chapter on 'Fetishism and Spiritualism' it was suggested that the
+movements of inanimate objects, apparently without contact, may have been
+one of the causes leading to fetishism, to the opinion that a spirit may
+inhabit a stick, stone, or what not. We added that, whether such movements
+were caused by trickery or not, was inessential as long as the savage did
+not discover the imposture.
+
+The evidence for the genuine supernormal character of such phenomena was
+not discussed, that we might preserve the continuity of the general
+argument. The history of such phenomena is too long for statement here.
+The same reports are found 'from China to Peru,' from Eskimo to the Cape,
+from Egyptian magical papyri to yesterday's provincial newspaper.[1]
+
+About 1850-1870 phenomena, which had previously been reported as of
+sporadic and spontaneous occurrence, were domesticated and organised by
+Mediums, generally American. These were imitators of the enigmatic David
+Dunglas Home, who was certainly a most oddly gifted man, or a most
+successful impostor. A good deal of scientific attention was given to
+the occurrences; Mr. Darwin, Mr. Tyndall, Dr. Carpenter, Mr. Huxley, had
+all glanced at the phenomena, and been present at _seances_. In most cases
+the exhibitions, in the dark, or in a very bad light, were impudent
+impostures, and were so regarded by the _savants_ who looked into them. A
+series of exposures culminated in the recent detection of Eusapia
+Paladino by Dr. Hodgson and other members of the S.P.R. at Cambridge.
+
+There was, however, an apparent exception. The arch mystagogue, Home,
+though by no means a clever man, was never detected in fraudulent
+productions of fetishistic phenomena. This is asserted here because
+several third-hand stories of detected frauds by Home are in circulation,
+and it is hoped that a well-attested first-hand case of detection may be
+elicited.
+
+Of Home's successes with Sir William Crookes, Lord Crawford, and others,
+something remains to be said; but first we shall look into attempted
+explanations of alleged physical phenomena occurring _not_ in the presence
+of a paid or even of a recognised 'Medium.' It will appear, we think, that
+the explanations of evidence so widely diffused, so uniform, so old, and
+so new, are far from satisfactory. Our inference would be no more than
+that our eyes should be kept on such phenomena, if they are reported to
+recur.
+
+Mr. Tylor says, 'I am well aware that the problem [of these phenomena] is
+one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct
+opinion how far it may be connected with facts insufficiently appreciated
+and explained by science, and how far with superstition, delusion, and
+sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful observation in a
+scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light on some interesting
+psychological questions.'
+
+Acting on Mr. Tylor's hint, Mr. Podmore puts forward as explanations
+(1) fraud; (2) hallucinations caused by excited expectation, and by the
+_Schwaermerei_ consequent on sitting in hushed hope of marvels.
+
+To take fraud first: Mr. Podmore has collected, and analyses, eleven
+recent sporadic cases of volatile objects.[2] His first instance (Worksop,
+1883) yields no proof of fraud, and can only be dismissed by reason of the
+bad character of the other cases, and because Mr. Podmore took the
+evidence five weeks after the events. To this example we confine
+ourselves. This case appears to have been first reported in the 'Retford
+and Gainsborough Times' 'early in March,' 1883 (really March 9). It does
+not seem to have struck Mr. Podmore that he should publish these
+contemporary reports, to show us how far they agree with evidence
+collected by him on the spot five weeks later. To do this was the more
+necessary, as he lays so much stress on failure of memory. I have
+therefore secured the original newspaper report, by the courtesy of the
+editor. To be brief, the phenomena began on February 20 or 21, by the
+table voluntarily tipping up, and upsetting a candle, while Mrs. White
+only saved the wash tub by alacrity and address. 'The whole incident
+struck her as very extraordinary.' It is not in the newspaper report. On
+February 26, Mr. White left his home, and a girl, Eliza Rose, 'child of a
+half-imbecile mother,' was admitted by the kindness of Mrs. White to share
+her bed. The girl was eighteen years of age, was looking for a place as
+servant, and nothing is said in the newspaper about her mother. Mr. White
+returned on Wednesday night, but left on Thursday morning, returning on
+Friday afternoon. On Thursday, in Mr. White's absence, phenomena set in.
+On Thursday night, in Mr. White's presence, they increased in vigour. A
+doctor was called in, also a policeman. On Saturday, at 8 A.M., the row
+recommenced. At 4 P.M. Mr. White sent Eliza Rose away, and peace returned.
+We now offer the
+
+STATEMENT OF POLICE CONSTABLE HIGGS. A man of good intelligence, and
+believed to be entirely honest....
+
+'On the night of Friday, March 2nd, I heard of the disturbances at Joe
+White's house from his young brother, Tom. I went round to the house at
+11.55 P.M., as near as I can judge, and found Joe White in the kitchen
+of his house. There was one candle lighted in the room, and a good fire
+burning, so that one could see things pretty clearly. The cupboard doors
+were open, and White went and shut them, and then came and stood against
+the chest of drawers. I stood near the outer door. No one else was in
+the room at the time. White had hardly shut the cupboard doors when they
+flew open, and a large glass jar came out past me, and pitched in the
+yard outside, smashing itself. I didn't see the jar leave the cupboard,
+or fly through the air; it went too quick. But I am quite sure that it
+wasn't thrown by White or any one else. White couldn't have done it
+without my seeing him. The jar couldn't go in a straight line from the
+cupboard out of the door; but it certainly did go.
+
+'Then White asked me to come and see the things which had been smashed
+in the inner room. He led the way and I followed. As I passed the chest
+of drawers in the kitchen I noticed a tumbler standing on it. Just
+after I passed I heard a crash, and looking round, I saw that the tumbler
+had fallen on the ground in the direction of the fireplace, and was
+broken. I don't know how it happened. There was no one else in the room.
+
+'I went into the inner room, and saw the bits of pots and things on the
+floor, and then I came back with White into the kitchen. The girl Rose
+had come into the kitchen during our absence. She was standing with
+her back against the bin near the fire. There was a cup standing on the
+bin, rather nearer the door. She said to me, "Cup'll go soon; it has
+been down three times already." She then pushed it a little farther on
+the bin, and turned round and stood talking to me by the fire. She had
+hardly done so, when the cup jumped up suddenly about four or five feet
+into the air, and then fell on the floor and smashed itself. White was
+sitting on the other side of the fire.
+
+'Then Mrs. White came in with Dr. Lloyd; also Tom White and Solomon
+Wass. After they had been in two or three minutes, something else
+happened. Tom White and Wass were standing with their backs to the
+fire, just in front of it. Eliza Rose and Dr. Lloyd were near them, with
+their backs turned towards the bin, the doctor nearer to the door. I
+stood by the drawers, and Mrs. White was by me near the inner door. Then
+suddenly a basin, which stood on the end of the bin near the door, got up
+into the air, _turning over and over as it went. It went up not very
+quickly, not as quickly as if it had been thrown_. When it reached the
+ceiling it fell plump and smashed. I called Dr. Lloyd's attention to it,
+and we all saw it. No one was near it, and I don't know how it happened.
+I stayed about ten minutes more, but saw nothing else. I don't know what
+to make of it all. I don't think White or the girl could possibly have
+done the things which I saw.'
+
+This statement was made five weeks after date to Mr. Podmore. We compare
+it with the intelligent constable's statement made between March 3 and
+March 8, that is, immediately after the events, and reported in the local
+paper of March 9.
+
+STATEMENT BY POLICE CONSTABLE HIGGS.--During Friday night, Police
+Constable Higgs visited the house, and concerning the visit he makes the
+following statement.
+
+'About ten minutes past [to?] twelve on Friday night, I was met in Bridge
+Street by Buck Ford, and Joe's brother, Tom White and Dr. Lloyd. Tom said
+to me, "Will you go with us to Joe's, and you will see something you have
+never seen before?" I went; and when I got into the house Joe went and
+shut the cupboard doors. No sooner had he done so than the doors flew
+open again, and an ordinary sized glass jar flew across the kitchen, out
+of the door into the yard. A sugar jar also flew out of the cupboard
+unseen. In fact, we saw nothing and heard nothing until we heard it smash.
+The distance travelled by the articles was about seven yards. I stood
+a minute or two, and then the glass which I noticed on the drawers jumped
+off the drawers a yard away, and broke in about a hundred bits. The next
+thing was a cup, which stood on the flour-bin just beyond the yard
+door. It flew upwards, and then fell to the ground and broke. The girl
+said that this cup had been on the floor three times, and that she had
+picked it up just before it went off the bench. I said, "I suppose the cup
+will be the next." The cup fell a distance of two yards away from the
+flour-bin. Dr. Lloyd had been in the next house lancing the back of a
+little boy who had been removed there. He now came in, and we began
+talking, the doctor saying, "It is a most mysterious thing." He turned
+with his back to the flour-bin, on which stood a basin. The basin flew up
+into the air obliquely, went over the doctor's head, and fell at his feet
+in pieces. The doctor then went out. I stood a short time longer, but
+saw nothing farther. There were six persons in the room while these things
+were going on, and so far as I could see, there was no human agency at
+work. I had not the slightest belief in anything appertaining to the
+super-natural. I left just before one o'clock, having been in the
+house thirty minutes.'
+
+As the policeman says, there was nothing 'super-natural,' but there was an
+appearance of something rather supernormal. On the afternoon of Saturday
+White sent the girl Rose away, and a number of people watched in his house
+till after midnight. Though the sceptical reporter thought that objects
+were placed where they might easily be upset, none were upset. The ghost
+was laid. 'Excited expectation' was so false to its function as to beget
+no phenomena.
+
+The newspaper reports contain no theory that will account for White's
+breaking his furniture and crockery, nor for Rose's securing her own
+dismissal from a house where she was kindly received by wilfully
+destroying the property of her hostess. An amateur published a theory
+of silken threads attached to light articles, and thick cords to heavy
+articles, whereof no trace was found by witnesses who examined the
+volatile objects. An elaborate machinery of pulleys fixed in the ceiling,
+the presence of a trickster in a locked pantry, apparent errors in the
+account of the flight of the objects, and a number of accomplices, were
+all involved in this local explanation, the explainer admitting that he
+could not imagine _why_ the tricks were played. Six or eight pounds' worth
+of goods were destroyed, nor is it singular that poor Mrs. White wept over
+her shattered penates.
+
+The destruction began, of course, in the _absence_ of White. The girl Rose
+gave to the newspaper the same account as the other witnesses, but, as
+White thought _she_ was the agent, so she suspected White, though she
+admitted that he was not at home when the trouble arose.
+
+Mr. Podmore, reviewing the case, says, 'The phenomena described are quite
+inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.[3] Yet he elsewhere[4] suggests
+that Rose herself, 'as the instrument of mysterious agencies, or simply as
+a half-witted girl, gifted with abnormal cunning and love of mischief, may
+have been directly responsible for all that took place.' That is to say, a
+half-witted girl could do (barring 'mysterious agencies') 'what is quite
+inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means,' while, according to the
+policeman, she was not even present on some occasions. But it is not easy
+to make out, in the evidence of White, the other witness, whether this
+girl Rose was present or not when the jar flew circuitously out of the
+cupboard, a thing easily worked by a half-witted girl. Such discrepancies
+are common in all evidence to the most ordinary events. In any case a
+half-witted girl, in Mr. Podmore's theory, can do what 'is quite
+inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.' There is not the shadow of
+evidence that the girl Rose had the inestimable advantage of being
+'half-witted;' she is described by Mr. Podmore as 'the child of an
+imbecile mother.' The phenomena began, in an isolated case (the tilted
+table), _before_ Rose entered the house. She was admitted in kindness,
+acted as a maid, and her interest was _not_ to break the crockery
+and upset furniture. The troubles, which began before the girl's arrival,
+were apparently active when she was not present, and, if she _was_
+present, she could not have caused them 'by ordinary mechanical means,'
+while of extraordinary mechanical means there was confessedly no trace.
+The disturbances ceased after she was dismissed--nothing else connects her
+with them.
+
+Mr. Podmore's attempt at a normal explanation by fraud, therefore, is
+of no weight. He has to exaggerate the value, as disproof, of such
+discrepancies as occur in all human evidence on all subjects. He has to
+lay stress on the interval of five weeks between the events and the
+collection of testimony by himself. But contemporary accounts appeared in
+the local newspapers, and he does not compare the contemporary with the
+later evidence, as we have done. There is one discrepancy which looks as
+if a witness, not here cited, came to think he had seen what he heard
+talked about. Finally, after abandoning the idea that mechanical means can
+possibly have produced the effect, Mr. Podmore falls back on the cunning
+of a half-witted girl whom nothing shows to have been half-witted. The
+alternative is that the girl was 'the instrument of mysterious agencies.'
+
+So much for the hypothesis of a fraud, which has been identical in results
+from China to Peru and from Greenland to the Cape.
+
+We now turn to the other, and concomitantly active cause, in Mr. Podmore's
+theory, hallucination. 'Many of the witnesses described the articles as
+moving slowly through the air, or exhibiting some peculiarity of flight.'
+(See e.g. the Worksop case.) Mr. Podmore adds another English case,
+presently to be noted, and a German one. 'In default of any experimental
+evidence' (how about Mr. William Crookes's?) 'that disturbances of this
+kind are ever due to abnormal agency, I am disposed to explain the
+appearance of moving slowly or flying as a sensory illusion, conditioned
+by the excited state of the percipient.' ('Studies,' 157, 158.)
+
+Before criticising this explanation, let us give the English affair,
+alluded to by Mr. Podmore.
+
+The most curious modern case known to me is not of recent date, but it
+occurred in full daylight, in the presence of many witnesses, and the
+phenomena continued for weeks. The events were of 1849, and the record is
+expanded, by Mr. Bristow, a spectator, from an account written by him in
+1854. The scene was Swanland, near Hull, in a carpenter's shop, where Mr.
+Bristow was employed with two fellow workmen. To be brief, they were
+pelted by odds and ends of wood, about the size of a common matchbox. Each
+blamed the others, till this explanation became untenable. The workrooms
+and space above were searched to no purpose. The bits of wood sometimes
+danced along the floor, more commonly sailed gently along, or "moved as if
+borne on gently heaving waves." This sort of thing was repeated during six
+weeks. One piece of wood "came from a distant corner of the room towards
+me, describing what may be likened to a geometrical square, or corkscrew
+of about eighteen inches diameter.... Never was a piece seen to come in
+at the doorway." Mr. Bristow deems this period 'the most remarkable
+episode in my life.' (June 27, 1891.) The phenomena 'did not depend on the
+presence of any one person or number of persons.'
+
+Going to Swanland, in 1891, Mr. Sidgwick found one surviving witness of
+these occurrences, who averred that the objects could not have been thrown
+because of the eccentricities of their course, which he described in the
+same way as Mr. Bristow. The thrower must certainly have had a native
+genius for 'pitching' at base-ball. This witness, named Andrews, was
+mentioned by Mr. Bristow in his report, but not referred to by him for
+confirmation. Those to whom he referred were found to be dead, or had
+emigrated. The villagers had a superstitious theory about the phenomena
+being provoked by a dead man, whose affairs had not been settled to his
+liking. So Mr. Darwin's spoon danced--on a grave.[5]
+
+This case has a certain interest _a propos_ of Mr. Podmore's surmise that
+all such phenomena arise in trickery, which produces excitement in the
+spectators, while excitement begets hallucination, and hallucination
+takes the form of seeing the thrown objects move in a non-natural way.
+Thus, I keep throwing things about. You, not detecting this stratagem, get
+excited, consequently hallucinated, and you believe you see the things
+move in spirals, or undulate as if on waves, or hop, or float, or glide
+in an impossible way. So close is the uniformity of hallucination
+that these phenomena are described, in similar terms, by witnesses
+(hallucinated, of course) in times old and new, as in cases cited by
+Glanvil, Increase Mather, Telfer (of Rerrick), and, generally, in works of
+the seventeenth century. Nor is this uniform hallucination confined to
+England. Mr. Podmore quotes a German example, and I received a similar
+testimony (to the flight of an object round a corner) from a gentleman who
+employed Esther Teed, 'the Amherst Mystery,' in his service. _He_ was not
+excited, for he was normally engaged in his normal stable, when the
+incident occurred unexpectedly as he was looking after his live stock. One
+may add the case of Cideville (1851) and Sir W. Crookes's evidence, and
+that of Mr. Schhapoff.
+
+Mr. Podmore must, therefore, suppose that, in states of excitement, the
+same peculiar form of hallucination develops itself uniformly in America,
+France, Germany, and England (not to speak of Russia), and persists
+through different ages. This is a novel and valuable psychological law.
+Moreover, Mr. Podmore must hold that 'excitement' lasted for six weeks
+among the carpenters in the shop at Swanland, one of whom writes like a
+man of much intelligence, and has thriven to be a master in his craft.
+It is difficult to believe that he was excited for six weeks, and we still
+marvel that excitement produces the same uniformity of hallucination,
+affecting policemen, carpenters, marquises, and a F.R.S. We allude to Sir
+W. Crookes's case.
+
+Strictly scientific examination of these prodigies has been very rare. The
+best examples are the experiments of Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., with
+Home.[6] He demonstrated, by means of a machine constructed for the
+purpose, and automatically registering, that, in Home's presence, a
+balance was affected to the extent of two pounds when Home was not in
+contact with the table on which the machine was placed. He also saw
+objects float in air, with a motion like that of a piece of wood on small
+waves of the sea (clearly excitement producing hallucination), while Home
+was at a distance, other spectators holding his hands, and his feet being
+visibly enclosed in a kind of cage. All present held each other's hands,
+and all witnessed the phenomena. Sir W. Crookes being, professionally,
+celebrated for the accuracy of his observations, these circumstances are
+difficult to explain, and these are but a few cases among multitudes.
+
+I venture to conceive that, on reflection, Mr. Podmore will doubt whether
+he has discovered an universal law of excited malperception, or whether
+the remarkable, and certainly undesigned, coincidence of testimony to the
+singular flight of objects does not rather point to an 'abnormal agency'
+uniform in its effects. Contagious hallucination cannot affect witnesses
+ignorant of each other's existence in many lands and ages, nor could they
+cook their reports to suit reports of which they never heard.
+
+We now turn to peculiarities in the so-called Medium, such as floating in
+air, change of bulk, and escape from lesion when handling or treading in
+fire. Mr. Tylor says nothing of Sir William Crookes's cases (1871), but
+speaks of the alleged levitation, or floating in air, of savages and
+civilised men. These are recorded in Buddhist and Neoplatonic writings,
+and among Red Indians, in Tonquin (where a Jesuit saw and described the
+phenomena, 1730), in the 'Acta Sanctorum,' and among modern spiritualists.
+In 1760, Lord Elcho, being at Home, was present at the _proces_ for
+canonising a Saint (unnamed), and heard witnesses swear to having seen the
+holy man levitated. Sir W. Crookes attests having seen Home float in air
+on several occasions. In 1871, the Master of Lindsay, now Lord Crawford
+and Balcarres, F.R.S., gave the following evidence, which was corroborated
+by the two other spectators, Lord Adare and Captain Wynne.
+
+'I was sitting with Mr. Home and Lord Adare and a cousin of his. During
+the sitting, Mr. Home went into a trance, and in that state was carried
+out of the window in the room next to where we were, and was brought in
+at our window. The distance between the windows was about seven feet six
+inches, and there was not the slightest foothold between them, nor was
+there more than a twelve-inch projection to each window, which served as
+a ledge to put flowers on. _We heard the window in the next room lifted
+up_, and almost immediately after we saw Home floating in the air outside
+our window. The moon was shining full into the room; my back was to the
+light, and I saw the shadow on the wall of the window sill, and Home's
+feet about six inches above it. He remained in this position for a few
+seconds, then raised the window and glided into the room feet foremost
+and sat down.
+
+'Lord Adare then went into the next room to look at the window from which
+he had been carried. It was raised about eighteen inches, and he expressed
+his wonder how Mr. Home had been taken through so narrow an aperture. Home
+said, still entranced, "I will show you," and then with his back to the
+window he leaned back and was shot out of the aperture, head first, with
+the body rigid, and then returned quite quietly. The window is about
+seventy feet from the ground.' The hypothesis of a mechanical arrangement
+of ropes or supports outside has been suggested, but does not cover the
+facts as described.
+
+Mr. Podmore, who quotes this, offers the explanation that the witnesses
+were excited, and that Home 'thrust his head and shoulders out of the
+window.' But, if he did, they could not see him do it, for he was in the
+next room. A brick wall was between them and him. Their first view of Home
+was 'floating in the air outside our window.' It is not very easy to hold
+that a belief to which the collective evidence is so large and universal,
+as the belief in levitation, was caused by a series of saints, sorcerers,
+and others thrusting their heads and, shoulders, out of windows where the
+observers could not see them. Nor in Lord Crawford's case is it easy
+to suppose that three educated men, if hallucinated, would all be
+hallucinated in the same way.
+
+The argument of excited expectation and consequent hallucination does not
+apply to Mr. Hamilton Aide and M. Alphonse Karr, neither of whom was a man
+of science. Both were extremely prejudiced against Home, and at Nice went
+to see, and, if possible, to expose him. Home was a guest at a large
+villa in Nice, M. Karr and Mr. Aide were two of a party in a spacious
+brilliantly lighted salon, where Home received them. A large heavy table,
+remote from their group, moved towards them. M. Karr then got under a
+table which rose in air, and carefully examined the space beneath, while
+Mr. Aide observed it from above. Neither of them could discover any
+explanation of the phenomenon, and they walked away together, disgusted,
+disappointed, and reviling Home.[7]
+
+In this case there was neither excitement nor desire to believe, but a
+strong wish to disbelieve and to expose Home. If two such witnesses could
+be hallucinated, we must greatly extend our notion of the limits of the
+capacity for entertaining hallucinations.
+
+One singular phenomenon was reported in Home's case, which has, however,
+little to do with any conceivable theory of spirits. He was said to become
+elongated in trance.[8] Mr. Podmore explains that 'perhaps he really
+stretched himself to his full height'--one of the easiest ways conceivable
+of working a miracle, Iamblichus reports the same phenomenon in his
+possessed men.[9] Iamblichus adds that they were sometimes broadened as
+well as lengthened. Now, M. Fere observes that 'any part of the body of an
+hysterical patient may change in volume, simply owing to the fact that the
+patient's attention is fixed on that part.'[10] Conceivably the elongation
+of Home and the ancient Egyptian mediums may have been an extreme case of
+this 'change of volume.' Could this be proved by examples, Home's
+elongation would cease to be a 'miracle.' But it would follow that in this
+case observers were _not_ hallucinated, and the presumption would be
+raised that they were not hallucinated in the other cases. Indeed, this
+argument is of universal application.
+
+There is another class of 'physical phenomena,' which has no direct
+bearing on our subject. Many persons, in many ages, are said to have
+handled or walked through fire, not only without suffering pain, but
+without lesion of the skin. Iamblichus mentions this as among the
+peculiarities of his 'possessed' men; and in 'Modern Mythology' (1897) I
+have collected first-hand evidence for the feat in classical times, and in
+India, Fiji, Bulgaria, Trinidad, the Straits Settlements, and many other
+places. The evidence is that of travellers, officials, missionaries, and
+others, and is backed (for what photographic testimony is worth) by
+photographs of the performance. To hold glowing coals in his hand, and to
+communicate the power of doing so to others, was in Home's _repertoire_.
+Lord Crawford saw it done on eight occasions, and himself received from
+Home's hand the glowing coal unharmed. A friend of my own, however, still
+bears the blister of the hurt received in the process. Sir W. Crookes's
+evidence follows:
+
+'At Mr. Home's request, whilst he was entranced, I went with him to the
+fireplace in the back drawing-room. He said, "We want you to notice
+particularly what Dan is doing." Accordingly I stood close to the
+fire, and stooped down to it when he put his hands in....
+
+'Mr. Home then waved the handkerchief about in the air two or three times,
+held it above his head, and then folded it up and laid it on his hand like
+a cushion. Putting his other hand into the fire, he took out a large
+lump of cinder, red-hot at the lower part, and placed the red part on the
+handkerchief. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been in a blaze.
+In about half a minute he took it off the handkerchief with his hand,
+saying, "As the power is not strong, if we leave the coal longer it will
+burn." He then put it on his hand, and brought it to the table in the
+front room, where all but myself had remained seated.'
+
+Mr. Podmore explains that only two candles and the fire gave light on one
+occasion, and that 'possibly' Home's hands were protected by some
+'non-conducting substance.' He does not explain how this substance was put
+on Lord Crawford's hands, nor tell us what this valuable substance may be.
+None is known to science, though it seems to be known to Fijians, Tongans,
+Klings, and Bulgarians, who walk through fire unhurt.
+
+It is not necessary to believe Sir W. Crookes's assertions that he saw
+Home perform the fire-tricks, for we can fall back on the lack of light
+(only two candles and the fire-light), as also on the law of hallucination
+caused by excitement. But it _is_ necessary to believe this distinguished
+authority's statement about his ignorance of 'some non-conducting
+substance:'
+
+'Schoolboys' books and mediaeval tales describe how this can be done with
+alum and other ingredients. It is possible that the skin may be so
+hardened and thickened by such preparations that superficial charring
+might take place without the pain becoming great; but the surface of the
+skin would certainly suffer severely. After Home had recovered from the
+trance, I examined his hand with care to see if there were any signs of
+burning or of previous preparation. I could detect no trace or injury
+to the skin, which was soft and delicate, like a woman's. Neither were
+there signs of any preparation having been previously applied. I have
+often seen conjurers and others handle red-hot coals and iron, but there
+were always palpable signs of burning.'[11]
+
+In September 1897 a crew of passengers went from New Zealand to see the
+Fijian rites, which, as reported in the 'Fiji Times,' corresponded exactly
+with the description published by Mr. Basil Thomson, himself a witness.
+The interesting point, historically, is the combination in Home of all the
+_repertoire_ of the possessed men in Iamblichus. We certainly cannot get
+rid of the fire-trick by aid of a hypothetical 'non-conducting substance.'
+Till the 'substance' is tested experimentally it is not a _vera causa_. We
+might as well say 'spirits' at once. Both that 'substance' and those
+'spirits' are equally 'in the air.' Yet Mr. Podmore's 'explanations' (not
+satisfactory to himself) are conceived so thoroughly in the spirit of
+popular science--one of them casually discovering a new psychological law,
+a second contradicting the facts it seeks to account for, a third
+generously inventing an unknown substance--that they ought to be welcomed
+by reviewers and lecturers.
+
+It seems wiser to admit our ignorance and suspend our belief.
+
+Here closes the futile chapter of explanations. Fraud is a _vera causa_,
+but an hypothesis difficult of application when it is admitted that the
+effects could not be caused by ordinary mechanical means. Hallucination,
+through excitement, is a _vera causa_, but its remarkable uniformity,
+as described by witnesses from different lands and ages, knowing nothing
+of each other, makes us hesitate to accept a sweeping hypothesis of
+hallucination. The case for it is not confirmed, when we have the same
+reports from witnesses certainly not excited.
+
+This extraordinary bundle, then, of reports, practically identical, of
+facts paralysing to belief, this bundle made up of statements from so many
+ages and countries, can only be 'filed for reference.' But it is manifest
+that any savage who shared the experiences of Sir W. Crookes, Lord
+Crawford, Mr. Hamilton Aide, M. Robert de St. Victor at Cideville, and
+Policeman Higgs at Worksop, would believe that a spirit might tenant a
+stick or stone--so believing he would be a Fetishist. Thus even of
+Fetishism the probable origin is in a region of which we know nothing--the
+_X_ region.
+
+[Footnote 1: A sketch of the history will be found in the author's _Cock
+Lane and Common Sense_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The best source is his article on 'Poltergeists.'
+_Proceedings_ xi. 45-116. See, too, his 'Poltergeists' in _Studies in
+Psychical Research_.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Studies in Psychical Research_, p. 140.]
+
+[Footnote 4: See Preface to this edition for correction.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Proceedings_, S.P.R. vii. 383-394.]
+
+[Footnote 6: See Sir W. Crookes's _Researches in Spiritualism_.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Mr. Aide has given me this information. He recorded the
+circumstances in his Diary at the time.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Report of Dialectical Society_, p. 209.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See Porphyry, in Parthey's edition (Berlin, 1857), iii. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Bulletin de la Societe de Biologie_, 1880, p. 399.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Crookes, _Proceedings_, ix. 308.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+_CRYSTAL-GAZING_
+
+Since the chapter on crystal-gazing was in type, a work by Dr. Pierre
+Janet has appeared, styled 'Les Nevroses et les Idees Fixes.'[1] It
+contains a chapter on crystal-gazing. The opinion of Dr. Janet, as that of
+a savant familiar, at the Salpetriere, with 'neurotic' visionaries,
+cannot but be interesting. Unluckily, the essay must be regarded as
+seriously impaired in value by Dr. Janet's singular treatment of his
+subject. Nothing is more necessary in these researches than accuracy of
+statement. Now, Dr. Janet has taken a set of experiences, or experiments,
+of Miss X.'s from that lady's interesting essay, already cited; has
+attributed them, not to Miss X., but to various people--for example, to
+_une jeune fille, une pauvre voyante, une personne un peu mystique_; has
+altered the facts in the spirit of romance; and has triumphantly given
+that explanation, revival of memory, which was assigned by Miss X.
+herself.
+
+Throughout his paper Dr. Janet appears as the calm man of science
+pronouncing judgment on the visionary vagaries of 'haunted' young girls
+and disappointed seeresses. No such persons were concerned; no such
+hauntings, supposed premonitions, or 'disillusions' occurred; the romantic
+and 'marvellous' circumstances are mythopoeic accretions due to Dr.
+Janet's own memory or fancy; his scientific explanation is that given by
+his trinity of _jeune fille, pauvre voyante_, and _personne un peu
+mystique_.
+
+Being much engaged in the study of 'neurotic' and hysterical patients, Dr.
+Janet thinks that they are most apt to see crystal visions. Perhaps they
+are; and one doubts if their descriptions are more to be trusted than
+the romantic essay of their medical attendant. In citing Miss X.'s paper
+(as he did), Dr. Janet ought to have reported her experiments correctly,
+ought to have attributed them to herself, and should, decidedly, have
+remarked that the explanation he offered was her own hypothesis, verified
+by her own exertions.
+
+Not having any acquaintances in neurotic circles, I am unable to say
+whether such persons supply more cases of the faculty of crystal vision
+than ordinary people; while their word, one would think, is much less to
+be trusted than that of men and women in excellent health. The crystal
+visions which I have cited from my own knowledge (and I could cite scores
+of others) were beheld by men and women engaged in the ordinary duties
+of life. Students, barristers, novelists, lawyers, school-masters,
+school-mistresses, golfers--to all of whom the topic was perfectly
+new--have all exhibited the faculty. It is curious that an Arabian author
+of the thirteenth century, Ibn Khaldoun, cited by M. Lefebure, offers the
+same account of _how_ the visions appear as that given by Miss Angus in
+the _Journal_ of the S.P.R., April 1898. M. Lefebure's citation was sent
+to me in a letter.
+
+I append M. Lefebure's quotation from Ibn Khaldoun. The original is
+translated in 'Notices et Extraits des MSS. de la Bibliotheque Imperiale,'
+I. xix. p. 643-645.
+
+'Ibn Kaldoun admet que certains hommes ont la faculte de deviner l'avenir.
+
+'"Ceux, ajoute-t-il, qui regardent dans les corps diaphanes, tels que les
+miroirs, les cuvettes remplies d'eau et les liquides; ceux qui inspectent
+les coeurs, les foies et les os des animaux, ... tous ces gens-la
+appartiennent aussi a la categorie des devins, mais, a cause de
+l'imperfection de leur nature, ils y occupent un rang inferieur. Pour
+ecarter le voile des sens, le vrai devin n'a pas besoin de grands efforts;
+quant aux autres, ils tachent d'arriver au but en _essayant de concentrer
+en un seul sens toutes leurs perceptions_. Comme la vue est le sens le
+plus noble, ils lui donnent la preference; fixant leur regard sur on objet
+a superficie unie, ils le considerent avec attention jusqu'a ce qu'ils y
+apercoivent la chose qu'ils veulent annoncer. Quelques personnes croient
+que l'image apercue de cette maniere se dessine sur la surface du miroir;
+mais ils se trompent. Le devin regarde fixement cette surface jusqu'a ce
+qu'elle disparaisse et qu'un rideau, semblable a un brouillard,
+s'interpose entre lui et le miroir. Sur ce rideau se dessinent les choses
+_qu'il desira apercevoir_, et cela lui permet de donner des indications
+soit affirmatives, soit negatives, sur ce que l'on desire savoir. Il
+raconte alors les perceptions telles qu'il les recoit. Les devins,
+pendant qu'ils sont dans cet etat, n'apercoivent pas ce qui se voit
+reellement dans le miroir; c'est un autre mode de perception qui nait
+chez eux et qui s'opere, non pas au moyen de la vue, mais de l'ame. Il
+est vrai que, _pour eux, les perceptions de l'ame ressemblent a celles
+des sens au point de les tromper_; fait qui, du reste, est bien connu. La
+meme chose arrive a ceux qui examinent les coeurs et les foies d'animaux.
+Nous avons vu quelques-uns de ces individus _entraver l'operation des
+sens_ par l'emploi de simples _fumigations_, puis se servir
+d'_incantations_[2] afin de donner a l'ame la disposition requise; ensuite
+ils racontent ce qu'ils ont apercu. Ces formes, disent-ils, se montrent
+dans l'air et representent des personnages: elles leur apprennent, au
+moyen d'emblemes et de signes, les choses qu'ils cherchent a savoir. Les
+individus de cette classe se detachent moins de l'influence des sens que
+ceux de la classe precedente."'
+
+[Footnote 1: Lican, Paris, 1898.]
+
+[Footnote 2: L'auteur arabe avait deja mentionne (p. 209) l'emploi des
+incantations et indique qu'elles etuient un simple adjuvant physique
+destine a donner a certains hommes une exaltation dont ils se servaient
+pour tacher de decouvrir l'avenir.
+
+'Pour arriver au plus haut degre d'inspiration dont il est capable, le
+devin doit avoir recours a l'emploi de certaines phrases qui se
+distinguent par _une cadence et un parallelisme particuliers_. Il
+essaye ce moyen _afin de soustraire son ame aux influences des sens_ et
+de lui donner assez de force pour se mettre dans un contact imparfait
+avec le monde spirituel.[a] Cette agitation d'esprit, jointe a l'emploi
+des moyens intrinseques dont nous avons parle, excite dans son coeur
+des idees que cet organe exprime par le ministere de la langne. Les
+paroles qu'il prononce sont tantot vraies, tantot fausses. En effet,
+le devin, voulant suppleer a l'imperfection de son naturel, se sert de
+moyens tout a fait etrangers a sa faculte perceptive et qui ne
+s'accordent en aucune facon avec elle. Donc la verite et l'erreur se
+presentent a lui en meme temps, aussi ne doit on mettre aucune
+confiance en ses paroles. Quelquefois meme il a recours a des
+suppositions et a des conjectures dans l'espoir de rencontrer la verite
+et de tromper ceux qui l'interrogent.']
+
+[Footnote a: Compare Tennyson's way of attaining a state of trance by
+repeating to himself his own name.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+_CHIEFS IN AUSTRALIA_
+
+In the remarks on Australian religion, it is argued that chiefs in
+Australia are, at most, very inconspicuous, and that a dead chief cannot
+have thriven into a Supreme Being. Attention should be called, however, to
+Mr. Howitt's remarks on Australian 'Head-men,' in his tract on 'The
+Organisation of Australian Tribes' (pp. 103-113).
+
+He attaches more of the idea of power to 'Head-men' than does Mr. Curr in
+his work, 'The Australian Race.' The Head-men, as a rule, arrive at such
+influence as they possess by seniority, if accompanied by courage, wisdom,
+and, in some cases, by magical acquirements. There are traces of a
+tendency to keep the office (if it may be called one) in the same kinship.
+'But Vich Ian Vohr or Chingahgook are not to be found in Australian
+tribes' (p. 113). I do not observe that the manes or ghost of a dead
+Head-man receives any worship or service calculated to fix him in the
+tribal memory, and so lead to the evolution of a deity, though one
+Head-man was potent through the whole Dieyri tribe over three hundred
+miles of country. Such a person, if propitiated after death, might
+conceivably develop into a hero, if not into a creative being. But we
+must await evidence to the effect that any posthumous reverence was paid
+to this man, Ialina Piramurane (New Moon). Mr. Howitt's essay is in the
+'Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria for 1889.'
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Academy of Medicine, Paris, inquiry into animal magnetism, 34
+
+Achille, the case of, 134
+
+Acosta, Pere, cited, 74, 244, 246
+
+Adare, Lord, cited, 335
+
+Addison, cited, 16
+
+Africans, religious faiths of, 212, 218, 221, 222.
+  See under separate tribal names.
+
+Ahone, North-American Indian god, 231-233, 241, 248, 258, 262, 280
+
+Aide, Hamilton, cited, 336
+
+Algonquins, the, 250
+
+Allen, Grant, cited, 190
+
+American Creators, 230;
+  parallel with African gods, 230;
+  savage gods of Virginia, 231;
+  the Ahone-Okeus creed, 231-233;
+  Pawnee tribal religions, 233-236;
+  Ti-ra-wa, the Spirit Father, 234, 235;
+  rite to the Morning Star, 234;
+  religion of the Blackfeet, 236;
+  Na-pi, 237-239;
+  one account of the Inca religion, 239-242;
+  Sun-worship, 239-241;
+  cult of Pachacamac, the Inca deity, 239-247;
+  another account of the Inca religion, 242-246;
+  hymns of the Zunis, 247;
+  _Awonawilona_, 247
+
+Amoretti, Sig., cited, 30, 152
+
+Ancestor, worship, 164-166, 178, 205, 212, 268, 271-277
+
+Andamanese, the, religious beliefs of,     167, 194-197, 205, 208, 211,
+    249, 252, 256, 272
+'Angus, Miss,' cases in her experience of crystal-gazing, 89-102, 341
+
+Animal magnetism, inquiry into, 29, 34, 35
+
+Animism, nature and influence of,     48, 49, 53, 58, 63, 129, 168, 190,
+    191, 206, 256, 264, 266, 268, 269, 303
+
+Anthropology and hallucinations, 105;
+  sleeping and waking experience, 105, 106;
+  hallucinations in mentally sound people, 107;
+  ghosts, 107;
+  coincidence of hallucinations of the sane with death or other crisis of
+    person seen, 107;
+  morbid hallucinations and coincidental 'flukes,' 108;
+  connection of cause and effect, 108;
+  the emotional effect, 108;
+  illustrative coincidence, 108;
+  hallucinations of sight, 109;
+  causes of hallucinations, 110;
+  collective hallucinations, 110;
+  the properly receptive state, 110;
+  telepathy, 111;
+  phantasms of the living, 112;
+  Maori cases, 113-115;
+  evidence to be rejected, 116;
+  subjective hallucination caused by expectancy, 116;
+  puzzling nature of hallucinations shared by several people at once, 116,
+    117;
+  hallucinations coincident with a death, 117;
+  apparitions and deaths connected in fact, 117;
+  Census of the Society for Psychical Research thereupon, 118;
+  number and character of the instances, 119;
+  weighing evidence, 119;
+  opinion of the Committee on Hallucinations, 121;
+  remoteness of occurrence of instances, 121;
+  want of documentary evidence, 121
+  non-coincidental hallucinations, 121;
+  telepathy existing between kinsfolk and friends, 122;
+  influence of anxiety, 123;
+  existence of illness known, 123;
+  mental and nervous conditions in connection with hallucinations, 134;
+  value of the statistics of the Census, 124;
+  anecdote of an English officer, 125
+
+Anthropology and religion, 30;
+  early scientific prejudice against, 40;
+  evolution and evidence, 40;
+  testing of evidence, 41-43;
+  psychical research, 48;
+  origin of religion, 44;
+  inferences drawn from supernormal phenomena, 41, 53;
+  savage parallels of psychical phenomena, 45;
+  meanings of religion, 45, 40;
+  disproof of godless tribes, 47;
+  Animism, 48, 49;
+  limits of savage tongues, 49;
+  waking and sleeping hallucinations, 60;
+  crystal-gazing, 50;
+  the ghost-soul, 51;
+  savage abstract speculation, 52;
+  analogy of the ideas of children and primitive man, 53;
+  early man's conception of life, 32;
+  ghost-seers, 54;
+  psychical conditions in which savages differ from civilised men, 54;
+  power of producing non-normal psychological conditions, 55;
+  faculties of the lower animals, 56;
+  man's first conception of religion, 56;
+  the suggested hypnotic state, 57;
+  second-sight, 68;
+  savage names for the ghost-soul, 60;
+  the migratory spirit, 60-64
+
+Anynrabia, South Guinea Creator, 220
+
+Apaches, crystal-gazing by, 84, 85
+
+Apollonius of Tyana, 66
+
+Atua, the Tongan Elohim, 279
+
+Aurora Borealis, savage ideas of the, 4, 262, 292
+
+Australians, religious beliefs of, 50, 83, 118, 128, 165, 175-182, 185,
+    188, 190, 205, 208, 211, 215, 219, 224, 240, 249, 253, 266, 261-263
+
+Automatism, 155
+
+Awonawilona, Zuni deity, 248, 251
+
+Ayinard, Jacques, case of, 150, 182
+
+Aztecs, creed of, 104 _note_, 183, 233, 234, 255, 258, 263
+
+Bealz, Dr., cited, 132
+
+Baiame, deity, 189, 190, 191, 205, 261, 280
+
+Baker, Sir Samuel, cited, 42, 211
+
+Bakwains, the, 169
+
+Balfour, A.J., quoted, 44, 57 _note_
+
+Banks Islanders, their gods, 169, 197-198
+
+Bantus, religious beliefs of, 176, 211, 220, 248
+
+Barkworth, Mr., his opinion of Mrs. Piper, 140
+
+Barrett, Professor, on the divining-rod, 162-154
+
+Bostian, Adolf, cited, 6, 43
+
+Baxter, cited, 15
+
+Beaton, Cardinal, his mistress visualized, 97
+
+Bell, John, cited, 149
+
+Beni-Israel, 282
+
+Berna, magnetiser, 34
+
+Bernadette, case of, 117
+
+Big Black Man, Fuegian deity, 258
+
+Binet and Fere, quoted, 20, 76
+
+Bissett, Mr. and Mrs., experiences of crystal-gazing, 99-102
+
+Blackfeet, beliefs of, 230, 236
+
+Blantyre region, religion in the, 217, 218
+
+Bleck, Dr., cited, 194
+
+Bobowissi, Gold Coast god, 225-227, 230-232
+
+Bodinus, cited, 15
+
+Book of the Dead, 286, 303
+
+Bora, Australian mysteries, 176, 179, 190, 196, 260
+
+Bosman, cited, 225
+
+Bourget, Paul, his opinion of Mrs. Piper, 139, 140
+
+Bourke, Captain J.G., cited, 83
+
+Boyle, cited, 15
+
+Braid, inventor of the word 'hypnotism,' 24, 35, 36
+
+Brewster, Sir David, cited, 33
+
+Brinton, Dr., cited, 67, 168, 232, 236, 254, 264, 290
+
+Bristow, Mr., cited, 332
+
+British Association decline to hear Braid's essay, 24
+  rejection of anthropological papers, 89
+
+Brasses, de, cited, 149
+
+Brown, General Mason, cited, 68, 67
+
+Bunjil, deity, 189
+
+Bushmen, religious beliefs of, 165, 198, 208, 211, 252
+
+Button, Jemmy, the Faegian, case of, 116
+
+Caon, Boshmon deity, 189, 193, 205
+
+Callawoy, Dr., on Zulu beliefs, 72, 85, 106, 142, 151 207, 208
+
+Cardan, cited, 15
+
+Carpenter, Dr., cited, 324
+
+Carver, Captain Jonathan, his instance of savage possession, 142
+  cited, 60, 144, 145
+
+Charcot, Dr., on faith cures, 20-23, 24 _note_
+
+Chevreul, M., cited, 152
+
+Chinese, the, demon possession in, 181, 183
+  divining-rod, 154
+  religious beliefs, 237, 290, 291
+
+Chonos, the, 176
+
+Circumcision, 286
+
+Clairvoyance (vue a distance), 65
+  'opening the Gates at Distance.' 65, 66
+  attested cases among savages, 66
+  conflict with the laws of exact science, 67
+  instances, 67
+  among the Zulus, 68-70
+  among the Lapps, 70
+  the Llarson case, 71
+  seers, 72
+  the element of trickery, 73
+  a Red Indian seeress, 73
+  Peruvian clairvoyants, 75
+  Professor Richet's case, 75
+  Mr. Dobbie's case, 76
+  Scottish tales of second-sight, 78-81
+  visions provoked by various methods, 81
+  See Crystal visions
+
+Clodd, Edward, cited, 119, 120, 300
+
+'Cockburn, Mrs.,' test of crystal-gazing, 99-101
+
+Codrington, Dr., cited, 150, 169, 197-199
+
+Coirin, Mlle., her miraculous cure, 20
+
+Coleridge, cited, 9, 11, 12 _note_, 295, 296
+
+Collins, cited, 179
+
+Comanches, the, 250
+
+Confucius, religious teaching of, 290, 291
+
+Cook, Captain, cited, 271
+
+Corpse-binding, 143, 144
+
+Crawford, Lord, cited, 325, 334, 330, 387
+
+Creeks, the, 143
+
+Croesus, tests the Delphic Oracle, 14
+
+Crookes, Sir William, cited, 325, 331, 333, 334, 337, 338
+
+Crystal visions, 83
+  savage instances, 83-85
+  in later Europe, 85
+  nature of 'Miss X's' experiments, 85
+  attributed to 'dissociation,' 86
+  examples of 'thought-transference,' 87
+  arguments against accepting recognition of objects described by another
+    person, 87
+  coincidence of fact and fiction, 88
+  cases in the experience of 'Miss Angus,' 89-102
+  'Miss Rose's' experience, 91, 92
+  phenomena suggest the savage theory of the wandering soul, 103
+  cited, 7, 44, 50, 314-316, 340
+
+Cumberland, Stuart, 72
+
+Cures by suggestion, 20, 21
+
+Curr, Mr., reports 'godless' savages, 184 _note_
+
+Dampier, cited, 176
+
+Dancing sticks, 149-131
+
+Darumulun, Australian Supreme Being, 178, 179, 183, 186, 191, 213, 240,
+    258-264, 280
+
+Darwin, cited, 115, 149, 174 _note_, 324, 332
+
+Death, savage ideas on, 187
+
+Degeneration theory, the, 254
+  the powerful creative Being of lowest savages, 254
+  differences between the Supreme Being of higher and lower savages, 255
+  human sacrifice, 255
+  hungry, cruel gods degenerate from the Australian Father in Heaven, 256
+  savage Animism, 256
+  a pure religion forgotten, 257
+  an inconvenient moral Creator, 257
+  hankering after useful ghost-gods, 257
+  lowering of the ideal of a Creator, 257
+  maintenance of an immoral system in the interests of the State and the
+    clergy, 258
+  moral monotheism of the Hebrew religion, 258
+  degradation of Jehovah, 258
+  human sacrifice in ritual of Israel, 258
+  origin of conception of Jehovah, 258
+  Semitic gods, 259
+  status of Darumulun, 259
+  conception of Jehovah conditioned by space, 260
+  degeneration of deity in Africa, 260
+  political advance produces religious degeneration, 261
+  sacrificial ideas, 262
+  the savage Supreme Being on a higher plane than the Semitic and
+    Greek gods, 263
+  Animism full of the seeds of religions degeneration, 264
+  falling off in the theistic conception, 265
+  fetishism, 265
+  modus of degeneration by Animism supplanting Theism, 265
+  feeling after a God who needs not anything at man's hands, 267
+
+Demoniacal possession, 128
+  the 'inspired' or 'possessed,' 129
+  'change of control,' 130
+  gift of eloquence and poetry, 131
+  instances in China, 131
+  attempted explanations of the phenomena, 132
+  'alternating personality,' 132
+  symptoms of possession, 132
+  evidence for, 133
+  scientific account of a demoniac and his cure, 134
+  inducing the 'possessed' state, 135
+  exhibition of abnormal knowledge by the possessed, 136
+  Scientific study of the phenomena, 136
+  details of the case of Mrs. Piper, 136-141
+  diagnosing and prescribing for patients, 142
+  Carver's example of savage possession, 142, 157
+  custom of binding the seer with bonds, 142, 145
+  corpse-binding, 143, 144
+
+Dendid, Dinka Supreme Being, 211, 212, 258, 280
+
+Deslon, M., disciple of Mesmer, 24
+
+Dessoir, Dr. Max, quoted, 32, 33, 57
+
+Dinkas, beliefs of the, 42, 211, 212, 256
+
+Divining-rod, use of the, 30, 152-155
+
+Dobbie, Mr., his case of clairvoyance, 76
+
+Dorman, Mr., cited, 203
+
+Dunbar, Mr., cited, 236
+
+Du Pont, cited, 75
+
+Du Prel, cited, 28
+
+Dynois, Jonka, trance of, 65
+
+Ebumtupism, second sight, 73
+
+Egyptians, beliefs of, 83, 302
+
+Elcho, Lord, cited, 334
+
+Eleusinian mysteries, 196
+
+Elliotson, Dr., cited, 24, 35, 37, 40
+
+Ellis, Major, on Polynesian and African religions ideas, 83, 144, 222-228,
+    232, 251, 260, 272
+
+Elohim, savage equivalents to the term, 277
+
+Esemkofu, Zulu ghosts, 128, 129
+
+Eskimo, religious beliefs of, 72, 113, 184
+
+Faith-Cures, 20-22
+
+Fenton, Francis Dart, on Maori ghost-seeing, 114
+
+Ferrand, Mlle., on hallucinations, 32
+
+Fetishism and Spiritualism, 147
+  the fetish, 147
+  sources super-normal to savages, 148
+  independent motion in inanimate objects, 149
+  comparison with physical phenomena of spiritualism, 149
+  Melanesian belief in sticks moved by spirits, 150
+  a sceptical Zulu, 150
+  a form of the pendulum experiment, 151
+  table-turning, 152
+  the divining-rod, 152
+  the civilised and savage practice of automatism, 156
+  dark room manifestations, 156
+  the disturbances in the house of M. Zoller, 156
+  consideration of physical phenomena, 158
+  instanced, 165, 225, 265, 266, 276, 324-339
+
+Figuier, M., cited, 152
+
+Fijians, religious beliefs of, 128, 136, 200, 248, 338
+
+Finns, the, 58
+
+Fire ceremony, the, 180 _note_
+
+Fison, Mr., cited, 128
+
+Fitzroy, Admiral, cited, 115, 173, 174
+
+Flacourt, Sieur de, on crystal-gazing in Madagascar, 84
+
+Flint, Professor, cited, 253
+
+Francis, St., stigmata of, 22
+
+Fuegians, beliefs and customs of, 115, 165, 173-175, 183, 187, 208,
+    211, 227, 258, 262, 272
+
+Galton, Mr., cited, 12, 96, 107, 294, 295
+
+Garcilasso de la Vega, on Inca beliefs, 239-244
+
+'Gates of Distance, Opening the,' 65, 66, 68
+
+Ghost-seers, 54, 63
+
+Ghost-soul, the, 51
+  names for the, 60
+
+Gibert, Dr., on 'willing' sleep, 36
+
+Gibier, Dr., cited, 146
+
+Gippsland tribes, 187
+
+Glanvil, Rev. Joseph, his scientific investigations, 15
+
+God, evolution of the idea of, 160
+  anthropological hypothesis, 160
+  primitive logic of the savage, 161
+  regarded as a spirit, 162
+  idea of spiritual beings framed on the human soul, 164
+  deified ancestors, 164
+  the Zulu first ancestor, 164
+  fetishes, 165
+  great gods in savage systems of religion, 165
+  the Lord of the Dead, 165
+  conception of an idealised divine First Ancestor, 188
+  hostile Good and Bad Beings, 166
+  the Supreme Being of savage creeds, 166
+  mediating 'Sons,' 167
+  Christian and Islamite influence on savage conceptions, 167
+  probable germs of the savage idea of a Supreme Being, 168
+  animistic conceptions, 168
+  ghosts, and Beings who never were human, 169
+  recognition by savages of our God in theirs, 169
+  the hypothesis of degeneracy, 170
+  the moral, friendly creative Being of low savage faith, 171
+  food offerings to a Universal Power, 171
+  the High Gods of low races, 173
+  intrusion of European ideas into savage religions, 173
+  the Fuegian Big Man, 174
+  ghosts of dead medicine man, 175
+  the Bora, or Australian tribal mysteries, 176, 177, 179
+  possible evolution of the Australian god, 178
+  mythology and theology of Darumulun, the highest Australian god, 178,
+    179, 183
+  religious sanction of morals, 179
+  selflessness the very essence of goodness, 180
+  precepts of Darumulan, 181, 182
+  argument from design, 184
+  Supreme Gods not necessarily developed out of 'spirits,' 185
+  distinction between deities and ghosts, 185
+  human beings adored as gods, 186
+  deathlessness of the Supreme Being of savage faith, 186, 188
+  idealisation of the savage himself, 187
+  negation of the ghost-theory, 188, 189
+  high creative gods never wore mortal men, 189
+  low savage distinction between gods, 189
+  propitiation by food and sacrifice, 190
+  'magnified non-natural men,' 190
+  gods to talk about, not to adore, 190
+  higher gods prior to the ghost theory, 191
+  See Supreme Beings; American Creators; Jehovah
+
+Greeks, the, beliefs of, 302
+
+Greenlanders, the, 144, 182
+
+Gregory, Dr., cited, 86
+
+Griesinger, Dr., cited, 132
+
+Grinnell, Mr., on Pawnee beliefs, 234-237
+
+Guiana Indians, religious beliefs of, 202-206, 256
+
+Guinea, North and South, religious beliefs in, 220
+
+Gurney, Mr., his experiments in hypnotism, 85, 86
+  cited, 107, 114, 117
+
+Guyau, M., cited, 12, 24, 25
+
+Hallucinations. See Anthropology and Hallucinations
+
+Hamilton, Sir William, cited, 12
+
+Hammond, Dr., on demoniacal possession, 131
+
+Harteville, Madame, case of, 26
+
+Hearne, on the Aurora Borealis, 3
+  on cure by suggestion, 21, 22
+
+Hebrews. See Israelites
+
+Hegel, cited, 30-34, 50, 56, 58, 78, 111, 152
+
+Higgs, Police Constable, statement of, on the disturbances at Mr.
+  White's house, 326-328
+
+Highland second-sight, 143-145
+
+Hodgson, Dr., report on Mrs. Piper, 137, 140, 141
+  cited, 135, 325
+
+Home, David Dunglas, his powers as a medium, 324, 325, 334-339
+
+Howitt, Mr., cited, 128, 177-182
+
+Hume, David, attitude towards miracles, 16
+  definition of a miracle, 16
+  self-contradictions, 17
+  refuses to examine miracle of the Abbe Paris, 18, 19, 22-25
+  alternative definition of a miracle, 25
+  cited, 297
+
+Huxley, Professor, on savage religious cults, 42, 43, 48, 162, 163, 171,
+    176, 177, 182
+  on the evolution of Jehovah, 270, 271, 277, 279, 282, 286
+  cited, 17 _note_, 296, 324
+
+Hypnotism, 6, 24, 29, 32, 34, 35, 37, 75, 76
+
+Iamblichus, cited, 14, 336, 337, 339
+
+Ibn Khaldoun, cited, 341
+
+Im Thurn, on the religious ideas of the Indians of Guiana, 50, 160,
+    202-207, 256, 298
+
+Incas, the, 85, 240-247, 258
+
+Iroquois, the, 84, 85
+
+Islam, influence of, on African beliefs, 221
+
+Israelites, development of their religious ideas, 258, 260, 268-284, 302
+
+James, Professor William, quoted, 23, 59, 73, 107, 110, 132, 137, 156,
+    294
+
+Janet, Dr. Pierre, on 'willing' sleep, 36
+  on demoniacal possession, 134, 135
+  cited, 73, 294, 340, 341
+
+Jeanne d'Arc, 34, 73, 115, 128, 276
+
+Jehovah, theories of, 258, 260, 268
+  as a Moral Supreme Being, 268
+  anthropological theory of the origin of Jehovah-worship, 270
+  absence of ancestor-worship from the Hebrew tradition, 270-273
+  alleged evidence for ancestor-worship in Israel, 273-277
+  evolution from ghost-cult to the cult of Jehovah, 277
+  the term Elohim, 277
+  human shape assumed, 278
+  considered as a ghost-god, 279
+  sacrifices to, 280
+  suggestion of a Being not yet named Jehovah, 281
+  traditional emergence of Jehovah as the god of Israel, 281
+  as a deified ancestor, 282
+  moral element in the idea of Jehovah, 282, 286
+  a mere tribal god, 283
+  a Kenite god, 283, 284
+  inconsistencies of theorists concerning, 285
+  the moral element a survival of primitive ethics in the savage ancestors
+    of the Israelites, 287
+  verity of the Biblical account, 287
+  cited, 299
+
+Jeraeil, mysteries of the Kurnai, 180
+
+Jevons, Mr., cited, 186, 255, 300, 302
+
+Jugglery, Pawnee, 235
+
+Jung-Stilling, cited, 30, 63
+
+Kaloc, Fijian name for gods, 200, 201
+
+Kamschatkans, 166
+
+Kant, inquires into Swedenborg's visions, 26, 59
+  disappointed with Swedenborg's 'Arcana Coelestia', 26, 27
+  on the metaphysics of 'spirits,' 27
+  discusses the subconscious, 28
+  cited, 125
+
+Karens, beliefs of, 60, 73, 151
+
+Karr, Alphonse, cited, 336
+
+Kelvin, Lord, on hypnotism, 37
+
+Kenites, the, 284
+
+Kingsley, Miss, cited, 175, 211, 220, 328
+
+Kirk, cited, 144
+
+Kohl, cited, 148
+
+Kulin, Australian tribe, 49
+
+Kurnai, Australian tribe, their religious conceptions, 49, 180, 181, 187,
+    215, 262, 263, 287, 291
+
+Laing, Mr. Samuel, cited, 12 _note_
+
+Langlois, M., the case of, 75, 76
+
+Lapps, beliefs of, 58, 71, 81
+
+Latukas, the, 42
+
+Laverterus, telepathic hypothesis of, 15
+
+Le Loyer, cited, 15
+
+Leaf, Mr., cited, 112 _note_
+
+Leeward Isles, ideas of a god in, 251
+
+Lefebure, M., cited, 84, 149, 341
+
+Legge, Dr., on the teaching of Confucius, 290
+
+Lejean, M., on the Dinkas, 212
+
+Lejeaune, Pere, cited, 74, 83
+
+Leng, Mr., cited, 133
+
+Leon, Cieza de, cited, 241, 244
+
+Leonie, the case of her hypnotisation, 75, 76
+
+Leslie, David, on Zulu clairvoyance, 68
+  on ghosts, 128
+
+Levitation, 334
+
+Littre, M., cited, 136
+
+Livingstone, Dr., cited, 6, 135, 170
+
+Lloyd, Dr., cited, 327, 328
+
+Loan-god, a, Tshi theory of, 222-229
+
+Lourdes, cures at, 19
+
+Lubbock, Sir John, cited, 42
+
+Macalister, Professor, his opinion of Mrs. Piper, 140
+
+MacCulloch, Dr., on second-sight, 58
+
+Macdonald, Duff, cited, 150, 213, 215, 218
+
+Macgregor, Dr. Alastair, gives instances of second-sight, 79-81
+
+Madagascar, 84
+
+Magnetism, 29, 34, 35
+
+Malagasies, beliefs of, 84
+
+Malays of Keeling Island, fetishism in, 141
+
+Man, Mr., on Andamanese religion and mythology, 194, 195
+
+Mans, magical rapport, 199, 200
+
+Mandans, the, 188
+
+Manganjah, practice of sorcery in, 149
+
+Manning, Mr., cited, 146
+
+Maoris, religious beliefs of, 83, 113-115, 118, 119, 150, 166, 188
+
+Marawa, Banks Islands deity, 198, 199
+
+Mariner, cited, 278
+
+Markham, Mr., cited, 243, 246
+
+Marson, Madame, case of, 71
+
+Mason, Dr., on familiar spirits, 130
+
+Mather, Cotton, cited, 16, 55
+
+Maudsloy, Dr., cited, 23 _note_
+
+Mani, Maori deity, 166, 188
+
+Mayo, Dr., cited, 86
+
+Medici, Catherine de', cited, 66
+
+Medicine-men, 84
+
+Mediums, 324-339
+
+Melanesians, religious beliefs of, 150, 169, 189, 197, 199, 200
+
+Menestrier, le Pere, uses the divining-rod, 154
+
+Menzies, Professor, cited, 257
+
+Mesmer, his theory of magnetism, 29, 34
+
+Millar, cited, 40, 41
+
+Miracles, regarded from the standpoint of science, 14
+  early tests, 14
+  and more modern research, 15
+  witchcraft, 15, 16
+  Hume's essay on, 16
+  and his definitions of a miracle, 16, 25
+  cures at the tomb of the Abbe Paris, 18-20, 23
+  Binet and Fere's explanation of these cures, 20
+  cures by suggestion, 20, 21
+  Dr. Charcot's views, 20
+  faith cures, 20-22
+  science opposed to systematic negation, 22
+  refusal to examine evidence, 23-25
+  'marvellous facts,' 24
+  suggestion a distance, 24
+  Kant's researches, 26-29
+  Swedenborg's clairvoyance, 26, 27
+  thought-transference and hypnotic sleep, 29, 30, 32, 35
+  water-finding, 39
+  phenomena of clairvoyance, 31
+  Hegel's 'magic tie,' 31
+  Dr. Max Dessoir's views, 31, 32
+  hallucinations, 32
+  animal magnetism, 34
+  hypnotism, 35
+  'willing,' 36
+  facts and phenomena confronting science, 37
+
+'Miss X,' on crystal-gazing, 87, 315, 316, 340, 341
+
+Mlungu, Central African deity, 213-218
+
+Molina, Christoval de, on Inca beliefs, 242, 243
+
+Moll, Herr, cited, 314
+
+Montgeron, M., cited, 19, 20
+
+More, Henry, cited, 15
+
+Moses, founder of the Hebrew religion, 283-286
+
+Mtanga, African deity, 213-217
+
+Mueller, Max, cited, 41, 43, 46, 265, 266, 289
+
+Mungan-ngaur, Kurnai Supreme Being, 181, 188, 190, 205, 217, 259
+
+Mwetyi, Shekuni Great Spirit, 220
+
+Myers, Frederic, on hypnotic slumber, 30, 33
+  cited, 15 _note_
+
+Nana Nyankupon, Gold Coast Supreme Being, 225-228, 232, 280
+
+Na-pi, American Indian deity, 237-239, 241
+
+Ndengei, Fijian Supreme Being, 200-202, 228, 248
+
+Nevius, Dr., on demoniacal possession, 131-135
+
+Newbold, Professor W. Romaine, 135
+
+Nezahuati, erects a bloodless fane to the Unknown God, 258
+
+Nicaraguans, the, 60
+
+North, Major, on Pawnee jugglery, 235, 236
+
+Nzambi Mpungu, Bantu Supreme Being, 226, 228, 242
+
+Okeus (Oki), American Indian deity, 231, 232
+
+Okey, the sisters, case of, 37 _note_
+
+Ombwiri, South Guinea god, 220
+
+Orpen, Mr., cited, 193
+
+Oxford, Rev. A.W., on ancient Israel, 275-277, 283-285
+
+Pachacamac, Inca, Supreme Being, 230, 239-247, 258
+
+Pachayachachi, Inca god, 242, 246
+
+Paladino, Eusapia, case of, 325
+
+Palmer, Mr., cited, 179
+
+Paris, Abbe miracles wrought at his tomb, 18-20, 23
+
+Parish, Herr, criticism of his reply to the arguments for telepathy,
+    307-323
+  cited, 8, 86, 107
+
+Park, Mungo, on African beliefs, 221, 223
+
+Pawnees, religious beliefs and practices of, 212, 224, 230, 233-236, 263
+
+Payne, Mr., cited, 160, 161, 246
+
+Peden, Rev. Mr., cited, 66
+
+Pelippa, Captain, cited, 173
+
+Pendulum experiment, a form of the, 151
+
+Pepys, cited, 15
+
+Peruvians, religious ideas and practices of, 75, 239-247
+
+Phantasms of the Dead, 128
+
+Phinuit, Dr. See Mrs. Piper
+
+Piper, Mrs., the case of, 132, 136-141
+
+Pliny, cited, 15
+
+Plotinus, cited, 66
+
+Plutarch, cited, 15
+
+Podmore, Mr., on psychical research, 111, 325, 326, 328, 330-336, 338, 339
+
+Poltergeist, the, and his explainers, 334-339
+
+Polynesians, religious beliefs of, 7, 83, 251, 252, 256
+
+Polytheism, 289, 291, 303
+
+Porphyry, cited, 14
+
+Powhattan, Virginian chief, 231, 232
+
+Puluga, Andamanese Supreme Being, 195, 205, 228, 258, 262
+
+Pundjel, Australian god, 258, 261, 262
+
+Puysegur, de, his discovery of hypnotic sleep, 29,
+  cited, 76
+
+Qat, Banks Islands deity, 189, 198, 199
+
+Qing, Bushman, his ideas of the god Cang, 193, 196
+
+Ravenwood, Master of, instanced, 126
+
+Red Indians, beliefs and practices of, 3, 5, 6, 21, 22, 83, 104 _note_,
+    128, 142, 143, 203
+
+Regnard, M., cited, 71
+
+Renan, M., cited, 285
+
+Revillo, M., cited, 291, 293
+
+Reynolds, Dr. Russell, cited, 22
+
+Rhombos, use of the, 84
+
+Ribot, M., cited, 132
+
+Richet, Professor Charles, hypnotises Leonie, 75, 76
+  cited, 64, 73, 82, 154, 294
+
+Ritter, Dr., believes in Siderism, 29
+
+Romans, religious ideas of, 302
+
+'Rose, Miss,' her experience of crystal-gazing, 90,91
+
+Rose, Eliza, the case of, 326-330
+
+Roskoff, cited, 42
+
+Rowley, Mr., cited, 149
+
+Russegger, cited, 212
+
+Salcamayhua, cited, 246
+
+Samoyeds, 58, 72
+
+Sand, George, cited, 86
+
+Santos, cited, 214
+
+Saul and the Witch of Endor, 14
+
+Scheffer, cited, 66, 70, 71, 81
+
+Schoolcraft, Mr., cited, 236
+
+Schrenck-Notzing, von, cited, 55 _note_
+
+Scot, Reginald, cited, 15
+
+Scott, Rev. David Clement, cited, 49 _note_, 106, 217, 218
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, his attitude towards clairvoyance, 27
+  cited, 121, 126
+
+Sebituane, case of, 135, 136
+
+Second-sight, 56, 66, 78-81
+
+Seer-binding, 143
+
+Seers, 72
+
+Shang-ti, Chinese Supreme Being, 245, 290, 291
+
+Shortland, Mr., quoted, 113
+
+Sidgwick, Professor, cited, 318, 332
+
+Sioux, the, 236
+
+Skidi or Wolf Pawnees, the, 233, 234
+
+Smith, Mrs. Erminie, on crystal-gazing, 84
+
+Smith, historian of Virginia, cited, 231, 232
+
+Smith, Robertson, cited, 259, 261, 262, 281 _note_, 298
+
+Smyth, Brough, cited, 42, 178, 182, 293
+
+Society for Psychical Research, 116, 118
+
+Spencer, Herbert, on early religious ideas, 42, 43
+  ghosts, 47
+  Animism, 48 _note_, 53, 54
+  limits of savage language, 49
+  the Fuegian Big Man, 174
+  Australian marriage customs, 175
+  Australian religion, 182
+  men-gods, 186
+  religion of Bushmen, 193
+  ancestor-worship, 212, 213, 271-273
+  cited, 162, 167, 170, 216, 218, 292
+
+Spiritualism, 324-339.
+  See Fetishism
+
+Stade, Herr, cited, 276, 284, 285
+
+Stanley, Hans, cited, 12
+
+Starr, cited, 104 _note_
+
+Stoll, cited, 72
+
+Strachey, William, cited, 229-232
+
+Suetonius, cited, 15
+
+Sully, Mr., cited. 295
+
+Sun-worship, 238-245
+
+Supreme Beings of savages, regarded as eternal, moral, and powerful, 193
+  Cagn, the Bushman god, 193
+  Puluga, the Andamanese god, 195
+  savage mysteries and rites, 196
+  alliance of ethics with religion, 196
+  the Banks Islanders' belief in Tamate (ghosts) and Vui (Beings who never
+    had been human), 197
+  corporeal and incorporeal Vuis, 198
+  sacrificial offerings to ghosts and spirits, 199
+  the soul the complex of real bodiless after-images, 200
+  Fijian belief, 200
+  Ndengei, the Fijian chief god, 200, 201
+  the idea of primeval Eternal Beings, 202
+  the Great Spirit of North American tribes, 203
+  dream origin of the ghost theory, 203
+  Guiana Indian names indicating a belief in a Great Spirit, 203-206
+  the God-cult abandoned for the Ghost-cult, 205
+  Unkulunkulu, the Zulu Creator, 207-210
+  the notion of a dead Maker, 208
+  preference for serviceable family spirits, 209
+  the Dinka Creator, 211
+  African ancestor-worship, 212
+  Mlungu, a deity formed by aggregation of departed spirits, 213
+  ethical element in religious mysteries, 215
+  the position of Mtanga, 216
+  religious beliefs in the Blantyre region, 217, 218
+  negro tendency to monotheism, 218
+  beliefs in North and South Guinea, 220
+  Mungo Park's observation of African beliefs, 221
+  Islamic influence, 221
+  the Tshi theory of a loan-god,' borrowed from Europeans, 222-228
+  varieties of Tshi gods, 224, 225
+  fetishes, 225
+  Nana Nyankupon, the 'God of the Christians,' 225-229
+  American Creators (see under), 230-252
+  the Polynesian cult, 251, 252
+  Chinese conceptions, 290-292
+
+Swedenborg, Emanuel, visions of, 26
+  recovers Mme. Harteville's receipt, 26
+  his 'Arcana Coelestia,' 27
+  noticed by Kant, 28, 29, 59
+
+Taa-Roa, Polynesian deity, 251, 252, 256, 280, 308
+
+Table-turning, 151
+
+Tahitians, 251
+
+Taine, M., cited, 57
+
+Ta-li-y-Tooboo, Tongan deity, 278, 279, 282
+
+Tamate, Banks Islands ghosts, 197-199
+
+Tamoi, the 'ancient of heaven,' 188
+
+Tando, Gold Coast god, 225
+
+Tanner, John, case of, 57, 128
+
+Teed, Esther, the Amherst mystery, 333
+
+Telepathy, oppositions of science to, 307
+  hallucination of memory, 307
+  presentiments, 308
+  dreams, 308, 309, 312
+  veridical hallucinations, 309, 311
+  coincidence in S.P.R.'s Census cases, 310
+  non-coincidental cases, 311
+  condition to beget hallucination, 312
+  hallucinations mere dreams, 312
+  crystal-gazing, 314-316
+  number of coincidences no proof, 316
+  association of ideas, 316
+  coincidental collective hallucinations, 317-323
+  See Crystal visions
+
+Thomson, Basil, cited, 200 _note_, 248, 249, 339
+
+Thought-transference, 4, 29-32, 35
+  illustrative cases, 88-103
+
+Thouvenel, M., cited, 152
+
+Thyraeus on ghosts, 15
+
+Tien, Chinese heaven, 290, 291
+
+Ti-ra-wa, American Indian god, 234-236, 239
+
+Tlapane, African wizard, 135
+
+Tongans, religious beliefs of, 278-280
+
+Tonkaways, American tribe, 233
+
+Torfaeus, cited, 71
+
+Totemism, 239, 241, 262, 263, 269, 270, 276
+
+Tregear, Mr., on Maori ghost-seeing, 113
+
+Tshi theory of a loan-god, 223-227
+
+Tuckey, Dr. Lloyd, cited, 36
+
+Tui Laga, Fijian deity, 249
+
+Tundun, ancestor of the Kurnai, 181
+
+Tylor, Mr., his test of recurrence, 41
+  on anthropological origin of religion, 43
+  on savage philosophy of super-normal phenomena, 45, 53
+  disproves the assertion about 'godless' tribes, 47
+  his term Animism, 48, 49
+  theory of metaphysical genius in low savages, 51
+  ghost-seers, 54
+  on psychical conditions of contemporary savages, 54-56
+  on the influence of Swedenborg, 59
+  savage names for the ghost-soul, 60
+  second-sight, 66
+  mediums, 73
+  dreams, 106
+  hallucinations, 110-113, 117, 118
+  demoniacal possession, 131
+  fetishism, 148, 149, 165
+  divining-rod, 153
+  evolution of gods from ghosts, 163, 164
+  fetish deities, 165
+  dualistic idea, 166
+  Supreme Being of savage creeds, 166, 167
+  the degeneration theory, 170, 254
+  confusion of thought upon religion, 182
+  list of first ancestors deified, 188
+  savage mysteries, 201
+  savage Animism, 204
+  Okeus and his rites, 231
+  Pachacamac, 245
+  Confucius's teaching, 290
+  the mystagogue Home, 325
+  levitation, 334
+  cited, 50, 52, 53, 58, 59, 61-63, 78, 151, 161, 162, 170, 173, 184, 185,
+    203, 231, 232, 246, 257, 293, 297
+
+Tyndall, Professor, cited, 324
+
+Uiracocha, Inca Creator, 242-246
+
+Umabakulists, diviners by sticks, 151
+
+Unkulunkulu, Zulu mythical first ancestor, 164, 168, 188, 202, 207, 220
+
+Vincent, Mr., 29
+  on clairvoyance, 34, 36, 37
+
+Virchow, cited, 19
+
+Vui, non-ghost gods, 169, 197-200
+
+Wabose, Catherine, Red Indian seeress, experience of, 73, 74
+
+Waltz, cited, 177, 194 _note_, 218-220, 222, 243
+
+Wallace, Alfred Basset, on Hume's theory of 'miracles,' 17, 18
+  on Ritter, 29
+  on clairvoyance, 31
+
+Wayao, Supreme Being of the, 213, 214
+
+Wellhausen, cited, 277, 283, 285, 286, 298
+
+Welton, Thomas, on the divining-rod, 154
+
+Wesley, John, cited, 16
+
+White, Joseph, spirit manifestations at his house, 326-331
+
+Wierus, cited, 15
+
+Williams, Mr., cited, 201, 248
+
+Wilson, Mr., cited, 50, 219, 220
+
+Windward Isles, ideas of a God in, 251
+
+Witch of Endor, the, 14, 277, 278
+
+Witchcraft, 14-16
+
+Wodrow, Mr., cited, 16
+
+Wolf tribes, 233
+
+Wynne, Captain, cited, 335
+
+Yama, Vedic-Aryan ghost-god, 188
+
+Yaos, religious beliefs of, 150, 213, 214-216
+
+Yerri Yuppon, good spirit of the Chonos, 175
+
+York, a Fuegian, cited, 174
+
+Yuncus, a Peruvian race, worship of, 240, 246
+
+Zarate, Augustin de, cited, 240
+
+Zoller, M., disturbances in the house of, 156, 157
+
+Zulus, religious beliefs and customs of, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 85, 128,
+    141, 142, 150, 152, 207-210
+
+Zunis, hymns of the, 248, 251
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Making of Religion, by Andrew Lang
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