New Zealand, hold that a man's soul can travel in dreams beyond the limits of the earth to the regions of the dead, and can enter into conversation there with his departed kinsmen and friends. The Fijians* hold that the spirit of a man, while he is still alive, can quit his body during sleep to inflict trouble or suffering upon his enemies. It is a reasonable supposition, as I have already urged, that, if primitive man looked upon the temporary departure of the spirit from the body as the theory naturally accounting for the phenomena of sleep and dreams, he would give the same account of such an event as a trance or a swoon. For unconsciousness is a feature of one case as of the other; and the reason of unconsciousness, as he supposes, is that the soul for the time being has left the body. And here the testimony of travellers and explorers confirms the supposition. According to Schürmann,† for example, the word for "soul or spirit" in the Parukalla language is wilya. But the word for "unconscious" is wilya marraba, which means "without soul" or "without spirit." Keating relates that in the belief of the Chippewa Indians, the soul, when it leaves the body, makes its way to a stream which it must cross on the back of a large snake. "Some souls come to the edge of the stream, but are prevented from passing by the snake that threatens to devour them; these are the souls of persons in a lethargy or trance." Williams is the authority for the extraordinary statement that in Fiji "when anyone faints or dies, their spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after it; and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying at full length and bawling out lustily for the return of his own soul." Not less ample is the evidence for the primitive view of physical or mental disease as caused by the temporary departure of the soul from the body. *T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, vol. i, ch. 7, p. 204. + Vocabulary of the Parukalla Language, pp. 72, 73. The Parukalla language is described as "spoken by the natives inhabiting the western shores of Spencer's Gulf in South Australia." Expedition to the Sources of St. Peter's River, vol. ii, ch. 3, p. 154. The Burmese, for example, imagine, when a person falls ill, either that his leyp-bya (i.e., his soul in the form of a butterfly) has been scared by an evil spirit out of his body, or that after being so scared, it has hurried back with such precipitancy as to disorganise his constitution.* The Mongols explain bodily sickness in various ways, but the popular explanation among them seems to be that the soul has gone out of the body and is unable or unwilling to return to it. "To secure the return of the soul it is therefore necessary on the one hand to make its body as attractive as possible, and on the other hand to show it the way home. To make the body attractive all the sick man's best clothes and most valued possessions are placed beside him, he is washed, incensed, and made as comfortable as possible, and all his friends march thrice round the hut, calling out the sick man's name and coaxing his soul to return. To help the soul to find its way back a coloured cord is stretched from the patient's head to the door of the hut. The priest in his robes reads a list of the horrors of hell and the dangers incurred by souls which wilfully absent themselves from their bodies. Then turning to the assembled friends and the patient he asks, Is it come?' All answer, 'Yes,' and bowing to the returning soul throws seed over the sick man. The cord which 6 guided the soul back is then rolled up and placed round the patient's neck, who must wear it for seven days without taking it off. None may frighten or hurt him, lest his soul, not yet familiar with its body, should again take flight."† And as with physical so it was also with mental disease. That, too, was attributed to a severance between spirit and body. Thus it is recorded that the negroes of North Guinea habitually ascribed imbecility or lunacy to the premature flight of the soul from its bodily tenement. Nor is the evidence less strong or striking as to the savage mode of looking upon death. Thus the Malays believe that the soul of a dying man escapes through his * Shway Yeo, The Burman, His Life and Notions, vol. ii, p. 101. + Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i, ch. 2, p. 128. His description is based upon Bastian, Die Seele und Ihre Erscheinung-wesen im der Ethnographie, J. L. Wilson, West Africa, p. 220. p. 36. nostrils. The Chinese make a hole in the roof of the house where a person lies dying to let out his soul. The custom of opening a door or a window for the departing soul when it quits the body is not yet wholly abandoned among the common people in France or Germany or England. To quote the opinion of a careful observert: "It is, or rather was, believed in nearly every part of the West of England that death is retarded, and the dying kept in a state of suffering, by having any lock closed, or any bolt shot in the dwelling of the dying person." What became of the spirit after its severance from the body was in early times, as it has ever been, a matter of difference, if not of dispute. But it was natural to suppose that the disembodied spirit would linger, at least for a while, in the neighbourhood of the dead body which it had left. Accordingly, the Iroquois Indians were, or perhaps are, wont to bore holes in the coffin or to leave an opening in the grave that the spirit or soul might revisit the body. It is the same idea, half unconsciously entertained, which has at all times marked out churchyards as the natural lurking places of departed spirits or ghosts. But not to multiply quotations or references, which are easily accessible, it seems that the first step which primitive man took or could well take towards the origination of an elementary religion, faith and practice, lay in the apprehension, however dim and faint it might be, of his own dualism. He realised that there were two constituent parts of his nature, body and spirit, and that the spirit could live and act without the body, whereas the body without the spirit was dead. He inferred therefore the superiority of the spirit to the body, and as he surveyed the face of Nature, he was prepared and inclined to discern everywhere traces of the same spiritual energy as he was conscious of in himself. Let me try to follow the process of his reasoning, The spirit is the source of life in man. Theoretically it was localised by primitive thought in various parts of the * Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 454. + Hart, Popular Romances of the West of England, p. 379. human body—in the blood, or the heart, or the pupil of the eye, or, as seems most natural, in the breath. But whatever the assumed locality of the spirit might be, its presence meant life, and its departure meant death. But life is not the attribute of man alone in Nature. There is life everywhere-motion, energy, force, vitality, not in the lower animals only, but in the wind, the sea, the flowing streams, the echoing waterfalls, the thunder, the lightning, the tremulous forest, the growing crops, the gathering dawn, the lengthening shadows of nightfall; and wherever there was life-so primitive man would argue-there was spirit. What could be more natural than that he should imagine a spiritual force-a spiritual Being as associated with, and actually resident in, the various objects of the natural world? Greek mythology itself recognised, almost instinctively, such deities as the Dryades, or spirits of the trees; the Naiades, or spirits of the waters, the Hyades, or spirits of the rain-clouds. It spoke not of the sky only but of Ouranos, nor of the ocean but of Poseidon, nor of the sun but of Apollo, nor of the fire but of Hephaistos, nor of the earth, but of Demeter. It is perhaps in the instance of the thunder that the anthropomorphism of primitive theology reveals itself most clearly for to savage minds the thunder could scarcely appear anything else than the voice of a living superhuman Person. Accordingly the thunder-god is a deity known to all or nearly all early mythologies. The Iroquois believe in the god Heno, who rides through the heavens on the clouds, and splits the trees of the forest with the bolts which he hurls at his enemies. The Yorubas call the same god Shango; he it is who with his thunder-clap and lightning flash casts down upon the earth, according to their fancy, the rude stone celts which they dig up out of the soil and call his axes. Among the Araucanians of Chili, he is known as Dillar; and to him as the thunder-god they pray for victory, before forming battle, and render thanks when the victory is won. This half-unconscious spiritualisation of natural phenomena is the germ of such worship as is frequently, but not correctly, held to be idolatrous. It is not to the natural object but to the spirit residing within it, that the worship is paid. "In modern times," says Mr. Tylor,* "it is among the negroes of the New Guinea coast that the clearest idea of the sea-god is to be found when the native kings, praying him not to be boisterous, would have rice and cloth, and bottles of rum, and even slaves, cast into the sea as sacrifices." The modern Parsi worships not the sun but the Sun-god, as the ancient Egyptians worshipped Ra. Traces of such sun-worship are not wanting in the Old Testament;† it was one of the forces constantly threatening the pure monotheism of Israel. From the sun and the ocean, from the thunder and the lightning, and such other powerful and impressive natural forces, the conception of spirits, innate and inherent in natural objects, came to be spread over the whole face of Nature. But it was always the spirit of the object and not the object which was worshipped. Thus Waitzt makes the following remark: "A negro who paid honour and offered food to a tree was told that the tree did not eat anything; he defended himself against the criticism by replying, 'Oh! it is not the tree which is fetish; the fetish is a spirit which is invisible, but he has incorporated himself in this tree. It is true that he cannot consume our material foods, but he enjoys the spiritual part of them, and leaves behind the material part which we see.'" But the "omnipresent religions and personal interpretation of Nature," as Grote§ calls it, so natural to primitive man, soon went a step further. It attributed to natural objects not only life and force but volition. And this, too, was the result of judging Nature by the standard of humanity. Man was conscious of will in himself; he knew that he could do things or refrain from doing them at will. He knew, too, that his fellow men could do him either good or, more *Anthropology, ch. 14, p. 360. + Deut. iv, 19; xvii, 3. II Kings xxiii, 11. |