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 consolation11. 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 M............