The origin of a belief in GOD beyond the ken of history and of speculation — Sketch of conjectural theories — Two elements in all beliefs, whether of backward or civilised races — The Mythical and the Religious — These may be coeval, or either may be older than the other — Difficulty of study — The current anthropological theory — Stated objections to the theory — Gods and spirits — Suggestion that savage religion is borrowed from Europeans — Reply to Mr. Tylor’s arguments on this head — The morality of savages.

“The question of the origin of a belief in Deity does not come within the scope of a strictly historical inquiry. No man can watch the idea of GOD in the making or in the beginning. We are acquainted with no race whose beginning does not lie far back in the unpenetrated past. Even on the hypothesis that the natives of Australia, for example, were discovered in a state of culture more backward than that of other known races, yet the institutions and ideas of the Australians must have required for their development an incalculable series of centuries. The notions of man about the Deity, man’s religious sentiments and his mythical narratives, must be taken as we find them. There have been, and are, many theories as to the origin of the conception of a supernatural being or beings, concerned with the fortunes of mankind, and once active in the making of the earth and its inhabitants. There is the hypothesis of an original divine tradition, darkened by the smoke of foolish mortal fancies. There is the hypothesis of an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced to man by the very nature of his knowledge and perceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise a finite and an infinite. There is the hypothesis that gods were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, seeking in his early speculations for the causes of things, and conscious of his own powers as an active cause, projected his own shadow on the mists of the unknown, and peopled the void with figures of magnified non-natural men, his own parents and protectors, and the makers of many of the things in the world.

“Since the actual truth cannot be determined by observation and experiment, the question as to the first germs of the divine conception must here be left unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and examine apart the two chief elements in the earliest as in the latest ideas of Godhead. Among the lowest and most backward, as among the most advanced races, there coexist the MYTHICAL and the RELIGIOUS elements in belief. The rational factor (or what approves itself to us as the rational factor) is visible in religion; the irrational is prominent in myth. The Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in hours of danger and necessity ‘yearns after the gods,’ and has present in his heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element. The same man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always traces back to the belief in a power that is benign and works for righteousness. Myth, even in Homer or the Rig-Veda, perpetually falls back on the old stock of absurd and immoral divine adventures.1

“It would be rash, in the present state of knowledge, to pronounce that the germ of the serious Homeric sense of the justice and power of the Divinity is earlier or later than the germ of the Homeric stories of gods disguised as animals, or imprisoned by mortals, or kicked out of Olympus. The rational and irrational aspects of mythology and religion may be of coeval antiquity for all that is certainly known, or either of them, in the dark backward of mortal experience, may have preceded the other. There is probably no religion nor mythology which does not offer both aspects to the student. But it is the part of advancing civilisation to adorn and purify the rational element, and to subordinate and supersede the irrational element, as far as religious conservatism, ritual and priestly dogma will permit.”

Such were the general remarks with which this chapter opened in the original edition of the present work. But reading, reflection and certain additions to the author’s knowledge of facts, have made it seem advisable to state, more fully and forcibly than before, that, in his opinion, not only the puzzling element of myth, but the purer element of a religious belief sanctioning morality is derived by civilised people from a remote past of savagery. It is also necessary to draw attention to a singular religious phenomena, a break, or “fault,” as geologists call it, in the religious strata. While the most backward savages, in certain cases, present the conception of a Being who sanctions ethics, and while that conception recurs at a given stage of civilisation, it appears to fade, or even to disappear in some conditions of barbarism. Among some barbaric peoples, such as the Zulus, and the Red Indians of French Canada when first observed, as among some Polynesians and some tribes of Western and Central Africa little trace of a supreme being is found, except a name, and that name is even occasionally a matter of ridicule. The highest religious conception has been reached, and is generally known, yet the Being conceived of as creative is utterly neglected, while ghosts, or minor gods, are served and adored. To this religious phenomenon (if correctly observed) we must attempt to assign a cause. For this purpose it is necessary to state again what may be called the current or popular anthropological theory of the evolution of Gods.

That theory takes varying shapes. In the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer we find a pure Euhemerism. Gods are but ghosts of dead men, raised to a higher and finally to the highest power. In the somewhat analogous but not identical system of Mr. Tylor, man first attains to the idea of spirit by reflection on various physical, psychological and psychical experiences, such as sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, hallucinations, breath and death, and he gradually extends the conception of soul or ghost till all nature is peopled with spirits. Of these spirits one is finally promoted to supremacy, where the conception of a supreme being occurs. In the lowest faiths there is said, on this theory, to be no connection, or very little connection, between religion and morality. To supply a religious sanction of morals is the work of advancing thought.2

This current hypothesis is, confessedly, “animistic,” in Mr. Tylor’s phrase, or, in Mr. Spencer’s terminology, it is “the ghost theory”. The human soul, says Mr. Tylor, has been the model on which all man’s ideas of spiritual beings, from “the tiniest elf” to “the heavenly Creator and ruler of the world, the Great Spirit,” have been framed.3 Thus it has been necessary for Mr. Tylor and for Mr. Spencer to discover first an origin of man’s idea of his own soul, and that supposed origin in psychological, physical and psychical experiences is no doubt adequate. By reflection on these facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached, though the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor may contain points as yet unexplained by Materialism. From these sources are derived all really “animistic” gods, all that from the first partake of the nature of hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though in certain cases that hunger may have been transferred, we surmise, by worshippers to gods not ORIGINALLY animistic.

In answer to this theory of an animistic or ghostly origin of all gods, it must first be observed that all gods are not necessarily, it would seem, of animistic origin. Among certain of the lowest savages, although they believe in ghosts, the animistic conception, the spiritual idea, is not attached to the relatively supreme being of their faith. He is merely a powerful BEING, unborn, and not subject to death. The purely metaphysical question “was he a ghost?” does not seem always to have been asked. Consequently there is no logical reason why man’s idea of a Maker should not be prior to man’s idea that there are such things as souls, ghosts and spirits. Therefore the animistic theory is not necessary as material for the “god-idea”. We cannot, of course, prove that the “god-idea” was historically prior to the “ghost-idea,” for we know no savages who have a god and yet are ignorant of ghosts. But we can show that the idea of God may exist, in germ, without explicitly involving the idea of spirit. Thus gods MAY be prior in evolution to ghosts, and therefore the animistic theory of the origin of gods in ghosts need not necessarily be accepted.

In the first place, the original evolution of a god out of a ghost need not be conceded, because in perhaps all known savage theological philosophy the God, the Maker and Master, is regarded as a being who existed before death entered the world. Everywhere, practically speaking, death is looked on as a comparatively late intruder. He came not only after God was active, but after men and beasts had populated the world. Scores of myths accounting for this invasion of death have been collected all over the world.4 Thus the relatively supreme being, or beings, of religion are looked on as prior to Death, therefore, not as ghosts. They are sometimes expressly distinguished as “original gods” from other gods who are secondary, being souls of chiefs. Thus all Tongan gods are Atua, but all Atua are not “original gods”.5 The word Atua, according to Mr. White, is “A-tu-a”. “A” was the name given to the author of the universe, and signifies: “Am the unlimited in power,” “The Conception,” “the Leader,” “the Beyond All”. “Tua” means “Beyond that which is most distant,” “Behind all matter,” and “Behind every action”. Clearly these conceptions are not more mythical (indeed A does not seem to occur in the myths), nor are they more involved in ghosts, than the unknown absolute of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Yet the word Atua denotes gods who are recognised as ghosts of chiefs, no less than it denotes the supreme existence.6 These ideas are the metaphysical theology of a race considerably above the lowest level. They lend no assistance to a theory that A was, or was evolved out of, a human ghost, and he is not found in Maori MYTHOLOGY as far as our knowledge goes. But, among the lowest known savages, the Australians, we read that “the Creator was a gigantic black, once on earth, now among the stars”. This is in Gippsland; the deities of the Fuegians and the Blackfoot Indians are also Beings, anthropomorphic, unborn and undying, like Mangarrah, the creative being of the Larrakeah tribe in Australia. “A very good man called Mangarrah lives in the sky. . . . He made everything” (blacks excepted). He never dies.7 The Melanesian Vui “never were men,” were “something different,” and “were NOT ghosts”. It is as a Being, not as a Spirit, that the Kurnai deity Munganngaur (Our Father) is described.8 In short, though Europeans often speak of these divine beings of low savages as “spirits,” it does not appear that the natives themselves advance here the metaphysical idea of spirit. These gods are just BEINGS, anthropomorphic, or (in myth and fable), very often bestial, “theriomorphic”.9 It is manifest that a divine being envisaged thus need not have been evolved out of the theory of spirits or ghosts, and may even have been prior to the rise of the belief in ghosts.

Again, these powerful, or omnipotent divine beings are looked on as guardians of morality, punishers of sin, rewarders of righteousness, both in this world and in a future life, in places where ghosts, though believed in, ARE NOT WORSHIPPED, NOR IN RECEIPT OF SACRIFICE, and where, great grandfathers being forgotten, ancestral ghosts can scarcely swell into gods. This occurs among Andamanese, Fuegians and Australians, therefore, among non-ghost-worshipping races, ghosts cannot have developed into deities who are not even necessarily spirits. These gods, again, do not receive sacrifice, and thus lack the note of descent from hungry food-craving ghosts. In Australia, indeed, while ghosts are not known to receive any offerings, “the recent custom of providing food for it”— the dead body of a friend —“is derided by the intelligent old aborigines as ‘white fellow’s gammon’”.10

The Australians possess no chiefs like “Vich Ian Vohr or Chingachgook” whose ghosts might be said to swell into supreme moral deities. “Headmen” they have, leaders of various degrees of authority, but no Vich Ian Vohr, no semi-sacred representative of the tribe.11 Nor are the ghosts of the Headmen known to receive any particular posthumous attention or worship. Thus it really seems impossible to show proof that Australian gods grew out of Australian ghosts, a subject to which we shall return.

Some supporters of the current theory therefore fall back on the hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate.12 Chiefs, it is argued, or kings, they once had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor have correctly argued that the soil of Australia has not yet yielded so much as a fragment of native pottery, nor any trace of native metal work, not a vestige of stone buildings occurs, nor of any work beyond the present native level of culture, unless we reckon weirs for fish-catching. “The Australian boomerang,” writes Mr. Tylor, “has been claimed as derived from some hypothetical high culture, whereas the transition-stages through which it is connected with the club are to be observed in its own country, while no civilised race possesses the weapon.”13

Therefore the Australian, with his boomerang, represents no degeneration but advance on his ancestors, who had not yet developed the boomerang out of the club. If the excessively complex nature of Australian rules of prohibited degrees be appealed to as proof of degeneration from the stage in which they were evolved, we reply that civilisation everywhere tends not to complicate but to simplify such rules, as it also notoriously simplifies the forms of language.

The Australian people, when discovered, were only emerging from palaeolithic culture, while the neighbouring Tasmanians were frankly palaeolithic.14 Far from degenerating, the Australians show advance when they supersede their beast or other totem by an eponymous human hero.15 The eponymous hero, however, changed with each generation, so that no one name was fixed as that of tribal father, later perhaps to become a tribal god. We find several tribes in which the children now follow the FATHER’S class, and thus paternal kin takes the place of the usual early savage method of reckoning kinship by the mother’s side, elsewhere prevalent in Australia. In one of these tribes, dwelling between the Glenelg and Mount Napier, headmanship is hereditary, but nothing is said of any worship of the ghosts of chiefs. All this social improvement denotes advance on the usual Australian standard.16 Of degeneration (except when produced recently by European vices and diseases) I know no trace in Australia. Their highest religious conceptions, therefore, are not to be disposed of as survivals of a religion of the ghosts of such chiefs as the Australians are not shown ever to have recognised. The “God idea” in Australia, or among the Andamanese, must have some other source than the Ghost-Theory. This is all the more obvious because not only are ghosts not worshipped by the Australians, but also the divine beings who are alleged to form links between the ghost and the moral god are absent. There are no departmental gods, as of war, peace, the chase, love, and so forth. Sun, sky and earth are equally unworshipped. There is nothing in religion between a Being, on one hand (with a son or sons), and vague mischievous spirits, boilyas or mrarts, and ghosts (who are not worshipped), on the other hand. The friends of the idea that the God is an ancient evolution from the ghost of such a chief as is not proved to have existed, must apparently believe that the intermediate stages in religious evolution, departmental gods, nature gods and gods of polytheism in general once existed in Australia, and have all been swept away in a deluge of degeneration. That deluge left in religion a moral, potently active Father and Judge. Now that conception is considerably above the obsolescent belief in an otiose god which is usually found among barbaric races of the type from which the Australians are said to have degenerated. There is no proof of degeneracy, and, if degeneration has occurred, why has it left just the kind of deity who, in the higher barbaric culture, is not commonly found? Clearly this attempt to explain the highest aspect of Australian religion by an undemonstrated degeneration is an effort of despair.

While the current theory thus appears to break down over the deities of certain Australian tribes and of other low savages to be more particularly described later, it is not more successful in dealing with what we have called the “fault” or break in the religious strata of higher races. The nature of that “fault” may thus be described: While the deities of several low savage peoples are religiously regarded as guardians and judges of conduct both in this life and in the next, among higher barbarians they are often little, or not at all, interested in conduct. Again, while among Australians, and Andamanese, and Fuegians, there is hardly a verifiable trace, if any trace there be, of sacrifice to any divine being, among barbarians the gods beneath the very highest are in receipt even of human sacrifice. Even among barbarians the highest deity is very rarely worshipped with sacrifice. Through various degrees he is found to lose all claim on worship, and even to become a mere name, and finally a jest and a mockery. Meanwhile ancestral ghosts, and gods framed on the same lines as ghosts, receive sacrifice of food and of human victims. Once more, the high gods of low savages are not localised, not confined to any temple or region. But the gods of higher barbarians (the gods beneath the highest), are localised in this way, as occasionally even the highest god also is.

All this shows that, among advancing barbarians, the gods, if they started from the estate of gods among savages on the lowest level, become demoralised, limited, conditioned, relegated to an otiose condition, and finally deposed, till progressive civilisation, as in Greece, reinstates or invents purer and more philosophic conceptions, without being able to abolish popular and priestly myth and ritual.

Here, then, is a flaw or break in the strata of religion. What was the cause of this flaw? We answer, the evolution, through ghosts, of “animistic” gods who retained the hunger and selfishness of these ancestral spirits whom the lowest savages are not known to worship.

The moral divine beings of these lowest races, beings (when religiously regarded) unconditioned, in need of no gift that man can give, are not to be won by offerings of food and blood. Of such offerings ghosts, and gods modelled on ghosts, are notoriously in need. Strengthened and propitiated by blood and sacrifice (not offered to the gods of low savages), the animistic deities will become partisans of their adorers, and will either pay no regard to the morals of their worshippers, or will be easily bribed to forgive sins. Here then is, ethically speaking, a flaw in the strata of religion, a flaw found in the creeds of ghost-worshipping barbarians, but not of non-ghost-worshipping savages. A crowd of venal, easy-going, serviceable deities has now been evolved out of ghosts, and Animism is on its way to supplant or overlay a rude early form of theism. Granting the facts, we fail to see how they are explained by the current theory which makes the highest god the latest in evolution from a ghost. That theory wrecks itself again on the circumstance that, whereas the tribal or national highest divine being, as latest in evolution, ought to be the most potent, he is, in fact, among barbaric races, usually the most disregarded. A new idea, of course, is not necessarily a powerful or fashionable idea. It may be regarded as a “fad,” or a heresy, or a low form of dissent. But, when universally known to and accepted by a tribe or people, then it must be deemed likely to possess great influence. But that is not the case; and among barbaric tribes the most advanced conception of deity is the least regarded, the most obsolete.

An excellent instance of the difference between the theory here advocated, and that generally held by anthropologists, may be found in Mr. Abercromby’s valuable work, Pre-and Proto-Historic Finns, i. 150-154. The gods, and other early ideas, says Mr. Abercromby, “could in no sense be considered as supernatural”. We shall give examples of gods among the races “nearest the beginning,” whose attributes of power and knowledge can not, by us at least, be considered other than “supernatural”. “The gods” (in this hypothesis) “were so human that they could be forced to act in accordance with the wishes of their worshippers, and could likewise be punished.” These ideas, to an Australian black, or an Andamanese, would seem dangerously blasphemous. These older gods “resided chiefly in trees, wells, rivers and animals”. But many gods of our lowest known savages live “beyond the sky”. Mr. Abercromby supposes the sky god to be of later evolution, and to be worshipped after man had exhausted “the helpers that seemed nearest at hand . . . in the trees and waters at his very door”. Now the Australian black has not a door, nor has he gods of any service to him in the “trees and waters,” though sprites may lurk in such places for mischief. But in Mr. Abercromby’s view, some men turned at last to the sky-god, “who in time would gain a large circle of worshippers”. He would come to be thought omnipotent, omniscient, the Creator. This notion, says Mr. Abercromby, “must, if this view is correct, be of late origin”. But the view is not correct. The far-seeing powerful Maker beyond the sky is found among the very backward races who have not developed helpers nearer man, dwelling round what would be his door, if door he was civilised enough to possess. Such near neighbouring gods, of human needs, capable of being bullied, or propitiated by sacrifice, are found in races higher than the lowest, who, for their easily procurable aid, have allowed the Maker to sink into an otiose god, or a mere name. Mr. Abercromby unconsciously proves our case by quoting the example of a Samoyede. This man knew a Sky-god, Num; that conception was familiar to him. He also knew a familiar spirit. On Mr. Abercromby’s theory he should have resorted for help to the Sky-god, not to the sprite. But he did the reverse: he said, “I cannot approach Num, he is too far away; if I could reach him I should not beseech thee (the familiar spirit), but should go myself; but I cannot”. For this precise reason, people who have developed the belief in accessible affable spirits go to them, with a spell to constrain, or a gift to bribe, and neglect, in some cases almost forget, their Maker. But He is worshipped by low savages, who do not propitiate ghosts and who have no gods in wells and trees, close at hand. It seems an obvious inference that the greater God is the earlier evolved.

These are among the difficulties of the current anthropological theory. There is, however, a solution by which the weakness of the divine conception, its neglected, disused aspect among barbaric races, might be explained by anthropologists, without regarding it as an obsolescent form of a very early idea. This solution is therefore in common use. It is applied to the deity revealed in the ancient mysteries of the Australians, and it is employed in American and African instances.

The custom is to say that the highest divine being of American or African native peoples has been borrowed from Europeans, and is, especially, a savage refraction from the God of missionaries. If this can be proved, the shadowy, practically powerless “Master of Life” of certain barbaric peoples, will have degenerated from the Christian conception, because of that conception he will be only a faint unsuccessful refraction. He has been introduced by Europeans, it is argued, but is not in harmony with his new environment, and so is “half-remembered and half forgot”.

The hypothesis of borrowing admits of only one answer, but that answer should be conclusive. If we can discover, say in North America, a single instance in which the supreme being occurs, while yet he cannot possibly be accounted for by any traceable or verifiable foreign influence, then the burden of proof, in other cases, falls on the opponent. When he urges that other North American supreme beings were borrowed, we can reply that our crucial example shows that this need not be the fact. To prove that it is the fact, in his instances, is then his business. It is obvious that for information on this subject we must go to the reports of the earliest travellers who knew the Red Indians well. We must try to get at gods behind any known missionary efforts. Mr. Tylor offers us the testimony of Heriot, about 1586, that the natives of Virginia believed in many gods, also in one chief god, “who first made other principal gods, and then the sun, moon and stars as petty gods”.17 Whence could the natives of Virginia have borrowed this notion of a Creator before 1586? If it is replied, in the usual way, that they developed him upwards out of sun, moon and star gods, other principal gods, and finally reached the idea of the Creator, we answer that the idea of the Maker is found where these alleged intermediate stages are NOT found, as in Australia. In Virginia then, as in Victoria, a Creator may have been evolved in some other way than that of gradual ascent from ghosts, and may have been, as in Australia and elsewhere, prior to verifiable ghost-worship. Again, in Virginia at our first settlement, the native priests strenuously resisted the introduction of Christianity. They were content with their deity, Ahone, “the great God who governs all the world, and makes the sun to shine, creating the moon and stars his companions. . . . The good and peaceable God . . . needs not to be sacrificed unto, for he intendeth all good unto them.” This good Creator, without sacrifice, among a settled agricultural barbaric race sacrificing to other gods and ghosts, manifestly cannot be borrowed from the newly arrived religion of Christianity, which his priests, according to the observer, vigorously resisted. Ahone had a subordinate deity, magisterial in functions, “looking into all men’s actions” and punishing the same, when evil. To THIS god sacrifices WERE made, and if his name, Okeus, is derived from Oki = “spirit,” he was, of course, an animistic ghost-evolved deity. Anthrop............