Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 4

Dr. Hahn remarks, "Strangely enough the Namaquas also call it |Gaunab, as they call the enemy of Tsui |Goab".* In Kolb's time, as now, the rites of the Khoi (except, apparently, their wors.h.i.+p at dawn) were performed beside cairns of stones. If we may credit Kolb, the Khoi-Khoi are not only most fanatical adorers of the mantis, but "pay a religious veneration to their saints and men of renown departed". Thunberg (1792) noticed cairn-wors.h.i.+p and heard of mantis-wors.h.i.+p. In 1803 Lichtenstein saw cairn-wors.h.i.+p. With the beginning of the present century we find in Apple-yard, Ebner and others Khoi-Khoi names for a G.o.d, which are translated "Sore-Knee" or "Wounded-Knee ".

This t.i.tle is explained as originally the name of a "doctor or sorcerer"

of repute, "invoked even after death," and finally converted into a deity. His enemy is Gaunab, an evil being, and he is wors.h.i.+pped at the cairns, below which he is believed to be buried.** About 1842 Knudsen considered that the Khoi-Khoi believed in a dead medicine-man, Heitsi Eibib, who could make rivers roll back their waves, and then walk over safely, as in the _marchen_ of most peoples. He was also, like Odin, a "shape-s.h.i.+fter," and he died several times and came to life again.***

* Page 42; compare pp. 92, 125.

** Alexander, Expedition, i 166; Hahn, op. cit., pp. 69, 50, where Moffat is quoted.

*** Hahn, p. 66.

Thus the numerous graves of Heitsi Eibib are explained by his numerous deaths. In Egypt the numerous graves of Osiris were explained by the story that he was mutilated, and each limb buried in a different place.

Probably both the Hottentot and the Egyptian legend were invented to account for the many wors.h.i.+pped cairns attributed to the same corpse.

We now reach the myths of Heitsi Eibib and Tsui |Goab collected by Dr.

Hahn himself. According to the evidence of Dr. Hahn's own eyes, the working religion of the Khoi-Khoi is "a firm belief in sorcery and the arts of living medicine-men on the one hand, and, on the other, belief in and adoration of the powers of the dead" (pp. 81, 82, 112, 113). Our author tells us that he met in the wilds a woman of the "fat" or wealthy cla.s.s going to pray at the grave and to the manes of her own father. "We Khoi-Khoi always, if we are in trouble, go and pray at the graves of our grandparents and ancestors." They also sing rude epic verses, accompanied by the dance in honour of men distinguished in the late Namaqua and Damara war. Now it is alleged by Dr. Hahn that prayers are offered at the graves of Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab, as at those of ancestors lately dead, and Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab within living memory were honoured by song and dance, exactly like the braves of the Damara war.

The obvious and natural inference is that Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab were and are regarded by their wors.h.i.+ppers as departed but still helpful ancestral warriors or medicine-men. We need not hold that they ever were actual living men; they may be merely idealised figures of Khoi-Khoi wisdom and valour. Here, as elsewhere, Animism, ghost-wors.h.i.+p, is potent, and, in proportion, theism declines.

Here Dr. Hahn offers a different explanation, founded on etymological conjecture and a philosophy of religion. According to him, the name of Tsui Goab originally meant, not wounded knee, but red dawn. The dawn was wors.h.i.+pped as a symbol or suggestion of the infinite, and only by forgetfulness and false interpretation of the original word did the Khoi-Khoi fall from a kind of pure theosophy to adoration of a presumed dead medicine-man. As Dr. Hahn's ingenious hypothesis has been already examined by us,* it is unnecessary again to discuss the philological basis of his argument.

Dr. Hahn not only heard simple and affecting prayers addressed to Tsui Goab, but learned from native informants that the G.o.d had been a chief, a warrior, wounded in his knee in battle with Gaunab, another chief, and that he had prophetic powers. He still watches the ways of men (p. 62) and punishes guilt. Universal testimony was given to the effect that Heitsi Eibib also had been a chief from the East, a prophet and a warrior. He apportioned, by blessings and curses, their present habits to many of the animals. Like Odin, he was a "shape-s.h.i.+fter," possessing the medicine-man's invariable power of taking all manner of forms. He was on one occasion born of a cow, which reminds us of a myth of Indra.

By another account he was born of a virgin who tasted a certain kind of gra.s.s. This legend is of wonderfully wide diffusion among savage and semi-civilised races.**

* Custom and Myth, pp. 197-211.

** Le Fits de la Vierge, H. de Charency, Havre, 1879. A tale of incest by Heitsi Eibib, may be compared with another in Muir's Sanskrit Texts, iv. 39.

The tales about Tsui Goab and Heitsi Eibib are chiefly narratives of combats with animals and with the evil power in a nascent dualism, Gaunab, "at first a ghost," according to Hahn (p. 85), or "certainly n.o.body else but the Night" (pp. 125, 126). Here there is some inconsistency. If we regard the good power, Tsui Goab, as the Red Dawn, we are bound to think the evil power, Gaunab, a name for the Night.

But Dr. Hahn's other hypothesis, that the evil power was originally a malevolent ghost, seems no less plausible. In either case, we have here an example of the constant mythical dualism which gives the comparatively good being his perpetual antagonist--the Loki to his Odin, the crow to his eagle-hawk. In brief, Hottentot myth is pretty plainly a reflection of Hottentot general ideas about ancestor wors.h.i.+p, ghosts, sorcerers and magicians, while, in their _religious_ aspect, Heitsi Eibib or Tsui Goab are guardians of life and of morality, fathers and friends.

A description of barbarous beliefs not less scholarly and careful than that compiled by Dr. Hahn has been published by the Rev. R. H.

Codrington.* Mr. Codrington has studied the myths of the Papuans and other natives of the Melanesian group, especially in the Solomon Islands and Banks Island. These peoples are by no means in the lowest grade of culture; they are traders in their way, builders of canoes and houses, and their society is interpenetrated by a kind of mystic hierarchy, a religious _Camorra_. The Banks Islanders** recognise two sorts of intelligent extra-natural beings--the spirits of the dead and powers which have never been human.

* Journal Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.

** Op. cit., p. 267.

The former are _Tamate_, the latter _Vui_--ghosts and _genii_, we might call them. Vuis are cla.s.sed by Mr. Codrington as "corporeal" and "incorporeal," but he thinks the corporeal Vuis have not _human_ bodies. Among corporeal Vuis the chief are the beings nearest to G.o.ds in Melanesian myths--the half G.o.d, half "culture-hero," I Qat, his eleven brothers, and his familiar and a.s.sistant, Marawa. These were members of a race anterior to that of the men of to-day, and they dwelt in Vanua Levu. Though now pa.s.sed away from the eyes of mortals, they are still invoked in prayer. The following appeal by a voyaging Banks Islander resembles the cry of the s.h.i.+pwrecked Odysseus to the friendly river:--

"Qat! Marawa! look down upon us; smooth the sea for us two, that I may go safely on the sea. Beat down for me the crests of the tide-rip; let the tide-rip settle down away from me; beat it down level that it may sink and roll away, and I may come to a quiet landing-place."

Compare the prayer of Odysseus:--

"'Hear me, O king, whosoever thou art; unto thee am I come as to one to whom prayer is made, while I flee the rebukes of Poseidon from the deep....' So spake he, and the G.o.d straightway stayed his stream and withheld his waves, and made the water smooth before him, and brought him safely to the mouth of the river."

But for Qat's supernatural power and creative exploits,* "there would be little indeed to show him other than a man". He answers almost precisely to Maui, the "the culture-hero" of New Zealand. Qat's mother either was, or, like Niobe, became a stone.

* See "Savage Myths of the Origin of Things".

He was the eldest (unlike Maui) of twelve brothers, among whom were Tongaro the Wise and Tongaro the Fool. The brothers were killed by an evil gluttonous power like Kwai Hemm and put in a food chest. Qat killed the foe and revived his brothers, as the sons of Cronus came forth alive from their father's maw. His great foe--for of course he had a foe--was Qasavara, whom he destroyed by das.h.i.+ng him against the solid firmament of sky. Qasavara is now a stone (like the serpent displayed by Zeus at Aulis*), on which sacrifices are made. Qat's chief friend is Marawa, a spider, or a Vui in the shape of a spider. The divine mythology of the Melanesians, as far as it has been recovered, is meagre. We only see members of a previous race, "magnified non-natural men," with a friendly insect working miracles and achieving rather incoherent adventures.

* Iliad, ii. 315-318.

Much on the same footing of civilisation as the Melanesians were the natives of Tonga in the first decade of this century. The Tongan religious beliefs were nearly akin to the ideas of the Samoans and of the Solomon Islanders. In place of Vuis they spoke of Hotooas (Atuas), and like the Vuis, those spiritual beings have either been purely spiritual from the beginning or have been incarnate in humanity and are now ghosts, but ghosts enjoying many of the privileges of G.o.ds. All men, however, have not souls capable of a separate existence, only the _Egi_ or n.o.bles, possess a spiritual part, which goes to Bolotoo, the land of G.o.ds and ghosts, after death, and enjoys "power similar to that of the original G.o.ds, but less".

It is open to philosophers of Mr. Herbert Spencer's school to argue that the "original G.o.ds" were once ghosts like the others, but this was not the opinion of the Tongans. They have a supreme Creator, who alone receives no sacrifice.* Both sorts of G.o.ds appear occasionally to mankind--the primitive deities particularly affect the forms of "lizards, porpoises and a species of water-snake, hence those animals are much respected".**

* Mariner, ii. 205.

** Mariner's Tonga Islands, Edin., 1827, ii 99-101.

Whether each stock of Tongans had its own animal incarnation of its special G.o.d does not appear from Mariner's narrative. The G.o.ds took human morality under their special protection, punis.h.i.+ng the evil and rewarding the good, in this life only, not in the land of the dead.

When the comfortable doctrine of eternal punishment was expounded to the Tongans by Mariner, the poor heathen merely remarked that it "was very bad indeed for the Papalangies" or foreigners. Their untutored minds, in their pagan darkness, had dreamed of no such thing. The Tongans themselves are descended from some G.o.ds who set forth on a voyage of discovery out of Bolotoo. Landing on Tonga, these adventurers were much pleased with the island, and determined to stay there; but in a few days certain of them died. They had left the deathless coasts for a world where death is native, and, as they had eaten of the food of the new realm, they would never escape the condition of mortality. This has been remarked as a widespread belief. Persephone became enthralled to Hades after tasting the mystic pomegranate of the underworld.

In Samoa Siati may not eat of the G.o.d's meat, nor Wainamoinen in Pohjola, nor Thomas the Rhymer in Fairyland. The exploring G.o.ds from Bolotoo were in the same way condemned to become mortal and people the world with mortal beings, and all about them should be _mea mama_, subject to decay and death.* It is remarkable, if correctly reported, that the secondary G.o.ds, or ghosts of n.o.bles, cannot reappear as lizards, porpoises and water-snakes; this is the privilege of the original G.o.ds only, and may be an a.s.sumption by them of a conceivably totemistic aspect. The nearest approach to the idea of a permanent supreme deity is contained in the name of Tali y Toobo--"wait there, Toobo"--a name which conveys the notion perhaps of permanence or eternity. "He is a great chief from the top of the sky to the bottom of the earth."**

* Mariner, ii. 115.

** Ibid., ii. 205.

He is invoked both in war and peace, not locally, but "for the general good of the natives". He is the patron, not of any special stock or family, but of the house in which the royal power is lodged for the time. Alone of G.o.ds he is unpropitiated by food or libation, indicating that he is not evolved out of a hungry ghost. Another G.o.d, Toobo Toty or Toobo the Mariner, may be a kind of Poseidon. He preserves canoes from perils at sea. On the death of the daughter of Finow, the king in Mariner's time, that monarch was so indignant that he threatened to kill the priest of Toobo Toty. As the G.o.d is believed to inspire the priest, this was certainly a feasible way of getting at the G.o.d. But Toobo Toty was beforehand with Finow, who died himself before he could carry the war into Bolotoo.* This Finow was a sceptic; he allowed that there were G.o.ds, because he himself had occasionally been inspired by them; "but what the priests tell us about their power over mankind I believe to be all false". Thus early did the conflict of Church and State declare itself in Tonga. Human sacrifices were a result of priestcraft in Tonga, as in Greece. Even the man set to kill a child of Toobo Toa's was moved by pity, and exclaimed _O iaooe chi vale!_ ("poor little innocent!") The priest demanded this sacrifice to allay the wrath of the G.o.ds for the slaying of a man in consecrated ground.** Such are the religious ideas of Tonga; of their mythology but little has reached us, and that is under suspicion of being coloured by acquaintance with the stories of missionaries.

* Mariner, i. 307, it 107.

** Compare the ayos of the Alcmaenidae.

The Maoris, when first discovered by Europeans, were in a comparatively advanced stage of barbarism. Their society had definite ranks, from that of the Rangatira, the chief with a long pedigree, to the slave. Their religious hymns, of great antiquity, have been collected and translated by Grey, Taylor, Bastian and others. The mere possession of such hymns, accurately preserved for an unknown number of years by oral tradition, proves that the mythical notions of the Maoris have pa.s.sed through the minds of professed bards and early physical speculators. The verses, as Bastian has observed (_Die Heilige Sage der Polynesier_), display a close parallel to the roughest part of the early Greek cosmogonies, as expounded by Hesiod. Yet in the Maori hymns there are metaphysical ideas and processes which remind one more of Herac.l.i.tus than of Hesiod, and perhaps more of Hegel than of either. Whether we are to regard the abstract conceptions or the rude personal myths of G.o.ds such as A, the Beyond All, as representing the earlier development of Maori thought, whether one or the other element is borrowed, not original, are questions which theorists of different schools will settle in their own way to their own satisfaction. Some hymns represent the beginning of things from a condition of thought, and Socrates might have said of the Maori poets as he did of Anaxagoras, that compared with other early thinkers, they are "like sober men among drunkards". Thus one hymn of the origins runs thus:--

From the conception the increase, From the increase the swelling, From the swelling the thought, From the thought the remembrance, From the remembrance the desire.

The word became fruitful, It dwelt with the feeble glimmering, It brought forth Night.

From the nothing the begetting, It produced the atmosphere which is above us.

The atmosphere above dwelt with the glowing sky, Forthwith was produced the sun.

Then the moon sprang forth.

They were thrown up above as the chief eyes of heaven, Then the heavens became light.

The sky which floats above dwelt with Hawaiki,*

And produced (certain islands).

* The islands of Hawaiki, being then the only land known, is put for Papa, the earth.

Then follow genealogies of G.o.ds, down to the chief in whose family this hymn was traditional.*

* Taylor, New Zealand, pp. 110-112.

Other hymns of the same character, full of such metaphysical and abstract conceptions as "the proceeding from the nothing," are quoted at great length.

These extracts are obviously speculative rather than in any sense mythological The element of myth just shows itself when we are told that the sky dwelt with the earth and produced certain islands. But myth of a familiar character is very fully represented among the Maoris. Their mythical G.o.ds, though "mixed up with the spirits of ancestors," are great natural powers, first Heaven and Earth, Rangi and Papa, the parents of all. These are conceived as having originally been united in such a close embrace, the Heaven lying on the Earth, that between their frames all was darkness, and in darkness the younger G.o.ds, Atua, O-te-po, their children, were obliged to dwell. These children or younger G.o.ds (answering to the Cronidae) were the G.o.d of war (Tumatauenga), the forest-G.o.d (Tane Mahuta), in shape a tree, the wind-G.o.d (Tawhiri Matea), the G.o.ds of cultivated and natural fruits, the G.o.d of ocean (Tangaroa). These G.o.ds were unable to endure the dungeon and the darkness of their condition, so they consulted together and said: "Let us seek means whereby to destroy Heaven and Earth, or to separate them from each other". The counsel of Tane Mahuta prevailed: "Let one go upwards and become a stranger to us; let the other remain below and be a parent to us". Finally, Tane Mahuta rent asunder Heaven and Earth, pus.h.i.+ng Heaven up where he has ever since remained. The wind-G.o.d followed his father, abode with him in the open s.p.a.ces of the sky, and thence makes war on the trees of the forest-G.o.d, his enemy.

Tangaroa went, like Poseidon, to the great deep, and his children, the reptiles and fishes, clove part to the waters, part to the dry land. The war-G.o.d, Tu, was more of a human being than the other G.o.ds, though his "brethren" are plants, fish and reptiles. Still, Tu is not precisely the first man of New Zealand.