CHAPTER XVI: THE IDEAS OF SUPERNATURAL AGENTS.

§ 116. Specialized as they are in correspondence with our thoughts, our words do not represent truly the thoughts of the savage; and often entirely misrepresent them. The supernatural pre-supposes the natural; and until there has been reached that idea of orderly causation which we call natural, there can exist no such idea as we imply by supernatural. I am obliged to use the word, however, in default of a better; but the reader must be cautioned against ascribing to the primitive man a conception like that which the word gives to us.

This premised, let us, so far as we can, picture the imaginary environment the primitive man makes for himself, by the interpretations described in the last four chapters. Inconsistent in detail as are the notions he forms concerning surrounding actions, they are, in their ensemble, consistent with the notions that have been set forth as necessarily generated in him.

§ 117. In every tribe, a death from time to time adds another ghost to the many ghosts of those who died before. We have seen that, originally, these ghosts are thought of as close at hand—haunting the old home, lingering near the place of burial, wandering about in the adjacent bush. Continually accumulating, they form a surrounding population; Edition: current; Page: [219] usually invisible, but some of them occasionally seen. Here are a few illustrations.

By Australians the supernatural beings thus derived are supposed to be everywhere: the face of the country swarms with them—thickets, watering-places, rocks. The Veddahs, who trust in “the shades of their ancestors and their children,” “believe that the air is peopled with spirits, that every rock and every tree, every forest and every hill, in short, every feature of nature, has its genius loci.” The Tasmanians imagine “a host of malevolent spirits and mischievous goblins” in caverns, forests, clefts, mountain-tops. Where burial within the house prevails, the ghosts of the dead are conceived to be at the elbows of the living; and where, as among the aborigines of the Amazons, “some of the large houses have more than a hundred graves in them,” they must be thought of as ever jostling their descendants. “To a Karen, the world is more thickly peopled with spirits than it is with men. . . . The spirits of the departed dead crowd around him.” Similarly the Tahitians “imagined they lived in a world of spirits, which surrounded them night and day, watching every action.” Here regarded as friendly, and here as workers of mischief, the ancestral spirits are, in some cases, driven away, as by the Nicobar people—

There is a like custom in the Maldive islands; and some of the Indians of California annually expel the ghosts which have accumulated during the year.

These multitudinous disembodied spirits are agents ever Edition: current; Page: [220] available, as conceived antecedents to all occurrences needing explanation. It is not requisite that their identification as ghosts should continue in a distinct form: many of them are sure to lose this character. The swarms of demons by whom the Jews thought themselves environed, while regarded by some as the spirits of the wicked dead, readily came to be regarded by others as the offspring of the fallen angels and the daughters of men. When the genealogies of an accumulating host have been lost, there remains nothing to resist any suggested theory respecting their origin. But though the Arab who thinks the desert is so thickly peopled with spirits that on throwing anything away he asks the forgiveness of those which may be struck, probably does not now regard them as the wandering doubles of the dead; it is clear that, given the wandering doubles of the dead, supposed by the primitive man to be everywhere around, and we have the potentiality of countless supernatural agencies capable of indefinite variation.

§ 118. Hence the naturalness, and, indeed, the inevitableness, of those interpretations which the savage gives of surrounding phenomena. With the development of the ghost-theory, there arises an easy way of accounting for all those changes which the heavens and earth hourly exhibit. Clouds that gather and presently vanish, shooting stars that appear and disappear, sudden darkenings of the water’s surface by a breeze, animal-metamorphoses, transmutations of substance, storms, earthquakes, eruptions—all of them are now understood. These beings to whom is ascribed the power of making themselves visible and invisible at will, and to whose other powers no limits are known, are omnipresent. Explaining, as their agency seems to do, all unexpected changes, their own existence becomes further verified. No other causes for such changes are known, or can be conceived; therefore these souls of the dead must be the causes; therefore the survival of souls is manifest: Edition: current; Page: [221] a circular reasoning which suffices many besides savages.

The interpretations of nature which precede scientific interpretations, are thus the best that can then be framed. If by the Karens “unaccountable sounds and sights in the jungles” are, as Mason says, ascribed to the ghosts of the wicked, the Karens do but assume an origin which, in the absence of generalized knowledge, is the only imaginable origin. If, according to Bastian, the Nicobar people attribute to evil spirits the unlucky events they cannot explain by ordinary causes, they are simply falling back on such remaining causes as they can conceive. Livingstone names certain rocks which, having been intensely heated by the sun, and then suddenly cooled externally in the evening, break with loud reports; and these reports the natives set down to evil spirits. To what else should they set them down? Uncivilized men are far removed from the conception that a stone may break from unequal contraction; and in the absence of this conception, what assignable cause of breaking is there, but one of these mischievous demons everywhere at hand? In his account of the Danákil, Harris tells us that “no whirlwind ever sweeps across the path without being pursued by a dozen savages with drawn creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast.” Ludicrous as this notion appears, we have but to remember that the physical interpretation of a sand-whirlwind cannot be framed by the savage, to see that the only conceivable interpretation is that which he gives. Occasionally, too, his experiences suggest that such agencies are multitudinous, and everywhere present. Describing a tropical scene, Humboldt says—“the surface of these sands, heated by the rays of the sun, seems to be undulating, like the surface of a liquid . . . the sun animates the landscape, and gives mobility to the sandy plain, to the trunks of trees, and to the rocks that project into the sea like promontories.” What Edition: current; Page: [222] shakes the tree-trunks and makes the rocks oscillate? There is no alternative but to assume invisible beings scattered about everywhere. By savages these appearances cannot be understood as illusions caused by refraction.

As one of the above examples shows, the ghosts of the dead are in comparatively early stages the assigned agents for unusual phenomena; and there are other such examples. Thomson says the Araucanians think tempests are caused by the fights which the spirits of their countrymen have with their enemies. Such interpretations differ from the interpretations of more advanced races, only by presenting the individualities of dead friends and foes in their original forms: the eventful fading of these individualities leaves notions of personal agencies less definite in kind. An eddy in the river, where floating sticks are whirled round and engulfed, is not far from the place where one of the tribe was drowned and never seen again. What more manifest, then, than that the double of this drowned man, malicious as the unburied ever are, dwells thereabouts, and pulls these things under the surface—nay, in revenge, seizes and drags down persons who venture near? When those who knew the drowned man are all dead—when, after generations, the details of the story, thrust aside by more recent stories, have been lost—and especially when there comes some conquering tribe, in whose past history the local stories have no roots; there survives only the belief in a water-demon haunting the place.* And so throughout. There is nothing Edition: current; Page: [223] to maintain in tradition the likenesses between the ghosts and the individuals they were derived from; and along with innumerable divergences, there comes not only a fading of individual traits, but also at length a fading of human traits. Varieties pass into species, and genera, and orders, of supernatural beings.

§ 119. Of course, if the ghosts of the dead, passing gradually into less distinct but still personal forms, are thus the agents supposed to work all the notable effects in the surrounding world; they are also the agents supposed to work notable effects in the affairs of men. Ever at hand and moved by amity or enmity, it is incredible that they should not interfere with human actions. The soul of a dead foe is on the watch to cause an accident; the soul of a late relative is ready to help and to guard if in good humour, or, if offended, to make something go wrong.

Hence explanations, universally applicable, of successes and failures. Among all peoples such explanations have prevailed: differing only in the extent to which the aiding or hindering spirits have lost the human character. Low down we have the Veddah, who looks to the shade of his dead parent or child to give him success in the chase, and ascribes a bad shot to the lack of an invocation; we have the Australian who, “if a man tumbles out of a tree and breaks his neck,” thinks that “his life has been charmed away by the Boyala-men of another tribe;” we have the Ashantees, who “believe that the spirits of their departed relatives exercise a guardian care over them,” and that “the ghosts of departed enemies are . . . bad spirits,” who work mischief. Higher up we have, among the Homeric heroes, feats of arms set down to the assistance of the supernatural beings who join in the battle. With Hector “one at least of the gods is ever present, who wards off death;” and “Menelaus conquered by Minerva’s aid.” Diomed is unscathed because an immortal “has turned into another Edition: current; Page: [224] course the swift shaft just about to hit him;” Paris, dragged by the helmet, would have been lost had not Venus, “who quickly perceived it, broke for him the thong;” and Idæus escaped only because “Vulcan snatched him away.” Be it the Araucanian who ascribes success to the aid of his particular fairy; be it the African chief Livingstone names, who thought he had ensured the death of an elephant they were attacking by emptying his snuff-box as an offering to the Barimo; be it the Greek whose spear is well fixed in a Trojan’s side by the guiding hand of his favourite deity; be it the Jew’s ministering angel or the Catholic’s patron saint; there is identity in essentials, and only more or less of difference in form. The question is solely how far this evolution of the ghosts of the dead into supernatural agents has gone.

§ 120. Lastly, and chiefly, we have to note the fact that this machinery of causation which the primitive man is inevitably led to frame for himself, fills his mind to the exclusion of any other machinery. This hypothesis of ghost-agency gains a settled occupation of the field, long before there is either the power or the opportunity of gathering together and organizing the experiences which yield the hypothesis of physical-force-agency. Even among ourselves, with our vast accumulation of definite knowledge, and our facilities for diffusing it, the displacement of an old doctrine by a new one is difficult. Judge then its difficulty where the few facts known remain ungeneralized, unclassified, unmeasured; where the very notions of order, cause, law, are absent; where criticism and scepticism are but incipient; and where there is not even the curiosity needful to prompt inquiry. If, parodying a common adage, we may fitly say that prepossession is nine points of belief—if this is so even in the relatively-plastic minds of the civilized; how many points of belief must it be in the relatively-rigid minds of the uncivilized?

Hence the surprise commonly expressed at these primitive interpretations is an unwarranted surprise. If, as Mr. St. John tells us, the Dyaks never take the natural explanation of any phenomena, such as an accident, but always “fly to their superstitions;” they fly to the only kind of explanation which yet exists for them. The absurdity is in supposing that the uncivilized man possesses at the outset the idea of “natural explanation.” Only as societies grow, arts multiply, experiences accumulate, and constant relations of phenomena become recognized, registered, and familiar, does the notion of natural explanation become possible.

And now, having seen how the primitive man is led to think of the activities in his environment as controlled by the spirits of the dead, and by spirits more or less differentiated from them, let us observe how he is similarly led to think of such spirits as controlling the activities within his body and within the bodies of other men.