" Therefore he is caUed upon first, and it is said, ' So-and-so, son of 8o-and-8o/ he being landed by his land-giving names; then they prooeed to his father, and he too is mentioned in connection with the disease: and BO in time they come to the last; and so there is an end, when it is said, ' Ye people of C^wala, who did so-and-so,' (his great deeds being mentioned), ' come all of yon.* " So that, beginning with eulogy of the dead as a funeral rite, passing to praises repeated for a time, then to praises both occasional and periodic that are established, we rise to the characteristics of religious praises. Moreover, the BACKED PLACES^ TEMPLES^ AKB ALTABS; ETC. 295 two are alike in the ascribed demand for them by super- natural beings; in the nature of them as narrating great deeds; and in the motive for them as a means of obtaining benefits or avoiding evils.
§ 143. Yet another parallelism follows in immediate con- nection with the foregoing. Along with praises of the dead there go prayers to them. Livingstone tells us that the Banyai '^ pray to departed chiefs and relatives/' and we learn from Reade that in Equatorial Africa^ in times of distress the people go to the forest and cry to the spirits of those who have passed away. The Amazulu^ whose motive for praises we have just seen^ join prayers with their sacrifices. One of them says: — ** The owner of the bullock having prayed to the Amatongo, saying, * There is your bollock, ye spirits of our people;* and as he prays naming grandfathers and grandmothers who are dead, saying, ' There is your food; I pray for a healthy body, that I may live comfortably; and thou, So-and-so, treat me with mercy; and thou, So-and-so,' mentioning by name all of their family who are dead. " Similarly with the Yeddahs. They think themselves guarded by the spirits of '' their ancestors and their children •" and " in every calamity^ in every want, they call on them for aid." They " call on their deceased ancestors by name. ' Oome, and partake of this I Give us maintenance, as you did when living I ' " According to Schoolcraft, a Dakotah, when going hunting, utters the prayer — " Spirits or ghosts, have mercy on me, and show me where I can find a deer.'' Turner, describing the Yateans, who '' worship the spirits of their ancestors," says '' they pray to them over the kava- bowl, for health and prosperity;" and, describing the adjacent New Caledonians, he says that, sacrificing first- fruits to their dead and deified chiefs, the living chief prays aloud thus — " Compassionate &ther, here is some food for you; eat it; be kind to us on account of it."
Only in the supposed origin or nature of the super- natural being prayed to, do prayers like these differ &om 296 THE DATA OF S0CI0L06T.
the prayers of more civilized ^races to their diyinities. In the Iliad, Chryses, Apollo^s priest, is represented as saying — '' 0 Sminthius, if ever I have roofed thy graceful temple, or if, moreover, at any time I have burned to thee the fat thighs of bulls or of goats, accomplish this entreaty for me. Let the Grreeks pay for my tears, by thy arrows/' So, too, Bameses, calling upon Ammonfor aid in battle, reminds him of the 30,000 bulls he has sacrificed to him. This request for help in return for good things given, is in essentials perfectly like the requests above quoted. Between the Trojan or Egyptian, and the Zulu or New Caledonian, there is no difference in feeling or idea.
Of course, along with mental evolution there go modifica- tions in the prayers, as in the conceptions associated with them. The Hebrew prophets, who in later times represent the Hebrew Grod as not delighting in the odour of offerings, have evidently advanced far enough to abandon that gross kind of religious bribery which asks material benefits pro- portionate to material sacrifices; though it is manifest from the denunciations of these prophets, that the Hebrew people at large had not dropped the primitive beliefs and practices. fiut while the notion of the partially civilized is not the same in form as the notion of the uncivilized, it is the same in essence. The mediadval knight who, praying for aid to the Virgin or to a saint, promises a chapel if he is delivered, adopts the same policy as does the savage who bargains with the ancestral ghost to exchange protection for provision.
§ 144. There are sundry other parallelisms which I can- not spare space to exhibit in full. A parapraph only can be devoted to each.
Livingstone tells us that the East Africans believe " the spirits of the departed know what those they have left behind them are doing, and are pleased or not, ac- cording as their deeds are good or evil;'' and we learn from Schoolcraft that during the death-lament the Dakotahs ad- SACRED PliACES^ TEMPLKS^ AND ALTABS; ETC. 29 1 dress the spirit of the departed promising to behave well. Here reprobation of the ancestral ghost is feared^ just as among civilized races^ divine reprobation is feared; and ap- proval is sought with kindred motives.
There is evidence, too, of repentance caused by supposed ghostly reprobation. Concerning the ideas and feelings of the Turkomans, Vdmb^ry tells us that '' no greater punish- ment can befal a living man, than to be accused before the shade of his departed father or ancestor. This is done by planting a lance upon the top of the grave. * * * No sooner did Oraz perceive the lance fixed upon the.high Yo^ka of his grandfather, when in the silence of the following night he led the horse back to the tent of the MoUah and tied it to its former place. This act of restitution, as he himself told me, will pain him for a long time to come. But it is better to lie in the black earth than to have disturbed the repose of one's ancestors."
We read in Morgan's account of the Iroquois that " a prominent part of the ceremonial mourning for Sachems consisted in the repetition of their ancient laws.'' In this we trace an analogy to the repetition of divine injunctions as a religious observance.
The lighting of a fire at the grave for the benefit of the deceased, we found to be a not infrequent funeral rite; and in some cases the fire was kept alight, or re-lighted, for a long period. Joining these facts with the fact that lamps were kept burning in Egyptian tombs, as also in the sepulchres of the Romans, we see that maintenance of a sacred fire in a temple again exemplifies the development of funeral rites into religious rites.
Expressions of grief spontaneously arising from those who have lost a relative, naturally characterize funerals, and grow into funeral rites: sometimes, in advanced so- cieties, being swollen by the cries of hired mourners. It was thus with the ancient Egyptians; and with the ancient Egyptians wailing was also a religious rite. Once a year.
298 THE DATA Of SOCIOLOOT.
they ofiEered first-fruits on the altar of Isis with ** doleful lamentatioiis/' At Busiris^ which was the alleged burial- place of Osiris, there was an annaal festival at which the yotaries having fasted and pnt on mourning dresses, uttered a lament round a bumt-oSering: the death of Osiris being the subject of the lament. Adherents to the theory of nature-myths of course find a symbolic meaning for this observance; but to others it will appear veiy significant that this further likeness between funeral rites and reli- gious rites, occurred among people who sacrificed so elabo- rately to their ordinary dead, and who were characterized by the unparalleled persistence of their customs.
Along with dislike to disclosure of his name, which the savage thinks will put him in the power of one who learns it, there habitually goes dislike to name the dead: the ex- ercise of the implied power over them, being supposed to excite their anger. So strong is this feeling among the Malagasy, that Drury says ''they account it a crime to mention them [the dead] by the names they had when living.^' Similarly, by various semi-civilized races, the calling of deities by their true names has been interdicted or considered improper. It is so among the Hindus, who avoid uttering the sacred name Om; it was so with the Hebrews, whose pronunciation of the word Jehovah is not known for this reason; and Herodotus carefully avoids naming Osiris.
In Kaffir-land the grave of a chief is an asylum; and in Mariner's account of the Tonga Islands we read that the cemeteries where the great chiefs are buried, have such sacredness that enemies meeting there must regard each other as friends. In this we have a beginning of the right of sanctuary, attaching to the temples of deities among more advanced peoples.
Visiting the grave to take food, to repeat praises, to ask aid, implies a journey; and this journey, short if the grave is near, becomes, if the grave is &r ofP, a pilgrimage. That pilgrimages thoB ariBe, proof is given by Yamb^ry in describing certain predatory tribes of Torkomans, who, regarding as a martyr one of tbeir num- ber who is killed, adorn his gpraye and '* make pilgrimages to the holy place, where they implore with tears of contri- tion the intercession of the canonised robber/' Filial piety, taking a more expanded form as the ancestral ghost comes to be dominated by the ghost of the distin- gnished man, the pilgrimage to a relation's bnrial-place passes into the religions pilgrimage. Throughout, a gprare continues to be the terminus: the city where Mahomet was buried as well as that in which he was bom; the tomb of Baha-ed-din, regarded as a second Mahomet; the tope con- taining relics of Buddha; the sepulchre of Christ. More- over, the Canterbury pilgrimage reminds us that the tombs of saints have been, and still continue to be on the Conti- nenty the goals of pilgrimages among Christians.
One further analogy must be added. In some cases parts of the dead are swallowed by the living, who seek thus to inspire themselves with the good qualities of the dead; and we saw (§ 133) that the dead are supposed to be honoured by this act. Hie implied notion was shown to be associated with the further notion, that the nature of another being, inhering in all firagments of his body, inheres, too, in the unconsumed part of anything incorporated with his body; so that an operation wrought on the remnants of his food becomes an operation wrought on the food swal- lowed, and therefore on the swallower. Yet another im- plication is that between those who swallow different parts of the same food some community of nature is established. Hence such beliefs as that ascribed by Bastian to some ne- groes, who think that " on eating and drinking consecrated food they eat and drink the god himself" — such god being an ancestor, who has taken his share. Yarious cere- monies among savages are prompted by this conception; as, for instance, the choosing a totem. Among the Mosquito 300 THE DATA OF SOCIOLOGY.
Indians^ 'Hhe manner of obtaining this guardian was to proceed to some secluded spot and offer up a sacrifice: with the beast or bird which thereupon appeared^ in dream or in reality, a compact for life was made, by drawing blood from various parts of the body/' This blood, supposed to be taken by the chosen animal, connected the two, and the animaVs " life became so bound up with their own that the death of one involved that of the other/' * And now mark that in these same regions this idea re-appears as a religious observance. Sahagun and Herrera describe a ceremony of the Aztecs called '^ eating the god/' Mendieta, describing this ceremony, says — '' they had also a sort of eucharist. * * * They made a sort of small idols of seeds * * * and ate them as the body or memory of their gods/' As the seeds'were cemented partly by the blood of sacrificed boys; as their gods were cannibal gods; as Huitzilopochtli, whose worship included this rite, was the god to whom human sacrifices were most extensive; it is dear that the aim was to establisli community with him by taking blood in com- mon. So that what, among certain of these allied Ameri- can races, was a funeral rite by which survivors sought to inspire themselves with the virtues of the dead, and to bind themselves to the ghost, became, among the more civilized, modified into an observance implying inspiration by, and fealty to, one of their deities.
• § 145. Thus, evidence abundant in amount and varied in kind, justifies the statement made at the close of the last * We here get a duo to the origin of various strange ceremonies by which men bind themselves to one another. Michelet* in his Origines du Droit Francis, writes — " Boire le sang Tun de I'autre, c'^tait pour ainsi dire secure mdme chair. Ce symbole si expressif se tronve chez un grand nombre de peoples;" and he gives instances from various ancient races. But» as we here see, this practice is not originally adopted as a symbol (no practices begin as symbols), but is prompted by the belief that a community of nature is thus established, and a community of power over one another. Obviously the cx- shango of names between savages results from an allied belief.
SACRED PLACES^ TEMPLES, AND ALTARS; ETC. SOl chapter. Ifc was pointed out that the souls of the dead, con- ceived by savages sometimes as beneficent agents bat chiefly as the causes of evils, might be variously dealt with — ^might be deceived, resisted, expelled, or might be treated in ways likely to secure good will and mitigate anger. It was asserted that from this last policy all religious observances take their rise. We have seen how they do so.
The original sacred locality, is the locality where the dead are, and which their ghosts are supposed to frequent; the sheltering cave, or house, or other chamber for the dead, becomes the sacred chamber or temple; and that on which offerings for the dead are placed, becomes the sacred support for offerings — ^the altar. Food and drink and other things laid for the dead, grow into sacrifices and libations to the gods; while immolations of victims, blood- offerings, mutilations, cuttings-off of hair, originally occur- ring at the grave, occur afterwards before idols and as marks of fealty to a deity. Fasting as a funeral rite, passes into fasting as a religious rite; and lamentations, too, occur under both forms. Praises of the dead, chanted at the burial and afterwards, and recurring at festivals, pass into praises forming parts of religious worship; and prayers made to the dead for aid, for blessing, for protection, be- come prayers made to divinities for like advantages. An- cestral ghosts supposed to cause diseases, as gods send pestilences, are similarly propitiated by special sacrifices: the ascribed motives of ghosts and gods being the same in kind, and the modes of appealing to those motives the same. The parallelism runs out into various details. There is oversight of conduct by ghosts as there is by deities; there are pro- mises of good behaviour to both; there is penitence before the one as before the other. There is a repetition of in- junctions given by the dead, as there is a repetition of divine injunctions. There is a maintenance of fires at graves and in sepulchral chambers, as there is in temples. Burial-places are sometimes, like temples, used as places of refuge. A 302 THB DATA OF SOCIOLOQY.
secresy ib maintained respecting the name of the dead, as in many cases respecting the name of a god. There are pilgrim- ages to the graves of relatives^ and pilgrimages to the graves of supposed divine persons. And in America^ certain less- civilized races adopted a method of binding living with dead by seeking to participate in the qualities of the ghost^ which a more civilized American race paralleled by a method of binding to a deity through a kindred ceremony for esta- bUshing community of nature.
Can so many and such varied similarities have arisen in the absence of genetic relationship f Suppose the two sets of phenomena unconnected — suppose primitive men had^ as some thinks the consciousness of a Universal Power whence they and all other things proceeded. What probability would there be that towards such a Power they would spontaneously perform an act like that performed by them to the dead body of a fellow savage f And if one such community would not be probable^ what would be the probability of two such acts in common? what the probability of fourf what of the score communities above specified? In the absence of causal relation the probability against such a correspondence would be almost infinity to one.
Again^ if the two sets of rites have a common root, we may see how they come to coexist under forms differing only in their degrees of elaboration. But otherwise, how does it happen that in sundry societies the two sets of rites have been, or are, simultaneously observed in like ways? In Egypt at funerals, and afterwards in tombs, the dead were lauded and sacrified to as their deities were lauded and sacri- ficed to. Every day in Mexico there were burial-oblations of food and drink, slayings of servants, offerings of flowers, just as there were daily observances of like kinds to their gods; and representative images of the dead were preserved and worshipped as were the images of the gods. Peruvians poured out human blood on sepulchres and gave it to idols; sacrificed victims to the deceased chief and victims to the SACRED PIECES, TSMPLBS^ AUD ALTABS; ETC. 303 deity; cut off their hair for the dead and presented their hair to the Son; praised and prayed to embalmed bodies^ as they praised and prayed to divinities; and made obeisances to the one as to the other. If between the father regarded as ancestor and the father regarded as divinity there is no connection^ this community of observances is inexplicable.
Nor is this all. Were there no such origination of religious rites out of funeral rites^ it would be impossible to understand the genesis of ceremonies apparently so absurd. How could men possibly have come to think^ as did the Mexicans^ that a stone bowl full of human blood would please the Sun? or that the Sun would be pleased by burn- ing incense^ as the Egyptians thought? In what imaginable way were the Peruvians led to believe that the Sun was pro- pitiated by blowing towards it hairs from their eye-brows; or why did they suppose that by doing the like towards the sea they would mitigate its anger? From what antecedent did there result so strange an idea as that of the Santals^ who, worshipping '^the Great Mountain/' sacrifice to it beasts, flowers, and fruit? Or why should one ancient people think to please the Creator by placing on an altar bread, wine, and incense; which were the very things placed by an adjacent ancient people on altars before their mummies f The assumption that the primitive man gratuitously acts in an irrational way, is quite inadmissible. But if these religious rites, seemingly so irrational, arose from funeral rites, we no longer need wonder at their irrelevance.
We have, then, numerous lines of evidence which, con- verging to a focus, are by themselves enough to dissipate any doubt respecting tHs natural genesis of rehgious ob- servances. Traceable as it is in so many ways, the develop- ment of funeral rites into worship of the dead, and eventually into religious worship, becomes dear. We shall find that it becomes still clearer on contemplating other facts under other aspects.
CHAPTER XX.
ANCESTOR- WORSHIP IN GENERAL.
§ 146. From various parts of the worid, through wit- nesses of different nations and divergent beliefs, we have evidence that there exist tribes who are either wholly with- out ideas of sapematural beings, or whose ideas of them are extremely vague. " When Father Junipero Serra esta- blished the Mission of Dolores in 1776, the shores of San Francisco Bay were thickly populated by the Ahwashtees, Ohlones, Altahmos, Romanons, Tuolomos, and other tribes. The good Father found the field unoccupied, for, in the vocabulary of these people, there is found no word for god, angel, or devil; they held no theory of origin or destiny." This testimony, which Bancroft cites respecting the Indians of California, corresponds with the testimonies of old Spanish writers respecting some South American peoples. Garcilasso says that ^Hhe Ghirihuanas and the natives of the Gape de Pasau * * * had no inclination to worship any- thing high or low, neither from interested motives nor from fear;" Balboa mentions tribes without any religion as having been met with by Ynca Yupanqui; and Avendano asserts that in his time the Antis had no worship whatever. Many kindred instances are given by Sir John Lubbock, and further ones will be found in Mr. Tyler's Primitive OuUure.
But I agree with Mr. Tylor that the evidence habitually implies some notion, however wavering and inconsistent, of a reyiying other-self. Where this has not become a definite belief^ the substance of a belief is shown by the funeral rites and hj the fear of the dead.
Leaving unsettled the question whether there are men in whom dreams have not generated the notion of a wan- dering double^ and the sequent notion that at death the wandering double has gone far away^ it is unquestionably true that the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the conception of a ghost. This exists where no other idea of the i^me order exists; and this exists where multitudinous other ideas of the same order exist.
That belief in a surviving duplicate is produced among the savage^ and is perpetually reproduced among the civilized^ is a fact of great significance. Even alone it is almost enough to show that the ghost is the primitive type of supernatural being. Whatever is common to men's minds in all stages must be deeper down in thought than whatever is peculiar to men's minds in higher stages; and if the later product admits of being reached by modification and expansion of the earlier product^ the implication is that it has been so reached. Becognizing this implication^ we shall see how fully the facts now to be contemplated justify acceptance of it.
§ 147. As the notion of a ghost grows from that first vagueness and variableness indicated above^ into a definite and avowed faith^ there naturally arise the desire and the endeavour to propitiate the ghost. Hence, almost as widely spread as the belief in ghosts, may be looked for a more or less developed ancestor-worship. This we find.
Already in preceding chapters, and especially in the last, abundant indirect evidence has been given that not only in uncivilized societies constituted by races quite remote from one another in type, does ancestor-worship prevail; but that also in unallied civilized societies it exists, or has existed. Here let me add, in brief form, the direct evidence.
Where the levels of mental nature and social progress are X 306 THB DATA OF SOCIOLOQT.
lowest, we usually find, along with an absence of religioas ideas generally, an absence of, or very slight deyelopment of, ancestor-worship. A typical case is that of the Ju^ngs, a wild tribe of Bengal, who, described as having no word for god, no idea of a future state, no religious ceremonies, are also said to " have no notion of the worship of ances- tors/^ Cook, telling us what the Fuegians were before con- tact with Europeans had introduced foreign ideas, said there were no appearances of religion among them; and we are not told by him or others that they were ancestor- worshippers. So far as the scanty evidence may be trusted, the like seems to be the case with the Andamanese. The Australians, whose intercourse with the civilized has doubt- less affected their conceptions, but who have clearly an aboriginal belief in ghosts, show us not much persistence in ghost-propitiation. While believing in the maleficent and beneficent agency of ghosts, the Tasmanians seemingly made but few attempts to gain their good will. Among the Yeddahs, indeed, though extremely low, an active if simple ancestor- worship is the sole, or almost the sole, reli- gion; but here, contact with the more civilized Cingalese has probably been a factor.
When, however, instead of wandering groups who con- tinually leave far behind the places where their members lie buried, we come to settled groups whose burial* places are in their midst, and among whom development of funeral rites is thus made possible, we find that ghost- propitiation becomes an established practice. All varieties of men show us this. Taking first the Negrito races, we read that " with the Pijians, as soon as beloved parents expire, they take their place amongst the family gods. Bures, or temples, are erected to their memory,'' etc., etc. Similarly of the Tannese, Turner says— ''their general name for gods seems to be Arembaj that means a dead man - And the like is told us of other New Gale- doman peoples. With the more advanced Malayo- AKCEST0B-W0B8HIF IN QENERMi. 307 Polynesians it is the same; sfkre tliat with simple an- cestor-worship there usnally coexists a more dereloped worship of remoter ancestors^ who have become deities. Sacrificing to their gods^ the Tahitians also sacrifice to the spirits of departed chiefs and relatives. Kindred statements are made respecting the Sandwich Islanders^ the Samoans^ the Malagasy, and the Sumatrans; of which last people Marsden tells us that though " they neither worship god, devil, nor idol,'* yet that they ''venerate almost to the point of worshipping the tombs and mcmes of their deceased ancestors/* The like holds in Africa. Livingstone testifies that the people of Angola '' are constantly depre- cating the wrath of departed soids/* and he says the Bambiri "pray to departed chiefs and relatives/* So, ac cording to Shooter, by the Kafiirs the spirits of the dead '' are elevated in fact to the rank of deities/* And kindred statements are made concerning the people of Balonda, the Wanika, the Congoese. Quite different though they are in type, the lower Asiatic races yield us kindred illustrations. Of the Bhils, of the Bghais, of the Karens, of the Khonds, we find ancestor-worship alleged. Hunter asserts of the Santals, whose worship " is based upon the family,'* that " in addition to the family-god, each house- hold worships the ghosts of its ancestors/* And could we have any doubt as to how the family -god arose, it would be removed by Macpherson*s statement respecting the ancestor- worship of the Khonds — " The more distinguished fathers of the tribe, of its branches, or of its sub-divisions, are all remembered by the priests, their sanctity growing with the remoteness of the period of their deaths.** Of Northern Asiatics the Kirghiz and the Ostyaks yield further ex- amples; and the Turkomans were lately instanced as showing how this worship of the dead survives along with a nominal monotheism. Then, crossing over into America, the like phenomena are shown us from the extreme North to the uttermost South — from the Esquimaux to the 308 THE DATA OF SOCIOLOGY.
Patagonians: reacliing^ as we have seen^ very elaborate developments among the ancient civilized races.
How in the Old World ancestor-worship prevailed^ and evolved in a complex way^ among the people who^ in the Nile valley^ first carried civilization to a high stage^ has been already shown. How in the remote East, another vast society which had reached considerable heights of culture while Europe was covered by barbarians, has practised, and still practises, ancestor-worship, scarcely needs saying. And that it has all along characterized the Hindu civiliza- tion is also a fact, though a fact less familiar. With the highly-developed religious system of India, there coexists a daily re-genesis of deities from dead men. As Mr. A. G. Lyall shows in his ^' Religion of an Indian Province " {Fortnighily Review, Feb., 1872), apotheosis is a normal process which may be there constantly witnessed. He says: —