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SMITH .

STRACHEY .

But their chief god they worship is no other, indeed, then the divell, whome they make presentments of, and shadow under the forme of an idoll, which they entitle Okeus, and whome they worship as the Romans did their hurtful god Vejovis, more for feare of harme then for hope of any good; they saie they have conference with him, and fashion themselves in their disguisments as neere to his shape as they can imagyn. In every territory of a weroance is a temple and a priest, peradventure two or thrie; yet happie doth that weroance accompt himself who can detayne with him a Quiyough-quisock, of the best, grave, lucky, well instructed in their misteryes, and beloved of their god; and such a one is noe lesse honoured then was Dianae's priest at Ephesus, for whome they have their more private temples, with oratories and chauneells therein, according as is the dignity and reverence of the Quiyough-quisock, which the weroance wilbe at charge to build upon purpose, sometyme twenty foote broad and a hundred in length, fashioned arbour wyse after their buylding, having comonly the dore opening into the east, and at the west end a spence or chauncell from the body of the temple, with hollow wyndings and pillers, whereon stand divers black imagies, fashioned to the shoulders, with their faces looking down the church, and where within their weroances, upon a kind of biere of reedes, lye buryed; and under them, apart, in a vault low in the ground , vailed with a matt, sitts their Okeus, an image ill-favouredly carved, all black dressed, with chaynes of perle, the presentment and figure of that god which doth them all the harme they suffer, be yt in their bodies or goods, within doores or abroad; and true yt is many of them are divers tymes shrewdly scratched as they walke alone in the woods, yt may well be by the subtyle spirit, the malitious enemy to mankind, whome, therefore, to pacefie and worke to doe them good the priests tell them they must do these and these sacrifices unto of these and these things, and thus and thus often, by which meanes not only their owne children, but straungers, are sometimes sacrificed unto him: whilst the great god who governes all the world, and makes the sun to shine, creating the moone and stars his companyons, great powers, and which dwell with him, and by whose virtues and influences the under earth is tempered, and brings forth her fruiets according to her seasons, they calling Ahone; the good and peaceable god requires no such dutyes, nor needes be sacrificed unto, for he intendeth all good unto them, and will doe noe harme, only the displeased Okeus, looking into all men's accions, and examining the same according to the severe scale of justice, punisheth them with sicknesse, beats them, and strikes their ripe corn with blastings, stormes, and thunder clapps, stirrs up warre, and makes their women falce unto them. Such is the misery and thraldome under which Sathan hath bound these wretched miscreants.

I began by calling Strachey a plagiary. The reader will now observe that he gives far more than he takes. For example, his account of the temples is much more full than that of Smith, and he adds to Smith's version the character and being of Ahone, as what "the priests tell them". I submit, therefore, that Strachey's additions, if valid for temples, are not discredited for Ahone, merely because they are inserted in the framework of Smith. As far as I understand the matter, Smith's Map of Virginia is an amended copy, with additions, by Smith or another writer of that description, which he sent home to the Council of Virginia, in November, 1608. To the book of 1612 was added a portion of "Relations" by different hands, edited by W. S., namely, Dr. Symonds. Strachey's editor, in 1849, regarded W. S. as Strachey, and supposed that Strachey was the real author of Smith's Map of Virginia, so that, in his Historie of Travaile, Strachey merely took back his own. He did not take back his own; he made use of Smith's MS., not yet published, if Mr. Arber and I rightly date Strachey's MS. at 1610-15, or 1611-12. Why Strachey acted thus it is possible to conjecture. As a scholar well acquainted with Virginia, and as Secretary for the Colony, he would have access to Smith's MS. of 1608 among the papers of the Council, before its publication. Smith professes himself "no scholer". On the other hand, Strachey likes to show off his Latin and Greek. He has a curious, if inaccurate, knowledge of esoteric Greek and Roman religious antiquities, and in writing of religion aims at a comparative method. Strachey, however, took the trouble to copy bits of Smith into his own larger work, which he never gave to the printers.

Arber, p. 444.

Arber, p. 442.

Now as to Ahone. It suits my argument to suppose that Strachey's account is no less genuine than his description of the temples , and the account of the Great Hare of American mythology. This view of a Virginian Creator, "our chief god" "who takes upon him this shape of a hare," was got, says Strachey, "last year, 1610," from a brother of the Potomac King, by a boy named Spilman, who says that Smith "sold" him to Powhattan. In his own brief narrative Spelman says nothing about the Cosmogonic Legend of the Great Hare. The story came up when Captain Argoll was telling Powhattan's brother the account of creation in Genesis .

Strachey, p. 98-100.

"Spilman's Narrative," Arber, cx.-cxiv.

Now Strachey's Great Hare is accepted by mythologists, while Ahone is regarded with suspicion. Ahone does not happen to suit anthropological ideas, the Hare suits them rather better. Moreover, and more important, there is abundant corroborative evidence for Oke and for the Hare, Michabo, who, says Dr. Brinton, "was originally the highest divinity recognised by them, powerful and beneficent beyond all others, maker of the heavens and the world," just like Ahone, in fact. And Dr. Brinton instructs us that Michabo originally meant not Great Hare, but "the spirit of light". Thus, originally, the Red Men adored "The Spirit of Light, maker of the heavens and the world". Strachey claims no more than this for Ahone. Now, of course, Dr. Brinton may be right. But I have already expressed my extreme distrust of the philological processes by which he extracts "The Great Light; spirit of light," from Michabo, "beyond a doubt!" In my poor opinion, whatever claims Michabo may have as an unique creator of earth and heaven--"God is Light,"--he owes his mythical aspect as a Hare to something other than an unconscious pun. In any case, according to Dr. Brinton, Michabo, regarded as a creator, is equivalent to Strachey's Ahone. This amount of corroboration, valeat quantum, I may claim, from the Potomac Indians, for the belief in Ahone on the James River. Dr. Brinton is notoriously not a believer in American "monotheism".

Myths of the New World, p. 178.

Myths of the New World, p. 53.

The opponents of the authenticity of Ahone, however, will certainly argue: "For Oke, or Oki, as a redoubted being or spirit, or general name for such personages, we have plentiful evidence, corroborating that of Smith. But what evidence as to Ahone corroborates that of Strachey?" I must confess that I have no explicit corroborative evidence for Ahone, but then I have no accessible library of early books on Virginia. Now it is clear that if I found and produced evidence for Ahone as late as 1625, I would be met at once with the retort that, between 1610 and 1625, Christian ideas had contaminated the native beliefs. Thus if I find Ahone, or a deity of like attributes, after a very early date, he is of no use for my purpose. Nor do I much expect to find him. But do we find Winslow's Massachusetts God, Kiehtan, named AFTER 1622 , and if we don't, does that prevent Mr. Tylor from citing Kiehtan, with apparent reliance on the evidence?

Primitive Culture, ii. p. 342.

Again, Ahone, though primal and creative, is, by Strachey's account, a sleeping partner. He has no sacrifice, and no temple or idol is recorded. Therefore the belief in Ahone could only be discovered as a result of inquiry, whereas figures of Oke or Okeus, and his services, were common and conspicuous. As to Oke, I cannot quite understand Mr. Tylor's attitude. Summarising Lafitau, a late writer of 1724, Mr. Tylor writes: "The whole class of spirits or demons, known to the Caribs by the name of cemi, in Algonkin as manitu, in Huron as oki, Lafitau now spells with capital letters, and converts them each into a supreme being". Yet in Primitive Culture, ii., 342, 1891, Mr. Tylor had cited Smith's Okee as the "chief god" of the Virginians in 1612. How can Lafitau be said to have elevated oki into Oki, and so to have made a god out of "a class of spirits or demons," in 1724, when Mr. Tylor had already cited Smith's Okee, with a capital letter and as a "chief god," in 1612? Smith, rebuked for the same by Mr. Tylor, had even identified Okee with the devil. Lafitau certainly did not begin this erroneous view of Oki as a "chief god" among the Virginians. If I cannot to-day produce corroboration for a god named Ahone, I can at least show that, from the north of New England to the south of Virginia, there is early evidence, cited by Mr. Tylor, for a belief in a primal creative being, closely analogous to Ahone. And this evidence, I think, distinctly proves that such a being as Ahone was within the capacity of the Indians in these latitudes. Mr. Tylor must have thought in 1891 that the natives were competent to a belief in a supreme deity, for he said, "Another famous native American name for the supreme deity is Oki". In the essay of 1892, however, Oki does not appear to exist as a god's name till 1724. We may now, for earlier evidence, turn to Master Thomas Heriot, "that learned mathematician" "who spoke the Indian language," and was with the company which abandoned Virginia on 18th June, 1586. They ranged 130 miles north and 130 miles north-west of Roanoke Island, which brings them into the neighbourhood of Smith's and Strachey's country. Heriot writes as to the native creeds: "They believe that there are many gods which they call Mantoac, but of different sorts and degrees. Also that there is one chiefe God that hath beene from all eternitie, who, as they say, when he purposed first to make the world, made first other gods of a principall order, to be as instruments to be used in the Creation and Government to follow, and after the Sunne, Moone and Starres as pettie gods, and the instruments of the other order more principall.... They thinke that all the gods are of humane shape," and represent them by anthropomorphic idols. An idol, or image, "Kewasa" , is placed in the temples, "where they worship, pray and make many offerings". Good souls go to be happy with the gods, the bad burn in Popogusso, a great pit, "where the sun sets". The evidence for this theory of a future life, as usual, is that of men who died and revived again, a story found in a score of widely separated regions, down to our day, when the death, revival and revelation occurred to the founder of the Arapahoe new religion of the Ghost Dance. The belief "works for righteousness". "The common sort... have great care to avoyde torment after death, and to enjoy blesse," also they have "great respect to their Governors".

Okee's image, as early as 1607, was borne into battle against Smith, who captured the god . Ahone was not thus en evidence.

Journal of Anthrop. Inst., Feb., 1892, pp. 285, 286.

Prim. Cult,, ii. p. 342.

This belief in a chief god "from all eternitie" , may not be convenient to some speculators, but it exactly corroborates Strachey's account of Ahone as creator with subordinates. The evidence is of 1586 , and, like Strachey, Heriot attributes the whole scheme of belief to "the priestes". "This is the sum of their religion, which I learned by having speciall familiaritie with some of their priests." I see no escape from the conclusion that the Virginians believed as Heriot says they did, except the device of alleging that they promptly borrowed some of Heriot's ideas and maintained that these ideas had ever been their own. Heriot certainly did not recognise the identity. "Through conversing with us they were brought into great doubts of their owne , and no small admiration of ours; of which many desired to learne more than we had the meanes for want of utterance in their language to expresse." So Heriot could not be subtle in the native tongue. Heriot did what he could to convert them: "I did my best to make His immortall glory knowne". His efforts were chiefly successful by virtue of the savage admiration of our guns, mathematical instruments, and so forth. These sources of an awakened interest in Christianity would vanish with the total destruction and discomfiture of the colony, unless a few captives, later massacred, taught our religion to the natives.

According to Strachey, Heriot could speak the native language.

Heriot's Narrative, pp. 37-39. Quaritch, London, 1893.

I shall cite another early example of a New England deity akin to Ahone, with a deputy, a friend of sorcerers, like Okee. This account is in Smith's General History of New England, 1606-1624. We sent out a colony in 1607; "they all returned in the yeere 1608," esteeming the country "a cold, barren, mountainous rocky desart". I am apt to believe that they did not plant the fructifying seeds of grace among the natives in 1607-1608. But the missionary efforts of French traders may, of course, have been blessed; nor can I deny that a yellow-haired man, whose corpse was found in 1620 with some objects of iron, may have converted the natives to such beliefs as they possessed. We are told, however, that these tenets were of ancestral antiquity. I cite E. Winslow, as edited by Smith :--

"Those where in this Plantation say Kiehtan made all the other Gods: also one man and one woman, and with them all mankinde, but how they became so dispersed they know not. They say that at first there was no king but Kiehtan, that dwelleth far westerly above the heavens, whither all good men go when they die, and have plentie of all things. The bad go thither also and knock at the door, but he bids them go wander in endless want and misery, for they shall not stay there. They never saw Kiehtan, but they hold it a great charge and dutie that one race teach another; and to him they make feasts and cry and sing for plenty and victory, or anything that is good.

"They never saw Kiehtan." So, about 1854, "The common answer of intelligent black fellows on the Barwon when asked if they know Baiame... is this: 'Kamil zaia zummi Baiame, zaia winuzgulda'; 'I have not seen Baiame, I have heard or perceived him'. If asked who made the sky, the earth, the animals and man, they always answer 'Baiame'." Daramulun, according to the same authority in Lang's Queensland, was the familiar of sorcerers, and appeared as a serpent. This answers, as I show, to Hobamock the subordinate power to Kiehtan in New England and to Okee, the familiar of sorcerers in Virginia.

"They have another Power they call Hobamock, which we conceive the Devill, and upon him they call to cure their wounds and diseases; when they are curable he persuades them he sent them, because they have displeased him; but, if they be mortal, then he saith, 'Kiehtan sent them'; which makes them never call on him in their sickness. They say this Hobamock appears to them sometimes like a man, a deer, or an eagle, but most commonly like a snake; not to all but to their Powahs to cure diseases, and Undeses... and these are such as conjure in Virginia, and cause the people to do what they list." Winslow , had already said, "They believe, as do the Virginians, of many divine powers, yet of one above all the rest, as the Southern Virginians call their chief god Kewassa , and that we now inhabit Oke.... The Massachusetts call their great god Kiehtan."

Arber, pp. 767, 768.

Here, then, in Heriot , Strachey and Winslow , we find fairly harmonious accounts of a polydaemonism with a chief, primal, creative being above and behind it; a being unnamed, and Ahone and Kiehtan.

Is all this invention? Or was all this derived from Europeans before 1586, and, if so, from what Europeans? Mr. Tylor, in 1873, wrote, "After due allowance made for misrendering of savage answers, and importation of white men's thoughts, it can hardly be judged that a divine being, whose characteristics are often so unlike what European intercourse would have suggested, and who is heard of by such early explorers among such distant tribes, could be a deity of foreign origin". NOW, he "can HARDLY be ALTOGETHER a deity of foreign origin". I agree with Mr. Tylor's earlier statement. In my opinion Ahone--Okeus, Kiehtan--Hobamock, correspond, the first pair to the usually unseen Australian Baiame , while the second pair, Okeus and Hobamock, answer to the Australian familiars of sorcerers, Koin and Brewin; the American "Powers" being those of peoples on a higher level of culture. Like Tharramulun where Baiame is supreme, Hobamock appears as a snake .

Prim. Cult., ii. 340, 1873, 1892.

For all these reasons I am inclined to accept Strachey's Ahone as a veritable element in Virginian belief. Without temple or service, such a being was not conspicuous, like Okee and other gods which had idols and sacrifices.

As far as I see, Strachey has no theory to serve by inventing Ahone. He asks how any races "if descended from the people of the first creation, should maintain so general and gross a defection from the true knowledge of God". He is reduced to suppose that, as descendants of Ham, they inherit "the ignorance of true godliness." . The children of Shem and Japheth alone "retained, until the coming of the Messias, the only knowledge of the eternal and never-changing Trinity". The Virginians, on the other hand, fell heir to the ignorance, and "fearful and superstitious instinct of nature" of Ham . Ahone, therefore, is not invented by Strachey to bolster up a theory , of an inherited revelation, or of a sensus numinis which could not go wrong. Unless a proof be given that Strachey had a theory, or any other purpose, to serve by inventing Ahone, I cannot at present come into the opinion that he gratuitously fabled, though he may have unconsciously exaggerated.

What were Strachey's sources? He was for nine months, if not more, in the colony: he had travelled at least 115 miles up the James River, he occasionally suggests modifications of Smith's map, he refers to Smith's adventures, and his glossary is very much larger than Smith's; its accuracy I leave to American linguists. Such a witness, despite his admitted use of Smith's text is not to be despised, and he is not despised in America. Strachey, it is true, had not, like Smith, been captured by Indians and either treated with perfect kindness and consideration , or tied to a tree and threatened with arrows, and laid out to have his head knocked in with a stone; as he alleged sixteen years later! Strachey, not being captured, did not owe his release to the magnanimity of Powhattan, to his own ingenious lies, to the intercession of Pocahontas, as Smith, and his friends for him, at various dates inconsistently declared. Smith certainly saw more of the natives at home: Strachey brought a more studious mind to what he could learn of their customs and ideas; and is not a convicted braggart. I conjecture that one of Strachey's sources was a native named Kemps. Smith had seized Kemps and Kinsock in 1609. Unknown authorities represent these two savages as "the most exact villaines in the country". They were made to labour in fetters, then were set at liberty, but "little desired it". Some "souldiers" ran away to the liberated Kemps, who brought them back to Smith. Why Kemps and his friend are called "two of the most exact villains in the country" does not appear. Kemps died "of the surveye" at Jamestown, in 1610-11. He was much made of by Lord De la Warr, "could speak a pretty deal of our English, and came orderly to church every day to prayers". He gave Strachey the names of Powhattan's wives, and told him, truly or not, that Pocahontas was married, about 1610, to an Indian named Kocoum. I offer the guess that Kemps and Machumps, who came and went from Pocahontas, and recited an Indian prayer which Strachey neglected to copy out, may have been among Strachey's authorities. I shall, of course, be told that Kemps picked up Ahone at church. This did not strike Strachey as being the fact; he had no opinion of the creed in which Ahone was a factor, "the misery and thraldome under which Sathan has bound these wretched miscreants". According to Strachey, the priests, far from borrowing any part of our faith, "feare and tremble lest the knowledge of God, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ be taught in these parts".

Arber, cxvii. Strachey mentions that Pocahontas turned cart-wheels, naked, in Jamestown, being then under twelve, and not yet wearing the apron. Smith says she was ten in 1608, but does not mention the cart-wheels. Later, he found it convenient to put her age at twelve or thirteen in 1608. Most American scholars, such as Mr. Adams, entirely distrust the romantic later narratives of Smith.

The Proeeedings, etc., by W. S. Arber, p. 151.

Ibid., p. 155.

Ibid., p. 157.

Strachey, pp. 54, 55.

Strachey is therefore for putting down the priests, and, like Smith , accuses them of sacrificing children. To Smith's statement that such a rite was worked at Quiyough-cohanock, Strachey adds that Sir George Percy "was at, and observed" a similar mystery at Kecoughtan. It is plain that the rite was not a sacrifice, but a Bora, or initiation, and the parallel of the Spartan flogging of boys, with the retreat of the boys and their instructors, is very close, and, of course, unnoted by classical scholars except Mr. Frazer. Strachey ends with the critical remark that we shall not know all the certainty of the religion and mysteries till we can capture some of the priests, or Quiyough-quisocks.

Students who have access to a good library of Americana may do more to elucidate Ahone. I regard him as in a line with Kiehtan and the God spoken of by Heriot, and do not believe that Strachey lied; that natives deceived Strachey; that Ahone was borrowed from "the God of Captain Smith".

MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION.

Definitions of religion--Contradictory evidence--"Belief in spiritual beings"--Objection to Mr. Tylor's definition--Definition as regards this argument--Problem: the contradiction between religion and myth--Two human moods--Examples--Case of Greece--Ancient mythologists--Criticism by Eusebius--Modern mythological systems--Mr. Max Muller--Mannhardt.

The word "Religion" may be, and has been, employed in many different senses, and with a perplexing width of significance. No attempt to define the word is likely to be quite satisfactory, but almost any definition may serve the purpose of an argument, if the writer who employs it states his meaning frankly and adheres to it steadily. An example of the confusions which may arise from the use of the term "religion" is familiar to students. Dr. J. D. Lang wrote concerning the native races of Australia: "They have nothing whatever of the character of religion, or of religious observances, to distinguish them from the beasts that perish". Yet in the same book Dr. Lang published evidence assigning to the natives belief in "Turramullun, the chief of demons, who is the author of disease, mischief and wisdom". The belief in a superhuman author of "disease, mischief and wisdom" is certainly a religious belief not conspicuously held by "the beasts"; yet all religion was denied to the Australians by the very author who prints an account of part of their creed. This writer merely inherited the old missionary habit of speaking about the god of a non-Christian people as a "demon" or an "evil spirit".

See Primitive Culture, second edition, i. 419.

Lang's Queensland, p. 445, 1861.

See The Making of Religion, pp. 201-210.

"The history of the Jews, nay, the history of our own mind, proves to demonstration that the thought of God is a far easier thought, and a far earlier, than that of a spirit." Father Tyrrell, S. J., The Month, October, 1898. As to the Jews, the question is debated. As to our own infancy, we are certainly taught about God before we are likely to be capable of the metaphysical notion of spirit. But we can scarcely reason from children in Christian houses to the infancy of the race.

For these reasons we propose to define religion as the belief in a primal being, a Maker, undying, usually moral, without denying that the belief in spiritual beings, even if immoral, may be styled religious. Our definition is expressly framed for the purpose of the argument, because that argument endeavours to bring into view the essential conflict between religion and myth. We intend to show that this conflict between the religious and the mythical conception is present, not only in the faiths of the ancient civilised peoples, as in Greece, Rome, India and Egypt, but also in the ideas of the lowest known savages.

It may, of course, be argued that the belief in Creator is itself a myth. However that may be, the attitude of awe, and of moral obedience, in face of such a supposed being, is religious in the sense of the Christian religion, whereas the fabrication of fanciful, humorous, and wildly irrational fables about that being, or others, is essentially mythical in the ordinary significance of that word, though not absent from popular Christianity.

Now, the whole crux and puzzle of mythology is, "Why, having attained to a belief in an undying guardian, 'Master of Life,' did mankind set to work to evolve a chronique scandaleuse about HIM? And why is that chronique the elaborately absurd set of legends which we find in all mythologies?"

In answering, or trying to answer, these questions, we cannot go behind the beliefs of the races now most immersed in savage ignorance. About the psychology of races yet more undeveloped we can have no historical knowledge. Among the lowest known tribes we usually find, just as in ancient Greece, the belief in a deathless "Father," "Master," "Maker," and also the crowd of humorous, obscene, fanciful myths which are in flagrant contradiction with the religious character of that belief. That belief is what we call rational, and even elevated. The myths, on the other hand, are what we call irrational and debasing. We regard low savages as very irrational and debased characters, consequently the nature of their myths does not surprise us. Their religious conception, however, of a "Father" or "Master of Life" seems out of keeping with the nature of the savage mind as we understand it. Still, there the religious conception actually is, and it seems to follow that we do not wholly understand the savage mind, or its unknown antecedents. In any case, there the facts are, as shall be demonstrated. However the ancestors of Australians, or Andamanese, or Hurons arrived at their highest religious conception, they decidedly possess it. The development of their mythical conceptions is accounted for by those qualities of their minds which we do understand, and shall illustrate at length. For the present, we can only say that the religious conception uprises from the human intellect in one mood, that of earnest contemplation and submission: while the mythical ideas uprise from another mood, that of playful and erratic fancy. These two moods are conspicuous even in Christianity. The former, that of earnest and submissive contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and "the dim religious light" of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of the human race. They stand as near each other, and as far apart, as Love and Lust.

The hypothesis that the conception was borrowed from European creeds will be discussed later. See, too, "Are Savage Gods borrowed from Missionaries?" Nineteenth Century, January, 1899.

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