Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/381

Rh RELIGIONS 363 also "have a supreme deity, called Tsui- or Tsuni-Koab (the wounded knee) by the colonial Hottentots, Heitsi-eibib (wooden face) by the Namaqua. He, too, like the highest god of the Bantu, is the ancestor of the race and the chief of souls and spirits. But the primitive myth current about him shows that he was originally a moon-god, con- tending with the spirit of darkness. The altars intended for sacrifices to this god are now called his graves, and the Bantu, who do not use them, call them chiefs' graves. The great dili'erence between the religions of the Khoi- Khoin and the other Nigritians is the total absence of animal worship and of fetichism by which it is character- ized. Even sorcery and magic are still very primitive among them. Therefore they must be considered as a distinct family among the African tribes, only allied to the so-called Bushmen (Ba-tua, Ba-roa, or Soaqua, Sonqua), who seem to be a degraded race, sunk to the lowest degree of savagery, but Avho likewise worship a highest god and by whom likewise fetichism is not practised. >r The Chinese Religions, and their delation to the Mongolia ii! - and Ural-Altaic. This is perhaps the most knotty point in the genealogical classification of religious. There are ethnologists (as Oscar Peschel) who bring not only the Chinese, with their nearest relatives the Japanese and Coreans, all Ural-Altaic or Turanian nations, but also the whole Malay race, including the Polynesians and Micronesians, and even the aboriginal Americans, from the Eskimo to the Patagonians and Fuegians, under one and the same vast Mongoloid family. There is indeed some similarity in the religious customs of the Americans and of the so-called Turanians ; and even in the Polynesian religions some points of contact with those of the former might be discovered. Still, such conformities are but few and not very important, and do not justify our going so far. 1 Other ethnologists, like Friedrich Miiller, do not admit the Americans, including the Hyperboreans of North America and the north-west of Asia, nor the Malayans and the Polynesians as members of the Mongol- ian race. This, according to them, only comprises the Chinese and their relatives in Tibet and the Transgangetic peninsula, the Japanese and Coreans, and the Ural-Altaic or Turanian nations. Now Prof. Max Miiller 2 tries to . show that the religions of all those groups of nations let us say, of this Mongolian race are also bound together by a close relationship, because not only their character is fundamentally the same, but even the same name of the highest god, Tien, Tengre, Tangara, &c., is met with among most of them. Putting aside the argument taken from the common name of the supreme deity, which is all but general among the members of this ethnical family and seems" to have come from the Chinese to some of the Mongolians, 3 we cannot deny the fact that not only in the Ural-Altaic and Japanese but also in the highly-developed Chinese religions the relation between the divine powers and man is purely patriarchal. Just as the chief of the horde nay, even the son of heaven, the Chinese emperor is regarded as the father of all his subjects, whom they are bound to obey and to venerate, so are the gods to their worshippers. The only difference is that the Chinese heaven-god Tien is an emperor like his earthly representa- tive, ruling over the other spirits of heaven and earth as does the latter over the dukes of the empire and their subjects, while the Ural-Altaic heaven-god is indeed the most powerful being, invoked in the greatest difficulties, when he only is able to save, but no supreme ruler, not 1 They are enumerated by Waitz, Anthropologie der Natur milker, in., 56 sq. 2 Lectures on the Science of Religion, 190 sq. 3 The resemblance of the Mongolian Tengre, Tangara, to the Sumerian or Accadian Dingiva appears to be equally fortuitous as that of the Polynesian Tangaroa (Taaroa) to the Melanesian Ndengei. anything more than a primus inter pares, every .other god being absolute lord and master in his own domain. Now this difference is not one of character but of progress, and answers fully to the difference of the political institutions of which it is the reflex. The high veneration for the spirits of the deceased fathers, which are devoutly worshipped among all the members of this religious family,' is a necessary conse- quence of its patriarchal type. But this feature is not less predominant among nations belonging to wholly different races. Another striking characteristic of the Mongolic religions is their extensive magic and sorcery (Shamanism). One might say that even the gods and the heroes of epic poetry are sorcerers, and that what their worshippers value above all are the magical powers they possess. Shamans are most highly honoured. One of the Chinese religions, and in fact that which contains the most ancient elements, we mean Taoism, involves the most implicit belief in sorcery, and even Buddhism, as it was adopted by the Mongols and the Chinese, has degenerated to all but pure Shamanism. We are thus fully justified in assuming a Mongolian or patriarchal family of religions, of which the following aru the principal subdivisions : 1. Chinese Religions, being (a) the ANCIENT NATIONAL Chinese, religion, now superseded partly by (6) Confucianism and (c) Taoism, partly, though only several centuries later, by Chinese Buddhism. What the ancient national religion was can only be gathered from its survivals in the still existing faiths. Confucianism claims to be a restoration of the old and pure institutions of the fathers, though it may just as well be said to be a thorough reform, and Taoism is, according to some European scholars, the original Chinese religion in its latest development we should say, in its most miserable degradation. At all events, in some form or another, it is much older than Lao-tsze (6th century B.C., see LAO-TSZE), though it has availed itself of his mystical treatise Tao-te-King as a sacred book. There may be some truth in both these conflicting assertions. Without venturing to speculate on the origin of the Chinese nationality, which according to some is a mixture of autochthons with more civilized foreign invaders (the Hundred Families), nor on the possibility that this ethnic dualism may be the source of the two streams of religious development in China, we have some ground to hold Con- fucius's reform as the renewal of a much older reform (Chowkung's or even earlier), limited to the learned and the greater part of the upper classes, Taoism on the con- trary being a revival of the ancient popular Chinese religion, to which the Tao-te-King had to give the appear- ance of a philosophical basis. Chinese Buddhism does not differ much from the latter, and is now equally despised. 2. Japanese Religions, where we have again the same Japanese, triad, nearly parallel to the Chinese : (a) the old national religion Kami-no-madsu (the way, i.e., the wprship, of the gods), called frequently Sin-to (Chinese Shin-tao, the way or worship of the spirits), with the mikado as its spiritual head, just as Chinese Taoism had its popes ; (6) Confucianism, imported from China in the 7th century; and (c) Buddhism, imported from Corea and nearly ex- terminated in the 6th century, but reviving, and at last, in the beginning of the 7th century, triumphant. 3. The Finnic branch of the Ural-Altaic religions, all recog- Finnic, nizing the same heaven-god Num, Yum, Yummal, Yubmel, Yumala, as supreme. The primitive unity of this sub- division has been demonstrated by Castren, the highest authority upon it. By far the best known of this family are its North-European members, the religions of the Lapps, the Esthonians, and the Finns, but the two last named are not pure specimens of Ural-Altaic worship, as