Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/58

 32 long and judicious passage on the question, "Can changes be introduced into the rites?" and though they think the thing may, and, "in the dark backward and abysm of time," probably must, have been managed, it was confessedly very difficult. But from that possibility to the sudden acceptance from missionaries and insertion in the secret archaic rites of all the "biblical characteristics" we discuss is a very long step. These glaringly obvious difficulties do not seem to have been noticed at all by the friends of the theory of borrowing. So much for Mr. Tylor's contention that biblical analogies (which I presume I also may now regard as biblical in character) are of European origin.

Next, as to Creation, attributed to Baiame among others. "To use the word creation is to import into the deeds of an imaginary being, who is presented, if not as a 'deified blackfellow,' at least as hardly more than a very exalted savage wizard, ideas which do not belong to them [to those deeds], and therefore are utterly misleading to the reader," says Mr. Hartland. Now, in plenty of contradictory myths, Baiame is a rather low type of wizard; but, when my authorities tell me of "creation" by him, or by another being, what other word am I to use? If Baiame "made earth and water, sky, animals, and men," what did he do but "create"? I am not reduced to mere missionary evidence. In 1845 Mr. Eyre (not a missionary) described "the origin of creation" as narrated to him by blacks of the Murring. Noorele, with three unbegotten sons, lives up among the clouds. (Noorele, like Elohim, may, it seems, be plural.) He is "all-powerful" (not omnipotent, which is rhetorical, only "all-powerful)" "and of benevolent character. He made the earth, trees, waters, &c." "He receives the souls (ladko = umbræ) of the natives, who