Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/179

 Rh The appeal to fact that will occupy the rest of this paper, cursory though it must be in view of our space conditions, will suffice, I hope, to settle the matter. First, let us remind ourselves by the help of one or two typical quotations how widely and indiscriminately Supernaturalism casts its net. Thus Ellis writes of the Malagasy: "Whatever is great, whatever exceeds the capacity of their understandings, they designate by the one convenient and comprehensive appellation, Andriamanitra. Whatever is new and useful and extraordinary is called god. Silk is considered as god in the highest degree, the superlative adjective being added to the noun—Andriamanitra-indrinda. Rice, money, thunder and lightning, and earthquake are all called god. Their ancestors and a deceased sovereign they designate in the same manner. Tarantasy or book they call god, from its wonderful capacity of speaking by merely looking at it. Velvet is called by the singular epithet, 'son of god.'" So too of the Masai, though far lower than the Malagasy in the scale of culture, the account given by Joseph Thomson is precisely similar. "Their conception of the deity," he says, "seems marvellously vague. I was Ngai. My lamp was Ngai. Ngai was in the steaming holes. His house was in the eternal snow^s of Kilimanjaro. In fact, whatever struck them as strange or incomprehensible,, that they at once assumed had some connection with Ngai." As I have said, such quotations are typical and might be multiplied indefinitely. Andriamanitra and Ngai reappear in the Wakan of the North American Indian, the Mana of the Melanesian, the Kalou of the Fijian, and so on. It is the common element in ghosts and gods, in the magical and the mystical, the supernal and the infernal the unknown within and the unknown without. It is the Supernatural or Supernormal, as distinguished from the