Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/187

 Pre-animistic Religion. 177

snakes, and lizards, in fact a host of strange and gruesome beasts, are to the savage, of their own right and on the face of them, instinct with dreadful divinity. To take a single instance, a fishing party of Crees catch a new and terrible- looking kind of fish. It is promptly returned to the water as a Manttou, and five days are wasted whilst it is being appeased.^ Now in the case of Powers like these, sympa- thetic magic will naturally suggest the wearing of tooth or claw, bone or skin as a means of sharing in the divine potency. Here is the chance for Animism to step in. Thus a Kennaiah chief who wishes to wear the skin of the Borneo tiger cat for luck in war, will wrap himself in it, and before lying down to sleep will explain to the skin exactly what he wants, and beg the spirit to send him a propitious dream.^ Or in other cases mere association and coincidence will pave the way towards an animistic version of the facts. Thus I have no doubt that it is the uncanny appearance of the snake, combined with its habit of frequenting graves and of enter- ing dwellings, which has led more than one savage people to treat it as the chosen incarnation of their ancestral ghosts.^ And here let me leave this part of the subject, having thus barely touched upon it in order to confirm the single point that Religious Awe is towards Powers, and that these are not necessarily spirits or ghosts, though they tend to be- come so.

At length we reach what I have roughly described as the proper domain and parent-soil of Animism, namely the phenomena that have to do with dream and trance, disease and death. Here the question for us must be, " Do Super- naturalism and Animism originally coincide in respect to these phenomena ? " Or, in other words, " Is the Awful in each and all of them alike, primarily soul or spirit?" My

' llmA,- Red River Exped., ii., 135. ^ Ilose.y. A. /., xxiii., 159.

' " Zulus," Macdonald,y^. A. I., xx., 122. " Malagasy." Sibree,_/. A. I., xxi., 227.

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