Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/134

 112 Reviews.

man. Mr. Nassau quotes a not uncommon eccentricity of logic: M. Decle writes that the Barotse " beheve in a supreme Being,

Niambe " and also, of the Matabele, that " the idea of a

Supreme Being is utterly foreign to, and cannot be appreciated by the native mind." Eyre contradicts himself in the same way about his Australians; and I have observed the identical con- fusion in the work of an eminent living student of certain Australian tribes. The belief in the "All-Father," of course, is not on the level of a bishop's or of a philosopher's attempt to conceive the Deity, but it is very nearly on a level with the conception as illustrated by some passages in the Pentateuch. From the Deity of these passages, and from Baiame and Nyambe, it is easier to work up to the philosophic or Christian conception of God, than from the Zeus of Greece, or from the President of the divine consistory of any other polytheistic religion. Any one who compares Mr. Nassau's pages 35, 30, with the essay of M. AUegret, will see that these observers precisely corroborate each other as to the nature of the behef in Nyambe, as to its wide diffusion, as to its want of influence on conduct, and as to a vague " yearning after " Nyambe, to quote Eumaeus in the Odyssey. " He made these trees, that mountain, this river, these goats and chickens," say the natives (Nassau, p. 37). Yet I make little doubt that the natives have also other myths, explain- ing in detail how this, that, or the other object came to exist. elsewhere shown, is almost universally the case where such All-Fathers exist among savage or barbarous conceptions. The All-Father is nihil indiga nostn : sacrifices are for ancestral gods, and for fetish rocks, trees, pools, and so forth. In Israel they came to be transferred to the Being held most high; among known savages this is almost unexampled.
 * ' In practice they give Nyambe no worship," and this, as I have

Our two authors agree as well in their accounts of belief about spirits, magic, and fetishes of all sorts and sizes, as in their remarks on Nyambe. Mr. Nassau appears to find crystal-gazing (p. 134). In his paragraph on Totemism (p. 210) he appears to mix up Totems, Siboko, and Nyarongs (animal familiars) in helpless confusion. This is not unusual, unluckily. Mr. Nassau's examples of Mdrc/ien, some of which have European variants, is

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