Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/341

Rh ideas not formulated in the vague and sluggish mind of a savage. He has never thought them out. Mr. Lang finds it necessary to modify Professor Jevons' assertion that "ancestors known to be human were not worshipped as gods, and ancestors worshipped as gods were not believed to have been human" (p. 206). He unconsciously modifies it still further when he admits that Daramulun and Napi (a god of the Blackfeet of North America—here he anticipates), and Baiame are best described as "magnified non-natural men," and quotes Curr concerning the Gippsland tribes that "they believe the Creator was a gigantic black, living among the stars" (pp. 207, 203). A savage indeed holds his god to be altogether such an one as himself: the god reflects his features, mental, moral, and physical, on a larger scale. The god of the savage is not "a deified blackfellow," but the savage himself raised to the nth power.

I traverse, therefore, the pleonastic assertion that "where the first ancestor is equivalent to the Creator, and is supreme, he is—from the first—deathless and immortal" (p. 205). According to savage philosophy there must have been a first ancestor "once upon a time." But to apply the term Creator to him is to credit the savage philosopher with the ideas of the civilised philosopher. The savage "creator" is at most