To sum up, we have proved, by evidence of 1558, 1586, 1612-16, and
1633, that a sort of supreme creative being was known in North America
before any missionary influence reached the regions where he prevailed.
As to the Australian god Baiame, we have shown out of the mouth of Mr.
Tylor's own witness, Mr. Hale, that Baiame preceded the missionaries
in the region where literary evidence of his creed first occurs. We
have given Mr. Hale's opinion as to the improbability of borrowing.
We have left it to Mr. Tylor to find the missionary who, before 1840,
translated 'Creator' by the Kamilaroi word 'Baiame' while showing the
difficulty--I think the impossibility--of discovering any Kamilaroi
philologist before Mr. Threlkeld. And Mr. Threlkeld certainly did not
introduce Baiame! We have proved that, contrary to Mr. Tylor's theory
of what a missionary can do, Mr. Threlkeld could not introduce his
own names for God, Eloi and Jehovah-ka, into Kamilaroi practice. We
note the improbability that highly conservative medicine-men would
unanimously thrust a European idea into their ancient mysteries.
We have observed that by the nature of Mr. Tylor's theory, the
hypothetically borrowed divine names and attributes must (if taken over
from missionaries) have been well known to the women and children from
whom they are concealed under dreadful penalties. We have demonstrated
the worthlessness of negative evidence by proving that the facts were
discovered, on initiation, by a student (Mr. Howitt), confessedly in
the first rank, though he, during many years, had been ignorant of
their existence. We show that the ideas of age and paternity, in an
object of reverence, are natural and habitual to Australian natives,
and stood in no need of being borrowed. We suggest that the absence
of prayer to a powerful being is fatal to the theory of borrowing. We
show that direct native evidence utterly denies the borrowing of divine
names and attributes, and strenuously asserts that before Europeans
came to Melbourne (1835) they were revealed in the secret doctrine of
ancient initiatory rites. This evidence again removed the doubts which
Mr. Howitt had entertained on the point, and Mr. Palmer and Mr. Dawson
agree with Mr. Howitt, Mr. Ridley, Mr. Günther, and Mr. Greenway, all
experts, all studying the blacks on the spot. In the study, Waitz is of
the same opinion. Australian religion is unborrowed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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