'Risen again' he was, and did dance the Hieland Laddie at Gledsmuir
and Falkirk. The 'Volkslied' scientifically represents the conflict of
opinion as unsettled, despite the testimony of the grave of Satan at
the lang toun of Kirkcaldy; like the grave of Zeus in Crete.
Mr. Frazer, then, ought not, I think, to assume a general belief in
the mortality of Greenland gods in face of contradictory but uncited
evidence.
1. A North American Indian told Colonel Dodge that 'the Great Spirit
that made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have
lived so long as this.'[14] Now this was the _ipse dixit_ and personal
inference of a vague modern 'North American Indian,' living in an age
which, as Mr. Frazer remarks, must 'breach those venerable walls' of
belief. To prove his case, Mr. Frazer needs to find examples of the
opinion that the 'Great Spirit' was believed to be dead (if he grants
that there ever existed an American belief in a Great Spirit) among the
American Indians as first studied by Europeans. I have elsewhere argued
that the supreme being of most barbaric races is regarded as otiose,
inactive, and so may come to be a mere name and by-word, like the
Huron Atahocan,[15] 'who made everything,' and the Unkulunkulu of the
Zulus, who has been so thrust into the background by the competition of
ancestral spirits that his very existence is doubted. 'In process of
time we have come to worship the spirits only, because we know not what
to say about Unkulunkulu.' 'We seek out for ourselves the spirits that
we may not always be thinking about Unkulunkulu.'[16] In the same way,
throughout the beliefs of barbaric races, the competition of friendly
and helpful spirits pushes back such beings as the Australian Baiame
and Mungan-ngaur, who exist where sacrifice to ancestral spirits has
not yet been developed; and the Canadian Andouagni of 1558.[17] Thus
a modern North American Indian may infer, and may tell Colonel Dodge,
that the creator is dead, because he is not in receipt of sacrifice or
prayer. But the cult of such high beings, where it existed and still
exists, in North America, the cult of Ti-ra-wá with whom the Pawnees
expect to live after death, of the Blackfoot Ná-pi of Ahone, Okeus,
Kiehtan, and the rest, proves belief in gods who are alive, and who are
not said to be in any danger of death.
2. A tribe of Philippine Islanders told the Spanish conquerors that
the grave of the Creator was on the top of Mount Cabunian. So the
Philippine Islanders did believe in a Creator. The grave may have been
the result of the usual neglect of the supreme being already explained,
or may have meant no more than the grave of Zeus in Crete, while Zeus
was being worshipped all over the Greek world.
3. Heitsi Eibib, of the Hottentots, had a number of graves, accounted
for by the theory of successive lives and deaths. But so had Tammuz and
Adonis yearly lives and deaths, yet the god was _en permanence_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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