Not only by fasting, solitude, and intense expectation centred on the expected revelation, is it brought into reality, but in nearly every savage tribe we find a knowledge of narcotic plants which were employed to induce strange and vivid hallucinations or dreams. The negroes of the Niger had their “fetish water,” the Creek Indians of Florida their “black drink,” for this purpose. In many parts of the United States the natives smoked stramonium, the Mexican tribes swallowed the _peyotl_ and the snake-plant, the tribes of California and the Samoyeds of Siberia had found a poisonous toadstool;—all to bring about communion with the Divine and to induce ecstatic visions.[59] Whatever the means employed, their aim was everywhere the same, and was directed primarily and essentially towards the excitation of the religious emotions, towards securing a revelation of the will of the gods. Thus it came that the whole of life, waking and sleeping, assumed a dreamy, unreal character. The traveller Spix says of the forest tribes of Brazil that they never seem fully awake; and a Pawnee war song begins by an appeal to the gods to decide if this life itself is aught but a dream.[60] The ancient Mexicans had developed the doctrine that this life is a dream and that death is the awakening, the passing into a living condition. They spoke of dying as the appearance of the dawn, and the approach of light. This is closely akin to that doctrine of _mâyâ_, or the unreality of the duality of the subject and object, which “is the very life of the primitive [East] Indian philosophy.”[61] The influence which such a view must have exerted on the religious thought of a nation is manifest. 2. The question has been discussed by some philosophers whether the idea of Life is anterior in the human mind to that of Death. Had they studied the beliefs of primitive peoples, their doubts would have disappeared. The savage knows not death as a natural occurrence. His language has no word meaning “to die,” but only “to be killed.” Disease is an unseen shaft, or the work of a malignant sorcerer. To him, all things live and live forever. Each bird, each bush, each rock has its own vital principle. By reason of the consciousness of his own living Self, he imputes life to all around him, but in a higher degree and of some rarer quality to those existences which he holds as his deities. His god is supremely a living god, the source of Life, its creator, preserver, and sustainer. If we seek the recondite meaning hidden behind the two words which throughout Polynesia expressed in its most general sense the concept of the Divine, _io_, and _atua_, we discover that it is in both “the central cause or essentiality of Life.”[62] So among the Indians of Michoacan the epithet of the chief goddess of their cult was, “The Sustainer of Life”; the highest divinity of the Aztecs was Tonacatecutli, “God of Our Life”; and in the Muskoghean tribes His name was “The Master of Life.”