Religions of Primitive PeoplesBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Religion
Religions of Primitive Peoples
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Mythology; Religion; Religions -- History
This extends to the rudest tribes. The African traveller Holub says that
the actual name of the god of the Marutse and allied tribes along the
Zambesi river is Njambe; but to avoid revealing this, they employ the
term Molemo, “He above.” Among the south-eastern Australian tribes their
leading deity is Turramulun (the One-legged), who lives in the sky. His
name is never revealed to women, nor to youths before their initiation to
manhood.[112]
The Choctaw Indians regarded the name of their highest divinity as
self-existing, essential, and unspeakable. Therefore, when it was
necessary to refer to him, they adopted a circumlocution, for, says their
historian, “according to their fixed standard of speech, had they made
any nearer approach to the beloved Name, it would have been reckoned a
profanation.”[113]
How completely this notion has survived among ourselves is shown by
the second clause of that prayer on which we have all been brought up,
“Hallowed be Thy Name.” But how few who repeat it reflect that the name
referred to, whatever it was, is now through long concealment totally
lost!
Thus we see that the doctrine of “the ineffable Name” is the common
property of savage and cultured faiths.
From the misuse of the name to compel the obedience of the god, or
to injure his dignity and worth, came the idea of profanity, sternly
forbidden by the early Jewish law,—“Take not the name of the Lord in
vain”—and by many other faiths of a primitive aspect.
Quite consistently with this idea of real existence in names, the god who
had many names had just as many powers or faculties. For that reason,
the prominent gods of ancient Egypt, especially Isis, were called upon
by so numerous epithets that the Greeks spoke of them as “myrionomous,”
ten-thousand-named. In later Babylonian times all the names of the fifty
great gods were ascribed to Êa, by which process they were themselves
absorbed into his being. “When they lost their names, they lost their
personality as well.”[114] To the Mohammedan the “One hundred names of
God” repeated in the Koran express the multitude of His powers.
The same tendency is visible in the native religions of America. The
Mexicans applied many names to the same divinity, and in the _Popol Vuh_,
the sacred book of the Quiches, the chief deity is called by a variety of
titles, some sounding strange to us, as “the opossum-hunter,” the “green
snake,” the “calebash,” all of symbolic sense.[115]
In the South Seas, the name of a god, adopted by a chief, identified
him in the opinion of the people with the god and secured for him the
reverence and adoration ascribed to his divine namesake.[116]
This idea is that which in many early and later faiths led to what are
called the “theophorous” or god-bearing names, where the individual
is called by the proper name of a saint or god. They were especially
frequent in early Semitic religions, and are customary among Catholics
to-day.[117]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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