Trial by Ordeal. 267 method is employed by the negroes of the Gold Coast.25 Otherwise in South Africa (where it extends from the Atlantic tribes to the Masai), trial by ordeal generally takes the form of swallowing a goblet full of Mbundu juice. If the poisonous beverage does not at once act as an emetic, the guilt of the accused is proved. When the small-pox broke out on the Rembo in Mayolo (2° south lat., 11° east long.) in 1865, Du Chaillu saw victims of this Shamanistic deception perish by the side of the victims of the pestilence. 26 The judicial trials, accompanied by the torture of the accused, of the Amaxosa Kaffirs,27 have been strikingly described by Maclean. Belief in the efficacy of the black art is all the more difficult to eradicate, owing to the fact that the accused sometimes confesses that he has worked charms. It is beyond question that such attempts at magic actually take place, for Martius 28 the traveller caught a revengeful slave in a Brazilian hut in the act of performing her nocturnal incantations. It is difficult to see how this vicious practice is to be done away, for although the miracles of the Shamans frequently fail, this, in the eyes of the prejudiced, affords no proof of the nullity of the means employed, but merely that the medicines or incantations were too weak to counteract the evil work of some distant Shaman. All observers of foreign races of mankind unanimously assure us that the wizards themselves are among the deceived, and firmly believe in their own arts.29 The Siberian Shamans, the North American medicine-men, the Brazilian Piaï, the South African Mganga, the Australian and Papuan magicians, live apart from their tribes, educate their disciples by fasts and self-mortifications, and only thus reveal to them the treasures of their occult knowledge. The ultimate idea of Shamanism, which, under all its numerous names and guises, is always fundamentally the same, is based on the superstition that man is able to communicate with the invisible 25 Bosman, Guinese Goud-Kust. 26 Du Chaillu, Ashango Land, p. 175. 27 Kaffir Laws and Customs. Mount Coke, 1858. 25 Ethnographie, vol. i. 29 So says Dobrizhoffer of the Abipones (Geschichte der Abiponer), and Mariner (Tonga Islands), of the Polynesian inhabitants of the Friendly group. powers, and to force them to obedience. In either case symbolical practices and incantations are employed, and these have preserved their efficiency because human reason is so weak that one affirmative instance, ineradicably impressed upon the memory, completely outweighs nine negative instances, which are speedily forgotten. In its highest refinements this self-deception is able to insinuate itself into the purest minds. It attaches itself to symbolism and ritualism, and is in operation wherever a definite but not necessarily inevitable effect is expected from a symbolical act. When pious people in Protestant countries wish to obtain a revelation to guide them in the difficulties of life, they open a psalm book, expecting a divine answer in the first psalm or verse on which their eye may fall. They thus unconsciously make a covenant with the God within them that, when interrogated in this manner and with full faith, he is bound to bestow an answer. Nothing is more capable of Shamanistic abuse than prayer, for it becomes a magic spell the instant that the words of the supplicant are supposed to have any sort of influence on the divine will. That such errors have taken root in some places is easily seen in the fact that repetitions of prayers are employed in an extreme degree; and the Buddhists are so deeply sunk in this self-deception that they have invented prayer machines, which are revolving cylinders, on which is rolled a paper with the prayers inscribed upon it. The intention is to outwit the Deity by this apparatus at each revolution of the cylinder, for he is supposed to accept the prayers as though spoken. Ingenious Mongols have even set such prayerrolls in motion by wind and water-wheels, and thus endeavoured to gain the rewards of piety. Sacrifice tends to lead men into yet greater error. The purest motives, an overflow of gratitude, the avowal of a fault and the desire for its expiation may lead the believer to the altar. Imperceptibly, and almost inevitably, another aspect of sacrifice introduces itself behind this purer view. The Deity is then regarded as the recipient, and the donor expects a return for his benefits.30 30 Tylor (Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 400) justly calls to mind that in English, and, we may add, in German, sacrifice signifies a self-inflicted loss. Prayer and Sacrifice. 269 Thus the Homeric heroes, invoking the aid of their invisible protectors, reminded them of the many libations which they had offered up to them.31 But the superstition is most evil in its effects when symbolism is associated with the sacrifice. Nowhere has self-deception of this sort obtained such complete mastery over intelligent and even sagacious thinkers as in India; for the Brahmins are the chief of all Shamans-systematically educated, refined by depth of thought, and supported by the practice of a thousand years. Their most powerful charm is the juice of the Soma plant (Sarcostemma viminale) with which they reinforce their sacrifices. Like the Mganga, or South African rain-makers, they summon the desired wet weather; for only when invigorated by their sacred rites is the thunder-god Indra able to open the clouds and extract from them the fertilizing shower. A creative power is attributed to the sacrifice, for Brahma is supposed to be omnipresent in all offerings. 32 According to their doctrine, penances, if prolonged for an unlimited period, as were those of Vishvâmitra, at last confer such mighty power on the sufferer that the epic gods fear lest he may destroy both heaven and earth. But as, according to the Shamanistic hypothesis, by means of prayers and hymns, and above all by sacrifice, accompanied by effectual symbolical acts, the gods may be forced to perform the desired services, the logical conclusion is that penances, prayers, and sacrifices are stronger than the gods. Thus the Indians obtained the conception of Brahma, a spiritual power existing in the ritualistic mysteries and predominating over the gods. The Brahmins themselves, as the initiated to whom alone were known the occult meaning and the efficacy of the practices and sayings, were ultimately obliged to lay claim to superhuman qualities, and exalt themselves into incarnate deities. According to their doctrine, all success depended on the proper performance of sacrifice. To this act they owed their rank and prosperity. The sacrifices themselves, simple at first, became more and more complicated. Before long they required more than one day, then weeks, months, and years, and at the same time, by constant quadrupling, the number of officiating priests rose to sixty-four, according to Martin Haug, who 31 Iliad, i. 37-42. 32 Martin Haug, Alleg. Zeitung. 1873. was the first European to penetrate the deepest secrets of the Brahmins. 33 If the essence of Shamanism consists in the performance of some form of sorcery which rules the powers held to be divine, and extorts from them the fulfilment of a desire, or the disclosure of future events, it is obviously indifferent whether the method employed consists in shaking a rattle, in sacrifice, prayers, fastings, penances, or in the interrogation of the entrails of animals or the flight of birds. All nations have succumbed to this illusion; few have entirely shaken it off. It survives in full strength in America, in Siberia, in Buddhist Asia, in Brahminical India, under the various forms of the Amulet of the Mahommedans, the trial by ordeal, the rain-making of the Africans, and the Nahak tricks of the Papuans. We, ourselves, have only lately abolished trials for witchcraft. The great Kepler was obliged to return to his Suabian home in order to rescue his aged mother from death by fire, with which Protestant Shamanists were threatening her. From all this it is manifest that the moral education of mankind by means of religion has nowhere encountered greater dangers than from Shamanistic delusion. When any symbolical act is supposed to possess a supernatural effect, the rite is placed, like Brahma, higher than the deities. XI. THE DOCTRINE OF BUDDHA. THE Aryans spread themselves over the Punjaub and the plain of the Ganges at the expense of a barbarian aboriginal population, which they excelled in mental endowments and physical beauty. The possession of these advantages characteristic of the race, led to the prohibition by Manu's legislation of mixed marriages, and to the most uncharitable regulations of caste. The priests, as the initiated, had, as we have seen, exalted the knowledge of the Shamanistic practices, of prayers and sacrifices, into a power superior to the old gods, who were reduced to the subordinate 33 Martin Haug, Brahme und die Brahmanen. Vedantâ and Sânkhja. 271 office of guardians of the world. Brahma, in its oldest historical sense, means prayer,' and the Brahmins were originally called the people who pray. Brahma subsequently appeared, in an anthropomorphic aspect, as the god of prayer, and later still as the creator of the world. The priest had now the task of distorting the doctrines of the Vedas by skilful interpretation into conformity with the tenet of the transmigration of souls, taught by religious philosophy in the Brahminical books of ritual.2 Brahma, or the universal soul, was proclaimed to be the only real existence, while the world perceptible to the senses was an illusion, the work of Maja, or deception, and unsubstantial as the image of the moon reflected by calm waters. To see through this illusion, to proclaim that the world is nothing, to hail Brahma as the only existence, as Thou, to acknowledge Self as one with him, implied the liberation of the Ego from the illusions of the world of the senses, and reabsorption into Brahma. Like this doctrine of the Vedântâ, the Sankhja philosophy looked for the release of the human soul from its incarceration in the body, and regarded all objects of perception as illusions, but it expected liberation not by absorption into the Deity, but by a withdrawal of the soul into itself, and an alienation from the world of matter. The great maxim of the Vedântâ was, I am the The, I am Brahma; the Sankhja school, on the contrary, said, I am not the The (Nature).3 The people of India held, and still hold, to the conception of the indestructibility of the soul. A tendency to melancholy and weariness of life has existed in them from the earliest times. A never-ending series of transmigrations of the soul threatened them at every step. There are very few among ourselves sufficiently happy to care to begin their own lives anew with their disillusions and hours of dejection. In the words of the apostle, the creature groaneth for deliverance. The Hindoo was tortured and oppressed by the idea of a perpetual and unavoidable renewal of his present existence; the eternally revolving wheel could never 1 J. Muir, Sanscrit Texts. London, 1872. 3 Köppen, Die Religion des Buddha. Berlin, 1857. |