Ch. 12: Savage Supreme Beings

It is among 'the lowest savages' that the Supreme Beings are most regarded as eternal, moral (as the morality of the tribe goes, or above its habitual practice), and powerful. I have elsewhere described the Bushman god Cagn, as he was portrayed to Mr. Orpen by Qing, who 'had never before seen a white man except fighting.' Mr. Orpen got the facts from Qing by inducing him to explain the natives' pictures on the walls of caves. 'Cagn made all things, and we pray to him,' thus: 'O Cagn, O Cagn, are we not thy children? Do you not see us hunger? Give us food.' As to ethics, 'At first Cagn was very good, but he got spoilt through fighting so many things.' 'How came he into the world?' 'Perhaps with those who brought the Sun: only the initiated know these things.' It appears that Qing was not yet initiated in the dance (answering to a high rite of the Australian Bora) in which the most esoteric myths were unfolded.[1]

In Mr. Spencer's 'Descriptive Sociology' the religion of the Bushmen is thus disposed of. 'Pray to an insect of the caterpillar kind for success in the chase.' That is rather meagre. They make arrow-poison out of caterpillars,[2] though Dr. Bleek, perhaps correctly, identifies Cagn with i-kaggen, the insect.

The case of the Andaman Islanders may be especially recommended to believers in the anthropological science of religion. For long these natives were the joy of emancipated inquirers as the 'godless Andamanese.' They only supply Mr. Spencer's 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' with a few instances of the ghost-belief.[3] Yet when the Andamanese are scientifically studied in situ by an educated Englishman, Mr. Man, who knows their language, has lived with them for eleven years, and presided over our benevolent efforts 'to reclaim them from their savage state,' the Andamanese turn out to be quite embarrassingly rich in the higher elements of faith. They have not only a profoundly philosophical religion, but an excessively absurd mythology, like the Australian blacks, the Greeks, and other peoples. If, on the whole, the student of the Andamanese despairs of the possibility of an ethnological theory of religion, he is hardly to be blamed.

The people are probably Negritos, and probably 'the original inhabitants, whose occupation dates from prehistoric times.'[4] They use the bow, they make pots, and are considerably above the Australian level. They have second-sighted men, who obtain status 'by relating an extraordinary dream, the details of which are declared to have been borne out subsequently by some unforeseen event, as, for instance, a sudden death or accident.' They have to produce fresh evidential dreams from time to time. They see phantasms of the dead, and coincidental hallucinations.[5] All this is as we should expect it to be.

Their religion is probably not due to missionaries, as they always shot all foreigners, and have no traditions of the presence of aliens on the islands before our