inhabit the sky, at another they were identified with the sky and its phenomena : "Adspice hoc sublime candens quem invocant omnes Jovem ;" and moderns speak of Heaven's will, Heaven's purpose. The Chinese, before they settled into atheism, called the sky Thian, and compounded his hieroglyph of the character Ta, great, , and the sign for one, thus representing heaven as the Great One.2 The Finn named his god Jumala, which is the same as the Lapp Jubmel, the Tscherk Juma, and the Samojed Num; the name being an onomatopoetic designation of the thunder. They applied this name to the sky as the seat of thunder, and thus to the God whom they identified with the sky. The Araucanians designate God as "the soul of the sky," and the Quiches name him "The Master of the Azure Surface." The North Pole, around which the constellations wheel, was regarded by some peoples as the especial seat of the Deity. The Chinese name, Tay-ye, signifying the Great Unity, has been by them applied to the North Star. The disciples of Lao-tse venerated the North, and regarded it as a sin to spit in that direction; and Confucius, on his return from Lou, fasted, and then, having purified himself, assembled his disciples before an old altar, and having laid on it the six kings, or books he had composed, he knelt down with his face turned north, to adore Heaven. * Isaiah speaks of Lucifer in his opposition to the Most High establishing his throne in the sides of the North. The seven stars of the constellation Ursus major received special rev 1 Ennius, in Cic. de Nat. Deor. xxv. 2 Plath: Cultus and Relig. p. 18. 3 Castrén: Finnische Mythe. p. 16. • Mémoires concernant les Chinois, xii. 379. 5 Isa. xiv. 13, 14. erence and deification as wheeling around the North. They were the seven Rischis of India, and the seven Kudai of the Minussinian Tartars. The multiplication of names for the Deity is due to several causes. To the principle of these we shall allude in the chapter on Polytheism. But there was a potent cause which must be mentioned here. Words and ideas are so closely united, that men think there is some real bond of connexion between the thing and the name belonging to it; and among savages, it is popularly supposed that to mention the name of an object at a distance has a direct effect upon it. The name is held to be a part of the very being of man, so that by it his personality may be carried away and grafted elsewhere. A man may be cursed or bewitched through his name. The names of drugs written on slips of paper and swallowed by a patient are held to work as efficaciously as the medicines themselves.1 This confusion of objective with subjective connexion, which shows itself so uniform in principle, though so various in details," says Mr. Tylor, one of the shrewdest observers of the characteristics of savage thought, "in the practices upon images and names, done with a view of acting through them on their originals or their owners, may be applied to explain one branch after another of the arts of the sorcerer and diviner, till it almost seems as though we were coming near the end of his list, and might set down practices not based on this mental process as exceptions to a general rule. When a lock of hair is cut off as a memorial, the subjective connexion between it and its former owner is not severed. In the mind of the friend who treasures it up, it recalls thoughts of his presence, it is still something 1 Davis Chinese, ii. 215. belonging to him. We know, however, that the objective connexion was cut by the scissors, and that what is done. to that hair afterwards is not felt by the head on which it grew. But this is exactly what the savage has not come to know. He feels that the subjective bond is unbroken in his own mind, and he believes that the objective bond, which his mind never gets clearly separate from it, is unbroken too." As with the hair, so with the name. Among the lower races a remarkable aversion is noticeable to the designation by name of a friend or relative, lest the use of the name should produce a bad effect on the person spoken of. Thus the Indians of British Columbia exhibit an extreme dislike to mention their names, lest these names should be employed to hurt them. Among the Algonquins the real name is kept a profound secret, and the current designation is a mere nickname. It is next to impossible to induce an Indian to utter personal names; the utmost he will do, if a person implicated is present, is to move his lips, without speaking, in the direction of the personage.3 A Hindu wife will never, under any circumstances, mention the name of her husband; she will call him the Master, Swamy, &c., but will refrain carefully from giving his true name. The names of the dead are avoided with horror, lest the utterance of them should call up the ghost. This is very general among all savage races. Dr. Lang tried to get the name of a relative who had been killed from an Australian. "He told me who the lad's father was, who was his brother, what he was like, how he walked 1 Tylor: Early History of Mankind, p. 127. 2 Mayne British Columbia, p. 278; London, 1862. 3 Schoolcraft: Historical and Statistic Information, &c. part ii. pp 65, 433; Philadelphia, 1851. when he was alive, how he held his tomahawk in his left hand instead of his right (for he was left-handed), and with whom he usually associated; but the dreaded name never escaped his lips; and I believe no promises or threats could have induced him to utter it." "1 The same dislike is felt to mention any spiritual beings, or anything to which supernatural powers are ascribed, not lest the naming of them should hurt them, but lest it should attract their attention to the speaker. Our The Dyak will not speak of the small-pox by name, but will call it "the chief," or "jungle leaves." "Talk of the Devil, and he is sure to appear," is a familiar proverb among ourselves, indicative of the same feeling. countryfolk will not mention the fairies and pyxies except by some euphemism, as "the Good Folk." The Yezidis, who worship the Evil One, have a horror of his name being mentioned. The Greeks called the Furies Eumenides, the gracious ones. The Mahommedan supposes that the name of God is known only to the prophets, and Allah is regarded by them as a mere title. So the Jew held that Jehovah had an incommunicable name; and in his legends told how Solomon, beginning to utter it, made heaven and earth quake. An aged Indian of Lake Michigan explained why tales of the spirits were only told in winter, by saying that when the deep snow is on the ground the voices of those repeating their names is muffled, but that in summer the slightest mention of them must be avoided lest the spirits should be offended.2 This dread of vexing the gods by mentioning their names has led to the formation of a multitude of attribu 1 Lang: Queensland, pp. 367, 387; London, 1861. 2 Schoolcraft, part. iii. pp. 314, 492. tive titles and epithets, which could be familiarly used. In course of time these titles became sacred names, and euphemisms had to be coined for common use that they, in turn, might be avoided. The Semitic divine names bear indelibly on their front the stamp of their origin, and the language itself testifies against the insulation and abstraction of these names for polytheism. The Aryan's tongue bore no such testimony to him. The spirit of his language led him away from monotheism, whilst that of the Shemite was an everpresent monitor, directing him to a God, sole and undivided. "The glory of the Semitic race is this," says M. Renan, "that from its earliest days it grasped that notion of the Deity which all other peoples have had to adopt from its example, and on the faith of its declaration." That it was so is, to a very great extent, owing to the construction of the language, which is such that its roots lie unaltered in every inflexion and combination, without undergoing the modifications which have, in the Aryan tongues, almost obliterated the root-form. "In the Semitic languages, the roots expressive of the predicates which were to serve as the proper names of any subjects, remained so distinct within the body of a word, that those who used the word were unable to forget its predicative meaning, and retained in most cases a distinct consciousness of its appellative power."" Consequently the reduction of Semitic words to their roots is infallible, whilst, on the other hand, the reduction of Aryan words to their roots is liable to error. The difference in the two linguistic families greatly 1 Renan Hist. Gén. des Langues Sémitiques, i. 5. |