ideas not formulated in the vague and sluggish mind of a savage. He has never thought them out. Mr. Lang finds it necessary to modify Professor Jevons' assertion that "ancestors known to be human were not worshipped as gods, and ancestors worshipped as gods were not believed to have been human" (p. 206). He unconsciously modifies it still further when he admits that Daramulun and Napi (a god of the Blackfeet of North America—here he anticipates), and Baiame are best described as "magnified non-natural men," and quotes Curr concerning the Gippsland tribes that "they believe the Creator was a gigantic black, living among the stars" (pp. 207, 203).[1] A savage indeed holds his god to be altogether such an one as himself: the god reflects his features, mental, moral, and physical, on a larger scale. The god of the savage is not "a deified blackfellow," but the savage himself raised to the nth power.
I traverse, therefore, the pleonastic assertion that "where the first ancestor is equivalent to the Creator, and is supreme, he is—from the first—deathless and immortal" (p. 205). According to savage philosophy there must have been a first ancestor "once upon a time." But to apply the term Creator to him is to credit the savage philosopher with the ideas of the civilised philosopher. The savage "creator" is at most
- ↑ The reference, given only vaguely by Mr. Lang, is to The Australian Race, vol. iii., p. 547. The quotation is not accurate; nor does it bear out Mr. Lang's contention in the paragraph where it is quoted, that "The savage Supreme Being, with added power, omniscience, and immortality, is the idealisation of the savage, as conceived of by himself, minus fleshly body (as a rule), and minus Death." Quoted verbatim, it runs: "The Creator of all that has life on earth they believe to have been a gigantic blackfellow, who lived in Gippsland many centuries ago, and dwells amongst the stars. Indeed, many of the stars are named after some of their people long since dead." The death of the "Creator" is surely implied here, as a preliminary to his translation "amongst the stars." Observe, too, the limitation of his "creative" functions. Curr's conclusions are not always to be trusted, and his knowledge of the majority of the tribes was second-hand and imperfect; but his presentation of the god in these words is to be preferred to Mr. Lang's
