Ancestral spirit

“ The general attitude of the people towards the ancestral spirits has been described in the introductory chapter, and many concrete examples will be found in the accounts of the various ceremonies given later. ”

“ These children of Nature follow their ancestral traditions modified by Christian influences. The original religion of the natives, if we may call it by that name, consists in a dim belief in a future state, quite undefined even in their own minds. ”

“ Coming into their heritage, which is the accumulated knowledge and experience of their ancestors, before they have acquired a direct and profound grasp of life, they seem to enter the world full-fledged, while it is only that ancestral heritage that works through the impressions of the youthful brain and gives them the color of age. ”

“ Your viands are in slices. The personators of your ancestors feast and drink;--Happiness and dignity descend on them.
The wild-ducks and widgeons are where the waters meet; The personators of your ancestors feast and are honoured. The feast is spread in the ancestral temple. The place where happiness and dignity descend. The personators of your ancestors feast and drink;--Their happiness and dignity are at the highest point.
The wild-ducks and widgeons are in the gorge; The personators of your ancestors rest, full of complacency. The fine spirits are delicious ”

“ All joined in this request; and so, when the old man had filled and smoked his calumet again, he told them the Indian tradition of the origin of the human races:
“Long ago, perhaps as many moons as there are stars in the sky, the Great Spirit made this world of ours, and fitted it up as a dwelling place for his people. Then he set to work to make man. He took a piece of white clay, and moulded it and worked at it until he had formed a man. ”

“ But as we all pass through in our lives the various stages of ancestral culture, there comes a time when these rough sketches of life have their appeal to us as they had for our forefathers. The allegory gives us a pleasing and not too strenuous stimulation of the intellectual powers ”

“ And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed to some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more intelligent and emotional—more specially human in fact—than that of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior and more human spirit. ”

“ Such a mass, ignorant of ancestral history, and, therefore, not knowing to what their own sensations point, start some weird fantastic movement, related to some portion of ancestral history much as a dream is related to the past experience of the dreamer. Such movements are produced by some stratum of the ancestral past forcing itself into the consciousness of an irreverent and forgetful posterity. A nation lives long in the land which is careful to study its past ”

“ Their fiery imaginations brooded over the great traditions of their tribe, and at length there arose among them one of those men whose existence is an epoch in the history of human nature: a great creative spirit and organising mind, in whom the faculties of conception and of action are equally balanced and possessed in the highest degree ”

“ Brilliant, ingenious people of the generation inspire awe; through that awe, ancestral merit sparkles, and through the sparkling of ancestral merit, repentance is aroused in the world.
2. At the entrance to a man's house it is discernible if his ancestral merit has finished, or if his ancestral merit is effective.
3. One who does acts of kindness does not need ancestral merit. ”

“ But, as character is not exactly isolated and independent of ancestral fountains, from which the innate impulses, capacity, and tendency to good and evil have flown, the subject of ancestry justly belongs to the history of every man's mind and life. Our ancestors flow in our veins. We retain them more or less in our characters always, so that the great stress which different countries have put upon this theme, rests on other than artificial and ostentatious reasons. ”

“ In later days, when they became ashamed of the religious beliefs of their ancestors, they invented private and respectful interpretations, each to suit himself. For no one dared to shake the ancestral beliefs, as they honoured at a very high rate the sacredness and antiquity of old associations, and of the teaching they had received in childhood. ”

“ Indeed, our ancestors walked by themselves, the long way, which led them from being nomads, wild hunters, and gatherers, until they slowly started to develop knowledge about the world, life and nature, which would allow them to not only to ensure their existence and physical survival, but perhaps, and most importantly, to reach the transcendence of their existence, both, as individuals, and as a people. ”

“ These “well disposed ones” are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not gods even of the rank of a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri. ”

“ There is a natural sentiment and prepossession in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and aboriginal usages, which is a homage to the element of necessity and divinity which is in them. The respect for the old names of places, of mountains, and streams, is universal. ”

“ I would fain find a land where the soul of man, and the heart of man, and the mind of man, are as the glass of my ancestors’ tear-bottles in their enduring quality and beauty. My ancestors’ tear-bottles, and though buried in the earth ten thousand years, lose not a grain of their original purity and transparency, of their soft and iridescent colouring. But where is the natural colour and beauty of these human souls, buried in bunks under hatches? ”

“ It is evident that the primitive relies upon his ancient lore to help him out in his struggle with his environment, in his needs spiritual and his needs physical, and this immense service comes through religious ritual, moral incentive, and sociological pattern, as laid down in the cherished magical and legendary lore of his tribe. ”

“ The ethnic anthologies growing out of love of country are a mingled literature of filial and religious piety, ranging from war-like pæans to lyric prayers. They become the cherished inheritance of a nation, and, once fixed in the common memory and common heart, the people rarely let them die. ”

“ But proportionately as, through the development of mythology, the ancestral hero, who was at first confused with the totemic animal, distinguished himself more and more, and became a more personal figure, the imitation of the ancestor was substituted for the imitation of the animal, or took a place beside it, and then representative ceremonies replaced or completed the imitative rites. ”

“ I have thought sometimes that the explanation might be found in heredity,—in a deep-seated habit of the human mind descending from parent to child through countless ages and generations. Far back of history, in the dim twilight of primitive life, we may imagine our ancestors living in such wildness as can scarcely be found on earth to-day even among the lowest savages ”

“ The spirits of our ancestors can easily see whether we shall succeed in what we are about to undertake; and when we are to succeed they order us on, and when we are not they make signs to us to desist.” Their mode20 of ascertaining which of their ancestors interested himself most in their affairs was commonly this, that whenever a person talked incoherently in a fever or an epileptic fit, the spirit of one or other of his ancestors was supposed to be upon him. ”

“ And when we reflect how great is the proportion of those who sit in darkness, and that “even all who tread the earth are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom,” it is but natural to consider what our own belief would [346] bid us hold as to the future destiny of so large a portion of the human family. ”

“ Our ancestors believed that he could fascinate any one with his glance, lure them after him, and then devour them—that he changed his sex every year—that he could transform himself into a comely youth, and thus beguile young maidens off into the woods to be eaten up—that he could imitate the human voice perfectly—that it was his custom to conceal himself near a house, listen until the name of one of the family should be mentioned, then call out as if for assistance, pronouncing the name he had heard, and imitating the cries of one in distress. ”

“ Among whatever division of these aborigines tradition is found to exist, you discover wrapped up in allegory, or distorted by perverted fancy, distinct testimony of the origin of all from common parents; the idea that mankind had forfeited their original state of happiness ”

“ All the time, as we travelled along, the old men were talking amongst themselves about the natural features associated in tradition with these and other totemic ancestors of the tribe, and pointing them out to us. ”

“ Often he journeys to the heavens to seek some gift of his ancestors, the ingenious fancy keeping always before it an objective picture of this heavenly superstructure—bearing him thither upon a cloud or bird, on the path of a cobweb, a trailing vine, or a rainbow, or swung thither on the tip of a bamboo stalk. Arrived in the region of air, by means of tokens or by name chants, he proves his ancestry and often substantiates his claim in tests of power, ability thus sharing with blood the determining of family values. If his deeds are among men, they are of a marvelous nature. ”

“ Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the distant Asiatic prairies, enjoying a free and easy existence as fighters and hunters, composed songs which celebrated the mighty deeds of their great leaders and invented a form of poetry which has survived until our own day. ”

“ In the first place, the emotional nature prompting the general mode of conduct is derived from ancestors, being a product of all past activities; and, in the second place, the special motives which, directly or indirectly, determine the courses pursued, are induced during early life by seniors, and enlisted on behalf of beliefs and usages which the tribe inherits. ”

“ One might perhaps treat both as survivals of a belief in a sort of personification of, or divinity identified with, a family or tribe, but for the fact that such language is emptied of most of its meaning by the abstractions which it would connect with a primitive state of society. ”

“ The Great Spirit told us there were three things for people to attend to. First, we ought to take care of our wives and children. Secondly, the white people ought to attend to their farms and cattle. Thirdly, the Great Spirit has given the bears and deers to the Indians. ”

“ But throughout that century and a half of darkness, the cultural heritage of the past was handed down from generation to generation, the mother teaching to her child the songs of the people, and fostering a love for the language and the soil of the homeland. ”

“ If such, then, are the effects of ardent spirits upon the condition of civilized man, who has the precepts of instructed reason to enlighten him, and the consolations of Christianity to support him, what must be the influence of intemperate habits upon the aboriginal tribes? ”

“ This is well, for all these things teach us what manner of men made up the indigenous race, what were their powers, their aspirations, their mental grasp. But closer to very self, to thought and being, are the connected expressions of men in their own tongues. ”

“ He is strongly attached to his tribe, which has its own traditions, its own glories. There have been feuds, the memory of which must be cherished. There are heirlooms that give dignity to those who possess them. ”

“ Students of folklore have long been familiar with notions of this sort occurring in the stories of the birth of miraculous personages, but this is the first case on record of a tribe who believe in immaculate conception as the sole cause of the birth of every human being who comes into the world. ”

“ Now the initiatory development of this aboriginal instinct was very humble, and if we wish to know what our direct ancestors once were, we need only consult the record of anthropological research among such savages as the Fijians or Tonga Islanders. The shape assumed by religion amongst such people was most probably ancestor or ghost worship. The dead father or chieftain is still seen in the dreams of his children or people, and the mysteriousness of the new shape and presence he assumes excites the awe and reverence which is at the root of the religious habit. ”

“ I feel the same satisfaction that a nobleman feels in speaking of his ancestors when I think of our remote forefathers, those men-beasts, exposed like the animals to all the cruel severity of nature, who, little by little, through hundreds of centuries, have transformed themselves, triumphing in the unfolding of their minds, their brains, and their social instincts. ”

“ The same pressing needs and the same emotional storms often affect a whole tribe, and simultaneously stimulate every one’s imagination; and originating (no doubt) in ancient times and slowly accumulating and condensing, there grows up a mass [87] of public imagination-beliefs, which are inculcated into every individual by tradition and common ceremonies. Such beliefs embodied in stories and formulæ, and associated with rites and customs, have for a long time the strength of custom in governing the behaviour of individuals and in tribal respect ”

“ Barely is there a discussion which provokes traditional lore or traditional sentiment which does not bring to light some such thought or experience, re-appearing, like the lines in family feature, after the lapse of several generations. ”

“ We can turn them, like the reflector of a microscope, on the secret and hidden mysteries of the aboriginal man, and discover his inmost motives, his impulses, his concealed hopes and fears, those that gave rise to his customs and laws, his schemes of social life, his superstitions and his religions. ”