Jump to content

Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/25

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
BUSHMAN RELIGION.
11

danger, as they do now, before they ever heard of white men." This was to be expected. In short, the religion of savages, in its childlike and hopeful dependence on an invisible friend or friends, in its hope of moving him (or them) by prayer, in its belief that he (or they) "make for righteousness," is absolutely human. On the other side, as in the myths of Greece or India, stand the absurd and profane anecdotes of the gods. It may be argued by one set of thinkers that savage religion, in its nobler features, represents an original lofty ideal or an original revelation, of which the myths are a degenerate later development. Or it may be argued that the myths are earlier, and represent a more primitive form of thought, while the moral elements of the religion could not have been reached without long experience of and education in the way of the world. Being concerned here with myth rather than with religion, we merely observe that the myths of savages reflect their mental condition, and that similar myths occur everywhere among civilised races, whose theory of the world they do not reflect.

We now turn to a Bushman's account of the religious myths of his tribe. Shortly after the affair of Langalibalele, Mr. Orpen had occasion to examine an unknown part of the Maluti range, the highest mountains in South Africa. He engaged a scout named Qing, son of a chief of an almost exterminated clan of hill Bushmen. He was now huntsman to King Nqusha, Morosi's son, on the Orange River, and had never seen a white man except fighting. Thus Qing's evidence