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Updated: June 7, 2025
They began, trembled, and abstained. They had a ritual 'for almost every act of their lives, a thing unfamiliar to low savages. In fact, beyond all doubt, religious criminal acts, from human sacrifice to the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, increase as religion and culture move away from the stage of Bushmen and Andamanese to the stage of Aztec and Polynesian culture.
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 less developed races do not kill their flocks commonly for food. To the gods of Andamanese, Bushmen, Australians, no sacrifice is offered. To the Supreme Being of most African peoples no sacrifice is offered. There is no festivity in the worship of these Supreme Beings, no feasting, at all events. They are not to be 'got at' by gifts or sacrifices.
This Being could not be evolved out of the ordinary ghost of a second-sighted man, for I do not find that ancestral ghosts are worshipped, nor is there a trace of early missionary influence, while Mr. Man consulted elderly and, in native religion, well-instructed Andamanese for his facts. There is the usual story of a Deluge caused by the moral wrath of Puluga.
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.
Are they unaware that peoples infinitely more backward than Israel was at the date supposed have already moral Supreme Beings acknowledged over vast tracts of territory? Have they a tittle of positive evidence that early Israel was benighted beyond the darkness of Bushmen, Andamanese, Pawnees, Blackfeet, Hurons, Indians of British Guiana, Dinkas, Negroes, and so forth?
If a people like the Andamanese, or the Australian tribes whom we have studied, had such a conception as that of Puluga, or Baiame, or Mungan-ngaur and then, later, developed ancestor-worship with its propitiatory sacrifices and ceremonies, ancestor-worship, as the newest evolved and infinitely the most practical form of cult, would gradually thrust the belief in a Puluga, or Mungan-ngaur, or Cagn into the shade.
In an excellent article on the evolution of ceremonial institutions Herbert Spencer mentions the Fuegians, Veddahs, Andamanese, Dyaks, Todas, Gonds, Santals, Bodos, and Dhimals, Mishmis, Kamchadales, and Snake Indians, as among people who form societies to practice simple mutilations in slight forms.
Thus, in this particular respect the degeneration of religion from the Australian or Andamanese to the Dinka standard and infinitely more to the Polynesian, or Aztec, or popular Greek standard is as undeniable as any fact in human history.
The Guiana Indians believe in the continued, but not in the everlasting, existence of a man's ghost. They believe in no spirits which were not once tenants of material bodies. The belief in a Supreme Spirit is only attained 'in the highest form of religion' Andamanese, for instance as Mr. Im Thurn uses 'spirit' where we should say 'being. 'The Indians of Guiana know no god.
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