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The Supreme Being of the islands of the Pacific bears in New Zealand the name of Tangaroa, and is spoken of in quite metaphysical terms as the uncreated and eternal Creator. Here we may suspect Christian influence. With the Zulus Unkulunkulu the Old-old one might be supposed to be a kind of first cause.
Unkulunkulu will be described later. This is the list: Where the First Ancestor is equivalent to the Creator, and is supreme, he is from the first deathless and immortal. When he dies he is a confessed ghost-god. Now, ghost-worship and dead ancestor-worship are impossible before the ancestor is dead and is a ghost.
Ukoto, a very old Zulu, said: 'When we were children it was said "The Lord is in heaven." ... They used to point to the Lord on high; we did not hear his name. Unkulunkulu was understood, by this patriarch, to refer to immediate ancestors, whose mimes and genealogies he gave.
'The King is above, Unkulunkulu is beneath. The King above punishes sin, striking the sinner by lightning. Nor do the Zulus know how they have sinned. 'There remained only that word about the heaven, 'which, says Dr. Callaway, 'implies that there might have been other words which are now lost. There is great confusion of thought.
Callaway, 'and believe that their first ancestor, the First Man, was the Creator. But they may, like many other peoples, have had a different original tradition, and have altered it, just because they are now such fervent ancestor-worshippers. Unkulunkulu was prior to Death, which came among men in the usual mythical way. Whether Unkulunkulu still exists, is rather a moot question: Dr.
Similar figures are the Klamath Indian "Old Man" and the Zulu Unkulunkulu, an old man, the father of the people, only dimly understood by the natives who have been questioned on this point; they are uncertain whether he is dead or alive, but in any case he is revered as a great personage.
The Zulu godless ancestor-worship, then, by parity of reasoning, is, like their material culture, not an early but a late development. The Zulus 'hear of a King which is above' 'the heavenly King. 'We did not hear of him first from white men.... But he is not like Unkulunkulu, who, we say, made all things. Here may be dimly descried the ideas of a God, and a subordinate demiurge.
The Zulus, about as 'godless' a people as possible, have a mythical first ancestor, Unkulunkulu, but he is 'beyond the reach of rites, and is a centre of myths rather than of worship or of moral ideas. After other examples of ancestor-worship, Mr. Tylor branches off into a long discussion of the theory of 'possession' or inspiration, which does not assist the argument at the present point.
For that reason, the problem must be solved after a survey of the whole field of savage and barbaric religion; it cannot be settled by the ambiguous case of the Zulus alone. Unkulunkulu is represented as 'the First Man, who broke off in the beginning. 'They are ancestor-worshippers, says Dr.
'The king shall hae his ain again. Had it not been for the Prophets, Israel, by the time that Greece and Rome knew Israel, would have been worshipping a horde of little gods, and even beasts and ghosts, while the Eternal would have become a mere name perhaps, like Ndengei and Atahocan and Unkulunkulu, a jest.
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