Note 7 — Chapter II · PRIMITIVE FREETHINKING

There are many analogous phenomena. In old Samoa, in the ritual of mourning for the dead, the family God was first implored to restore the deceased, and then fiercely abused and menaced.7 See, too, the story of the people of Niuē or Savage Island in the South Pacific, who in the time of a great pestilence, thinking the sickness was caused by a certain idol, broke it in pieces and threw it away (Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 306). See further the cases cited by Constant, De la religion, 1824, vol. i, ptie. ii, pp. 32–34; and by Peschel, The Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 247–8, in particular that of Rastus, the last pagan Lapp in Europe, who quarrelled with his fetish stone for killing his reindeer in revenge for the withholding of its customary offering of brandy, and “immediately embraced Christianity.” (Compare E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 276.) See again the testimony of Herman Melville in his Typee, ch. xxiv; and that of T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1858, i, 236: “Sometimes the natives get angry with their deities, and abuse and even challenge them to fight.” Herodotos has similar stories of barbarians who defy their own and other deities (iv, 172, 183, 184). Compare the case of King Rum Bahadur of Nepaul, who cannonaded his Gods. Spencer, Study of Sociology, pp. 301–2. Also the anecdote cited by Spencer (Id. p. 160) from Sir R. Burton’s Goa, p. 167. Here there is no disbelief, no reflection, but simple resentment. Compare, too, the amusing story of a blasphemy by Rossini, told by Louis Viardot, Libre Examen, 6e éd. pp. 166–67, note. That threats against the Gods are possible at a semi-civilized stage is proved by various passages in medieval literature. Thus in Caxton’s Charles the Grete, a translation from an older French original, Charles is made to say: “O lord God, if ye suffre that Olyver be overcome and that my ryght at thys tyme be loste and defyled, I make a vowe that al Crystyante shal be destroyed. I shal not leve in Fraunce chirche ne monasterye, ymage ne aulter,” etc. (Early Eng. Text Soc. rep. 1881, pp. 70–71.) Such language was probably used by not a few medieval kings in moments of fury; and there is even record that at the battle of Dunbar certain of the Scots Presbyterian clergy intimated to their deity that he would not be their God if he failed them on that day.