Note 192.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

Great and awful as gods may be, they are after all but human. The most mysterious of them are conceived in quasi-human terms. On the other hand, human beings are often looked upon as gods and treated accordingly. But then their treatment is simply that of powerful men, men possessed of and filled with a greater or less degree of mana, who therefore require to be handled gingerly, like an unexploded bomb. Such a man-god, if a native ruler or fellow-tribesman, can seldom be driven away; but he may, especially if his mana be suspected of departing from him, be attacked and slain. To expound this practice and the belief on which it is founded, or with which it is bound up, Dr Frazer’s great work, The Golden Bough, has been written. The white man, like the gods, is to peoples in the lower culture mysterious, powerful, endowed with mana. To that extent he is the object of wonder and fear, he is a god. Yet he may be fought and overpowered, killed or driven away. Of the Bangala in the Upper Congo basin we are told that before the unknown and mysterious the native “is timid, fearful, and very superstitious. He will regard you as a god, and yet try to fight you; he will superstitiously believe that you have wonderful occult powers that can stop the rain, cause pestilence and plagues; and yet he will not attempt to conciliate you, but he will savagely tell you to clear out of his town and take your witchcraft elsewhere.”192.1