Note 19.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

The opportunity of blundering in the endeavour to understand and report the beliefs and usages of the lower races is obviously as great as could be desired. When to the various causes enumerated above is added not merely the conscious want of sympathy on the part of the observer, but his unconscious prejudice in favour of certain interpretations derived from the civilized and the specifically Christian notions in which he has been brought up from his youth, the wonder is not that so many mistakes have been made, but that we have on the whole succeeded in obtaining so large a mass of fairly trustworthy information. Even that of which we are the best assured, however, must be used with caution. It must be criticized, checked with other accounts of the same or neighbouring tribes; and allowance must be made for the personal equation of the observer. The use of a word like worship, spirit, or God, which connotes to us very different ideas from those connoted to the native mind by the native word thus translated, must put us at once on our guard. Fancied resemblances between the myths, heard perhaps at second-hand and only half-understood, and some story, Biblical or other, known to the reporter, and the expectation of finding in savage tradition some fragment of divine revelation have proved real Will-o’-the-wisps to the unwary. Nor must we forget that things actually seen are also liable to be misinterpreted. Captain John Smith, in writing of Virginia, describes as a human sacrifice—a sacrifice of children—what seems to have been no more than the ceremony of initiation into manhood.19.1 It is true that his account was written three hundred years ago, and that he was not allowed to witness the whole performance. But after all our subsequent experience and accumulation of records, nothing is harder even yet than to determine the meaning of ceremonies and institutions, often carefully examined and minutely described by skilled eyewitnesses and scientific explorers.