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CHAPTER 1
THE “GOD CONTROVERSY” IN PRE-CHRISTIAN INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS
When modern missionary activity developed among Roman Catholics in the sixteenth century, partly influenced by the founding of the Society of Jesus, and reached its heyday among Protestants in the nineteenth century, various questions about pre-Christian faith came to preoccupy Christian theologians. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci argued in the early seventeenth century that the original word for God among Chinese Confucians (Shangti) represented a form of monotheism consistent with Christianity, but that this had later degenerated into “atheistic neo-Confucianism” (Ahn 2011: 44–5). The London Missionary Society missionary and noted sinologist James Legge, working in China during the early to mid-nineteenth century, supported Ricci’s interpretation of an original Confucian monotheism that had subsequently degenerated. Legge suggested further that humanity had diffused throughout the world from a single source according to the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel (ibid.: 76). Ricci and later Legge represented a missionary strategy that, although controversial and contentious among some of their church sponsors, anticipated later academic discussions of an original monotheism as the source of religion, which had deteriorated into polytheism, animism and lower forms of religion. As a missionary theology, this fitted nicely into the Christian doctrine of a fallen humanity, which could only be rescued by accepting Christ and by returning to the true, pure monotheism of biblical faith.
It is often overlooked by scholars writing about the history of religious studies that notions of a primitive monotheism advocated by certain late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century interpreters of religions among archaic societies, such as Andrew Lang, Wilhelm Schmidt and (as we shall see) Mircea Eliade, had their roots in theological interpretations of pre-Christian religions. That the academic debate over primitive monotheism developed in the wake of the rapid development of missionary activity is therefore no surprise. This relation is missed, for example, by Jane Simpson in her discussion of primitive monotheism in the context of the postulated Māori belief in the Supreme Being, Io, to which I will return in the next chapter. Simpson (1997: 56) argues that “the primitive monotheism of a certain school of anthropologists and of the early historians of religion … was indispensable for the survival and growth of their new disciplines”, particularly in their attempt to dissociate themselves from theological methods. She explains that primitive monotheism accomplished this since it demonstrated that “the missionary God had not been needed after all and … that the religious beliefs of ‘primitive’ peoples met post-Enlightenment tests of advanced mentality and introspective thought” (ibid.). Although this conclusion applies, as we will see, particularly to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anti-missionary ethnologists working in New Zealand, for important precursors to the academic study of religions who advanced the doctrine of primitive monotheism, this idea underscored the need for the superior and advanced revelation of God in Christian faith, particularly in light of the contention that original monotheism had degenerated into forms of polytheism and animism. Moreover, the very argument that indigenous peoples were fully human and had from time immemorial been the recipients of divine revelation provided a foundation for all missionary work and is a bedrock of current reconstructions of Christianity in indigenous traditions (see Cox 2007a: 10–13).
In this chapter, I examine the relationship between academic and theological interests in making God indigenous, which consumed much of the attention of anthropologists and ethnologists at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first two decades of the twentieth century. My purpose in doing so is to set the context for my later case studies by demonstrating that the academic arguments which reached a heightened intensity at the turn of the twentieth century and which still bear on contemporary efforts to locate the Christian God in indigenous societies, were based largely on ideological presuppositions that pre-determined the interpretations scholars gave to the data they uncovered. I will argue that those who sided with the primitive monotheistic argument did so primarily for theologically inspired reasons, although these were often veiled beneath “scientific” evidence based on what reports from field studies told them about beliefs in God in indigenous societies. By contrast, the aim of anthropologists writing with an anti-religious bias was to disclose the earliest phases of religion by studying, but not interfering with, societies that they believed were doomed to extinction. Neither position had anything to do with the interests of indigenous people themselves nor was it intended to treat indigenous religions as worthy of study in their own right. This point was emphasized in this instance quite correctly by Jane Simpson (1997: 85), who at the conclusion of her discussion of the debates surrounding Io in the context of New Zealand observes that the protagonists in this controversy were not interested in what she calls the “Other”, even as “object”, but primarily were engaged in an argument over “the primitive origins of the religious beliefs of the colonizer, the ‘subject’”.
THE APPLICATION OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY TO THE STUDY OF AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES: THE INFLUENCE OF BALDWIN SPENCER
In the chapter he calls “Darwinism Makes It Possible”, Eric Sharpe (1975: 47), in his seminal Comparative Religion: A History, argues that by around 1880, “the Darwinian hypothesis was becoming virtually impossible to resist”. The most influential scholar who applied evolutionary theories to social and cultural development, according to Sharpe, was the British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose First Principles, initially published in 1862 before Darwin’s theories had become widely known, subjected “every aspect of human culture” to an evolutionary pattern and by the end of the nineteenth century “it was a matter of working Spencer’s insights out in detail” (ibid.). Sharpe notes the radical change evolutionary theory made for interpretations of religion: “From being a body of revealed truth, it became a developing organism” (ibid.). In the new field of anthropology, two key figures who employed evolutionary thinking to determine the origins of religion among human societies were E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer. In his Primitive Culture, first published in 1871, Tylor posits his famous theory that religion originated in the primitive’s projection of spirit or anima onto all natural objects, whether animate or inanimate. This had resulted from the imagination of prehistoric humans who in dreams encountered unembodied spirits and at death saw breath, interpolated as soul, leave the human body (Tylor 1913: vol. I, 428–9). Through a process of psychic projections representing a universal internal working of the human mind, external objects, such as stones, trees, pools, rivers, mountains, forests and any other number of natural objects were imbued with life, breath, spirit or anima. From this early human projection, Tylor built up a developmental model of religion which advanced to gods and ultimately to the belief in monotheism and ethical forms of religion (ibid.: vol. II, 332–61). He regarded the presence of animistic beliefs in the “doctrines and rites of the higher races” as a “survival of the old in the midst of the new” (ibid.: vol. I, 500).
In his multi-volume work written over many decades called The Golden Bough,1 J. G. Frazer followed a similar developmental model as that of Tylor, but Frazer suspected that the origins of religion lay in magical thinking, the attempt by human communities to manipulate external forces for good or evil. Frazer regarded this as false science, which because it did not always work, gave way to religion which assigned to forces outside human control independent wills with power over events affecting human welfare. This resulted in the development of ritual life, sacrifices and other characteristics of religion which are aimed at persuading unseen powers to act according to the requests made by human communities. For Frazer, the end of all this is science, true causality, which demonstrates how humans actually can control forces that impinge on their health and well-being.2
It will be clear that on a Darwinian interpretation the earliest form of religion was simple, basic and unsophisticated, which over time became increasingly more complex, more diverse, involving ever more intricate and multi-layered forms of ritual behaviour. Herbert Spencer (1880: 327) defined evolution as “a universal process”, which, “under its primary aspect, is a change from a less coherent form to a more coherent form”. He referred to this process as a development from “a homogeneous state to a heterogeneous state” (ibid.: 330), which culturally can be seen when “these traits are turned into those of the adult European” (ibid.: 342; see also Cox 2006: 70–71). Of course, the evolution of religions was not understood in a strictly linear fashion as if one stage moved seamlessly into the other. This is evidenced in the notion of “survivals” as suggested by both Tylor and Frazer, in which it was posited that primitive ways of thinking and acting still could be detected in the higher religions. For example, according to Frazer, in the Christian Eucharist we can discern the survival of the ancient Greek Dionysian cult where the body of the god was sacrificed and consumed (see Frazer [1922] 1963: 578; see also Cox 2007a: 15; Berner 2004: 141–9). Nonetheless, it was not in the contemporary survival of early forms of religion expressed in the great monotheistic religions where primitive human religious expressions could be located and analysed, but in the actual and still existing simple societies which anthropologists were discovering and studying in Africa, parts of South America, but most notably among the Australian Aborigines.
It was against this background that the ethnographic work of Baldwin Spencer was conducted among the Aboriginal peoples of the central desert regions of Australia. Spencer studied natural sciences at Oxford University where he was influenced by E. B. Tylor. In 1887 he was appointed Professor of Biology in the University of Melbourne. Seven years later, in 1894, he was invited to join the Horn Expedition to central Australia, which was a collaboration between the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, aimed at investigating in a remote part of Australia a wide range of scientific interests, including botany, geology, anthropology, ethnology and zoology. Spencer was the expedition’s zoologist and photographer, and later the author of its report. The Horn Expedition, which lasted three months, stimulated Spencer’s interest in studying further the Aboriginal peoples of the central desert region. He returned two years later, and in close cooperation with the Alice Springs postmaster, F. J. Gillen, whom Spencer had met during the Horn Expedition, began a study of indigenous societies in the region. Gillen, who in 1892 was appointed Alice Springs post and telegraph station master, according to the linguist and anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow (1947: 169), arranged “a series of initiation and other ceremonies … for Spencer’s benefit”. This research resulted in a joint article published in the journal Nature in 1897 describing a cycle of ceremonies performed by the Arunta (Arrernte) called Engwura, which Gillen described in a letter he wrote to Spencer in 1896 as “a big ceremony … which is performed in various places and at long intervals throughout the whole tribe” (cited by Jones 2005: 18). In 1899, Spencer and Gillen published their comprehensive volume outlining their research among central desert Aboriginal peoples under the title, Native Tribes of Central Australia. According to Phillip Jones of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, this work is notable not only for its ethnographic descriptions (praised by J. G. Frazer), but for its adept use of photographs. Jones explains:
Spencer and Gillen went to considerable lengths to position photographs in the book, illustrating and expanding upon particular points and themes. As a result, the book revealed Central Australia as a previously unknown stage, peopled with human actors whose choreographed rituals explicitly linked ceremony to place. (Ibid.: 10)
Spencer returned to the central desert region in 1926. A year later, he published The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People, in which he credited Gillen, who had died fifteen years earlier, as co-author. Since his days at Oxford, Spencer had been a committed evolutionist, a position he maintained consistently with respect to his studies of the tribes of the Australian central desert. In her unpublished PhD thesis completed at the University of Sydney, Anna Kenny (2008: 7) argues that “Spencer never abandoned his view that the Arrernte were ‘Stone Age’ or primitive people and the evidence of … ‘the missing link’ proclaimed in social Darwinist theories”. This view is expressed by Spencer himself in the starkest terms in his Preface to The Arunta:
Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms. This applies equally to the aboriginal as to the platypus and kangaroo. Just as the platypus, laying its eggs and feebly suckling its young, reveals a mammal in the making, so does the Aboriginal show us, at least in broad outline, what early man must have been like before he learned to read and write, domesticate animals, cultivate crops and use a metal tool. It has been possible to study in Australia human beings that still remain on the culture level of men of the Stone Age. (Spencer & Gillen 1927: vii)
Between the publication of The Native Tribes of Central Australia and The Arunta, Spencer noted such a decline in the numbers of Aboriginal peoples that he was sure the indigenous population was bound to die out. He writes: “Of the local group of Udnirringita people at Alice Springs, that numbered forty when we knew them in 1886, not a solitary man, woman or child remains” (ibid.: ix). This same situation is replicated by numerous groups that Spencer and Gillen had studied thirty years earlier, leading Spencer to conclude that with the dying out of the older generation of Arrernte men “with them will pass away all knowledge of primitive customs and beliefs” (ibid.). This conclusion prompted T. G. H. Strehlow (1947: xvii) to suggest that Spencer regarded the Arrernte “merely as a highly specialized offshoot of the human species – primitive and incapable of further development, and therefore inevitably and naturally doomed to total extinction from the day when the superior white man entered upon his domains”.
Spencer returned to Alice Springs to conduct further research on the Arrernte partly in response to the findings of the missionary Carl Strehlow, who had been stationed at the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg and who wrote his own in-depth study of the central desert peoples in German in seven volumes published between 1907 and 1920 under the title Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral Australien. Spencer in particular wanted to investigate the claim made by Strehlow that the Arrernte believed in a High God or Supreme Being, which the missionaries translated as Alchera in the native language. In The Arunta, Spencer (Spencer & Gillen 1927: x) wrote that he “re-investigated, as carefully as possible, the Alchera and Churinga3 beliefs, and realized how fortunate we [he and Gillen] had been in having the opportunity of seeing and studying in the early days, the various initiation, Engwura, Intichiuma and other ceremonies in their entirety and primitive state”. On the claim by Strehlow that Alchera refers to God, Spencer concluded that “the word is not applied to any Being, either mythical or actually existing” and asserted that “its use by the missionaries as the equivalent of God is wrong and misleading” (ibid.: x–xi). Spencer claimed that Alchera, rather than referring to God, “is associated intimately in the mind of the native with the far past times in which his totem ancestors came into existence, lived and died” (ibid.: 304). As a result, every individual possesses his or her own Alchera which “includes his totem … the original ancestors of his totemic group, his association with them, everything that they possessed, everything they did and the times in which they lived” (ibid.).4 Spencer’s conclusions about the lack of belief in a Supreme Being among the Arrernte were consistent with the evolutionary theory of religion as advocated by Tylor and Frazer, and they point to the prior assumptions on which Spencer’s research was based. It would not have been expected that a primitive society, with its elemental grasp of ideas, would have developed a concept of God that could be considered commensurate with monotheistic religions.
In light of his conviction that the indigenous people of the central desert region inevitably will become extinct, Spencer believed it was incumbent on scientists to describe and record Aboriginal customs, beliefs and rituals without interfering with them or trying to change them. On this score, the missionaries were absolutely wrong to attempt to alter the beliefs of Aboriginal peoples by introducing them to concepts that were beyond their grasp. In the report of the Horn Expedition, Spencer (1896: vol. I, 111) described the work of the Lutherans at Hermannsburg under the leadership of Carl Strehlow as attempting “to teach them [natives] ideas absolutely foreign to their minds and which they are utterly incapable of grasping”. He then asserted that “it is far better that as much as possible he should be left in his native state and that no attempt should be made either to cause him to lose faith in the strict tribal rule, or to teach him abstract ideas which are utterly beyond the comprehension of an Australian aborigine” (ibid.). This attitude, although appearing scientific and objective, reveals the underlying evolutionary presupposition under which Spencer’s work was conducted. He regarded his role as preserving for posterity that which would soon disappear, much like other Stone Age civilizations had been overtaken by advancing technologies and intellectual developments. This presupposition prompted T. G. H. Strehlow (1978: 3) to charge that Spencer’s work, was not only prejudiced from the outset, but that this inherent evolutionary bias has largely gone unchallenged by the wider scientific community with damaging results for how Aboriginal society has been evaluated:
The nauseating insults heaped upon his aboriginal informants by Spencer himself … have always been passed off in silence by the later anthropologists, who have followed in his steps and reserved their criticisms for the missionaries, some of whom admittedly criticized “pagan” ideas strongly, without, however, ceasing to regard the original people of this continent as fellow human beings.
CARL STREHLOW: GERMAN ETHNOLOGY AND A MISSIONARY STRATEGY
We can contrast the approach of Spencer with that of Carl Strehlow, who was senior missionary at the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission, located around 125 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs, from 1894 until he was forced to leave due to illness in 1922. According to Kenny (2008: 10), Strehlow inherited the larger nineteenth-century German humanistic tradition which can be “traced through German philology, the German Romantic movement, Humboldtian cosmography, history and comparative geography”. This humanistic interpretation of Australian religions can be compared to Spencer’s dismissal of Aboriginal peoples as Stone Age primitives destined to extinction. Kenny describes the difference between Strehlow’s a...
