Ritual and belief : studies in the history of religion / by Edwin Sidney Hartland.

  • Edwin Sidney Hartland
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ritual and belief : studies in the history of religion / by Edwin Sidney Hartland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    omnipresent leads naturally to the belief that it enters into everything in nature ; and the notion that it is active causes the mind to look everywhere for its manifestations. These manifestations assume various forms ; they vary with individuals and with reference to the same and different objects. “ Language affords means of approaching nearer to a definition of this religious sentiment. In the Algonkin dialects of the Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo, a rigid distinction of gender is made between things with life and things without life. . . . Accordingly, when they refer to the manitou in the sense of a virtue, a property, an abstraction, they employ the form expressive of inanimate gender. When the manitou becomes associated with an object, then the gender becomes less definite. . . . “ When the property becomes the indwelling element of an object, then it is natural to identify the property with animate being. It is not necessary that the being shall be the tangible representative of a natural object.” This the writer illustrates from the account given by a Fox Indian of the sweat-lodge, in the course of which he observes : “ The manitou comes from the place of his abode in the [heated] stone, . . . when the water is sprinkled on it. It comes out in the steam, and in the steam it enters the body wherever it finds entrance. It moves up and down and all over inside the body, driving out every- thing that inflicts pain. Before the manitou returns to the stone it imparts some of its nature to the body. That is why one feels so well after having been in the sweat-lodge.” The writer’s comment on this is instructive. “ The sentiment,” he says, “ behind the words rests upon the consciousness of a belief in an objective presence ; it rests on the sense of an existing reality with the quality of self-dependence ; it rests on the perception of a definite,