Chapter IV: Touching Matters Religious at Abeokuta (2)

The Egbas have no such thing as demonolatry because they have no demons, or the genius which Christian philosophers opined to be evil spirits. The distinction between diaboloi and daimonii is unknown to them; but they believe in certain entities which, unless propitiated, will do them evil. The missionaries Anglicise Egbiri by ‘ghost,’ and Emi by ‘spirit’—a manifest borrowing from the Pneuma, Psychos, Soma, that compose the European Ego.[114] The hysteric sufferers known to the ancients as daimonazomenoi and enthusiazomenoi, who, under fits, were insensible, like the mesmeric subjects of the modern day, are common amongst the Egbas, as indeed amongst all pure or nearly pure African races. Of course there is the true African belief in ghosts, who are supposed to desire men’s deaths, and the deceased is a vindictive thing to be feared as long as remembered.[115] Witchcraft is common. The white witch or witch-finder of the days of James I. is usually the fetish-man; and according to the Mosaic law, the witch or wizard is not suffered to live. Europeans often consider the crime fanciful, and waste a great deal of good pity upon victims to popular indignation. Setting aside the Mosaic order and the Twelve Tables, the witch, it must be remembered, believes in the power of her spells, and commits murder in her heart; her incantations too often take effect—like the predictions of Mdlle. le Normand—upon the silly superstitious souls around her; and not unfrequently she brings arsenic, or something equally material—as the homœopaths do calomel—to the aid of her spiritual powers.[116] On the other hand, witchcraft has its good side, and is by no means the unmixed evil that some hold it to be. Where the dark places of the earth are full of cruelty, its vague terrors form a salutary check upon the violence of husbands and masters, rulers and criminals. It is the power, and the only power, of the weak.

Where witchcraft prevails, the talisman must be common. Here the grigri, as it is barbarously called, is the prophylactic of the Jews, the amulet of Christian Abyssinia and Syria, the cross and miraculous medal of Southern Europe. So horse-shoes in England and the West Indies neutralize evil influences; egg-shells hung in the chimney-corner make chickens flourish, and extracted teeth are thrown over the house, or are worn, to prevent toothache. A folio volume might be filled with these fooleries of faith, which serve for two objects—the attainment of good and the avoidance of harm in this life. I look upon them as the vestiges of that fetishism which is the first dawn of religion in the breast of the savage and the barbarian, and which cannot fail to crop out even from the enlightened surface of monotheism. Besides which, belief or superstition is, like happiness, most equally divided amongst men. Those who balk at the possible will swallow the impossible, and those who deride the credos of others must make up for themselves faiths of their own, which appear quite as ridiculous to their neighbours. In the present state of human nature, faith appears a necessary evil, an inseparable weakness. Nor can we see any corrective of, or substitute for it until, after the convulsion which follows the present period of quiescence, a higher race—as the elephant is to the mastodon—succeeds the present.

Witchcraft also necessitates ordeals; these, however, are not the Judicia Dei, as they were held to be in Europe. They rather correspond in action with the Erinnyes and the Eumenides of ancient Greece. The poisons and drugs are intelligent beings, which, entering the stomach that here represents man’s heart in its sentimental sense, searches out his guilt and sin. At times, finding nothing of evil, it returns by emetism, and thus establishes the innocence of the accused; at others, it discovers the material element of witch-power—the aorta has been shown as an irrefragable proof—and it kills the wizard by the mismanagement of a weapon intended for the destruction of others; he is hoisted with his own petard; he falls into the pit which he digged for his brother. Trial by poison ordeal, however, is not so fatally common as the sancy water and the poison bean, which sweep away whole families and even villages on the coast and on the Oil Rivers; nor is it accompanied with the horrors that distinguish it at Badagry and ill- famed Dahome. The priest will squirt capsicum or bird-pepper juice into the eyes of the accused, and lachrymation proves guilt: this, however, appears rather in the light of a torture to make criminals confess. Certain Yoruban cities are said to have local ordeals, but little is known of them at Abeokuta.

Dreams, according to the Yorubans and to many of our fetishists, are not an irregular action, and partial activity of the brain, but so many revelations brought by the manes of the departed. They believe in a physical metamorphosis, which Europeans insist upon confounding with metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. The former is simple and purely natural; the latter is a complex and contradictory system, postulating the existence of what is proofless; an immortal nonentity called Spirit, created out of nothing—despite ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’—in a limited number for an unlimited number of human beings, and destined to end where it began, and whence its beginning was consequently uncalled for. But Europe cannot deride Asia in this particular. He who denies or demands proof that a soul or spirit exists, who considers ‘Mind’ to be the working of the brain, and who holds ‘Matter,’ as it is popularly understood, sufficient for all human phenomena, is held in a holy horror. To me it appears that he rather honours the Omnipotent who can, out of so vile a body, produce effects which others must attribute to their mysterious ‘dweller in the temple,’ must in fact solve their difficulties by adding a supplement to the Book of Creation.

It is hard to say whence came the tales invented by the African to explain the inferiority of the black to the white man. Their universality induces me to think them an emanation from the Hamitic brain. Nothing so puzzles and perplexes the negro as to inform him that all nations were made of one flesh; it is an insult to his Common Sense which Time only can efface. The much-vexed Noachian flood is of course found for them in their legends of local inundations. As might be expected amongst a working people, there is already an idea of a week[117]—a decimal week, like that of the Aztecs and Javans, containing five days. The terminal day of rest is called Ose, when water is brought for the deities in long processions, libations are poured out, and other religious ceremonies are performed. A month of four weeks, each consisting of five days, gives an equal number of units to each whole; with us the system is so complicated that we cannot remember it without a schoolboy rhyme—moreover, all the weeks are comprehended without fractions in the year.

It is a question whether the intercourse of more progressive creeds is or is not modifying the Yoruban mythology. The older hands declare that faith is gradually decaying, and that Oro is not nearly so powerful as in their day; and they vainly attempt to arouse the enthusiasm of the people by petty attempts at a persecution. Old age, however, is and always will be _laudator temporis acti se puero_; on the other hand, there are residents who assert that the idolatries are not diminishing, and that cannibalism and human sacrifices, which were once performed in public, are now practised under the rose. My time did not permit me to enter deeply into these troublesome questions. Mr. Crowther[118] has accused the Egbas (his own tribe) of boiling and eating the bodies of certain Ijebu invaders, in order to terrify the enemy;[119] and declares that Ikumi, chief of the Ijebu, was guilty of a similar savagery. The missionary, however, like the antiquary, is always somewhat credulous on the subject of heathen malpractices. Concerning human sacrifice I have something in a future page.

There is nothing remarkable in the marriage rites of the Egbas. Betrothal takes place early, although the girl is rarely married before eighteen or twenty, and the dowry, amongst the middle classes, may be four dollars. The bride and bridegroom repair to Ife, or some other place of pilgrimage; pray, and sacrifice. At night the bridesmaids escort the bride to her new home, where a feast leads to the consummation of the marriage. If the groom be satisfied, he sends presents to the wife’s family, especially to his mother-in-law, who is called the ‘little mother,’ in contradiction to the true parent. If he find reason to complain, he dismisses his bride, and sends, bitterly, a few broken cowries to her mamma.[120] The marriages are not very prolific; ‘fecundity diminishes in proportion as we advance from temperate regions to the poles and the equator.’ All Africans—amongst whom there is a curious Malthusian instinct—possess anaphrodisiacs, and, finally, the prolonged lactation, by determining the vital current to the breast, prevents the women from becoming mothers. There are few ceremonies after birth: a name is presently given to the child, and, as amongst the Mpongwe of the Gaboon River, water is sprinkled upon it—a faint resemblance to the modern, not the ancient, baptism of the Christians. The son inherits all the father’s wives save his own mother.

Polygamy is of course the foundation-stone of Yoruban society. I cannot remember a single African or Asiatic tribe—except the polyandrous—in which this is not the case, and the rule is equally applicable to the North American aborigines. Europe forms, and almost always has formed, the sole exception. To account for this fact perhaps a few lines may not be out of place.

The savage and the barbarian are polygamic because they are dependent for the necessaries and for the little comforts of their poor existence upon a plurality of women and the number of their children. Servants are unknown; slaves are rare. A single wife cannot perform all the offices required even in the simplest stage of society. Moreover, there is, in the different races or sub-species of mankind, as amongst the humbler animals, a greater or a lesser difference, bodily and mental, between the two sexes. In the gallinaceæ the male is far nobler than the female; in the equines the two are nearly equal; in the falconidæ the female is stronger and braver than the male. Thus, in the European and the Hindu,[121] the woman is quasi-equal with the man; in the African, the American, and the lower races of Asiatic, she is inferior and monogamous, whilst his propensities are polygamic.

Amongst the Jews there was at first no attempt at the vulgar limitations of the family. ‘The care of the Mosaic, as of other Oriental legislation, was directed to the protection of the woman from harsh behaviour or capricious desertion, and to the fair treatment of the offspring without reference to the mutual affection of the parents. That the man who associated with a virgin incurred the charge of her protection, and that the mother, by the very act of maternity, assumed the lesser dignity of the wife, were the foundations of the domestic morals of the ancient world, the guiding principles of the social life.’[122] Samuel and the Patriarchs had two and more spouses, Solomon a countless harem, as became a king of kings, and Cato looked upon his wife merely as a machine for the manufacture of progeny. As society became more complex, a certain limitation became necessary. The customary laws of the Jews confined the high-priest to one wife, and apostolic injunction continued the same to the Christian bishop, without, however, forbidding a plurality of wives to the laity or to the other officers of the Church. It is hard to believe that this want of express condemnation arose from mere expediency, from the danger of disruption of the Oriental home, and from the fear of its being an obstacle to the conversion of the wealthier classes. Those familiar with modes of thought in the East well know the horror and loathing with which the people generally look upon the one-wife system, their contempt for the bastard, and their inability to witness in their own society those scenes which the monogamic cities of Europe must tolerate for fear of even greater social evils to the family. The ordinary Hebrew was ordered to be contented with four wives, a practice perpetuated by the apostle of El Islam and the king to eighteen. Thus Josephus distinctly called polygamy ‘the custom of his country.’ Nor was it modified till the depression of the Jew’s social position compelled him to follow the laws and customs of the nations amongst whom he was located. ‘In the eleventh century Rabbi Gerson, in connection with other Jewish doctors in France and the north of Germany, prohibited marrying more than one wife under pain of excommunication, and this was afterwards accepted by most European congregations. Nevertheless, both in Italy and Germany there seems to have existed the permission to take a second wife, when the first was hopelessly barren, and Papal dispensations to this effect are recorded to have been given in the dominions of the Holy See as late as the seventeenth century (_vide_ “Historia degli riti Hebraici,” by Leo. Mutensis, 1657, cited by Selden in his “Uxor Hebraica”); while in Sicily, where the Saracenic traditions might still linger, the author of the “Ebraismo della Sicilia,” writing in 1748, attributes the rapid increase of the Jewish population to the enforced early marriages and the habitual practice of polygamy.’[123] (P. 20. By Giovanni de’ Giovanni: Inquisator Reale della suprema Inquisizione di Sicilia.)

It is, as the reviewer well remarks, entirely gratuitous to suppose that, at the time of the advent of Christ, the general Jewish custom of polygamy had fallen into desuetude in consequence of the prohibition by Roman manners, if not by Roman laws. The reverse was the case; the rigid monogamy of the early Italians was disappearing in the presence of a less austere and a more sensuous life. ‘The almost sacramental Sabine ceremony of the _confarreatio_ (of which we still retain a relic in our “bride-cake”) was rapidly becoming confined to the use of the Pagan priesthood; the wife was daily ceasing to regard her husband as _amicum, patrem, tutorem_; the dignity and privilege of the _materfamilias_ had declined to the position of _uxor tantummodo_; the married Antony had openly espoused Cleopatra, and the _quotidiana repudia_ of Mæcenas shocked only the stoic Seneca.’ To this I will add that the old-bachelor system appeared in its entirety amongst the philosophers and wits, _teste_ one Horatius Flaccus, who might have been a club-man of the present day.

During a missionary dinner at Abeokuta I was somewhat startled by an account of their treatment of polygamic converts. Having accidentally mentioned that a Protestant bishop in South Africa had adopted to advantage the plan of not separating husband and wives, I was assured that in Yoruba the severe test of sincerity was always made a _sine quâ non_ before baptism. This naturally induced an inquiry as to what became of the divorcees. ‘We marry them,’ said the Rev. Mr. Gollmer, ‘to some bachelor converts.’ This appeared to me the greatest insult to common sense, the exercise of a power to bind and to loose with a witness; a right to sanctify adultery pure and simple, to do evil that good may come of it,[124] a proceeding which may make any marriage a no-marriage. But I was still more astonished to find, when quoting the opinion of Martin Luther, in the case of Philip of Hesse, that several reverend gentlemen had never heard of it, and most when the Rev. Mr. Gollmer, who manifestly made acquaintance with it for the first time, opined that the said Martin Luther had so lately emerged from the darkness of Romanism, that on this point his inner vision was not strong enough to face the light.[125]

The reverend gentleman’s last objection struck me the more forcibly, as it is evident that to the Roman Catholic Church—which, when barely adolescent claimed, and still claims in her decrepitude, the right of precedence over the State—we owe, in modern times, the most curious limitation of human liberty ever forced upon mankind. Let us see what the reviewer says upon the subject. I will abridge his excellent sketch.

No council, during the first centuries of the Church, denounced polygamy as a sin, but the apostolic limitation of the bishop’s household was soon applied to the whole ministry, and, in the West penalties were attached to the practice. The Manicheans and Gnostics condemned marriage in toto, because it is founded on concupiscence and propagates the work of the devil in confining human souls in bodies of matter: hence Mani called his elect or perfect—the class above the hearers—men-virgins. This heresy was rebutted, but it seems to have found place in the minds of men. St. Jerome, who is accused by the Reformers of thinking too exclusively of ‘victuals and virginity,’ would not undertake to declare a polygamist in mortal sin (‘Epistle to Pammachius,’ where he writes ‘non damno polygamos’). St. Augustine (contra Faustum, lib. 22) is even more precise: ‘Quando mos erat plures habere uxores, crimen non erat; nunc propterea crimen est, quia mos non est.’[126] Polygamy was forbidden throughout the empire by the imperial decrees of A.D. 393, but within thirty years the Emperor Valentinian restored the liberty of marriage, according to the several customs and religions of the inhabitants of the Roman world. Even in later days the Merovingian kings took as many wives simultaneously as suited their passions or their politics, and ‘Charlemagne, an eminently Christian emperor, paraded as large a harem as an Oriental sultan would have decorously concealed.’ Probably, in the presence of such disorders, that development of the doctrine and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church took place which ended in marriage being taken out of the category of personal contracts, and, according to the character of the participants, crowned as a sacrament or branded as a sin. In these latter days the claims of polygamy have been wholly neglected. A late work (‘La Régénération du Monde, opuscule dédié aux douze tribus d’Israël’) by M. Joseph de Félicité, contains the following curious sentences:—‘Il est donc essentiel que les peuples’ (Jews and Moslems), ‘sachant que la Polygamie, qui a été autorisée et pratiquée jusqu’au temps de Jésus- Christ, a été revoquée par lui’ (when? where?) ‘et qu’elle est interdite par la Sainte Eglise suivant le décrit du Concile de Trent XXIVme session: “Si quelqu’un dit qu’il est permis aux Chretiens d’avoir plusieurs femmes, et que cela n’est défendu par aucune loi divine, qu’il soit anathème.”’ But there is an older and a more terrible anathema upon him who takes away from or adds to a word of what was spoken, and, perhaps, even the Council of Trent will not be held guiltless.

It is, therefore, among the dissidents from the Church of Rome that we must look for assertions touching the lawfulness of polygamy. The advocates are of two classes. The first is of the Casuists—the German Reformers, for instance—who permit the practice in exceptional cases of individual temperament or state necessity, such as might be the subjects of especial dispensation in the Roman Church; the second is of the Moralists, who, without regarding polygamy as an absolute good, still look on it as a preservative from the miseries and disgraces incident to the illicit intercourse of the sexes in countries where marriage is restricted and men are licentious.[127] To this class belong the Saxon Lyserus (author of ‘Polygamia Triumphatrix,’ under the name of Theophilus Aletheus), Bishops Berkeley and Burnet—who concludes by saying that ‘he can see nothing so strong against polygamy as to balance the great and visible imminent hazards that hang over so many thousands if it be not allowed’—the Rev. Mr. Madan, who, in his ‘Thelyphthora,’ would give to seduction all the responsibilities of marriage, and the ‘oblique advocate,’ poetic Cowper. In 1784, the argument was revived in Russia by the Comte de Rantzow, who asserted that Frederic of Sweden had lately proposed to the states of his kingdom—where bigamy is punished with extreme severity—to permit polygamy, and that the project had been accepted by the two Lower, but rejected by the two Upper Houses of the legislature.

To conclude; I would assure these and other missionaries that had less objection been made to polygamy on their part, the heathen would have found far fewer obstacles to conversion. Those who hold it their duty to save souls, should seriously consider whether they are justified in placing such stumbling-blocks upon the path of improvement.

Funerals play almost as important a part as weddings in the economy of Yoruban society. The preliminary wake takes place in the verandah of the dead man’s house, which, like the king’s audience room, is hung with the richest cloths procurable. The ceremony itself reminds us of the old Scotch annalist’s words: ‘In years of plenty,’ says Fletcher of Saltoun, ‘many thousands of them meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days, and at country weddings, markets, burials, and other public occasions, they are to be seen, both men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together.’ Women are there skilful in weeping and shrieking ‘like mandrakes torn from the ground;’ the sound of the tom-tom is incessant; at times an overloaded musket is discharged; whilst the mob drinks to intoxication and dances to ‘break the fear,’ as the East Africans say. During the orgies, a procession perambulates the town, numerous singers, dancers, and myriologists, or keeners, accompanying men who bear a board covered with a cloth to represent a corpse. The body, packed mummy-like in all the finery which was never exposed during lifetime,[128] is buried at full length in the house where the deceased lived, and a stone is placed over the grave, or a painted tablet is affixed to the wall opposite the spot. Hunters and other castes are buried outside the city gates. The corpses of debtors and ‘pawns,’ or men pledged for debt, are tied up in mats, as on the Gold Coast, and are placed horizontally between stakes at a distance of four to five feet from the ground, where they must remain until redeemed by the nearest of kin. Infants are buried behind the housewalls, not in the piazza, because they are supposed to have been killed by evil influences. On the seventh night, the relations and friends of the departed issue from the city gates after dark, cast his arms and clothes on the way-side, thrice call upon his name, and adjure him not to let, haunt, or otherwise injure them. After thus propitiating the ghost, they return to the dead man’s house, where a feast and a carousal end the ceremonies.

Human sacrifices for the dead, or ‘customs,’ so common in many parts of Africa, are here comparatively rare; when offered, it is with the idea of presenting to the departed what is most valuable to the living;[129] and, as has been observed, a modified apotheosis is common. In Roman Catholic countries the deceased, if not too severely handled by the devil’s advocate, may after a century or so, and at an expense of 10,000_l._, become a saint—at Abeokuta he has a chance of being raised to the godhead. The Cairene superstition of the dead refusing to leave the town, the bier whirling round and round, and the bearers being driven hither and thither, is not unknown: here, however, if the people are thrown against the wall of a man’s house, it involves the latter in a witchcraft ‘palaver,’ which he must settle by fine or by the poison ordeal.

[Footnote 86: When we first occupied the unhappy valley of the Indus, the Sindhian women used to bathe without dress at the wells: with Moslem decorum they were safe, but the Frank soon changed all that.]

[Footnote 87: Lagos kills a consul about every two years. The only way to remedy it would be to sleep for the first year on board a ship, or still better, a large hulk anchored off the town in mid-channel. At night the malarious vapour is condensed and concentrated by the chilliness of the ground, and is absorbed or rendered innocuous by passing over a sheet of water.]

[Footnote 88: The European fashion is best adapted for heavy axe-blades in temperate climates. In the tropics the wood, alternately wetted and parched, shrinks, swells, and rots. I prefer, to all, a hollow iron handle, firmly riveted to the blade.]

[Footnote 89: I sent some to England, where their novelty and grotesqueness caused them to be greatly admired.]

[Footnote 90: An account of the Egba dispersion will be given in a future page.]

[Footnote 91: Figurative. There are but few wild bees, and honey is unknown in this part of Africa.]

[Footnote 92: Mr. Senior, and probably others, opines touching ‘plural government,’ that ‘the Greeks were the inventors of the system of dividing the sovereign power among a number of co-ordinate persons, whose combined assent was necessary to an act of supreme authority.’ He would have found the principle and the practice in the remotest and most barbarous of African tribes.]

[Footnote 93: It is not cultivated, and therefore little prized by natives: the flavour of turpentine is its characteristic.]

[Footnote 94: This curious admission reminds me of the words of a certain preacher: ‘Now, my brethren, Conscience is not, as some say, a geographical or a chronological accident,’—a fatal sentence, never to be forgotten, I am sure, by many of his hearers.]

[Footnote 95: Mr. Bowen steps into the absurd, by enunciating the doctrine, that ‘no _man_ has ever believed in two gods.’ He should have said, no free-born citizen of the Great Republic.]

[Footnote 96: Some writers (_e.g._ ‘Savage Life in Africa.’ Home and Foreign Review, July, 1862,) have objected that ‘it does not follow, because a savage calls God and sky by the same name, that therefore he necessarily confuses one with the other. Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins had one name for spirit, breath, and wind; but we cannot therefore conclude that they identified them. The foundation of reason is the power of using symbols, _i.e._, of making one thing stand for another, which is known to be different from it.’ But this is a vicious analogy. The Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins were not savages: I only assert, that in the undeveloped human mind the confusion of name points to the confusion of sense—that the metaphysical idea is subordinate to the physical. Nezuhualcoyotl, the great Mexican king, when weary of idols, raised a temple ‘al Dios no conocido, causa di los causas.’ If this be no priestly pious fraud, Mexico, like Athens, had the foot lifted for another step in advance when Christianity, the fourth and penultimate act of the great drama, appeared on the stage of life.]

[Footnote 97: Did Mungo Park ever write this ‘Encyclopædist’ sentence?]

[Footnote 98: From the Hindu to the Romanist, no educated man really adores the picture or image; and, I suspect, few uneducated men do otherwise than adore it. This should be a serious consideration with those who allow and contend for what Moses absolutely forbade—the bowing before graven images. The Iconoclasts of early Christianity, and the Apostle of El Islam, doubtless found the abuse of such ornaments greater than their use, and told the people to hold them in abomination.]

[Footnote 99: ‘The present Alake succeeded Shodeke, a man so venerated as to be ranked among the demigods.’—(Mr. Campbell, p. 40.)]

[Footnote 100: Mr. Bowen says that ‘Iyangba herself is Obatala. The two are one, or, in other words, Obatala is an androgyne, representing the productive energy of nature, or the generative principle, as distinguished from the creative power of God.’ But this explanation appears extra Indo-European. On the other hand the Rev. Mr. Crowther calls Obbatalla ‘the great goddess of Yoruba, supposed to be the framer of the human body in the womb.’ The fact that this diety is male, female, and hermaphrodite, is a fair specimen of pagan vagueness.]

[Footnote 101: So the Spiritualists or Fetishists of the present day assert that everything on earth is but a copy, of which the antitype is to be found in the other.]

[Footnote 102: The worship of Shango, however, is not known in Great Benin.]

[Footnote 103: She is denoted by a little idol, with dull yellow skin, blue hair, white beads, and striped dress.]

[Footnote 104: The authoress of ‘A Residence at Sierra Leone’ (p. 96) tells us, ‘Many of the liberated Africans worship lightning,’ and is told by a Christian convert, that an Aku man, who offered himself as a groom, ‘no do for horseman, he worship de tunder.’ Of course the man was a devotee of Shango.]

[Footnote 105: A Shango-stone was showed to me; it was a bit of white quartz.]

[Footnote 106: There are probably two Ife. One is placed in our maps in the province of Kakanda, between Aku-land and the Niger. According to some, it has lately been destroyed: the spot is worthy of exploration. The mythical Ife was founded by Obalofu, and there worship (_alias_ idolatry) is said to have originated. As the first place made by the Creator, it has become the market of ghostland—the dead there go to sell and buy.]

[Footnote 107: The place of the Mganga, or medicine-man of the South—the rain-maker or rain-stopper, like the χαλαζοφύλακες, and those who practised aquælicium in classical Europe—is supplied in Yoruba, as we might expect, from the comparative complexity of the system, by a great variety of priestly drones.]

[Footnote 108: The priest brings his nuts in a rhinoceros horn from the upper country. Holding the sixteen in his left hand, he takes them up at random—as we do at a ‘bean club’—in his right, and the operation is repeated till either two, called ‘ofu,’ or one, called ‘ossa,’ remains. The chosen nut is then rolled, with the middle finger, over the earth, or over a board whitened with the dust made by tree-worms. Finally, it is marked with certain lines, which, by deciding the value and the nature of sacrifice, procure success.

An old converted priest thus performed the ceremony in my presence. He counted sixteen nuts, freed them from dust, and placed them in a bowl on the ground, full of yam half boiled, crushed, and covered with some acrid vegetable infusion. His acolyte, a small boy, was then called, made to squat near the bowl, resting his body on the outer edge of the feet, which were turned inwards, and to take from the fetish-man two or three bones, seeds, and shells, some of which are of good, others of bad omen. Elevating them, he rested his hands upon his knees. The adept cast the nuts from one hand to the other, retaining some in the left, and while manipulating, dropped others into the bowl. He then stooped down, drew with the index and medius lines on the yam, inspected the nuts, and occasionally referred to the articles in the boy’s hand. Thus he was enabled to pronounce an opinion upon what was to happen.

I cannot flatter myself that the _modus operandi_ has been made quite intelligible to the reader, for the best of reasons—I do not quite understand it myself. The system is far more simple in Dahome, and at some future time I may explain it.]

[Footnote 109: Mr. Crowther mentions that Odudua was situated in front of the Council House at Ake, and that sacrifices of beasts and fowls were made to it every five days, in order to obtain children, wealth, and peace.]

[Footnote 110: Twins, however, at Abeokuta are not necessarily killed, as in the Oil Rivers further south, or amongst the Kamskatkans, and many of the North American aborigines.]

[Footnote 111: Here, as in other parts of Africa, Christian Europeans, like Moslems, call all idols ‘devils,’ and foolishly believe that every image, tree, stone, charm, and amulet are objects of worship, pure and simple.]

[Footnote 112: Europeans, as has been said, call all the native objects of worship ‘devils,’ indiscriminately. The practice is incorrect, but dates of old. ‘All the gods of the Gentiles are devils,’ says the Psalmist.]

[Footnote 113: ‘Illustrated Handbook of American Travel.’ New York: Appleton and Co.]

[Footnote 114: Like the Mbuiti of the Mpongwe, or Gaboons. The word ‘spirit’ is always used in these cases: nothing can be more incorrect than the secondary idea which it conveys, yet I am at pains to find a better. ‘Emi’ is synonymous with the Hebrew ‘Ruach’ (breath).]

[Footnote 115: The Basutos think that the ghosts of their ancestors are always endeavouring to draw them to themselves (‘Casalis,’ p. 249). M. du Chaillu (ch. xix.) very truly shows that no negro fears the ghost of his grandfather or his great-grandfather, proving, as has been well remarked, the shortness of thought which is characteristic of the African.]

[Footnote 116: In one of the silliest of modern effusions, the ‘Night Side of Nature,’ where black magic is traced to the power of the will, we read: ‘It is extremely absurd to suppose that statutes were created to suppress a crime which never existed.’ The crime did exist, and does exist, amongst the ignorant and barbarous: the light of science, of course, is an efficient exorciser.]

[Footnote 117: The Fulas, to mention no other African tribe, have not a regular week.]

[Footnote 118: ‘Journal,’ &c., p. 185.]

[Footnote 119: The same is told of a cannibal race in Eastern Africa.]

[Footnote 120: This reminds one of the Hindostani slang ‘tutelí kaurí,’ or ‘broken cowrie,’ which in Africa becomes ‘broken calabash.’]

[Footnote 121: The Hindu race, in early times, made an approximation to monogamy. The country was then almost civilized, and the population must have been dense. The Semitic family shows the same phenomenon. But when quoting the words of the Eastern poet—

‘His wives may never be four,

He will best consult his reason,

Best secure his home from treason,

Who takes one, and wants no more’—

they should be read rather as a grumble against the ‘legalities and proprieties of society,’ than as a theory which could be generally carried out. The Asiatic races that are inferior to the Arab and the Hindu, have never, I believe, adopted monogamy, although polyandry has been practised for centuries.]

[Footnote 122: I have borrowed these sentences, and almost all the information contained in these paragraphs, from a Paper in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ Jan., 1862. The reader will readily recognize the master-hand in that admirable article. It is amusing, however, to see in it what a poor halfpenny-worth there is of bread (monogamy) to an intolerable deal of sack (polygamy). Whilst pages 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 are devoted to showing that polygamy was a Mosaic institution, unforbidden to the early Christians, and only rendered restrictive and penal—principally by the Church of Rome—in modern times, a single sentence informs us that the settlement of the question was left to old Roman laws, to German manners, and to ‘the silent but absolute operation of a religion, based on the sentiments with which no system of polygamy seems to be compatible—freedom and love.’

An eminent Moslem divine—El Siyuti, I think—wrote a Moslem treatise on what to avoid. Through some three hundred pages he indulges his reader with a full description of the most voluptuous practices of the East—a perfect worship of Bacchus and Venus. In the last he perorates, beginning—‘This much, O reader, have I recounted unto thee, so that thou mayest know the things forbidden unto thee,’ &c., &c.

With respect to the reviewer’s last assertion, viz., that Christianity is based upon freedom and love—I doubt that the monogamic sentiment was ever intended by it. And I doubt even more vehemently whether the mixture of sentiment and passion, which we know by that name, has not added to the miseries rather than conduced to the happiness of human life. In my humble opinion, it is not one of the least merits of polygamy that it abstracts from the parents an affection which it bestows upon the progeny. As no man, it is said, can serve God and Mammon, so no woman can equally love husband and children; even the same woman, at different periods of her existence, will prefer one to the detriment of the other. And whilst conjugal love contains the base alloy of sexual feeling, parental affection is of all the most pure and holy. The unselfish will find no difficulty in pointing out which to prefer.]

[Footnote 123: St. Augustine, Grotius, and other authorities, admit that polygamy is more natural than monogamy, yet they declare—and they are followed by Paley—that it would prevent increase of population. The contrary is the case. Hippocrates, Harvey, Willoughby, Forster, and the practice of the Mormons, show, that amongst all animals, mankind included, polygamy tends to population by increasing the births of female children. Dr. Johnson (‘Life,’ vol. iii., p. 71) says it is ‘not natural for a man and a woman to live together in the married state.’ Balzac explains this, by observing that, ‘physically and morally, man is man longer than woman is woman.’ Napoleon, the last of the three Avataras of intellect, declares, in the Code Civile, ‘Le mariage ne dérive pas de la nature.’

In the City of the Saints, I flattered myself it had been proved, that whereas monogamy equalizes the birth of the two sexes, polygamy produces more females, and polyandry more males. Hence came the deduction, that ‘Nature, our plastic mother, had prepared her children for all three systems.’ The ‘British Quarterly Review,’ of Jan. 1st, 1862, in an un- able article, thus reasons upon this adaptation principle:—‘If a man breaks a leg, nature instantly adopts extraordinary measures to insure its repair; but are we entitled to infer that she delights in fractured limbs?’ If this be argument, there can be no more said upon the subject. Polygamy and polyandry, amongst mankind, are the rule, not the exception. Broken legs are the exception, not the rule. The comparison of the ‘learned’ reviewer is, therefore, applicable to monogamy, not to polygamy and polyandry.]

[Footnote 124: Martin Luther allowed Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, for political reasons, to intermarry with a second wife, the first being still living. (‘Memoirs of Luther,’ translated by M. Michelet: 1836. See also ‘Athenæum,’ June 18, 1836.) The Reformer, who said, ‘If Sarah refuses, take Hagar,’ regarded, like all the early Christians, saints and sinners, marriage as a purely civil rite. He never hesitated, when the object of union was impeded, to grant letters of divorce, and he notably held that the polygamy practised under the Mosaic dispensation was lawful in modern times. ‘For my part,’ he declares, ‘I confess that I cannot oppose the man who may wish to marry several wives, and that I do not think such plurality contrary to the Holy Scriptures.’ This is true wisdom. Human liberty has been sufficiently abridged without imagining further curtailments.]

[Footnote 125: The lax law makes the polygamic wife a legitimate wife, the missionary declares her illegitimate and not respectable; he degrades her in her own estimate, and he would drive her an outcast from her home. Can aught be more absurd, more wicked?]

[Footnote 126: This ‘mos’ is equivalent with the Moslems’ ‘Rasm:’ the importance attached to it is eminently Oriental, conservative opposed to progressive. One is tempted to quote St. Augustine against himself: ‘Væ tibi, flumen moris humani! Quis resistat tibi?’ (‘Conf.,’ i. 8.)]

[Footnote 127: There is nothing more curious in the moral world than to watch the effects of restriction of marriage by increased luxury and expense in England, France, and other so-called civilized lands. Polygamy has been cast out except amongst the few who can afford to practise an illegal concubinage, and polyandry has now become the last resource of those unable or unwilling to marry.]

[Footnote 128: Some authorities say that cowries are placed in the tomb as gold-dust is further west: others deny it.]

[Footnote 129: It must be remembered that human sacrifices prevailed amongst all the polished people of the old and new worlds; in Greece they were common until the days of Solon, and the Romans abolished them only in A.C. 100.]