Again, these powerful, or omnipotent divine beings are looked on as guardians of morality, punishers of sin, rewarders of righteousness, both in this world and in a future life, in places where ghosts, though believed in, ARE NOT WORSHIPPED, NOR INRECEIPT OF SACRIFICE, and where, great grandfathers being forgotten, ancestral ghosts can scarcely swell into gods. This occurs among Andamanese, Fuegians and Australians, therefore, among non-ghost-worshipping races, ghosts cannot have developed into deities who are not even necessarily spirits. These gods, again, do not receive sacrifice, and thus lack the note of descent from hungry food-craving ghosts. In Australia, indeed, while ghosts are not known to receive any offerings, "the recent custom of providing food for it"--the dead body of a friend--"is derided by the intelligent old aborigines as 'white fellow's gammon'".
The Australians possess no chiefs like "Vich Ian Vohr or Chingachgook" whose ghosts might be said to swell into supreme moral deities. "Headmen" they have, leaders of various degrees of authority, but no Vich Ian Vohr, no semi-sacred representative of the tribe. Nor are the ghosts of the Headmen known to receive any particular posthumous attention or worship. Thus it really seems impossible to show proof that Australian gods grew out of Australian ghosts, a subject to which we shall return.
"Transactions of Royal Society of Victoria," 1889.
Some supporters of the current theory therefore fall back on the hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate. Chiefs, it is argued, or kings, they once had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the very faintest trace of Australian degeneration.
Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor have correctly argued that the soil of Australia has not yet yielded so much as a fragment of native pottery, nor any trace of native metal work, not a vestige of stone buildings occurs, nor of any work beyond the present native level of culture, unless we reckon weirs for fish-catching. "The Australian boomerang," writes Mr. Tylor, "has been claimed as derived from some hypothetical high culture, whereas the transition-stages through which it is connected with the club are to be observed in its own country, while no civilised race possesses the weapon."
Therefore the Australian, with his boomerang, represents no degeneration but advance on his ancestors, who had not yet developed the boomerang out of the club. If the excessively complex nature of Australian rules of prohibited degrees be appealed to as proof of degeneration from the stage in which they were evolved, we reply that civilisation everywhere tends not to complicate but to simplify such rules, as it also notoriously simplifies the forms of language.
The Australian people, when discovered, were only emerging from palaeolithic culture, while the neighbouring Tasmanians were frankly palaeolithic. Far from degenerating, the Australians show advance when they supersede their beast or other totem by an eponymous human hero. The eponymous hero, however, changed with each generation, so that no one name was fixed as that of tribal father, later perhaps to become a tribal god. We find several tribes in which the children now follow the FATHER'S class, and thus paternal kin takes the place of the usual early savage method of reckoning kinship by the mother's side, elsewhere prevalent in Australia. In one of these tribes, dwelling between the Glenelg and Mount Napier, headmanship is hereditary, but nothing is said of any worship of the ghosts of chiefs. All this social improvement denotes advance on the usual Australian standard. Of degeneration (except when produced recently by European vices and diseases) I know no trace in Australia. Their highest religious conceptions, therefore, are not to be disposed of as survivals of a religion of the ghosts of such chiefs as the Australians are not shown ever to have recognised. The "God idea" in Australia, or among the Andamanese, must have some other source than the Ghost-Theory. This is all the more obvious because not only are ghosts not worshipped by the Australians, but also the divine beings who are alleged to form links between the ghost and the moral god are absent. There are no departmental gods, as of war, peace, the chase, love, and so forth. Sun, sky and earth are equally unworshipped. There is nothing in religion between a Being, on one hand (with a son or sons), and vague mischievous spirits, boilyas or mrarts, and ghosts (who are not worshipped), on the other hand.
The friends of the idea that the God is an ancient evolution from the ghost of such a chief as is not proved to have existed, must apparently believe that the intermediate stages in religious evolution, departmental gods, nature gods and gods of polytheism in general once existed in Australia, and have all been swept away in a deluge of degeneration. That deluge left in religion a moral, potently active Father and Judge. Now that conception is considerably above the obsolescent belief in an otiose god which is usually found among barbaric races of the type from which the Australians are said to have degenerated. There is no proof of degeneracy, and, if degeneration has occurred, why has it left just the kind of deity who, in the higher barbaric culture, is not commonly found? Clearly this attempt to explain the highest aspect of Australian religion by an undemonstrated degeneration is an effort of despair.