The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1932, Page 123

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

123

from him; it refuses to accept benefits for him.
She who is about to become a mother is rendered
miserable by fear. Her mother joy is embittered by
fear of her own soul and of the soul of her child
as well as of envious spirits. The souls of relatives
are easily wounded, and woe to him who even un-
intentionally offends them! Primitive man has to
wind his way amid the throng of the souls of the
people around him and must continually bargain
or fight with invisible and sinister powers. The
farmer is not only worried about the growth of his
crops and the state of the weather, he has not only
to guard his fields against high water or to defend
them against rats, destructive beetles, and flocks
of thievish birds; he is helpless also against the
soul of the rice, whose moods determine whether
the fruits produced by his laborious efforts shall
contain nourishing power or not. It is not difficult
to fight or circumvent a visible enemy, but who
can defend himself against the incalculable soul?
Animism seems devised for the purpose of tor-
menting men and hindering them from enjoy-
ing life.

“To that must be added fear of the dead, of
demons, of the thousand spirits of earth, air, water,
mountains, and trees. The Battak is like a man
driven in a frenzied pursuit round and round.
Ghosts of the most diverse kinds lurk in house and
village; in the fields they endanger the produce of
labor; in the forest they terrify the woodcutter; in
the bush they hunt the wanderer. From them come
diseases, madness, death of cattle, and famine.
Malicious demons surround women during preg-
nancy and at confinement; they lie in wait for the
child from the day of its birth; they swarm around
the houses at night; they spy through the chinks
of the walls for their helpless victims. Gigantic
spirits stride through the villages, scattering epi-
demics around them; they lurk in the sea and
rivers with the view of dragging travelers into the
depths. They are not laughing fauns or mocking
satyrs, but merciless messengers of death, enemies
swollen with envy, who would fain hurl the living
into the kingdom of the dead. The dead friend
and brother becomes an enemy, and his coffin and
grave are the abode of terrors. It is fear that occa-
sions the worship of the departed and the observance
of their mourning usages in its smallest details;
fear dictates that host of prohibitions which sur-
rounds every movement of their daily life. Fear is
the moving power of animistic religion, in Asia as
in Africa.

“This observation is confirmed by the unani-
mous testimony of historians of religion and of
missionary literature. Thus Tiele says: ‘In the
religions dominated by Animism fear appears more
frequently than trust. The spirits and their wor-
shipers are both alike, self-seeking. ‘The lower, as
a rule, are more worshiped than the higher, the
local more than those at a distance, the particular
more than the common. Their rewards and punish-
ments, if this point of view prevails, are not mea-
sured by the good or bad acts of men in their social
life, but only by the sacrifices and gifts which are
offered or withheld from them. (Tiele, Kompen-

Dwelling of Natives in Sumatra.

dium, p. 22.) ‘The religions of uncivilized peoples
are not exclusively, but they are chiefly, a worship of
demons. Beings are worshiped who, even in the
consciousness of the people themselves, are not re-
garded as the highest; beings inferior to God, but
nearer to man and who can do him harm. They
have their abode here and there in surrounding
nature; they may also be spirits of dead men.
(P. Wurm, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte,
p- 94.) The fear of demons is very plainly ex-
hibited among the Kols: “Their religious usages
are so perverted, unspiritual, and opposed to all
true religion that they can be described by no other
name than superstition. Fear or ordinary self-
interest is the cause of all that takes place. One
really comes to see that fear of sinister super-