Legend
Annihilation
“Annihilation” is evidently coming to the fore. Adjunctive evidence to a very wide extent respecting this doctrine held by the theosophists and the Conditional Humanity Association is borne witness to by one whose testimony Spiritualists will unhesitatingly accept.
Captain R. F. Burton, the illustrious traveller, shows us in his work, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (Sampson Low, 1876), that the doctrine of man’s destruction is largely, if not universally held by the whole negro race. He tells us (Vol. I., p. 92), “Africans have a material, evanescent, intelligible future, not an immaterial, incomprehensible eternity; the ghost endures only for a while, and perishes like the memory of the little-great name. Hence the ignoble dread in East and West Africa of a death which leads to a shadowy world, and eventually to utter annihilation.”
He says:—“They wail and sorrow with a burden of despair over the idea of dying; any allusion to loss of life turns their black skins blue.”
Such is the effect of the doctrine of annihilation— or let us call it, more philosophically, perishment, destruction—upon the sensitive and primitive race. For here let me draw a very marked line between the view held by the theosophist and the conditional immortality man as distinguished from that of the black man. The latter has, unlike the two former, no immortal future for the elect, or shall we call them the lucky ones—a future utterly dissimilar to that of the non-elect or the unlucky ones. No, with the negro all mankind are under the same ban; utter destruction sooner or later is the lot of all. All linger for a while in a ghostly state after death, and then vanish away.
The negro does not believe “that any human being is at once extinguished as to his conscious individuality at the change called death.” But he makes no reservation; he believes that all humanity, himself included, must look for “annihilation” or destruction “eventually.’’
Now I cannot but think that the negro, who sees no exception from the common lot to any, not even for himself, presents a striking picture of noble humility, an absence of self-seeking worthy of the highest admiration, commendable as it is rare among the higher races; as well as demonstrating, to my thinking, a fund of common sense in gauging rightly, as we believe, God’s dealing with man, His highest work, in a way that we may look for in vain among Europeans, as a rule.
So we who do not believe in annihilation or man’s destruction, think that there are brighter hopes in store for the negroes than they have conceived for themselves, or than the spirits of their race, with whom they arc in communion, have, in these present days, any cognisance of; though they have already conceived, in their own way, we believe, the one grand secret: that there is, for humanity, whether in the fluidic or earthly state, men or angels, good or bad, under all and every circumstance, emanations as they are all from the Eternal, but one common eventuality for all.
These “poor Pagans,” who have all along the African coasts refused all incentives to accept what Captain Burton calls, “Another and a better, or a worse,” are still amenable to something more precious than the anticipation of eventual destruction; but of something which, at the same time, may be still the common lot. And Buddhism offers this alternative now, as Neoplatonism also offered it until it was put down. We have reason to think that if Buddhism had been offered to the negro he would have adopted it. Buddhism, which is the only existing faith except Fetish, Spiritism, and Spiritualism partially, that gives the same eventuality to all mankind. But Buddhism, with its progress through successive incarnations, and its fluidic and earthly purgatories (or methods of cleansing), trusts not to propagandism for success: people go to it, not it to them, and the Buddhists seem contented with holding already in their harmonious fold far more than a third of the human race. I am led to this opinion that the negro would accept Buddhism by an observation of Captain Burton himself. He tells us: “An African chief said in my presence to a Yahoo-like naval officer, “When so be I die, I come up for white man! When so be you die, you come up for monkey!” We sec, then, that there is an aptitude in the negro, who now believes in destruction, to accept, in its stead, the hopeful tenet, of progress through reincarnation. However it may have been in former days, when the negroes too may have had their elect, yet long experience appears to have taught the negro spirits who communicate with and teach the living, to know that Anyambia, their Great “First Cause,” suffers no favouritism. So, since there are no elect, their communicating spirits have now led, and, probably, honestly led, the black race to a belief in the doctrine of destruction for all, with what “ignoble” results Captain Burton has shown; and this I need not recapitulate, for we have seen into what a pusillanimous position a long belief in this doctrine has landed them. But' what if, because spirits, missing their fellow spirits, and believing it themselves, tell their mediums that these missing spirits must be annihilated; what if, in lieu of that, these missed spirits are not lost but reincarnated? What if it should be thus? Why not?
Scrutator.
Editor's notes
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 374, October 24, 1879, pp. 196-97