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134 LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. When walking one evening with a Samoyede sailor along the coast of the Polar Sea, Castrén asked him:
Tell me, where is Num?' (i.e. Jumala.) Without a moment's hesitation the old sailor pointed to the dark, distant sea, and said: 'He is there.'
Again, in the epic poem Kalevala, when the hostess of Pohjola is in labour, she calls on Jumala, and says:
Come now into the bath, Jumala, into the warmth, O Lord of the air !' (p. 19).
At another time Jumala is the god of the air, and is invoked in the following lines (p. 21):
Harness now thyself, Jumala, Ruler of the air, thy horses ! Bring them forth, thy rapid racers, Drive the sledge with glittering colours, Passing through our bones, our ankles, Through our flesh that shakes and trembles, Through our veins which seem all broken. Knit the flesh and bones together, Fasten vein to vein more firmly. Let our joints be filled with silver,
Let our veins with gold be running! In all these cases the deity invoked is the same, it is the deity of the sky, Jumala ; but so indefinite is his character, that we can hardly say whether he is the god of the sky, or the sun, or the sea, or the air, or whether he is a supreme deity reflected in all these aspects of nature.
However, you will naturally ask, where is there any similarity between the name of that deity and the Chinese deity of the sky, Tien? The common worship of Jumala may prove some kind of religious concentration among the different Altaic nations in the North of Asia, but it does not prove any prehistoric community of worship between those nations
