We must be content with a mere glance at other types of wrong-doing which, whilst sooner or later recognized by the law of thecommunity, affect its members in their individual capacity. Theft and slander are cases in point.
Amongst the ruder savages there cannot be much stealing, because there is next to nothing to steal. Nevertheless, groups are apt to quarrel over hunting and fishing claims; whilst the division of the spoils of the chase may give rise to disputes, which call for the interposition of leading men. We even occasionally find amongst Australians the formal duel employed to decide cases of the violation of property-rights. Not, however, until the arts of life have advanced, and wealth has created the two classes of "haves" and "have-nots," does theft become an offence of the first magnitude, which the central authority punishes with corresponding severity.
As regards slander, though it might seem a slight matter, it must be remembered that the savage cannot stand up for a moment again an adverse public opinion; so that to rob him of his good name is to take away all that makes life worth living. To shout out, Long-nose! Sunken-eyes! or Skin-and-bone! usually leads to a fight in Andamanese circles, as Mr. Man informs us. Nor, again, is it conducive to peace in Australian society to sing as follows about the staying-powers of a fellow-tribesman temporarily overtaken byEuropean liquor: "Spirit like emu—as a whirlwind—pursues—lays violent hold on travelling—uncle of mine (this being particularly derisive)—tired out with fatigue—throws himself down helpless." Amongst more advanced peoples, therefore, slander and abuse are sternly checked. They constitute a ground for a civil action in Kafir law; whilst we even hear of an African tribe, the Ba-Ngindo, who rejoice in the special institution of a peace-maker, whose business is to compose troubles arising from this vexatious source.
Let us now turn to another class of offences, such as, from the first, are regarded as so prejudicial to the public interest that the community as a whole must forcibly put them down.
Cases of what may be termed military discipline fall under this head. Even when the functions of the commander are undeveloped, and war is still "an affair of armed mobs," shirking—a form of crime which, to do justice to primitive society, is rare—is promptly and effectively resented by the host. Amongst American tribes the coward's arms are taken away from him; he is made to eat with the dogs; or perhaps a shower of arrows causes him to "run the gauntlet." Thetraitor, on the other hand, is inevitably slain without mercy—tied to a tree and shot, or, it may be, literally hacked to pieces. Naturally, with the evolution of war, these spontaneous outbursts of wrath and disgust give way to a more formal system of penalties. To trace out this development fully, however, would entail a lengthy disquisition on the growth of kingship in one of its most important aspects. If constant fighting turns the tribe into something like a standing army, the position of war-lord, as, for instance, amongst the Zulus, is bound to become both permanent and of all-embracing authority. There is, however, another side to the history of kingship, as the following considerations will help to make clear.
Public safety is construed by the ruder type of man not so much in terms of freedom from physical danger—unless such a danger, the onset of another tribe, for instance, is actually imminent—as in terms of freedom from spiritual, or mystic, danger. The fear of ill-luck, in other words, is the bogy that haunts him night and day. Hence his life is enmeshed, as Dr. Frazer puts it, in a network of taboos. A taboo is anything that one must not do lest ill-luck befall. And ill-luck is catching, like an infectious disease. If my next-door neighbour breaks a taboo,and brings down a visitation on himself, depend upon it some of its unpleasant consequences will be passed on to me and mine. Hence, if some one has committed an act that is not merely a crime but a sin, it is every one's concern to wipe out that sin; which is usually done by wiping out the sinner. Mobbish feeling always inclines to violence. In the mob, as a French psychologist has said, ideas neutralize each other, but emotions aggrandize each other. Now war-feeling is a mobbish experience that, I daresay, some of my readers have tasted; and we have seen how it leads the unorganized levy of a savage tribe to make short work of the coward and traitor. But war-fever is a mild variety of mobbish experience as compared with panic in any form, and with superstitious panic most of all. Being attacked in the dark, as it were, causes the strongest to lose their heads.
Hence it is not hard to understand how it comes about that the violator of a taboo is the central object of communal vengeance in primitive society. The most striking instance of such a taboo-breaker is the man or woman who disregards the prohibition against marriage within the kin—in other words, violates the law of exogamy. To be thus guilty of incest is to incite in the community at large a horror which, venting itself in what Bagehotcalls a "wild spasm of wild justice," involves certain death for the offender. To interfere with a grave, to pry into forbidden mysteries, to eat forbidden meats, and so on, are further examples of transgressions liable to be thus punished.
Falling under the same general category of sin, though distinct from the violation of taboo, is witchcraft. This consists in trafficking, or at any rate in being supposed to traffic, with powers of evil for sinister and anti-social ends. We have only to remember how England, in the seventeenth century, could work itself up into a frenzy on this account to realize how, in an African society even of the better sort, the "smelling-out" and destroying of a witch may easily become a general panacea for quieting the public nerves.
When crimes and sins, affairs of state and affairs of church thus overlap and commingle in primitive jurisprudence, it is no wonder if the functions of those who administer the law should tend to display a similar fusion of aspects. The chief, or king, has a "divine right," and is himself in one or another sense divine, even whilst he takes the lead in regard to all such matters as are primarily secular. The earliest written codes, such as the Mosaic Books of the Law, with their strange medleyof injunctions concerning things profane and sacred, accurately reflect the politico-religious character of all primitive authority.
Indeed, it is only by an effort of abstraction that the present chapter has been confined to the subject of law, as distinguished from the subject of the following chapter, namely, religion. Any crime, as notably murder, and even under certain circumstances theft, is apt to be viewed by the ruder peoples either as a violation of taboo, or as some closely related form of sin. Nay, within the limits of the clan, legal punishment can scarcely be said to be in theory possible; the sacredness of the blood-tie lending to any chastisement that may be inflicted on an erring kinsman the purely religious complexion of a sacrifice, an act of excommunication, a penance, or what not. Thus almost insensibly we are led on to the subject of religion from the study of the legal sanction; this very term "sanction," which is derived from Roman law, pointing in the same direction, since it originally stood for the curse which was appended in order to secure the inviolability of a legal enactment.
CHAPTER VIII
"How can there be a History of Religions?" once objected a French senator. "For either one believes in a religion, and then everything in it appears natural; or one does not believe in it, and then everything in it appears absurd!"
This was said some thirty years ago, when it was a question of founding the now famous chair of the General History of Religions at the Collège de France. At that time, such chairs were almost unheard of. Now-a-days the more important universities of the world, to reckon them alone, can show at least thirty.
What is the significance of this change? It means that the parochial view of religion is out of date. The religious man has to be a man of the world, a man of the wider world, an anthropologist. He has to recognize that there is a "soul of truth" in other religions besides his own.
It will be replied—and I fully realize the force of the objection—that history, and therefore anthropology, has nothing to do with truth or falsehood—in a word, with value.In strict theory, this is so. Its business is to describe and generalize fact; and religion from first to last might be pure illusion or even delusion, and it would be fact none the less on that account.
At the same time, being men, we all find it hard, nay impossible, to study mankind impartially. When we say that we are going to play the historian, or the anthropologist, and to put aside for the time being all consideration of the moral of the story we seek to unfold, we are merely undertaking to be as fair all round as we can. Willy nilly, however, we are sure to colour our history, to the extent, at any rate, of taking a hopeful or a gloomy view of man's past achievements, as bearing on his present condition and his future prospects.
In the same way, then, I do not believe that we can help thinking to ourselves all the time, when we are tracing out the history of world-religion, either that there is "nothing in it" at all, or that there is "something in it," whatever form it assume, and whether it hold itself to be revealed (as it almost always does) or not. On the latter estimate of religion, however, it is still quite possible to judge that one form of religion is infinitely higher and better than another. Religion, regarded historically, is in evolution. Thebest form of religion that we can attain to is inevitably the best for us; but, as a worse form preceded it, so a better form, we must allow and even desire, may follow. Now, frankly, I am one of those who take the more sympathetic view of historical religion; an I say so at once, in case my interpretation of the facts turn out to be coloured by this sanguine assumption.
Moreover, I think that we may easily exaggerate the differences in culture and, more especially, in religious insight and understanding that exist between the ruder peoples and ourselves. In view of our common hope, and our common want of knowledge, I would rather identify religion with a general striving of humanity than with the exclusive pretension of any one people or sect. Who knows, for instance, the final truth about what happens to the soul at death? I am quite ready to admit, indeed, that some of us can see a little farther into a brick wall than, say, Neanderthal man. Yet when I find facts that appear to prove that Neanderthal man buried his dead with ceremony, and to the best of his means equipped them for a future life, I openly confess that I would rather stretch out a hand across the ages and greet him as my brother and fellow-pilgrim than throw in my lot with the self-righteousfolk who seem to imagine this world and the next to have been created for their exclusive benefit.
Now the trouble with anthropologists is to find a working definition of religion on which they can agree. Christianity is religion, all would have to admit. Again, Mahomedanism is religion, for all anthropological purposes. But, when a naked savage "dances" his god—when the spoken part of the rite simply consists, as amongst the south-eastern Australians, in shouting "Daramulun! Daramulun!" (the god's name), so that we cannot be sure whether the dancers are indulging in a prayer or in an incantation—is that religion? Or, worse still, suppose that no sort of personal god can be discovered at the back of the performance—which consists, let us say, as amongst the central Australians, in solemnly rubbing a bull-roarer on the stomach, so that its mystic virtues may cause the man to become "good" and "glad" and "strong" (for that is his own way of describing the spiritual effects)—is that religion, in any sense that can link it historically with, say, the Christian type of religion?
No, say some, these low-class dealings with the unseen are magic, not religion. The rude folk in question do not go the right way about putting themselves into touch with the unseen.They try to put pressure on the unseen, to control it. They ought to conciliate it, by bowing to its will. Their methods may be earnest, but they are not propitiatory. There is too much "My will be done" about it all.
Unfortunately, two can play at this game ofex-partedefinition. The more unsympathetic type of historian, relentlessly pursuing the clue afforded by this distinction between control and conciliation, professes himself able to discover plenty of magic even in the higher forms of religion. The rite as such—say, churchgoing as such—appears to be reckoned by some of the devout as not without a certain intrinsic efficacy. "Very well," says this school, "then a good deal of average Christianity is magic."
My own view, then, is that this distinction will only lead us into trouble. And, to my mind, it adds to the confusion if it be further laid down, as some would do, that this sort of dealing with the unseen which, on the face of it, and according to our notions, seems rather mechanical (being, as it were, an effort to get a hold on some hidden force) is so far from being akin to religion that its true affinity is with natural science. The natural science of to-day, I quite admit, has in part evolved out of experiments with the occult;just as law, fine art, and almost every other one of our higher interests have likewise done. But just so long and so far as it was occult science, I would maintain, it was not natural science at all, but, as it were, rather supernatural science. Besides, much of our natural science has grown up out of straightforward attempts to carry out mechanical work on industrial lines—to smelt iron, let us say; but since then, as now, there were numerous trade-secrets, an atmosphere of mystery was apt to surround the undertaking, which helped to give it the air of a trafficking with the uncanny. But because science then, as even now sometimes, was thought by the ignorant to be somehow closely associated with all the powers of evil, it does not follow that then or now the true affinity of science must be with the devil.
Magic and religion, according to the view I would support, belong to the same department of human experience—one of the two great departments, the two worlds, one might almost call them, into which human experience, throughout its whole history, has been divided. Together they belong to the supernormal world, thex-region of experience, the region of mental twilight.
Magic I take to include all bad ways, and religion all good ways, of dealing with thesupernormal—bad and good, of course, not as we may happen to judge them, but as the society concerned judges them. Sometimes, indeed, the people themselves hardly know where to draw the line between the two; and, in that case, the anthropologist cannot well do it for them. But every primitive society thinks witchcraft bad. Witchcraft consists in leaguing oneself with supernormal powers of evil in order to effect selfish and anti-social ends. Witchcraft, then, is genuine magic—black magic of the devil's colour. On the other hand, every primitive society also distinguishes certain salutary ways of dealing with supernormal powers. All these ways taken together constitute religion. For the rest, there will always be a mass of more or less evaporated beliefs, going with practices that have more or less lost their hold on the community. These belong to the folklore which every people has. Under this or some closely related head must also be set down the mass of mere wonder-tales, due to the play of fancy, and without direct bearing on the serious pursuits of life.
The world to which neither magic nor religion belongs, but to which physical science, the knowledge of how to deal mechanically with material things, does belong wholly, is the workaday world, the region of normal,commonplace, calculable happenings. With our telescopes and microscopes we see farther and deeper into things than does the savage. Yet the savage has excellent eyes. What he sees he sees. Consequently, we must duly allow for the fact that there is for him, as well as for us, a "natural," that is to say, normal and workaday world; even though it be far narrower in extent than ours. The savage is not perpetually spook-haunted. On the contrary, when he is engaged on the daily round, and all is going well, he is as careless and happy as a child.
But savage life has few safeguards. Crisis is a frequent, if intermittent, element in it. Hunger, sickness and war are examples of crisis. Birth and death are crises. Marriage is usually regarded by humanity as a crisis. So is initiation—the turning-point in one's career, when one steps out into the world of men. Now what, in terms of mind, does crisis mean? It means that one is at one's wits' end; that the ordinary and expected has been replaced by the extraordinary and unexpected; that we are projected into the world of the unknown. And in that world of the unknown we must miserably abide until, somehow, confidence is restored.
Psychologically regarded, then, the function of religion is to restore men's confidence whenit is shaken by crisis. Men do not seek crisis; they would always run away from it, if they could. Crisis seeks them; and, whereas the feebler folk are ready to succumb, the bolder spirits face it. Religion is the facing of the unknown. It is the courage in it that brings comfort.[6]
[Footnote 6: The courage involved in all live religion normally coexists with a certain modesty or humility. I have tried to work out this point elsewhere in a short study entitledThe Birth of Humility.]
We must go on, however, to consider religion sociologically. A religion is the effort to face crisis, so far as that effort is organized by society in some particular way. A religion is congregational—that is to say, serves the ends of a number of persons simultaneously. It is traditional—that is to say, has served the ends of successive generations of persons. Therefore inevitably it has standardized a method. It involves a routine, a ritual. Also it involves some sort of conventional doctrine, which is, as it were, the inner side of the ritual—its lining.
Now in what follows I shall insist, in the first instance, on this sociological side of religion. For anthropological purposes it is the sounder plan. We must altogether eschew that "Robinson Crusoe method" which consists in reconstructing the creed of a solitary savage,who is supposed to evolve his religion out of his inner consciousness: "The mountain frowns, therefore it is alive"; "I move about in my dreams whilst my body lies still, therefore I have a soul," and so on. No doubt somebody had to think these things, for they are thoughts. But he did not think them, at any rate did not think them out, alone. Men thought them out together; nay, whole ages of living and thinking together have gone to make them what they are. So a social method is needed to explain them.
The religion of a savage is part of his custom; nay, rather, it is his whole custom so far as it appears sacred—so far as it coerces him by way of his imagination. Between him and the unknown stands nothing but his custom. It is his all-in-all, his stand-by, his faith and his hope. Being thus the sole source of his confidence, his custom, so far as his imagination plays about it, becomes his "luck." We may say that any and every custom, in so far as it is regarded as lucky, is a religious rite.
Hence the conservatism inherent in religion. "Nothing," says Robertson Smith, "appeals so strongly as religion to the conservative instincts." "The history of religion," once exclaimed Dr. Frazer, "is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for absurd practice." At firstsight one is apt to see nothing but the absurdities in savage custom and religion. After all, these are what strike us most, being the curiosity-hunters that we all are. But savage custom and religion must be taken as a whole, the bad side with the good. Of course, if we have to do with a primitive society on the down-grade—and very few that have been "civilizaded," as John Stuart Mill terms it, at the hands of the white man are not on the down-grade—its disorganized and debased custom no longer serves a vital function. But a healthy society is bound, in a wholesale way, to have a healthy custom. Though it may go about the business in a queer and roundabout fashion, it must hit off the general requirements of the situation. Therefore I shall not waste time, as I might easily do, in piling up instances of outlandish "superstitions," whether horrible and disgusting, from our more advanced point of view, or merely droll and silly. On the contrary, I would rather make it my working assumption that, with all its apparent drawbacks, the religion of a human society, if the latter be a going concern, is always something to be respected.
In considering, however, the relation of religion to custom, we are met by the apparent difficulty that, whereas custom implies "Do,"the prevailing note of primitive religion would seem rather to consist in "Do not." But there is really no antagonism between them on this account. As the old Greek proverb has it, "There is only one way of going right, but there are infinite ways of going wrong." Hence, a nice observance of custom of itself involves endless taboos. Since a given line of conduct is lucky, then this or that alternative course of behaviour must be unlucky. There is just this difference between positive customs or rites, which cause something to be done, and negative customs or rites, which cause something to be left undone, that the latter appeal more exclusively to the imagination for their sanction, and are therefore more conspicuously and directly a part of religion. "Why should I do this?" is answered well-nigh sufficiently by saying, "Because it is the custom, because it is right." It seems hardly necessary to add, "Because it will bring luck." But "Why should I not do something else instead?" meets, in the primitive society, with the invariable answer, "Because, if you do, something awful will happen to us all." What precise shape the ill-luck will take need not be specified. The suggestion rather gains than loses by the indefiniteness of its appeal to the imagination.
To understand more clearly the difference between negative and positive types of custom as associated with religion, let us examine in some detail an example of each. It will be well to select our cases from amongst those that show the custom and the religion to be quite inseparable—to be, in short, but two aspects of one and the same fact. Now nothing could be more commonplace and secular a custom than that of providing for one's dinner. Yet for primitive society this custom tends to be likewise a rite—a rite which may, however, be mainly negative and precautionary, or mainly positive and practical in character, as we shall now see.
The Todas, so well described by Dr. Rivers, are a small community, less than a thousand all told, who have retired out of the stress of the world into the fastnesses of the Nilgiri Hills, in southern India, where they spend a safe but decidedly listless life. They are in a backwater, and are likely to remain there. At any rate, their religion is not such as to make them more enterprising. Gods they may be said to have none. The bare names of certain deities of the hill-tops are retained, but whether these were once the honoured gods of the Todas or, as some think, those of a former race, certain it is that there is more shadow than substance about them now. The realreligion of the people centres round a dairy-ritual. From a practical and economic point of view, the work of the dairy consists in converting the milk of their buffaloes into the butter and buttermilk which constitute their staple diet. From a religious point of view, it consists in converting something they dare not eat into something they can eat.
Many, though not all, of their buffaloes are sacred, and their milk may not be drunk. The reason why it may not be drunk anthropologists may cast about to discover, but the Todas themselves do not know. All that they know, and are concerned to know, is that things would somehow all go wrong, if any one were foolish enough to commit such a sin. So in the Toda temple, which is a dairy, the Toda priest, who is the dairyman, sets about rendering the sacred products harmless. The dairy has two compartments—one sacred, the other profane. In the first are stored the sacred vessels, into which the milk is placed when it comes from the buffaloes, and in which it is turned into butter and buttermilk with the help of some of the previous brew, this having meanwhile been put by in an especially sacred vessel. In the second compartment are profane vessels, destined to receive the butter and buttermilk, after they have been carefully transferred from the sacred vessels with thehelp of an intermediary vessel, which stands exactly on the line between the two compartments. This transference, being carried out to the accompaniment of all sorts of reverential gestures and utterances, secures such a profanation of the sacred substance as is without the evil consequences that would otherwise be entailed. Thus the ritual is essentially precautionary. A taboo is the hinge of the whole affair.
And the tendency of such a negative type of religion is to pile precautions on precautions. Thus the dairyman, in order to be equal to his sacred office, must observe taboos without end. He must be celibate. He must avoid all contact with the dead. He is limited to certain kinds of food; which, moreover, must be prepared in a certain way, and consumed in a certain place. His drink, again, is a special milk, which must be poured out with prescribed formulas. He is inaccessible to ordinary folk save on certain days and in certain ways, their mode of approach, their salutations, his greeting in reply, being all regulated with the utmost nicety. He can only wear a special garb. He must never cut his hair. His nails must be suffered to grow long. And so on and so forth. Such disabilities, indeed, are wont to circumscribe the life of all sacred persons, and can be matchedfrom every part of the world. But they may fairly be cited here, as helping to fill in the picture of what I have called the precautionary or negative type of religious ritual.
Further, there is something rotten in the state of Toda religion. The dairymen struck Dr. Rivers as very slovenly in the performance of their duties, as well as vague and inaccurate in their accounts of what ought to be done. Indeed, it was hard to find persons willing to undertake the office. Ritual duties involving uncomfortable taboos were apt to be thrust on youngsters. The youngsters, being youngsters, would probably violate the taboos; but anyway that was their look-out. From evasions to fictions is but a step. Hence when an unclean person approached the dairyman, the latter would simply pretend not to see him. Or the rule that he must not enter a hut, if women were within, would be circumvented by simply removing from the dwelling the three emblems of womanhood, the pounder, the sieve, and the sweeper; whereupon his "face was saved." Now wherefore all this lack of earnestness? Dr. Rivers thinks that too much ritual was the reason. I agree; but would venture to add, "too much negative ritual." A religion that is all dodging must produce a sneaking kind of worshipper.
Now let us turn another type of primitivereligion that is equally identified with the food-quest, but allied to its positive and active functions, which it seeks to help out. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have given us a most minute account of certain ceremonies of the Arunta, a people of central Australia. These ceremonies they have namedIntichiuma, and the name will probably stick, though there is reason to believe that the native word for them is really something different. Their purpose is to make the food-animals and food-plants multiply and prosper. Each animal or plant is attended to by the group that has it for a totem. (Totemism amongst this very remarkable people has nothing to do either with exogamy or with lineage; but that is a subject into which it is impossible to go here.) The rites vary considerably from totem to totem, but a typical case or two may be cited.
The witchetty-grub men, for instance, want the grubs to multiply, that there may be plenty for their fellows to eat. So they wend their way along a certain path which tradition declares to have been traversed by the great leader of the witchetty-grubs of the days of long ago. (These were grubs transformed into men, who became by reincarnation ancestors of the present totemites.) The path brings them to a place in the hills where thereis a big stone surrounded by many small stones. The big stone is the adult animal, the little stones are its eggs. So first they tap the big stone, chanting an invitation to it to lay eggs. Then the master of the ceremonies rubs the stomach of each totemite with the little stones, and says, "You have eaten much food."
Or, again, the Kangaroo men repair to a place called Undiara. It is a picturesque spot. By the side of a water-hole that is sheltered by a tall gum-tree rises a curiously gnarled and weather-beaten face of quartzite rock. About twenty feet from the base a ledge juts out. When the totemites hold their ceremony, they repair to this ledge. For here in the days of long ago the ancestors who are now reincarnated in them cooked and ate kangaroo food; and here, moreover, the kangaroo animals of that time deposited their spirit-parts. First the face of the rock below the ledge is decorated with long stripes of red ochre and white gypsum, to represent the red fur and white bones of the kangaroo. It is, in fact, one of those rock-paintings such as the palæolithic men of Europe made in their caves. Then a number of men, say, seven or eight, mount upon the ledge, and, whilst the rest sing solemn chants about the prospective increase of the kangaroos, thesemen open veins in their arms, so that the blood flows down freely upon the ceremonial stone. This is the first part of the rite. The second part is no less interesting. After the blood-letting, they hunt until they kill a kangaroo. Thereupon the old men of the totem eat a little of the meat; then they smear some of the fat on the bodies of all the party; finally, they divide the flesh amongst them. Afterwards, the totemites paint their bodies with stripes in imitation of the design upon the rock. A second hunt, followed by a second sacramental meal, concludes the whole ceremony. That their meal is sacramental, a sort of communion service, is proved by the fact that henceforth in an ordinary way they allow themselves to partake of kangaroo meat at most but very sparingly, and of certain portions of the flesh not at all.
One more example of these rites may be cited, in order to bring out the earnestness of this type of religion, which is concerned with doing, instead of mere not-doing. There is none of the Toda perfunctoriness here. It will be enough to glance at the commencement of the ritual of the honey-ant totemites. The master of the ceremonies places his hand as if he were shading his eyes, and gazes intently in the direction of the sacred place to which they are about to repair. As hedoes so, the rest kneel, forming a straight line behind him. In this position they remain for some time, whilst the leader chants in a subdued tone. Then all stand up. The company must now start. The leader, who has fallen to the rear, that he may marshal the column in perfect line, gives the signal. Then they move off in single file, taking a direct course to the holy ground, marching in perfect silence, and with measured step, as if something of the profoundest import were about to take place.
I make no apology for describing these proceedings at some length. It is necessary to my argument to convey the impression that the essentials of religion are present in these apparently godless observances of the ruder peoples. They arise directly out of custom—in this case the hunting custom. Their immediate design is to provide these people with their daily bread. Yet their appeal to the imagination—which in religion, as in science, art, and philosophy, is the impulse that presides over all progress, all creative evolution—is such that the food-quest is charged with new and deeper meaning. Not bread alone, but something even more sustaining to the life of man, is suggested by these tangled and obscure solemnities. They are penetrated by quickenings of sacrifice, prayer,and communion. They bring to bear on the need of the hour all the promise of that miraculous past, which not only cradled the race, but still yields it the stock of reincarnated soul-force that enables it to survive. If, then, these rites are part and parcel of mere magic, most, or all, of what the world knows as religion must be mere magic. But it is better for anthropology to call things by the names that they are known by in the world of men—that is, in the wider world, not in some corner or coterie of it.
In order to bring out more fully the second point that I have been trying to make, namely, the close interdependence between religion and custom in primitive society, let me be allowed to quote one more example of the ritual of a rude people. And again let us resort to native Australia, though this time to the south-eastern corner of it; since in Australia we have a cultural development on the whole very low, having been as it were arrested through isolation, yet one that turns out to be not incompatible with high religion in the making.
Initiation in native Australia is the equivalent of what is known amongst ourselves as the higher education. The only difference is that, with them, every one who is not judgedutterly unfit is duly initiated; whereas, with us, the higher education is offered to some who are unfit, whilst many who are fit never have the luck to get it. The initiation-custom is intended to tide the boys over the difficult time of puberty, and turn them into responsible men. The whole of the adult males assist in the ceremonies. Special men, however, are told off to tutor the youth—a lengthy business, since it entails a retirement, perhaps for six months, into the bush with their charges; who are there taught the tribal traditions, and are generally admonished, sometimes forcibly, for their good. Further, this is rather like a retirement into a monastery for the young men, seeing that during all the time they are strictly taboo, or in other words in a holy state that involves much fasting and mortification of the flesh. At last comes the time when their actual passage across the threshold of manhood has to be celebrated. The rites may be described in one word as impressive. Society wishes to set a stamp on their characters, and believes in stamping hard. Physically, then, the lads feel the force of society. A tooth is knocked out, they are tossed in the air to make them grow tall, and so on—rites that, whilst they may have separate occult ends in view, are completely at one in being highly unpleasant.
Spiritual means of education, however, are always more effective than physical, if designed and applied with sufficient wisdom. The bull-roarer, of which something has been already said, furnishes the ceremonies with a background of awe. It fills the woods, that surround the secret spot where the rites are held, with the rise and fall of its weird music, suggestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits in the air. Not until the boys graduate as men do they learn how the sound is produced. Even when they do learn this, the mystery of the voice speaking through the chip of wood merely wings the imagination for loftier flights. Whatever else the high god of these mysteries, Daramulun, may be for these people—and undoubtedly all sorts of trains of confused thinking meet in the notion of him—he is at any rate the god of the bull-roarer, who has put his voice into the sacred instrument. But Daramulun is likewise endowed with a human form; for they set up an image of him rudely shaped in wood, and round about it dance and shout his name. Daramulun instituted these rites, as well as all the other immemorial rites of the assembled tribe or tribes. So when over the heads of the boys, prostrated on the ground, are recited solemnly what Mr. Lang calls "the ten commandments," that bid them honourthe elders, respect the marriage law, and so on, there looms up before their minds the figure of the ultimate law-giver; whilst his unearthly voice becomes for them the voice of the law. Thus is custom exalted, and its coercive force amplified, by the suggestion of a power—in this case a definitely personal power—that "makes for righteousness," and, whilst beneficent, is full of terror for offenders.
And now it may seem high time to pass on from the sociological and external view that has hitherto been taken of primitive religion to a psychological view of it—one that should endeavour to disclose the hidden motives, the spiritual sources, of the beliefs that underlie and sustain the customary practices. But precisely at this point the anthropological treatment of religion is apt to prove unsatisfactory. History can record that such and such is done with far more certainty than that such and such a state of mind accompanies and inspires the doing. Besides, the savage is no authority on the why and wherefore of his customs. "However else would a reasonable being think of acting?" is his sufficient reason, as we have already seen. Not but what the higher minds amongst savages reflect in their own way upon the meaning of their customs and rites. But most of this reflection is no morethan an elaborate "justification after the event." The mind invents what Mr. Kipling would call a "Just-so story" to account for something already there. How it might have come about, not how it did come about, is all that the professed explanation amounts to. And when it comes to choosing amongst mere possibilities, the anthropologist, instead of consulting the savage, may just as well endeavour to do it for himself.
Now anthropological theories of the origin of religion seem to me to go wrong mainly because they seek to simplify too much. Having got down to what they take to be a root-idea, they straightway proclaim ittheroot-idea. I believe that religion has just as few, or as many, roots as human life and mind.
The theory of the origin of religion that may be said to hold the field, because it is the view of the greatest of living anthropologists, is Dr. Tylor's theory of animism. The term animism is derived from the Latinanima, which—like the corresponding wordspiritus, whence our "spirit"—signifies the breath, and hence the soul, which primitive folk tend to identify with the breath. Dr. Tylor's theory of animism, then, as set forth in his great work,Primitive Culture, is that "the belief in spiritual beings" will do as adefinition of religion taken at its least; which for him means the same thing as taken at its earliest. Now what is a "spiritual being"? Clearly everything turns on that. Dr. Tylor's general treatment of the subject seems to lay most of the emphasis on the phantasm. A phantasm (as the etymology of the word shows) is essentially an appearance. In a dream or hallucination one sees figures, more or less dim, but still having "vaporous materiality." So, too, the shadow is something without body that one can see; though the breath, except on a frosty day, shows its subtle but yet sensible nature rather by being felt than by being seen. Now there can be no doubt that the phantasm plays a considerable part in primitive religion (as well as in those fancies of the primitive mind that have never found their way into religion, at all events into religion as identified with organized cult). Savages see ghosts, though probably not more frequently than we do; they have vivid dreams, and are much impressed by their dream-experiences; and so on. Besides, the phantasm forms a very convenient half-way house between the seen and the unseen; and there can be no doubt that the savage often says breath, shadow, and so forth, when he is trying to think and mean something immaterial altogether.
But animism would seem sometimes to be used by Dr. Tylor in a wider sense, namely, as "a doctrine of universal vitality." In dealing with the myths of the ruder peoples, as, for example, those about the sun, moon, and stars, he shows how "a general animation of nature" is implied. The primitive man reads himself into these things, which, according to our science, are without life or personality. He thinks that they have a different kind of body, but the same kind of feelings and motives. But this is not necessarily to think that they are capable of giving off a phantasm, as a man does when his soul temporarily leaves him, or when after death his soul becomes a ghost. There need be nothing ghost-like about the sun, whether it is imagined as a shining orb, or as a shining being of human shape to whom the orb belongs. There is not anything in the least phantasmal about the Greek god Apollo. I think, then, that we had better distinguish this wider sense of animism by a different name, calling it "animatism," since that will serve at once to disconnect and to connect the two conceptions.
I am not sure, however, how far we ought to press this "doctrine of universal vitality." Does a savage, for instance, when he is hammering at a piece of flint think of it as other than a "thing," any more than we should?I doubt it. He may say "Confound you!" if it suddenly snaps in two, just as we might do. But though the language may seem to imply a "you," he would mean, I believe, to impute to the flint just as much, or as little, of personality as we should mean to do when using similar language. In other words, I believe that, within the world of his ordinary work-a-day experience, he recognizes both things and persons; without giving a thought, in either case, to the hidden principles that make them be what they are, and act as they do.
When, on the other hand, the thing, or the person, falls within the world of supernormal experience, when they strike the imagination as wonderful and wonder-working, then there is much more reason why he should seek to account to himself for the mystery in, or behind, the strange appearance. Howitt, who knew his Australian natives intimately, cites the following as "a good example of how the native mind works." To the black-fellow his club or his spear are part and parcel of his ordinary life. There is no, "medicine," no "devil," in them. If they are to be made supernaturally potent, they must be specially charmed. But it is quite otherwise with his spear-thrower or his bull-roarer. The former for no obvious reason enables him to throw his spear extraordinarily far. (I have myselfseen an Australian spear, with the help of the spear-thrower, fly a hundred and fifty yards, and strike true and deep at the end of its flight.) The latter emits the noise of thunder, though a mere chip of wood on the end of a string. These, then, are in themselves "medicine." There is "virtue" in, or behind, them.
Is, then, to attribute "virtue" the same thing, necessarily, as to attribute vitality? Are the spear-thrower and the bull-roarer inevitably thought of as alive? Or are they, as a matter of course, endowed with soul or spirit? Or may there be also an impersonal kind of "virtue," "medicine," or whatever the wonder-working power in the wonder-working thing is to be called? Now there is evidence that the savage himself, in speaking about these matters, sometimes says power, sometimes vitality, sometimes spirit. But the simplest way of disposing of these questions is to remember that such fine distinctions as these, which theorists may seek to draw, do not appeal at all to the savage himself. For him the only fact that matters is that, whereas some things in the world are ordinary, and can be reckoned on, other things cannot be reckoned on, but are wonder-working.
Moreover, of wonder-working things, some are good and some are bad. To get all thegood kind of wonder-workers on to his side, so as to confound the bad kind—that is what his religion is there to do for him. "May blessings come, may mischiefs go!" is the import of his religious striving, whether anthropologists class it as spell or as prayer.
Now the function of religion, it has been assumed, is to restore confidence, when man is mazed, and out of his depth, fearful of the mysteries that obtrude on his life, yet compelled, if not exactly wishful, to face them and wrest from them whatever help is in them. This function religion fulfils by what may be described in one word as "suggestion." How the suggestion works psychologically—how, for instance, association of ideas, the so-called "sympathetic magic," predominates at the lower levels of religious experience—is a difficult and technical question which cannot be discussed here. Religion stands by when there is something to be done, and suggests that it can be done well and successfully; nay, that it is being so done. And, when the religion is of the effective sort, the believers respond to the suggestion, and put the thing through. As the Latin poet says, "they can because they think they can."
What, from the anthropological point of view, is the effective sort of religion, the sort that survives because, on the whole, thosewhom it helps survive? It is dangerous to make sweeping generalizations, but there is at any rate a good deal to be said for classing the world's religions either as mechanical and ineffective, or as spiritual and effective. The mechanical kind offers its consolations in the shape of a set of implements. The "virtue" resides in certain rites and formularies. These, as we have seen, are especially liable to harden into mere mechanism when they are of the negative and precautionary type. The spiritual kind of religion, on the other hand, which is especially associated with the positive and active functions of life, tends to read will and personality into the wonder-working powers that it summons to man's aid. The will and personality in the worshippers are in need not so much of implements as of more will and personality. They get this from a spiritual kind of religion; which in one way or another always suggests a society, a communion, as at once the means and the end of vital betterment.
To say that religion works by suggestion is only to say that it works through the imagination. There is good make-believe as well as bad; and one must necessarily imagine and make-believe in order to will. The more or less inarticulate and intuitional forces of the mind, however, need to be supplemented bythe power of articulate reasoning, if the will is to make good its twofold character of a faculty of ends that is likewise a faculty of the means to those ends. Suggestion, in short, must be purged by criticism before it can serve as the guide of the higher life. To bring this point out will be the object of the following chapter.