people confine that term to the historic faiths and cults, calling others
“superstitions” and “paganisms.” Some will not acknowledge that there is
any religion whatever except their own; all other beliefs are heresies,
apostasies, or heathenisms. Even such an intelligent writer as Sir John
Lubbock expressed doubts in one of his works whether he ought to apply
the word “religions” to the worship tendered their deities by savages.
On the other hand, a Protestant will freely denounce the practices
of the Roman Church as “superstitions,” and will claim that they are
degenerations of religion; while among Protestants, the Quaker looks upon
all external rites as equally “superstitious.”
No such distinctions can be recognised in ethnology. The principle at
the basis of all religions and all superstitions is the same, as I shall
show in the next lecture, and the grossest rites of barbarism deserve the
name of “religion” just as much as the refined ceremonies of Christian
churches. The aims of the worshipper may be selfish and sensuous, there
may be an entire absence of ethical intention, his rites may be empty
formalities and his creed immoral, but this will be his religion all the
same, and we should not apply to it any other name.[19]
There is no one belief or set of beliefs which constitutes a religion.
We are apt to suppose that every creed must teach a belief in a god or
gods, in an immortal soul, and in a divine government of the world. The
Parliament of Religions, which lately met at Chicago, announced, in its
preliminary call, these elements as essential to the idea of religion.
No mistake could be greater. The religion which to-day counts the largest
number of adherents, Buddhism, rejects every one of these items.[20] The
Jewish doctrine of the Old Testament, the Roman religion of the time
of Julius Cæsar, and many others, have not admitted the existence of a
soul, or the continuance of the individual life after death.[21] Some
believe in souls, but not in gods; while a divine government is a thought
rarely present in savage minds. They do not, as a rule, recognise any
such principle as that of good and evil, or any doctrine of rewards and
punishment hereafter for conduct in the present life.
There is, in fact, not any one item in any creed which is accepted
by all religions; yet a common source, a common end in view, and the
closest analogy of means to that end, bind all in one, representing
an indefeasible element of human nature, the lowest containing the
potentiality of the highest, the highest being but the necessary
evolution of the lowest. The same promptings which led the earliest of
men to frame their crude ideas about the super-sensuous around them have
nourished and developed religions ever since, and keep them alive to-day.
Temples may crumble and creeds decay, but the spirit remains the same.
This inherent unity of all religious feeling and expression was
long ago perceived by St. Augustine. In a well-known passage of his
_Retractations_ he makes the striking remark: “Res ipsa, quæ nunc religio
Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis
humani”; “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among
the ancients, and in fact was with the human race from the beginning.”
This is, essentially, the maxim of modern ethnology. The religiosity
of man is a part of his psychical being. In the nature and laws of the
human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions, and passions, lie the
well-springs of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen.
To these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors,
falsehoods, bigotry, or cruelty have stained man’s creeds and cults: to
them we must credit whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have hallowed
and glorified his long search for the perfect and the eternal.
If this opinion of the place of religion in ethnology is correct, we
should not expect to find any considerable number of men, in the present
epoch of the race’s development, devoid of some form of worship and
belief.
The fact is that there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude,
known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be
destitute of religion, under some form.
The contrary of this has been asserted by various modern writers of
weight, for example by Herbert Spencer and Sir John Lubbock, not from
their own observation, for neither ever saw a savage tribe, but from the
reports of travellers and missionaries.
I speak advisedly when I say that every assertion to this effect when
tested by careful examination has proved erroneous.[22]
What led to such a mistaken opinion is easily seen. The missionaries
would not recognise as religion the beliefs which were so different from
and inferior to their own. The god of the heathens was to them no god
whatever. When they heard stories of ghosts, magic, and charms, they
spurned these as old wives’ fables, and confidently proclaimed that the
tribe had no religion. Thus it was with those who first worked in South
Africa. They returned and proclaimed that atheism was “endemic” among the
tribes of that region. Later observers, acquainting themselves with the
languages of the Blacks, found an ample mythology and an extensive ritual
of worship.[23]
Another example may be quoted from a recent description of the Motu
tribe of New Guinea. The writer, a missionary, denies that they have any
religion whatever; but immediately proceeds to describe their numerous
“superstitious” rites, their belief in spirits, their ceremonial law,
etc.![24]
Another and potent cause of error was the unwillingness of the natives
to speak to foreigners of the sacred mysteries. This is not peculiar to
them, but obtains everywhere. In the polite society of our own cities, it
is held to be an infraction of etiquette to question a person about his
religious opinions and practices. Greater repugnance would be felt were
it known that the questioner could have no sympathy with one’s opinions,
and would probably hold them up to derision and contempt.
Even a stronger deterrent motive closes the mouth of most savages giving
such information. It is _tabu_, prohibited under severe penalties, to
impart it to any stranger, or even to another tribesman. The tendency
to secrecy, to the esoteric, belongs to all religions, and especially
to those in which the emotions are predominant, as is the case with
primitive cults.
Even with a willing narrator, it is impossible to acquire a true
understanding of a religion without a knowledge of the language in which
its myths and precepts are couched. Ordinary interpreters are worse than
useless. Captain Bourke tells us that time and again he was assured by
Mexican interpreters who had lived for years among the Apaches that this
tribe had no religion and no sacred ceremonies.
“These interpreters,” he adds, “had no intention to deceive; they were
simply unable to disengage themselves from their own prejudices; they
could not credit the existence of any such thing as religion save
and except that taught them at their mother’s knees.”[25] If these
Spanish-Mexicans, who had passed half their lives among the natives,
denied them religion, what can we expect the ordinary traveller to learn
in a few weeks’ visit?
Religion, therefore, is and has been, so far as history informs us,
universal in the human race. Can we go farther back in time than history
leads us, and say that it has ever been an element of humanity?
The resources at our command to answer this inquiry lie in prehistoric
archæology and linguistics.
Beyond historic ages, and beyond those referred to by vague tradition,
which we may call semi-historic, lies the epoch of culture called from
its chief industry the Stone Age, divided into the more recent or
“neolithic” period, and the older or “palæolithic” period.
Concerning the former, there can be no doubt whatever that religion
exercised a tremendous influence on men’s minds. We have numberless
sepulchres of peoples then living, mighty mounds and massive temples,
such as Stonehenge and Karnac; we have them by the tens of thousands,
over vast areas, remaining as indubitable proofs that the chief market
of the time of those early sons of the soil was to worship the gods and
prepare for death. We have their idols, amulets, and mystic symbols,
their altars and their talismans, so as to leave no doubt of their deep
devotion. No archæologist questions this.
When we come to palæolithic man, however, especially to those ancient
tribes who lived in Western Europe when the great continental glacier
chilled the air of Southern France to an arctic frigidity, or still
earlier, in that pre-glacial summer when the hippopotamus found a
congenial home in the river Thames, we are not so sure. Among the many
thousands of artificially shaped stone and bone objects which have been
collected from that horizon, there is not one which we can positively
identify as of religious purport, as a charm, amulet, fetish, or idol.
The rare instances in which the bones of the men of that age have been
preserved reveal no positive signs of funerary rites.
For these reasons some able archæologists, such as Professor G. de
Mortillet, have maintained that man, as he then was, had not yet
developed his religious faculties. The evidence for this, is, indeed,
negative, and fresh discoveries may refute it, but the present
probability is that in the infancy of the race there was at least no
objective expression of religious feeling.[26]
This appears supported by testimony from another quarter. When we can
trace back the sacred words of a language to their original roots, we
find that these roots do not have religious associations, but refer to
concrete and sensuous images. There must have been a time, therefore,
when those who spoke that original dialect employed these words without
any religious meaning attached to them, and therefore had no religious
ideas expressed in their language, and presumably none defined in their
minds.
I am not sure, however, that this argument is so valid as some writers
claim. Those early men may have had other religious terms, now lost;
and the current belief among linguists that all radicals had at first
concrete meanings is one I seriously doubt. Mental processes and feelings
are just as real as actions, and in the aboriginal tongues of America
are expressed by radicals as distinct and as ancient as any for sensuous
perception.
There must, however, have been a time in the progress of organic forms
from some lower to that highest mammal, Man, when he did not have a
religious consciousness; for it is doubtful if even the slightest traces
of it can be discerned in the inferior animals.
Mr. Darwin, indeed, put in a plea that his favourite dog manifested the
same psychical traits which lead savages to believe in gods or spiritual
agencies[27]; and lately Professor Pinsero, of Palermo, has argued that
the anthropoid apes cultivate a worship of serpents, even burying them
with considerable ceremony, and placing in their tombs a provision of
insects for their consumption in their future life![28]
But these scientific speculations have not found general acceptance, and
even Professor Pinsero himself, while conceding religion to the ape,
denies it to prehistoric man of the earlier epochs.
We may conclude, therefore, that the development of the religious side of
man’s nature began at a very early period in his history as a species,
though probably it was extremely vague or practically absent in his first
stadia; and that it is something distinctly human, and not shared in any
definite form by even the best developed of the lower animals.
It is the only trait in which he is qualitatively separated from them.
They, too, communicate knowledge by sounds; they have governments and
arts; but never do we see anywhere among them the notion of the Divine.
This was the spark of Promethean fire which has guided man along the
darksome and devious ways of his earthly pilgrimage to the supremacy he
now enjoys.
The Greek fable tells us of the shepherd lad Endymion, who fed his sheep
on Mt. Latmus, and dreamed of no higher ambition, until in his sleep the
goddess Selene descended from heaven and embraced him. Inspired by her
divine touch, he waked to noble aspirations, and went forth to become
monarch of Elis and father of a line of kings.
So the human mind groped for dateless ages amid brutish toils and
pleasures, unconscious of grander aims; until the thought of God, rising
to consciousness within the soul, whispered to it of endless progress and
divine ideals, in quest of which it has sought and will ever continue
seeking, with tireless endeavour and constantly increasing reward.
This question settled, another arises. The religions thus found
everywhere among the rudest tribes, did they take root and exert a deep
influence on the individual and society, or were they superficially felt,
and of slight moment in practical life?
In reference to this I can scarcely be too positive. No opinion can
be more erroneous than the one sometimes advanced that savages are
indifferent to their faiths. On the contrary, the rule, with very few
exceptions, is that religion absorbs nearly the whole life of a man under
primitive conditions. From birth to death, but especially during adult
years, his daily actions are governed by ceremonial laws of the severest,
often the most irksome and painful characters. He has no independent
action or code of conduct, and is a very slave to the conditions which
such laws create.
This is especially visible in the world-wide customs of totemic divisions
and the _tabu_, or religious prohibitions. These govern his food and
drink, his marriage and social relations, the disposition of property,
and the choice of his wives. An infraction of them is out of the
question. It means exile or death. The notions of tolerance, freedom
of conscience, higher law, are non-existent in primitive communities,
except under certain personal conditions which I shall mention in a later
lecture.
As has been tersely said by Professor Granger, “Religion in the ancient
world comprised every social function”; and the identity of its rules
with those of common life is correctly put by Professor Thiele in these
words: “The idea of a separation between Church and State is utterly
foreign to all the religions of antiquity.”[29]
What was true in those ancient days is equally so in this age among
savage peoples. Let us take as an example the Dyaks of Borneo. A recent
observer describes them as utter slaves to their “superstitions,” that
is, to their religion.[30] “When they lay out their fields, gather
the harvest, go hunting or fishing, contract a marriage, start on an
expedition, propose a commercial journey, or anything of importance,
they always consult the gods, offer sacrifices, celebrate feasts, study
the omens, obtain talismans, and so on, often thus losing the best
opportunity for the business itself.”
This is equally the case with most savage tribes. Mr. J. Walter Fewkes
informed me that it was a severe moral shock to the Pueblo Indians to see
the white settlers plant corn without any religious ceremony; and a much
greater one to perceive that the corn grew, flourished, and bore abundant
crops! The result did more to shatter their simple faith than a dozen
missionary crusades.
To the simple mind of the primitive man, as to the Mohammedan to-day,
there is no such thing as an intermediate law, directing phenomena, and
capable of expression in set terms. To him, every event of nature and of
life is an immediate manifestation of the power of God, _eine Kraftprobe
Gottes_.[31]
Religion, however, does not begin from any external pressure, no matter
how strong this may be. If it has any vitality, if it is anything more
than the barrenest ceremonial, it must start within, from the soul
itself. Thus it did in primordial ages in all tribes of men.
Therefore in studying its origin and pursuing its development we must
commence with its fonts and springs in the mind of man, its psychic
sources. These understood, we can proceed to its three chief expressions,
in Words, in Objects, and in Rites.
LECTURE II.
The Origin and Contents of Primitive Religions.
CONTENTS:—Former Theories of the Origin of Religions—Inadequacy
of these—Universal Postulate of Religions that Conscious
Volition is the Source of Force—How Mind was Assigned
to Nature—Communion between the Human and the Divine
Mind—Universality of “Inspiration”—Inspiration the Product of
the Sub-Conscious Mind—Known to Science as “Suggestion”—This
Explained—Examples—Illustrations from Language—No Primitive
Monotheism—The Special Stimuli of the Religious Emotions:
1. Dreaming and Allied Conditions—Life as a Dream—2. The
Apprehension of Life and Death and the Notion of the Soul—3.
The Perception of Light and Darkness; Day and Night—The Sky God
as the High God—4. The Observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions
of Force—The Thunder God—5. The Impression of Vastness—Dignity
of the Sub-Conscious Intelligence.
In the last lecture we have seen that all tribes of men, so far as is
known, have had religions. How this happened, what general cause brought
about so universal a fact, has puzzled the brains of philosophers and
theologians. Their explanations have been as various and as conflicting
on this as on most other subjects.
A goodly number of philosophers, ancient and modern, have looked upon
religion of any kind as a symptom of a diseased brain. Thus Empedocles,
in the fifth century B.C., declared it to be a sickness of the mind,
and Feuerbach, in the present century, has characterised it as the
most pernicious malady of humanity. Regarding all forms of religions
as delusions, detrimental therefore to sound reason and the pursuit of
truth, they believed the human intellect could freely employ its powers
only when liberated from such shackles.
Another ancient theory still survives, that which has its name from
Euhemerus, a Sicilian writer of the time of Alexander the Great. He
claimed that religions arose from the respect and reverence paid to kings
and heroes during their lives, continued by custom after their deaths.
Under the modern name of “ancestor worship” this has been maintained by
Herbert Spencer and others as the primitive source of all worship.
Yet another philosophical opinion has been that religions were due
to the craft of rulers and priests, who, by the aid of superstitious
fear, sought to keep their subjects and votaries in subjection. These
tricksters invented the terrors of another world to secure their own
power and places in this one. This opinion was a favourite about the time
of the French Revolution and is mirrored in the poems of Shelley, who
announced it as one of his missions, “to unveil the religious frauds by
which nations have been deluded into submission.”[32]
The prevailing theory of the great world-religions, Christianity and
Mohammedanism, has been substantially that of Empedocles. They have
regarded all the religions of the world as cunning fabrications of the
Devil and his imps, snares spread for human souls; always with one
exception however: each excepts itself. This is the view so grandly
expressed in Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ and quite common yet in civilised
lands.
On the other hand, a strong school of Christian writers, led early in
this century by Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand and represented in
our tongue by Archdeacon Trench, have asserted that all faiths, even
the most savage, are fragments and reminiscences, distorted and broken
indeed, of a primitive revelation vouchsafed by the Almighty to the
human race everywhere at the beginning. These have occupied themselves
in pointing out the analogies of savage and pagan creeds and rites with
those of Christianity, in proof of their theory.
Not remote from them are the teachers of the doctrine of the “inner
light,” that “light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world,”
disclosing unto him the existence of God and the fact of his soul. They
teach, with Wordsworth, that
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home;”
and that it is by perversion or wilful blindness that any man avers
ignorance of these primal truths.
The philosophic aspect of this theory has been presented by the master
minds of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Kant identified the idea of God with
the Ideal of Reason, the perfect Intelligence, toward which all minds,
even the humblest, must necessarily strive. Hegel, in a fine passage of
his _Philosophy of Religion_, urges the study of pagan and primitive
religions with a view to define their real significance and to discover
the grains of truth which ever lie within them, the reason and the
goodness which give them life.
The modern German ethnographers, such as Peschel, Ratzel, and
Schurtz,[33] have not ventured to follow these earlier thinkers of their
nation, but have contented themselves with tracing the origin of religion
to one characteristic of the human intellect, to wit, the notion of
Cause. The relation of cause and effect, they claim, is so ingrained in
the thinking mind that it inevitably leads all men to assume causes,
such as spiritual agencies, when others are not visible.
This popular view seems weak; for not only is the relation of cause to
effect a mere assumption, and, indeed, rejected by exact science; but
it dodges the very question at issue, which is to explain why spiritual
agencies are imagined as causes of material effects.
Similar objections lie to deriving primitive religions from a vague
“perception of the Infinite,” or a _sensus numinis_, some _deus in
nobis_, “warning us,” as Virgil says, “by his quick motion.” These are
unclear, unsatisfying expressions, offering no rational explanation, and
full of equivocations.
A favourite theory in all times is that religions arose from the emotion
of fear. It was taught by the Latin poet Petronius in a famous line,
where he says “Fear first made the gods”; and it has been strenuously
advocated by many modern philosophers and ethnologists.
Now if this emotion is alone sufficient to evoke religious feeling, why,
I ask, is that feeling absent in the craven and timid lower animals? Why
is it so feeble in many a coward? Why has it been so strong in many a
hero?
Moreover, the spirit of many early religions is the reverse of that of
fear. They are, as Dr. Robertson Smith correctly said, “predominantly
joyous.”
These are proofs enough that this ancient and popular notion rests on
a misconception of facts. The “fear of God” enters, indeed, into every
religion; but religion itself did not arise from it. We must already have
a notion of God, before we can fear Him.
If we are going to apply the scientific method to the study of religions
we must offer an explanation for their existence which is intelligible,
which is verifiable, and which holds good for all of them, primitive or
developed, those of the remotest ages and those of to-day. Only thus can
the ethnologist treat them as one element of the history of Humanity, a
property of the species.
This has not been done, so far as I know, up to the present time. In
fact, much of the teaching of modern anthropology has been calculated to
deter it. The outspoken advocacy of atheism and materialism by the French
School has led its disciples to consider the effort unprofitable;[34] and
the acceptance of the doctrine of “Animism” as a sufficient explanation
of early cults has led to the neglect, in English-speaking lands, of
their profounder analysis. Such a writer, for instance, as Andrew Lang
does not hesitate to teach that, “The origin of a belief in God is beyond
the ken of history and speculation.”[35]
The real explanation of the origin of religion is simple and universal.
Let any man ask himself on what his own religious belief is founded, and
the answer, if true, will hold good for every member of the race, past
and present. It makes no difference whether we analyse the superstitions
of the rudest savages, or the lofty utterances of John the Evangelist, or
of Spinoza the “god-intoxicated philosopher”; we shall find one and the
same postulate to the faith of all.