SOCIOLOGICAL CONDITIONS
Perhaps the most important part of the anthropological aspect of
custom, rite, and belief in tradition is sociological. Perhaps, too,
it is the most neglected. Inquirers into the origin of religion
proceed one after the other to investigate the phenomena of early
beliefs as they interpret the origin of religion, without one thought
of the sociological conditions of the problem. They interpose, as I
have already pointed out, the theory of a state religion, when such a
foundation is incidentally found to be necessary to carry the imposing
superstructure of Celtic mythology, but they do not pause to inquire
whether the state, suddenly introduced into the argument, is a
discoverable factor; or they proceed to erect their superstructure of
religious origins without any social foundation whatever, and we are
left with a great concept of abstract thought having no roots in the
source from which it is supposed to be drawn. The sun-god and the
dawn-god, even the All-father, are traced in the most primitive
thought of man, but it is not deemed necessary to show in what
relation these concepts stand to practical life. It is here I must
refer back to Robertson-Smith's dictum on mythology, for it is the
necessary preliminary to showing that belief cannot enter into life
except through the sociological units into which all humanity fits
itself; or rather, I would prefer Robertson-Smith's way of putting it,
"the circle into which a man was born was not simply a human society,
a circle of kinfolk and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain
divine beings, the gods of the family and the state, which to the
ancient mind were as much a part of the particular community with
which they stood connected as the human members of the social
group."[427] Any proposal to examine a group of customs, beliefs, and
rites which at their origin take us back to the earliest history of a
country must, therefore, be considered from the sociological side. The
great mass of the material to be used in such an inquiry is not
ancient so far as its date of record is a test of antiquity, but it is
ancient as traditional survival, and it is not possible to trace back
custom and belief surviving in modern times to the earliest times,
except through the medium of the institutions which formed the social
basis of the peoples to whom such custom and belief belonged. A custom
or belief exists as a living force before it sinks back into the
position of a survival. It is the lingering effect of this living
force which helps to preserve it for so many ages, and in the midst of
such adverse circumstances, as a survival among other customs and
beliefs existing under a different living force. It is not possible,
therefore, to ascertain the origin of custom or belief in survival,
except as a fragment of the social institution to which it originally
belonged. No custom or belief has a life of its own separate from all
other. It is joined to other customs and beliefs in indissoluble
co-partnership, the whole group making up the institutions under which
the race or people to whom they belong live and flourish. This, as we
have already seen, is a most important principle in the study of
survivals. Not only is it strictly true of all primitive peoples, but
it is true of the early stages of more advanced communities.[428]
Indeed it has been put into a phrase used long ago by an English
writer on the manorial tenant, "His religion is a part of his
copyhold,"[429] and when the jurist talks to us in highly technical
language of lords, freeholders, villans, and serfs, we must bear in
mind that at any rate these villans and serfs belonged to a social
institution, one element of which was religion. So, too, must the
folklorist bear in mind that it is not the individual belief he is
concerned with, but with the belief that belongs to a community. It
must be assumed that the true test of the antiquity of every custom or
belief is its natural and easy assimilation with other customs and
beliefs, equally with itself in the position of a survival, and the
recognition of the whole group thus brought into relationship as
belonging to the institutions of the people from whom it is derived.
It is well to understand what this condition of things exactly means
as an element in the study of early beliefs. It will be dealing with
beliefs from their place in the social habitat; housing them, so to
speak, within the groups of human beings with which they are
connected. It will be considering them as part of the living organism
which the social units of man have created. All this indicates a
method of treating the subject entirely different from what has
hitherto obtained. Students of early English institutions are content
to construct elaborate arguments from the often conflicting testimony
of historical authorities; students of early beliefs construct
elaborate systems of religious thought far above the custom and rite
with which they are dealing. The two branches of the same subject are
never brought together to illustrate each other. Early institutions
cannot be separated from early beliefs. Early beliefs cannot properly
be separated from the society of which they form a component part. We
require to know not only what beliefs a particular people possess, but
in what manner these beliefs generate custom and rite and take their
place among the influences which affect the social organism. Early man
does not live individually. His life is part of a collective group.
The group worships collectively as it lives collectively, and it is
extremely important to work out the dual conditions. If the several
items of custom and belief preserved by tradition are really ancient
in their origin, they must be floating fragments, as it were, of an
ancient _system_ of custom and belief--the cultus of the people among
whom they originated. This cultus has been destroyed, struggling
unsuccessfully against foreign and more vigorous systems of religion
and society. To be of service to history each floating fragment of
ancient custom and belief must not only be labelled "ancient," but it
must be placed back in the system from which it has been torn away. To
do this is to a great extent to restore the ancient system; and to
restore an ancient system of culture, even if the restoration be only
a mosaic and a shattered mosaic, is to bring into evidence the people
to which it belongs.
In the previous chapter it was necessary to lay somewhat special
stress upon the system of social organisation known as totemism, which
was not founded upon kinship. This was traced in survival among the
pre-Celtic peoples of Britain. If we now turn to the Celts and Teutons
of Britain we shall find that we have to deal with a social
organisation founded definitely upon kinship; and if there are
survivals of belief, custom, and rite, derived from this kinship
system, existing side by side in the same culture area with survivals
from the kinless system, it will be necessary to explain how two such
opposite streams can have been kept flowing.
It is not difficult in the case of countries occupied by Celtic or
Teutonic peoples to ascertain what the particular institution was
which linked together the beliefs of the people, though it is not easy
to trace out all the phases of it. It is the tribe--that system of
society which appears as the means by which Greek and Roman, Celt and
Teuton, Scandinavian and Slav, Hindu and Persian, were able to
conquer, overrun, and finally to settle in the lands which they have
made their own. We know something of the Celtic tribe, less of the
Teutonic tribe, but all we know is that it possesses features in
common with the tribe of its kindred. There is no fact more certainly
true as a result of comparative research than that the tribe is the
common heritage of those people who have become the dominant rulers of
the Indo-European world. I use this term "tribe" in no formal sense,
not in the sense of its Roman derivation and use, which shows it quite
as a secondary institution, but as the most convenient term to define
that grouping of men with wives, families, and descendants, and all
the essentials of independent life, which is found as a primal unit of
European society in a state of unsettlement as regards land or
country. The tie which bound all together was personal not local,
kinship with a tribal god, kinship more or less real with
fellow-tribesmen, kinship in status and rights. We meet with this
tribal organisation everywhere in Indo-European history. It made
movement from country to country possible. It made conquest possible.
Celt and Teuton did not conquer in families any more than Greek or
Hindu did. They conquered in tribes, and it was because of the
strength of the tribal organisation during the period, first of
migration and wandering and then of conquest, that the settlement
after conquest was possible and was so strong. Everywhere we find
these people conquerors and settlers. In India, in Iran, in Greece and
Rome, in Scandinavia, in Celtic and Teutonic Europe, in Slavic Europe,
they are moving tribes of conquerors come to settle and rule the
people they conquer.[430] When Dr. Ridgeway asks whence came the
Acheans,[431] he answers the question much in the same fashion as that
in which Dr. Duncker describes the settlement on the Ganges:--
"The ancient population of the new states on the
Ganges was not entirely extirpated, expelled, or
enslaved. Life and freedom were allowed to those who
submitted and conformed to the law of the conqueror;
they might pass their lives as servants on the farms
of the Aryas (Manu, i. 91). But though the remnant of
this population was spared, the whole body of the
immigrants looked down on them with the pride of
conquerors--of superiority in arms, blood, and
character--and in contrast to them they called
themselves Vaicyas, i.e. tribesmen, comrades, in other
words those who belong to the community or body of
rulers. Whether the Vaicya belonged to the order of
the nobles, the minstrels and priests or peasants, was
a matter of indifference, he regarded the old
inhabitants as an inferior species of mankind.... In
the new states on the Ganges therefore the population
was separated into two sharply divided masses. How
could the conquerors mix with the conquered? How could
their pride stoop to any union with the despised
servants?"[432]
These two divided masses thus so clearly described were, in fact,
tribesmen and non-tribesmen, just that distinction which we meet with
in Celtic and Teutonic law, and described in the same terms which
Bishop Stubbs was obliged to use when he set forth the facts of the
Teutonic invasion of Britain.
The terms are indeed necessary terms. Tribesmen capable of retaining
the tribal organisation during the period of migration and conquest
did not lightly lose that organisation when they settled. In Sir
Alfred Lyall's pure genealogic clan of Central India[433] I recognise
the unbroken tribal formation before the family group has arisen as a
political unit. In Mr. Tupper's argument against the conclusions of
Sir Henry Maine I recognise the Hindu evidence that the tribe was the
earliest social group, breaking up, as later influences arose, into
village communities and joint families.[434] In Bishop Stubbs's
masterly analysis of English constitutional history the tribe appears
at the outset--"the invaders," he says, "came in families and kindreds
and in the full organisation of their tribes ... the tribe was as
complete when it had removed to Kent as when it stayed in Jutland; the
magistrate was the ruler of the tribe not of the soil; the divisions
were those of the folk and the host not of the land; the laws were the
usage of the nation not of the territory."[435] And so I agree with
Mr. Skene as to the Celtic tribe that "the tuath or tribe preceded the
fine or clan,"[436] and with the editors of the Irish law tracts that
"the tribe existed before the family came into being and continued to
exist after the latter had been dissolved."[437]
We need not go beyond this evidence. The tribe is the common form into
which the early Indo-European peoples grouped themselves for the
purpose of conquest and settlement. It was their primal unit. It may
have been numerically large or small. It may have been the result of
a combination of many smaller tribes into one great tribe. But in any
case and under any conditions there stands out the tribal
organisation, that great institutional force from which spring all
later institutions. Its roots go back into the remotest past of
Indo-European history; its active force caused the Indo-European
people to become the mightiest in human history; its lasting results
have scarcely yet ceased to shape the aspirations of political society
and to affect the destinies of nations. The whole life of the early
period was governed by tribal conditions--the political, social,
legal, and even religious conceptions were tribal in form and
expression.
The tribal institution of the Aryan-speaking peoples includes a life
outside the tribe. That was an outlaw's life, a kinless outcast, whom
no tribesman would look upon or assist, whom every tribesman
considered as an enemy until he had reduced him to the position of
helot or slave, but for whom every tribe had a place in its
organisation and a legal status in its constitution. But it was the
legal status imposed by the master over the servant, and the kinless
included not only the outcast from the tribe, but the conquered
aboriginal who had never been within the tribe. It is important to
notice this, for it to some extent measures the strength of the tribal
organisation. It not only allowed for a special position for all
tribesmen, but it allowed for that position to have a definite
relationship to persons who were not tribesmen, and it is in the
combined forces of tribesmen and non-tribesmen that the tribal
organisation which swept over part of Asia and over all Europe obtains
its greatest power. There are tribal systems outside the Semitic and
the Indo-European, but these do not have the distinctive features that
the tribal systems of these two great civilising peoples possess. Like
the Semitic and Aryan tribal systems, savage tribes are fashioned for
conquest, but, unlike them, they are not fashioned for settlement and
resettlement, and perhaps again and again conquest and resettlement.
They spent all their power, or most of their power, in their one great
effort of conquest, and whether we turn to the American Indian tribes,
to the African tribes, or to the Asiatic tribes we find the same facts
of frequent dissipation of power after sudden and complete conquest of
it. The tribal system which led to civilisation has a different
history. It has, too, a different constitution in that to the strength
of tribesmen was added the subordination--politically, industrially,
and economically--of non-tribesmen. They were the people who, in the
terms of the northern poem,
"Laid fences,
Enriched the plough lands,
Tended swine,
Herded goats,
Dug peat."[438]
Unfortunately the institution of the tribe has never been properly
studied by the great authorities in history, and students are left
without guidance in this important matter. And yet in any attempt to
get back to the earliest period of history in lands governed by an
Aryan-speaking people we must proceed, can only proceed, on the basis
of the tribe, and it is the failure to understand this which has made
so much early history unsatisfactory and inconclusive and compels us
to the conclusion that the master-hand is still needed to rewrite in
terms of tribal history all that has been written in terms merely of
political history.
If, however, history from the written records is thus at fault, so too
is history from the traditional records. No systematic effort has been
made to treat the traditional story or the traditional custom and
belief as part of the tribal history of our race, and yet in the few
cases where it has been so treated the results are obviously
satisfactory. I can illustrate the value of this point of view by an
example drawn from the period which witnessed the earliest struggles
of our race. I think with Mr. Keary that in those German stories
"which delight above all things in that portrait of the youngest son
of the house--he is the youngest of three--who is left behind despised
and neglected when his brothers go forth to seek their fortunes," we
have traces of a veritable fact, of an historical condition where the
elder sons actually went forth to conquest and to settlement and the
youngest son remained in the original home as the hearth-child.[439]
The position of hearth-child, surviving as it does in our law of
Borough English, is of great significance, and that we can by the aid
of tradition reach a state of society which gave birth to it is a
point of the greatest importance, even if we could go no further. But
there is a stage beyond it. The majority of these youngest-son
stories relate to events not to be identified with any particular
tribe or people, but which belong to all the tribes and peoples whose
course of conquest and settlement took the common form. But if apart
from these all-world stories there exist stories, or if there be but
one story which has become identified with an episode, a person, or a
place belonging to a particular people, we may claim it as part of the
history of that particular people. It may be that the general story
has become specialised in this one case, or it may be that an entirely
new story has sprung out of the special case. But whichever be the
origin of such a story attached to a particular people, it must tell
us something of that people at a period when its history was being
made rather than recorded. What it tells may be very little, may not
lead up to anything very great or definite, so far as later history is
concerned; but that for the period to which it belongs it relates to
an episode worthy to have been kept in the memories of the descendants
of the chief actors in the events is the point to bear in mind.
There is one such story which belongs to English history. One of the
most famous of these youngest-son stories is that of Childe Rowland,
and Mr. Jacobs, on examining its incidents and details, suggests that
"our story may have a certain amount of historic basis and give a
record which history fails to give of the very earliest conflict of
races in these isles."[440] Mr. Jacobs gives good grounds for this
conclusion, and shows up a picture of earliest English history which
is certainly not contained elsewhere, and we are able by this means
to pass from that large group of youngest-son stories, which have
brought with them living testimony of an ancient institution of our
race in its oldest home, to the narrower but more direct example which
comes to us from events which happened just at the dawn of history in
our own land. It is not necessary to emphasise the importance of this
service to history at the instance of tradition, for it will be
obvious to every student that many a struggle must have remained
unrecorded and many a hero must have died unnamed in the events which
belong to the period of tribal conquest and settlement. And to have
still with us the far-off echo of these events is no slight
encouragement to an inquiry which has for its object the
reconstruction of the conditions under which such events took place.
This would be all the better understood if we could get a concrete
case for illustration, and, fortunately, this is possible by turning
to the evidence of India. "What we know of the manner in which the
states of Upper India were founded," says Sir Alfred Lyall,
"gives a very fair sample of the movements and changes
of the primitive world. When the dominant Rajput
families lost their dominion in the rich Gangetic
plains one part of their clan seems to have remained
in the conquered country, having submitted to the
foreigner, cultivating in strong communities of
villages and federations of villages and paying such
land tax as the ruler could extract. Another part of
the clan, probably the near kinsmen of the defeated
chief, followed his family into exile, and helped him
to carve out another, but a much poorer, dominion.
Here the chief built himself a fort upon the hill; his
clansmen slew or subdued the tribes they found in
possession of the soil, and the lands were all
parcelled off among the chief's kinsfolk, the
indigenous proprietors being subjected to payment of a
land tax, but not otherwise degraded. When the land
grew too strait for the support of the chief's family
or of the sept--that is, when there were no vacant
allotments, a landless son of the chief would assemble
a band, and set forth to make room for himself
elsewhere."[441]
The evidence from India is fact, the evidence from England is
tradition, and yet I do not think any student will deny that both fact
and tradition are part and parcel of the same conditions of society,
the same forces operating upon the same material. The conditions of
society in both cases are tribal conditions, and the common factor
having thus been discovered, it is possible to determine not only the
inter-relationship between fact and tradition, but the means by which
we may estimate the value of both.
We cannot, however, stop here. I carry on the same argument from the
traditional legend to the traditional custom and belief, and affirm
that it is only by their position as part of the tribal system that
custom and belief in survival must be tested. If they have descended
from early Celtic or Teutonic custom and belief, they have descended
from tribal custom and belief, and somewhere in the stages of descent
will be found the link which connects them definitely with the tribe.
That not all custom and belief has so descended is due to the fact
that much of it belongs to the pre-Celtic period, which was not
tribal; some of it, no doubt, to comparatively modern times, when, as
we have already seen, superstition had taken the place of thought,
while some phases of early belief belong to conditions which
transcend the division between pre-Aryan and Aryan folk. On this I
will say something by way of explanation presently. In the meantime it
is an extremely important task to classify survivals into tribal and
non-tribal groups. Those which belong to Celtic or Teutonic origins
must show their tribal origin, for they could not have come into
existence apart from the tribe, and apart from the tribe they could
not have survived after the break-up of the tribe consequent upon the
development of national and political life. Custom and belief which do
not fit into the ancient tribal system, therefore, cannot be
recognised as ancient Celtic or ancient Teutonic custom and belief,
and contrariwise when it is seen that they naturally fall into this
system it may be argued that there we must search for their origin.
Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers have left a curious testimony to this view
of the question in their word "holy" or wholesome. What is wholesome
is so for the whole group. The Anglo-Saxon idea of holiness implies as
its chief element relation to the tribal life.[442]
The classification of survivals in folklore into tribal and non-tribal
items is a lengthy and intricate process. Some years ago I made a
start in a study of fire worship which I presented to the British
Association,[443] and I hope shortly to be ready with a volume on
_Tribal Custom_, which will embody a fuller study of fire worship and
its accompanying beliefs, together with a complete study of all the
remains of traditional custom, rite, and belief, which only as the
detritus of the ancient tribal organisation receive adequate
explanation of their presence in the midst of modern political and
religious institutions. If I leave this part of my subject without
further illustration in this present volume, I must add one important
note upon the persistence of survivals of both kinless and kinship
societies. I have shown that the tribal system of the advanced races
included provision for non-tribesmen, provision which kept
non-tribesmen outside the tribal bond, and at the same time kept them
tied to the tribe by using them as the necessary dependent adjunct of
the tribe, using them as bondmen and serfs in point of fact. This
extremely important factor in the history of the tribal organisation,
which has not been properly noticed by the few authorities who have
investigated tribal institutions, receives additional importance when
viewed from the standpoint of folklore, for it allows for the
preservation of non-tribal cults side by side with tribal cults.
Non-tribesmen preserved their custom, belief, and rite simply because
they were not admitted to the custom, belief, and rite of the tribe,
and this is the explanation of the existence, in survival, of folklore
which goes back to pre-Celtic times. Some of this pre-Celtic folklore
we have already had before us, and some of it I have studied in my
_Ethnology in Folklore_. Later on I shall have something more to say
on the subject. Here it is only necessary to emphasise the importance
of having ascertained why it is that the Celtic conquerors of Britain
and the earliest tribal conquerors of the Indo-European world
generally permitted to live in their midst what in a sense was opposed
to all that they believed, to all that they practised, to all that
governed them in thought and action.
I think this is a strong position upon which to conduct folklore
research. It includes the whole of the historical position; it takes
due count of historical facts instead of ignoring them. It is based
upon a scientific conception of the meaning of a survival of culture.
A survival is that which has been left stranded amidst the development
that is going on around. Its future life is not one of development but
of decay. We are not dealing with the evolution of society, but with
the decaying fragments of a social system which has passed away. We
have to trace out its line of decay from the point where it almost
vanishes as the mere superstition or practice of a peasant or an
outcast, back to phases where it exists in more strenuous fashion, and
finally back to its original position as part and parcel of a living
social fabric. Moreover, the strength of our position is based upon a
scientific conception of the development of the nation or people among
whom survivals exist. It is not all parts of the nation which develop
at the same rate, at the same time, and for the same period. There are
social strata in every country, and it is the observance of these
strata which has made it possible for the inquirer of to-day to use
the evidence they afford for historical purposes.
FOOTNOTES:
[427] _Religion of the Semites_, 30. It is worth while quoting here
Merivale's note in his Boyle lectures, _Conversion of the Northern
Nations_, 122. "Pagan temples were always the public works of nations
and communities. They were national buildings dedicated to national
purposes. The mediaeval churches, on the other hand, were the erection
of individuals, monuments of personal piety, tokens of the hope of a
personal reward." _Cf._ Stanley, _Hist. Westminster Abbey_, 12.
[428] Mr. Granger has a very instructive passage on this point in his
_Worship of the Romans_, 210-214; _cf._ Robertson-Smith, _Religion of
the Semites_, lec. ii.; Mr. MacDonald, _Africana_, i. 64, notes, too,
that "the natives worship not so much individually as in villages or
communities." Prof. Sayce, studying early religion, says in its outward
form it "was made up of rites and ceremonies which could only be
performed collectively."--_Science of Language_, ii. 290.
[429] Clarke's _Survey of the Lakes_, 36.
[430] Pritchard's _Researches into the Physical Hist. of Mankind_, vol.
iii., may still be consulted for an account of the tribal movements in
Europe.
[431] _Early Age of Greece_, i. cap. iv.
[432] _History of Antiquity_, iv. 116-17.
[433] _Asiatic Studies_, i. 173.
[434] _Punjab Customary Law_, ii. 3-59. _Cf._ Baden-Powell's _Indian
Vill. Com._, 230; Duncker, _Hist. Antiq._, iv. 115-17.
[435] Stubbs's _Const. Hist._, i. 64. _Cf. Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law_,
12.
[436] _Celtic Scotland_, iii. 137, note 4.
[437] _Anc. Laws of Ireland_, iv. p. 77. _Cf._ also Mr. Andrews' _Old
English Manor_, p. 20, and Meyer, _Geschichte der Alterthums_, 2-3.
[438] Du Chaillu, _The Viking Age_, i. 488.
[439] Keary, _Origin of Primitive Belief_, 464-5. Mr. MacCulloch,
_Childhood of Fiction_, devotes a chapter to the clever-youngest-son
group of tales (cap. xiii.), which should be consulted.
[440] _Folklore_, ii. 194.
[441] Sir A. Lyall, _Asiatic Studies_, 184, and compare pp. 198, 208,
211.
[442] _Cf._ Granger, _Worship of the Romans_, 211. Mr. Granger uses
terms which I do not quite accept, though his suggestion is entirely
good in principle.
[443] _Report of British Association_ (Liverpool Meeting).