THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
EMILE DURKHEIM
_The Elementary Forms
of the
Religious Life_
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
JOSEPH WARD SWAIN
M.A.
_LONDON_
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE MUSEUM STREET
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1915
SECOND IMPRESSION 1926
THIRD IMPRESSION 1954
FOURTH IMPRESSION 1957
FIFTH IMPRESSION 1964
_This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private
study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under
the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion may be reproduced
by any process without written permission. Enquiry
should be made to the publisher._
_© George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1915_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY HOLLEN STREET PRESS LTD
LONDON W.1
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
SUBJECT OF OUR STUDY: RELIGIOUS SOCIOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE
PAGE
I.--Principal subject of the book: analysis of the simplest
religion known to determine the elementary forms of the
religious life--Why they are more easily found and explained
in the primitive religions 1
II.--Secondary subject of research: the genesis of the
fundamental notions of thought or the categories--Reasons for
believing that their origin is religious and consequently
social--How a way of restating the theory of knowledge is
thus seen 9
BOOK I
PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS
CHAPTER I
DEFINITION OF RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA AND OF RELIGION
Usefulness of a preliminary definition of religion; method to be
followed in seeking this definition--Why the usual definitions
should be examined first 23
I.--Religion defined by the supernatural and mysterious--
Criticism: the notion of mystery is not primitive 24
II.--Religion defined in connection with the idea of God or a
spiritual being.--Religions without gods--Rites in deistic
religions which imply no idea of divinity 29
III.--Search for a positive definition--Distinction between
beliefs and rites--Definition of beliefs--First characteristic:
division of things between sacred and profane--Distinctive
characteristics of this definition--Definition of rites in
relation to beliefs--Definition of religion 36
IV.--Necessity of another characteristic to distinguish magic
from religion--The idea of the Church--Do individualistic
religions exclude the idea of a Church? 42
CHAPTER II
LEADING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ELEMENTARY RELIGION
I.--_Animism_
Distinction of animism and naturism 48
I.--The three theses of animism: Genesis of the idea of the soul;
Formation of the idea of spirits; Transformation of the cult of
spirits into the cult of nature 49
II.--Criticism of the first thesis--Distinction of the idea of
the soul from that of a double--Dreams do not account for the
idea of the soul 55
III.--Criticism of the second thesis--Death does not explain the
transformation of a soul into a spirit--The cult of the souls
of the dead is not primitive 60
IV.--Criticism of the third thesis--The anthropomorphic
instinct--Spencer's criticism of it; reservations on this
point--Examination of the facts by which this instinct is
said to be proved--Difference between a soul and the spirits
of nature--Religious anthropomorphism is not primitive 65
V.--Conclusion: animism reduces religion to nothing more than
a system of hallucinations 68
CHAPTER III
LEADING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ELEMENTARY RELIGION--(_continued_)
II.--_Naturism_
History of the theory 71
I.--Exposition of Max Müller's naturism 73
II.--If the object of religion is to express natural forces, it
is hard to see how it has maintained itself, for it expresses
them in an erroneous manner--Pretended distinction between
religion and mythology 78
III.--Naturism does not explain the division of things into
sacred and profane 84
CHAPTER IV
TOTEMISM AS AN ELEMENTARY RELIGION
I.--Brief history of the question of totemism 88
II.--Reasons of method for which our study will be given
specially to the totemism of Australia--The place which
will be given to facts from America 93
BOOK II
THE ELEMENTARY BELIEFS
CHAPTER I
TOTEMIC BELIEFS
_The Totem as Name and as Emblem_
I.--Definition of the clan--The totem as name of the clan--Nature
of the things which serve as totems--Ways in which the totem is
acquired--The totems of phratries; of matrimonial classes 102
II.--The totem as emblem--Totemic designs engraved or carved upon
objects; tatooings or designs upon the body 113
III.--Sacred character of the totemic emblem--The churinga--The
nurtunja--The waninga--Conventional character of totemic emblems 119
CHAPTER II
TOTEMIC BELIEFS--(_continued_)
_The Totemic Animal and Man_
I.--Sacred character of the totemic animals--Prohibition to
eat them, kill them or pick the totemic plants--Different
moderations given these prohibitions--Prohibition of
contact--The sacred character of the animal is less marked
than that of the emblem 128
II.--The man--His relationship with the totemic animal or
plant--Different myths explaining this relationship--The sacred
character of the man is more apparent in certain parts of the
organism: the blood, hair, etc.--How this character varies with
sex and age--Totemism is not plant or animal worship 134
CHAPTER III
TOTEMIC BELIEFS--(_continued_)
_The Cosmological System of Totemism and the Idea of Class_
I.--The classification of things into clans, phratries and classes 141
II.--Genesis of the notion of class: the first classifications of
things take their forms from society--Differences between the
sentiment of the differences of things and the idea of class--
Why this is of social origin 144
III.--Religious significance of these classifications: all of
the things classified into a clan partake of the nature of the
totem and its sacred character--The cosmological system of
totemism--Totemism as the tribal religion 148
CHAPTER IV
TOTEMIC BELIEFS--(_end_)
_The Individual Totem and the Sexual Totem_
I.--Individual totem as a forename; its sacred character--
Individual totem as personal emblem--Bonds between the man and
his individual totem--Relations with the collective totem 157
II.--The totems of sexual groups--Resemblances and differences
with the collective and individual totems--Their tribal nature 165
CHAPTER V
ORIGINS OF THESE BELIEFS
_Critical Examination of Preceding Theories_
I.--Theories which derive totemism from a previous religion: from
the ancestor cult (Wilken and Tylor); from the nature cult
(Jevons)--Criticism of these theories 168
II.--Theories which derive collective totemism from individual
totemism--Origins attributed by these theories to the
individual totem (Frazer, Boas, Hill Tout)--Improbability
of these hypotheses--Reasons showing the priority of the
collective totem 172
III.--Recent theory of Frazer: _conceptional_ and local
totemism--The begging of the question upon which it rests--The
religious character of the totem is denied--Local totemism is
not primitive 180
IV.--Theory of Lang: that the totem is only a name--Difficulties
in explaining the religious character of totemic practices from
this point of view 184
V.--All these theories explain totemism only by postulating other
religious notions anterior to it 186
CHAPTER VI
ORIGINS OF THESE BELIEFS--(_continued_)
_The Notion of the Totemic Principle, or Mana, and the Idea of
Force_
I.--The notion of the totemic force or principle--Its ubiquity--
Its character at once physical and moral 188
II.--Analogous conceptions in other inferior societies--The gods
in Samoa, the wakan of the Sioux, the orenda of the Iroquois,
the mana of Melanesia--Connection of these notions with
totemism--The Arunkulta of the Arunta 191
III.--Logical priority of impersonal force over the different
mythical personalities--Recent theories which tend to admit
this priority 198
IV.--The notion of religious force is the prototype of that of
force in general 203
CHAPTER VII
ORIGINS OF THESE BELIEFS--(_end_)
_Origin of the Idea of the Totemic Principle or Mana_
I.--The totemic principle is the clan, but thought of under a
more empirical form 205
II.--General reasons for which society is apt to awaken the
sensation of the sacred and the divine--Society as an
imperative moral force; the notion of moral authority--Society
as a force which raises the individual outside of himself--
Facts which prove that society creates the sacred 206
III.--Reasons peculiar to Australian societies--The two phases
through which the life of these societies alternatively passes:
dispersion, concentration--Great collective effervescence
during the periods of concentration--Examples--How the
religious idea is born out of this effervescence 214
Why collective force has been thought of under totemic forms: it
is the totem that is the emblem of the clan--Explanation of the
principal totemic beliefs 219
IV.--Religion is not the product of fear--It expresses something
real--Its essential idealism--This idealism is a general
characteristic of collective mentality--Explanation of the
external character of religious forces in relation to their
subjects--The principle that _the part is equal to the whole_ 223
V.--Origin of the notion of emblem: emblems a necessary condition
of collective representations--Why the clan has taken its
emblems from the animal and vegetable kingdoms 230
VI.--The proneness of the primitive to confound the kingdoms and
classes which we distinguish--Origins of these confusions--How
they have blazed the way for scientific explanations--They do
not exclude the tendency towards distinction and opposition 234
CHAPTER VIII
THE IDEA OF THE SOUL
I.--Analysis of the idea of the soul in the Australian societies 240
II.--Genesis of this idea--The doctrine of reincarnation
according to Spencer and Gillen: it implies that the soul is
a part of the totemic principle--Examination of the facts
collected by Strehlow; they confirm the totemic nature of
the soul 246
III.--Generality of the doctrine of reincarnation--Diverse facts
in support of the proposed genesis 256
IV.--Antithesis of the soul and the body: what there is objective
in this--Relations of the individual soul with the collective
soul--The idea of the soul is not chronologically after that
of mana 262
V.--Hypothesis to explain the belief in its survival 267
VI.--The idea of a soul and the idea of a person; impersonal
elements in the personality 269
CHAPTER IX
THE IDEA OF SPIRITS AND GODS
I.--Difference between a soul and a spirit--The souls of the
mythical ancestors are spirits, having determined functions--
Relations between the ancestral spirit, the individual soul
and the individual totem--Explanation of this latter--Its
sociological significance 273
II.--Spirits and magic 281
III.--The civilizing heroes 283
IV.--The great gods--Their origin--Their relations with the
totemic system--Their tribal and international character 285
V.--Unity of the totemic system 295
BOOK III
THE PRINCIPAL RITUAL ATTITUDES
CHAPTER I
THE NEGATIVE CULT AND ITS FUNCTIONS
THE ASCETIC RITES
I.--The system of interdictions--Magic and religious
interdictions--Interdictions between sacred things of different
sorts--Interdictions between sacred and profane--These latter
are the basis of the negative cult--Leading types of these
interdictions; their reduction to two essential types 299
II.--The observance of interdictions modifies the religious state
of individuals--Cases where this efficacy is especially
apparent: ascetic practices--The religious efficacy of sorrow--
Social function of asceticism 309
III.--Explanation of the system of interdictions: antagonism of
the sacred and the profane, contagiousness of the sacred 317
IV.--Causes of this contagiousness--It cannot be explained by
the laws of the association of ideas--It is because religious
forces are outside of their subjects--Logical interest in this
property of religious forces 321
CHAPTER II
THE POSITIVE CULT
I.--_The Elements of Sacrifice_
The Intichiuma ceremony in the tribes of Central Australia--
Different forms which it presents 326
I.--The Arunta Form--The two phases--Analysis of the first: visit
to sacred places, scattering of sacred dust, shedding of blood,
etc., to assure the reproduction of the totemic species 327
II.--Second phase: ritual consumption of the totemic plant or
animal 333
III.--Interpretation of the complete ceremony--The second rite
consists in a communion meal--Reason for this communion 336
IV.--The rites of the first phase consists in oblations--Analogies
with sacrificial oblations--The Intichiuma thus contains the two
elements of sacrifice--Interest of these facts for the theory of
sacrifice 340
V.--On the pretended absurdity of sacrificial oblations--How
they are explained: dependence of sacred beings upon their
worshippers--Explanation of the circle in which sacrifice seems
to move--Origin of the periodicity of positive rites 344
CHAPTER III
THE POSITIVE CULT--(_continued_)
II.--_Imitative Rites and the Principle of Causality_
I.--Nature of the imitative rites--Examples of ceremonies where
they are employed to assure the fertility of the species 351
II.--They rest upon the principle: _like produces like_--
Examination of the explanation of this given by the
anthropological school--Reasons why they imitate the animal
or plant--Reasons for attributing a physical efficacy to these
gestures--Faith--In what sense it is founded upon experience--
The principles of magic are born in religion 355
III.--The preceding principle considered as one of the first
statements of the principle of causality--Social conditions
upon which this latter depends--The idea of impersonal force or
power is of social origin--The necessity for the conception of
causality explained by the authority inherent in social
imperatives 362
CHAPTER IV
THE POSITIVE CULT--(_continued_)
III.--_Representative or Commemorative Rites_
I.--Representative rites with physical efficacy--Their relations
with the ceremonies already described--Their action is wholly
moral 371
II.--Representative rites without physical efficacy--They confirm
the preceding results--The element of recreation in religion:
its importance; its reason for existence--The idea of a feast 376
III.--Ambiguity of function in the various ceremonies studied;
they substitute themselves for each other--How this ambiguity
confirms the theory proposed 383
CHAPTER V
PIACULAR RITES AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE NOTION OF SACREDNESS
Definition of the piacular rite 389
I.--Positive rites of mourning--Description of these rites 390
II.--How they are explained--They are not a manifestation of
private sentiments--The malice attributed to the souls of the
dead cannot account for them either--They correspond to the
state of mind in which the group happens to be--Analysis of
this state--How it ends by mourning--Corresponding changes in
the way in which the souls of the dead are conceived 396
III.--Other piacular rites; after a public mourning, a poor
harvest, a drought, the southern lights--Rarity of these rites
in Australia--How they are explained 403
IV.--The two forms of the sacred: the pure and the impure--Their
antagonism--Their relationship--Ambiguity of the idea of the
sacred--All rites present the same character 409
CONCLUSION
To what extent the results obtained may be generalized 415
I.--Religion rests upon an experience that is well founded but
not privileged--Necessity of a science to reach the reality at
the bottom of this experience--What is this reality?--The human
groups--Human meaning of religion--Concerning the objection
which opposes the ideal society to the real society 416
How religious individualism and cosmopolitanism are explained in
this theory 424
II.--The eternal element in religion--Concerning the conflict
between science and religion; it has to do solely with the
speculative side of religion--What this side seems destined to
become 427
III.--How has society been able to be the source of logical,
that is to say conceptual, thought? Definition of the concept:
not to be confounded with the general idea; characterized by
its impersonality and communicability--It has a collective
origin--The analysis of its contents bears witness in the same
sense Collective representations as types of ideas which
individuals accept--In regard to the objection that they are
impersonal only on condition of being true--Conceptual thought
is coeval with humanity 431
IV.--How the categories express social things--The chief category
is the concept of totality which could be suggested only by
society--Why the relations expressed by the categories could
become conscious only in society--Society is not an a-logical
being--How the categories tend to detach themselves from
geographically determined groups 439
The unity of science on the one hand, and of morals and religion
on the other--How the society accounts for this unity--
Explanation of the rôle attributed to society: its creative
power--Reactions of sociology upon the science of man 445
THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
INTRODUCTION
SUBJECT OF OUR STUDY: RELIGIOUS SOCIOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
In this book we propose to study the most primitive and simple religion
which is actually known, to make an analysis of it, and to attempt an
explanation of it. A religious system may be said to be the most
primitive which we can observe when it fulfils the two following
conditions: in the first place, when it is found in a society whose
organization is surpassed by no others in simplicity;[1] and secondly,
when it is possible to explain it without making use of any element
borrowed from a previous religion.
We shall set ourselves to describe the organization of this system with
all the exactness and fidelity that an ethnographer or an historian
could give it. But our task will not be limited to that: sociology
raises other problems than history or ethnography. It does not seek to
know the passed forms of civilization with the sole end of knowing them
and reconstructing them. But rather, like every positive science, it has
as its object the explanation of some actual reality which is near to
us, and which consequently is capable of affecting our ideas and our
acts: this reality is man, and more precisely, the man of to-day, for
there is nothing which we are more interested in knowing. Then we are
not going to study a very archaic religion simply for the pleasure of
telling its peculiarities and its singularities. If we have taken it as
the subject of our research, it is because it has seemed to us better
adapted than any other to lead to an understanding of the religious
nature of man, that is to say, to show us an essential and permanent
aspect of humanity.
But this proposition is not accepted before the raising of strong
objections. It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be
transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an
understanding of humanity as it is at present. This manner of procedure
seems particularly paradoxical in the question which concerns us. In
fact, the various religions generally pass as being quite unequal in
value and dignity; it is said that they do not all contain the same
quota of truth. Then it seems as though one could not compare the
highest forms of religious thought with the lowest, without reducing the
first to the level of the second. If we admit that the crude cults of
the Australian tribes can help us to understand Christianity, for
example, is that not supposing that this latter religion proceeds from
the same mentality as the former, that it is made up of the same
superstitions and rests upon the same errors? This is how the
theoretical importance which has sometimes been attributed to primitive
religions has come to pass as a sign of a systematic hostility to all
religion, which, by prejudging the results of the study, vitiates them
in advance.
There is no occasion for asking here whether or not there are scholars
who have merited this reproach, and who have made religious history and
ethnology a weapon against religion. In any case, a sociologist cannot
hold such a point of view. In fact, it is an essential postulate of
sociology that a human institution cannot rest upon an error and a lie,
without which it could not exist. If it were not founded in the nature
of things, it would have encountered in the facts a resistance over
which it could never have triumphed. So when we commence the study of
primitive religions, it is with the assurance that they hold to reality
and express it; this principle will be seen to re-enter again and again
in the course of the analyses and discussions which follow, and the
reproach which we make against the schools from which we have separated
ourselves is that they have ignored it. When only the letter of the
formulæ is considered, these religious beliefs and practices undoubtedly
seem disconcerting at times, and one is tempted to attribute them to
some sort of a deep-rooted error. But one must know how to go underneath
the symbol to the reality which it represents and which gives it its
meaning. The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the
strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either
individual or social. The reasons with which the faithful justify them
may be, and generally are, erroneous; but the true reasons do not cease
to exist, and it is the duty of science to discover them.
In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true
in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given
conditions of human existence. It is undeniably possible to arrange them
in a hierarchy. Some can be called superior to others, in the sense that
they call into play higher mental functions, that they are richer in
ideas and sentiments, that they contain more concepts with fewer
sensations and images, and that their arrangement is wiser. But
howsoever real this greater complexity and this higher ideality may be,
they are not sufficient to place the corresponding religions in
different classes. All are religions equally, just as all living beings
are equally alive, from the most humble plastids up to man. So when we
turn to primitive religions it is not with the idea of depreciating
religion in general, for these religions are no less respectable than
the others. They respond to the same needs, they play the same rôle,
they depend upon the same causes; they can also well serve to show the
nature of the religious life, and consequently to resolve the problem
which we wish to study.
But why give them a sort of prerogative? Why choose them in preference
to all others as the subject of our study?--It is merely for reasons of
method.
In the first place, we cannot arrive at an understanding of the most
recent religions except by following the manner in which they have been
progressively composed in history. In fact, historical analysis is the
only means of explanation which it is possible to apply to them. It
alone enables us to resolve an institution into its constituent
elements, for it shows them to us as they are born in time, one after
another. On the other hand, by placing every one of them in the
condition where it was born, it puts into our hands the only means we
have of determining the causes which gave rise to it. Every time that we
undertake to explain something human, taken at a given moment in
history--be it a religious belief, a moral precept, a legal principle,
an æsthetic style or an economic system--it is necessary to commence by
going back to its most primitive and simple form, to try to account for
the characteristics by which it was marked at that time, and then to
show how it developed and became complicated little by little, and how
it became that which it is at the moment in question. One readily
understands the importance which the determination of the point of
departure has for this series of progressive explanations, for all the
others are attached to it. It was one of Descartes's principles that
the first ring has a predominating place in the chain of scientific
truths. But there is no question of placing at the foundation of the
science of religions an idea elaborated after the cartesian manner, that
is to say, a logical concept, a pure possibility, constructed simply by
force of thought. What we must find is a concrete reality, and
historical and ethnological observation alone can reveal that to us. But
even if this cardinal conception is obtained by a different process than
that of Descartes, it remains true that it is destined to have a
considerable influence on the whole series of propositions which the
science establishes. Biological evolution has been conceived quite
differently ever since it has been known that monocellular beings do
exist. In the same way, the arrangement of religious facts is explained
quite differently, according as we put naturism, animism or some other
religious form at the beginning of the evolution. Even the most
specialized scholars, if they are unwilling to confine themselves to a
task of pure erudition, and if they desire to interpret the facts which
they analyse, are obliged to choose one of these hypotheses, and make it
their starting-point. Whether they desire it or not, the questions which
they raise necessarily take the following form: how has naturism or
animism been led to take this particular form, here or there, or to
enrich itself or impoverish itself in such and such a fashion? Since it
is impossible to avoid taking sides on this initial problem, and since
the solution given is destined to affect the whole science, it must be
attacked at the outset: that is what we propose to do.
Besides this, outside of these indirect reactions, the study of
primitive religions has of itself an immediate interest which is of
primary importance.
If it is useful to know what a certain particular religion consists in,
it is still more important to know what religion in general is. This is
the problem which has aroused the interest of philosophers in all times;
and not without reason, for it is of interest to all humanity.
Unfortunately, the method which they generally employ is purely
dialectic: they confine themselves to analysing the idea which they make
for themselves of religion, except as they illustrate the results of
this mental analysis by examples borrowed from the religions which best
realize their ideal. But even if this method ought to be abandoned, the
problem remains intact, and the great service of philosophy is to have
prevented its being suppressed by the disdain of scholars. Now it is
possible to attack it in a different way. Since all religions can be
compared to each other, and since all are species of the same class,
there are necessarily many elements which are common to all. We do not
mean to speak simply of the outward and visible characteristics which
they all have equally, and which make it possible to give them a
provisional definition from the very outset of our researches; the
discovery of these apparent signs is relatively easy, for the
observation which it demands does not go beneath the surface of things.
But these external resemblances suppose others which are profound. At
the foundation of all systems of beliefs and of all cults there ought
necessarily to be a certain number of fundamental representations or
conceptions and of ritual attitudes which, in spite of the diversity of
forms which they have taken, have the same objective significance and
fulfil the same functions everywhere. These are the permanent elements
which constitute that which is permanent and human in religion; they
form all the objective contents of the idea which is expressed when one
speaks of _religion_ in general. How is it possible to pick them out?
Surely it is not by observing the complex religions which appear in the
course of history. Every one of these is made up of such a variety of
elements that it is very difficult to distinguish what is secondary from
what is principal, the essential from the accessory. Suppose that the
religion considered is like that of Egypt, India or the classical
antiquity. It is a confused mass of many cults, varying according to the
locality, the temples, the generations, the dynasties, the invasions,
etc. Popular superstitions are there confused with the purest dogmas.
Neither the thought nor the activity of the religion is evenly
distributed among the believers; according to the men, the environment
and the circumstances, the beliefs as well as the rites are thought of
in different ways. Here they are priests, there they are monks,
elsewhere they are laymen; there are mystics and rationalists,
theologians and prophets, etc. In these conditions it is difficult to
see what is common to all. In one or another of these systems it is
quite possible to find the means of making a profitable study of some
particular fact which is specially developed there, such as sacrifice or
prophecy, monasticism or the mysteries; but how is it possible to find
the common foundation of the religious life underneath the luxuriant
vegetation which covers it? How is it possible to find, underneath the
disputes of theology, the variations of ritual, the multiplicity of
groups and the diversity of individuals, the fundamental states
characteristic of religious mentality in general?
Things are quite different in the lower societies. The slighter
development of individuality, the small extension of the group, the
homogeneity of external circumstances, all contribute to reducing the
differences and variations to a minimum. The group has an intellectual
and moral conformity of which we find but rare examples in the more
advanced societies. Everything is common to all. Movements are
stereotyped; everybody performs the same ones in the same circumstances,
and this conformity of conduct only translates the conformity of
thought. Every mind being drawn into the same eddy, the individual type
nearly confounds itself with that of the race. And while all is uniform,
all is simple as well. Nothing is deformed like these myths, all
composed of one and the same theme which is endlessly repeated, or like
these rites made up of a small number of gestures repeated again and
again. Neither the popular imagination nor that of the priests has had
either the time or the means of refining and transforming the original
substance of the religious ideas and practices; these are shown in all
their nudity, and offer themselves to an examination, it requiring only
the slightest effort to lay them open. That which is accessory or
secondary, the development of luxury, has not yet come to hide the
principal elements.[2] All is reduced to that which is indispensable, to
that without which there could be no religion. But that which is
indispensable is also that which is essential, that is to say, that
which we must know before all else.
Primitive civilizations offer privileged cases, then, because they are
simple cases. That is why, in all fields of human activity, the
observations of ethnologists have frequently been veritable revelations,
which have renewed the study of human institutions. For example, before
the middle of the nineteenth century, everybody was convinced that the
father was the essential element of the family; no one had dreamed that
there could be a family organization of which the paternal authority was
not the keystone. But the discovery of Bachofen came and upset this old
conception. Up to very recent times it was regarded as evident that the
moral and legal relations of kindred were only another aspect of the
psychological relations which result from a common descent; Bachofen and
his successors, MacLennan, Morgan and many others still laboured under
this misunderstanding. But since we have become acquainted with the
nature of the primitive clan, we know that, on the contrary,
relationships cannot be explained by consanguinity. To return to
religions, the study of only the most familiar ones had led men to
believe for a long time that the idea of god was characteristic of
everything that is religious. Now the religion which we are going to
study presently is, in a large part, foreign to all idea of divinity;
the forces to which the rites are there addressed are very different
from those which occupy the leading place in our modern religions, yet
they aid us in understanding these latter forces. So nothing is more
unjust than the disdain with which too many historians still regard the
work of ethnographers. Indeed, it is certain that ethnology has
frequently brought about the most fruitful revolutions in the different
branches of sociology. It is for this same reason that the discovery of
unicellular beings, of which we just spoke, has transformed the current
idea of life. Since in these very simple beings, life is reduced to its
essential traits, these are less easily misunderstood.
But primitive religions do not merely aid us in disengaging the
constituent elements of religion; they also have the great advantage
that they facilitate the explanation of it. Since the facts there are
simpler, the relations between them are more apparent. The reasons with
which men account for their acts have not yet been elaborated and
denatured by studied reflection; they are nearer and more closely
related to the motives which have really determined these acts. In order
to understand an hallucination perfectly, and give it its most
appropriate treatment, a physician must know its original point of
departure. Now this event is proportionately easier to find if he can
observe it near its beginnings. The longer the disease is allowed to
develop, the more it evades observation; that is because all sorts of
interpretations have intervened as it advanced, which tend to force the
original state into the background, and across which it is frequently
difficult to find the initial one. Between a systematized hallucination
and the first impressions which gave it birth, the distance is often
considerable. It is the same thing with religious thought. In proportion
as it progresses in history, the causes which called it into existence,
though remaining active, are no longer perceived, except across a vast
scheme of interpretations which quite transform them. Popular
mythologies and subtile theologies have done their work: they have
superimposed upon the primitive sentiments others which are quite
different, and which, though holding to the first, of which they are an
elaborated form, only allow their true nature to appear very
imperfectly. The psychological gap between the cause and the effect,
between the apparent cause and the effective cause, has become more
considerable and more difficult for the mind to leap. The remainder of
this book will be an illustration and a verification of this remark on
method. It will be seen how, in the primitive religions, the religious
fact still visibly carries the mark of its origins: it would have been
well-nigh impossible to infer them merely from the study of the more
developed religions.
The study which we are undertaking is therefore a way of taking up
again, _but under new conditions_, the old problem of the origin of
religion. To be sure, if by origin we are to understand the very first
beginning, the question has nothing scientific about it, and should be
resolutely discarded. There was no given moment when religion began to
exist, and there is consequently no need of finding a means of
transporting ourselves thither in thought. Like every human institution,
religion did not commence anywhere. Therefore, all speculations of this
sort are justly discredited; they can only consist in subjective and
arbitrary constructions which are subject to no sort of control. But the
problem which we raise is quite another one. What we want to do is to
find a means of discerning the ever-present causes upon which the most
essential forms of religious thought and practice depend. Now for the
reasons which were just set forth, these causes are proportionately more
easily observable as the societies where they are observed are less
complicated. That is why we try to get as near as possible to the
origins.[3] It is not that we ascribe particular virtues to the lower
religions. On the contrary, they are rudimentary and gross; we cannot
make of them a sort of model which later religions only have to
reproduce. But even their grossness makes them instructive, for they
thus become convenient for experiments, as in them, the facts and their
relations are easily seen. In order to discover the laws of the
phenomena which he studies, the physicist tries to simplify these latter
and rid them of their secondary characteristics. For that which concerns
institutions, nature spontaneously makes the same sort of
simplifications at the beginning of history. We merely wish to put these
to profit. Undoubtedly we can only touch very elementary facts by this
method. When we shall have accounted for them as far as possible, the
novelties of every sort which have been produced in the course of
evolution will not yet be explained. But while we do not dream of
denying the importance of the problems thus raised, we think that they
will profit by being treated in their turn, and that it is important to
take them up only after those of which we are going to undertake the
study at present.
II
But our study is not of interest merely for the science of religion. In
fact, every religion has one side by which it overlaps the circle of
properly religious ideas, and there, the study of religious phenomena
gives a means of renewing the problems which, up to the present, have
only been discussed among philosophers.
For a long time it has been known that the first systems of
representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and
themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a
cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things.
If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because
religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy. But
it has been less frequently noticed that religion has not confined
itself to enriching the human intellect, formed beforehand, with a
certain number of ideas; it has contributed to forming the intellect
itself. Men owe to it not only a good part of the substance of their
knowledge, but also the form in which this knowledge has been
elaborated.
At the roots of all our judgments there are a certain number of
essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life; they are what
philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the
understanding: ideas of time, space,[4] class, number, cause, substance,
personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal properties of
things. They are like the solid frame which encloses all thought; this
does not seem to be able to liberate itself from them without destroying
itself, for it seems that we cannot think of objects that are not in
time and space, which have no number, etc. Other ideas are contingent
and unsteady; we can conceive of their being unknown to a man, a society
or an epoch; but these others appear to be nearly inseparable from the
normal working of the intellect. They are like the framework of the
intelligence. Now when primitive religious beliefs are systematically
analysed, the principal categories are naturally found. They are born in
religion and of religion; they are a product of religious thought. This
is a statement that we are going to have occasion to make many times in
the course of this work.
This remark has some interest of itself already; but here is what gives
it its real importance.
The general conclusion of the book which the reader has before him is
that religion is something eminently social. Religious representations
are collective representations which express collective realities; the
rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the
assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain or recreate
certain mental states in these groups. So if the categories are of
religious origin, they ought to participate in this nature common to all
religious facts; they too should be social affairs and the product of
collective thought. At least--for in the actual condition of our
knowledge of these matters, one should be careful to avoid all radical
and exclusive statements--it is allowable to suppose that they are rich
in social elements.
Even at present, these can be imperfectly seen in some of them. For
example, try to represent what the notion of time would be without the
processes by which we divide it, measure it or express it with objective
signs, a time which is not a succession of years, months, weeks, days
and hours! This is something nearly unthinkable. We cannot conceive of
time, except on condition of distinguishing its different moments. Now
what is the origin of this differentiation? Undoubtedly, the states of
consciousness which we have already experienced can be reproduced in us
in the same order in which they passed in the first place; thus portions
of our past become present again, though being clearly distinguished
from the present. But howsoever important this distinction may be for
our private experience, it is far from being enough to constitute the
notion or category of time. This does not consist merely in a
commemoration, either partial or integral, of our past life. It is an
abstract and impersonal frame which surrounds, not only our individual
existence, but that of all humanity. It is like an endless chart, where
all duration is spread out before the mind, and upon which all possible
events can be located in relation to fixed and determined guide lines.
It is not _my time_ that is thus arranged; it is time in general, such
as it is objectively thought of by everybody in a single civilization.
That alone is enough to give us a hint that such an arrangement ought to
be collective. And in reality, observation proves that these
indispensable guide lines, in relation to which all things are
temporally located, are taken from social life. The divisions into days,
weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of
rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.[5] A calendar expresses the
rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function
is to assure their regularity.[6]
It is the same thing with space. As Hamelin has shown,[7] space is not
the vague and indetermined medium which Kant imagined; if purely and
absolutely homogeneous, it would be of no use, and could not be grasped
by the mind. Spatial representation consists essentially in a primary
co-ordination of the data of sensuous experience. But this co-ordination
would be impossible if the parts of space were qualitatively equivalent
and if they were really interchangeable. To dispose things spatially
there must be a possibility of placing them differently, of putting some
at the right, others at the left, these above, those below, at the north
of or at the south of, east or west of, etc., etc., just as to dispose
states of consciousness temporally there must be a possibility of
localizing them at determined dates. That is to say that space could not
be what it is if it were not, like time, divided and differentiated. But
whence come these divisions which are so essential? By themselves, there
are neither right nor left, up nor down, north nor south, etc. All these
distinctions evidently come from the fact that different sympathetic
values have been attributed to various regions. Since all the men of a
single civilization represent space in the same way, it is clearly
necessary that these sympathetic values, and the distinctions which
depend upon them, should be equally universal, and that almost
necessarily implies that they be of social origin.[8]
Besides that, there are cases where this social character is made
manifest. There are societies in Australia and North America where space
is conceived in the form of an immense circle, because the camp has a
circular form;[9] and this spatial circle is divided up exactly like the
tribal circle, and is in its image. There are as many regions
distinguished as there are clans in the tribe, and it is the place
occupied by the clans inside the encampment which has determined the
orientation of these regions. Each region is defined by the totem of the
clan to which it is assigned. Among the Zuñi, for example, the pueblo
contains seven quarters; each of these is a group of clans which has had
a unity: in all probability it was originally a single clan which was
later subdivided. Now their space also contains seven quarters, and each
of these seven quarters of the world is in intimate connection with a
quarter of the pueblo, that is to say with a group of clans.[10] "Thus,"
says Cushing, "one division is thought to be in relation with the north,
another represents the west, another the south," etc.[11] Each quarter
of the pueblo has its characteristic colour, which symbolizes it; each
region has its colour, which is exactly the same as that of the
corresponding quarter. In the course of history the number of
fundamental clans has varied; the number of the fundamental regions of
space has varied with them. Thus the social organization has been the
model for the spatial organization and a reproduction of it. It is thus
even up to the distinction between right and left which, far from being
inherent in the nature of man in general, is very probably the product
of representations which are religious and therefore collective.[12]
Analogous proofs will be found presently in regard to the ideas of
class, force, personality and efficacy. It is even possible to ask if
the idea of contradiction does not also depend upon social conditions.
What makes one tend to believe this is that the empire which the idea
has exercised over human thought has varied with times and societies.
To-day the principle of identity dominates scientific thought; but there
are vast systems of representations which have played a considerable
rôle in the history of ideas where it has frequently been set aside:
these are the mythologies, from the grossest up to the most
reasonable.[13] There, we are continually coming upon beings which have
the most contradictory attributes simultaneously, who are at the same
time one and many, material and spiritual, who can divide themselves up
indefinitely without losing anything of their constitution; in mythology
it is an axiom that the part is worth the whole. These variations
through which the rules which seem to govern our present logic have
passed prove that, far from being engraven through all eternity upon the
mental constitution of men, they depend, at least in part, upon factors
that are historical and consequently social. We do not know exactly what
they are, but we may presume that they exist.[14]
This hypothesis once admitted, the problem of knowledge is posed in new
terms.
Up to the present there have been only two doctrines in the field. For
some, the categories cannot be derived from experience: they are
logically prior to it and condition it. They are represented as so many
simple and irreducible data, imminent in the human mind by virtue of its
inborn constitution. For this reason they are said to be _a priori_.
Others, however, hold that they are constructed and made up of pieces
and bits, and that the individual is the artisan of this
construction.[15]
But each solution raises grave difficulties.
Is the empirical thesis the one adopted? Then it is necessary to deprive
the categories of all their characteristic properties. As a matter of
fact they are distinguished from all other knowledge by their
universality and necessity. They are the most general concepts which
exist, because they are applicable to all that is real, and since they
are not attached to any particular object they are independent of every
particular subject; they constitute the common field where all minds
meet. Further, they must meet there, for reason, which is nothing more
than all the fundamental categories taken together, is invested with an
authority which we could not set aside if we would. When we attempt to
revolt against it, and to free ourselves from some of these essential
ideas, we meet with great resistances. They do not merely depend upon
us, but they impose themselves upon us. Now empirical data present
characteristics which are diametrically opposed to these. A sensation or
an image always relies upon a determined object, or upon a collection of
objects of the same sort, and expresses the momentary condition of a
particular consciousness; it is essentially individual and subjective.
We therefore have considerable liberty in dealing with the
representations of such an origin. It is true that when our sensations
are actual, they impose themselves upon us _in fact_. But _by right_ we
are free to conceive them otherwise than they really are, or to
represent them to ourselves as occurring in a different order from that
where they are really produced. In regard to them nothing is forced upon
us except as considerations of another sort intervene. Thus we find that
we have here two sorts of knowledge, which are like the two opposite
poles of the intelligence. Under these conditions forcing reason back
upon experience causes it to disappear, for it is equivalent to reducing
the universality and necessity which characterize it to pure appearance,
to an illusion which may be useful practically, but which corresponds to
nothing in reality; consequently it is denying all objective reality to
the logical life, whose regulation and organization is the function of
the categories. Classical empiricism results in irrationalism; perhaps
it would even be fitting to designate it by this latter name.
In spite of the sense ordinarily attached to the name, the apriorists
have more respect for the facts. Since they do not admit it as a truth
established by evidence that the categories are made up of the same
elements as our sensual representations, they are not obliged to
impoverish them systematically, to draw from them all their real
content, and to reduce them to nothing more than verbal artifices. On
the contrary, they leave them all their specific characteristics. The
apriorists are the rationalists; they believe that the world has a
logical aspect which the reason expresses excellently. But for all that,
it is necessary for them to give the mind a certain power of
transcending experience and of adding to that which is given to it
directly; and of this singular power they give neither explanation nor
justification. For it is no explanation to say that it is inherent in
the nature of the human intellect. It is necessary to show whence we
hold this surprising prerogative and how it comes that we can see
certain relations in things which the examination of these things cannot
reveal to us. Saying that only on this condition is experience itself
possible changes the problem perhaps, but does not answer it. For the
real question is to know how it comes that experience is not sufficient
unto itself, but presupposes certain conditions which are exterior and
prior to it, and how it happens that these conditions are realized at
the moment and in the manner that is desirable. To answer these
questions it has sometimes been assumed that above the reason of
individuals there is a superior and perfect reason from which the others
emanate and from which they get this marvellous power of theirs, by a
sort of mystic participation: this is the divine reason. But this
hypothesis has at least the one grave disadvantage of being deprived of
all experimental control; thus it does not satisfy the conditions
demanded of a scientific hypothesis. More than that, the categories of
human thought are never fixed in any one definite form; they are made,
unmade and remade incessantly; they change with places and times. On the
other hand, the divine reason is immutable. How can this immutability
give rise to this incessant variability?
Such are the two conceptions that have been pitted against each other
for centuries; and if this debate seems to be eternal, it is because the
arguments given are really about equivalent. If reason is only a form of
individual experience, it no longer exists. On the other hand, if the
powers which it has are recognized but not accounted for, it seems to be
set outside the confines of nature and science. In the face of these two
opposed objections the mind remains uncertain. But if the social origin
of the categories is admitted, a new attitude becomes possible, which we
believe will enable us to escape both of the opposed difficulties.
The fundamental proposition of the apriorist theory is that knowledge is
made up of two sorts of elements, which cannot be reduced into one
another, and which are like two distinct layers superimposed one upon
the other.[16] Our hypothesis keeps this principle intact. In fact, that
knowledge which is called empirical, the only knowledge of which the
theorists of empiricism have made use in constructing the reason, is
that which is brought into our minds by the direct action of objects. It
is composed of individual states which are completely explained[17] by
the psychical nature of the individual. If, on the other hand, the
categories are, as we believe they are, essentially collective
representations, before all else, they should show the mental states of
the group; they should depend upon the way in which this is founded and
organized, upon its morphology, upon its religious, moral and economic
institutions, etc. So between these two sorts of representations there
is all the difference which exists between the individual and the
social, and one can no more derive the second from the first than he can
deduce society from the individual, the whole from the part, the complex
from the simple.[18] Society is a reality _sui generis_; it has its own
peculiar characteristics, which are not found elsewhere and which are
not met with again in the same form in all the rest of the universe. The
representations which express it have a wholly different contents from
purely individual ones and we may rest assured in advance that the first
add something to the second.
Even the manner in which the two are formed results in differentiating
them. Collective representations are the result of an immense
co-operation, which stretches out not only into space but into time as
well; to make them, a multitude of minds have associated, united and
combined their ideas and sentiments; for them, long generations have
accumulated their experience and their knowledge. A special intellectual
activity is therefore concentrated in them which is infinitely richer
and complexer than that of the individual. From that one can understand
how the reason has been able to go beyond the limits of empirical
knowledge. It does not owe this to any vague mysterious virtue but
simply to the fact that according to the well-known formula, man is
double. There are two beings in him: an individual being which has its
foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is
therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the
highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by
observation--I mean society. This duality of our nature has as its
consequence in the practical order, the irreducibility of a moral ideal
to a utilitarian motive, and in the order of thought, the irreducibility
of reason to individual experience. In so far as he belongs to society,
the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he
acts.
This same social character leads to an understanding of the origin of
the necessity of the categories. It is said that an idea is necessary
when it imposes itself upon the mind by some sort of virtue of its own,
without being accompanied by any proof. It contains within it something
which constrains the intelligence and which leads to its acceptance
without preliminary examination. The apriorist postulates this singular
quality, but does not account for it; for saying that the categories are
necessary because they are indispensable to the functioning of the
intellect is simply repeating that they are necessary. But if they
really have the origin which we attribute to them, their ascendancy no
longer has anything surprising in it. They represent the most general
relations which exist between things; surpassing all our other ideas in
extension, they dominate all the details of our intellectual life. If
men did not agree upon these essential ideas at every moment, if they
did not have the same conception of time, space, cause, number, etc.,
all contact between their minds would be impossible, and with that, all
life together. Thus society could not abandon the categories to the free
choice of the individual without abandoning itself. If it is to live
there is not merely need of a satisfactory moral conformity, but also
there is a minimum of logical conformity beyond which it cannot safely
go. For this reason it uses all its authority upon its members to
forestall such dissidences. Does a mind ostensibly free itself from
these forms of thought? It is no longer considered a human mind in the
full sense of the word, and is treated accordingly. That is why we feel
that we are no longer completely free and that something resists, both
within and outside ourselves, when we attempt to rid ourselves of these
fundamental notions, even in our own conscience. Outside of us there is
public opinion which judges us; but more than that, since society is
also represented inside of us, it sets itself against these
revolutionary fancies, even inside of ourselves; we have the feeling
that we cannot abandon them if our whole thought is not to cease being
really human. This seems to be the origin of the exceptional authority
which is inherent in the reason and which makes us accept its
suggestions with confidence. It is the very authority of society,[19]
transferring itself to a certain manner of thought which is the
indispensable condition of all common action. The necessity with which
the categories are imposed upon us is not the effect of simple habits
whose yoke we could easily throw off with a little effort; nor is it a
physical or metaphysical necessity, since the categories change in
different places and times; it is a special sort of moral necessity
which is to the intellectual life what moral obligation is to the
will.[20]
But if the categories originally only translate social states, does it
not follow that they can be applied to the rest of nature only as
metaphors? If they were made merely to express social conditions, it
seems as though they could not be extended to other realms except in
this sense. Thus in so far as they aid us in thinking of the physical or
biological world, they have only the value of artificial symbols, useful
practically perhaps, but having no connection with reality. Thus we come
back, by a different road, to nominalism and empiricism.
But when we interpret a sociological theory of knowledge in this way, we
forget that even if society is a specific reality it is not an empire
within an empire; it is a part of nature, and indeed its highest
representation. The social realm is a natural realm which differs from
the others only by a greater complexity. Now it is impossible that
nature should differ radically from itself in the one case and the other
in regard to that which is most essential. The fundamental relations
that exist between things--just that which it is the function of the
categories to express--cannot be essentially dissimilar in the different
realms. If, for reasons which we shall discuss later,[21] they are more
clearly disengaged in the social world, it is nevertheless impossible
that they should not be found elsewhere, though in less pronounced
forms. Society makes them more manifest but it does not have a monopoly
upon them. That is why ideas which have been elaborated on the model of
social things can aid us in thinking of another department of nature. It
is at least true that if these ideas play the rôle of symbols when they
are thus turned aside from their original signification, they are
well-founded symbols. If a sort of artificiality enters into them from
the mere fact that they are constructed concepts, it is an
artificiality which follows nature very closely and which is constantly
approaching it still more closely.[22] From the fact that the ideas of
time, space, class, cause or personality are constructed out of social
elements, it is not necessary to conclude that they are devoid of all
objective value. On the contrary, their social origin rather leads to
the belief that they are not without foundation in the nature of
things.[23]
Thus renovated, the theory of knowledge seems destined to unite the
opposing advantages of the two rival theories, without incurring their
inconveniences. It keeps all the essential principles of the apriorists;
but at the same time it is inspired by that positive spirit which the
empiricists have striven to satisfy. It leaves the reason its specific
power, but it accounts for it and does so without leaving the world of
observable phenomena. It affirms the duality of our intellectual life,
but it explains it, and with natural causes. The categories are no
longer considered as primary and unanalysable facts, yet they keep a
complexity which falsifies any analysis as ready as that with which the
empiricists content themselves. They no longer appear as very simple
notions which the first comer can very easily arrange from his own
personal observations and which the popular imagination has unluckily
complicated, but rather they appear as priceless instruments of thought
which the human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries and
where they have accumulated the best of their intellectual capital.[24]
A complete section of the history of humanity is resumed therein. This
is equivalent to saying that to succeed in understanding them and
judging them, it is necessary to resort to other means than those which
have been in use up to the present. To know what these conceptions which
we have not made ourselves are really made of, it does not suffice to
interrogate our own consciousnesses; we must look outside of ourselves,
it is history that we must observe, there is a whole science which must
be formed, a complex science which can advance but slowly and by
collective labour, and to which the present work brings some fragmentary
contributions in the nature of an attempt. Without making these
questions the direct object of our study, we shall profit by all the
occasions which present themselves to us of catching at their very birth
some at least of these ideas which, while being of religious origin,
still remain at the foundation of the human intelligence.
BOOK I
PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS
CHAPTER I
DEFINITION OF RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA AND OF RELIGION[25]
If we are going to look for the most primitive and simple religion which
we can observe, it is necessary to begin by defining what is meant by a
religion; for without this, we would run the risk of giving the name to
a system of ideas and practices which has nothing at all religious about
it, or else of leaving to one side many religious facts, without
perceiving their true nature. That this is not an imaginary danger, and
that nothing is thus sacrificed to a vain formalism of method, is well
shown by the fact that owing to his not having taken this precaution, a
certain scholar to whom the science of comparative religions owes a
great deal, Professor Frazer, has not been able to recognize the
profoundly religious character of the beliefs and rites which will be
studied below, where, according to our view, the initial germ of the
religious life of humanity is to be found. So this is a prejudicial
question, which must be treated before all others. It is not that we
dream of arriving at once at the profound characteristics which really
explain religion: these can be determined only at the end of our study.
But that which is necessary and possible, is to indicate a certain
number of external and easily recognizable signs, which will enable us
to recognize religious phenomena wherever they are met with, and which
will deter us from confounding them with others. We shall proceed to
this preliminary operation at once.
But to attain the desired results, it is necessary to begin by freeing
the mind of every preconceived idea. Men have been obliged to make for
themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of
religions started its methodical comparisons. The necessities of
existence force all of us, believers and non-believers, to represent in
some way these things in the midst of which we live, upon which we must
pass judgment constantly, and which we must take into account in all our
conduct. However, since these preconceived ideas are formed without any
method, according to the circumstances and chances of life, they have no
right to any credit whatsoever, and must be rigorously set aside in the
examination which is to follow. It is not from our prejudices, passions
or habits that we should demand the elements of the definition which we
must have; it is from the reality itself which we are going to define.
Let us set ourselves before this reality. Leaving aside all conceptions
of religion in general, let us consider the various religions in their
concrete reality, and attempt to disengage that which they have in
common; for religion cannot be defined except by the characteristics
which are found wherever religion itself is found. In this comparison,
then, we shall make use of all the religious systems which we can know,
those of the present and those of the past, the most primitive and
simple as well as the most recent and refined; for we have neither the
right nor the logical means of excluding some and retaining others. For
those who regard religion as only a natural manifestation of human
activity, all religions, without any exception whatsoever, are
instructive; for all, after their manner, express man, and thus can aid
us in better understanding this aspect of our nature. Also, we have seen
how far it is from being the best way of studying religion to consider
by preference the forms which it presents among the most civilized
peoples.[26]
But to aid the mind in freeing itself from these usual conceptions
which, owing to their prestige, might prevent it from seeing things as
they really are, it is fitting to examine some of the most current of
the definitions in which these prejudices are commonly expressed, before
taking up the question on our own account.
I
One idea which generally passes as characteristic of all that is
religious, is that of the supernatural. By this is understood all sorts
of things which surpass the limits of our knowledge; the supernatural
is the world of the mysterious, of the unknowable, of the
un-understandable. Thus religion would be a sort of speculation upon all
that which evades science or distinct thought in general. "Religions
diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas," said Spencer, "are
perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that the existence of the
world, with all it contains and all which surrounds it, is a mystery
calling for an explanation"; he thus makes them consist essentially in
"the belief in the omnipresence of something which is inscrutable."[27]
In the same manner, Max Müller sees in religion "a struggle to conceive
the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing after the
Infinite."[28]
It is certain that the sentiment of mystery has not been without a
considerable importance in certain religions, notably in Christianity.
It must also be said that the importance of this sentiment has varied
remarkably at different moments in the history of Christianity. There
are periods when this notion passes to an inferior place, and is even
effaced. For example, for the Christians of the seventeenth century,
dogma had nothing disturbing for the reason; faith reconciled itself
easily with science and philosophy, and the thinkers, such as Pascal,
who really felt that there is something profoundly obscure in things,
were so little in harmony with their age that they remained
misunderstood by their contemporaries.[29] It would appear somewhat
hasty, therefore, to make an idea subject to parallel eclipses, the
essential element of even the Christian religion.
In all events, it is certain that this idea does not appear until late
in the history of religions; it is completely foreign, not only to those
peoples who are called primitive, but also to all others who have not
attained a considerable degree of intellectual culture. When we see them
attribute extraordinary virtues to insignificant objects, and people the
universe with singular principles, made up of the most diverse elements
and endowed with a sort of ubiquity which is hardly representable, we
are undoubtedly prone to find an air of mystery in these conceptions. It
seems to us that these men would have been willing to resign themselves
to these ideas, so disturbing for our modern reason, only because of
their inability to find others which were more rational. But, as a
matter of fact, these explanations which surprise us so much, appear to
the primitive man as the simplest in the world. He does not regard them
as a sort of _ultima ratio_ to which the intellect resigns itself only
in despair of others, but rather as the most obvious manner of
representing and understanding what he sees about him. For him there is
nothing strange in the fact that by a mere word or gesture one is able
to command the elements, retard or precipitate the motion of the stars,
bring rain or cause it to cease, etc. The rites which he employs to
assure the fertility of the soil or the fecundity of the animal species
on which he is nourished do not appear more irrational to his eyes than
the technical processes of which our agriculturists make use, for the
same object, do to ours. The powers which he puts into play by these
diverse means do not seem to him to have anything especially mysterious
about them. Undoubtedly these forces are different from those which the
modern scientist thinks of, and whose use he teaches us; they have a
different way of acting, and do not allow themselves to be directed in
the same manner; but for those who believe in them, they are no more
unintelligible than are gravitation and electricity for the physicist of
to-day. Moreover, we shall see, in the course of this work, that the
idea of physical forces is very probably derived from that of religious
forces; then there cannot exist between the two the abyss which
separates the rational from the irrational. Even the fact that religious
forces are frequently conceived under the form of spiritual beings or
conscious wills, is no proof of their irrationality. The reason has no
repugnance _a priori_ to admitting that the so-called inanimate bodies
should be directed by intelligences, just as the human body is, though
contemporary science accommodates itself with difficulty to this
hypothesis. When Leibniz proposed to conceive the external world as an
immense society of minds, between which there were, and could be, only
spiritual relations, he thought he was working as a rationalist, and saw
nothing in this universal animism which could be offensive to the
intellect.
Moreover, the idea of the supernatural, as we understand it, dates only
from to-day; in fact, it presupposes the contrary idea, of which it is
the negation; but this idea is not at all primitive. In order to say
that certain things are supernatural, it is necessary to have the
sentiment that a _natural order of things_ exists, that is to say, that
the phenomena of the universe are bound together by necessary relations,
called laws. When this principle has once been admitted, all that is
contrary to these laws must necessarily appear to be outside of nature,
and consequently, of reason; for what is natural in this sense of the
word, is also rational, these necessary relations only expressing the
manner in which things are logically related. But this idea of universal
determinism is of recent origin; even the greatest thinkers of classical
antiquity never succeeded in becoming fully conscious of it. It is a
conquest of the positive sciences; it is the postulate upon which they
repose and which they have proved by their progress. Now as long as this
was lacking or insufficiently established, the most marvellous events
contained nothing which did not appear perfectly conceivable. So long as
men did not know the immutability and the inflexibility of the order of
things, and so long as they saw there the work of contingent wills, they
found it natural that either these wills or others could modify them
arbitrarily. That is why the miraculous interventions which the ancients
attributed to their gods were not to their eyes miracles in the modern
acceptation of the term. For them, they were beautiful, rare or terrible
spectacles, or causes of surprise and marvel ([Greek: thaúmata],
_mirabilia_, _miracula_); but they never saw in them glimpses of a
mysterious world into which the reason cannot penetrate.
We can understand this mentality the better since it has not yet
completely disappeared from our midst. If the principle of determinism
is solidly established to-day in the physical and natural sciences, it
is only a century ago that it was first introduced into the social
sciences, and its authority there is still contested. There are only a
small number of minds which are strongly penetrated with this idea that
societies are subject to natural laws and form a kingdom of nature. It
follows that veritable miracles are believed to be possible there. It is
admitted, for example, that a legislator can create an institution out
of nothing by a mere injunction of its will, or transform one social
system into another, just as the believers in so many religions have
held that the divine will created the world out of nothing, or can
arbitrarily transmute one thing into another. As far as social facts are
concerned, we still have the mentality of primitives. However, if so
many of our contemporaries still retain this antiquated conception for
sociological affairs, it is not because the life of societies appears
obscure and mysterious to them; on the contrary, if they are so easily
contented with these explanations, and if they are so obstinate in their
illusions which experience constantly belies, it is because social
events seem to them the clearest thing in the world; it is because they
have not yet realized their real obscurity; it is because they have not
yet recognized the necessity of resorting to the laborious methods of
the natural sciences to gradually scatter the darkness. The same state
of mind is found at the root of many religious beliefs which surprise us
by their pseudo-simplicity. It is science and not religion which has
taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
But the human mind, says Jevons,[30] has no need of a properly
scientific culture to notice that determined sequences, or a constant
order of succession, exist between facts, or to observe, on the other
hand, that this order is frequently upset. It sometimes happens that the
sun is suddenly eclipsed, that rain fails at the time when it is
expected, that the moon is slow to reappear after its periodical
disappearance, etc. Since these events are outside the ordinary course
of affairs, they are attributed to extraordinary exceptional causes,
that is to say, in fine, to extra-natural causes. It is under this form
that the idea of the supernatural is born at the very outset of history,
and from this moment, according to this author, religious thought finds
itself provided with its proper subject.
But in the first place, the supernatural cannot be reduced to the
unforeseen. The new is a part of nature just as well as its contrary. If
we state that in general, phenomena succeed one another in a determined
order, we observe equally well that this order is only approximative,
that it is not always precisely the same, and that it has all kinds of
exceptions. If we have ever so little experience, we are accustomed to
seeing our expectations fail, and these deceptions return too often to
appear extraordinary to us. A certain contingency is taught by
experience just as well as a certain uniformity; then we have no reason
for assigning the one to causes and forces entirely different from those
upon which the other depends. In order to arrive at the idea of the
supernatural, it is not enough, therefore, to be witnesses to unexpected
events; it is also necessary that these be conceived as impossible, that
is to say, irreconcilable with an order which, rightly or wrongly,
appears to us to be implied in the nature of things. Now this idea of a
necessary order has been constructed little by little by the positive
sciences, and consequently the contrary notion could not have existed
before them.
Also, in whatever manner men have represented the novelties and
contingencies revealed by experience, there is nothing in these
representations which could serve to characterize religion. For
religious conceptions have as their object, before everything else, to
express and explain, not that which is exceptional and abnormal in
things, but, on the contrary, that which is constant and regular. Very
frequently, the gods serve less to account for the monstrosities,
fantasies and anomalies than for the regular march of the universe, for
the movement of the stars, the rhythm of the seasons, the annual growth
of vegetation, the perpetuation of species, etc. It is far from being
true, then, that the notion of the religions coincides with that of the
extraordinary or the unforeseen. Jevons replies that this conception of
religious forces is not primitive. Men commenced by imagining them to
account for disorders and accidents, and it was only afterwards that
they began to utilize them in explaining the uniformities of
nature.[31] But it is not clear what could have led men to attribute
such manifestly contradictory functions to them. More than that, the
hypothesis according to which sacred beings were at first restricted to
the negative function of disturbers is quite arbitrary. In fact, we
shall see that, even with the most simple religions we know, their
essential task is to maintain, in a positive manner, the normal course
of life.[32]
So the idea of mystery is not of primitive origin. It was not given to
man; it is man who has forged it, with his own hands, along with the
contrary idea. This is why it has a place only in a very small number of
advanced religions. It is impossible to make it the characteristic mark
of religious phenomena without excluding from the definition the
majority of the facts to be defined.
II
Another idea by which the attempt to define religion is often made, is
that of divinity. "Religion," says M. Réville,[33] "is the determination
of human life by the sentiment of a bond uniting the human mind to that
mysterious mind whose domination of the world and itself it recognizes,
and to whom it delights in feeling itself united." It is certain that if
the word divinity is taken in a precise and narrow sense, this
definition leaves aside a multitude of obviously religious facts. The
souls of the dead and the spirits of all ranks and classes with which
the religious imagination of so many different peoples has populated
nature, are always the object of rites and sometimes even of a regular
cult; yet they are not gods in the proper sense of the term. But in
order that the definition may embrace them, it is enough to substitute
for the term "gods" the more comprehensive one of "spiritual beings."
This is what Tylor does. "The first requisite in a systematic study of
the religions of the lower races," he says, "is to lay down a
rudimentary definition of religion. By requiring in this definition the
belief in a supreme deity ..., no doubt many tribes may be excluded from
the category of religious. But such narrow definition has the fault of
identifying religion rather with particular developments.... It seems
best ... simply to claim as a minimum definition of Religion, the belief
in Spiritual Beings."[34] By spiritual beings must be understood
conscious subjects gifted with powers superior to those possessed by
common men; this qualification is found in the souls of the dead,
geniuses or demons as well as in divinities properly so-called. It is
important, therefore, to give our attention at once to the particular
conception of religion which is implied in this definition. The
relations which we can have with beings of this sort are determined by
the nature attributed to them. They are conscious beings; then we can
act upon them only in the same way that we act upon consciousnesses in
general, that is to say, by psychological processes, attempting to
convince them or move them, either with the aid of words (invocations,
prayers), or by offerings and sacrifices. And since the object of
religion is to regulate our relations with these special beings, there
can be no religion except where there are prayers, sacrifices,
propitiatory rites, etc. Thus we have a very simple criterium which
permits us to distinguish that which is religious from that which is
not. It is to this criterium that Frazer,[35] and with him numerous
ethnographers,[36] systematically makes reference.
But howsoever evident this definition may appear, thanks to the mental
habits which we owe to our religious education, there are many facts to
which it is not applicable, but which appertain to the field of religion
nevertheless.
In the first place, there are great religions from which the idea of
gods and spirits is absent, or at least, where it plays only a secondary
and minor rôle. This is the case with Buddhism. Buddhism, says Burnouf,
"sets itself in opposition to Brahmanism as a moral system without god
and an atheism without Nature."[37] "As it recognizes not a god upon
whom man depends," says Barth, "its doctrine is absolutely
atheistic,"[38] while Oldenberg, in his turn, calls it "a faith without
a god."[39] In fact, all that is essential to Buddhism is found in the
four propositions which the faithful call the four noble truths.[40] The
first states the existence of suffering as the accompaniment to the
perpetual change of things; the second shows desire to be the cause of
suffering; the third makes the suppression of desire the only means of
suppressing sorrow; the fourth enumerates the three stages through which
one must pass to attain this suppression: they are uprightness,
meditation, and finally wisdom, the full possession of the doctrine.
These three stages once traversed, one arrives at the end of the road,
at the deliverance, at salvation by the Nirvâna.
Now in none of these principles is there question of a divinity. The
Buddhist is not interested in knowing whence came the world in which he
lives and suffers; he takes it as a given fact,[41] and his whole
concern is to escape it. On the other hand, in this work of salvation,
he can count only upon himself; "he has no god to thank, as he had
previously no god to invoke during his struggle."[42] Instead of
praying, in the ordinary sense of the term, instead of turning towards a
superior being and imploring his assistance, he relies upon himself and
meditates. This is not saying "that he absolutely denies the existence
of the beings called Indra, Agni and Varuna;[43] but he believes that he
owes them nothing and that he has nothing to do with them," for their
power can only extend over the goods of this world, which are without
value for him. Then he is an atheist, in the sense that he does not
concern himself with the question whether gods exist or not. Besides,
even if they should exist, and with whatever powers they might be armed,
the saint or the emancipated man regards himself superior to them; for
that which causes the dignity of beings is not the extent of the action
they exercise over things, but merely the degree of their advancement
upon the road of salvation.[44]
It is true that Buddha, at least in some divisions of the Buddhist
Church, has sometimes been considered as a sort of god. He has his
temples; he is the object of a cult, which, by the way, is a very simple
one, for it is reduced essentially to the offering of flowers and the
adoration of consecrated relics or images. It is scarcely more than a
commemorative cult. But more than that, this divinization of Buddha,
granting that the term is exact, is peculiar to the form known as
Northern Buddhism. "The Buddhist of the South," says Kern, "and the less
advanced of the Northern Buddhists can be said, according to data known
to-day, to speak of their founder as if he were a man."[45] Of course,
they attribute extraordinary powers to Buddha, which are superior to
those possessed by ordinary mortals; but it was a very ancient belief in
India, and one that is also very general in a host of different
religions, that a great saint is endowed with exceptional virtues;[46]
yet a saint is not a god, any more than a priest or magician is, in
spite of the superhuman faculties frequently attributed to them. On the
other hand, according to the most authorized scholars, all this theism
and the complicated mythology which generally accompanies it, are only
derived and deviated forms of Buddhism. At first, Buddha was only
regarded as "the wisest of men."[47] Burnouf says "the conception of a
Buddha who is something more than a man arrived at the highest stage of
holiness, is outside the circle of ideas which form the foundation of
the simple Sûtras";[48] and the same author adds elsewhere that "his
humanity is a fact so incontestably recognized by all that the
myth-makers, to whom miracles cost so little, have never even had the
idea of making a god out of him since his death."[49] So we may well ask
if he has ever really divested himself completely of all human
character, and if we have a right to make him into a god completely;[50]
in any case, it would have to be a god of a very particular character
and one whose rôle in no way resembles that of other divine
personalities. For a god is before all else a living being, with whom
man should reckon, and upon whom he may count; but Buddha is dead, he
has entered into the Nirvâna, and he can no longer influence the march
of human events.[51]
Finally, whatever one may think of the divinity of Buddha, it remains a
fact that this is a conception wholly outside the essential part of
Buddhism. Buddhism consists primarily in the idea of salvation, and
salvation supposes only that one know the good doctrine and practise it.
To be sure, this could never have been known if Buddha had not come to
reveal it; but when this revelation had once been made, the work of
Buddha was accomplished. From that moment he ceased to be a factor
necessary to the religious life. The practice of the four holy truths
would be possible, even if the memory of him who revealed them were
completely obliterated.[52] It is quite another matter with
Christianity, which is inconceivable without the ever-present idea of
Christ and his ever-practised cult; for it is by the ever-living Christ,
sacrificed each day, that the community of believers continues to
communicate with the supreme source of the spiritual life.[53]
All that precedes can be applied equally well to another great religion
of India, Jaïnism. The two doctrines have nearly the same conception of
the world and of life. "Like the Buddhists," says Barth, "the Jaïnas are
atheists. They admit of no creator; the world is eternal; they
explicitly deny the possibility of a perfect being from the beginning.
The Jina became perfect; he was not always so."
Just as the Buddhists in the north, the Jaïnists, or at least certain of
them, have come back to a sort of deism; in the inscriptions of Dekhan
there is mention of a _Jinapati_, a sort of supreme Jina, who is called
the primary creator; but such language, says the same author, is "in
contradiction to the most explicit declarations extracted from their
most authorized writings."[54]
Moreover, if this indifference for the divine is developed to such a
point in Buddhism and Jaïnism, it is because its germ existed already in
the Brahmanism from which the two were derived. In certain of its forms
at least, Brahmic speculation ended in "a frankly materialistic and
atheistic interpretation of the universe."[55] In time, the numerous
divinities which the people of India had originally learned to adore,
came to merge themselves into a sort of principal deity, impersonal and
abstract, the essence of all that exists. This supreme reality, which no
longer has anything of a divine personality about it, is contained
within man himself, or rather, man is but one with it, for nothing
exists apart from it. To find it, and unite himself to it, one does not
have to search some external support outside himself; it is enough to
concentrate upon himself and meditate. "If in Buddhism," says Oldenberg,
"the proud attempt be made to conceive a deliverance in which man
himself delivers himself, to create a faith without a god, it is
Brahmanical speculation which has prepared the way for this thought. It
thrusts back the idea of a god step by step; the forms of the old gods
have faded away, and besides the Brahma, which is enthroned in its
everlasting quietude, highly exalted above the destinies of the human
world, there is left remaining, as the sole really active person in the
great work of deliverance, man himself."[56] Here, then, we find a
considerable portion of religious evolution which has consisted in the
progressive recoil of the idea of a spiritual being from that of a
deity. Here are great religions where invocations, propitiations,
sacrifices and prayers properly so-called are far from holding a
preponderating place, and which consequently do not present that
distinctive sign by which some claim to recognize those manifestations
which are properly called religious.
But even within deistic religions there are many rites which are
completely independent of all idea of gods or spiritual beings. In the
first place, there are a multitude of interdictions. For example, the
Bible orders that a woman live isolated during a determined period each
month;[57] a similar isolation is obligatory during the lying-in at
child-birth;[58] it is forbidden to hitch an ass and a horse together,
or to wear a garment in which the hemp is mixed with flax;[59] but it is
impossible to see the part which belief in Jahveh can have played in
these interdictions, for he is wholly absent from all the relations thus
forbidden, and could not be interested in them. As much can be said for
the majority of the dietetic regulations. These prohibitions are not
peculiar to the Hebrews, but they are found under diverse forms, but
with substantially the same character, in innumerable religions.
It is true that these rites are purely negative, but they do not cease
being religious for that. Also there are others which demand active and
positive services of the faithful, but which are nevertheless of the
same nature. They work by themselves, and their efficacy depends upon no
divine power; they mechanically produce the effects which are the reason
for their existence. They do not consist either in prayers or offerings
addressed to a being upon whose goodwill the expected result depends;
this result is obtained by the automatic operation of the ritual. Such
is notably the case with the sacrifice of the Vedic religion. "The
sacrifice exercises a direct influence upon the celestial phenomena,"
says Bergaigne;[60] it is all-powerful of itself, and without any divine
influence. It is this, for example, which broke open the doors of the
cavern where the dawn was imprisoned and which made the light of day
burst forth.[61] In the same way there are special hymns which, by
their direct action, made the waters of heaven fall upon the earth, and
_even in spite of the gods_.[62] The practice of certain austerities has
the same power. More than that, "the sacrifice is so fully the origin of
things _par excellence_, that they have attributed to it not only the
origin of man, but even that of the gods.... Such a conception may well
appear strange. It is explained, however, as being one of the ultimate
consequences of the idea of the omnipotence of sacrifice."[63] Thus, in
the entire first part of his work, M. Bergaigne speaks only of
sacrifices, where divinities play no rôle whatsoever.
Nor is this fact peculiar to the Vedic religion, but is, on the
contrary, quite general. In every cult there are practices which act by
themselves, by a virtue which is their own, without the intervention of
any god between the individual who practises the rite and the end sought
after. When, in the so-called Feast of the Tabernacles, the Jew set the
air in motion by shaking willow branches in a certain rhythm, it was to
cause the wind to rise and the rain to fall; and it was believed that
the desired phenomenon would result automatically from the rite,
provided it were correctly performed.[64] This is the explanation of the
fundamental importance laid by nearly all cults upon the material
portion of the ceremonies. This religious formalism--very probably the
first form of legal formalism--comes from the fact that since the
formula to be pronounced and the movements to be made contain within
themselves the source of their efficacy, they would lose it if they did
not conform absolutely to the type consecrated by success.
Thus there are rites without gods, and even rites from which gods are
derived. All religious powers do not emanate from divine personalities,
and there are relations of cult which have other objects than uniting
man to a deity. Religion is more than the idea of gods or spirits, and
consequently cannot be defined exclusively in relation to these latter.
III
These definitions set aside, let us set ourselves before the problem.
First of all, let us remark that in all these formulæ it is the nature
of religion as a whole that they seek to express. They proceed as if it
were a sort of indivisible entity, while, as a matter of fact, it is
made up of parts; it is a more or less complex system of myths, dogmas,
rites and ceremonies. Now a whole cannot be defined except in relation
to its parts. It will be more methodical, then, to try to characterize
the various elementary phenomena of which all religions are made up,
before we attack the system produced by their union. This method is
imposed still more forcibly by the fact that there are religious
phenomena which belong to no determined religion. Such are those
phenomena which constitute the matter of folk-lore. In general, they are
the debris of passed religions, inorganized survivals; but there are
some which have been formed spontaneously under the influence of local
causes. In our European countries Christianity has forced itself to
absorb and assimilate them; it has given them a Christian colouring.
Nevertheless, there are many which have persisted up until a recent
date, or which still exist with a relative autonomy: celebrations of May
Day, the summer solstice or the carnival, beliefs relative to genii,
local demons, etc., are cases in point. If the religious character of
these facts is now diminishing, their religious importance is
nevertheless so great that they have enabled Mannhardt and his school to
revive the science of religions. A definition which did not take account
of them would not cover all that is religious.
Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental
categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and
consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action.
Between these two classes of facts there is all the difference which
separates thought from action.
The rites can be defined and distinguished from other human practices,
moral practices, for example, only by the special nature of their
object. A moral rule prescribes certain manners of acting to us, just as
a rite does, but which are addressed to a different class of objects. So
it is the object of the rite which must be characterized, if we are to
characterize the rite itself. Now it is in the beliefs that the special
nature of this object is expressed. It is possible to define the rite
only after we have defined the belief.
All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one
common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the
things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed
groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated
well enough by the words _profane_ and _sacred_ (_profane_, _sacré_).
This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that
is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of
religious thought; the beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are either
representations or systems of representations which express the nature
of sacred things, the virtues and powers which are attributed to them,
or their relations with each other and with profane things. But by
sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which
are called gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece
of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred. A rite can have
this character; in fact, the rite does not exist which does not have it
to a certain degree. There are words, expressions and formulæ which can
be pronounced only by the mouths of consecrated persons; there are
gestures and movements which everybody cannot perform. If the Vedic
sacrifice has had such an efficacy that, according to mythology, it was
the creator of the gods, and not merely a means of winning their favour,
it is because it possessed a virtue comparable to that of the most
sacred beings. The circle of sacred objects cannot be determined, then,
once for all. Its extent varies infinitely, according to the different
religions. That is how Buddhism is a religion: in default of gods, it
admits the existence of sacred things, namely, the four noble truths and
the practices derived from them.[65]
Up to the present we have confined ourselves to enumerating a certain
number of sacred things as examples: we must now show by what general
characteristics they are to be distinguished from profane things.
One might be tempted, first of all, to define them by the place they are
generally assigned in the hierarchy of things. They are naturally
considered superior in dignity and power to profane things, and
particularly to man, when he is only a man and has nothing sacred about
him. One thinks of himself as occupying an inferior and dependent
position in relation to them; and surely this conception is not without
some truth. Only there is nothing in it which is really characteristic
of the sacred. It is not enough that one thing be subordinated to
another for the second to be sacred in regard to the first. Slaves are
inferior to their masters, subjects to their king, soldiers to their
leaders, the miser to his gold, the man ambitious for power to the hands
which keep it from him; but if it is sometimes said of a man that he
makes a religion of those beings or things whose eminent value and
superiority to himself he thus recognizes, it is clear that in any case
the word is taken in a metaphorical sense, and that there is nothing in
these relations which is really religious.[66]
On the other hand, it must not be lost to view that there are sacred
things of every degree, and that there are some in relation to which a
man feels himself relatively at his ease. An amulet has a sacred
character, yet the respect which it inspires is nothing exceptional.
Even before his gods, a man is not always in such a marked state of
inferiority; for it very frequently happens that he exercises a
veritable physical constraint upon them to obtain what he desires. He
beats the fetich with which he is not contented, but only to reconcile
himself with it again, if in the end it shows itself more docile to the
wishes of its adorer.[67] To have rain, he throws stones into the spring
or sacred lake where the god of rain is thought to reside; he believes
that by this means he forces him to come out and show himself.[68]
Moreover, if it is true that man depends upon his gods, this dependence
is reciprocal. The gods also have need of man; without offerings and
sacrifices they would die. We shall even have occasion to show that this
dependence of the gods upon their worshippers is maintained even in the
most idealistic religions.
But if a purely hierarchic distinction is a criterium at once too
general and too imprecise, there is nothing left with which to
characterize the sacred in its relation to the profane except their
heterogeneity. However, this heterogeneity is sufficient to characterize
this classification of things and to distinguish it from all others,
because it is very particular: _it is absolute_. In all the history of
human thought there exists no other example of two categories of things
so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The
traditional opposition of good and bad is nothing beside this; for the
good and the bad are only two opposed species of the same class, namely
morals, just as sickness and health are two different aspects of the
same order of facts, life, while the sacred and the profane have always
and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes,
as two worlds between which there is nothing in common. The forces
which play in one are not simply those which are met with in the other,
but a little stronger; they are of a different sort. In different
religions, this opposition has been conceived in different ways. Here,
to separate these two sorts of things, it has seemed sufficient to
localize them in different parts of the physical universe; there, the
first have been put into an ideal and transcendental world, while the
material world is left in full possession of the others. But howsoever
much the forms of the contrast may vary,[69] the fact of the contrast is
universal.
This is not equivalent to saying that a being can never pass from one of
these worlds into the other: but the manner in which this passage is
effected, when it does take place, puts into relief the essential
duality of the two kingdoms. In fact, it implies a veritable
metamorphosis. This is notably demonstrated by the initiation rites,
such as they are practised by a multitude of peoples. This initiation is
a long series of ceremonies with the object of introducing the young man
into the religious life: for the first time, he leaves the purely
profane world where he passed his first infancy, and enters into the
world of sacred things. Now this change of state is thought of, not as a
simple and regular development of pre-existent germs, but as a
transformation _totius substantiae_--of the whole being. It is said that
at this moment the young man dies, that the person that he was ceases to
exist, and that another is instantly substituted for it. He is re-born
under a new form. Appropriate ceremonies are felt to bring about this
death and re-birth, which are not understood in a merely symbolic sense,
but are taken literally.[70] Does this not prove that between the
profane being which he was and the religious being which he becomes,
there is a break of continuity?
This heterogeneity is even so complete that it frequently degenerates
into a veritable antagonism. The two worlds are not only conceived of as
separate, but as even hostile and jealous rivals of each other. Since
men cannot fully belong to one except on condition of leaving the other
completely, they are exhorted to withdraw themselves completely from the
profane world, in order to lead an exclusively religious life. Hence
comes the monasticism which is artificially organized outside of and
apart from the natural environment in which the ordinary man leads the
life of this world, in a different one, closed to the first, and nearly
its contrary. Hence comes the mystic asceticism whose object is to root
out from man all the attachment for the profane world that remains in
him. From that come all the forms of religious suicide, the logical
working-out of this asceticism; for the only manner of fully escaping
the profane life is, after all, to forsake all life.
The opposition of these two classes manifests itself outwardly with a
visible sign by which we can easily recognize this very special
classification, wherever it exists. Since the idea of the sacred is
always and everywhere separated from the idea of the profane in the
thought of men, and since we picture a sort of logical chasm between the
two, the mind irresistibly refuses to allow the two corresponding things
to be confounded, or even to be merely put in contact with each other;
for such a promiscuity, or even too direct a contiguity, would
contradict too violently the dissociation of these ideas in the mind.
The sacred thing is _par excellence_ that which the profane should not
touch, and cannot touch with impunity. To be sure, this interdiction
cannot go so far as to make all communication between the two worlds
impossible; for if the profane could in no way enter into relations with
the sacred, this latter could be good for nothing. But, in addition to
the fact that this establishment of relations is always a delicate
operation in itself, demanding great precautions and a more or less
complicated initiation,[71] it is quite impossible, unless the profane
is to lose its specific characteristics and become sacred after a
fashion and to a certain degree itself. The two classes cannot even
approach each other and keep their own nature at the same time.
Thus we arrive at the first criterium of religious beliefs. Undoubtedly
there are secondary species within these two fundamental classes which,
in their turn, are more or less incompatible with each other.[72] But
the real characteristic of religious phenomena is that they always
suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe, known and knowable,
into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically
exclude each other. Sacred things are those which the interdictions
protect and isolate; profane things, those to which these interdictions
are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first.
Religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of
sacred things and the relations which they sustain, either with each
other or with profane things. Finally, rites are the rules of conduct
which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of
these sacred objects.
When a certain number of sacred things sustain relations of
co-ordination or subordination with each other in such a way as to form
a system having a certain unity, but which is not comprised within any
other system of the same sort, the totality of these beliefs and their
corresponding rites constitutes a religion. From this definition it is
seen that a religion is not necessarily contained within one sole and
single idea, and does not proceed from one unique principle which,
though varying according to the circumstances under which it is applied,
is nevertheless at bottom always the same: it is rather a whole made up
of distinct and relatively individualized parts. Each homogeneous group
of sacred things, or even each sacred thing of some importance,
constitutes a centre of organization about which gravitate a group of
beliefs and rites, or a particular cult; there is no religion, howsoever
unified it may be, which does not recognize a plurality of sacred
things. Even Christianity, at least in its Catholic form, admits, in
addition to the divine personality which, incidentally, is triple as
well as one, the Virgin, angels, saints, souls of the dead, etc. Thus a
religion cannot be reduced to one single cult generally, but father
consists in a system of cults, each endowed with a certain autonomy.
Also, this autonomy is variable. Sometimes they are arranged in a
hierarchy, and subordinated to some predominating cult, into which they
are finally absorbed; but sometimes, also, they are merely rearranged
and united. The religion which we are going to study will furnish us
with an example of just this latter sort of organization.
At the same time we find the explanation of how there can be groups of
religious phenomena which do not belong to any special religion; it is
because they have not been, or are no longer, a part of any religious
system. If, for some special reason, one of the cults of which we just
spoke happens to be maintained while the group of which it was a part
disappears, it survives only in a disintegrated condition. That is what
has happened to many agrarian cults which have survived themselves as
folk-lore. In certain cases, it is not even a cult, but a simple
ceremony or particular rite which persists in this way.[73]
Although this definition is only preliminary, it permits us to see in
what terms the problem which necessarily dominates the science of
religions should be stated. When we believed that sacred beings could be
distinguished from others merely by the greater intensity of the powers
attributed to them, the question of how men came to imagine them was
sufficiently simple: it was enough to demand which forces had, because
of their exceptional energy, been able to strike the human imagination
forcefully enough to inspire religious sentiments. But if, as we have
sought to establish, sacred things differ in nature from profane things,
if they have a wholly different essence, then the problem is more
complex. For we must first of all ask what has been able to lead men to
see in the world two heterogeneous and incompatible worlds, though
nothing sensible experience seems able to suggest the idea of so radical
a duality to them.
IV
However, this definition is not yet complete, for it is equally
applicable to two sorts of facts which, while being related to each
other, must be distinguished nevertheless: these are magic and religion.
Magic, too, is made up of beliefs and rites. Like religion, it has its
myths and its dogmas; only they are more elementary, undoubtedly
because, seeking technical and utilitarian ends, it does not waste its
time in pure speculation. It has its ceremonies, sacrifices,
lustrations, prayers, chants and dances as well. The beings which the
magician invokes and the forces which he throws in play are not merely
of the same nature as the forces and beings to which religion addresses
itself; very frequently, they are identically the same. Thus, even with
the most inferior societies, the souls of the dead are essentially
sacred things, and the object of religious rites. But at the same time,
they play a considerable rôle in magic. In Australia[74] as well as in
Melanesia,[75] in Greece as well as among the Christian peoples,[76] the
souls of the dead, their bones and their hair, are among the
intermediaries used the most frequently by the magician. Demons are also
a common instrument for magic action. Now these demons are also beings
surrounded with interdictions; they too are separated and live in a
world apart, so that it is frequently difficult to distinguish them
from the gods properly so-called.[77] Moreover, in Christianity itself,
is not the devil a fallen god, or even leaving aside all question of his
origin, does he not have a religious character from the mere fact that
the hell of which he has charge is something indispensable to the
Christian religion? There are even some regular and official deities who
are invoked by the magician. Sometimes these are the gods of a foreign
people; for example, Greek magicians called upon Egyptian, Assyrian or
Jewish gods. Sometimes, they are even national gods: Hecate and Diana
were the object of a magic cult; the Virgin, Christ and the saints have
been utilized in the same way by Christian magicians.[78]
Then will it be necessary to say that magic is hardly distinguishable
from religion; that magic is full of religion just as religion is full
of magic, and consequently that it is impossible to separate them and to
define the one without the other? It is difficult to sustain this
thesis, because of the marked repugnance of religion for magic, and in
return, the hostility of the second towards the first. Magic takes a
sort of professional pleasure in profaning holy things;[79] in its
rites, it performs the contrary of the religious ceremony.[80] On its
side, religion, when it has not condemned and prohibited magic rites,
has always looked upon them with disfavour. As Hubert and Mauss have
remarked, there is something thoroughly anti-religious in the doings of
the magician.[81] Whatever relations there may be between these two
sorts of institutions, it is difficult to imagine their not being
opposed somewhere; and it is still more necessary for us to find where
they are differentiated, as we plan to limit our researches to religion,
and to stop at the point where magic commences.
Here is how a line of demarcation can be traced between these two
domains.
The really religious beliefs are always common to a determined group,
which makes profession of adhering to them and of practising the rites
connected with them. They are not merely received individually by all
the members of this group; they are something belonging to the group,
and they make its unity. The individuals which compose it feel
themselves united to each other by the simple fact that they have a
common faith. A society whose members are united by the fact that they
think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations
with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common
ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history,
we do not find a single religion without a Church. Sometimes the Church
is strictly national, sometimes it passes the frontiers; sometimes it
embraces an entire people (Rome, Athens, the Hebrews), sometimes it
embraces only a part of them (the Christian societies since the advent
of Protestantism); sometimes it is directed by a corps of priests,
sometimes it is almost completely devoid of any official directing
body.[82] But wherever we observe the religious life, we find that it
has a definite group as its foundation. Even the so-called private
cults, such as the domestic cult or the cult of a corporation, satisfy
this condition; for they are always celebrated by a group, the family or
the corporation. Moreover, even these particular religions are
ordinarily only special forms of a more general religion which embraces
all;[83] these restricted Churches are in reality only chapels of a
vaster Church which, by reason of this very extent, merits this name
still more.[84]
It is quite another matter with magic. To be sure, the belief in magic
is always more or less general; it is very frequently diffused in large
masses of the population, and there are even peoples where it has as
many adherents as the real religion. But it does not result in binding
together those who adhere to it, nor in uniting them into a group
leading a common life. _There is no Church of magic._ Between the
magician and the individuals who consult him, as between these
individuals themselves, there are no lasting bonds which make them
members of the same moral community, comparable to that formed by the
believers in the same god or the observers of the same cult. The
magician has a clientele and not a Church, and it is very possible that
his clients have no other relations between each other, or even do not
know each other; even the relations which they have with him are
generally accidental and transient; they are just like those of a sick
man with his physician. The official and public character with which he
is sometimes invested changes nothing in this situation; the fact that
he works openly does not unite him more regularly or more durably to
those who have recourse to his services.
It is true that in certain cases, magicians form societies among
themselves: it happens that they assemble more or less periodically to
celebrate certain rites in common; it is well known what a place these
assemblies of witches hold in European folk-lore. But it is to be
remarked that these associations are in no way indispensable to the
working of the magic; they are even rare and rather exceptional. The
magician has no need of uniting himself to his fellows to practise his
art. More frequently, he is a recluse; in general, far from seeking
society, he flees it. "Even in regard to his colleagues, he always keeps
his personal independence."[85] Religion, on the other hand, is
inseparable from the idea of a Church. From this point of view, there is
an essential difference between magic and religion. But what is
especially important is that when these societies of magic are formed,
they do not include all the adherents to magic, but only the magicians;
the laymen, if they may be so called, that is to say, those for whose
profit the rites are celebrated, in fine, those who represent the
worshippers in the regular cults, are excluded. Now the magician is for
magic what the priest is for religion, but a college of priests is not a
Church, any more than a religious congregation which should devote
itself to some particular saint in the shadow of a cloister, would be a
particular cult. A Church is not a fraternity of priests; it is a moral
community formed by all the believers in a single faith, laymen as well
as priests. But magic lacks any such community.[86]
But if the idea of a Church is made to enter into the definition of
religion, does that not exclude the private religions which the
individual establishes for himself and celebrates by himself? There is
scarcely a society where these are not found. Every Ojibway, as we shall
see below, has his own personal _manitou_, which he chooses himself and
to which he renders special religious services; the Melanesian of the
Banks Islands has his _tamaniu_;[87] the Roman, his _genius_;[88] the
Christian, his patron saint and guardian angel, etc. By definition all
these cults seem to be independent of all idea of the group. Not only
are these individual religions very frequent in history, but nowadays
many are asking if they are not destined to be the pre-eminent form of
the religious life, and if the day will not come when there will be no
other cult than that which each man will freely perform within
himself.[89]
But if we leave these speculations in regard to the future aside for the
moment, and confine ourselves to religions such as they are at present
or have been in the past, it becomes clearly evident that these
individual cults are not distinct and autonomous religious systems, but
merely aspects of the common religion of the whole Church, of which the
individuals are members. The patron saint of the Christian is chosen
from the official list of saints recognized by the Catholic Church;
there are even canonical rules prescribing how each Catholic should
perform this private cult. In the same way, the idea that each man
necessarily has a protecting genius is found, under different forms, at
the basis of a great number of American religions, as well as of the
Roman religion (to cite only these two examples); for, as will be seen
later, it is very closely connected with the idea of the soul, and this
idea of the soul is not one of those which can be left entirely to
individual choice. In a word, it is the Church of which he is a member
which teaches the individual what these personal gods are, what their
function is, how he should enter into relations with them and how he
should honour them. When a methodical analysis is made of the doctrines
of any Church whatsoever, sooner or later we come upon those concerning
private cults. So these are not two religions of different types, and
turned in opposite directions; both are made up of the same ideas and
the same principles, here applied to circumstances which are of interest
to the group as a whole, there to the life of the individual. This
solidarity is even so close that among certain peoples,[90] the
ceremonies by which the faithful first enter into communication with
their protecting geniuses are mixed with rites whose public character is
incontestable, namely the rites of initiation.[91]
There still remain those contemporary aspirations towards a religion
which would consist entirely in internal and subjective states, and
which would be constructed freely by each of us. But howsoever real
these aspirations may be, they cannot affect our definition, for this is
to be applied only to facts already realized, and not to uncertain
possibilities. One can define religions such as they are, or such as
they have been, but not such as they more or less vaguely tend to
become. It is possible that this religious individualism is destined to
be realized in facts; but before we can say just how far this may be the
case, we must first know what religion is, of what elements it is made
up, from what causes it results, and what function it fulfils--all
questions whose solution cannot be foreseen before the threshold of our
study has been passed. It is only at the close of this study that we can
attempt to anticipate the future.
Thus we arrive at the following definition: _A religion is a unified
system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to
say, things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite
into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to
them._ The second element which thus finds a place in our definition is
no less essential than the first; for by showing that the idea of
religion is inseparable from that of the Church, it makes it clear that
religion should be an eminently collective thing.[92]
CHAPTER II
LEADING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ELEMENTARY RELIGION
I.--_Animism_
Armed with this definition, we are now able to set out in search of this
elementary religion which we propose to study.
Even the crudest religions with which history and ethnology make us
acquainted are already of a complexity which corresponds badly with the
idea sometimes held of primitive mentality. One finds there not only a
confused system of beliefs and rites, but also such a plurality of
different principles, and such a richness of essential notions, that it
seems impossible to see in them anything but the late product of a
rather long evolution. Hence it has been concluded that to discover the
truly original form of the religious life, it is necessary to descend by
analysis beyond these observable religions, to resolve them into their
common and fundamental elements, and then to seek among these latter
some one from which the others were derived.
To the problem thus stated, two contrary solutions have been given.
There is no religious system, ancient or recent, where one does not
meet, under different forms, two religions, as it were, side by side,
which, though being united closely and mutually penetrating each other,
do not cease, nevertheless, to be distinct. The one addresses itself to
the phenomena of nature, either the great cosmic forces, such as winds,
rivers, stars or the sky, etc., or else the objects of various sorts
which cover the surface of the earth, such as plants, animals, rocks,
etc.; for this reason it has been given the name of _naturism_. The
other has spiritual beings as its object, spirits, souls, geniuses,
demons, divinities properly so-called, animated and conscious agents
like man, but distinguished from him, nevertheless, by the nature of
their powers and especially by the peculiar characteristic that they do
not affect the senses in the same way: ordinarily they are not visible
to human eyes. This religion of spirits is called _animism_. Now, to
explain the universal co-existence of these two sorts of cults, two
contradictory theories have been proposed. For some, animism is the
primitive religion, of which naturism is only a secondary and derived
form. For the others, on the contrary, it is the nature cult which was
the point of departure for religious evolution; the cult of spirits is
only a peculiar case of that.
These two theories are, up to the present, the only ones by which the
attempt has been made to explain rationally[93] the origins of religious
thought. Thus the capital problem raised by the history of religions is
generally reduced to asking which of these two solutions should be
chosen, or whether it is not better to combine them, and in that case,
what place must be given to each of the two elements.[94] Even those
scholars who do not admit either of these hypotheses in their systematic
form, do not refuse to retain certain propositions upon which they
rest.[95] Thus we have a certain number of theories already made, which
must be submitted to criticism before we take up the study of the facts
for ourselves. It will be better understood how indispensable it is to
attempt a new one, when we have seen the insufficiency of these
traditional conceptions.
I
It is Tylor who formed the animist theory in its essential outlines.[96]
Spencer, who took it up after him, did not reproduce it without
introducing certain modifications.[97] But in general the questions are
posed by each in the same terms, and the solutions accepted are, with a
single exception, identically the same. Therefore we can unite these two
doctrines in the exposition which follows, if we mark, at the proper
moment, the place where the two diverge from one another.
In order to find the elementary form of the religious life in these
animistic beliefs and practices, three _desiderata_ must be satisfied:
first, since according to this hypothesis, the idea of the soul is the
cardinal idea of religion, it must be shown how this is formed without
taking any of its elements from an anterior religion; secondly, it must
be made clear how souls become the object of a cult and are transformed
into spirits; and thirdly and finally, since the cult of these spirits
is not all of any religion, it remains to be explained how the cult of
nature is derived from it.
According to this theory, the idea of the soul was first suggested to
men by the badly understood spectacle of the double life they ordinarily
lead, on the one hand, when awake, on the other, when asleep. In fact,
for the savage,[98] the mental representations which he has while awake
and those of his dreams are said to be of the same value: he objectifies
the second like the first, that is to say, that he sees in them the
images of external objects whose appearance they more or less accurately
reproduce. So when he dreams that he has visited a distant country, he
believes that he really was there. But he could not have gone there,
unless two beings exist within him: the one, his body, which has
remained lying on the ground and which he finds in the same position on
awakening; the other, during this time, has travelled through space.
Similarly, if he seems to talk with one of his companions who he knows
was really at a distance, he concludes that the other also is composed
of two beings: one which sleeps at a distance, and another which has
come to manifest himself by means of the dream. From these repeated
experiences, he little by little arrives at the idea that each of us has
a double, another self, which in determined conditions has the power of
leaving the organism where it resides and of going roaming at a
distance.
Of course, this double reproduces all the essential traits of the
perceptible being which serves it as external covering; but at the same
time it is distinguished from this by many characteristics. It is more
active, since it can cover vast distances in an instant. It is more
malleable and plastic; for, to leave the body, it must pass out by its
apertures, especially the mouth and nose. It is represented as made of
matter, undoubtedly, but of a matter much more subtile and etherial than
any which we know empirically. This double is the soul. In fact, it
cannot be doubted that in numerous societies the soul has been conceived
in the image of the body; it is believed that it reproduces even the
accidental deformities such as those resulting from wounds or
mutilations. Certain Australians, after having killed their enemy, cut
off his right thumb, so that his soul, deprived of its thumb also,
cannot throw a javelin and revenge itself. But while it resembles the
body, it has, at the same time, something half spiritual about it. They
say that "it is the finer or more aeriform part of the body," that "it
has no flesh nor bone nor sinew"; that when one wishes to take hold of
it, he feels nothing; that it is "like a purified body."[99]
Also, other facts of experience which affect the mind in the same way
naturally group themselves around this fundamental fact taught by the
dream: fainting, apoplexy, catalepsy, ecstasy, in a word, all cases of
temporary insensibility. In fact, they all are explained very well by
the hypothesis that the principle of life and feeling is able to leave
the body momentarily. Also, it is natural that this principle should be
confounded with the double, since the absence of the double during sleep
daily has the effect of suspending thought and life. Thus diverse
observations seem to agree mutually and to confirm the idea of the
constitutional duality of man.[100]
But the soul is not a spirit. It is attached to a body which it can
leave only by exception; in so far as it is nothing more than that, it
is not the object of any cult. The spirit, on the other hand, though
generally having some special thing as its residence, can go away at
will, and a man can enter into relations with it only by observing
ritual precautions. The soul can become a spirit, then, only by
transforming itself: the simple application of these preceding ideas to
the fact of death produced this metamorphosis quite naturally. For a
rudimentary intelligence, in fact, death is not distinguished from a
long fainting swoon or a prolonged sleep; it has all their aspects. Thus
it seems that it too consists in a separation of the soul and the body,
analogous to that produced every night; but as in such cases, the body
is not reanimated, the idea is formed of a separation without an
assignable limit of time. When the body is once destroyed--and funeral
rites have the object of hastening this destruction--the separation is
taken as final. Hence come spirits detached from any organism and left
free in space. As their number augments with time, a population of
souls forms around the living population. These souls of men have the
needs and passions of men; they seek to concern themselves with the life
of their companions of yesterday, either to aid them or to injure them,
according to the sentiments which they have kept towards them. According
to the circumstances, their nature makes them either very precious
auxiliaries or very redoubtable adversaries. Owing to their extreme
fluidity, they can even enter into the body, and cause all sorts of
disorders there, or else increase its vitality. Thus comes the habit of
attributing to them all those events of life which vary slightly from
the ordinary: there are very few of these for which they cannot account.
Thus they constitute a sort of ever-ready supply of causes which never
leaves one at a loss when in search of explanations. Does a man appear
inspired, does he speak with energy, is it as though he were lifted
outside himself and above the ordinary level of men? It is because a
good spirit is in him and animates him. Is he overtaken by an attack or
seized by madness? It is because an evil spirit has entered into him and
brought him all this trouble. There are no maladies which cannot be
assigned to some influence of this sort. Thus the power of souls is
increased by all that men attribute to them, and in the end men find
themselves the prisoners of this imaginary world of which they are,
however, the authors and the models. They fall into dependence upon
these spiritual forces which they have created with their own hands and
in their own image. For if souls are the givers of health and sickness,
of goods and evils to this extent, it is wise to conciliate their favour
or appease them when they are irritated; hence come the offerings,
prayers, sacrifices, in a word, all the apparatus of religious
observances.[101]
Here is the soul transformed. From a simple vital principle animating
the body of a man, it has become a spirit, a good or evil genius, or
even a deity, according to the importance of the effects with which it
is charged. But since it is death which brought about this apotheosis,
it is to the dead, to the souls of ancestors, that the first cult known
to humanity was addressed. Thus the first rites were funeral rites; the
first sacrifices were food offerings destined to satisfy the needs of
the departed; the first altars were tombs.[102]
But since these spirits were of human origin, they interested themselves
only in the life of men and were thought to act only upon human events.
It is still to be explained how other spirits were imagined to account
for the other phenomena of the universe and how the cult of nature was
subsequently formed beside that of the ancestors.
For Tylor, this extension of animism was due to the particular mentality
of the primitive who, like an infant, cannot distinguish the animate and
the inanimate. Since the first beings of which the child commences to
have an idea are men, that is, himself and those around him, it is upon
this model of human nature that he tends to think of everything. The
toys with which he plays, or the objects of every sort which affect his
senses, he regards as living beings like himself. Now the primitive
thinks like a child. Consequently, he also is inclined to endow all
things, even inanimate ones, with a nature analogous to his own. Then
if, for the reasons exposed above, he once arrives at the idea that man
is a body animated by a spirit, he must necessarily attribute a duality
of this sort and souls like his own even to inert bodies themselves. Yet
the sphere of action of the two could not be the same. The souls of men
have a direct influence only upon the world of men: they have a marked
preference for the human organism, even when death has given them their
liberty. On the other hand, the souls of things reside especially in
these things, and are regarded as the productive causes of all that
passes there. The first account for health and sickness, skilfulness or
unskilfulness, etc.; by the second are explained especially the
phenomena of the physical world, the movement of water-courses or the
stars, the germination of plants, the reproduction of animals, etc. Thus
the first philosophy of man, which is at the basis of the ancestor-cult,
is completed by a philosophy of the world.
In regard to these cosmic spirits, man finds himself in a state of
dependence still more evident than that in regard to the wandering
doubles of his ancestors. For he could have only ideal and imaginary
relations with the latter, but he depends upon things in reality; to
live, he has need of their concurrence; he then believes that he has an
equal need of the spirits which appear to animate these things and to
determine their diverse manifestations. He implores their assistance, he
solicits them with offerings and prayers, and the religion of man is
thus completed in a religion of nature.
Herbert Spencer objects against this explanation that the hypothesis
upon which it rests is contradicted by the facts. It is held, he says,
that there is a time when men do not realize the differences which
separate the animate from the inanimate. Now, as one advances in the
animal scale, he sees the ability to make this distinction develop. The
superior animals do not confound an object which moves of itself and
whose movements are adapted to certain ends, with those which are
mechanically moved from without. "Amusing herself with a mouse she has
caught, the cat, if it remains long stationary, touches it with her paw
to make it run. Obviously the thought is that a living thing disturbed
will try to escape."[103] Even the primitive men could not have an
intelligence inferior to that of the animals which preceded them in
evolution; then it cannot be for lack of discernment that they passed
from the cult of ancestors to the cult of things.
According to Spencer, who upon this point, but upon this point only,
differs from Tylor, this passage was certainly due to a confusion, but
to one of a different sort. It was, in a large part at least, the result
of numerous errors due to language. In many inferior societies it is a
very common custom to give to each individual, either at his birth or
later, the name of some animal, plant, star or natural object. But as a
consequence of the extreme imprecision of his language, it is very
difficult for a primitive to distinguish a metaphor from the reality. He
soon lost sight of the fact that these names were only figures, and
taking them literally, he ended by believing that an ancestor named
"Tiger" or "Lion" was really a tiger or a lion. Then the cult of which
the ancestor was the object up to that time, was changed over to the
animal with which he was thereafter confounded; and as the same
substitution went on for the plants, the stars and all the natural
phenomena, the religion of nature took the place of the old religion of
the dead. Besides this fundamental confusion, Spencer signalizes others
which aided the action of the first from time to time. For example, the
animals which frequent the surroundings of the tombs or houses of men
have been taken for their reincarnated souls, and adored under this
title;[104] or again, the mountain which tradition made the cradle of
the race was finally taken for the ancestor of the race; it was thought
that men were descended from it because their ancestors appeared coming
from it, and it was consequently treated as an ancestor itself.[105] But
according to the statement of Spencer, these accessory causes had only a
secondary influence; that which principally determined the institution
of naturism was "the literal interpretation of metaphorical names."[106]
We had to mention this theory to have our exposition of animism
complete; but it is too inadequate for the facts, and too universally
abandoned to-day to demand that we stop any longer for it. In order to
explain a fact as general as the religion of nature by an illusion, it
would be necessary that the illusion invoked should have causes of an
equal generality. Now even if misunderstandings, such as those of which
Spencer gives some rare illustrations, could explain the transformation
of the cult of ancestors into that of nature, it is not clear why this
should be produced with a sort of universality. No psychical mechanism
necessitated it. It is true that because of its ambiguity, the word
might lead to an equivocation; but on the other hand, all the personal
souvenirs left by the ancestor in the memories of men should oppose this
confusion. Why should the tradition which represented the ancestor such
as he really was, that is to say, as a man who led the life of a man,
everywhere give way before the prestige of a word? Likewise, one should
have a little difficulty in admitting that men were born of a mountain
or a star, of an animal or a plant; the idea of a similar exception to
the ordinary conceptions of generation could not fail to raise active
resistance. Thus, it is far from true that the error found a road all
prepared before it, but rather, all sorts of reasons should have kept it
from being accepted. It is difficult to understand how, in spite of all
these obstacles, it could have triumphed so generally.
II
The theory of Tylor, whose authority is always great, still remains. His
hypotheses on the dream and the origin of the ideas of the soul and of
spirits are still classic; it is necessary, therefore, to test their
value.
First of all, it should be recognized that the theorists of animism have
rendered an important service to the science of religions, and even to
the general history of ideas, by submitting the idea of the soul to
historical analysis. Instead of following so many philosophers and
making it a simple and immediate object of consciousness, they have much
more correctly viewed it as a complex whole, a product of history and
mythology. It cannot be doubted that it is something essentially
religious in its nature, origin and functions. It is from religion that
the philosophers received it; it is impossible to understand the form in
which it is represented by the thinkers of antiquity, if one does not
take into account the mythical elements which served in its formation.
But if Tylor has had the merit of raising this problem, the solution he
gives raises grave difficulties.
First of all, there are reservations to be made in regard to the very
principle which is at the basis of this theory. It is taken for granted
that the soul is entirely distinct from the body, that it is its double,
and that within it or outside of it, it normally lives its own
autonomous life. Now we shall see[107] that this conception is not that
of the primitive, or at least, that it only expresses one aspect of his
idea of the soul. For him, the soul, though being under certain
conditions independent of the organism which it animates, confounds
itself with this latter to such an extent that it cannot be radically
separated from it: there are organs which are not only its appointed
seat, but also its outward form and material manifestation. The notion
is therefore more complex than the doctrine supposes, and it is doubtful
consequently whether the experiences mentioned are sufficient to account
for it; for even if they did enable us to understand how men have come
to believe themselves double, they cannot explain how this duality does
not exclude, but rather, implies a deeper unity and an intimate
interpenetration of the two beings thus differentiated.
But let us admit that the idea of the soul can be reduced to the idea of
a double, and then see how this latter came to be formed. It could not
have been suggested to men except by the experience of dreams. That they
might understand how they could see places more or less distant during
sleep, while their bodies remained lying on the ground, it would seem
that they were led to conceive of themselves as two beings: on the one
hand, the body, and on the other, a second self, able to leave the
organism in which it lives and to roam about in space. But if this
hypothesis of a double is to be able to impose itself upon men with a
sort of necessity, it should be the only one possible, or at least, the
most economical one. Now as a matter of fact, there are more simple ones
which, it would seem, might have occurred to the mind just as naturally.
For example, why should the sleeper not imagine that while asleep he is
able to see things at a distance? To imagine such a power would demand
less expense to the imagination than the construction of this complex
notion of a double, made of some etherial, semi-invisible substance, and
of which direct experience offers no example. But even supposing that
certain dreams rather naturally suggest the animistic explanation, there
are certainly many others which are absolutely incompatible with it.
Often our dreams are concerned with passed events; we see again the
things which we saw or did yesterday or the day before or even during
our youth, etc.; dreams of this sort are frequent and hold a rather
considerable place in our nocturnal life. But the idea of a double
cannot account for them. Even if the double can go from one point to
another in space, it is not clear how it could possibly go back and
forth in time. Howsoever rudimentary his intelligence may be, how could
a man on awakening believe that he had really been assisting at or
taking part in events which he knows passed long before? How could he
imagine that during his sleep he lived a life which he knows has long
since gone by? It would be much more natural that he should regard these
renewed images as merely what they really are, that is, as souvenirs
like those which he has during the day, but ones of a special intensity.
Moreover, in the scenes of which we are the actors and witnesses while
we sleep, it constantly happens that one of our contemporaries has a
rôle as well as ourselves: we think we see and hear him in the same
place where we see ourselves. According to the animists, the primitive
would explain this by imagining that his double was visited by or met
with those of certain of his companions. But it would be enough that on
awakening he question them, to find that their experiences do not
coincide with his. During this same time, they too have had dreams, but
wholly different ones. They have not seen themselves participating in
the same scene; they believe that they have visited wholly different
places. Since such contradictions should be the rule in these cases, why
should they not lead men to believe that there had probably been an
error, that they had merely imagined it, that they had been duped by
illusions? This blind credulity which is attributed to the primitive is
really too simple. It is not true that he must objectify all his
sensations. He cannot live long without perceiving that even when awake
his senses sometimes deceive him. Then why should he believe them more
infallible at night than during the day? Thus we find that there are
many reasons opposing the theory that he takes his dreams for the
reality and interprets them by means of a double of himself.
But more than that, even if every dream were well explained by the
hypothesis of a double, and could not be explained otherwise, it would
remain a question why men have attempted to explain them. Dreams
undoubtedly constitute the matter of a possible problem. But we pass by
problems every day which we do not raise, and of which we have no
suspicion until some circumstance makes us feel the necessity of raising
them. Even when the taste for pure speculation is aroused, reflection is
far from raising all the problems to which it could eventually apply
itself; only those attract it which present a particular interest.
Especially, when it is a question of facts which always take place in
the same manner, habit easily numbs curiosity, and we do not even dream
of questioning them. To shake off this torpor, it is necessary that
practical exigencies, or at least a very pressing theoretical interest,
stimulate our attention and turn it in this direction. That is why, at
every moment of history, there have been so many things that we have not
tried to understand, without even being conscious of our renunciation.
Up until very recent times, it was believed that the sun was only a few
feet in diameter. There is something incomprehensible in the statement
that a luminous disc of such slight dimensions could illuminate the
world: yet for centuries men never thought of resolving this
contradiction. The fact of heredity has been known for a long time, but
it is very recently that the attempt has been made to formulate its
theory. Certain beliefs were even admitted which rendered it wholly
unintelligible: thus in many Australian societies of which we shall have
occasion to speak, the child is not physiologically the offspring of its
parents.[108] This intellectual laziness is necessarily at its maximum
among the primitive peoples. These weak beings, who have so much trouble
in maintaining life against all the forces which assail it, have no
means for supporting any luxury in the way of speculation. They do not
reflect except when they are driven to it. Now it is difficult to see
what could have led them to make dreams the theme of their meditations.
What does the dream amount to in our lives? How little is the place it
holds, especially because of the very vague impressions it leaves in the
memory, and of the rapidity with which it is effaced from remembrance,
and consequently, how surprising it is that a man of so rudimentary an
intelligence should have expended such efforts to find its explanation!
Of the two existences which he successively leads, that of the day and
that of the night, it is the first which should interest him the most.
Is it not strange that the second should have so captivated his
attention that he made it the basis of a whole system of complicated
ideas destined to have so profound an influence upon his thought and
conduct?
Thus all tends to show that, in spite of the credit it still enjoys, the
animistic theory of the soul must be revised. It is true that to-day the
primitive attributes his dreams, or at least certain of them, to
displacements of his double. But that does not say that the dream
actually furnished the materials out of which the idea of the double or
the soul was first constructed; it might have been applied afterwards to
the phenomena of dreams, ecstasy and possession, without having been
derived from them. It is very frequent that, after it has been formed,
an idea is employed to co-ordinate or illuminate--with a light
frequently more apparent than real--certain facts with which it had no
relation at first, and which would never have suggested it themselves.
God and the immortality of the soul are frequently proven to-day by
showing that these beliefs are implied in the fundamental principles of
morality; as a matter of fact, they have quite another origin. The
history of religious thought could furnish numerous examples of these
retrospective justifications, which can teach us nothing of the way in
which the ideas were formed, nor of the elements out of which they are
composed.
It is also probable that the primitive distinguishes between his dreams,
and does not interpret them all in the same way. In our European
societies the still numerous persons for whom sleep is a sort of
magico-religious state in which the mind, being partially relieved of
the body, has a sharpness of vision which it does not enjoy during
waking moments, do not go to the point of considering all their dreams
as so many mystic intuitions: on the contrary, along with everybody
else, they see in the majority of their dreams only profane conditions,
vain plays of images, or simple hallucinations. It might be supposed
that the primitive should make analogous distinctions. Codrington says
distinctly that the Melanesians do not attribute all their dreams
indiscriminately to the wanderings of their souls, but merely those
which strike their imagination forcibly:[109] undoubtedly by that should
be understood those in which the sleeper imagines himself in relations
with religious beings, good or evil geniuses, souls of the dead, etc.
Similarly, the Dieri in Australia sharply distinguish ordinary dreams
from those nocturnal visions in which some deceased friend or relative
shows himself to them. In the first, they see a simple fantasy of their
imagination; they attribute the second to the action of an evil
spirit.[110] All the facts which Howitt mentions as examples to show how
the Australian attributes to the soul the power of leaving the body,
have an equally mystic character. The sleeper believes himself
transported into the land of the dead or else he converses with a dead
companion.[111] These dreams are frequent among the primitives.[112] It
is probably upon these facts that the theory is based. To account for
them, it is admitted that the souls of the dead come back to the living
during their sleep. This theory was the more readily accepted because no
fact of experience could invalidate it. But these dreams were possible
only where the ideas of spirits, souls and a land of the dead were
already existent, that is to say, where religious evolution was
relatively advanced. Thus, far from having been able to furnish to
religion the fundamental notion upon which it rests, they suppose a
previous religious system, upon which they depended.[113]
III
We now arrive at that which constitutes the very heart of the doctrine.
Wherever this idea of a double may come from, it is not sufficient,
according to the avowal of the animists themselves, to explain the
formation of the cult of the ancestors which they would make the initial
type of all religions. If this double is to become the object of a cult,
it must cease to be a simple reproduction of the individual, and must
acquire the characteristics necessary to put it in the rank of sacred
beings. It is death, they say, which performs this transformation. But
whence comes the virtue which they attribute to this? Even were the
analogy of sleep and death sufficient to make one believe that the soul
survives the body (and there are reservations to be made on this point),
why does this soul, by the mere fact that it is now detached from the
organism, so completely change its nature? If it was only a profane
thing, a wandering vital principle, during life, how does it become a
sacred thing all at once, and the object of religious sentiments? Death
adds nothing essential to it, except a greater liberty of movement.
Being no longer attached to a special residence, from now on, it can do
at any time what it formerly did only by night; but the action of which
it is capable is always of the same sort. Then why have the living
considered this uprooted and vagabond double of their former companion
as anything more than an equal? It was a fellow-creature, whose approach
might be inconvenient; it was not a divinity.[114]
It seems as though death ought to have the effect of weakening vital
energies, instead of strengthening them. It is, in fact, a very common
belief in the inferior societies that the soul participates actively in
the life of the body. If the body is wounded, it is wounded itself and
in a corresponding place. Then it should grow old along with the body.
In fact, there are peoples who do not render funeral honours to men
arrived at senility; they are treated as if their souls also had become
senile.[115] It even happens that they regularly put to death, before
they arrive at old age, certain privileged persons, such as kings or
priests, who are supposed to be the possessors of powerful spirits whose
protection the community wishes to keep. They thus seek to keep the
spirit from being affected by the physical decadence of its momentary
keepers; with this end in view, they take it from the organism where it
resides before age can have weakened it, and they transport it, while it
has as yet lost nothing of its vigour, into a younger body where it will
be able to keep its vitality intact.[116] So when death results from
sickness or old age, it seems as though the soul could retain only a
diminished power; and if it is only its double, it is difficult to see
how it could survive at all, after the body is once definitely
dissolved. From this point of view, the idea of survival is intelligible
only with great difficulty. There is a logical and psychological gap
between the idea of a double at liberty and that of a spirit to which a
cult is addressed.
This interval appears still more considerable when we realize what an
abyss separates the sacred world from the profane; it becomes evident
that a simple change of degree could not be enough to make something
pass from one category into the other. Sacred beings are not
distinguished from profane ones merely by the strange or disconcerting
forms which they take or by the greater powers which they enjoy; between
the two there is no common measure. Now there is nothing in the notion
of a double which could account for so radical a heterogeneity. It is
said that when once freed from the body, the spirit can work all sorts
of good or evil for the living, according to the way in which it regards
them. But it is not enough that a being should disturb his neighbourhood
to seem to be of a wholly different nature from those whose tranquillity
it menaces. To be sure, in the sentiment which the believer feels for
the things he adores, there always enters in some element of reserve and
fear; but this is a fear _sui generis_, derived from respect more than
from fright, and where the dominating emotion is that which _la majesté_
inspires in men. The idea of majesty is essentially religious. Then we
have explained nothing of religion until we have found whence this idea
comes, to what it corresponds and what can have aroused it in the mind.
Simple souls of men cannot become invested with this character by the
simple fact of being no longer incarnate.
This is clearly shown by an example from Melanesia. The Melanesians
believe that men have souls which leave the body at death; it then
changes its name and becomes what they call a _tindalo_, a _natmat_,
etc. Also, they have a cult of the souls of the dead: they pray to them,
invoke them and make offerings and sacrifices to them. But every
_tindalo_ is not the object of these ritual practices; only those have
this honour which come from men to whom public opinion attributed,
during life, the very special virtue which the Melanesians call the
_mana_. Later on, we shall have occasion to fix precisely the meaning
which this word expresses; for the time being, it will suffice to say
that it is the distinctive character of every sacred being. As
Codrington says, "it is what works to effect anything which is beyond
the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature."[117]
A priest, a sorcerer or a ritual formula have mana as well as a sacred
stone or spirit. Thus the only tindalo to which religious services are
rendered are those which were already sacred of themselves, when their
proprietor was still alive. In regard to the other souls, which come
from ordinary men, from the crowd of the profane, the same author says
that they are "nobodies alike before and after death."[118] By itself,
death has no deifying virtue. Since it brings about in a more or less
complete and final fashion the separation of the soul from profane
things, it can well reinforce the sacred character of the soul, if this
already exists, but it cannot create it.
Moreover, if, as the hypothesis of the animists supposes, the first
sacred beings were really the souls of the dead and the first cult that
of the ancestors, it should be found that the lower the societies
examined are, the more the place given to this cult in the religious
life. But it is rather the contrary which is true. The ancestral cult is
not greatly developed, or even presented under a characteristic form,
except in advanced societies like those of China, Egypt or the Greek and
Latin cities; on the other hand, it is completely lacking in the
Australian societies which, as we shall see, represent the lowest and
simplest form of social organization which we know. It is true that
funeral rites and rites of mourning are found there; but these practices
do not constitute a cult, though this name has sometimes wrongfully been
given them. In reality, a cult is not a simple group of ritual
precautions which a man is held to take in certain circumstances; it is
a system of diverse rites, festivals and ceremonies which _all have this
characteristic, that they reappear periodically_. They fulfil the need
which the believer feels of strengthening and reaffirming, at regular
intervals of time, the bond which unites him to the sacred beings upon
which he depends. That is why one speaks of marriage rites but not of a
marriage cult, of rites of birth but not of a cult of the new-born
child; it is because the events on the occasion of which these rites
take place imply no periodicity. In the same way, there is no cult of
the ancestors except when sacrifices are made on the tombs from time to
time, when libations are poured there on certain more or less specific
dates, or when festivals are regularly celebrated in honour of the dead.
But the Australian has no relations of this sort with his dead. It is
true that he must bury their remains according to a ritual, mourn for
them during a prescribed length of time and in a prescribed manner, and
revenge them if there is occasion to.[119] But when he has once
accomplished these pious tasks, when the bones are once dry and the
period of mourning is once accomplished, then all is said and done, and
the survivors have no more duties towards their relatives who exist no
longer. It is true that there is a way in which the dead continue to
hold a place in the lives of their kindred, even after the mourning is
finished. It is sometimes the case that their hair or certain of their
bones are kept, because of special virtues which are attached to
them.[120] But by that time they have ceased to exist as persons, and
have fallen to the rank of anonymous and impersonal charms. In this
condition they are the object of no cult; they serve only for magical
purposes.
However, there are certain Australian tribes which periodically
celebrate rites in honour of fabulous ancestors whom tradition places at
the beginning of time. These ceremonies generally consist in a sort of
dramatic representation in which are rehearsed the deeds which the myths
ascribe to these legendary heroes.[121] But the personages thus
represented are not men who, after living the life of men, have been
transformed into a sort of god by the fact of their death. They are
considered to have exercised superhuman powers while alive. To them is
attributed all that is grand in the history of the tribe, or even of the
whole world. It is they who in a large measure made the earth such as it
is, and men such as they are. The haloes with which they are still
decorated do not come to them merely from the fact that they are
ancestors, that is to say, in fine, that they are dead, but rather from
the fact that a divine character is and always has been attributed to
them; to use the Melanesian expression, it is because they are
constitutionally endowed with mana. Consequently, there is nothing in
these rites which shows that death has the slightest power of
deification. It cannot even be correctly said of certain rites that they
form an ancestor-cult, since they are not addressed to ancestors as
such. In order to have a real cult of the dead, it is necessary that
after death real ancestors, the relations whom men really lose every
day, become the object of the cult; let us repeat it once more, there
are no traces of any such cult in Australia.
Thus the cult which, according to this hypothesis, ought to be the
predominating one in inferior societies, is really nonexistent there. In
reality, the Australian is not concerned with his dead, except at the
moment of their decease and during the time which immediately follows.
Yet these same peoples, as we shall see, have a very complex cult for
sacred beings of a wholly different nature, which is made up of numerous
ceremonies and frequently occupying weeks or even entire months. It
cannot be admitted that the few rites which the Australian performs when
he happens to lose one of his relatives were the origin of these
permanent cults which return regularly every year and which take up a
considerable part of his existence. The contrast between the two is so
great that we may even ask whether the first were not rather derived
from the second, and if the souls of men, far from having been the model
upon which the gods were originally imagined, have not rather been
conceived from the very first as emanations from the divinity.
IV
From the moment that the cult of the dead is shown not to be primitive,
animism lacks a basis. It would then seem useless to discuss the third
thesis of the system, which concerns the transformation of the cult of
the dead into the cult of nature. But since the postulate upon which it
rests is also found in certain historians of religion who do not admit
the animism properly so-called, such as Brinton,[122] Lang,[123]
Réville,[124] and even Robertson Smith himself,[125] it is necessary to
make an examination of it.
This extension of the cult of the dead to all nature is said to come
from the fact that we instinctively tend to represent all things in our
own image, that is to say, as living and thinking beings. We have seen
that Spencer has already contested the reality of this so-called
instinct. Since animals clearly distinguish living bodies from dead
ones, it seemed to him impossible that man, the heir of the animals,
should not have had this same faculty of discernment from the very
first. But howsoever certain the facts cited by Spencer may be, they
have not the demonstrative value which he attributes to them. His
reasoning supposes that all the faculties, instincts and aptitudes of
the animal have passed integrally into man; now many errors have their
origin in this principle which is wrongfully taken as a proven truth.
For example, since sexual jealousy is generally very strong among the
higher animals, it has been concluded that it ought to be found among
men with the same intensity from the very beginnings of history.[126]
But it is well known to-day that men can practise a sexual communism
which would be impossible if this jealousy were not capable of
attenuating itself and even of disappearing when necessary.[127] The
fact is that man is not merely an animal with certain additional
qualities: he is something else. Human nature is the result of a sort of
recasting of the animal nature, and in the course of the various complex
operations which have brought about this recasting, there have been
losses as well as gains. How many instincts have we not lost? The reason
for this is that men are not only in relations with the physical
environment, but also with a social environment infinitely more
extended, more stable and more active than the one whose influence
animals undergo. To live, they must adapt themselves to this. Now in
order to maintain itself, society frequently finds it necessary that we
should see things from a certain angle and feel them in a certain way;
consequently it modifies the ideas which we would ordinarily make of
them for ourselves and the sentiments to which we would be inclined if
we listened only to our animal nature; it alters them, even going so far
as to put the contrary sentiments in their place. Does it not even go so
far as to make us regard our own individual lives as something of little
value, while for the animal this is the greatest of things?[128] Then it
is a vain enterprise to seek to infer the mental constitution of the
primitive man from that of the higher animals.
But if the objection of Spencer does not have the decisive value which
its author gives it, it is equally true that the animist theory can draw
no authority from the confusions which children seem to make. When we
hear a child angrily apostrophize an object which he has hit against, we
conclude that he thinks of it as a conscious being like himself; but
that is interpreting his words and acts very badly. In reality, he is
quite a stranger to the very complicated reasoning attributed to him. If
he lays the blame on the table which has hurt him, it is not because he
supposes it animated and intelligent, but because it has hurt him. His
anger, once aroused by the pain, must overflow; so it looks for
something upon which to discharge itself, and naturally turns toward the
thing which has provoked it, even though this has no effect. The action
of an adult in similar circumstances is often as slightly reasonable.
When we are violently irritated, we feel the need of inveighing, of
destroying, though we attribute no conscious ill-will to the objects
upon which we vent our anger. There is even so little confusion that
when the emotion of a child is calmed, he can very well distinguish a
chair from a person: he does not act in at all the same way towards the
two. It is a similar reason which explains his tendency to treat his
playthings as if they were living beings. It is his extremely intense
need of playing which thus finds a means of expressing itself, just as
in the other case the violent sentiments caused by pain created an
object out of nothing. In order that he may consciously play with his
jumping-jack, he imagines it a living person. This illusion is the
easier for him because imagination is his sovereign mistress; he thinks
almost entirely with images, and we know how pliant images are, bending
themselves with docility before every exigency of the will. But he is so
little deceived by his own fiction that he would be the first to be
surprised if it suddenly became a reality, and his toy bit him![129]
Let us therefore leave these doubtful analogies to one side. To find out
if men were primitively inclined to the confusions imputed to them, we
should not study animals or children of to-day, but the primitive
beliefs themselves. If the spirits and gods of nature were really formed
in the image of the human soul, they should bear traces of their origin
and bring to mind the essential traits of their model. The most
important characteristic of the soul is that it is conceived as the
internal principle which animates the organism: it is that which moves
it and makes it live, to such an extent that when it withdraws itself,
life ceases or is suspended. It has its natural residence in the body,
at least while this exists. But it is not thus with the spirits assigned
to the different things in nature. The god of the sun is not necessarily
in the sun, nor is the spirit of a certain rock in the rock which is its
principal place of habitation. A spirit undoubtedly has close relations
with the body to which it is attached, but one employs a very inexact
expression when he says that it is its soul. As Codrington says,[130]
"there does not appear to be anywhere in Melanesia a belief in a spirit
which animates any natural object, a tree, waterfall, storm or rock, so
as to be to it what the soul is believed to be to the body of man.
Europeans, it is true, speak of the spirits of the sea or of the storm
or of the forest; but the native idea which they represent is that
ghosts haunt the sea and the forest, having power to raise storms and
strike a traveller with disease." While the soul is essentially within
the body, the spirit passes the major portion of its time outside the
object which serves as its base. This is one difference which does not
seem to show that the second idea was derived from the first.
From another point of view, it must be added that if men were really
forced to project their own image into things, then the first sacred
beings ought to have been conceived in their likeness. Now
anthropomorphism, far from being primitive, is rather the mark of a
relatively advanced civilization. In the beginning, sacred beings are
conceived in the form of an animal or vegetable, from which the human
form is only slowly disengaged. It will be seen below that in Australia,
it is animals and plants which are the first sacred beings. Even among
the Indians of North America, the great cosmic divinities, which
commence to be the object of a cult there, are very frequently
represented in animal forms.[131] "The difference between the animal,
man and the divine being," says Réville, not without surprise, "is not
felt in this state of mind, and generally it might be said that _it is
the animal form which is the fundamental one_."[132] To find a god made
up entirely of human elements, it is necessary to advance nearly to
Christianity. Here, God is a man, not only in the physical aspect in
which he is temporarily made manifest, but also in the ideas and
sentiments which he expresses. But even in Greece and Rome, though the
gods were generally represented with human traits, many mythical
personages still had traces of an animal origin: thus there is Dionysus,
who is often met with in the form of a bull, or at least with the horns
of a bull; there is Demeter, who is often represented with a horse's
mane, there are Pan and Silenus, there are the Fauns, etc.[133] It is
not at all true that man has had such an inclination to impose his own
form upon things. More than that, he even commenced by conceiving of
himself as participating closely in the animal nature. In fact, it is a
belief almost universal in Australia, and very widespread among the
Indians of North America, that the ancestors of men were beasts or
plants, or at least that the first men had, either in whole or in part,
the distinctive characters of certain animal or vegetable species. Thus,
far from seeing beings like themselves everywhere, men commenced by
believing themselves to be in the image of some beings from which they
differed radically.
V
Finally, the animistic theory implies a consequence which is perhaps its
best refutation.
If it were true, it would be necessary to admit that religious beliefs
are so many hallucinatory representations, without any objective
foundation whatsoever. It is supposed that they are all derived from the
idea of the soul because one sees only a magnified soul in the spirits
and gods. But according to Tylor and his disciples, the idea of the soul
is itself constructed entirely out of the vague and inconsistent images
which occupy our attention during sleep: for the soul is the double, and
the double is merely a man as he appears to himself while he sleeps.
From this point of view, then, sacred beings are only the imaginary
conceptions which men have produced during a sort of delirium which
regularly overtakes them every day, though it is quite impossible to see
to what useful ends these conceptions serve, nor what they answer to in
reality. If a man prays, if he makes sacrifices and offerings, if he
submits to the multiple privations which the ritual prescribes, it is
because a sort of constitutional eccentricity has made him take his
dreams for perceptions, death for a prolonged sleep, and dead bodies for
living and thinking beings. Thus not only is it true, as many have held,
that the forms under which religious powers have been represented to the
mind do not express them exactly, and that the symbols with the aid of
which they have been thought of partially hide their real nature, but
more than that, behind these images and figures there exists nothing but
the nightmares of primitive minds. In fine, religion is nothing but a
dream, systematized and lived, but without any foundation in
reality.[134] Thence it comes about that the theorists of animism, when
looking for the origins of religious thought, content themselves with a
small outlay of energy. When they think that they have explained how men
have been induced to imagine beings of a strange, vaporous form, such as
those they see in their dreams, they think the problem is resolved.
In reality, it is not even approached. It is inadmissible that systems
of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in
history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy
which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of
illusions. To-day we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even
scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time
confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit. How
could a vain fantasy have been able to fashion the human consciousness
so strongly and so durably? Surely it ought to be a principle of the
science of religions that religion expresses nothing which does not
exist in nature; for there are sciences only of natural phenomena. The
only question is to learn from what part of nature these realities come
and what has been able to make men represent them under this singular
form which is peculiar to religious thought. But if this question is to
be raised, it is necessary to commence by admitting that they are real
things which are thus represented. When the philosophers of the
eighteenth century made religion a vast error imagined by the priests,
they could at least explain its persistence by the interest which the
sacerdotal class had in deceiving the people. But if the people
themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas at
the same time that they were its dupes, how has this extraordinary
dupery been able to perpetuate itself all through the course of history?
One might even demand if under these conditions the words of science of
religions can be employed without impropriety. A science is a discipline
which, in whatever manner it is conceived, is always applied to some
real data. Physics and chemistry are sciences because physico-chemical
phenomena are real, and of a reality which does not depend upon the
truths which these sciences show. There is a psychological science
because there are really consciousnesses which do not hold their right
of existence from the psychologist. But on the contrary, religion could
not survive the animistic theory and the day when its truth was
recognized by men, for they could not fail to renounce the errors whose
nature and origin would thus be revealed to them. What sort of a science
is it whose principal discovery is that the subject of which it treats
does not exist?
CHAPTER III
LEADING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ELEMENTARY RELIGION--_continued_
II.--_Naturism_
The spirit of the naturistic school is quite different. In the first
place, it is recruited in a different environment. The animists are, for
the most part, ethnologists or anthropologists. The religions which they
have studied are the crudest which humanity has ever known. Hence comes
the extraordinary importance which they attribute to the souls of the
dead, to spirits and to demons, and, in fact, to all spiritual beings of
the second order: it is because these religions know hardly any of a
higher order.[135] On the contrary, the theories which we are now going
to describe are the work of scholars who have concerned themselves
especially with the great civilizations of Europe and Asia.
Ever since the work of the Grimm brothers, who pointed out the interest
that there is in comparing the different mythologies of the
Indo-European peoples, scholars have been struck by the remarkable
similarities which these present. Mythical personages were identified
who, though having different names, symbolized the same ideas and
fulfilled the same functions; even the names were frequently related,
and it has been thought possible to establish the fact that they are not
unconnected with one another. Such resemblances seemed to be explicable
only by a common origin. Thus they were led to suppose that these
conceptions, so varied in appearance, really came from one common
source, of which they were only diversified forms, and which it was not
impossible to discover. By the comparative method, they believed one
should be able to go back, beyond these great religions, to a much more
ancient system of ideas, and to the really primitive religion, from
which the others were derived.
The discovery of the Vedas aided greatly in stimulating these ambitions.
In the Vedas, scholars had a written text, whose antiquity was
undoubtedly exaggerated at the moment of its discovery, but which is
surely one of the most ancient which we have at our disposition in an
Indo-European language. Here they were enabled to study, by the ordinary
methods of philology, a literature as old as or older than Homer, and a
religion which was believed more primitive than that of the ancient
Germans. A document of such value was evidently destined to throw a new
light upon the religious beginnings of humanity, and the science of
religions could not fail to be revolutionized by it.
The conception which was thus born was so fully demanded by the state of
the science and by the general march of ideas, that it appeared almost
simultaneously in two different lands. In 1856, Max Müller exposed its
principles in his _Oxford Essays_.[136] Three years later appeared the
work of Adalbert Kuhn on _The Origin of Fire and the Drink of the
Gods_,[137] which was clearly inspired by the same spirit. When once set
forth, the idea spread very rapidly in scientific circles. To the name
of Kuhn is closely associated that of his brother-in-law Schwartz, whose
work on _The Origin of Mythology_,[138] followed closely upon the
preceding one. Steinthal and the whole German school of
_Völkerpsychologie_ attached themselves to the same movement. The theory
was introduced into France in 1863 by M. Michel Bréal.[139] It met so
little resistance that, according to an expression of Gruppe,[140] "a
time came when, aside from certain classical philologists, to whom Vedic
studies were unknown, all the mythologists had adopted the principles of
Max Müller or Kuhn as their point of departure."[141] It is therefore
important to see what they really are, and what they are worth.
Since no one has presented them in a more systematic form than Max
Müller, it is upon his work that we shall base the description which
follows.[142]
I
We have seen that the postulate at the basis of animism is that
religion, at least in its origin, expresses no physical reality. But Max
Müller commences with the contrary principle. For him, it is an axiom
that religion reposes upon an experience, from which it draws all its
authority. "Religion," he says, "if it is to hold its place as a
legitimate element of our consciousness, must, like all other knowledge,
begin with sensuous experience."[143] Taking up the old empirical adage,
"_Nihil est in intellectu quod non ante fuerit in sensu_," he applies it
to religion and declares that there can be nothing in beliefs which was
not first perceived. So here is a doctrine which seems to escape the
grave objection which we raised against animism. From this point of
view, it seems that religion ought to appear, not as a sort of vague and
confused dreaming, but as a system of ideas and practices well founded
in reality.
But which are these sensations which give birth to religious thought?
That is the question which the study of the Vedas is supposed to aid in
resolving.
The names of the gods are generally either common words, still employed,
or else words formerly common, whose original sense it is possible to
discover. Now both designate the principal phenomena of nature. Thus
_Agni_, the name of one of the principal divinities of India, originally
signified only the material fact of fire, such as it is ordinarily
perceived by the senses and without any mythological addition. Even in
the Vedas, it is still employed with this meaning; in any case, it is
well shown that this signification was primitive by the fact that it is
conserved in other Indo-European languages: the Latin _ignis_, the
Lithuanian _ugnis_, the old Slav _ogny_ are evidently closely related to
Agni. Similarly, the relationship of the Sanskrit _Dyaus_, the Greek
_Zeus_, the Latin _Jovis_ and the _Zio_ of High German is to-day
uncontested. This proves that these different words designate one single
and the same divinity, whom the different Indo-European peoples
recognized as such before their separation. Now Dyaus signifies the
bright sky. These and other similar facts tend to show that among these
peoples the forms and forces of nature were the first objects to which
the religious sentiment attached itself: they were the first things to
be deified. Going one step farther in his generalization, Max Müller
thought that he was prepared to conclude that the religious evolution of
humanity in general had the same point of departure.
It is almost entirely by considerations of a psychological sort that he
justifies these inferences. The varied spectacles which nature offers
man seemed to him to fulfil all the conditions necessary for arousing
religious ideas in the mind directly. In fact, he says, "at first sight,
nothing seemed less natural than nature. Nature was the greatest
surprise, a terror, a marvel, a standing miracle, and it was only on
account of their permanence, constancy, and regular recurrence that
certain features of that standing miracle were called natural, in the
sense of foreseen, common, intelligible.... It was that vast domain of
surprise, of terror, of marvel, of miracle, the unknown, as
distinguished from the known, or, as I like to express it, the infinite,
as distinct from the finite, which supplied from the earliest times the
impulse to religious thought and language."[144] In order to illustrate
his idea, he applies it to a natural force which holds a rather large
place in the Vedic religion, fire. He says, "if you can for a moment
transfer yourselves to that early stage of life to which we must refer
not only the origin, but likewise the early phases of Physical Religion,
you can easily understand what an impression the first appearance of
fire must have made on the human mind. Fire was not given as something
permanent or eternal, like the sky, or the earth, or the water. In
whatever way it first appeared, whether through lightning or through the
friction of the branches of trees, or through the sparks of flints, it
came and went, it had to be guarded, it brought destruction, but at the
same time, it made life possible in winter, it served as a protection
during the night, it became a weapon of defence and offence, and last,
not least, it changed man from a devourer of raw flesh into an eater of
cooked meat. At a later time it became the means of working metal, of
making tools and weapons, it became an indispensable factor in all
mechanical and artistic progress, and has remained so ever since. What
should we be without fire even now?"[145] The same author says in
another work that a man could not enter into relations with nature
without taking account of its immensity, of its infiniteness. It
surpasses him in every way. Beyond the distances which he perceives,
there are others which extend without limits; each moment of time is
preceded and followed by a time to which no limit can be assigned; the
flowing river manifests an infinite force, since nothing can exhaust
it.[146] There is no aspect of nature which is not fitted to awaken
within us this overwhelming sensation of an infinity which surrounds us
and dominates us.[147] It is from this sensation that religions are
derived.[148]
However, they are there only in germ.[149] Religion really commences
only at the moment when these natural forces are no longer represented
in the mind in an abstract form. They must be transformed into personal
agents, living and thinking beings, spiritual powers or gods; for it is
to beings of this sort that the cult is generally addressed. We have
seen that animism itself has been obliged to raise this question, and
also how it has answered it: man seems to have a sort of native
incapacity for distinguishing the animate from the inanimate and an
irresistible tendency to conceive the second under the form of the
first. Max Müller rejects any such solution.[150] According to him it is
language which has brought about this metamorphosis, by the action which
it exercises upon thought.
It is easily explained how men, being perplexed by the marvellous forces
upon which they feel that they depend, have been led to reflect upon
them, and how they have asked themselves what these forces are and have
made an effort to substitute for the obscure sensation which they
primitively had of them, a clearer idea and a better defined concept.
But as our author very justly says,[151] this idea and concept are
impossible without the word. Language is not merely the external
covering of a thought; it also is its internal framework. It does not
confine itself to expressing this thought after it has once been formed;
it also aids in making it. However, its nature is of a different sort,
so its laws are not those of thought. Then since it contributes to the
elaboration of this latter, it cannot fail to do it violence to some
extent, and to deform it. It is a deformation of this sort which is said
to have created the special characteristic of religious thought.
Thinking consists in arranging our ideas, and consequently in
classifying them. To think of fire, for example, is to put it into a
certain category of things, in such a way as to be able to say that it
is this or that, or this and not that. But classifying is also naming,
for a general idea has no existence and reality except in and by the
word which expresses it and which alone makes its individuality. Thus
the language of a people always has an influence upon the manner in
which new things, recently learned, are classified in the mind and are
subsequently thought of; these new things are thus forced to adapt
themselves to pre-existing forms. For this reason, the language which
men spoke when they undertook to construct an elaborated representation
of the universe marked the system of ideas which was then born with an
indelible trace.
Nor are we without some knowledge of this language, at least in so far
as the Indo-European peoples are concerned. Howsoever distant it may be
from us, souvenirs of it remain in our actual languages which permit us
to imagine what it was: these are the roots. These stems, from which are
derived all the words which we employ and which are found at the basis
of all the Indo-European languages, are regarded by Max Müller as so
many echoes of the language which the corresponding peoples spoke before
their separation, that is to say, at the very moment when this religion
of nature, which is to be explained, was being formed. Now these roots
present two remarkable characteristics, which, it is true, have as yet
been observed only in this particular group of languages, but which our
author believes to be present equally in the other linguistic
families.[152]
In the first place, the roots are general; that is to say that they do
not express particular things and individuals, but types, and even types
of an extreme generality. They represent the most general themes of
thought; one finds there, as though fixed and crystallized, those
fundamental categories of the intellect which at every moment in history
dominate the entire mental life, the arrangement of which philosophers
have many times attempted to reconstruct.[153]
Secondly, the types to which they correspond are types of action, and
not of objects. They translate the most general manners of acting which
are to be observed among living beings and especially among men; they
are such actions as striking, pushing, rubbing, lying down, getting up,
pressing, mounting, descending, walking, etc. In other words, men
generalized and named their principal ways of acting before generalizing
and naming the phenomena of nature.[154]
Owing to their extreme generality, these words could easily be extended
to all sorts of objects which they did not originally include; it is
even this extreme suppleness which has permitted them to give birth to
the numerous words which are derived from them. Then when men, turning
towards things, undertook to name them, that they might be able to think
about them, they applied these words to them, though they were in no way
designed for them. But, owing to their origin, these were able to
designate the forces of nature only by means of their manifestations
which seemed the nearest to human actions: a thunderbolt was called
_something_ that tears up the soil or that spreads fire; the wind,
_something_ that sighs or whistles; the sun, _something_ that throws
golden arrows across space; a river, _something_ that flows, etc. But
since natural phenomena were thus compared to human acts, this
_something_ to which they were attached was necessarily conceived under
the form of personal agents, more or less like men. It was only a
metaphor, but it was taken literally; the error was inevitable, for
science, which alone could dispel the illusion, did not yet exist. In a
word, since language was made of human elements, translating human
states, it could not be applied to nature without transforming it.[155]
Even to-day, remarks M. Bréal, it forces us in a certain measure to
represent things from this angle. "We do not express an idea, even one
designating a simple quality, without giving it a gender, that is to
say, a sex; we cannot speak of an object, even though it be considered
in a most general fashion, without determining it by an article; every
subject of a sentence is presented as an active being, every idea as an
action, and every action, be it transitory or permanent, is limited in
its duration by the tense in which we put the verb."[156] Our scientific
training enables us to rectify the errors which language might thus
suggest to us; but the influence of the word ought to be all-powerful
when it has no check. Language thus superimposes upon the material
world, such as it is revealed to our senses, a new world, composed
wholly of spiritual beings which it has created out of nothing and which
have been considered as the causes determining physical phenomena ever
since.
But its action does not stop there. When words were once forged to
represent these personalities which the popular imagination had placed
behind things, a reaction affected these words themselves: they raised
all sorts of questions, and it was to resolve these problems that myths
were invented. It happened that one object received a plurality of
names, corresponding to the plurality of aspects under which it was
presented in experience; thus there are more than twenty words in the
Vedas for the sky. Since these words were different, it was believed
that they corresponded to so many distinct personalities. But at the
same time, it was strongly felt that these same personalities had an air
of relationship. To account for that, it was imagined that they formed a
single family; genealogies, a civil condition and a history were
invented for them. In other cases, different things were designated by
the same term: to explain these homonyms, it was believed that the
corresponding things were transformations of each other, and new
fictions were invented to make these metamorphoses intelligible. Or
again, a word which had ceased to be understood, was the origin of
fables designed to give it a meaning. The creative work of language
continued then, making constructions ever more and more complex, and
then mythology came to endow each god with a biography, ever more and
more extended and complete, the result of all of which was that the
divine personalities, at first confounded with things, finally
distinguished and determined themselves.
This is how the notion of the divine is said to have been constructed.
As for the religion of ancestors, it was only a reflection of this
other.[157] The idea of the soul is said to have been first formed for
reasons somewhat analogous to those given by Tylor, except that
according to Max Müller, they were designed to account for death, rather
than for dreams.[158] Then, under the influence of diverse, partially
accidental, circumstances,[159] the souls of men, being once disengaged
from the body, were drawn little by little within the circle of divine
beings, and were thus finally deified themselves. But this new cult was
the product of only a secondary formation. This is proven by the fact
that deified men have generally been imperfect gods or demi-gods, whom
the people have always been able to distinguish from the genuine
deities.[160]
II
This doctrine rests, in part, upon a certain number of linguistic
postulates which have been and still are very much questioned. Some have
contested the reality of many of the similarities which Max Müller
claimed to have found between the names of the gods in the various
European languages. The interpretation which he gave them has been
especially doubted: it has been asked if these names, far from being the
mark of a very primitive religion, are not the slow product, either of
direct borrowings or of natural intercourse with others.[161] Also, it
is no longer admitted that the roots once existed in an isolated state
as autonomous realities, nor that they allow us to reconstruct, even
hypothetically, the original language of the Indo-Europeans.[162]
Finally, recent researches would tend to show that the Vedic divinities
did not all have the exclusively naturistic character attributed to them
by Max Müller and his school.[163] But we shall leave aside those
questions, the discussion of which requires a special competence as a
philologist, and address ourselves directly to the general principles of
the system. It will be important here not to confound the naturistic
theory with these controverted postulates; for this is held by numbers
of scholars who do not make language play the predominating rôle
attributed to it by Max Müller.
That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and
consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an
early date, is something that everyone will readily admit. Co-operation
with the things with which they were in immediate connection was so
necessary for them that they could not fail to seek a knowledge of their
nature. But if, as naturism pretends, it is of these reflections that
religious thought was born, it is impossible to explain how it was able
to survive the first attempts made, and the persistence with which it
has maintained itself becomes unintelligible. If we have need of knowing
the nature of things, it is in order to act upon them in an appropriate
manner. But the conception of the universe given us by religion,
especially in its early forms, is too greatly mutilated to lead to
temporarily useful practices. Things become nothing less than living and
thinking beings, minds or personalities like those which the religious
imagination has made into the agents of cosmic phenomena. It is not by
conceiving of them under this form or by treating them according to this
conception that men could make them work for their ends. It is not by
addressing prayers to them, by celebrating them in feasts and
sacrifices, or by imposing upon themselves fasts and privations, that
men can deter them from working harm or oblige them to serve their own
designs. Such processes could succeed only very exceptionally and, so to
speak, miraculously. If, then, religion's reason for existence was to
give us a conception of the world which would guide us in our relations
with it, it was in no condition to fulfil its function, and people would
not have been slow to perceive it: failures, being infinitely more
frequent than successes, would have quickly shown them that they were
following a false route, and religion, shaken at each instant by these
repeated contradictions, would not have been able to survive.
It is undeniably true that errors have been able to perpetuate
themselves in history; but, except under a union of very exceptional
circumstances, they can never perpetuate themselves thus unless they
were _true practically_, that is to say, unless, without giving us a
theoretically exact idea of the things with which they deal, they
express well enough the manner in which they affect us, either for good
or for bad. Under these circumstances, the actions which they determine
have every chance of being, at least in a general way, the very ones
which are proper, so it is easily explained how they have been able to
survive the proofs of experience.[164] But an error and especially a
system of errors which leads to, and can lead to nothing but mistaken
and useless practices, has no chance of living. Now what is there in
common between the rites with which the believer tries to act upon
nature and the processes by which science has taught us to make use of
it, and which we now know are the only efficacious ones? If that is what
men demanded of religion, it is impossible to see how it could have
maintained itself, unless clever tricks had prevented their seeing that
it did not give them what they expected from it. It would be necessary
to return again to the over simple explanations of the eighteenth
century.[165]
Thus it is only in appearance that naturism escapes the objection which
we recently raised against animism. It also makes religion a system of
hallucinations, since it reduces it to an immense metaphor with no
objective value. It is true that it gives religion a point of departure
in reality, to wit, in the sensations which the phenomena of nature
provoke in us; but by the bewitching action of language, this sensation
is soon transformed into extravagant conceptions. Religious thought does
not come in contact with reality, except to cover it at once with a
thick veil which conceals its real forms: this veil is the tissue of
fabulous beliefs which mythology brought forth. Thus the believer, like
the delirious man, lives in a world peopled with beings and things which
have only a verbal existence. Max Müller himself recognized this, for he
regarded myths as the product of a disease of the intellect. At first,
he attributed them to a disease of language, but since language and the
intellect are inseparable for him, what is true of the one is true of
the other. "When trying to explain the inmost nature of mythology," he
says, "I called it a disease of Language rather than of Thought....
After I had fully explained in my _Science of Thought_ that language and
thought are inseparable, and that a disease of language is therefore the
same thing as a disease of thought, no doubt ought to have remained as
to what I meant. To represent the supreme God as committing every kind
of crime, as being deceived by men, as being angry with his wife and
violent with his children, is surely a proof of a disease, of an unusual
condition of thought, or, to speak more clearly, of real madness."[166]
And this argument is not valid merely against Max Müller and his theory,
but against the very principle of naturism, in whatever way it may be
applied. Whatever we may do, if religion has as its principal object the
expression of the forces of nature, it is impossible to see in it
anything more than a system of lying fictions, whose survival is
incomprehensible.
Max Müller thought he escaped this objection, whose gravity he felt, by
distinguishing radically between mythology and religion, and by putting
the first outside the second. He claims the right of reserving the name
of religion for only those beliefs which conform to the prescriptions of
a sane moral system and a rational theology. The myths were parasitic
growths which, under the influence of language, attached themselves upon
these fundamental conceptions, and denatured them. Thus the belief in
Zeus was religious in so far as the Greeks considered him the supreme
God, father of humanity, protector of laws, avenger of crimes, etc.; but
all that which concerned the biography of Zeus, his marriages and his
adventures, was only mythology.[167]
But this distinction is arbitrary. It is true that mythology has an
æsthetic interest as well as one for the history of religions; but it is
one of the essential elements of the religious life, nevertheless. If
the myth were withdrawn from religion, it would be necessary to withdraw
the rite also; for the rites are generally addressed to definite
personalities who have a name, a character, determined attributes and a
history, and they vary according to the manner in which these
personalities are conceived. The cult rendered to a divinity depends
upon the character attributed to him; and it is the myth which
determines this character. Very frequently, the rite is nothing more
than the myth put in action; the Christian communion is inseparable from
the myth of the Last Supper, from which it derives all its meaning. Then
if all mythology is the result of a sort of verbal delirium, the
question which we raised remains intact: the existence, and especially
the persistence of the cult become inexplicable. It is hard to
understand how men have continued to do certain things for centuries
without any object. Moreover, it is not merely the peculiar traits of
the divine personalities which are determined by mythology; the very
idea that there are gods or spiritual beings set above the various
departments of nature, in no matter what manner they may be represented,
is essentially mythical.[168] Now if all that which appertains to the
notion of gods conceived as cosmic agents is blotted out of the
religions of the past, what remains? The idea of a divinity in itself,
of a transcendental power upon which man depends and upon which he
supports himself? But that is only an abstract and philosophic
conception which has been fully realized in no historical religion; it
is without interest for the science of religions.[169] We must therefore
avoid distinguishing between religious beliefs, keeping some because
they seem to us to be true and sane and rejecting others because they
shock and disconcert us. All myths, even those which we find the most
unreasonable, have been believed.[170] Men have believed in them no less
firmly than in their own sensations; they have based their conduct upon
them. In spite of appearances, it is therefore impossible that they
should be without objective foundation.
However, it will be said that in whatever manner religions may be
explained, it is certain that they are mistaken in regard to the real
nature of things: science has proved it. The modes of action which they
counsel or prescribe to men can therefore rarely have useful effects: it
is not by lustrations that the sick are cured nor by sacrifices and
chants that the crops are made to grow. Thus the objection which we have
made to naturism would seem to be applicable to all possible systems of
explanation.
Nevertheless, there is one which escapes it. Let us suppose that
religion responds to quite another need than that of adapting ourselves
to sensible objects: then it will not risk being weakened by the fact
that it does not satisfy, or only badly satisfies, this need. If
religious faith was not born to put man in harmony with the material
world, the injuries which it has been able to do him in his struggle
with the world do not touch it at its source, because it is fed from
another.
If it is not for these reasons that a man comes to believe, he should
continue to believe even when these reasons are contradicted by the
facts. It is even conceivable that faith should be strong enough, not
only to support these contradictions, but also even to deny them and to
keep the believer from seeing their importance; this is what succeeds in
rendering them inoffensive for religion. When the religious sentiment is
active, it will not admit that religion can be in the wrong, and it
readily suggests explanations which make it appear innocent; if the rite
does not produce the desired results, this failure is imputed either to
some fault of execution, or to the intervention of another, contrary
deity. But for that, it is necessary that these religious ideas have
their source in another sentiment than that betrayed by these deceptions
of experience, or else whence could come their force of resistance?
III
But more than that, even if men had really had reasons for remaining
obstinate, in spite of all their mistakes, in expressing cosmic
phenomena in religious terms, it is also necessary that these be of a
nature to suggest such an interpretation. Now when could they have
gotten such a property? Here again we find ourselves in the presence of
one of those postulates which pass as evident only because they have not
been criticized. It is stated as an axiom that in the natural play of
physical forces there is all that is needed to arouse within us the idea
of the sacred; but when we closely examine the proofs of this
proposition, which, by the way, are sufficiently brief, we find that
they reduce to a prejudice.
They talk about the marvel which men should feel as they discover the
world. But really, that which characterizes the life of nature is a
regularity which approaches monotony. Every morning the sun mounts in
the horizon, every evening it sets; every month the moon goes through
the same cycle; the river flows in an uninterrupted manner in its bed;
the same seasons periodically bring back the same sensations. To be
sure, here and there an unexpected event sometimes happens: the sun is
eclipsed, the moon is hidden behind clouds, the river overflows. But
these momentary variations could only give birth to equally momentary
impressions, the remembrance of which is gone after a little while; they
could not serve as a basis for these stable and permanent systems of
ideas and practices which constitute religions. Normally, the course of
nature is uniform, and uniformity could never produce strong emotions.
Representing the savage as filled with admiration before these marvels
transports much more recent sentiments to the beginnings of history. He
is much too accustomed to it to be greatly surprised by it. It requires
culture and reflection to shake off this yoke of habit and to discover
how marvellous this regularity itself is. Besides, as we have already
remarked,[171] admiring an object is not enough to make it appear sacred
to us, that is to say, to mark it with those characteristics which make
all direct contact with it appear a sacrilege and a profanation. We
misunderstand what the religious sentiment really is, if we confound it
with every impression of admiration and surprise.
But, they say, even if it is not admiration, there is a certain
impression which men cannot help feeling in the presence of nature. He
cannot come in contact with it, without realizing that it is greater
than he. It overwhelms him by its immensity. This sensation of an
infinite space which surrounds him, of an infinite time which has
preceded and will follow the present moment, and of forces infinitely
superior to those of which he is master, cannot fail, as it seems, to
awaken within him the idea that outside of him there exists an infinite
power upon which he depends. And this idea enters as an essential
element into our conception of the divine.
But let us bear in mind what the question is. We are trying to find out
how men came to think that there are in reality two categories of
things, radically heterogeneous and incomparable to each other. Now how
could the spectacle of nature give rise to the idea of this duality?
Nature is always and everywhere of the same sort. It matters little that
it extends to infinity: beyond the extreme limit to which my eyes can
reach, it is not different from what it is here. The space which I
imagine beyond the horizon is still space, identical with that which I
see. The time which flows without end is made up of moments identical
with those which I have passed through. Extension, like duration,
repeats itself indefinitely; if the portions which I touch have of
themselves no sacred character, where did the others get theirs? The
fact that I do not see them directly, is not enough to transform
them.[172] A world of profane things may well be unlimited; but it
remains a profane world. Do they say that the physical forces with which
we come in contact exceed our own? Sacred forces are not to be
distinguished from profane ones simply by their greater intensity, they
are different; they have special qualities which the others do not have.
Quite on the contrary, all the forces manifested in the universe are of
the same nature, those that are within us just as those that are outside
of us. And especially, there is no reason which could have allowed
giving a sort of pre-eminent dignity to some in relation to others. Then
if religion really was born because of the need of assigning causes to
physical phenomena, the forces thus imagined would have been no more
sacred than those conceived by the scientist to-day to account for the
same facts.[173] This is as much as to say that there would have been
no sacred beings and therefore no religion.
But even supposing that this sensation of being "overwhelmed" were
really able to suggest religious ideas, it could not have produced this
effect upon the primitive, for he does not have it. He is in no way
conscious that cosmic forces are so superior to his own. Since science
has not yet taught him modesty, he attributes to himself an empire over
things which he really does not have, but the illusion of which is
enough to prevent his feeling dominated by them. As we have already
pointed out, he thinks that he can command the elements, release the
winds, compel the rain to fall, or stop the sun, by a gesture, etc.[174]
Religion itself contributes to giving him this security, for he believes
that it arms him with extended powers over nature. His rites are, in
part, means destined to aid him in imposing his will upon the world.
Thus, far from being due to the sentiment which men should have of their
littleness before the universe, religions are rather inspired by the
contrary sentiment. Even the most elevated and idealistic have the
effect of reassuring men in their struggle with things: they teach that
faith is, of itself, able "to move mountains," that is to say, to
dominate the forces of nature. How could they give rise to this
confidence if they had had their origin in a sensation of feebleness and
impotency?
Finally, if the objects of nature really became sacred because of their
imposing forms or the forces which they manifest, then the sun, the
moon, the sky, the mountains, the sea, the winds, in a word, the great
cosmic powers, should have been the first to be raised to this dignity;
for there are no others more fitted to appeal to the senses and the
imagination. But as a matter of fact, they were divinized but slowly.
The first beings to which the cult is addressed--the proof will be found
in the chapters which follow--are humble vegetables and animals, in
relation to which men could at least claim an equality: they are ducks,
rabbits, kangaroos, lizards, worms, frogs, etc. Their objective
qualities surely were not the origin of the religious sentiments which
they inspired.
CHAPTER IV
TOTEMISM AS AN ELEMENTARY RELIGION
_History of the Question.--Method of Treating it_
Howsoever opposed their conclusions may seem to be, the two systems
which we have just studied agree upon one essential point: they state
the problem in identical terms. Both undertake to construct the idea of
the divine out of the sensations aroused in us by certain natural
phenomena, either physical or biological. For the animists it is dreams,
for the naturists, certain cosmic phenomena, which served as the point
of departure for religious evolution. But for both, it is in the nature,
either of man or of the universe, that we must look for the germ of the
grand opposition which separates the profane from the sacred.
But such an enterprise is impossible: it supposes a veritable creation
_ex nihilo_. A fact of common experience cannot give us the idea of
something whose characteristic is to be outside the world of common
experience. A man, as he appears to himself in his dreams, is only a
man. Natural forces, as our senses perceive them, are only natural
forces, howsoever great their intensity may be. Hence comes the common
criticism which we address to both doctrines. In order to explain how
these pretended data of religious thought have been able to take a
sacred character which has no objective foundation, it would be
necessary to admit that a whole world of delusive representations has
superimposed itself upon the other, denatured it to the point of making
it unrecognizable, and substituted a pure hallucination for reality.
Here, it is the illusions of the dream which brought about this
transfiguration; there, it is the brilliant and vain company of images
evoked by the word. But in one case as in the other, it is necessary to
regard religion as the product of a delirious imagination.
Thus one positive conclusion is arrived at as the result of this
critical examination. Since neither man nor nature have of themselves a
sacred character, they must get it from another source. Aside from the
human individual and the physical world, there should be some other
reality, in relation to which this variety of delirium which all
religion is in a sense, has a significance and an objective value. In
other words, beyond those which we have called animistic and naturistic,
there should be another sort of cult, more fundamental and more
primitive, of which the first are only derived forms or particular
aspects.
In fact, this cult does exist: it is the one to which ethnologists have
given the name of totemism.
I
It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the word totem
appeared in ethnographical literature. It is found for the first time in
the book of an Indian interpreter, J. Long, which was published in
London in 1791.[175] For nearly a half a century, totemism was known
only as something exclusively American.[176] It was only in 1841 that
Grey, in a passage which has remained celebrated,[177] pointed out the
existence of wholly similar practices in Australia. From that time on,
scholars began to realize that they were in the presence of a system of
a certain generality.
But they saw there only an essentially archaic institution, an
ethnographical curiosity, having no great interest for the historian.
MacLennan was the first who undertook to attach totemism to the general
history of humanity. In a series of articles in the _Fortnightly
Review_,[178] he set himself to show that totemism was not only a
religion, but one from which were derived a multitude of beliefs and
practices which are found in much more advanced religious systems. He
even went so far as to make it the source of all the animal-worshipping
and plant-worshipping cults which are found among ancient peoples.
Certainly this extension of totemism was abusive. The cults of animals
and plants depend upon numerous causes which cannot be reduced to one,
without the error of too great simplicity. But this error, by its very
exaggerations, had at least the advantage, that it put into evidence the
historical importance of totemism.
Students of American totemism had already known for a long time that
this form of religion was most intimately united to a determined social
organization, that its basis is the division of the social group into
clans.[179] In 1877, in his _Ancient Society_,[180] Lewis H. Morgan
undertook to make a study of it, to determine its distinctive
characteristics, and at the same time to point out its generality among
the Indian tribes of North and Central America. At nearly the same
moment, and even following the direct suggestion of Morgan, Fison and
Howitt[181] established the existence of the same social system in
Australia, as well as its relations with totemism.
Under the influence of these directing ideas, observations could be made
with better method. The researches which the American Bureau of
Ethnology undertook, played an important part in the advance of these
studies.[182] By 1887, the documents were sufficiently numerous and
significant to make Frazer consider it time to unite them and present
them to us in a systematic form. Such is the object of his little book
_Totemism_,[183] where the system is studied both as a religion and as a
legal institution. But this study was purely descriptive; no effort was
made to explain totemism[184] or to understand its fundamental notions.
Robertson Smith is the first who undertook this work of elaboration. He
realized more clearly than any of his predecessors how rich this crude
and confused religion is in germs for the future. It is true that
MacLennan had already connected it with the great religions of
antiquity; but that was merely because he thought he had found here and
there the cult of animals or plants. Now if we reduce totemism to a sort
of animal or plant worship, we have seen only its most superficial
aspect: we have even misunderstood its real nature. Going beyond the
mere letter of the totemic beliefs, Smith set himself to find the
fundamental principles upon which they depend. In his book upon _Kinship
and Marriage in Early Arabia_,[185] he had already pointed out that
totemism supposes a likeness in nature, either natural or acquired, of
men and animals (or plants). In his _The Religion of the Semites_,[186]
he makes this same idea the first origin of the entire sacrificial
system: it is to totemism that humanity owes the principle of the
communion meal. It is true that the theory of Smith can now be shown
one-sided; it is no longer adequate for the facts actually known; but
for all that, it contains an ingenious theory and has exercised a most
fertile influence upon the science of religions. The _Golden Bough_[187]
of Frazer is inspired by these same ideas, for totemism, which MacLennan
had attached to the religions of classical antiquity, and Smith to the
religions of the Semitic peoples, is here connected to the European
folk-lore. The schools of MacLennan and Morgan are thus united to that
of Mannhardt.[188]
During this time, the American tradition continued to develop with an
independence which it has kept up until very recent times. Three groups
of societies were the special object of the researches which were
concerned with totemism. These are, first, certain tribes of the
North-west, the Tlinkit, the Haida, the Kwakiutl, the Salish and the
Tsimshian; then, the great nation of the Sioux; and finally, the Pueblo
Indians in the south-western part of the United States. The first were
studied principally by Dall, Krause, Boas, Swanton, Hill Tout; the
second by Dorsey; the last by Mindeleff, Mrs. Stevenson and
Cushing.[189] But however rich the harvest of facts thus gathered in all
parts of the country may have been, the documents at our disposal were
still fragmentary. Though the American religions contain numerous traces
of totemism, they have passed the stage of real totemism. On the other
hand, observations in Australia had brought little more than scattered
beliefs and isolated rites, initiation rituals and interdictions
relative to totemism. It was with facts taken from all these sources
that Frazer attempted to draw a picture of totemism in its entirety.
Whatever may be the incontestable merit of the reconstruction undertaken
in such circumstances, it could not help being incomplete and
hypothetical. A totemic religion in complete action had not yet been
observed.
It is only in very recent years that this serious deficiency has been
repaired. Two observers of remarkable ability, Baldwin Spencer and F. J.
Gillen, discovered[190] in the interior of the Australian continent a
considerable number of tribes whose basis and unity was founded in
totemic beliefs. The results of their observations have been published
in two works, which have given a new life to the study of totemism. The
first of these, _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_,[191] deals
with the more central of these tribes, the Arunta, the Luritcha, and a
little farther to the south, on the shores of Lake Eyre, the Urabunna.
The second, which is entitled _The Northern Tribes of Central
Australia_,[192] deals with the societies north of the Urabunna,
occupying the territory between MacDonnell's Range and Carpenter Gulf.
Among the principal of these we may mention the Unmatjera, the Kaitish,
the Warramunga, the Worgaia, the Tjingilli, the Binbinga, the Walpari,
the Gnanji and finally, on the very shores of the gulf, the Mara and the
Anula.[193]
More recently, a German missionary, Carl Strehlow, who has also passed
long years in these same Central Australian societies,[194] has
commenced to publish his own observations on two of these tribes, the
Aranda and the Loritja (the Arunta and Luritcha of Spencer and
Gillen).[195] Having well mastered the language spoken by these
peoples,[196] Strehlow has been able to bring us a large number of
totemic myths and religious songs, which are given us, for the most
part, in the original text. In spite of some differences of detail which
are easily explained and whose importance has been greatly
exaggerated,[197] we shall see that the observations of Strehlow, though
completing, making more precise and sometimes even rectifying those of
Spencer and Gillen, confirm them in all that is essential.
These discoveries have given rise to an abundant literature to which we
shall have occasion to return. The works of Spencer and Gillen
especially have exercised a considerable influence, not only because
they were the oldest, but also because the facts were there presented in
a systematic form, which was of a nature to give a direction to later
studies,[198] and to stimulate speculation. Their results were commented
upon, discussed and interpreted in all possible manners. At this same
time, Howitt, whose fragmentary studies were scattered in a number of
different publications,[199] undertook to do for the southern tribes
what Spencer and Gillen had done for those of the centre. In his _Native
Tribes of South-East Australia_,[200] he gives us a view of the social
organization of the peoples who occupy Southern Australia, New South
Wales, and a good part of Queensland. The progress thus realized
suggested to Frazer the idea of completing his Totemism by a sort of
compendium[201] where would be brought together all the important
documents which are concerned either with the totemic religion or the
family and matrimonial organization which, rightly or wrongly, is
believed to be connected with this religion. The purpose of this book is
not to give us a general and systematic view of totemism, but rather to
put the materials necessary for a construction of this sort at the
disposition of scholars.[202] The facts are here arranged in a strictly
ethnographical and geographical order: each continent, and within the
continent, each tribe or ethnic group is studied separately. Though so
extended a study, where so many diverse peoples are successively passed
in review, could hardly be equally thorough in all its parts, still it
is a useful hand-book to consult, and one which can aid greatly in
facilitating researches.
II
From this historical résumé it is clear that Australia is the most
favourable field for the study of totemism, and therefore we shall make
it the principal area of our observations.
In his _Totemism_, Frazer sought especially to collect all the traces of
totemism which could be found in history or ethnography. He was thus led
to include in his study societies the nature and degree of whose culture
differs most widely: ancient Egypt,[203] Arabia and Greece,[204] and the
southern Slavs[205] are found there, side by side with the tribes of
Australia and America. This manner of procedure is not at all surprising
for a disciple of the anthropological school. For this school does not
seek to locate religions in the social environments of which they are a
part,[206] and to differentiate them according to the different
environments to which they are thus connected. But rather, as is
indicated by the name which it has taken to itself, its purpose is to go
beyond the national and historical differences to the universal and
really human bases of the religious life. It is supposed that man has a
religious nature of himself, in virtue of his own constitution, and
independently of all social conditions, and they propose to study
this.[207] For researches of this sort, all peoples can be called upon
equally well. It is true that they prefer the more primitive peoples,
because this fundamental nature is more apt to be unaltered here; but
since it is found equally well among the most civilized peoples, it is
but natural that they too should be called as witnesses. Consequently,
all those who pass as being not too far removed from the origins, and
who are confusedly lumped together under the rather imprecise rubric of
_savages_, are put on the same plane and consulted indifferently. Since
from this point of view, facts have an interest only in proportion to
their generality, they consider themselves obliged to collect as large a
number as possible of them; the circle of comparisons could not become
too large.
Our method will not be such a one, for several reasons.
In the first place, for the sociologist as for the historian, social
facts vary with the social system of which they form a part; they cannot
be understood when detached from it. This is why two facts which come
from two different societies cannot be profitably compared merely
because they seem to resemble each other; it is necessary that these
societies themselves resemble each other, that is to say, that they be
only varieties of the same species. The comparative method would be
impossible, if social types did not exist, and it cannot be usefully
applied except within a single type. What errors have not been committed
for having neglected this precept! It is thus that facts have been
unduly connected with each other which, in spite of exterior
resemblances, really have neither the same sense nor the same
importance: the primitive democracy and that of to-day, the collectivism
of inferior societies and actual socialistic tendencies, the monogamy
which is frequent in Australian tribes and that sanctioned by our laws,
etc. Even in the work of Frazer such confusions are found. It frequently
happens that he assimilates simple rites of wild-animal-worship to
practices that are really totemic, though the distance, sometimes very
great, which separates the two social systems would exclude all idea of
assimilation. Then if we do not wish to fall into these same errors,
instead of scattering our researches over all the societies possible, we
must concentrate them upon one clearly determined type.
It is even necessary that this concentration be as close as possible.
One cannot usefully compare facts with which he is not perfectly well
acquainted. But when he undertakes to include all sorts of societies and
civilizations, one cannot know any of them with the necessary
thoroughness; when he assembles facts from every country in order to
compare them, he is obliged to take them hastily, without having either
the means or the time to carefully criticize them. Tumultuous and
summary comparisons result, which discredit the comparative method with
many intelligent persons. It can give serious results only when it is
applied to so limited a number of societies that each of them can be
studied with sufficient precision. The essential thing is to choose
those where investigations have the greatest chance to be fruitful.
Also, the value of the facts is much more important than their number.
In our eyes, the question whether totemism has been more or less
universal or not, is quite secondary.[208] If it interests us, it does
so before all because in studying it we hope to discover relations of a
nature to make us understand better what religion is. Now to establish
these relations it is neither necessary nor always useful to heap up
numerous experiences upon each other; it is much more important to have
a few that are well studied and really significant. One single fact may
make a law appear, where a multitude of imprecise and vague observations
would only produce confusion. In every science, the scholar would be
overwhelmed by the facts which present themselves to him, if he did not
make a choice among them. It is necessary that he distinguish those
which promise to be the most instructive, that he concentrate his
attention upon these, and that he temporarily leave the others to one
side.
That is why, with one reservation which will be indicated below, we
propose to limit our research to Australian societies. They fulfil all
the conditions which were just enumerated. They are perfectly
homogeneous, for though it is possible to distinguish varieties among
them, they all belong to one common type. This homogeneity is even so
great that the forms of social organization are not only the same, but
that they are even designated by identical or equivalent names in a
multitude of tribes, sometimes very distant from each other.[209] Also,
Australian totemism is the variety for which our documents are the most
complete. Finally, that which we propose to study in this work is the
most primitive and simple religion which it is possible to find. It is
therefore natural that to discover it, we address ourselves to
societies as slightly evolved as possible, for it is evidently there
that we have the greatest chance of finding it and studying it well. Now
there are no societies which present this characteristic to a higher
degree than the Australian ones. Not only is their civilization most
rudimentary--the house and even the hut are still unknown--but also
their organization is the most primitive and simple which is actually
known; it is that which we have elsewhere called _organization on a
basis of clans_.[210] In the next chapter, we shall have occasion to
restate its essential traits.
However, though making Australia the principal field of our research, we
think it best not to leave completely aside the societies where totemism
was first discovered, that is to say, the Indian tribes of North
America.
This extension of the field of comparison has nothing about it which is
not legitimate. Undoubtedly these people are more advanced than those of
Australia. Their civilization has become much more advanced: men there
live in houses or under tents, and there are even fortified villages.
The size of the society is much greater, and centralization, which is
completely lacking in Australia, is beginning to appear there; we find
vast confederations, such as that of the Iroquois, under one central
authority. Sometimes a complicated system of differentiated classes
arranged in a hierarchy is found. However, the essential lines of the
social structure remain the same as those in Australia; it is always the
organization on a basis of clans. Thus we are not in the presence of two
different types, but of two varieties of a single type, which are still
very close to each other. They represent two successive moments of a
single evolution, so their homogeneousness is still great enough to
permit comparisons.
Also, these comparisons may have their utility. Just because their
civilization is more advanced than that of the Australians, certain
phases of the social organization which is common to both can be studied
more easily among the first than among the second. As long as men are
still making their first steps in the art of expressing their thought,
it is not easy for the observer to perceive that which moves them; for
there is nothing to translate clearly that which passes in these obscure
minds which have only a confused and ephemeral knowledge of themselves.
For example, religious symbols then consist only in formless
combinations of lines and colours, whose sense it is not easy to divine,
as we shall see. There are many gestures and movements by which interior
states express themselves; but being essentially ephemeral, they
readily elude observation. That is why totemism was discovered earlier
in America than in Australia; it was much more visible there, though it
held relatively less place in the totality of the religious life. Also,
wherever beliefs and institutions do not take a somewhat definite
material form, they are more liable to change under the influence of the
slightest circumstances, or to become wholly effaced from the memory.
Thus the Australian clans frequently have something floating and Protean
about them, while the corresponding organization in America has a
greater stability and more clearly defined contours. Thus, though
American totemism is further removed from its origins than that of
Australia, still there are important characteristics of which it has
better kept the memory.
In the second place, in order to understand an institution, it is
frequently well to follow it into the advanced stages of its
evolution;[211] for sometimes it is only when it is fully developed that
its real signification appears with the greatest clearness. In this way
also, American totemism, since it has a long history behind it, could
serve to clarify certain aspects of Australian totemism.[212] At the
same time, it will put us in a better condition to see how totemism is
bound up with the forms which follow, and to mark its place in the
general historical development of religion.
So in the discussions which follow, we shall not forbid ourselves the
use of certain facts borrowed from the Indian societies of North
America. But we are not going to study American totemism here;[213] such
a study must be made directly and by itself, and cannot be mixed with
the one which we are undertaking; it raises other problems and implies a
wholly different set of special investigations. We shall have recourse
to American facts merely in a supplementary way, and only when they seem
to be able to make us understand Australian facts to advantage. It is
these latter which constitute the real and immediate object of our
researches.[214]
BOOK II
THE ELEMENTARY BELIEFS
CHAPTER I
TOTEMIC BELIEFS
_The Totem as Name and as Emblem_
Owing to its nature, our study will include two parts. Since every
religion is made up of intellectual conceptions and ritual practices, we
must deal successively with the beliefs and rites which compose the
totemic religion. These two elements of the religious life are too
closely connected with each other to allow of any radical separation. In
principle, the cult is derived from the beliefs, yet it reacts upon
them; the myth is frequently modelled after the rite in order to account
for it, especially when its sense is no longer apparent. On the other
hand, there are beliefs which are clearly manifested only through the
rites which express them. So these two parts of our analysis cannot fail
to overlap. However, these two orders of facts are so different that it
is indispensable to study them separately. And since it is impossible to
understand anything about a religion while unacquainted with the ideas
upon which it rests, we must seek to become acquainted with these latter
first of all.
But it is not our intention to retrace all the speculations into which
the religious thought, even of the Australians alone, has run. The
things we wish to reach are the elementary notions at the basis of the
religion, but there is no need of following them through all the
development, sometimes very confused, which the mythological imagination
of these peoples has given them. We shall make use of myths when they
enable us to understand these fundamental ideas better, but we shall not
make mythology itself the subject of our studies. In so far as this is a
work of art, it does not fall within the jurisdiction of the simple
science of religions. Also, the intellectual evolution from which it
results is of too great a complexity to be studied indirectly and from a
foreign point of view. It constitutes a very difficult problem which
must be treated by itself, for itself and with a method peculiar to
itself.
Among the beliefs upon which totemism rests, the most important are
naturally those concerning the totem; it is with these that we must
begin.
I
At the basis of nearly all the Australian tribes we find a group which
holds a preponderating place in the collective life: this is the clan.
Two essential traits characterize it.
In the first place, the individuals who compose it consider themselves
united by a bond of kinship, but one which is of a very special nature.
This relationship does not come from the fact that they have definite
blood connections with one another; they are relatives from the mere
fact that they have the same name. They are not fathers and mothers,
sons or daughters, uncles or nephews of one another in the sense which
we now give these words; yet they think of themselves as forming a
single family, which is large or small according to the dimensions of
the clan, merely because they are collectively designated by the same
word. When we say that they regard themselves as a single family, we do
so because they recognize duties towards each other which are identical
with those which have always been incumbent upon kindred: such duties as
aid, vengeance, mourning, the obligation not to marry among themselves,
etc.
By this first characteristic, the clan does not differ from the Roman
_gens_ or the Greek [Greek: genos]; for this relationship also came
merely from the fact that all the members of the _gens_ had the same
name,[215] the _nomen gentilicium_. And in one sense, the _gens_ is a
clan; but it is a variety which should not be confounded with the
Australian clan.[216] This latter is distinguished by the fact that its
name is also the name of a determined species of material things with
which it believes that it has very particular relations, the nature of
which we shall presently describe; they are especially relations of
kinship. The species of things which serves to designate the clan
collectively is called its _totem_. The totem of the clan is also that
of each of its members.
Each clan has its totem, which belongs to it alone; two different clans
of the same tribe cannot have the same. In fact, one is a member of a
clan merely because he has a certain name. All who bear this name are
members of it for that very reason; in whatever manner they may be
spread over the tribal territory, they all have the same relations of
kinship with one another.[217] Consequently, two groups having the same
totem can only be two sections of the same clan. Undoubtedly, it
frequently happens that all of a clan does not reside in the same
locality, but has representatives in several different places. However,
this lack of a geographical basis does not cause its unity to be the
less keenly felt.
In regard to the word totem, we may say that it is the one employed by
the Ojibway, an Algonquin tribe, to designate the sort of thing whose
name the clan bears.[218] Although this expression is not at all
Australian,[219] and is found only in one single society in America,
ethnographers have definitely adopted it, and use it to denote, in a
general way, the system which we are describing. Schoolcraft was the
first to extend the meaning of the word thus and to speak of a "totemic
system."[220] This extension, of which there are examples enough in
ethnography, is not without inconveniences. It is not normal for an
institution of this importance to bear a chance name, taken from a
strictly local dialect, and bringing to mind none of the distinctive
characteristics of the thing it designates. But to-day this way of
employing the word is so universally accepted that it would be an excess
of purism to rise against this usage.[221]
In a very large proportion of the cases, the objects which serve as
totems belong either to the animal or the vegetable kingdom, but
especially to the former. Inanimate things are much more rarely
employed. Out of more than 500 totemic names collected by Howitt among
the tribes of south-eastern Australia, there are scarcely forty which
are not the names of plants or animals; these are the clouds, rain,
hail, frost, the moon, the sun, the wind, the autumn, the summer, the
winter, certain stars, thunder, fire, smoke, water or the sea. It is
noticeable how small a place is given to celestial bodies and, more
generally, to the great cosmic phenomena, which were destined to so
great a fortune in later religious development. Among all the clans of
which Howitt speaks, there were only two which had the moon as
totem,[222] two the sun,[223] three a star,[224] three the thunder,[225]
two the lightning.[226] The rain is a single exception; it, on the
contrary, is very frequent.[227]
These are the totems which can be spoken of as normal. But totemism has
its abnormalities as well. It sometimes happens that the totem is not a
whole object, but the part of an object. This fact appears rather rarely
in Australia;[228] Howitt cites only one example.[229] However, it may
well be that this is found with a certain frequency in the tribes where
the totemic groups are excessively subdivided; it might be said that the
totems had to break themselves up in order to be able to furnish names
to these numerous divisions. This is what seems to have taken place
among the Arunta and the Loritja. Strehlow has collected 442 totems in
these two societies, of which many are not an animal species, but some
particular organ of the animal of the species, such as the tail or
stomach of an opossum, the fat of the kangaroo, etc.[230]
We have seen that normally the totem is not an individual, but a species
or a variety: it is not such and such a kangaroo or crow, but the
kangaroo or crow in general. Sometimes, however, it is a particular
object. First of all, this is necessarily the case when the thing
serving as totem is unique in its class, as the sun, the moon, such or
such a constellation, etc. It also happens that clans take their names
from certain geographical irregularities or depressions of the land,
from a certain ant-hill, etc. It is true that we have only a small
number of examples of this in Australia; but Strehlow does mention
some.[231] But the very causes which have given rise to these abnormal
totems show that they are of a relatively recent origin. In fact, what
has made certain geographical features of the land become totems is that
a mythical ancestor is supposed to have stopped there or to have
performed some act of his legendary life there.[232] But at the same
time, these ancestors are represented in the myths as themselves
belonging to clans which had perfectly regular totems, that is to say,
ones taken from the animal or vegetable kingdoms. Therefore, the totemic
names thus commemorating the acts and performances of these heroes
cannot be primitive; they belong to a form of totemism that is already
derived and deviated. It is even permissible to ask if the
meteorological totems have not a similar origin; for the sun, the moon
and the stars are frequently identified with the ancestors of the
mythological epoch.[233]
Sometimes, but no less exceptionally, it is an ancestor or a group of
ancestors which serves as totem directly. In this case, the clan takes
its name, not from a thing or a species of real things, but from a
purely mythical being. Spencer and Gillen had already mentioned two or
three totems of this sort. Among the Warramunga and among the Tjingilli
there are clans which bear the name of an ancestor named Thaballa who
seems to be gaiety incarnate.[234] Another Warramunga clan bears the
name of a huge fabulous serpent named Wollunqua, from which the clan
considers itself descended.[235] We owe other similar facts to
Strehlow.[236] In any case, it is easy enough to see what probably took
place. Under the influence of diverse causes and by the very development
of mythological thought, the collective and impersonal totem became
effaced before certain mythical personages who advanced to the first
rank and became totems themselves.
Howsoever interesting these different irregularities may be, they
contain nothing which forces us to modify our definition of a totem.
They are not, as has sometimes been believed,[237] different varieties
of totems which are more or less irreducible into each other or into the
normal totem, such as we have defined it. They are merely secondary and
sometimes even aberrant forms of a single notion which is much more
general, and there is every ground for believing it the more primitive.
The manner in which the name is acquired is more important for the
organization and recruiting of the clan than for religion; it belongs to
the sociology of the family rather than to religious sociology.[238] So
we shall confine ourselves to indicating summarily the most essential
principles which regulate the matter.
In the different tribes, three different systems are in use.
In a great number, or it might even be said, in the greater number of
the societies, the child takes the totem of its mother, by right of
birth: this is what happens among the Dieri and the Urabunna of the
centre of Southern Australia; the Wotjobaluk and the Gournditch-Mara of
Victoria; the Kamilaroi, the Wiradjuri, the Wonghibon and the Euahlayi
of New South Wales; and the Wakelbura, the Pitta-Pitta and the
Kurnandaburi of Queensland, to mention only the most important names. In
this case, owing to a law of exogamy, the mother is necessarily of a
different totem from her husband, and on the other hand, as she lives in
his community, the members of a single totem are necessarily dispersed
in different localities according to the chances of their marriages. As
a result, the totemic group lacks a territorial base.
Elsewhere the totem is transmitted in the paternal line. In this case,
if the child remains with his father, the local group is largely made up
of people belonging to a single totem; only the married women there
represent foreign totems. In other words, each locality has its
particular totem. Up until recent times, this scheme of organization was
found in Australia only among the tribes where totemism was in
decadence, such as the Narrinyeri, where the totem has almost no
religious character at all any more.[239] It was therefore possible to
believe that there was a close connection between the totemic system and
descent in the uterine line. But Spencer and Gillen have observed, in
the northern part of central Australia, a whole group of tribes where
the totemic religion is still practised but where the transmission of
the totem is in the paternal line: these are the Warramunga, the Quanji,
the Umbia, the Binbinga, the Mara and the Anula.[240]
Finally, a third combination is the one observed among the Arunta and
Loritja. Here the totem of the child is not necessarily either that of
the mother or that of the father; it is that of a mythical ancestor who
came, by processes which the observers recount in different ways,[241]
and mysteriously fecundated the mother at the moment of conception. A
special process makes it possible to learn which ancestor it was and to
which totemic group he belonged.[242] But since it was only chance which
determined that this ancestor happened to be near the mother, rather
than another, the totem of the child is thus found to depend finally
upon fortuitous circumstances.[243]
Outside of and above the totems of clans there are totems of phratries
which, though not differing from the former in nature, must none the
less be distinguished from them.
A phratry is a group of clans which are united to each other by
particular bonds of fraternity. Ordinarily the Australian tribe is
divided into two phratries between which the different clans are
distributed. Of course there are some tribes where this organization has
disappeared, but everything leads us to believe that it was once
general. In any case, there are no tribes in Australia where the number
of phratries is greater than two.
Now in nearly all the cases where the phratries have a name whose
meaning has been established, this name is that of an animal; it would
therefore seem that it is a totem. This has been well demonstrated in a
recent work by A. Lang.[244] Thus, among the Gournditch (Victoria), the
phratries are called Krokitch and Kaputch; the former of the words
designates the white cockatoo and the latter the black cockatoo.[245]
The same expressions are found again among the Buandik and the
Wotjobaluk.[246] Among the Wurunjerri, the names employed are Bunjil and
Waang, which designate the eagle-hawk and the crow.[247] The words
Mukwara and Kilpara are used for the same purpose in a large number of
tribes of New South Wales;[248] they designate the same birds.[249] It
is also the eagle-hawk and the crow which have given their names to the
two phratries of the Ngarigo and the Wolgal.[250] Among the Kuinmurbura,
it is the white cockatoo and the crow.[251] Many other examples might be
cited. Thus we are led to regard the phratry as an ancient clan which
has been dismembered; the actual clans are the product of this
dismemberment, and the solidarity which unites them is a souvenir of
their primitive unity.[252] It is true that in certain tribes, the
phratries no longer have special names, as it seems; in others where
these names exist, their meaning is no longer known, even to the
members. But there is nothing surprising in this. The phratries are
certainly a primitive institution, for they are everywhere in a state of
regression; their descendants the clans have passed to the first rank.
So it is but natural that the names which they bore should have been
effaced from memory little by little, when they were no longer
understood; for they must belong to a very archaic language no longer in
use. This is proved by the fact that in many cases where we know the
animal whose name the phratry bears, the word designating this animal in
the current language is very different from the one employed here.[253]
Between the totem of the phratry and the totems of the clans there
exists a sort of relation of subordination. In fact, in principle each
clan belongs to one and only one phratry; it is very exceptional that it
has representatives in the other phratry. This is not met with at all
except among certain central tribes, notably the Arunta;[254] also even
where, owing to disturbing influences, overlappings of this sort have
taken place, the great part of the clan is included entirely within one
or the other of the two groups of the tribe; only a small minority is to
be found in the other one.[255] As a rule then, the two phratries do not
overlap each other; consequently, the list of totems which an individual
may have is predetermined by the phratry to which he belongs. In other
words, the phratry is like a species of which the clans are varieties.
We shall presently see that this comparison is not purely metaphorical.
In addition to the phratries and clans, another secondary group is
frequently met with in Australian societies, which is not without a
certain individuality: these are the matrimonial classes.
By this name they designate certain subdivisions of the phratry, whose
number varies with the tribe: there are sometimes two and sometimes four
per phratry.[256] Their recruiting and operation are regulated by the
two following principles. In the first place, each generation in a
phratry belongs to different clans from the immediately preceding one.
Thus, when there are only two classes per phratry, they necessarily
alternate with each other every generation. The children make up the
class of which their parents are not members; but grandchildren are of
the same class as their grandparents. Thus, among the Kamilaroi, the
Kupathin phratry has two classes, Ippai and Kumbo; the Dilby phratry,
two others which are called Murri and Kubbi. As descent is in the
uterine line, the child is in the phratry of its mother; if she is a
Kupathin, the child will be one also. But if she is of the Ippai class,
he will be a Kumbo; if the child is a girl, her children will again be
in the Ippai class.
Likewise, the children of the women of the Murri class will be in the
Kubbi class, and the children of the Kubbi women will be Murri again.
When there are four classes per phratry, instead of two, the system is
naturally more complex, but the principle is the same. The four classes
form two couples of two classes each, and these two classes alternate
with each other every generation in the manner just indicated. Secondly,
the members of one class can in principle[257] marry into only one of
the classes of the other phratry. The Ippai must marry into the Kubbi
class and the Murri into the Kumbo class. It is because this
organization profoundly affects matrimonial relations that we give the
group the name of matrimonial class.
Now it may be asked whether these classes do not sometimes have totems
like the phratries and clans.
This question is raised by the fact that in certain tribes of
Queensland, each matrimonial class has dietetic restrictions that are
peculiar to it. The individuals who compose it must abstain from eating
the flesh of certain animals which the others may consume freely.[258]
Are these animals not totems?
But dietetic restrictions are not the characteristic marks of totemism.
The totem is a name first of all, and then, as we shall see, an emblem.
Now in the societies of which we just spoke, there are no matrimonial
classes which bear the name of an animal or plant, or which have an
emblem.[259] Of course it is possible that these restrictions are
indirectly derived from totemism. It might be supposed that the animals
which these interdictions protect were once the totems of clans which
have since disappeared, while the matrimonial classes remained. It is
certain that they have a force of endurance which the clans do not have.
Then these interdictions, deprived of their original field, may have
spread themselves out over the entire class, since there were no other
groups to which they could be attached. But it is clear that if this
regulation was born of totemism, it represents only an enfeebled and
denatured form of it.[260]
All that has been said of the totem in Australian societies is equally
applicable to the Indian tribes of North America. The only difference is
that among these latter, the totemic organization has a strictness of
outline and a stability which are not found in Australia. The Australian
clans are not only very numerous, but in a single tribe their number is
almost unlimited. Observers cite some of them as examples, but without
ever succeeding in giving us a complete list. This is because the list
is never definitely terminated. The same process of dismemberment which
broke up the original phratries and give birth to clans properly
so-called still continues within these latter; as a result of this
progressive crumbling, a clan frequently has only a very small effective
force.[261] In America, on the contrary, the totemic system has better
defined forms. Although the tribes there are considerably larger on the
average, the clans are less numerous. A single tribe rarely has more
than a dozen of them,[262] and frequently less; each of them is
therefore a much more important group. But above all, their number is
fixed; they know their exact number, and they it tell to us.[263]
This difference is due to the superiority of their social economy. From
the moment when these tribes were observed for the first time, the
social groups were strongly attached to the soil, and consequently
better able to resist the decentralizing forces which assailed them. At
the same time, the society had too keen a sentiment of its unity to
remain unconscious of itself and of the parts out of which it was
composed. The example of America thus enables us to explain even better
the organization at the base of the clans. We would take a mistaken
view, if we judged this only on the present conditions in Australia. In
fact, it is in a state of change and dissolution there, which is not at
all normal; it is much rather the product of a degeneration which we
see, due both to the natural decay of time and the disorganizing effect
of the whites. To be sure, it is hardly probable that the Australian
clans ever had the dimensions and solid structure of the American ones.
But there must have been a time when the distance between them was less
considerable than it is to-day, for the American societies would never
have succeeded in making so solid a structure if the clans had always
been of so fluid and inconsistent a nature.
This greater stability has even enabled the archaic system of phratries
to maintain itself in America with a clearness and a relief no longer to
be found in Australia. We have just seen that in the latter continent
the phratry is everywhere in a state of decadence; very frequently it is
nothing more than an anonymous group; when it has a name, this is either
no longer understood, or in any case, it cannot mean a great deal to the
native, since it is borrowed from a foreign language, or from one no
longer spoken. Thus we have been able to infer the existence of totems
for phratries only from a few survivals, which, for the most part, are
so slightly marked that they have escaped the attention of many
observers. In certain parts of America, on the contrary, this
institution has retained its primitive importance. The tribes of the
North-west coast, the Tlinkit and the Haida especially, have now
attained a relatively advanced civilization; yet they are divided into
two phratries which are subdivided into a certain number of clans: the
phratries of the Crow and the Wolf among the Tlinkit,[264] of the Eagle
and the Crow among the Haida.[265] And this division is not merely
nominal; it corresponds to an ever-existing state of tribal customs and
is deeply marked with the tribal life. The moral distance separating the
clans is very slight in comparison with that separating the
phratries.[266] The name of each is not a word whose sense is forgotten
or only vaguely known; it is a totem in the full sense of the term; they
have all its essential attributes, such as will be described below.[267]
Consequently, upon this point also, American tribes must not be
neglected, for we can study the totems of phratries directly there,
while Australia offers only obscure vestiges of them.
II
But the totem is not merely a name; it is an emblem, a veritable
coat-of-arms whose analogies with the arms of heraldry have often been
remarked. In speaking of the Australians, Grey says, "each family adopt
an animal or vegetable as their crest and sign,"[268] and what Grey
calls a family is incontestably a clan. Also Fison and Howitt say, "the
Australian divisions show that the totem is, in the first place, the
badge of a group."[269] Schoolcraft says the same thing about the totems
of the Indians of North America. "The totem is in fact a design which
corresponds to the heraldic emblems of civilized nations, and each
person is authorized to bear it as a proof of the identity of the family
to which it belongs. This is proved by the real etymology of the word,
which is derived from _dodaim_, which means village or the residence of
a family group."[270] Thus when the Indians entered into relations with
the Europeans and contracts were formed between them, it was with its
totem that each clan sealed the treaties thus concluded.[271]
The nobles of the feudal period carved, engraved and designed in every
way their coats-of-arms upon the walls of their castles, their arms, and
every sort of object that belonged to them; the blacks of Australia and
the Indians of North America do the same thing with their totems. The
Indians who accompanied Samuel Hearne painted their totems on their
shields before going into battle.[272] According to Charlevoix, in time
of war, certain tribes of Indians had veritable ensigns, made of bits of
bark fastened to the end of a pole, upon which the totems were
represented.[273] Among the Tlinkit, when a conflict breaks out between
two clans, the champions of the two hostile groups wear helmets over
their heads, upon which are painted their respective totems.[274] Among
the Iroquois, they put the skin of the animal which serves as totem upon
each wigwam, as a mark of the clan.[275] According to another observer,
the animal was stuffed and set up before the door.[276] Among the
Wyandot, each clan has its own ornaments and its distinctive
paintings.[277] Among the Omaha, and among the Sioux generally, the
totem is painted on the tent.[278]
Wherever the society has become sedentary, where the tent is replaced by
the house, and where the plastic arts are more fully developed, the
totem is engraved upon the woodwork and upon the walls. This is what
happens, for example, among the Haida, the Tsimshian, the Salish and the
Tlinkit. "A very particular ornament of the house, among the Tlinkit,"
says Krause, "is the totemic coat-of-arms." Animal forms, sometimes
combined with human forms, are engraved upon the posts at the sides of
the door of entry, which are as high as 15 yards; they are generally
painted with very bright colours.[279] However, these totemic
decorations are not very numerous in the Tlinkit village; they are found
almost solely before the houses of the chiefs and rich men. They are
much more frequent in the neighbouring tribe of the Haida; here there
are always several for each house.[280] With its many sculptured posts
arising on every hand, sometimes to a great height, a Haida village
gives the impression of a sacred city, all bristling with belfries or
little minarets.[281] Among the Salish, the totem is frequently
represented upon the interior walls of the house.[282] Elsewhere, it is
found upon the canoes, the utensils of every sort and the funeral
piles.[283]
The preceding examples are taken exclusively from the Indians of North
America. This is because sculpture, engravings and permanent figurations
are not possible except where the technique of the plastic arts has
reached a degree of perfection to which the Australian tribes have not
yet attained. Consequently the totemic representations of the sort which
we just mentioned are rarer and less apparent in Australia than in
America. However, cases of them are cited. Among the Warramunga, at the
end of the burial ceremonies, the bones of the dead man are interred,
after they have been dried and reduced to powder; beside the place where
they are deposited, a figure representing the totem is traced upon the
ground.[284] Among the Mara and the Anula, the body is placed in a piece
of hollow wood decorated with designs characteristic of the totem.[285]
In New South Wales, Oxley found engravings upon the trees near the tomb
where a native was buried[286] to which Brough Smyth attributes a
totemic character. The natives of the Upper Darling carve totemic images
upon their shields.[287] According to Collins, nearly all the utensils
are covered with ornaments which probably have the same significance;
figures of the same sort are found upon the rocks.[288] These totemic
designs may even be more frequent than it seems, for, owing to reasons
which will be discussed below, it is not always easy to see what their
real meaning is.
These different facts give us an idea of the considerable place held by
the totem in the social life of the primitives. However, up to the
present, it has appeared to us as something relatively outside of the
man, for it is only upon external things that we have seen it
represented. But totemic images are not placed only upon the walls of
their houses, the sides of their canoes, their arms, their utensils and
their tombs; they are also found on the bodies of the men. They do not
put their coat-of-arms merely upon the things which they possess, but
they put it upon their persons; they imprint it upon their flesh, it
becomes a part of them, and this world of representations is even by
far the more important one.
In fact, it is a very general rule that the members of each clan seek to
give themselves the external aspect of their totem. At certain religious
festivals among the Tlinkit, the person who is to direct the ceremonies
wears a garment which represents, either wholly or in part, the body of
the animal whose name he bears.[289] These same usages are also found in
all the North-West of America.[290] They are found again among the
Minnitaree, when they go into combat,[291] and among the Indians of the
Pueblos.[292] Elsewhere, when the totem is a bird, men wear the feathers
of this bird on their heads.[293] Among the Iowa, each clan has a
special fashion of cutting the hair. In the Eagle clan, two large tufts
are arranged on the front of the head, while there is another one
behind; in the Buffalo clan, they are arranged in the form of
horns.[294] Among the Omaha, analogous arrangements are found: each clan
has its own head-dress. In the Turtle clan, for example, the hair is all
shaved off, except six bunches, two on each side of the head, one in
front, and one behind, in such a way as to imitate the legs, the head
and the tail of the animal.[295]
But it is more frequently upon the body itself that the totemic mark is
stamped: for this is a way of representation within the capacity of even
the least advanced societies. It has sometimes been asked whether the
common rite of knocking out a young man's two upper teeth at the age of
puberty does not have the object of reproducing the form of the totem.
The fact is not established, but it is worth mentioning that the natives
themselves sometimes explain the custom thus. For example, among the
Arunta, the extraction of teeth is practised only in the clans of the
rain and of water; now according to tradition, the object of this
operation is to make their faces look like certain black clouds with
light borders which are believed to announce the speedy arrival of rain,
and which are therefore considered things of the same family.[296] This
is a proof that the native himself is conscious that the object of these
deformations is to give him, at least conventionally, the aspect of his
totem. Among these same Arunta, in the course of the rites of
sub-incision, certain gashes are cut upon the sisters and the future
wife of the novice; scars result from these, whose form is also
represented upon a certain sacred object of which we shall speak
presently and which is called the _churinga_; as we shall see, the lines
thus drawn upon the _churinga_ are emblematic of the totem.[297] Among
the Kaitish, the euro is believed to be closely connected with the
rain;[298] the men of the rain clan wear little ear-rings made of euro
teeth.[299] Among the Yerkla, during the initiation the young man is
given a certain number of slashes which leave scars; the number and form
of these varies with the totems.[300] An informer of Fison mentions the
same fact in the tribes observed by him.[301] According to Howitt, a
relationship of the same sort exists among the Dieri between certain
arrangements of scars and the water totem.[302] Among the Indians of the
North-West, it is a very general custom for them to tattoo themselves
with the totem.[303]
But even if the tattooings which are made by mutilations or scars do not
always have a totemic significance,[304] it is different with simple
designs drawn upon the body: they are generally representations of the
totem. It is true that the native does not carry them every day. When he
is occupied with purely economic occupations, or when the small family
groups scatter to hunt or fish, he does not bother with all this
paraphernalia, which is quite complicated. But when the clans unite to
live a common life and to assist at the religious ceremonies together,
then he must adorn himself. As we shall see, each of the ceremonies
concerns a particular totem, and in theory the rites which are connected
with a totem can be performed only by the men of that totem. Now those
who perform,[305] who take the part of officiants, and sometimes even
those who assist as spectators, always have designs representing the
totem on their bodies.[306] One of the principal rites of initiation, by
which a young man enters into the religious life of the tribe, consists
in painting the totemic symbol on his body.[307] It is true that among
the Arunta the design thus traced does not always and necessarily
represent the totem of the initiated;[308] but these are exceptions,
due, undoubtedly, to the disturbed state of the totemic organization of
this tribe.[309] Also, even among the Arunta, at the most solemn moment
of the initiation, which is its crown and consecration, when the
neophyte is allowed to enter the sanctuary where all the sacred objects
belonging to the clan are preserved, an emblematic painting is placed
upon him; this time, it is the totem of the young man which is thus
represented.[310] The bonds which unite the individual to his totem are
even so strong that in the tribes on the North-west coast of North
America, the emblem of the clan is painted not only upon the living but
also upon the dead: before a corpse is interred, they put the totemic
mark upon it.[311]
III
These totemic decorations enable us to see that the totem is not merely
a name and an emblem. It is in the course of the religious ceremonies
that they are employed; they are a part of the liturgy; so while the
totem is a collective label, it also has a religious character. In fact,
it is in connection with it, that things are classified as sacred or
profane. It is the very type of sacred thing.
The tribes of Central Australia, especially the Arunta, the Loritja, the
Kaitish, the Unmatjera, and the Ilpirra,[312] make constant use of
certain instruments in their rites which are called the _churinga_ by
the Arunta, according to Spencer and Gillen, or the _tjurunga_,
according to Strehlow.[313] They are pieces of wood or bits of polished
stone, of a great variety of forms, but generally oval or oblong.[314]
Each totemic group has a more or less important collection of these.
_Upon each of these is engraved a design representing the totem of this
same group._[315] A certain number of the churinga have a hole at one
end, through which goes a thread made of human hair or that of an
opossum. Those which are made of wood and are pierced in this way serve
for exactly the same purposes as those instruments of the cult to which
English ethnographers have given the name of "bull-roarers." By means of
the thread by which they are suspended, they are whirled rapidly in the
air in such a way as to produce a sort of humming identical with that
made by the toys of this name still used by our children; this deafening
noise has a ritual significance and accompanies all ceremonies of any
importance. These sorts of churinga are real bull-roarers. But there are
others which are not made of wood and are not pierced; consequently they
cannot be employed in this way. Nevertheless, they inspire the same
religious sentiments.
In fact, every churinga, for whatever purpose it may be employed, is
counted among the eminently sacred things; there are none which surpass
it in religious dignity. This is indicated even by the word which is
used to designate them. It is not only a substantive but also an
adjective meaning sacred. Also, among the several names which each
Arunta has, there is one so sacred that it must not be revealed to a
stranger; it is pronounced but rarely, and then in a low voice and a
sort of mysterious murmur. Now this name is called the _aritna churinga_
(aritna means name).[316] In general, the word churinga is used to
designate all ritual acts; for example, _ilia churinga_ signifies the
cult of the emu.[317] Churinga, when used substantively, therefore
designates the thing whose essential characteristic is sacredness.
Profane persons, that is to say, women and young men not yet initiated
into the religious life, may not touch or even see the churinga; they
are only allowed to look at it from a distance, and even this is only on
rare occasions.[318]
The churinga are piously kept in a special place, which the Arunta call
the _ertnatulunga_.[319] This is a cave or a sort of cavern hidden in a
deserted place. The entrance is carefully closed by means of stones so
cleverly placed that a stranger going past it could not suspect that the
religious treasury of the clan was so near to him. The sacred character
of the churinga is so great that it communicates itself to the locality
where they are stored: the women and the uninitiated cannot approach it.
It is only after their initiation is completely finished that the young
men have access to it: there are some who are not esteemed worthy of
this favour except after years of trial.[320] The religious nature
radiates to a distance and communicates itself to all the surroundings:
everything near by participates in this same nature and is therefore
withdrawn from profane touch. Is one man pursued by another? If he
succeeds in reaching the ertnatulunga, he is saved; he cannot be seized
there.[321] Even a wounded animal which takes refuge there must be
respected.[322] Quarrels are forbidden there. It is a place of peace, as
is said in the Germanic societies; it is a sanctuary of the totemic
group, it is a veritable place of asylum.
But the virtues of the churinga are not manifested merely by the way in
which it keeps the profane at a distance. If it is thus isolated, it is
because it is something of a high religious value whose loss would
injure the group and the individuals severely. It has all sorts of
marvellous properties: by contact it heals wounds, especially those
resulting from circumcision;[323] it has the same power over
sickness;[324] it is useful for making the beard grow;[325] it confers
important powers over the totemic species, whose normal reproduction it
ensures;[326] it gives men force, courage and perseverance, while, on
the other hand, it depresses and weakens their enemies. This latter
belief is so firmly rooted that when two combatants stand pitted against
one another, if one sees that the other has brought churinga against
him, he loses confidence and his defeat is certain.[327] Thus there is
no ritual instrument which has a more important place in the religious
ceremonies.[328] By means of various sorts of anointings, their powers
are communicated either to the officiants or to the assistants; to bring
this about, they are rubbed over the members and stomach of the faithful
after being covered with grease;[329] or sometimes they are covered with
a down which flies away and scatters itself in every direction when they
are whirled; this a way of disseminating the virtues which are in
them.[330]
But they are not useful merely to individuals; the fate of the clan as a
whole is bound up with theirs. Their loss is a disaster; it is the
greatest misfortune which can happen to the group.[331] Sometimes they
leave the ertnatulunga, for example when they are loaned to other
groups.[332] Then follows a veritable public mourning. For two weeks,
the people of the totem weep and lament, covering their bodies with
white clay just as they do when they have lost a relative.[333] And the
churinga are not left at the free disposition of everybody; the
ertnatulunga where they are kept is placed under the control of the
chief of the group. It is true that each individual has special rights
to some of them;[334] yet, though he is their proprietor in a sense, he
cannot make use of them except with the consent and under the direction
of the chief. It is a collective treasury; it is the sacred ark of the
clan.[335] The devotion of which they are the object shows the high
price that is attached to them. The respect with which they are handled
is shown by the solemnity of the movements.[336] They are taken care of,
they are greased, rubbed, polished, and when they are moved from one
locality to another, it is in the midst of ceremonies which bear witness
to the fact that this displacement is regarded as an act of the highest
importance.[337]
Now in themselves, the churinga are objects of wood and stone like all
others; they are distinguished from profane things of the same sort by
only one particularity: this is that the totemic mark is drawn or
engraved upon them. So it is this mark and this alone which gives them
their sacred character. It is true that according to Spencer and Gillen,
the churinga serve as the residence of an ancestor's soul and that it is
the presence of this soul which confers these properties.[338] While
declaring this interpretation inexact, Strehlow, in his turn, proposes
another which does not differ materially from the other: he claims that
the churinga are considered the image of the ancestor's body, or the
body itself.[339] So, in any case, it would be sentiments inspired by
the ancestor which fix themselves upon the material object, and
convert it into a sort of fetish. But in the first place, both
conceptions,--which, by the way, scarcely differ except in the letter of
the myth,--have obviously been made up afterwards, to account for the
sacred character of the churinga. In the constitution of these pieces of
wood and bits of stone, and in their external appearance, there is
nothing which predestines them to be considered the seat of an ancestral
soul, or the image of his body. So if men have imagined this myth, it
was in order to explain the religious respect which these things
inspired in them, and the respect was not determined by the myth. This
explanation, like so many mythological explanations, resolves the
question only by repeating it in slightly different terms; for saying
that the churinga is sacred and saying that it has such and such a
relation with a sacred being, is merely to proclaim the same fact in two
different ways; it is not accounting for them. Moreover, according to
the avowal of Spencer and Gillen, there are some churinga among the
Arunta which are made by the old men of the group, to the knowledge of
and before the eyes of all;[340] these obviously do not come from the
great ancestors. However, except for certain differences of degree, they
have the same power as the others and are preserved in the same manner.
Finally, there are whole tribes where the churinga is never associated
with a spirit.[341] Its religious nature comes to it, then, from some
other source, and whence could it come, if not from the totemic stamp
which it bears? It is to this image, therefore, that the demonstrations
of the rite are really addressed; it is this which sanctifies the object
upon which it is carved.
Among the Arunta and the neighbouring tribes, there are two other
liturgical instruments closely connected with the totem and the
churinga itself, which ordinarily enters into their composition: they
are the _nurtunja_ and the _waninga_.
The nurtunja,[342] which is found among the northern Arunta and their
immediate neighbours,[343] is made up principally of a vertical support
which is either a single lance, or several lances united into a bundle,
or of a simple pole.[344] Bunches of grass are fastened all around it by
means of belts or little cords made of hair. Above this, down is placed,
arranged either in circles or in parallel lines which run from the top
to the bottom of the support. The top is decorated with the plumes of an
eagle-hawk. This is only the most general and typical form; in
particular cases, it has all sorts of variations.[345]
The waninga, which is found only among the southern Arunta, the Urabunna
and the Loritja, has no one unique model either. Reduced to its most
essential elements, it too consists in a vertical support, formed by a
long stick or by a lance several yards high, with sometimes one and
sometimes two cross-pieces.[346] In the former case, it has the
appearance of a cross. Cords made either of human hair or opossum or
bandicoot fur diagonally cross the space included between the arms of
the cross and the extremities of the central axis; as they are quite
close to each other, they form a network in the form of a lozenge. When
there are two cross-bars, these cords go from one to the other and from
these to the top and bottom of the support. They are sometimes covered
with a layer of down, thick enough to conceal the foundation. Thus the
waninga has the appearance of a veritable flag.[347]
Now the nurtunja and the waninga, which figure in a multitude of
important rites, are the object of a religious respect quite like that
inspired by the churinga. The process of their manufacture and erection
is conducted with the greatest solemnity. Fixed in the earth, or carried
by an officiant, they mark the central point of the ceremony: it is
about them that the dances take place and the rites are performed. In
the course of the initiation, the novice is led to the foot of a
nurtunja erected for the occasion. Someone says to him, "There is the
nurtunja of your father; many young men have already been made by it."
After that, the initiate must kiss the nurtunja.[348] By this kiss, he
enters into relations with the religious principle which resides there;
it is a veritable communion which should give the young man the force
required to support the terrible operation of sub-incision.[349] The
nurtunja also plays a considerable rôle in the mythology of these
societies. The myths relate that in the fabulous times of the great
ancestors, the territory of the tribe was overrun in every direction by
companies composed exclusively of individuals of the same totem.[350]
Each of these troops had a nurtunja with it. When it stopped to camp,
before scattering to hunt, the members fixed their nurtunja in the
ground, from the top of which their churinga was suspended.[351] That is
equivalent to saying that they confided the most precious things they
had to it. It was at the same time a sort of standard which served as a
rallying-centre for the group. One cannot fail to be struck by the
analogies between the nurtunja and the sacred post of the Omaha.[352]
Now its sacred character can come from only one cause: that is that it
represents the totem materially. The vertical lines or rings of down
which cover it, and even the cords of different colours which fasten the
arms of the waninga to the central axis, are not arranged arbitrarily,
according to the taste of the makers; they must conform to a type
strictly determined by tradition which, in the minds of the natives,
represents the totem.[353] Here we cannot ask, as we did in the case of
the churinga, whether the veneration accorded to this instrument of the
cult is not merely the reflex of that inspired by the ancestors; for it
is a rule that each nurtunja and each waninga last only during the
ceremony where they are used. They are made all over again every time
that it is necessary, and when the rite is once accomplished, they are
stripped of their ornaments and the elements out of which they are made
are scattered.[354] They are nothing more than images--and temporary
images at that--of the totem, and consequently it is on this ground,
and on this ground alone, that they play a religious rôle.
So the churinga, the nurtunja and the waninga owe their religious nature
solely to the fact that they bear the totemic emblem. It is the emblem
that is sacred. It keeps this character, no matter where it may be
represented. Sometimes it is painted upon rocks; these paintings are
called _churinga ilkinia_, sacred drawings.[355] The decorations with
which the officiants and assistants at the religious ceremonies adorn
themselves have the same name: women and children may not see them.[356]
In the course of certain rites, the totem is drawn upon the ground. The
way in which this is done bears witness to the sentiments inspired by
this design, and the high value attributed to it; it is traced upon a
place that has been previously sprinkled, and saturated with human
blood,[357] and we shall presently see that the blood is in itself a
sacred liquid, serving for pious uses only. When the design has been
made, the faithful remain seated on the ground before it, in an attitude
of the purest devotion.[358] If we give the word a sense corresponding
to the mentality of the primitive, we may say that they adore it. This
enables us to understand how the totemic blazon has remained something
very precious for the Indians of North America: it is always surrounded
with a sort of religious halo.
But if we are seeking to understand how it comes that these totemic
representations are so sacred, it is not without interest to see what
they consist in.
Among the Indians of North America, they are painted, engraved or carved
images which attempt to reproduce as faithfully as possible the external
aspect of the totemic animal. The means employed are those which we use
to-day in similar circumstances, except that they are generally cruder.
But it is not the same in Australia, and it is in the Australian
societies that we must seek the origin of these representations.
Although the Australian may show himself sufficiently capable of
imitating the forms of things in a rudimentary way,[359] sacred
representations generally seem to show no ambitions in this line: they
consist essentially in geometrical designs drawn upon the churinga, the
nurtunga, rocks, the ground, or the human body. They are either straight
or curved lines, painted in different ways,[360] and the whole having
only a conventional meaning. The connection between the figure and the
thing represented is so remote and indirect that it cannot be seen,
except when it is pointed out. Only the members of the clan can say what
meaning is attached to such and such combinations of lines.[361] Men and
women are generally represented by semicircles, and animals by whole
circles or spirals,[362] the tracks of men or animals by lines of
points, etc. The meaning of the figures thus obtained is so arbitrary
that a single design may have two different meanings for the men of two
different totems, representing one animal here, and another animal or
plant there. This is perhaps still more apparent with the nurtunja and
waninga. Each of them represents a different totem. But the few and
simple elements which enter into their composition do not allow a great
variety of combinations. The result is that two nurtunja may have
exactly the same appearance, and yet express two things as different as
a gum tree and an emu.[363] When a nurtunja is made, it is given a
meaning which it keeps during the whole ceremony, but which, in the last
resort, is fixed by convention.
These facts prove that if the Australian is so strongly inclined to
represent his totem, it is in order not to have a portrait of it before
his eyes which would constantly renew the sensation of it; it is merely
because he feels the need of representing the idea which he forms of it
by means of material and external signs, no matter what these signs may
be. We are not yet ready to attempt to understand what has thus caused
the primitive to write his idea of his totem upon his person and upon
different objects, but it is important to state at once the nature of
the need which has given rise to these numerous representations.[364]