THEORIES AND FACTS.
There is a festival to-day among the coolies. All night, from down in
the valley where their huts are, has come the sound of tom-toms beating.
And this morning there has been no roll-call, no telling off the men to
making pits and the women to weeding. The fields have been empty, and
the village which is usually so abandoned by day, is full of people.
They have roamed lazily to and fro or sat before their doorways in the
sun talking and waiting, for the ceremony is not till noon.
It begins with a procession. It is a long procession, all of men or
boys, for it seems that among these people women are not concerned in
the acting of the ceremonies. They are all men, mostly the elders and
the headsmen of gangs, and before them dances a man half naked, half
mad, who cries and throws his arms about. He is possessed of the Spirit.
I do not know what the procession means, and I ask. No one can tell me;
only it "is the custom." And so they pass up the main road near my house
with tom-toms beating and flowers about their necks, and the "possessed"
priest dancing ever before them. They go perhaps a mile about and then
return, and by the entrance to the village, where are boys who carry
rice and cocoanuts; and as the priest approaches they throw this rice
before him and break the cocoanuts at his feet. So they enter the
village. In the centre is an open space and they stop, the procession
breaks, for the priest goes to the centre still dancing, and the people
form a great ring about him. He dances more and more wildly as the
tom-toms quicken their beat, his eyes are bloodshot, his hands are
clenched, there is foam upon his lips. "He has the Spirit," the people
murmur with wonder. Then into the centre of this ring come two men
dragging a goat. It is a black goat with a white star on his forehead.
His horns are painted and there are flowers about his neck. When the
priest sees the goat he rushes forward. He grips the goat by the ears,
the men let go and depart, and the priest and goat are left alone. He
is about to sacrifice the goat, I know that, but I do not know how, for
he has no knife. But I quickly understand. He has seized the goat by
both ears in a grip of steel. Then bending down he bares his teeth and
catches the lower lip of the goat between them. He tears and worries,
and the goat struggles ineffectually, for with savage energy the priest
has torn at the lip till it peels off in a long strip down the throat,
so that the veins and arteries are laid bare. And then with a sudden
jerk he lets go the torn skin and buries his teeth deep in the
palpitating throat. You see his jaw work, you see the goat give a great
convulsive struggle, there is a sudden rush of blood from the torn
arteries pouring over the priest in a great red stream. For a minute
there is stillness, and then the goat's tense limbs relax. They droop,
for he is dead; and with a tremor in all his limbs the man stands for a
second and then drops too senseless, his face falling on the goat that
he has slain. For two, three, five minutes, I know not how long, there
is a dead silence. The sun is at its height and pours down upon the
intense crowd, upon the victim lying in its pool of blood, upon the
priest a huddled heap beside it. And then with a great sigh the people
awake. There is a movement and a murmur. Some elders go and carry away
the goat, and the priest is supported to the little temple near by. The
blood is covered up with fresh earth, the ceremony is over, and the
people break up.
* * * * *
In the evening my writer Antonio tells me all he knows. What is the god
who entered into the priest? I ask, and he shakes his head. "For sure,"
he answers, "I do not know. They only tell me 'Sawmy, Sawmy'; that is,
'God, God.' They say he want sacrifice, he want people to give him
present. I do not know why he want present, except he big God and must
be worship. If he not get sacrifice he angry. If he get sacrifice he
pleased."
So Antonio explains to me the scene. He argues like my books do. Let me
consider. They would explain it some way like this. They would say that
the "Sawmy" was the Sun God, or some other idealisation; that first of
all the Indians imagined this Sawmy out of ghosts or dreams; that having
done so they gave this God certain attributes and powers; that
subsequently they imagined the God angry and punishing the people, and
so they would proceed to a priest suffering from hysteria, which they
supposed to be the possession of this Sawmy, and finally arrive at the
procession and sacrifice. They would point out how the flesh of the goat
was divided among the coolies, thus bringing them into communion with
their God. And so they would come at last to the concrete fact, as
caused by a long process of imagination, an explanation quite incredible
to me. I read the facts differently, much more simply. As to imagination
the people have hardly any; they are hopelessly incapable of such a
train of thought. The priest himself admits that not one in fifty has
the least glimmering of any meaning in the ceremony. Nevertheless they
like it, they are awed by it, they would by no means allow it to be
omitted. And as to this feast of communion with their divinity, what are
the facts?
The coolies are poor, they live almost entirely on rice and vegetables.
Meat can very rarely be afforded. Yet they long for it, and a few times
in the year they all subscribe and buy a goat for food as a very special
luxury.
The goat being bought has to be killed. Now, to people in this stage of
civilisation, to people in _any_ stage of civilisation, the taking of
life is very attractive, it is an awe and wonder-inspiring act. These
people are so poor they can seldom afford such a sight, and therefore
it must be made the most of. You may note exactly the same passion in
bull fights, the execution of martyrs, in public executions of all
countries. What greater treat can you offer a boy than to see a pig
killed? So the death of the goat is compassed with much show and in a
peculiarly impressive way. That done the meat is divided as already
arranged, and everyone is pleased. They have got their food and their
sensation. The priest, too, is pleased, and makes his little scientific
theology to explain and apologise for this peculiar emotion. It has the
further result of making him powerful and revered. For he alone can see
and tell the coolies the inwardness of it all; and he can further claim
the tit-bits as representative of the Deity.
So arose sacrifice out of some inward hidden emotion of men's hearts. Do
not say this emotion is purely savage. It is allied often to the purest
pity, to awe, to strange searchings of the heart. To some it may be
hardening, but to most it is not so.
How do I know? I know by two ways, because I have watched the faces of
this and many crowds to see how they felt, and that is what I saw. I
have seen death inflicted so often, on animals and on man, that I know
and have felt what the emotion is. I cannot explain the emotion--who can
explain any emotion?--but I know it is there. And I know that, if not
witnessed too often or in wrong circumstances, the sight of suffering
and death, rightfully inflicted, is not brutalising, but very much the
reverse.
Who are the most kind-hearted, even soft-hearted, of men? They are
soldiers and doctors. The sights they have seen, the suffering and even
death they may themselves have inflicted of necessity, have never
hardened them. They have but made their sympathies the deeper and
stronger. Look at the contemporary history of any war, of that in Burma
fifteen years ago, of that in the Transvaal to-day. Who are they who
call out for stringent measures, for much shooting, for plenty of
hanging? Never the soldiers. Never those who know what these things are.
It is the civilians and journalists who know not what death is. Who
wrote "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," "La Debacle," "The Red Badge of
Courage," with their delight in blood? Not men who had seen war. Nor is
it they who read such books with pleasure. Men who have seen death and
watched it could never make the telling an hour's diversion. It is
those who have never seen the reality, who seek in art that stimulus
which they know they require.
The sight and knowledge and understanding of unavoidable suffering and
death is the greatest of all purifiers to the heart. The weak cannot
bear it. Women may avoid it because they know they are unable to sustain
it, because they know it does brutalise them. But with men it is never
so.
Suffering and death are facts; they are part of the world, and men must
know them. They are needed to strengthen and deepen the greatest
emotions of men.
And therefore there is in man this instinct, this attraction to the
sight of suffering and death, an instinct that, rightly followed, has in
it nothing but good.
So I read the ceremony I had witnessed. Such is, I am sure, the meaning
of all such ceremonies. They never arise from mental theories, always
from inner emotion. The scientific theologian of the tribe has explained
them in his way, and when enquirers have tried to understand these
ceremonies they have gone to the priest instead of the people. Hence the
absolute futility of all that has been written on the origins of
faiths.
Men have begun at the wrong end: they have argued down instead of up;
they have begun their pyramid at the top. Yet surely if there is any
fact that ought to be impressed on us since Darwin, it is to begin at
the bottom. Reason never produces facts or emotion. It can but theorise
on them.
And meditating on what I had seen, I came to see at last all my
mistakes.
Instead of beginning with ideas of God, to find man I ought to have gone
first to man, to see how arise the ideas of the First Cause. Instead of
examining codes of conduct as supernaturally given and impossible, I
ought to have gone to man and tried to discover how he came to frame and
to uphold these codes. And so also with heaven and hell, man has but
imagined them to suit his needs: and if so, what needs? I have tried all
the creeds to find an explanation of man, and there is none. I begin now
with man to find an explanation of the creeds. Man and his necessities
are the eternal truth, and all his religions are but framed by himself
to minister to his needs. This is the theory on which to work and try
for results.
We have an authority for such a method in science, for she proceeds not
from the unknown to the known, but from the observed to the imagined.
Thus has she imagined the unimaginable ether to explain certain
phenomena and to act as a working theory to proceed on. Scientific men
did not invent ether and the laws of ether first, and so descend to
light and electricity. They felt the light and heat, and gradually
worked inwards and upwards.
So perhaps has man felt certain needs, certain emotions and certain
impulses, and has imagined his First Cause, his Law, his codes, his
religious theories, one and all, to explain his needs and help himself.
The whole series of questions becomes altered.
It is no longer which is true, the Christian Triune God, the Hindu
million of Gods, the Mahommedan one God, the Buddhist Law? but from what
facts did these arise, and why do they persist to-day?
Out of what necessity, to justify what feeling, does the Christian
require a Triune God, the Hindu many Gods, and the Buddhist no God but
Law? Why does each reject the conception of the other? It is not what
code is the true code of life, the Jewish code, the Christian, the
Buddhist, but why are these Codes at all?
Why had the Jews their ruthless code? Why have the Christians and
Buddhists adopted codes they cannot act up to? Why have the Hindus in
"caste" the most elaborate codes we know.
Why did the Jews have no hereafter at all, the Mahommedans a sensual
paradise, the Greeks the Shades, the Brahmins and Buddhists a
transmigration of souls leading to Nirvana? These are very different
ideas. What necessities do they serve? And so with the many facets of
religions. Faiths do not explain man, perhaps man can explain his
faiths. That is my new standpoint from which I shall see.