with the question, 'Whence comes the supernatural predicate of the
fetich?' If a negro tells us his fetich is a god, whence got he the
idea of 'god'? Many obvious answers occur. Mr. Mueller says, speaking
of the Indians (p. 205): 'The concept of _gods_ was no doubt growing
up while men were assuming a more and more definite attitude towards
these semi-tangible and intangible objects'--trees, rivers, hills, the
sky, the sun, and so on, which he thinks suggested and developed, by
aid of a kind of awe, the religious feeling of the infinite. We too
would say that, among people who adore fetiches and ghosts, the
concept of gods no doubt silently grew up, as men assumed a more and
more definite attitude towards the tangible and intangible objects
they held sacred. Again, negroes have had the idea of god imported
among them by Christians and Islamites, so that, even if they did not
climb (as De Brosses grants that many of them do) to purer religious
ideas unaided, these ideas are now familiar to them, and may well be
used by them, when they have to explain a fetich to a European. Mr.
Max Mueller explains the origin of religion by a term ('the Infinite')
which, he admits, the early people would not have comprehended. The
negro, if he tells a white man that a fetich is a god, transposes
terms in the same unscientific way. Mr. Mueller asks: 'How do these
people, when they have picked up their stone or their shell, pick up,
at the same time, the concepts of a supernatural power, of spirit, of
god, and of worship paid to some unseen being?' But who says that men
picked up these ideas _at the same time_? These ideas were evolved by
a long, slow, complicated process. It is not at all impossible that
the idea of a kind of 'luck' attached to this or that object, was
evolved by dint of meditating on a mere series of lucky accidents.
Such or such a man, having found such an object, succeeded in hunting,
fishing, or war. By degrees, similar objects might be believed to
command success. Thus burglars carry bits of coal in their pockets,
'for luck.' This random way of connecting causes and effects which
have really no inter-relation, is a common error of early reasoning.
Mr. Max Mueller says that 'this process of reasoning is far more in
accordance with modern thought'; if so, modern thought has little to
be proud of. Herodotus, however, describes the process of thought as
consecrated by custom among the Egyptians. But there are many other
practical ways in which the idea of supernatural power is attached to
fetiches. Some fetich-stones have a superficial resemblance to other
objects, and thus (on the magical system of reasoning) are thought to
influence these objects. Others, again, are pointed out as worthy of
regard in dreams or by the ghosts of the dead.[201] To hold these
views of the origin of the supernatural predicate of fetiches is not
'to take for granted that every human being was miraculously endowed
with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich.'
Thus we need not be convinced by Mr. Max Mueller that fetichism (though
it necessarily has its antecedents in the human mind) is 'a corruption
of religion.' It still appears to be one of the most primitive steps
towards the idea of the supernatural.
What, then, is the subjective element of religion in man? How has he
become capable of conceiving of the supernatural? What outward objects
first awoke that dormant faculty in his breast? Mr. Max Mueller
answers, that man has 'the faculty of apprehending the infinite'--that
by dint of this faculty he is capable of religion, and that sensible
objects, 'tangible, semi-tangible, intangible,' first roused the
faculty to religious activity, at least among the natives of India. He
means, however, by the 'infinite' which savages apprehend, not our
metaphysical conception of the infinite, but the mere impression that
there is 'something beyond.' 'Everything of which his senses cannot
perceive a limit, is to a primitive savage or to any man in an early
stage of intellectual activity _unlimited_ or _infinite_.' Thus, in
all experience, the idea of 'a beyond' is forced on men. If Mr. Max
Mueller would adhere to this theory, then we should suppose him to mean
(what we hold to be more or less true) that savage religion, like
savage science, is merely a fanciful explanation of what lies beyond
the horizon of experience. For example, if the Australians mentioned
by Mr. Max Mueller believe in a being who created the world, a being
whom they do not worship, and to whom they pay no regard (for, indeed,
he has become 'decrepit'), their theory is scientific, not religious.
They have looked for the causes of things, and are no more religious
(in so doing) than Newton was when he worked out his theory of
gravitation. The term 'infinite' is wrongly applied, because it is a
term of advanced thought used in explanation of the ideas of men who,
Mr. Max Mueller says, were incapable of conceiving the meaning of such
a concept. Again, it is wrongly applied, because it has some modern
religious associations, which are covertly and fallaciously introduced
to explain the supposed emotions of early men. Thus, Mr. Mueller says
(p. 177)--he is giving his account of the material things that awoke
the religious faculty--'the mere sight of the torrent or the stream
would have been enough to call forth in the hearts of the early
dwellers on the earth ... a feeling that they were surrounded on all
sides by powers invisible, infinite, or divine.' Here, if I understand
Mr. Mueller, 'infinite' is used in our modern sense. The question is,
How did men ever come to believe in powers infinite, invisible,
divine? If Mr. Mueller's words mean anything, they mean that a dormant
feeling that there were such existences lay in the breast of man, and
was wakened into active and conscious life, by the sight of a torrent
or a stream. How, to use Mr. Mueller's own manner, did these people,
when they saw a stream, have mentally, at the same time, 'a feeling of
_infinite_ powers'? If this is not the expression of a theory of
'innate religion' (a theory which Mr. Mueller disclaims), it is capable
of being mistaken for that doctrine by even a careful reader. The
feeling of 'powers infinite, invisible, divine,' _must_ be in the
heart, or the mere sight of a river could not call it forth. How did
the feeling get into the heart? That is the question.
The ordinary anthropologist distinguishes a multitude of causes, a
variety of processes, which shade into each other and gradually
produce the belief in powers invisible, infinite, and divine. What
tribe is unacquainted with dreams, visions, magic, the apparitions of
the dead? Add to these the slow action of thought, the conjectural
inferences, the guesses of crude metaphysics, the theories of isolated
men of religious and speculative genius. By all these and other forces
manifold, that emotion of awe in presence of the hills, the stars, the
sea, is developed. Mr. Max Mueller cuts the matter shorter. The early
inhabitants of the earth saw a river, and the 'mere sight' of the
torrent called forth the feelings which (to us) seem to demand ages of
the operation of causes disregarded by Mr. Mueller in his account of
the origin of Indian religion.
The mainspring of Mr. Mueller's doctrine is his theory about
'apprehending the infinite.' Early religion, or at least that of
India, was, in his view, the extension of an idea of Vastness, a
disinterested emotion of awe.[202] Elsewhere, we think, early religion
has been a development of ideas of Force, an interested search, not
for something wide and far and hard to conceive, but for something
practically _strong_ for good and evil. Mr. Mueller (taking no count in
this place of fetiches, ghosts, dreams and magic) explains that the
sense of 'wonderment' was wakened by objects only semi-tangible,
trees, which are _taller_ than we are, 'whose roots are beyond our
reach, and which have a kind of life in them.' 'We are dealing with a
quartenary, it may be a tertiary troglodyte,' says Mr. Mueller. If a
tertiary troglodyte was like a modern Andaman Islander, a Kaneka, a
Dieyrie, would he stand and meditate in awe on the fact that a tree
was taller than he, or had 'a kind of life,' 'an unknown and
unknowable, yet undeniable something'?[203] Why, this is the sentiment
of modern Germany, and perhaps of the Indian sages of a cultivated
period! A troglodyte would look for a 'possum in the tree, he would
tap the trunk for honey, he would poke about in the bark after grubs,
or he would worship anything odd in the branches. Is Mr. Mueller not
unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into
the midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship
a tree if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical
meaning, or if _boilyas_ lived in its boughs, but whose practical way
of dealing with the problem of its life was to burn it round the stem,
chop the charred wood with stone axes, and use the bark, branches, and
leaves as they happened to come handy?
Mr. Mueller has a long list of semi-tangible objects 'overwhelming and
overawing,' like the tree. There are mountains, where 'even a stout
heart shivers before the real presence of the _infinite_'; there are
rivers, those instruments of so sudden a religious awakening; there is
earth. These supply the material for semi-deities. Then come sky,
stars, dawn, sun and moon: 'in these we have the germs of what,
hereafter, we shall have to call by the name of deities.'
Before we can transmute, with Mr. Mueller, these objects of a somewhat
vague religious regard into a kind of gods, we have to adopt Noire's
philological theories, and study the effects of auxiliary verbs on the
development of personification and of religion. Noire's philological
theories are still, I presume, under discussion. They are necessary,
however, to Mr. Mueller's doctrine of the development of the vague
'sense of the infinite' (wakened by fine old trees, and high
mountains) into _devas_, and of _devas_ (which means 'shining ones')
into the Vedic gods. Our troglodyte ancestors, and their sweet feeling
for the spiritual aspect of landscape, are thus brought into relation
with the Rishis of the Vedas, the sages and poets of a pleasing
civilisation. The reverence felt for such comparatively refined or
remote things as fire, the sun, wind, thunder, the dawn, furnished a
series of stepping-stones to the Vedic theology, if theology it can be
called. It is impossible to give each step in detail; the process must
be studied in Mr. Mueller's lectures. Nor can we discuss the later
changes of faith. As to the processes which produced the fetichistic
'corruption' (that universal and everywhere identical form of decay),
Mr. Mueller does not afford even a hint. He only says that, when the
Indians found that their old gods were mere names, 'they built out of
the scattered bricks a new altar to the Unknown God'--a statement
which throws no light on the parasitical development of fetichism. But
his whole theory is deficient if, having called fetichism a
_corruption_, he does not show how corruption arose, how it operated,
and how the disease attacked all religions everywhere.
We have contested, step by step, many of Mr. Mueller's propositions. If
space permitted, it would be interesting to examine the actual
attitude of certain contemporary savages, Bushmen and others, towards
the sun. Contemporary savages may be degraded, they certainly are not
primitive, but their _legends_, at least, are the oldest things they
possess. The supernatural elements in their ideas about the sun are
curiously unlike those which, according to Mr. Mueller, entered into
the development of Aryan religion.
The last remark which has to be made about Mr. Mueller's scheme of the
development of Aryan religion is that the religion, as explained by
him, does not apparently aid the growth of society, nor work with it
in any way. Let us look at a sub-barbaric society--say that of
Zululand, of New Zealand, of the Iroquois League, or at a savage
society like that of the Kanekas, or of those Australian tribes about
whom we have very many interesting and copious accounts. If we begin
with the Australians, we observe that society is based on certain laws
of marriage enforced by capital punishment. These laws of marriage
forbid the intermixing of persons belonging to the stock which
worships this or that animal, or plant. Now this rule, as already
observed, _made_ the 'gentile' system (as Mr. Morgan erroneously calls
it) the system which gradually reduces tribal hostility, by making
tribes homogeneous. The same system (with the religious sanction of a
kind of zoolatry) is in force and has worked to the same result, in
Africa, Asia, America, and Australia, while a host of minute facts
make it a reasonable conclusion that it prevailed in Europe. Among
these facts certain peculiarities of Greek and Roman and Hindoo
marriage law, Greek, Latin, and English tribal names, and a crowd of
legends are the most prominent.[204] Mr. Max Mueller's doctrine of the
development of Indian religion (while admitting the existence of Snake
or Naga tribes) takes no account of the action of this universal
zoolatry on religion and society.
After marriage and after tribal institutions, look at _rank_. Is it
not obvious that the religious elements (magic and necromancy) left
out of his reckoning by Mr. Mueller are most powerful in developing
rank? Even among those democratic paupers, the Fuegians, 'the
doctor-wizard of each party has much influence over his companions.'
Among those other democrats, the Eskimo, a class of wizards, called
Angakuts, become 'a kind of civil magistrates,' because they can cause
fine weather, and can magically detect people who commit offences.
Thus the germs of rank, in these cases, are sown by the magic which is
fetichism in action. Try the Zulus: 'the heaven is the chief's,' he
can call up clouds and storms, hence the sanction of his authority. In
New Zealand, every Rangatira has a supernatural power. If he touches
an article, no one else dares to appropriate it, for fear of terrible
supernatural consequences. A head chief is 'tapued an inch thick, and
perfectly unapproachable.' Magical power abides in and emanates from
him. By this superstition, an aristocracy is formed, and property (the
property, at least, of the aristocracy) is secured. Among the Red
Indians, as Schoolcraft says, 'priests and jugglers are the persons
that make war and have a voice in the sale of the land.' Mr. E. W.
Robertson says much the same thing about early Scotland. If Odin was
not a god with the gifts of a medicine-man, and did not owe his
chiefship to his talent for dealing with magic, he is greatly
maligned. The Irish Brehons also sanctioned legal decisions by magical
devices, afterwards condemned by the Church. Among the Zulus, 'the
_Itongo_ (spirit) dwells with the great man; he who dreams is the
chief of the village.' The chief alone can 'read in the vessel of
divination.' The Kaneka chiefs are medicine-men.
Here then, in widely distant regions, in early European, American,
Melanesian, African societies, we find those factors in religion which
the primitive Aryans are said to have dispensed with, helping to
construct society, rank, property. Is it necessary to add that the
ancestral spirits still 'rule the present from the past,' and demand
sacrifice, and speak to 'him who dreams,' who, therefore, is a strong
force in society, if not a chief? Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Tylor, M.
Fustel de Coulanges, a dozen others, have made all this matter of
common notoriety. As Hearne the traveller says about the Copper River
Indians, 'it is almost necessary that they who rule them should
profess something a little supernatural to enable them to deal with
the people.' The few examples we have given show how widely, and among
what untutored races, the need is felt. The rudimentary government of
early peoples requires, and, by aid of dreams, necromancy, 'medicine'
(_i.e._, fetiches), _tapu_, and so forth, obtains, a supernatural
sanction.
Where is the supernatural sanction that consecrated the chiefs of a
race which woke to the sense of the existence of infinite beings, in
face of trees, rivers, the dawn, the sun, and had none of the
so-called late and corrupt fetichism that does such useful social
work?
To the student of other early societies, Mr. Mueller's theory of the
growth of Aryan religion seems to leave society without cement, and
without the most necessary sanctions. One man is as good as another,
before a tree, a river, a hill. The savage organisers of other
societies found out fetiches and ghosts that were 'respecters of
persons.' Zoolatry is intertwisted with the earliest and most
widespread law of prohibited degrees. How did the Hindoos dispense
with the aid of these superstitions? Well, they did not quite dispense
with them. Mr. Max Mueller remarks, almost on his last page (376), that
'in India also ... the thoughts and feelings about those whom death
had separated from us for a time, supplied some of the earliest and
most important elements of religion.' If this was the case, surely the
presence of those elements and their influence should have been
indicated along with the remarks about the awfulness of trees and the
suggestiveness of rivers. Is nothing said about the spirits of the
dead and their cult in the Vedas? Much is said, of course. But, were
it otherwise, then other elements of savage religion may also have
been neglected there, and it will be impossible to argue that
fetichism did not exist because it is not mentioned. It will also be
impossible to admit that the _Hibbert Lectures_ give more than a
one-sided account of the Origin of Indian Religion.
The perusal of Mr. Max Mueller's book deeply impresses one with the
necessity of studying early religions and early societies
simultaneously. If it be true that early Indian religion lacked
precisely those superstitions, so childish, so grotesque, and yet so
useful, which we find at work in contemporary tribes, and which we
read of in history, the discovery is even more remarkable and
important than the author of the _Hibbert Lectures_ seems to suppose.
It is scarcely necessary to repeat that the negative evidence of the
Vedas, the religious utterances of sages, made in a time of what we
might call 'heroic culture,' can never disprove the existence of
superstitions which, if current in the former experience of the race,
the hymnists, as Barth observes, would intentionally ignore. Our
object has been to defend the 'primitiveness of fetichism.' By this we
do not mean to express any opinion as to whether fetichism (in the
strictest sense of the word) was or was not earlier than totemism,
than the worship of the dead, or than the involuntary sense of awe and
terror with which certain vast phenomena may have affected the
earliest men. We only claim for the powerful and ubiquitous practices
of fetichism a place _among_ the early elements of religion, and
insist that what is so universal has not yet been shown to be 'a
corruption' of something older and purer.
One remark of Mr. Max Mueller's fortifies these opinions. If fetichism
be indeed one of the earliest factors of faith in the supernatural; if
it be, in its rudest forms, most powerful in proportion to other
elements of faith among the least cultivated races (and _that_ Mr.
Mueller will probably allow)--among what class of cultivated peoples
will it longest hold its ground? Clearly, among the least cultivated,
among the fishermen, the shepherds of lonely districts, the peasants
of outlying lands--in short, among the _people_. Neglected by sacred
poets in the culminating period of purity in religion, it will linger
among the superstitions of the rustics. There is no real break in the
continuity of peasant life; the modern folklore is (in many points)
the savage ritual. Now Mr. Mueller, when he was minimising the
existence of fetichism in the Rig Veda (the oldest collection of
hymns), admitted its existence in the Atharva_n_a (p. 60).[205] On p.
151, we read 'the Atharva-veda-Sanhita is a later collection,
containing, besides a large number of Rig Veda verses, _some curious
relics of popular poetry connected with charms, imprecations, and
other superstitious usages_.' The italics are mine, and are meant to
emphasise this fact:--When we leave the sages, the Rishis, and look at
what is _popular_, look at what that class believed which of savage
practice has everywhere retained so much, we are at once among the
charms and the fetiches! This is precisely what one would have
expected. If the history of religion and of mythology is to be
unravelled, we must examine what the unprogressive classes in Europe
have in common with Australians and Bushmen, and Andaman Islanders. It
is the function of the people to retain in folklore these elements of
religion, which it is the high duty of the sage and the poet to purify
away in the fire of refining thought. It is for this very reason that
_ritual_ has (though Mr. Max Mueller curiously says that it seems not
to possess) an immense scientific interest. Ritual holds on, with the
tenacity of superstition, to all that has ever been practised. Yet,
when Mr. Mueller wants to know about _origins_, about actual ancient
_practice_, he deliberately turns to that 'great collection of ancient
poetry' (the Rig Veda) 'which has no special reference to sacrificial
acts,' not to the Brahmanas which are full of ritual.
To sum up briefly:--(1) Mr. Mueller's arguments against the evidence
for, and the primitiveness of, fetichism seem to demonstrate the
opposite of that which he intends them to prove. (2) His own evidence
for _primitive_ practice is chosen from the documents of a
_cultivated_ society. (3) His theory deprives that society of the very
influences which have elsewhere helped the Tribe, the Family, Rank,
and Priesthoods to grow up, and to form the backbone of social
existence.
FOOTNOTES:
[197] _Lectures on Language._ Second Series, p. 41.
[198] A defence of the evidence for our knowledge of savage faiths,
practices, and ideas will be found in _Primitive Culture_, i. 9-11.
[199] A third reference to Pausanias I have been unable to verify.
There are several references to Greek fetich-stones in Theophrastus'
account of the Superstitious Man. A number of Greek sacred stones
named by Pausanias may be worth noticing. In Boeotia (ix. 16), the
people believed that Alcmene, mother of Heracles, was changed into a
stone. The Thespians worshipped, under the name of Eros, an unwrought
stone, ~agalma palaiotaton~, 'their most ancient sacred object' (ix.
27). The people of Orchomenos 'paid extreme regard to certain stones,'
said to have fallen from heaven, 'or to certain figures made of stone
that descended from the sky' (ix. 38). Near Chaeronea Rhea was said to
have deceived Cronus, by offering him, in place of Zeus, a stone
wrapped in swaddling bands. This stone, which Cronus vomited forth
after having swallowed it, was seen by Pausanias at Delphi (ix. 41).
By the roadside, near the city of the Panopeans, lay the stones out of
which Prometheus made men (x. 4). The stone swallowed in place of Zeus
by his father lay at the exit from the Delphian temple and was
anointed (compare the action of Jacob, Gen. xxviii. 18) with oil every
day. The Phocians worshipped thirty squared stones, each named after a
god (vii. xxii.). '_Among all the Greeks rude stones were worshipped
before the images of the gods._' Among the Troezenians a sacred stone
lay in front of the temple, whereon the Troezenian elders sat, and
purified Orestes from the murder of his mother. In Attica there was a
conical stone worshipped as Apollo (i. xliv.). Near Argos was a stone
called Zeus Cappotas, on which Orestes was said to have sat down, and
so recovered peace of mind. Such are examples of the sacred stones,
the oldest worshipful objects, of Greece.
[200] See Essays on 'Apollo and the Mouse' and 'The Early History of
the Family.'
[201] Here I may mention a case illustrating the motives of the
fetich-worshipper. My friend, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, who has for many
years studied the manners of the people of New Caledonia, asked a
native _why_ he treasured a certain fetich stone. The man replied
that, in one of the vigils which are practised beside the corpses of
deceased friends, he saw a lizard. The lizard is a totem, a worshipful
animal in New Caledonia. The native put out his hand to touch it, when
it disappeared and left a stone in its place. This stone he therefore
held sacred in the highest degree. Here then a fetich-stone was
indicated as such by a spirit in form of a lizard.
[202] Much the same theory is propounded in Mr. Mueller's lectures on
'The Science of Religion.'
[203] The idea is expressed in a well-known parody of Wordsworth,
about the tree which--
'Will grow ten times as tall as me
And live ten times as long.'
[204] See Essay on 'The Early History of the Family.'
[205] Bergaigne's _La Religion Vedique_ may be consulted for Vedic
Fetichism.
THE FAMILY.
_THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE FAMILY._