Had not human originally meant humane we should not have been here to
tell the tale. The greater traditions of a bloodless age are enshrined
in sacred books; minor traditions of it abound in the folk-lore of the
world. Man was home-sick of innocence; his conscience, which has gone on
getting more blunted, not more sensitive, revolted at the “daily
murder.” So mankind called upon heaven to provide an excuse for
slaughter.
The Kirghis of Mongolia say that in the beginning only four men and four
animals were made: the camel, the ox, the sheep, and the horse, and all
were told to live on grass. The animals grazed, but the men pulled up
the grass by the roots and stored it. The animals complained to God that
the men were pulling up all the grass, and that soon there would be none
left. God said: “If I forbid men to eat grass, will you allow them to
eat you?” Fearing starvation, the animals consented.
From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of the “Origin of Species”
there is one long testimony to our vegetarian ancestor, but beyond the
fact that he existed, what do we know about him? We may well believe
that he lived in a good climate and on a plenteous earth. Adam and Eve
or their representatives could not have subsisted in Greenland. I think
that the killing of wild animals, and especially the eating of them,
began when man found himself confronted by extremes of cold and length
of winter nights. The skins of animals gave him the only possibility of
keeping warm or even of living at all, if he was to brave the outer air,
while their flesh may have been often the only food he could find. He
was obliged to eat them to keep alive, as Arctic explorers have been
obliged to eat their sledge-dogs. Not preference, but hard necessity,
made him carnivorous.
These speculations are confirmed by the doings of the earliest man of
whom we have any sure knowledge; _not_ the proto-man who must have
developed, as I have said, under very different climatic conditions.
Perhaps he sat under the palm-trees growing on the banks of the Thames,
but though the palm-trees have left us their fruit, man, if he was
there, left nothing to speak of his harmless sojourn. By tens of
thousands of years the earliest man with whom we can claim acquaintance
is the reindeer hunter of Quartenary times. He hunted and fed upon the
reindeer, but he had not tamed them. He wore reindeer skins, but he
could not profit by reindeer milk; no children were brought up by hand,
possibly to the advantage of the children. It is likely, by the by, that
the period of human lactation was very long. The horse also was killed
for food at a time infinitely removed from the date of his first service
to man.
[Illustration:
REINDEER BROWSING.
Older Stone Age.]
[Illustration:
HORSE DRAWING DISC OF THE SUN.
Older Bronze Age.]
The reindeer hunter was a most intelligent observer of animals. He was
an artist and a very good one. The best of his scratchings on reindeer
horn and bone of horses and reindeer in different attitudes are
admirable for freedom, life, and that intuition of character which makes
the true animal painter. For a time which makes one dizzy to look down
upon, no such draughtsman appeared as the pre-historic cave dweller. The
men of the age of Polished Stone and of the early ages of metals
produced nothing similar in the way of design. They understood beauty of
form and ornament or, rather, perhaps, they still shared in that
Nature’s own unerring touch; it took millenniums of civilisation for man
to make one ugly pot or pan. But these men had not the gift or even the
idea of sitting down to copy a grazing or running animal.
We need not go far, however, to find a man who, living under nearly the
same conditions as the reindeer hunter of Southern France, has developed
the same artistic aptitude. I shall always recall with pleasure my visit
to a Laplander’s hut; it was in the broad daylight of Arctic midnight—no
one slept in the hut, except an extraordinarily small baby in a
canoe-shaped cradle. The floor was spread with handsome furs, and its
aspect was neither untidy nor comfortless. I reflected that this was how
the cave dweller arranged his safe retreat. Much more strongly was he
brought to my mind by the domestic objects of every sort made of
reindeer horn and adorned with drawings. As I write I have one of them
before me, a large horn knife, the sheath of which ends with the
branching points. It is beautifully decorated with _graffiti_, showing
the good and graceful creature without whom the Laplander cannot live.
The school of art is distinctly Troglodite.
A theory has been started that the man of the Quartenary age drew his
horses and his reindeer solely as a magical decoy from the idea that the
pictures “called” the game as whistling (_i.e._, imitating the sound of
the wind) “calls” the wind. I do not know that the Lapps, though
practised in magic, have any such purpose in view. It is said that it
would be absurd to attribute a motive of mere artistic pleasure to the
Troglodite. Why? Some races have as natural a tendency to artistic
effort as the bower-bird has to decorate its nest. Conditions of climate
may have given the hunter periods of enforced idleness, and art, in its
earliest form, was, perhaps, always an escape from _ennui_, a mode of
passing the time. That the early hunter dealt in magic is likely enough;
he is supposed, though not on altogether conclusive grounds, to have
been a fetich-worshipper, and fetich-worship is akin to some kinds of
magic. But it does not follow that _all_ his art had this connexion. How
animals appeared to his eyes we know; what he thought about them he has
not told us. The Eskimo, the modern pre-historic man who is believed to
be a better-preserved type than even the Lapp, may be asked to speak for
him.
The Eskimo can say that he had a friendly feeling towards all living
things, notwithstanding that he fed on flesh, and that wild beasts
sometimes fed on him. Not that he had ever talked of wild beasts, for he
had no tame ones. He had not a vocabulary of rude terms about animals.
He was inclined to credit every species with many potential merits. The
Eskimo is afraid—very much afraid—of bears. Yet he is the first to admit
that the bear is capable of acting like the finest of fine gentlemen. A
woman was in a fright at seeing a bear and so gave him a partridge; that
bear never forgot the trifling service, but brought her newly killed
seals ever after. Another bear saved the life of three men who wished to
reward him. He politely declined their offer, but if, in winter time,
they should see a bald-headed bear, will they induce their companions to
spare him? After so saying, he plunged into the sea. Next winter a bear
was sighted and they were going to hunt him, when these men, remembering
what had happened, begged the hunters to wait till they had had a look
at him. Sure enough it was “their own bear”! They told the others to
prepare a feast for him, and when he had refreshed himself, he lay down
to sleep and _the children played around him_. Presently he awoke and
ate a little more, after which he went down to the sea, leapt in, and
was never seen again.
Even such lovely imaginings, we may believe, without an excessive
stretch of fancy, gilded the mental horizon of the Troglodite. He had
long left behind the stage of primal innocence, but no supernatural
chasm gaped between him and his little brothers.
The reindeer hunters were submerged by what is more inexorable than
man—Nature. The reindeer vanished, and with him the hunter, doomed by
the changed conditions of climate. He vanished as the Lapp is vanishing;
the poignantly tragic scene which was chronicled by two lines in the
newspapers during the early summer of 1906—the suicide of a whole clan
of Lapps whose reindeer were dead and who had nothing to do but to
follow them—may have happened in what we call fair Provence. Thousands
of men paid with their lives for its becoming a rose garden.
The successors of the reindeer hunters, Turanian like them, but far more
progressive, were the lake dwellers, the dolmen-builders, with their
weaving and spinning, their sowing and reaping, their pottery and their
baskets, their polished flints and their domestic animals. Man’s
greatest achievement, the domestication of animals, had been reached in
the unrecorded ages that divide the rough and the polished stone. Man,
“excellent in art,” had mastered the beast whose lair is in the wilds;
“he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck; he
tames the tireless mountain bull.” The great mind of Sophocles saw and
saw truly that these were the mighty works of man; the works which made
man, man. We know that when the Neolithic meat-eater of what is now
Denmark threw away the bones after he had done his meal, these bones
were gnawed by house-dogs. A simple thing, but it tells a wondrous tale.
Did these dogs come with their masters from Asia, or had they been tamed
in their Northern home? The answer depends on whether the dog is
descended from jackal or wolf. In either case it is unlikely that the
most tremendous task of domestication was the first.
Not everywhere has man domesticated animals, though we may be sure that
he took them everywhere with him after he had domesticated them. If man
walked on dry land across the Atlantic as some enthusiastic students of
sub-oceanic geography now believe that he did, he led no sheep, no
horses, no dogs. In America, when it was discovered, there was only one
domestic animal, and in Australia there was none. Of native animals, the
American buffalo could have been easily tamed. It may be said that in
Australia there was no suitable animal, but the dog’s ancestor could not
have seemed a suitable animal for a household protector; a jackal is not
a promising pupil, still less a wolf, unless there was some more gentle
kind of wolf than any which now survives. Might not a good deal have
been made out of the kangaroo? Possibly the whole task of domestication
was the work of one patient, intelligent and widely-spread race, kindred
of the Japanese, who in making forest trees into dwarfs show the sort of
qualities that would be needed to make a wild animal not only unafraid
(that is nothing), but also a willing servant.
The Neolithic man’s eschatology of animals and of himself was identical.
He contemplated for both a future life which reproduced this one. “The
belief in the deathlessness of souls,” said Canon Isaac Taylor, “was the
great contribution of the Turanian race to the religious thought of the
world.” This appears to claim almost too much. Would any race have had
the courage to start upon its way had it conceived death as real?
“It is a modest creed and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be
Like all the rest, a mockery.”
It is a creed which springs from the very instinct of life. Two pelicans
returning to their nest found their two young ones dead from sunstroke.
The careful observer who was watching them has recorded that they _did
not seem to recognise_ the inert, fluffy heap as what _was_ their
fledglings; they hunted for them for a long while, moving the twigs of
the nest, and at last threw one of the dead birds out of it. So the
primitive man in presence of the dead knows that this is not _he_ and he
begins to ask: where is he?
But if every race in turn has asked that question, it was asked with
more insistence by some peoples than by others, and above all, it was
answered by some with more assurance. The Neolithic Turanians had
nothing misty in their vision of another world. It was full of movement
and variety: the chase, the battle, the feast, sleep and awakening,
night and day—these were there as well as here. Animals were essential
to the picture, and it never struck the Neolithic man that there was any
more difficulty about their living again than about his living again. If
he philosophised at all, it was probably after the fashion of the Eskimo
who holds the soul to be the “owner” of the body: the body, the flesh,
dies and may be devoured, but he who kills the body does not kill its
“owner.”
Vast numbers of bones have been found near the dolmens in Southern
France. The steed of the dead man galloped with him into the Beyond. The
faithful dog trotted by the little child, comrade and guardian. In the
exquisite Hebrew idyll Tobias has his dog as well as the angel to
accompany him on his adventurous earthly journey. The little Neolithic
boy had only the dog and his journey was longer; but to some grieving
fathers would it not be a rare comfort to imagine their lost darlings
guarded by loving four-footed friends along the Path of Souls?
The Celtic conquerors of the dolmen-builders took most of their
religious ideas. When successful aid in mundane matters was what was
chiefly sought in religion, a little thing might determine conversion
_en masse_. If the divinities of one set of people seemed on some
occasion powerless, it was natural to try the divinities of somebody
else. When success crowned the experiment, the new worship was formally
adopted. This is exactly what happened in the historic case of Clovis
and “Clothilde’s God,” and it doubtless happened frequently before the
dawn of history. Druidism is believed to have arisen in this way in a
grafting of the new on the old. The Celts had the same views about the
next world as the dolmen-builders. They are thought to have taken them
from the conquered with the rest of their religious system, but to me it
seems unlikely that they had not already similar views when they arrived
from Asia. In the early Vedas goats and horses were sacrificed to go
before and announce the coming of the dead; Vedic animals kept their
forms, the renewed body was perfect and incorruptible, but it was the
real body. A celebrated racehorse was deified after death. Such beliefs
have a strong affinity to the theory that animals (or slaves) killed at
the man’s funeral will be useful to him in the after-life. However
derived, our European ancestors embraced that theory to the full.
Only a few years ago a second Viking ship was found at Oseberg, in
Norway, in which were the remains of ten horses, four dogs, a young ox,
and the head of an old ox. Three more horses were found outside. The
dogs had on their own collars with long chains. There were also sledges
with elaborately carved animals’ heads. It was a queen’s grave; her
distaff and spinning-wheel told of simple womanly tasks amidst so much
sepulchral splendour. In those late times the law by which religious
forms grow more sumptuous as the faith behind them grows less, may have
come into operation. Lavish but meaningless tributes may have taken the
place of a provision full of meaning for real wants.
So the sacrifices to the gods may have been once intended to stock the
pastures of heaven. It cannot be doubted that the victim was never
_killed_ in the mind of the original sacrificer, it was merely
transferred to another sphere. The worser barbarity comes in when the
true significance of the act is lost and when it is repeated from habit.
After animals were domesticated they were not killed at all for a long
time—still less were they eaten. Of this there can be no shadow of
doubt. The first domestic animals were far too valuable possessions for
any one to think of killing them. As soon would a showman kill a
performing bull which had cost him a great deal of trouble to train.
Besides this, and more than this, the natural man, who is much better
than he is painted, has a natural horror of slaying the creature that
eats out of his hand and gives him milk and wool and willing service.
There are pastoral tribes now in South Africa which live on the milk,
cheese and butter of their sheep, but only kill them as the last
necessity. In East Africa the cow is never killed, and if one falls ill,
it is put into a sort of infirmary and carefully tended. We all know the
divinity which hedges round the Hindu cow. The same compunction once
saved the labouring ox. When I was at Athens for the Archæological
Congress of 1905, Dr. R. C. Bosanquet, at that time head of the British
school, told me that he had observed among the peasants in Crete the
most intense reluctance to kill the ox of labour. In several places in
Ancient Greece all sorts of devices were resorted to in order that the
sacrificial knife might seem to kill the young bull accidentally, and
the knife—the guilty thing—was afterwards thrown into the sea. This last
custom is important; it marks the moment when the slaughter of domestic
animals, _even_ for sacrificial purposes, still caused a scruple. The
case stands thus: at first they were not killed at all; then, for a long
time, they were killed only for sacrifice. Then they were killed for
food, but far and wide relics of the original scruple may be detected as
in the common invocation of divine permission which every Moslem butcher
utters before killing an animal.
Animal and human sacrifices are one phenomenon of early manners, not
two. The people who sacrificed domestic animals to accompany their dead
generally, if not always, also sacrificed slaves for the same purpose,
and the sacrifice of fair maidens at the funerals of heroes was to give
them these as companions in another world.
I am not aware that Gift Sacrifice ever led to cannibalism nor, in its
primitive forms, did it lead to eating the flesh of the animal victim
which was buried or burnt with the body of the person whom it was
intended to honour. This is what was done by the dolmen-builders. The
earlier reindeer hunters had no domestic animals to sacrifice, and it is
unlikely that they sacrificed men. At all events, they were not
cannibals.
On the other hand, cannibalism is closely connected with Pact Sacrifice,
which there is a tendency now to regard as antecedent to Gift Sacrifice,
especially among those scholars who think that the whole human race has
passed through a stage of Totemism. Psychologically the Totemist’s
sacrifice of a reserved animal to which all the sanctity of human life
is ascribed, resembles the sacrifice by some African tribes of a human
victim—as in both cases not only is a pact of brotherhood sealed, but
also those who partake of the flesh are supposed to acquire the
physical, moral, or supersensual qualities attributed to the victim.
Indeed, it would be possible to argue that the Totem was a substitute
for a human victim, and a whole new theory of Totemism might be evolved
from that postulate, but it is wiser to observe such affinities without
trying to derive one thing from another which commonly proves a snare
and a delusion. It is sufficient to note that among fundamental human
ideas is the belief that man grows like what he feeds upon.
The sacrifice of the Totem, though found scattered wherever Totemism
prevails, is not an invariable or even a usual accompaniment of it. When
it does occur, the Totem is not supposed to die, any more than the
victim was supposed to die in the primitive Gift Sacrifice. It changes
houses or goes to live with “our lost others,” or returns to eternal
life in the “lake of the dead.” The death of the soul is the last thing
that is thought of. The majority of Totemists do not kill their Totems
under any circumstances, and when the Totem is a wild beast they believe
that it shows a like respect for the members of its phratry. If one dies
they deplore its loss; in some parts of East Africa where the Totem is a
hyena not even the chief is mourned for with equal ceremony.
Totemism is the adoption of an animal (or plant) as the visible badge of
an invisible bond. The word Totem is an American Indian word for
“badge,” and the word Taboo a Polynesian term meaning an interdiction.
The Totemist generally says that he is descended from his Totem: hence
the men and the beasts of each Totem clan are brothers. But the beast is
something more than a brother, he is the perpetual reincarnation of the
race-spirit. Numerical problems never trouble the natural human mind;
all the cats of Bubastis were equally sacred, and all the crows of
Australia are equally sacred to the clans who have a crow for Totem. To
the mass of country folks every cow is _the_ cow, every mouse is _the_
mouse; the English villager is practically as much convinced of this as
the American Indian or the Australian native is convinced that every
Totem is _the_ Totem.
Men and women of the same Totem are _taboo_: they cannot intermarry. But
I need not speak of Totemism here as a social institution. My business
with it is limited to its place in the history of ideas about animals.
In Totemism we find represented not one idea, but an aggregation of most
of the fundamental ideas of mankind. This is why the attempt to trace it
to one particular root has failed to dispose of the question of its
origin in a final and satisfactory manner. For a time there seemed to be
a general disposition to accept what is called the “Nickname theory” by
which Totemism was attributed to the custom of giving animal nicknames.
We have a peasant called Nedrott (in the Brescian dialect “duck”); I
myself never heard his real name—his wife is “la Nedrott” and his
children are “i Nedrotti.” It is alleged that his father or grandfather
had flat feet. But I never heard of a confusion between the Nedrotti and
their nicknamesakes. It may be said that this would be sure to happen
were they less civilised. How can we be sure that it would be sure to
happen? An eminent scholar who objects to the nickname theory on the
ground that it assigns too much importance to “verbal misunderstanding,”
proposes as an alternative the “impregnation theory.” A woman, on
becoming aware of approaching motherhood, mentally connects the future
offspring with an animal or plant which happens to catch her eye at that
moment. This is conceivable, given the peculiar notions of some savages
on generation, but if all Totemism sprang from such a cause, is it not
strange that in Australia there are only two Totems, the eagle-hawk and
crow?
As a mere outward fact, the Totem is what its name implies, a badge or
sign; just as the wolf was the badge of Rome, or as the lion is taken to
represent the British Empire. The convenience of adopting a common badge
or sign may have appeared to men almost as soon as they settled into
separate clans or communities. Besides public Totems there exist private
and secret Totems, and this suggests that the earliest communities may
have consisted of a sort of freemasonry, a league of mutual help of the
nature of a secret society. Around the outward and so to speak heraldic
fact of Totemism are gathered the impressions and beliefs which make it
a rule of life, a morality and a religion.
The time may come when the desire to give a reason for an emotion will
be recognised as one of the greatest factors in myth-making. The
Totemist thinks that he spares his Totem because it is his Totem. But
man is glad to find an excuse for sparing something. Altruism is as old
as the day when the first bird took a succulent berry to its mate or
young ones instead of eating it. Where men see no difference between
themselves and animals, what more natural than that they should wish to
spare them? When it was found difficult or impossible to spare all, it
was a katharsis of the wider sentiment to spare one, and Totemism gave a
very good excuse. It appealed to a universal instinct. This is not the
same as to say that it had its origin in keeping pets; it would be
nearer the truth to describe the love of pets as a later birth of the
same instinctive tendency which the Totemist follows when he cherishes
and preserves his Totem.
The primitive man is a child in the vast zoological garden of Nature; a
child with a heart full of love, curiosity and respect, anxious to make
friends with the lion which looks so very kind and the white bear who
must want some one to comfort him. The whole folk-lore of the world
bears witness to this temper, even leaving Totemism out of the question.
The Bechuanas make excuses to the lion before killing him, the Malays to
the tiger, the Red Indians to the bear—he says that his children are
hungry and need food—would the bear kindly not object to be killed? Some
writers see Totemism in all this, and so it may be, but there is
something in it deeper than even Totemism—there is human nature.