NEOLITHIC RELIGION
Man's ancestors, as we have seen, owed their progress to their training,
policing, and harassing by stronger and better-armed competitors. The
earliest vertebrates developed a notochordal rod of cartilage, and then
a backbone, by the habit of swimming forced upon them by the mollusks
and crustacea which held the rich feeding-grounds of the ocean bottom
along the shores. In early Paleozoic time the sharks crowded the ganoids
in successive waves toward and into fresh water, until finally some
crawled out on the shore as amphibia.
Land life and air-breathing gave the possibility of warm blood and high
development of brain, and a strong tendency toward viviparous and
finally intrauterine development of the embryo. Reptiles harassed
mammals into the attainment of a certain amount of wariness and
intelligence. The comparatively weak Primates were kept in the trees and
forced to develop hand and brain by the fierce and well-armed
Carnivora. Only a "saving remnant" has progressed, and these mostly
under stern and strenuous pressure. The "aspiring" ape exists only in
our imagination.
The apes had become accustomed to life in the trees, and found it safe
and comfortable. A change of climate compelled those dwelling farthest
north to seek their living on the ground. Most of them fled southward,
many became extinct, a few came down and adapted themselves to the new
mode of life. Nature was in no sense a "fairy god-mother" to them, but a
stern, harsh disciplinarian whose method of education was "not a word
and a blow and the blow first, but the blow without the word, leaving
the pupil to find out why his ears had been boxed"[155]; and nature's
cuffs were frequently fatal. The pupil had to learn by others'
experience. Paleolithic man lived in France poorly armed and
ill-protected against a threatening climate steadily changing for the
worse. Food may have been abundant, but enemies hunting for him were
also numerous. He was compelled to be keen, watchful, prying, wary; to
discover distant danger, and to notice every trace of its approach. He
learned the habits and behavior of animals, and the ways of things--an
excellent course of study. He had to rely on his wits, and they were
none too keen or many.
Some things he could understand: he learned to avoid or to ward off many
dangers. Others seemed altogether beyond his understanding or control.
Here he could only wonder; but the wise old Greeks knew that wonder was
the mother of wisdom. He wondered at storm, lightning, hail, and flood;
at disease and death, and a hundred other things. He sat in the mouth of
his cave and watched that strange creature fire devouring the wood and
sending smoke and sparks skyward. He thought a very little in a dull,
stupid way, dozed and dreamed and awaked to wonder again. Or he saw fire
raging through the forest and fled for his life. But it was warming and
fascinating, and somehow akin to himself. Did it not devour wood and lap
up water on the hearth?
He seems to have come to feel rather than recognize that he was
surrounded by invisible powers, in some respects like himself but vastly
more powerful, who knew what he was doing, and who would hurt him if he
did certain things and might help him if he did others. Certain places
were to be strictly avoided, certain objects must not be touched,
certain things must never be done, or could be permitted only at
certain times. They were taboo. He has started on a long journey of
exploration, experiment, and discovery.
How had he come to believe this? Largely through hard experience of
nature's buffets, whenever he acted contrary to this hypothesis or
feeling. His religion was largely one of fear fitted for a savage mind,
though not without a mingling of hope.
Of course in us cultured folk perfect love, sentimentality, softness of
fibre, heedlessness, forgetfulness, and general superficiality of
life--to make a very inadequate list--have combined to cast out fear, "for
fear hath torment"; and we thank God loudly that we are so much wiser
than our benighted ancestors. Even our New England fathers feared God,
though they feared nothing else, but we fear only everything else except
God and law. But the unlucky scientific wight living and working in the
shadow of adamantine law remains in hopeless bondage to fear.
"Nach ewigen ehernen, grossen Gesetzen
Mussen wir alle unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden."[156]
These great powers might not necessarily be hopelessly hostile. They
might be appeased or won over, possibly controlled. What could he do to
please them? For something must be done. Here ritual arises.[157]
Possibly he offers to one or more of them a share in the feast which he
so much enjoys after a successful hunt. In time this may become a
sacrifice, sent up and out on the wings of fire.[158] Or he practises a
wind or rain dance as the outlet and expression of his intense desire;
and to awaken, encourage, and help the powers of these elements. He
holds a hunting-dance to rehearse and gain power for the killing of the
bear. Call it objectification of his heart's desire, or magic if you
prefer. Magic and religion grow up side by side, and probably from the
same root in these early stages: as alchemy and chemistry, astrology and
astronomy will spring up later.
The pictures on the cave-walls of France probably had a magical or
religious purpose. Here we find very few representations of human
beings. But in a rock-painting at Cogul, possibly Neolithic though
probably older, we see a group of women apparently engaged in some rite
of magic or religion. The occurrence of amulets also does not surprise
us.
We cannot make a study of primitive ritual magic and religion, their
origin, form, and content. But even our hasty glance shows us that man
had been wondering and thinking about this subject during millennia
before our Neolithic time, had been forced to accept many profound
convictions, containing germs of sublime truth overlaid, like our own,
with many errors; he had elaborated a system of ritual, and had
travelled far along the road of religious experience and discoveries
long before this comparatively recent epoch.
The conspicuous features of the religion of this ancient period of
primeval stupidity, or _Urdummheit_, to borrow the German word, were the
host of invisible powers or dæmons, and the law of taboo, the forbidden
thing. Breach of taboo rendered not only the individual lawbreaker but
the whole tribe, however innocent, liable to punishment. The whole
community was responsible for every deed of any and every one of its
members, and suffered or prospered accordingly. When Agamemnon had
wronged the priest of Apollo, the god shot his arrows not at Agamemnon
but throughout the innocent Greek host. The children of Israel were
routed at Ai, because Achan had taken the devoted or forbidden thing.
This stage of tribal responsibility seems to be practically universal.
It gave the law an iron grip on the people, tamed them, and made them
march in lock-step, a necessary stage of terrible discipline. But only
under the protection and stimulus of this tribal feeling of common
responsibility and resulting tribal conscience could the individual
conscience be gradually awakened and developed, and finally break
through the cake or crust of custom into freedom and light.
All these forces and influences were acting throughout the Neolithic
and later periods, and are still with us. Perhaps we can gain a
tolerably distinct and correct view of Neolithic religion among the
Mediterranean peoples by a glance at the ancient Greek mysteries.
Students of Greek art and literature quite naturally have been very
slow to take interest in these crude, often ugly and indecent,
rituals. But for this very reason the primitive stands out all the
more sharply defined against the brilliant, beautiful, artistic
Olympian religion of Greek art and literature, and particularly of
Homer. Students like Professor Murray could hardly be expected to
explore these lower strata with great sympathy. For this very reason,
as somewhat unwilling witnesses to whatever is good or great in
primitive Greek ritual, their testimony is all the more valuable,
though probably hardly as just as that of Miss Harrison.[159] We shall
follow mainly Professor Murray's vivid portrayal.[160] In his
_Saturnia Regna_ he pictures the ritual and belief of the ancient
Greeks before the arrival of Achæans or Hellenes in any strict sense
of the word. Strictly speaking, it is a description of the religion of
the Bronze Age during the earlier part of the second millennium B. C.
It has been growing, developing, and undergoing modifications since
Neolithic time, but in all its essential features it is ancient.
We find here very few traces of the chief Olympian divinities, which
belong to a later age than the objects of worship or cult of these
ancient peoples whom we venture to call Pelasgi. They worshipped powers
or dæmons in indefinite numbers, but with no individual names:
represented, if at all, by emblems or symbols, very rarely in bodily
human form. Of these spirits of death, disease, madness, and calamity
there were "thousands upon thousands, from whom man can never escape or
hide." So much is mainly a heritage from Paleolithic times. But the
conception of spirit has grown more clear, distinct, and elevated, as we
saw in our study of burial rites.
But Neolithic men lived in communities and devoted themselves largely to
tillage of the ground and to raising sheep, goats, swine, and cattle.
Their life was still precarious. "Their food depended on the crops of
one tiny plot of ground. All the while they knew almost nothing of the
real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was
a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defilement. It is this state of
things that explains the curious cruelty of agricultural works, which
like most cruelty had its roots in terror, terror of the breach of
taboo--the 'Forbidden Thing.'"
Neolithic man, with his new discoveries and industries, had given new
hostages to fortune, and a new and wider scope of application to the old
doctrine of taboo and of tribal responsibility. This strengthened the
hold of the priest or magician on the hopes, fears, and faith of his
people. The law is going deeper as well as wider. There arises an
individual feeling of pollution and of the need of expiation which will
blaze out in the oldest Greek tragedies as almost a veritable sense of
sin. We might almost say that a sense of morality toward the spirit
world is now appearing in a religion previously almost or quite unmoral.
We may easily overestimate the extent and power of the change, but we
can hardly be mistaken in recognizing its dawn and the vast germinal
possibilities of this dim feeling or conception.
In agriculture and throughout nature seed-time was followed by harvest,
fall, and winter's gloom and death. Then in the next spring there was a
return, a rebirth or a resurrection. If the seed failed to come up, if
the blade withered or was blighted, it was because the vegetation spirit
or dæmon had failed to reappear or had been reborn weak or sickly, and
all this because some one had broken taboo, had touched the forbidden
thing. This must be prevented at all cost, they must help the spirit.
Hence there must be every year a time of purification, of renovation,
when the old garments and utensils and everything which could carry the
pollution of death were cast off or cleansed.
All these conclusions, and some others of equal importance to which we
will return later, are expressed or symbolized in the great Dromena,
festivals, mysteries, or whatever you may call these rites of
pre-Homeric Greece. Then, for a time, they are partially, though never
totally, eclipsed, by the brilliant beauty of the Olympian religion with
its glorious temples, statues, and other works of art.
The Olympian gods had conquered the world. They practise neither
agriculture nor industry, nor any honest work. They fight and feast and
drink and play. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. The
Olympian religion had its time and place, and did its work. It swept
out many indecent features of the older cults, many superstitions and
abuses. It suited the Achæans and their civilization exactly, and we can
never forget its "sheer beauty," But it went bankrupt, lost its hold on
men's minds and hearts, failed and faded out. Professor Murray compares
its end to that of a garden of rare exotic flowers overrun by the rank
weeds which it had temporarily displaced. Miss Harrison more justly
compares it to a flower withering because cut off from its roots.
There was vastly more vitality in the ancient crude symbols and chaos of
conceptions than in the ordered and artistic Olympian hierarchy with its
marvellous representations of the gods in human or superhuman form and
beauty. Even its art and literature could not save it. It had lost its
mysticism. The old Neolithic religion, handed down by peasants and
artisans reoccupied the field, transformed sometimes almost beyond
recognition, like the Ugly Duckling of the fairy tale. It returned
triumphant through sheer power of unlimited vitality and adaptability.
Plato draws his finest illustrations from its mysteries, out of which,
also, the Greek drama arose. Paul quotes from them or from a similar
stratum of belief.
Some of the many sources of its vitality are obvious. It was rooted in
the firm conviction of the existence of a spiritual world toward and
into which its every rootlet was forcing its way and from which it drew
nourishment and power. We might better change the illustration and say
that it was slowly developing a spiritual eye which peered into a higher
world and developed in keenness and clearness of vision in response to
the higher pulsations. By patient experiment and experience, which
produced a hope that could not make ashamed and a faith in which hope
and experiment combined, it was feeling its way into spiritual
knowledge. It knew nothing of practical science or of material cause and
effect. But its world pulsated with the universal life. It recognized
the law of forbidden things and the sure penalty of law-breaking. It had
a tribal conscience and recognized the need of purification. It had the
promise, at least, of individual conscience and consciousness of sin.
Its symbol was the mystery which lifted only a corner of the veil and
left an abundant opportunity for wonder, imagination, thought, and
mysticism, which was entirely lacking in the perfect statue and the
finished creed. It made man, through its sympathetic magic, a coworker
with his divinities or dæmons in gaining the answer to an intensive
desire or prayer acted by all the members of the community with all
their united might, instead of expressed merely in words, the utterance
of his whole being and life. Such a system or chaos overflows with
sublime possibilities.
The introduction of agriculture had produced another most important
change in religious views and ritual. In tillage the earth brought forth
and gave birth to the crops which furnished their chief food supply, and
probably, in their view, to animals and men also; just as the human
mother gives birth to the child. Hence there was a wide-spread belief
in, and cult of, an earth divinity, of course female, or in a goddess or
dæmon of fertility. She is sometimes or usually accompanied by a male
partner, companion or son, but he occupies a lower place.
[Illustration: FEMALE IDOLS, THRACE]
[Illustration: FEMALE IDOL, ANAU
Reproduced from "Explorations in Turkestan." Carnegie Institute of
Washington, Publishers.]
This cult of the goddess seems to have been a marked feature of
Neolithic religion.[161] We find it in the remains of the Minoan periods
in Crete; Isis and her companion god Osiris were very prominent in
Egypt. The cult was wide-spread throughout Asia Minor: Diana, or better
Artemis, of the Ephesians, Ma in Anatolia, the great goddess of the
Hittites are a few examples. Farther eastward we find Astarte. Pumpelly
found a female idol (Astarte?) at Anau. The cult dots, if it does not
cover, the old middle migration route. We remember the wide-spread
distribution of the painted pottery from Susa to Anau and over to
Boghaz-keui in the land of the Hittites. Art and religion are closely
related during the early times and a wide-spread type of art suggests,
though it does not prove, an accompanying form of religion similar
throughout the same wide area. In Greece we find Demeter, and in
"Pelasgic Athens" the goddess Athena always held the highest place. Hera
may well have been another great goddess of the Pelasgi. When the
conquering Achæans came in and their chieftains wedded the princesses of
the land, they married their god Zeus to the goddess of the land. Hence
this cult has been displaced and its records blotted out by later
changes. That so many traces of it outlasted the Bronze Age is a proof
of its firm hold and great vitality.
We have studied these ancient cults in Greece and the Mediterranean
basin because here they are easily discovered and can be restored. They
are covered by only a thin layer of later cults which could not destroy
their vitality. When we attempt to explore northern Europe the
situation is quite different. Christianity blotted out all traces of the
worship of Odin and Thor; what it could not blot out it took over into
its own service in a modified form. Behind Thor and Odin we see the
shadowy form of Dyaus (Ziu?), perhaps a sky-god akin to the Hellenic
Zeus, whose name has come down to us in our weekday, Tuesday. Behind all
these we must search for traces of the deeply buried and almost
obliterated genuine Neolithic cults. These traces could persist only as
superstitions of peasants.
We notice first of all that we find one race extending northward along
the coast of France into England and Denmark, the zone of the megalithic
monuments. In this zone we find figurines and carvings of divinities.
Here Déchelette tells us that the female divinity was undoubtedly
preferred as the guardian of the tombs.[162] This zone was so closely
connected with the Mediterranean region that we should expect nothing
else.
In southeastern Europe, around the valley of the Danube, at Cucuteni,
Jablanica, and elsewhere, we find figurines, and here again the female
divinity is at least the more prominent, if not decidedly
dominant.[163] Déchelette tells us as to its source: "From the earliest
times striking analogies have been proven between the old villages of
the Danube and the Balkans and the Ægean settlements of the Troad and
Phrygia. Primitive idols, painted pottery, frequent employment of the
spiral in decorative art: all these occur scattered through the stations
of southeastern Europe in Neolithic times and in the eastern
Mediterranean basin in pre-Mycenæan and Mycenæan days. Between Butmir
(near Sarajevo, Bosnia) and Hissarlik (Troy) these discoveries mark the
routes which without doubt were already opening communication between
the pre-Hellenic peoples and the pre-Celtic tribes." Reinach adds:
"Eastern Europe, part of Asia Minor and of Egypt, have been revealed as
very intense centres of Neolithic civilization."[164] They may be traced
in rare examples still farther northward into Bohemia and even in
Thuringia. But their distribution outside of southeastern Europe is very
sparse. Traces of the worship of an earth mother,[165] though vague and
few, can still be discovered in the superstitions of the peasant folk of
northern Germany. A primitive belief in spirits of the earth, of
vegetation, of fertility--of dæmons who preside over the crops, who die
in the autumn or winter and reappear in the spring--is common in the
folk-lore and customs of the peasants in many parts of Europe. Our
Maypole has an interesting history and is probably the last survival of
an ancient cult. Still other more interesting illustrations might easily
be cited.[166]
The Balder-myth is familiar to us all. He is a "rare exotic," entirely
out of place in that circle of berserker gods and brutal giants who
lived in or over against the Norse Valhalla, but would have found
himself at home in the land and times of Dionysus. Have we possibly here
an intrusion of a far more ancient religious element which even the rude
dwellers in a harsh Northland could not forget, and would not allow to
die?
Usually accompanying the cult of the goddess we find frequent and
wide-spread traces of a related trend of thought, mother-right
(Mutterrecht), maternal kinship, matriarchy: under which were generally
included the reckoning of descent in the female line, rights of
inheritance by the daughter, hence female rights of property and general
high social and economic position of woman. These features need not be
united--they may appear separately, one here and another there. We are
probably not studying a system of thought or law, but a general tendency
of life.[167]
Mother-right, to use the most general term, survived, partially at
least, down to historic time in Egypt. It persisted in Asia Minor.
Perhaps it crops out in the story of the Amazons. We find traces of it
in ancient law and custom in northern Europe. Says Hoernes: "Among the
Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, and Slavs, remains of mother-right occur
even in historic times."[168] Wundt thinks that maternal kinship was
once universal.[169] We have no time or room to discuss the origin of
mother-kinship. We may yet find that it and mother-right represent
distinct forms of a deep-seated universal tendency, often of independent
origin, occurring usually together but sometimes separate.
Something akin to mother-right, and to a high position and dominating
influence of woman in the family and in society, is only what we should
expect at this time. We have seen that women were the first great
discoverers and inventors; discoverers and founders of all our household
arts and crafts as well as of most of our science. Women were the first
spinners and weavers, the first potters. They were the first herbalists
and botanists and the first household physicians. In the care of the
children they were compelled to be alert, quick-minded, ready for all
sorts of emergencies. Paleolithic man was a mere hunter; the rest of the
time he ate and loafed. The woman provided the vegetable food, as well
as much of the animal, and became the first gardener or farmer. She
introduced tillage of the ground, and thus became economically by far
the more important member of the partnership, and she probably had by
far the more alert, quick-witted brain.
The establishment of agriculture was followed by the cult of the
earth-mother, who gave birth to all the fruits of the ground and
probably to all life. The goddess, with or without a male companion, was
the head of the hierarchy. This again could not have been without its
influence. Says Miss Harrison: "Woman to primitive man is a thing at
once weak and magical, to be oppressed, yet feared. She is charged with
powers of child-bearing denied to man, powers only half understood,
sources of attraction but also of danger and repulsion, forces that all
over the world seem to fill him with dim terror. The attitude of man to
woman and, though perhaps to a less degree, of woman to man is still
essentially magical. Man cannot escape being born of woman: but he can,
and if he is wise he will, as soon as he comes to manhood, perform
ceremonies of riddance and purgation."[170]
One other fact deserves notice. In times of dearth the savage man always
eats up all the grain reserved as seed for the next year, and there is
none to sow. This is the rock on which attempts to introduce agriculture
among savages or nomads have usually been shipwrecked. Here the priest,
or perhaps priestess, of the goddess came to her aid, armed with the
weapon of taboo. Against this alliance the poor, stupid, clumsy, and
slow-witted Neolithic man struggled in vain. He could vent his fury by
pulling his wife about by the hair, but this availed little or naught.
He had to submit and be resigned.
Female magic increases in power as we approach the frontier and frontier
life. At the fall of the Roman Empire northern tribes swept away the old
civilization. Grass grew in the ruined cities, only villages remained
inhabited. The priests, by a liberal preaching of hell and other dire
torments, attempted to subdue these barbarians to law and to introduce
order. Agriculture and industry rearose or returned slowly. Finally
after the "dark ages" great cathedrals sprang up, dedicated not to
apostles or martyrs but to the Virgin, Queen of Heaven. Mr. Adams tells
us that at this time the women of France were the real leaders. Is this
apparent parallelism mere chance, or is it due to a certain amount of
similarity in conditions?
Some one has said that our Neolithic ancestors, especially the
megalith-builders, were priest-ridden. If he had added that they were
tamed and led, and very possibly diligently hen-pecked, by a veritable
matriarchate, I suspect that he would have discovered and correctly
estimated the two great sources of their marvellous progress. For at
this stage, as at some others, the priests and the women were the élite,
and the government was, therefore, ideal for its day.
But the tendency was based upon something far broader and deeper than
changing social and economic conditions and religious feeling. Even the
"mere man" must admit that it was biological and natural. "Nature," says
Humboldt, "has taken woman under her special protection." She has always
been partial to the female. Throughout the long period of mammalian
evolution she has showed very little regard for the males. The more they
fight and kill one another off, the fewer useless individuals to feed.
The same tendency reaches its logical conclusion in the parthenogenesis
of insects. Havelock Ellis says of woman: "She bears the special
characteristics of humanity in a higher degree than man, and represents
more nearly than man the human type which man is approximating." He
boldly asserts that man seems to be the "weaker vessel," and brings
strong arguments for his assertion.[171]
"Das Ewig-weibliche
Zieht uns hinan."
The buried Pelasgic religion regained its rightful place. It had more
vital reality than the Olympian. Has the great Roman Catholic Church, in
its worship of the Virgin, retained at least the symbol of an element of
vital reality which we Protestants, in our recoil from so-called
"Mariolatry," have neglected to our cost in favor of a purely paternal
conception of God? We leave this question to the theologians.