What is the true place of Fetichism, to use a common but unscientific
term, in the history of religious evolution? Some theorists have made
fetichism, that is to say, the adoration of odds and ends (with which
they have confused the worship of animals, of mountains, and even of the
earth), the first moment in the development of worship. Others, again,
think that fetichism is 'a corruption of religion, in Africa, as
elsewhere.' The latter is the opinion of Mr Max Muller, who has stated
it in his 'Hibbert Lectures,' on 'The Origin and Growth of Religion,
especially as illustrated by the Religions of India.' It seems probable
that there is a middle position between these two extremes. Students may
hold that we hardly know enough to justify us in talking about the
_origin_ of religion, while at the same time they may believe that
Fetichism is one of the earliest traceable steps by which men climbed to
higher conceptions of the supernatural. Meanwhile Mr. Max Muller
supports his own theory, that fetichism is a 'parasitical growth,' a
'corruption' of religion, by arguments mainly drawn from historical study
of savage creeds, and from the ancient religious documents of India.
These documents are to English investigators ignorant of Sanskrit 'a book
sealed with seven seals.' The Vedas are interpreted in very different
ways by different Oriental scholars. It does not yet appear to be known
whether a certain word in the Vedic funeral service means 'goat' or
'soul'! Mr. Max Muller's rendering is certain to have the first claim on
English readers, and therefore it is desirable to investigate the
conclusions which he draws from his Vedic studies. The ordinary
anthropologist must first, however, lodge a protest against the tendency
to look for _primitive_ matter in the Vedas. They are the elaborate
hymns of a specially trained set of poets and philosophers, living in an
age almost of civilisation. They can therefore contain little testimony
as to what man, while still 'primitive,' thought about God, the world,
and the soul. One might as well look for the first germs of religion,
for _primitive_ religion strictly so called, in 'Hymns Ancient and
Modern' as in the Vedas. It is chiefly, however, by way of deductions
from the Vedas, that Mr. Max Muller arrives at ideas which may be briefly
and broadly stated thus: he inclines to derive religion from man's sense
of the Infinite, as awakened by natural objects calculated to stir that
sense. Our position is, on the other hand, that the germs of the
religious sense in early man are developed, not so much by the vision of
the Infinite, as by the idea of Power. Early religions, in short, are
selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so much
as eager to gain something to his advantage. In fetiches, he ignorantly
recognises something that possesses power of an abnormal sort, and the
train of ideas which leads him to believe in and to treasure fetiches is
one among the earliest springs of religious belief.
Mr. Muller's opinion is the very reverse: he believes that a
contemplative and disinterested emotion in the presence of the Infinite,
or of anything that suggests infinitude or is mistaken for the Infinite,
begets human religion, while of this religion fetichism is a later
corruption.
* * * * *
In treating of fetichism Mr. Muller is obliged to criticise the system of
De Brosses, who introduced this rather unfortunate term to science, in an
admirable work, 'Le Culte des Dieux Fetiches' (1760). We call the work
'admirable,' because, considering the contemporary state of knowledge and
speculation, De Brosses's book is brilliant, original, and only now and
then rash or confused. Mr. Muller says that De Brosses 'holds that all
nations had to begin with fetichism, to be followed afterwards by
polytheism and monotheism.' This sentence would lead some readers to
suppose that De Brosses, in his speculations, was looking for the origin
of religion; but, in reality, his work is a mere attempt to explain a
certain element in ancient religion and mythology. De Brosses was well
aware that heathen religions were a complex mass, a concretion of many
materials. He admits the existence of regard for the spirits of the dead
as one factor, he gives Sabaeism a place as another. But what chiefly
puzzles him, and what he chiefly tries to explain, is the worship of odds
and ends of rubbish, and the adoration of animals, mountains, trees, the
sun, and so forth. When he masses all these worships together, and
proposes to call them all Fetichism (a term derived from the Portuguese
word for a talisman), De Brosses is distinctly unscientific. But De
Brosses is distinctly scientific when he attempts to explain the animal-
worship of Egypt, and the respect paid by Greeks and Romans to shapeless
stones, as survivals of older savage practices.
The position of De Brosses is this: Old mythology and religion are a
tissue of many threads. Sabaeism, adoration of the dead, mythopoeic
fancy, have their part in the fabric. Among many African tribes, a form
of theism, Islamite or Christian, or self-developed, is superimposed on a
mass of earlier superstitions. Among these superstitions, is the worship
of animals and plants, and the cult of rough stones and of odds and ends
of matter. What is the origin of this element, so prominent in the
religion of Egypt, and present, if less conspicuous, in the most ancient
temples of Greece? It is the survival, answers De Brosses, of ancient
practices like those of untutored peoples, as Brazilians, Samoyeds,
Negroes, whom the Egyptians and Pelasgians once resembled in lack of
culture.
This, briefly stated, is the hypothesis of De Brosses. If he had
possessed our wider information, he would have known that, among savage
races, the worships of the stars, of the dead, and of plants and animals,
are interlaced by the strange metaphysical processes of wild men. He
would, perhaps, have kept the supernatural element in magical stones,
feathers, shells, and so on, apart from the triple thread of Sabaeism,
ghost-worship, and totemism, with its later development into the regular
worship of plants and animals. It must be recognised, however, that De
Brosses was perfectly well aware of the confused and manifold character
of early religion. He had a clear view of the truth that what the
religious instinct has once grasped, it does not, as a rule, abandon, but
subordinates or disguises, when it reaches higher ideas. And he avers,
again and again, that men laid hold of the coarser and more material
objects of worship, while they themselves were coarse and dull, and that,
as civilisation advanced, they, as a rule, subordinated and disguised the
ruder factors in their system. Here it is that Mr. Max Muller differs
from De Brosses. He holds that the adoration of stones, feathers,
shells, and (as I understand him) the worship of animals are, even among
the races of Africa, a corruption of an earlier and purer religion, a
'parasitical development' of religion.
However, Mr. Max Muller himself held 'for a long time' what he calls 'De
Brosses's theory of fetichism.' What made him throw the theory
overboard? It was 'the fact that, while in the earliest accessible
documents of religious thought we look in vain for any very clear traces
of fetichism, they become more and more frequent everywhere in the later
stages of religious development, and are certainly more visible in the
later corruptions of the Indian religion, beginning with the Atharvana,
than in the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda.' Now, by the earliest
accessible documents of religious thought, Professor Max Muller means the
hymns of the Rig Veda. These hymns are composed in the most elaborate
metre, by sages of old repute, who, I presume, occupied a position not
unlike that of the singers and seers of Israel. They lived in an age of
tolerably advanced cultivation. They had wide geographical knowledge.
They had settled government. They dwelt in States. They had wealth of
gold, of grain, and of domesticated animals. Among the metals, they were
acquainted with that which, in most countries, has been the latest
worked--they used iron poles in their chariots. How then can the hymns
of the most enlightened singers of a race thus far developed be called
'the earliest religious documents'? Oldest they may be, the oldest that
are accessible, but that is a very different thing. How can we possibly
argue that what is absent in these hymns, is absent because it had not
yet come into existence? Is it not the very office of pii vates et Phoebo
digna locuti to purify religion, to cover up decently its rude shapes, as
the unhewn stone was concealed in the fane of Apollo of Delos? If the
race whose noblest and oldest extant hymns were pure, exhibits traces of
fetichism in its later documents, may not that as easily result from a
recrudescence as from a corruption? Professor Max Muller has still,
moreover, to explain how the process of corruption which introduced the
same fetichistic practices among Samoyeds, Brazilians, Kaffirs, and the
people of the Atharvana Veda came to be everywhere identical in its
results.
Here an argument often urged against the anthropological method may be
shortly disposed of. 'You examine savages,' people say, 'but how do you
know that these savages were not once much more cultivated; that their
whole mode of life, religion and all, is not debased and decadent from an
earlier standard?' Mr. Muller glances at this argument, which, however,
cannot serve his purpose. Mr. Muller has recognised that savage, or
'nomadic,' languages represent a much earlier state of language than
anything that we find, for example, in the oldest Hebrew or Sanskrit
texts. 'For this reason,' he says, {218} 'the study of what I call
_nomad_ languages, as distinguished from _State_ languages, becomes so
instructive. We see in them what we can no longer expect to see even in
the most ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. We watch the childhood of language
with all its childish freaks.' Yes, adds the anthropologist, and for
this reason the study of savage religions, as distinguished from State
religions, becomes so instructive. We see in them what we can no longer
expect to see even in the most ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew faiths. We
watch the childhood of religion with all its childish freaks. If this
reasoning be sound when the Kaffir tongue is contrasted with ancient
Sanskrit, it should be sound when the Kaffir faith is compared with the
Vedic faith. By parity of reasoning, the religious beliefs of peoples as
much less advanced than the Kaffirs as the Kaffirs are less advanced than
the Vedic peoples, should be still nearer the infancy of faith, still
'nearer the beginning.'
We have been occupied, perhaps, too long with De Brosses and our apology
for De Brosses. Let us now examine, as shortly as possible, Mr. Max
Muller's reasons for denying that fetichism is 'a primitive form of
religion.' The negative side of his argument being thus disposed of, it
will then be our business to consider (1) his psychological theory of the
subjective element in religion, and (2) his account of the growth of
Indian religion. The conclusion of the essay will be concerned with
demonstrating that Mr. Max Muller's system assigns little or no place to
the superstitious beliefs without which, in other countries than India,
society could not have come into organised existence.
* * * * *
In his polemic against Fetichism, it is not always very easy to see
against whom Mr. Muller is contending. It is one thing to say that
fetichism is a 'primitive form of religion,' and quite another to say
that it is 'the very beginning of all religion.' Occasionally he attacks
the 'Comtian theory,' which, I think, is not now held by many people who
study the history of man, and which I am not concerned to defend. He
says that the Portuguese navigators who discovered among the negroes 'no
other trace of any religious worship' except what they called the worship
of feiticos, concluded that this was the whole of the religion of the
negroes (p. 61). Mr. Muller then goes on to prove that 'no religion
consists of fetichism only,' choosing his examples of higher elements in
negro religion from the collections of Waitz. It is difficult to see
what bearing this has on his argument. De Brosses (p. 20) shows that
_he_, at least, was well aware that many negro tribes have higher
conceptions of the Deity than any which are implied in fetich-worship.
Even if no tribe in the world is exclusively devoted to fetiches, the
argument makes no progress. Perhaps no extant tribe is in the way of
using unpolished stone weapons and no others, but it does not follow that
unpolished stone weapons are not primitive. It is just as easy to
maintain that the purer ideas have, by this time, been reached by aid of
the stepping-stones of the grosser, as that the grosser are the
corruption of the purer. Mr. Max Muller constantly asserts that the
'human mind advanced by small and timid steps from what is intelligible,
to what is at first sight almost beyond comprehension' (p. 126). Among
the objects which aided man to take these small and timid steps, he
reckons rivers and trees, which excited, he says, religious awe. What he
will not suppose is that the earliest small and timid steps were not
unaided by such objects as the fetichist treasures--stones, shells, and
so forth, which suggest no idea of infinity. Stocks he will admit, but
not, if he can help it, stones, of the sort that negroes and Kanekas and
other tribes use as fetiches. His reason is, that he does not see how
the scraps of the fetichist can appeal to the feeling of the Infinite,
which feeling is, in his theory, the basis of religion.
After maintaining (what is readily granted) that negroes have a religion
composed of many elements, Mr. Muller tries to discredit the evidence
about the creeds of savages, and discourses on the many minute shades of
progress which exist among tribes too often lumped together as if they
were all in the same condition. Here he will have all scientific
students of savage life on his side. It remains true, however, that
certain elements of savage practice, fetichism being one of them, are
practically ubiquitous. Thus, when Mr. Muller speaks of 'the influence
of public opinion' in biassing the narrative of travellers, we must not
forget that the strongest evidence about savage practice is derived from
the 'undesigned coincidence' of the testimonies of all sorts of men, in
all ages, and all conditions of public opinion. 'Illiterate men,
ignorant of the writings of each other, bring the same reports from
various quarters of the globe,' wrote Millar of Glasgow. When sailors,
merchants, missionaries, describe, as matters unprecedented and unheard
of, such institutions as polyandry, totemism, and so forth, the evidence
is so strong, because the witnesses are so astonished. They do not know
that anyone but themselves has ever noticed the curious facts before
their eyes. And when Mr. Muller tries to make the testimony about savage
faith still more untrustworthy, by talking of the 'absence of recognised
authority among savages,' do not let us forget that custom ([Greek]) is a
recognised authority, and that the punishment of death is inflicted for
transgression of certain rules. These rules, generally speaking, are of
a religious nature, and the religion to which they testify is of the sort
known (too vaguely) as 'fetichistic.' Let us keep steadily before our
minds, when people talk of lack of evidence, that we have two of the
strongest sorts of evidence in the world for the kind of religion which
least suits Mr. Muller's argument--(1) the undesigned coincidences of
testimony, (2) the irrefutable witness and sanction of elementary
criminal law. Mr. Muller's own evidence is that much-disputed work,
where 'all men see what they want to see, as in the clouds,' and where
many see systematised fetichism--the Veda. {222}
The first step in Mr. Max Muller's polemic was the assertion that
Fetichism is nowhere unmixed. We have seen that the fact is capable of
an interpretation that will suit either side. Stages of culture overlap
each other. The second step in his polemic was the effort to damage the
evidence. We have seen that we have as good evidence as can be desired.
In the third place he asks, What are the antecedents of fetich-worship?
He appears to conceive himself to be arguing with persons (p. 127) who
'have taken for granted that every human being was miraculously endowed
with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich, call it
power, spirit, or god.' If there are reasoners so feeble, they must be
left to the punishment inflicted by Mr. Muller. On the other hand,
students who regard the growth of the idea of power, which is the
predicate of every fetish, as a slow process, as the result of various
impressions and trains of early half-conscious reasoning, cannot be
disposed of by the charge that they think that 'every human being was
miraculously endowed' with any concept whatever. They, at least, will
agree with Mr. Max Muller that there are fetiches and fetiches, that to
one reverence is assigned for one reason, to another for another.
Unfortunately, it is less easy to admit that Mr. Max Muller has been
happy in his choice of ancient instances. He writes (p. 99): 'Sometimes
a stock or a stone was worshipped because it was a forsaken altar or an
ancient place of judgment, sometimes because it marked the place of a
great battle or a murder, or the burial of a king.' Here he refers to
Pausanias, book i. 28, 5, and viii. 13, 3. {223} In both of these
passages, Pausanias, it is true, mentions stones--in the first passage
stones on which men stood [Greek], in the second, barrows heaped up in
honour of men who fell in battle. In neither case, however, do I find
anything to show that the stones were worshipped. These stones, then,
have no more to do with the argument than the milestones which certainly
exist on the Dover road, but which are not the objects of superstitious
reverence. No! the fetich-stones of Greece were those which occupied the
holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within
dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted. They
were the stones and blocks which bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo,
names perhaps given, as De Brosses says, to the old fetichistic objects
of worship, _after_ the anthropomorphic gods entered Hellas. This, at
least is the natural conclusion from the fact that the Apollo and Hera of
untouched wood or stone were confessedly the _oldest_. Religion,
possessing an old fetich did not run the risk of breaking the run of luck
by discarding it, but wisely retained and renamed it. Mr. Max Muller
says that the unhewn lump may indicate a higher power of abstraction than
the worship paid to the work of Phidias; but in that case all the savage
adorers of rough stones _may_ be in a stage of more abstract thought than
these contemporaries of Phidias who had such very hard work to make Greek
thought abstract.
Mr Muller founds a very curious argument on what he calls 'the ubiquity
of fetichism.' Like De Brosses, he compiles (from Pausanias) a list of
the rude stones worshipped by the early Greeks. He mentions various
examples of fetichistic superstitions in Rome. He detects the fetichism
of popular Catholicism, and of Russian orthodoxy among the peasants.
Here, he cries, in religions the history of which is known to us,
fetichism is secondary, 'and why should fetiches in Africa, where we do
not know the earlier development of religion, be considered as primary?'
What a singular argument! According to Pausanias, this fetichism (if
fetichism it is) _was_ primary, in Greece. The _oldest_ temples, in
their holiest place, held the oldest fetich. In Rome, it is at least
probable that fetichism, as in Greece, was partly a survival, partly a
new growth from the primal root of human superstitions. As to
Catholicism, the records of Councils, the invectives of the Church, show
us that, from the beginning, the secondary religion in point of time, the
religion of the Church, laboured vainly to suppress, and had in part to
tolerate, the primary religion of childish superstitions. The documents
are before the world. As to the Russians, the history of their
conversion is pretty well known. Jaroslaf, or Vladimir, or some other
evangelist, had whole villages baptized in groups, and the pagan peasants
naturally kept up their primary semi-savage ways of thought and worship,
under the secondary varnish of orthodoxy. In all Mr. Max Muller's
examples, then, fetichism turns out to be _primary_ in point of time;
_secondary_ only, as subordinate to some later development of faith, or
to some lately superimposed religion. Accepting his statement that
fetichism is ubiquitous, we have the most powerful a priori argument that
fetichism is primitive. As religions become developed they are
differentiated; it only fetichism that you find the same everywhere. Thus
the bow and arrow have a wide range of distribution: the musket, one not
so wide; the Martini-Henry rifle, a still narrower range: it is the
primitive stone weapons that are ubiquitous, that are found in the soil
of England, Egypt, America, France, Greece, as in the hands of Dieyries
and Admiralty Islanders. And just as rough stone knives are earlier than
iron ones (though the same race often uses both), so fetichism is more
primitive than higher and purer faiths, though the same race often
combines fetichism and theism. No one will doubt the truth of this where
weapons are concerned; but Mr. Max Muller will not look at religion in
this way.
Mr. Max Muller's remarks on 'Zoolatry,' as De Brosses calls it, or animal-
worship, require only the briefest comment. De Brosses, very unluckily,
confused zoolatry with other superstitions under the head of Fetichism.
This was unscientific; but is it scientific of Mr. Max Muller to discuss
animal-worship without any reference to totemism? The worship of sacred
animals is found, in every part of the globe, to be part of the sanction
of the most stringent and important of all laws, the laws of marriage. It
is an historical truth that the society of Ashantees, Choctaws,
Australians, is actually constructed by the operation of laws which are
under the sanction of various sacred plants and animals. {226} There is
scarcely a race so barbarous that these laws are not traceable at work in
its society, nor a people (especially an ancient people) so cultivated
that its laws and religion are not full of strange facts most easily
explained as relics of totemism. Now note that actual living totemism is
always combined with the rudest ideas of marriage, with almost repulsive
ideas about the family. Presumably, this rudeness is earlier than
culture, and therefore this form of animal-worship is one of the earliest
religions that we know. The almost limitless distribution of the
phenomena, their regular development, their gradual disappearance, all
point to the fact that they are all very early and everywhere produced by
similar causes.
Of all these facts, Mr. Max Muller only mentions one--that many races
have called themselves Snakes, and he thinks they might naturally adopt
the snake for ancestor, and finally for god. He quotes the remark of
Diodorus that 'the snake may either have been made a god because he was
figured on the banners, or may have been figured on the banners because
he was a god'; to which De Brosses, with his usual sense, rejoins--'we
represent saints on our banners because we revere them; we do not revere
them because we represent them on our banners.'
In a discussion about origins, and about the corruption of religion, it
would have been well to account for institutions and beliefs almost
universally distributed. We know, what De Brosses did not, that zoolatry
is inextricably blent with laws and customs which surely must be early,
if not primitive, because they make the working faith of societies in
which male descent and the modern family are not yet established. Anyone
who wishes to show that this sort of society is a late corruption, not an
early stage in evolution towards better things, has a difficult task
before him, which, however, he must undertake, before he can prove
zoolatry to be a corruption of religion.
As to the worship of ancestral and embodied human spirits, which (it has
been so plausibly argued) is the first moment in religion, Mr. Max Muller
dismisses it, here, in eleven lines and a half. An isolated but
important allusion at the close of his lectures will be noticed in its
place.
The end of the polemic against the primitiveness of fetichism deals 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. Muller 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 Muller 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. Muller 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 Muller 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.
{230} 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 Muller 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 Muller 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.' 'Every thing 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 Muller
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 Muller
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 Muller 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. Muller 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. Muller, 'infinite' is used in our modern sense. The
question is, How did men ever come to believe in powers infinite,
invisible, divine? If Mr. Muller'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. Muller'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. Muller 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 Muller cuts the matter
shorter. The early inhabitants of 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. Muller in his
account of the origin of Indian religion.
The mainspring of Mr. Muller'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. {233a} 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. Muller (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.
Muller. 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'? {233b} 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. Muller 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. Muller 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. Muller, 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. Muller'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. Muller'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. Muller 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. Muller'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. Muller, entered into the development of
Aryan religion.
The last remark which has to be made about Mr. Muller'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. {236} Mr. Max Muller'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. Muller 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. Muller'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
Muller 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 Muller'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 Muller'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. Muller 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. Muller, when he was minimising the existence of
fetichism in the Rig Veda (the oldest collection of hymns), admitted its
existence in the Atharvana (p. 60). {241} 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 Muller 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. Muller 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. Muller'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.