PRIMITIVE FEARS
Various authorities in Ethnology and Anthropology concur in their
description and testimony as to the superstitious fears that obsess
primitive man.
Professor Baldwin Spencer, the anthropologist, writes of the
Australian aborigines that they have “an intense belief in evil
magic. The natives have no idea of disease or pain as being due to
anything but evil magic, except that which is caused by an actual
accident which they can see.... Anything they do not understand
they associate with evil magic.... You have only to tell a native
that he is the victim of evil magic, and he succumbs at once, and
can only be cured by the exercise of counter magic.
“The number of supernatural beings feared by aborigines of
Australia is exceedingly great. For not only are the heavens
peopled with such, but the whole face of the country swarms with
them; every thicket, most watering places abound with evil spirits.
In like manner, every natural phenomenon is believed to be the work
of demons, none of which seem to be of a benign nature, one and
all apparently striving to do all imaginable mischief to the poor
black fellow.”
The same is true of the negro. “The negro is wont to regard the
whole world around him as peopled with envious beings, to whom
he imputes every misfortune that happens to him, and from whose
harmful influence he seeks to protect himself by all kinds of magic
means.” “The religion of the Bolok (of the Upper Congo River),”
writes an observer, “has its basis in their fear of those numerous
invisible spirits which surround them on every side, and are
constantly trying to compass them in their sickness, misfortune and
death; and the Boloki’s sole object in practising their religion
is to cajole, or appease, cheat or conquer or kill those spirits
that trouble them, by their Nganga (medicine men), their rites,
their ceremonies, and their charms. If there were no evil spirits
to circumvent there would be no need of medicine men and their
charms.... The Boloki folk believe that they are surrounded by
spirits which try to thwart them at every twist and turn, and to
harm them every hour of day and night.... I never met among them a
man daring enough to go at night through the forest that divided
Monsembe from the upper villages even though a large reward was
offered. Their invariable reply was: ‘There are too many spirits in
the bush and forest.’ The spirits whom the people dread so much
are the mingoli, or disembodied souls of the dead; the life of the
Boloki is described as ‘one long drawn out fear of what the mingoli
may next do to them.’ Those dangerous beings dwell everywhere, land
and water are full of them; they are ever ready to pounce on the
living and carry them away, or to smite them with disease, and kill
them.... The belief in witchcraft affects their lives in a vast
number of ways. It regulates their actions, modifies their mode
of thought and speech, controls their conduct towards each other,
causes cruelty and callousness in a people not naturally cruel,
and sets the various members of a family against each other....
Belief in witches is interwoven into the very fiber of every Bantu
speaking man and woman; and the person who does not believe in them
is a monster, a witch to be killed.”
The fear of evil spirits, the fear of witchcraft, and the fear of
malicious spiritual agencies have been the pests of credulous,
fear-obsessed humanity in all the ages of its existence. The
crusades, and religious wars have shown us the blight suffered by
humanity, obsessed by the impulse of self-preservation and the fear
instinct. _Fear_ or _pretended Love_ of the great spirit, under
whatever name, is used for the avoidance of fears and evils.
Sir E. F. im Thurn describes the Indian of Guiana as haunted by
the omnipresence of malicious ghosts and spirits. “The whole world
of the Indian swarms with these beings. If by a mental effort,
we could for a moment revert to a similar mental position, we
should find ourselves surrounded everywhere by a host of harmful
beings.... It is not therefore, wonderful that the Indian fears to
move beyond the light of his camp-fire after dark ... nor is it
wonderful that occasionally the air round the settlement seems to
the Indian to grow so full of beings, that a sorcerer is employed.”
The Indians of Paraguay “live in constant dread of supernatural
beings and if nothing else contributed to make their life
miserable, this ever present dread would be in itself quite
sufficient to rob it of most of its joys.”
Professor Powell writes of the Indians: “The Indians believed that
diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and by witchcraft,
and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every fever,
every boil and every wound, in fact all their ailments were
attributed to such a cause. Their so-called medical practice was a
horrible system of sorcery and to such superstition human life was
sacrificed on an enormous scale....”
Similarly, the malignant spirits of the Maori are “so numerous as
to surround the living in crowds.” The Maori claims: “the spirits
throng like mosquitoes, ever watching to inflict harm.” The
Melanesian “sees himself surrounded at every step by evil spirits
and their influences.” The Papuans “people land and sea with
mysterious, malignant powers which take up their abode in stones
and trees or in men, and cause all kinds of misfortunes, especially
sickness and death.” The Bakua of New Guinea are in constant fear
of spirits.... “Of forest spirits the number is infinite; for it
is above all in the mysterious darkness, the tangled wilderness of
the virgin forests that the spirits love to dwell.... The spirits
are never bent on good, they live in evil places. At night-fall
the native hears the voices of the spirits, they make inroads into
human habitations, and drive man crazy.”
In Java, the people are firmly convinced that “the number of
spirits is innumerable, they are a source of fear and anxiety.” The
natives of Sumatra are possessed of “fear of unknown powers....
Every misfortune bespeaks the ill-will of hostile spirits. The
whole world is a meeting place of demons.” The Batakas “live in
perpetual fear of evil spirits.”
Professor M. Williams writes of the Hindoos: “The great majority
of the inhabitants of India are, from the cradle to the burning
ground, victims of a form of mental disease which is best explained
by the term _demonophobia_. They are haunted and oppressed by a
perpetual dread of demons. They are firmly convinced that evil
spirits of all kinds, from malignant fiends to mischievous imps
and elves, are ever on the watch to harm, harass and torment them,
to cause plague, sickness, famine, and disaster, to impede,
injure and mar every good work. The worship of at least ninety per
cent of the people of India in the present day is a worship of
fear. The simple truth is that evil of all kinds, difficulties,
dangers and disasters, famines, diseases, pestilences and death,
are thought by an ordinary Hindoo to proceed from demons, or more
properly speaking, from devils, and from devils alone.” “The
underlying principle (of the religion of the Kacharis of Assam) is
characteristically one of fear or dread.”
“The Thibetans,” writes an observer, “are thorough-going demon
worshippers. In every nook, path, big tree, rock, spring, waterfall
and lake there lurks a devil,--for which reason few individuals
will venture out alone after dark. The sky, the ground, the house,
the field, the country, have each their special demons; and
sickness is always attributed to malign demoniacal influence.”
The Burmese, the Laosians of Siam, the Thay of Indo-China are in
all their activities controlled by the fear instinct which is at
the bottom of all their beliefs. “The Thay cannot take a single
step without meeting a demon on the path.... Spirits watch him,
ready to punish negligence, and he is afraid. _Fear is not only for
him, the beginning of wisdom, it is the whole of his wisdom._”
The Koreans may be regarded as the most superstitious people among
the Orientals. Before me lies a Korean book full of superstitions
which can only be matched in their absurdities with those of
Australian aborigines who, in their savage culture, belong to
the paleolithic period. The whole course of the Korean’s life is
controlled to the very minutiae by the terrors and horrors of
demoniacal, invisible, deadly, malignant powers of demons, spirits,
ghosts, hobgoblins, specters, and witches. According to the Korean
belief the earth is a pandemonium in which witches and evil spirits
hold high carnival.
J. M. de Groot writes “In Korean belief, earth, air, and sea are
peopled by demons. They haunt every umbrageous tree, shady ravine,
spring and mountain crest.... They make a sport of human destinies.
They are on every roof, ceiling, oven and beam. They fill the
chimney, shed, the living room, the kitchen, they are on every
shelf and jar. In thousands they waylay the traveler as he leaves
his home, beside him, behind him, dancing in front of him, whirring
over his head, crying out upon him from air, earth, and water. They
are numbered by thousands of billions, and it has been well said
that their ubiquity is an unholy travesty of Divine Omnipresence.
This belief, and it seems to be the only one he possesses, keeps
the Korean in a perpetual state of nervous apprehension, it
surrounds him with indefinite terrors, and it may be truly said of
him that he passes the time of his sojourning here in fear.... The
spirits keep the Korean in bondage from birth to death.”
Im Bang, a Korean writer on Korean beliefs, has a characteristic
story of a poor relative of some Korean dignitary. This poor
relative of the high official once a year gathered hundreds of
thousands of spirits whom he checked off, so as to keep their
malignant disposition under control. And this gentleman was but
one of the many clerks; he was but one census man of the vast
bureaucratic spiritistic machinery for the regulation and control
of evil demons.
The same holds true of the other tribes in Asia. Thus the Gyliaks
think that all the places on earth are filled with malicious
demoniacal agencies. Similarly, the Koryaks on the Amoor are
terrorized by the malignancy of evil spirits that dog their steps.
W. Jochelson tells of the Koryaks that “when visiting the houses
to cause diseases and to kill people, they (the spirits or demons)
enter from under the ground.... They are invisible to human
beings, they are sometimes so numerous in houses that they sit
on the people, and fill up all corners.... With hammers and axes
they knock people over their heads and cause headache. They bite,
and cause swellings. They shoot invisible arrows which stick in
the body causing death. The demons tear out pieces of flesh from
people, thus causing sores and wounds to form on the body.” The
same spirit of fear of the invisible and of the mysterious, fear of
evil powers, controlling the fate of man, constitutes the central
belief of almost every primitive tribe, semi-civilized, ancient, as
well as modern nation. They are all controlled by the fundamental
instinct of life--the fear instinct.
The Semitic scholar, R. H. Harper, writes of the Assyrians and
Babylonians as follows: “There is no place in the universe where
evil spirits can not penetrate. Every manner of evil and disaster
is ascribed to them, from pestilence, fever, and the scorching wind
of the desert, down to the trifles of life,--a quarrel, a headache,
a broken dish, or a bad dream. They walk the street, slip into
the door, get into the food, in short, are everywhere, and the
danger from their presence is always imminent.... Corresponding to
a widespread belief in demons was a similar belief in witchcraft.
It was not at all strange that the demons, who worked in every
possible corner of the universe, should take possession of human
beings....”
The tablets excavated in the imperial library of Ashurbanipal show
the spirit of the people even of the highest classes debased with
delusions and religious hallucinations due to self-preservation
and fear instinct, so dominant in man who, when common-sense
departs from him, may be regarded as the _irrational animal par
excellence_.
We may give the following illustration taken from one of the many
tablets of the Shurpu series:
“The evil spirits like grass have covered the earth. To the four
winds they spread brilliancy like fire, they send forth flames. The
people living in dwellings they torment, their bodies they afflict.
In city and country they bring moaning, small and great they make
to lament. Man and woman they put in bonds, and fill with cries of
woe. Man they fall upon and cover him like a garment. In heaven and
earth like a tempest they rain; they rush on in pursuit. They fill
him with poison, his hands they bind, his sides they crush.”
According to the ancient rabbis, a man should not drink water by
night, for thus he exposes himself to the Shavriri, demons of
blindness. What then should he do if he is thirsty? If there be
another man with him, let him rouse him up and say: “I am thirsty,”
but if he be alone, let him tap upon the lid of the jug (to make
the demon fancy there is some one with him), and addressing him
by his own name, let him say: “Thy mother bid thee beware of the
Shavriri, vriri, riri, ri.” Rashi, a mediaeval commentator, says
that by this incantation the demon gradually contracts and vanishes
as the sound of the word Shavriri decreases.
The ancient rabbis instruct that “no one should venture out at
night time on Wednesday or Saturday, for Agrath, the daughter of
the demon Machloth, roams about accompanied by eighteen myriads of
evil demons, each one of which has power to destroy.” The rabbis
claim that the air, land and sea are full of demons, all bent on
evil and destruction of man. In this respect the learned rabbis
differ but little from the superstitious Koreans and Australian
savages. The rabbis warn the pious Jew that “should he forget to
fold his prayer cover, he is to shake it thoroughly next morning,
in order to get rid of the evil spirits that have harbored there
during the night.” The evil spirits are infinite in number. Thus
the Talmudic authorities are in full accord with the ancient
Babylonians, Assyrians, and with the lowest savages, ancient and
modern, obsessed by the fear of spirits, by Demonophobia.
One cannot help agreeing with the English anthropologist, Frazer,
who after his study of the subject, arrives at the following
conclusion: “In India from the earliest times down to the present
day the real religion of the common folk appears always to have
been a belief in a vast multitude of spirits of whom many, if
not most, are mischievous and harmful. As in Europe beneath a
superficial layer of Christianity a faith in magic and witchcraft,
in ghosts and goblins has always survived and even flourished among
the weak and the ignorant (and apparently cultivated) so it has
been and so it is in the East (and we may say also in the West).
Brahmanism, Buddhism, Islam may come and go, but the belief in
magic and demons remains unshaken through them all, and, if we may
judge of the future from the past, it is likely to survive the
rise and fall of other historical religions. For the great faiths
of the world, just in so far as they are the outcome of superior
intelligence, of extraordinary fervor of aspiration after the
ideal, fail to touch and move the common man. They make claims
upon his intellect and his heart, to which neither the one nor the
other is capable of responding. With the common herd who compose
the great bulk of every people, the new religion is accepted only
in outward show.... They yield a dull assent to it with their lips,
but in their heart they never abandon their old superstitions
(and fears of evil and mysterious miraculous agencies); in these
they cherish a faith such as they can never repose in the creed
which they nominally profess; and to these, in the trials and
emergencies of life, they have recourse as to infallible remedies.”
And he quotes Maxwell to the effect that “The Buddhists in Ceylon,
in times of sickness and danger ... turn to demons, feared and
reverenced in the same way as do ‘the Burmese, Talaings, and
Malays.’”
The Jews firmly believed in demoniacal agencies. “When the even
was become, they brought unto Him many that were possessed with
devils; and He cast out the spirits with His word, and healed
all that were sick.” “And in the synagogue there was a man which
had a spirit of an unclean devil; and he cried out with a loud
voice.” “And devils also came out of many ..., and He rebuking them
suffered them not to speak.” “And there was a herd of many swine
feeding on the mountains.... Then went the devils out of the man,
and entered into the swine, and the herd ran violently down a steep
place, and were choked.” “Casting out devils” was a sure proof of
divine mission.
Perhaps a quotation from the Talmud will make clear the fear of
demons which obsesses the Jew: Abba Benjamin says, “if the eye were
permitted to see the malignant spirits that beset us, we could not
rest on account of them.” Abai, another sage, says: “They outnumber
us, they surround us as the heaped up soil in our garden plots.”
Rav Hunna says: “Every one has a thousand on his left side and ten
thousand on his right.” Rava claims: “The crowding at the schools
is caused by their (demons) pushing in; they cause the weariness
which the rabbis experience in their knees, and even tear their
clothes by hustling against them. If one would discover traces
of their presence, let him sift some ashes upon the floor at his
bedside, and next morning he will see their footmarks as of fowls
on the surface. But if one would see the demons themselves, he must
burn to ashes the after-birth of a first born black kitten, the
offspring of a first-born black cat, and then put a little of the
ashes into his eyes, and he will not fail to see the demons.”
In the words of Lord Avebury, the archeologist, “the savage is a
prey to constant fears.... Savages never know but what they may
be placing themselves in the power of these terrible enemies (the
demons); and it is not too much to say that the horrible dread
of unknown evil hangs like a thick cloud over savage life and
embitters every pleasure.”
In our modern times the preachers, the revivalists, the pulpit,
appeal to fear and to hell in order to keep their flock in the
fold. Fear of eternal damnation for infidels is the war cry of
religion.
Professor Dreslar elicited from 875 California normal school
students four-fifths of whom were young women, 3225 confessions of
belief in superstitions.... “How thin is the veneer of culture over
that great mass of irrational predisposition which in the hour of
fear and excitement resumes control of the popular mind, and leads
on to folly and ruin!” (Ross).
Buckle is right in pointing out the significant fact that
superstition is found in any walk of life in which risk or danger
predominates. Sailors are more superstitious than landsmen, while
farmers and business people, especially gamblers and speculators,
are more superstitious than industrial workers. Similarly Cumont is
right in ascribing the superstitions of soldiers as due to risks
and dangers of war.
After the great world war one notices the rise of all sorts of
superstitions. Superstitions and fear are close companions. A
modern historian does not hesitate to declare that “Europe is held
in hate, because the nations fear each other.... What sentiment
has dug the ditch separating Russia from the rest of the world? It
is fear. The states of Western Europe, which the Soviets regard as
their persecutors, think themselves menaced in their turn by the
Soviet republic.” The Great War was produced by self-preservation
and fear. The world is still in the grip of the fear instinct.
The Bible claims: Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
The Latin poet declares: _Primus in orbe deos fecit timor_. The
real state of things is: _Self and fear are the Lords of life_,
individual and social.
Bacon in his essay “On the Wisdom of the Ancients,” with his
clear insight has stated the matter succinctly: “In the Panic
terrors there is set forth a very wise doctrine; for by the nature
of things _all living creatures are endued with a certain fear
and dread_, the office of which is to preserve their life and
existence, and to avoid or repel approaching mischief. But the
same nature knows not how to keep just measure,--but together with
salutary fears ever mingles vain and empty ones; insomuch that _all
things (if one could see into the heart of them) are quite full of
Panic terrors; human things most of all_; so infinitely tossed and
troubled as they are with superstition (which is in truth nothing
but a Panic terror), especially in seasons of hardship, anxiety,
and adversity.”