Frazer was led eventually to combat and deny the existence, 'in the
heart of Australia, amongst the most primitive savages known to us' of
'that totem sacrament which', in 1899 he declared, 'Robertson Smith,
with the intuition of genius' had divined years before it was actually
observed. It was by the evidence of new facts, discovered by Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen, that Sir James Frazer was compelled to abandon
Robertson Smith's theory of the evolution of religion. Robertson Smith
had seen, or had thought he saw, amongst the Australians sacramental
rites and the worship of totem gods. Sir James Frazer is now compelled
by the evidence of the facts to hold that in what he calls 'pure
totemism', i.e., in totemism as we find it in Australia, 'there is
nothing that can properly be described as worship of the totems.
Sacrifices are not presented to them, nor prayers offered, nor temples
built, nor priests appointed to minister to them. In a word, totems pure
and simple are never gods, but merely species of natural objects,
united by certain intimate and mystic ties to groups of men.' It seems,
therefore, according to Frazer, that in totemism, when dissected, there
is no religion, just as in the child's drum, when cut open, there
is--nothing. Yet, we may reflect, on the battle-field from a drum
proceeds a great and glorious sound, inspiring men to noble deeds.
Whereas _ex nihilo nil fit_: from nothing naturally nothing comes. If,
however, something does come, it is not from nothing that it comes.
Amongst the most primitive savages known to us, men are united to their
totems, as Frazer admits, by 'certain intimate and mystic ties'.
What then is it in totemism from which, on Sir James Frazer's view,
something comes? We might, perhaps, have expected that it was from the
'mystic' bond uniting man with the world which is not only around him
but of which he is part, and in which he lives and moves and has his
being. To say so, however, would be to admit that in totemism there was
something not only 'mystic' but potentially religious. And Sir James
Frazer does not follow that line of thought, so dangerous in his view.
On the contrary, he maintains that 'the aspect of the totemic system,
which we have hitherto been accustomed to describe as religious,
deserves rather to be called magical'. The totem rites which Robertson
Smith had interpreted as being sacramental and as being intended as a
means of communion with the totem-gods Sir James Frazer regards as
merely magical: 'totemism,' he says, 'is merely an organized system of
magic intended to secure a supply of food.'
We may remark, in passing, that if totemism is 'mere' magic, there is
indeed (as Sir James holds) no worship in totemism, but in that case in
totemism there can be no such 'intimate and mystic ties' between the
totem and the totem-kin as Sir James at first maintained there was. But
be that as it may, according to Sir James Frazer, 'in the heart of
Australia, amongst the most primitive savages known to us,' we find
totemism; and totemism on examination proves to be 'merely an organized
system of magic'. If now we start by assuming these premisses, or by
granting these postulates for the sake of argument, we can, indeed,
erect on them a theory of the evolution of religion. But if we so start,
we must do as Sir James Frazer did in the first edition of _The Golden
Bough_: we must hold that religion is but a developed form of magic. _En
route_ it may have changed considerably in appearance, but in fact and
fundamentally it remains the same thing. In all the lower forms of
religion, and in most of the higher, there are practices which are by
common consent and beyond doubt magical. This indisputable fact lends
colour to the view that religion was in its origin nothing but magic,
and that religion is, to those who can see the facts as they are,
nothing but magic to this day: the magician was but a priest, and the
priest, claiming superhuman power, is but a magician still. Prayers were
at first but spells, and even now are supposed, by simple repetition, to
produce their effects.
If against this view it be objected that one of the most constant facts
in the history of all religions, from the lowest to the highest, is that
religion has at all times carried on war against sorcery, witchcraft,
and magic, that in the lowest stages of man's evolution witches have
been 'smelt out' by the witch-finder, and that in the higher stages of
civilization witches have been persecuted, tortured, and burnt, the
reply made to the objection is that the war against witchcraft and magic
is due simply to the jealousy and resentment which regular practitioners
of any art, e.g., medicine, have ever displayed and do still display
towards irregular, unprofessional practitioners. This reply, however, is
now generally admitted to be one which it is impossible to accept in
the case of religion for the simple reason that it does not account for
the facts. The plain fact which wrecks this attempted explanation is
that magic is punished and witches are burnt not because witch-finders
or priests are jealous of them, but because the community dreads them
and feels their very existence to be a danger. It is the community which
feels the world of difference there is between magic and religion.
The attraction of the view that religion is but magic under another
name, that prayers are to the end but spells, that 'priest' is but
'magician' written differently, is that it is a simplicist theory. It
simplifies things. It exhibits religion as evolved out of magic and as
containing at the end nothing more or other than was present at the
beginning in magic. It is but a variant of the pre-formation theory of
the evolution of religion. In fine, the notion that in magic we have
religion pre-formed is the counterpart of the idea that we can find
religion pre-formed in totemism. In both cases we secure continuity in
the process of evolution apparently, but the continuity secured is
appearance merely and is gained only at the price of ignoring the facts.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in the later, enlarged editions of
_The Golden Bough_, Sir James Frazer has given up the view that religion
evolved out of magic, being moved thereto by the fact, as he says, that
there is 'a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle
between magic and religion'. There is, in Frazer's present view, no
continuity between the magic which came first and the religion which
came ages later: between them is an absolute breach of continuity, a
fundamental distinction, an opposition of principle. 'The principles of
thought on which magic is based,' Frazer says, 'resolve themselves into
two: first, that like produces like; and, second, that things which
have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each
other.' These beliefs are due to the association of ideas: if two things
are more or less like one another, or if two things have gone together
in our experience of the past, the sight of the one will make us think
of the other and expect to find it. So strong is the expectation which
is thus created that in the savage it amounts to absolute belief; and
magic consists in acting on that belief, in setting like to produce
like, with the firm conviction that thus (by magic) man can obtain all
that he desires. For long ages, according to Frazer, man acted on that
belief, and only eventually did he discover that magic did not always
act. This discovery set him thinking and led him to the inference that
at work in the world there must be supernatural powers or beings, that
the course of nature and of human life is controlled by personal beings
superior to man. And that inference, according to Sir James Frazer's
definition, constitutes religion.
The fundamental distinction, then, and even opposition of principle
between magic and religion, is that in the one case man thinks that he
can gain all that he desires by means of magic, and that in the other he
turns with offerings and supplication to the personal beings superior to
man whom he imagines to control the course of nature and of human life.
Whether the distinction which Sir James Frazer draws between magic and
religion will hold depends partly on whether his definitions of magic
and religion are acceptable. In his account of magic there at least
appears to be some confusion of thought. On the one hand, he says, 'it
must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put
forward by the magician, as such, is false; not one of them can be
maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.' This
pronouncement makes it easy for us to understand that even the savage
would eventually find magic an unsatisfactory method of gratifying his
desires, a deception in fact. On the other hand, Sir James apparently
contradicts himself, that is to say, he denies that every single
profession or claim put forward by the magician is false, and says,
'however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians
and condemn the deceptions which they have practised on mankind, the
original institution of this class of man has, take it all in all, been
productive of incalculable good to humanity.' The ground for this second
pronouncement, so contradictory of the first, is that magicians, Sir
James tells us, 'were the direct predecessors, not merely of our
physicians and surgeons but of our investigators and discoverers in
every branch of natural science.' Thus, though he no longer regards
priests as transmogrified magicians, he does regard magicians as the
earliest men of science, and does regard science, therefore, as a highly
developed stage of magic. This view logically follows from the premisses
from which it starts; and if it is felt to be unacceptable, we shall
naturally be inclined to scrutinize the premisses once more and more
carefully. When we do so scrutinize them, we see that the principles of
thought on which Sir James Frazer assumes magic to be based are in
effect the principles from which science started: they are the beliefs
that like produces like--the basis of the law of causation--and that
things which our experience shows to have gone together in the past tend
always to go together--which is one way of stating our belief in the
uniformity of nature. If then these principles of thought are the
principles on which magic as well as science is based, then science and
magic are the same thing, and we have only to choose whether we will
say that magic is not magic but undeveloped science, or that science is
not science but merely magic transmogrified. Thus, the pre-formation
theory once more reasserts itself: magic is the seed in which science is
prefigured or pre-formed.
If we wish to escape from this conclusion, if we wish to maintain the
validity of science and yet always to remember 'that every single
profession and claim put forward by the magician, as such, is false--not
one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or
unconscious', we must consider whether Sir James Frazer's account of
magic, according to which the principles of magic are identical with
those of science, is the only account that can be given of magic; and
for that purpose we may contrast it with the view of Wilhelm Wundt. But
before doing so, since Sir James Frazer holds that there is 'a
fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic
and religion', it will be well to try to see not only what he means by
magic, but also whether his description or definition of religion is
acceptable.
Whereas Robertson Smith held that religion, reduced to its very lowest
terms, must imply at least belief in a god and communion with him,
Frazer considers religion to be the belief that the course of nature and
of human life is controlled by personal beings superior to man. By the
one view stress is laid on the mystic side of religion, on the communion
which is effected through sacrifice; by the other view stress is laid on
the power which the gods may be induced by prayer and supplication to
exercise for the benefit of man. Our first reflection, therefore, is
that any view of religion, to be comprehensive, cannot confine itself to
either of these aspects singly, but must find room for both--for both
prayer and sacrifice. They cannot be mutually exclusive, nor can they
be simply juxtaposed, as though they were atoms unrelated to one
another, accidental neighbours in the same district. There must be a
higher unity, not created by or subsequent to the coalescence of
elements originally independent of each other, but a higher unity of
which both prayer and sacrifice are manifestations. This higher unity, I
venture to suggest, is the first principle of religion; and, if it is
not explicitly recognized as the first principle of religion either by
Robertson Smith or by Frazer, that may well be because their attention
is concentrated on the earlier stages in the evolution of religion, when
as yet it is not conspicuous and is, therefore, though in fact
operative, liable to be overlooked. As Ferrier has said, 'first
principles of every kind have their influence, and indeed operate
largely and powerfully long before they come to the surface of human
thought and are articulately expounded.' What then is the first
principle of religion which only after long ages of evolution rose to
the surface of human thought, and which, though it had been operative
largely and powerfully, came only in the slow course of human evolution
to be articulately expounded? The first principle of religion is
love--love of one's neighbour and one's God.
In the light of that first principle it is manifest that prayer and
sacrifice are not fundamentally unrelated and accidentally juxtaposed: a
sacrifice accompanied not even by unspoken prayer, prompted by no
desire, no wish for anything whatever, is a meaningless concept. Equally
unmeaning and unintelligible is the idea of a prayer which involves no
sacrifice--whether by sacrifice we understand the offering of gifts or
the sacrifice of self. But perhaps it may be said that, even though love
alone can lead to sacrifice of self, still it is undeniable that prayers
may be put up and sacrifices be offered by a man for the sake of what he
is going to get by doing so; and that that is what Sir James Frazer
means when he sees in religion the belief that beings superior to man
may be induced by prayer so to order things that man may get his heart's
desire. Then, indeed, we get a continuity of evolution, a continuity
between magic and religion, which Frazer perhaps did not intend wholly
to deny: that is to say the continuous thread running through both magic
and religion and uniting them is desire. Desire is continuous, though
the means of gratifying it change. In one stage of evolution magic is
the means; in another, religion. But throughout we find the process of
evolution to be continuous--change in continuity and continuity in
change.
Now it is indeed undeniable that prayer and sacrifice may be made by a
man for the sake of what he is going to get, and may from the beginning
have been made, partly at least, from that motive. But if evolution in
one of its aspects is change, then one of the changes brought about by
evolution in religion is precisely that prayer and sacrifice come to be
regarded as no longer a means whereby a man can get his desires
accomplished--his will done--but as the indispensable condition for
doing God's will. Prayer then becomes communion with God, and the
sacrifice of self the living exhibition of love--the first principle of
religion, the principle which manifests itself now in prayer and now in
sacrifice.
From this point of view, then, Sir James Frazer's account of religion
will be considered unacceptable: it makes religion and magic alike but
means whereby man has--vainly--sought to satisfy desire. And the
implication is that the day of both alike is over. But if Frazer's
account of religion is unacceptable, his account of magic also is open
to criticism. He wavers between two opinions about magic: at one time he
regards it as all falsehood and deception, at another as the source from
which science springs, just as at one time he considered magic
fundamentally the same as religion and then again as fundamentally
different from religion. When Frazer is bent upon identifying magic and
science, he attributes to primitive man a theory of causation (that like
produces like): magic is based, he says, upon 'the views of natural
causation embraced by the savage magician'. On the other hand, according
to Wilhelm Wundt in his _Völkerpsychologie_, primitive man has no notion
whatever of natural causation: primitive man, Wundt says, has only one
way of accounting for events--if something happens, somebody did it. If
any one mysteriously falls ill and dies, the question at once presents
itself to the savage mind, who did it? How any one could contrive to
make the man fall ill and die is, to the man's relations, thoroughly and
disquietingly mysterious. The one thing clear to them is that somebody
possesses and has exercised this mysterious and horrible power. The
person who, in the opinion not only of the relatives but also of all or
most of the community, naturally would do this sort of thing differs in
some way--in his appearance or habits--from the average member of the
community, and accordingly is credited, or discredited, with this
mysterious and dreadful power. Such a person, according to Wundt, is a
magician. Such an event is a marvel: so long as it is supposed to be
brought about by a man, it is a piece of magic; when it is ascribed (as,
according to Wundt, it comes in later, though not in primitive times, to
be ascribed) to a god, it is a miracle.
If science then does not work magic, there must be a fundamental
distinction between science and magic, an absolute opposition of
principles. The principles of thought on which magic is based cannot be,
as Frazer maintains, the same as those which give to science its
validity. In fine, the belief in magic seems to be based not on any
principle of thought, but upon the assumption that, if something
happens, somebody must have done it, and therefore must have had the
power to do it.
Wundt, whilst differing from Frazer in his description of magic, is at
one with him in believing that before religion existed there was an age
of magic. But Wundt's view that marvels are magic when supposed to have
been done by man, but miracles when supposed to have been done by a god
or his priests, suggests the possibility that, as the belief in magic is
found usually, if not always, to exist side by side with the belief in
miracles, the two beliefs may from the beginning have co-existed, that
the age of magic is not prior in the course of evolution to the age of
religion. This possibility, it will be admitted, derives some colour at
least from the way in which the theory of evolution is employed to
account for the origin of species: different though reptiles are from
birds, the serpent from the dove, both are descended from a common
ancestor, the archaeopteryx. If this instance be taken as typical of the
process of evolution in general, then the course of evolution is not, so
to speak, linear or rectilinear, but--to use M. Bergson's
word--'dispersive'. To suppose that religion is descended from magic
would then be as erroneous as to suppose that birds are descended from
reptiles or man from the monkey. The true view will be that the course
of evolution is not linear, is not a line produced for ever in the same
direction, not a succession of stages, but is 'dispersive', that from a
common starting point many lines of evolution radiate in different
directions. The course of evolution is not unilinear but multilinear; it
runs on many lines which diverge, but all the diverging lines start from
the same point.
If we apply this conception of evolution in general to the evolution of
religion in particular--and Bergson, I should say, does not--then the
centre of dispersion, common to all religions, is the heart of man. The
forms of religion evolving, emanating and radiating from that common
centre are, let us say, fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. If we
wish to avoid, in the theory of religious evolution, an error analogous
to that of supposing birds to be descended from reptiles, we must
decline to suppose that monotheism is simply polytheism evolved, or that
polytheism is descended from fetishism. We must consider that each of
these three forms of religion is terminal, in the sense that no one of
them leads on to, or passes into, either of the other two. All three
forms of religious life may, and indeed do, exist side by side with one
another, just as the countless forms of physical life may be found
existing side by side. The foraminifera exist now, as they existed
millions of years ago; but the fact that they co-exist with higher forms
of physical life does not show that the higher forms of life are but
foraminifera in a more highly evolved form. Similarly, the fact that
fetishism exists side by side with polytheism, or polytheism with
monotheism, does not show that one is but a higher form of another: we
must consider each to be a terminal form, as incapable of producing
another, as it is impossible to conceive that the serpent develops into
the dove.
The common centre and starting-point of fetishism, polytheism, and
monotheism on this view (the 'dispersive' view) of the evolution of
religion lies in the heart of man, in a consciousness, originally vague
in the extreme, of the personality and superiority to man of the being
or object worshipped. In all these three forms of religion there is
worship, and in all three forms the being worshipped is personal.
Further, a special tie is felt to exist between the worshipper and the
personality worshipped: religion is the bond of union between them, and
it is also a bond which unites the worshippers to one another. It is by
its very nature a bond of union, a means of communion between persons,
human and divine. That is the mystic aspect of religion which finds
expression in the rite of sacrifice and in the sacramental meals which
are felt somehow to bind together, or rather to reunite and keep
together, the worshippers and their god. This communion however is not
merely mystic: it has its practical effects inasmuch as it affects the
conduct of the worshipper and enables him to do what without it he would
not have had strength to do.
If fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism radiate from a common centre,
the heart of man, then the heart of man must also be regarded as the
starting-point of magic. If they spring straight from the heart, though
in different directions, dispersively, then magic must also start from
the common centre; and, though its divergence from religion tends to
become total, at first, and indeed it may be for long, the discrepancy
between them is rather felt uneasily than recognized clearly.
Categories, such as those of cause and effect, identity and difference,
which are the common property of civilized thought, and which among us,
Mr. L.T. Hobhouse says, 'every child soon comes to distinguish in
practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.' Two
categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild
confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the
dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated. In
ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle
itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in
throwing it off. Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be,
the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together. In the
lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by
priests as well; spells and prayers are hardly to be distinguished from
one another. The idea that 'priest' is but 'magician' writ differently,
that prayers are but spells under another name, is now obsolete. The
truth may be that religion neither follows on, nor is evolved from
magic, but that both radiate from a common centre, the heart of man; and
that at first both are attempts made by man to secure the fulfilment of
his desires, to do his will, though eventually he finds that the way to
control nature is to obey her, not to try to command her by working
magic; and that it is in endeavouring to do God's will, not his own,
that man finds peace at the last.