Part 17

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. Mueller 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 Mueller 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. Mueller 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 Mueller 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.[201] 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 Mueller 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 Mueller 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.' 'Everything 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 Mueller 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 Mueller 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 Mueller 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. Mueller 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. Mueller, 'infinite' is used in our modern sense. The question is, How did men ever come to believe in powers infinite, invisible, divine? If Mr. Mueller'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. Mueller'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. Mueller 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 Mueller cuts the matter shorter. The early inhabitants of the 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. Mueller in his account of the origin of Indian religion.

The mainspring of Mr. Mueller'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.[202] 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. Mueller (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. Mueller. 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'?[203] 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. Mueller 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. Mueller 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. Mueller, 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. Mueller'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. Mueller'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. Mueller 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. Mueller'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. Mueller, entered into the development of Aryan religion.

The last remark which has to be made about Mr. Mueller'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.[204] Mr. Max Mueller'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. Mueller 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. Mueller'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 Mueller 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 Mueller'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 Mueller'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. Mueller 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. Mueller, when he was minimising the existence of fetichism in the Rig Veda (the oldest collection of hymns), admitted its existence in the Atharva_n_a (p. 60).[205] 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 Mueller 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. Mueller 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. Mueller'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.

FOOTNOTES:

[197] _Lectures on Language._ Second Series, p. 41.

[198] A defence of the evidence for our knowledge of savage faiths, practices, and ideas will be found in _Primitive Culture_, i. 9-11.