Religions of Primitive Peoples

On the 24th of December, 1891, fifteen persons interested in promoting the historical study of religions united in issuing a circular-letter, inviting a conference in the Counci...

Under ordinary conditions of human life there are many more impressions on the senses which are everywhere the same or similar, than the reverse. Hence, the ideas, both primary...

These hints will indicate the chief sources from which I shall draw the material to illustrate the rudimentary stages of religious thought and act, the embryonic period, as it w...

This has not been done, so far as I know, up to the present time. In fact, much of the teaching of modern anthropology has been calculated to deter it. The outspoken advocacy of...

Thus it came that the whole of life, waking and sleeping, assumed a dreamy, unreal character. The traveller Spix says of the forest tribes of Brazil that they never seem fully a...

Probably in all primitive faiths the word is regarded as a magical power in itself. In Egypt it was believed that by words the most powerful of the gods could be made obedient t...

The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands have no forms of worship, they have no invocations to the gods, their language, indeed, has no original word for “prayer.” They believe firm...

CONTENTS:—Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship only—Identical with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a Stadium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Objects: 1. The...

_4. Trees and Plants._—Primitive man was arboreal. A hollow tree was his home, its branches his place of refuge, its fruit his sustenance. Naturally the tree became associated w...

The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the other, the passion of Love, exceeds all others in the power it exerts on the individual life. This it is, which in some of its fo...

Something very similar obtained in Peru. At the time of the vernal equinox, all strangers were bidden to leave the sacred city of Cuzco, where the Inca resided. A human victim w...

Another and significant funeral rite of high antiquity is that of cremation or incineration. It was symbolic in character, the body being given to the flames in order that the s...

I may go farther, and say that in all religions, in the essence of religion itself, there lies concealed a certain contempt for the merely ethical, as compared with the mystical...

But the secret of success lay within rather than without; the particular faith must pass through certain internal transformations in order to fit it for the wider field opened t...

[118] _Select Works of St. Ephrem_, p. 122. (Trans. by the Rev. J. B. Morris.) The name of Jesus was regarded by the early church as magical in itself. Arnobius says of him, “wh...

[281] There were, of course, some hobgoblins always ready to eat up or injure man; but not for any moral or ethical reason. “They afflict men, not out of anger or to punish sin,...

Professor Jastrow has during many years made a special study of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians, and has contributed many authoritative volumes and papers embodyin...