Part 3

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 were, of those emotions and beliefs which to us, in riper forms, are so dear and so holy.

Here I must define what is meant in these lectures by “religions.” Most people confine that term to the historic faiths and cults, calling others “superstitions” and “paganisms.” Some will not acknowledge that there is any religion whatever except their own; all other beliefs are heresies, apostasies, or heathenisms. Even such an intelligent writer as Sir John Lubbock expressed doubts in one of his works whether he ought to apply the word “religions” to the worship tendered their deities by savages.

On the other hand, a Protestant will freely denounce the practices of the Roman Church as “superstitions,” and will claim that they are degenerations of religion; while among Protestants, the Quaker looks upon all external rites as equally “superstitious.”

No such distinctions can be recognised in ethnology. The principle at the basis of all religions and all superstitions is the same, as I shall show in the next lecture, and the grossest rites of barbarism deserve the name of “religion” just as much as the refined ceremonies of Christian churches. The aims of the worshipper may be selfish and sensuous, there may be an entire absence of ethical intention, his rites may be empty formalities and his creed immoral, but this will be his religion all the same, and we should not apply to it any other name.[19]

There is no one belief or set of beliefs which constitutes a religion. We are apt to suppose that every creed must teach a belief in a god or gods, in an immortal soul, and in a divine government of the world. The Parliament of Religions, which lately met at Chicago, announced, in its preliminary call, these elements as essential to the idea of religion.

No mistake could be greater. The religion which to-day counts the largest number of adherents, Buddhism, rejects every one of these items.[20] The Jewish doctrine of the Old Testament, the Roman religion of the time of Julius Cæsar, and many others, have not admitted the existence of a soul, or the continuance of the individual life after death.[21] Some believe in souls, but not in gods; while a divine government is a thought rarely present in savage minds. They do not, as a rule, recognise any such principle as that of good and evil, or any doctrine of rewards and punishment hereafter for conduct in the present life.

There is, in fact, not any one item in any creed which is accepted by all religions; yet a common source, a common end in view, and the closest analogy of means to that end, bind all in one, representing an indefeasible element of human nature, the lowest containing the potentiality of the highest, the highest being but the necessary evolution of the lowest. The same promptings which led the earliest of men to frame their crude ideas about the super-sensuous around them have nourished and developed religions ever since, and keep them alive to-day. Temples may crumble and creeds decay, but the spirit remains the same.

This inherent unity of all religious feeling and expression was long ago perceived by St. Augustine. In a well-known passage of his _Retractations_ he makes the striking remark: “Res ipsa, quæ nunc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis humani”; “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and in fact was with the human race from the beginning.”

This is, essentially, the maxim of modern ethnology. The religiosity of man is a part of his psychical being. In the nature and laws of the human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions, and passions, lie the well-springs of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen. To these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors, falsehoods, bigotry, or cruelty have stained man’s creeds and cults: to them we must credit whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have hallowed and glorified his long search for the perfect and the eternal.

If this opinion of the place of religion in ethnology is correct, we should not expect to find any considerable number of men, in the present epoch of the race’s development, devoid of some form of worship and belief.

The fact is that there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude, known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of religion, under some form.

The contrary of this has been asserted by various modern writers of weight, for example by Herbert Spencer and Sir John Lubbock, not from their own observation, for neither ever saw a savage tribe, but from the reports of travellers and missionaries.

I speak advisedly when I say that every assertion to this effect when tested by careful examination has proved erroneous.[22]

What led to such a mistaken opinion is easily seen. The missionaries would not recognise as religion the beliefs which were so different from and inferior to their own. The god of the heathens was to them no god whatever. When they heard stories of ghosts, magic, and charms, they spurned these as old wives’ fables, and confidently proclaimed that the tribe had no religion. Thus it was with those who first worked in South Africa. They returned and proclaimed that atheism was “endemic” among the tribes of that region. Later observers, acquainting themselves with the languages of the Blacks, found an ample mythology and an extensive ritual of worship.[23]

Another example may be quoted from a recent description of the Motu tribe of New Guinea. The writer, a missionary, denies that they have any religion whatever; but immediately proceeds to describe their numerous “superstitious” rites, their belief in spirits, their ceremonial law, etc.![24]

Another and potent cause of error was the unwillingness of the natives to speak to foreigners of the sacred mysteries. This is not peculiar to them, but obtains everywhere. In the polite society of our own cities, it is held to be an infraction of etiquette to question a person about his religious opinions and practices. Greater repugnance would be felt were it known that the questioner could have no sympathy with one’s opinions, and would probably hold them up to derision and contempt.

Even a stronger deterrent motive closes the mouth of most savages giving such information. It is _tabu_, prohibited under severe penalties, to impart it to any stranger, or even to another tribesman. The tendency to secrecy, to the esoteric, belongs to all religions, and especially to those in which the emotions are predominant, as is the case with primitive cults.

Even with a willing narrator, it is impossible to acquire a true understanding of a religion without a knowledge of the language in which its myths and precepts are couched. Ordinary interpreters are worse than useless. Captain Bourke tells us that time and again he was assured by Mexican interpreters who had lived for years among the Apaches that this tribe had no religion and no sacred ceremonies.

“These interpreters,” he adds, “had no intention to deceive; they were simply unable to disengage themselves from their own prejudices; they could not credit the existence of any such thing as religion save and except that taught them at their mother’s knees.”[25] If these Spanish-Mexicans, who had passed half their lives among the natives, denied them religion, what can we expect the ordinary traveller to learn in a few weeks’ visit?

Religion, therefore, is and has been, so far as history informs us, universal in the human race. Can we go farther back in time than history leads us, and say that it has ever been an element of humanity?

The resources at our command to answer this inquiry lie in prehistoric archæology and linguistics.

Beyond historic ages, and beyond those referred to by vague tradition, which we may call semi-historic, lies the epoch of culture called from its chief industry the Stone Age, divided into the more recent or “neolithic” period, and the older or “palæolithic” period.

Concerning the former, there can be no doubt whatever that religion exercised a tremendous influence on men’s minds. We have numberless sepulchres of peoples then living, mighty mounds and massive temples, such as Stonehenge and Karnac; we have them by the tens of thousands, over vast areas, remaining as indubitable proofs that the chief market of the time of those early sons of the soil was to worship the gods and prepare for death. We have their idols, amulets, and mystic symbols, their altars and their talismans, so as to leave no doubt of their deep devotion. No archæologist questions this.

When we come to palæolithic man, however, especially to those ancient tribes who lived in Western Europe when the great continental glacier chilled the air of Southern France to an arctic frigidity, or still earlier, in that pre-glacial summer when the hippopotamus found a congenial home in the river Thames, we are not so sure. Among the many thousands of artificially shaped stone and bone objects which have been collected from that horizon, there is not one which we can positively identify as of religious purport, as a charm, amulet, fetish, or idol. The rare instances in which the bones of the men of that age have been preserved reveal no positive signs of funerary rites.

For these reasons some able archæologists, such as Professor G. de Mortillet, have maintained that man, as he then was, had not yet developed his religious faculties. The evidence for this, is, indeed, negative, and fresh discoveries may refute it, but the present probability is that in the infancy of the race there was at least no objective expression of religious feeling.[26]

This appears supported by testimony from another quarter. When we can trace back the sacred words of a language to their original roots, we find that these roots do not have religious associations, but refer to concrete and sensuous images. There must have been a time, therefore, when those who spoke that original dialect employed these words without any religious meaning attached to them, and therefore had no religious ideas expressed in their language, and presumably none defined in their minds.

I am not sure, however, that this argument is so valid as some writers claim. Those early men may have had other religious terms, now lost; and the current belief among linguists that all radicals had at first concrete meanings is one I seriously doubt. Mental processes and feelings are just as real as actions, and in the aboriginal tongues of America are expressed by radicals as distinct and as ancient as any for sensuous perception.

There must, however, have been a time in the progress of organic forms from some lower to that highest mammal, Man, when he did not have a religious consciousness; for it is doubtful if even the slightest traces of it can be discerned in the inferior animals.

Mr. Darwin, indeed, put in a plea that his favourite dog manifested the same psychical traits which lead savages to believe in gods or spiritual agencies[27]; and lately Professor Pinsero, of Palermo, has argued that the anthropoid apes cultivate a worship of serpents, even burying them with considerable ceremony, and placing in their tombs a provision of insects for their consumption in their future life![28]

But these scientific speculations have not found general acceptance, and even Professor Pinsero himself, while conceding religion to the ape, denies it to prehistoric man of the earlier epochs.

We may conclude, therefore, that the development of the religious side of man’s nature began at a very early period in his history as a species, though probably it was extremely vague or practically absent in his first stadia; and that it is something distinctly human, and not shared in any definite form by even the best developed of the lower animals.

It is the only trait in which he is qualitatively separated from them. They, too, communicate knowledge by sounds; they have governments and arts; but never do we see anywhere among them the notion of the Divine. This was the spark of Promethean fire which has guided man along the darksome and devious ways of his earthly pilgrimage to the supremacy he now enjoys.

The Greek fable tells us of the shepherd lad Endymion, who fed his sheep on Mt. Latmus, and dreamed of no higher ambition, until in his sleep the goddess Selene descended from heaven and embraced him. Inspired by her divine touch, he waked to noble aspirations, and went forth to become monarch of Elis and father of a line of kings.

So the human mind groped for dateless ages amid brutish toils and pleasures, unconscious of grander aims; until the thought of God, rising to consciousness within the soul, whispered to it of endless progress and divine ideals, in quest of which it has sought and will ever continue seeking, with tireless endeavour and constantly increasing reward.

This question settled, another arises. The religions thus found everywhere among the rudest tribes, did they take root and exert a deep influence on the individual and society, or were they superficially felt, and of slight moment in practical life?

In reference to this I can scarcely be too positive. No opinion can be more erroneous than the one sometimes advanced that savages are indifferent to their faiths. On the contrary, the rule, with very few exceptions, is that religion absorbs nearly the whole life of a man under primitive conditions. From birth to death, but especially during adult years, his daily actions are governed by ceremonial laws of the severest, often the most irksome and painful characters. He has no independent action or code of conduct, and is a very slave to the conditions which such laws create.

This is especially visible in the world-wide customs of totemic divisions and the _tabu_, or religious prohibitions. These govern his food and drink, his marriage and social relations, the disposition of property, and the choice of his wives. An infraction of them is out of the question. It means exile or death. The notions of tolerance, freedom of conscience, higher law, are non-existent in primitive communities, except under certain personal conditions which I shall mention in a later lecture.

As has been tersely said by Professor Granger, “Religion in the ancient world comprised every social function”; and the identity of its rules with those of common life is correctly put by Professor Thiele in these words: “The idea of a separation between Church and State is utterly foreign to all the religions of antiquity.”[29]

What was true in those ancient days is equally so in this age among savage peoples. Let us take as an example the Dyaks of Borneo. A recent observer describes them as utter slaves to their “superstitions,” that is, to their religion.[30] “When they lay out their fields, gather the harvest, go hunting or fishing, contract a marriage, start on an expedition, propose a commercial journey, or anything of importance, they always consult the gods, offer sacrifices, celebrate feasts, study the omens, obtain talismans, and so on, often thus losing the best opportunity for the business itself.”

This is equally the case with most savage tribes. Mr. J. Walter Fewkes informed me that it was a severe moral shock to the Pueblo Indians to see the white settlers plant corn without any religious ceremony; and a much greater one to perceive that the corn grew, flourished, and bore abundant crops! The result did more to shatter their simple faith than a dozen missionary crusades.

To the simple mind of the primitive man, as to the Mohammedan to-day, there is no such thing as an intermediate law, directing phenomena, and capable of expression in set terms. To him, every event of nature and of life is an immediate manifestation of the power of God, _eine Kraftprobe Gottes_.[31]

Religion, however, does not begin from any external pressure, no matter how strong this may be. If it has any vitality, if it is anything more than the barrenest ceremonial, it must start within, from the soul itself. Thus it did in primordial ages in all tribes of men.

Therefore in studying its origin and pursuing its development we must commence with its fonts and springs in the mind of man, its psychic sources. These understood, we can proceed to its three chief expressions, in Words, in Objects, and in Rites.

LECTURE II.

The Origin and Contents of Primitive Religions.

CONTENTS:—Former Theories of the Origin of Religions—Inadequacy of these—Universal Postulate of Religions that Conscious Volition is the Source of Force—How Mind was Assigned to Nature—Communion between the Human and the Divine Mind—Universality of “Inspiration”—Inspiration the Product of the Sub-Conscious Mind—Known to Science as “Suggestion”—This Explained—Examples—Illustrations from Language—No Primitive Monotheism—The Special Stimuli of the Religious Emotions: 1. Dreaming and Allied Conditions—Life as a Dream—2. The Apprehension of Life and Death and the Notion of the Soul—3. The Perception of Light and Darkness; Day and Night—The Sky God as the High God—4. The Observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions of Force—The Thunder God—5. The Impression of Vastness—Dignity of the Sub-Conscious Intelligence.

In the last lecture we have seen that all tribes of men, so far as is known, have had religions. How this happened, what general cause brought about so universal a fact, has puzzled the brains of philosophers and theologians. Their explanations have been as various and as conflicting on this as on most other subjects.

A goodly number of philosophers, ancient and modern, have looked upon religion of any kind as a symptom of a diseased brain. Thus Empedocles, in the fifth century B.C., declared it to be a sickness of the mind, and Feuerbach, in the present century, has characterised it as the most pernicious malady of humanity. Regarding all forms of religions as delusions, detrimental therefore to sound reason and the pursuit of truth, they believed the human intellect could freely employ its powers only when liberated from such shackles.

Another ancient theory still survives, that which has its name from Euhemerus, a Sicilian writer of the time of Alexander the Great. He claimed that religions arose from the respect and reverence paid to kings and heroes during their lives, continued by custom after their deaths. Under the modern name of “ancestor worship” this has been maintained by Herbert Spencer and others as the primitive source of all worship.

Yet another philosophical opinion has been that religions were due to the craft of rulers and priests, who, by the aid of superstitious fear, sought to keep their subjects and votaries in subjection. These tricksters invented the terrors of another world to secure their own power and places in this one. This opinion was a favourite about the time of the French Revolution and is mirrored in the poems of Shelley, who announced it as one of his missions, “to unveil the religious frauds by which nations have been deluded into submission.”[32]

The prevailing theory of the great world-religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism, has been substantially that of Empedocles. They have regarded all the religions of the world as cunning fabrications of the Devil and his imps, snares spread for human souls; always with one exception however: each excepts itself. This is the view so grandly expressed in Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ and quite common yet in civilised lands.

On the other hand, a strong school of Christian writers, led early in this century by Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand and represented in our tongue by Archdeacon Trench, have asserted that all faiths, even the most savage, are fragments and reminiscences, distorted and broken indeed, of a primitive revelation vouchsafed by the Almighty to the human race everywhere at the beginning. These have occupied themselves in pointing out the analogies of savage and pagan creeds and rites with those of Christianity, in proof of their theory.

Not remote from them are the teachers of the doctrine of the “inner light,” that “light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world,” disclosing unto him the existence of God and the fact of his soul. They teach, with Wordsworth, that

“Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home;”

and that it is by perversion or wilful blindness that any man avers ignorance of these primal truths.

The philosophic aspect of this theory has been presented by the master minds of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Kant identified the idea of God with the Ideal of Reason, the perfect Intelligence, toward which all minds, even the humblest, must necessarily strive. Hegel, in a fine passage of his _Philosophy of Religion_, urges the study of pagan and primitive religions with a view to define their real significance and to discover the grains of truth which ever lie within them, the reason and the goodness which give them life.

The modern German ethnographers, such as Peschel, Ratzel, and Schurtz,[33] have not ventured to follow these earlier thinkers of their nation, but have contented themselves with tracing the origin of religion to one characteristic of the human intellect, to wit, the notion of Cause. The relation of cause and effect, they claim, is so ingrained in the thinking mind that it inevitably leads all men to assume causes, such as spiritual agencies, when others are not visible.

This popular view seems weak; for not only is the relation of cause to effect a mere assumption, and, indeed, rejected by exact science; but it dodges the very question at issue, which is to explain why spiritual agencies are imagined as causes of material effects.

Similar objections lie to deriving primitive religions from a vague “perception of the Infinite,” or a _sensus numinis_, some _deus in nobis_, “warning us,” as Virgil says, “by his quick motion.” These are unclear, unsatisfying expressions, offering no rational explanation, and full of equivocations.

A favourite theory in all times is that religions arose from the emotion of fear. It was taught by the Latin poet Petronius in a famous line, where he says “Fear first made the gods”; and it has been strenuously advocated by many modern philosophers and ethnologists.

Now if this emotion is alone sufficient to evoke religious feeling, why, I ask, is that feeling absent in the craven and timid lower animals? Why is it so feeble in many a coward? Why has it been so strong in many a hero?

Moreover, the spirit of many early religions is the reverse of that of fear. They are, as Dr. Robertson Smith correctly said, “predominantly joyous.”

These are proofs enough that this ancient and popular notion rests on a misconception of facts. The “fear of God” enters, indeed, into every religion; but religion itself did not arise from it. We must already have a notion of God, before we can fear Him.

If we are going to apply the scientific method to the study of religions we must offer an explanation for their existence which is intelligible, which is verifiable, and which holds good for all of them, primitive or developed, those of the remotest ages and those of to-day. Only thus can the ethnologist treat them as one element of the history of Humanity, a property of the species.