Part 1

RITUAL AND BELIEF

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

BY EDWIN SIDNEY HARTLAND, F.S.A.

LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1914

PREFACE

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Among the various intellectual activities of the last fifty years none has awakened a more widespread interest than that of the study of the evolution of human civilization. The reason is apparent: it has revolutionized our conception of human history, and has shaken to their very centre the religious traditions of Europe and civilized America. The general doctrine of evolution as applied to the universe at large was established shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century by Darwin and Spencer. Geology had already revealed the enormous age of the earth, and the long procession of periods through which the flora and fauna had advanced to ever higher organization. Archæology had begun its enquiries into the antiquity of man; but the evidence was not yet fully understood, and its weight or even its existence was denied. While theology, after first indignantly repudiating the new teachers, was trying with many grimaces to accommodate itself to their teaching, new lines of investigation were entered upon in this country and America by Lubbock, Tylor, M‘Lennan, and Morgan. The mental and social development of mankind, the history of ideas and of institutions, received fresh and unexpected illumination. It began to be possible to sketch a very different outline of human origins and early history from that which had hitherto remained almost unquestioned. In a country like ours, where an established Church {vi} arrogated to itself all social and almost all intellectual influences, and where it was very generally supported by those who dissented from it on other points in its dogmatic opposition to the results of scientific enquiry, it was natural that attention should be directed to the bearing of those results on theology. Anthropology, as the new Science of Man came to be called, was materially assisted in the quarrel by Biblical criticism begun in Germany and popularized in England by Colenso and others. The authenticity of the books so long attributed to Moses was questioned and overthrown; they themselves were emptied of all historical authority, and put on a level in this respect with the books of heathen nations. Professor Robertson Smith’s fight for liberty of criticism in the Free Church of Scotland roused the enthusiasm even of men who did not agree with all his opinions; and when he was finally ejected from his chair at Aberdeen, he was provided with a home first at Edinburgh and then at Cambridge, and the editorship of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. Thus unmuzzled, he devoted himself to the study of Semitic religion and customs on the largest scale and in the most unbiassed spirit. Unfortunately, his health gave way; and two precious volumes are well-nigh all that has reached us of his labours. But his influence at Cambridge, and particularly over a younger fellow-countryman to whom we owe _The Golden Bough_, was of a most fruitful character. To the impulse he gave is to be traced much--perhaps more than we suspect--of what anthropology has accomplished in various directions during the last five-and-twenty years.

Meanwhile revolt against false interpretation of known facts and inadequate methods of enquiry had spread elsewhere. Professor Max Müller, by his unsurpassed {vii} powers of exposition, his eloquence and his wide knowledge of the Aryan tongues, had become the champion in this country of the German explanation of myths as a disease of language, a teacher on whose lips learned and simple hung. Great as was his learning, however, it was circumscribed by the Indo-European languages and literature. He took little account of savage myths which could not be interpreted on his principles, and still less of the equally important rites and beliefs of European peasants and primitive peoples beyond the seas. In Germany, Mannhardt, originally a disciple of the same school, had turned to more reasonable and penetrating modes of interpretation. It is his glory to have been the first to combat the fancies of the philologists in a series of works steeped as deeply in classical learning as theirs, but with a much wider outlook and a keener sense of actuality. Yet he died without having made many converts; and in Germany still the sun-myth lingers, though hastening fast to its inevitable setting. In England his works were hardly known, when, in 1887, Andrew Lang, after a powerful article on “Mythology” in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, and other preliminary essays, published _Myth, Ritual and Religion_, in which he attacked with overwhelming acumen and wit the philological position. It is not too much to say that as far as English-speaking countries were concerned the blow was decisive, the philological position was carried, and the enemy’s flag planted triumphantly on the battlements.

The way was thus cleared for a really scientific enquiry into the beginnings of religion. No longer were we hampered with the story of Genesis and the primitive revelation. Our vision was not to be bounded by the Aryan and Semitic peoples. The guesswork of the philological school was at an end, and ritual was admitted {viii} to be at least as indispensable to the enquiry as story and belief. Professor Tylor had already done something more than pioneer work in the chapters on Mythology and Animism in _Primitive Culture_. In the chapters on Animism in particular he had exhibited the universal belief in the souls, not merely of human beings, but of other animate, and even of inanimate, creatures. He had boldly discussed the relation of this belief to the doctrine of spirits generally, and considered the transitional series of ideas through the cult of the dead, possession, fetishism, idol-worship, and the beliefs of the Christian Fathers. It became evident that a doctrine so complex and subtle, even in its simpler manifestations, could not bean original and innate belief of the human mind, but that it must have been evolved from something simpler, perhaps vaguer, certainly more comprehensive. “A theoretical conception of primitive philosophy, designed to account for phenomena now classed under Biology, especially Life and Death, Health and Disease, Sleep and Dreams, Trance and Visions” pre-supposes a long period of observation, comparison and discussion, during which the ideas slowly took shape and ranged themselves round a central theory.

The late Mr Andrew Lang was the first seriously to consider the questions involved. His answer, given in _The Making of Religion_ (1898), was twofold. On the one hand, he suggested that “the savage theory of the soul may be based, at least in part, on experiences”--hypnotism, clairvoyance, hallucination, and so forth--“which cannot at present be made to fit into any purely materialistic system of the universe.” On the other hand, he contended that “the idea of God, in its earliest known shape, need not logically be derived from the idea of spirit, however that idea itself may have been attained or {ix} evolved.” In this he was aiming partly at Sir Edward Tylor’s theory of Animism, as developed in the last of his famous chapters on that subject, partly at the theory of the ancient sceptic Euhemerus, revived and championed within recent years by Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen, that gods had been developed out of the ghosts of dead men. He sought to draw a broad distinction between the two concepts, that of a god and that of a spirit of any sort. He claimed that the idea of God was earlier than that of a spirit, and that “a relatively Supreme God,” often expressly described as Creator, existing before death came into the world, and practically eternal, had everywhere preceded the propitiation of the dead. He did not commit himself to any definite opinion as to how this idea of a Supreme God was reached by the rude forefathers of the race. But when he oracularly observed, “The hypothesis of St Paul seems not the most unsatisfactory,” it is no wonder that orthodox readers understood by that expression a primitive revelation, whereas what he meant was the argument from Design as stated in Rom. i. 19, 20. Though Lang’s book, therefore, was hailed as a sign that anthropological science was after all coming round to the support of the old orthodoxy, he himself was too true a sceptic to fall satisfactorily into line. In fact, he solved nothing. The “High Gods” of the lowest savages must have had some origin, must have been evolved out of conceptions lower or more indefinite.

Professor Frazer has approached the problem from another side. In the first edition of _The Golden Bough_ he attempted no definition of Religion; and the relation of Magic to Religion, therefore, was hardly clear. Critics did not fail to call his attention to this. In the second edition (1900) he accordingly proceeded to define {x} his position. There, with Sir Alfred Lyall and Professor Jevons, he recognizes “a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion”; and in _The Magic Art_, he has more recently somewhat expanded his exposition of their relations. Magic, it appears, is a false science based on the assumption “that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency.” Religion is “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.” Man began with magic. He knew of no beings superior to himself, and he believed that by certain ceremonies he could cause the results he desired. “Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called the laws of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to break these laws in the smallest particular is to incur failure, and may even expose the unskilful practitioner himself to the utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional sovereignty, rigorously limited in its scope, and exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage.” After a while man found out his blunder. “The shrewder intelligences must in time have come to perceive that magical ceremonies and incantations did not really effect the results they were designed to produce, and which the majority of their simpler fellows still believed that they did actually produce.… The discovery amounted to this, that men for the first time recognized their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control. It was a confession of human {xi} ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain.… Not that the effects which he had striven so hard to produce did not continue to manifest themselves. They were still produced, but not by him.” In this emergency he turned to “a new system of faith and practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his harassing doubts and a substitute, however precarious, for that sovereignty over nature which he had abdicated. If the great world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own magic.… To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced in all the gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself, humbly confessing his dependence on their invisible power, and beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good things.” Here, to be sure, was a revolution. The Age of Religion succeeded to the Age of Magic, though gradually, reluctantly, and, as regards at least the majority of mankind, incompletely even to the present day.

It is needless to dwell on the contrast between this hypothesis and Lang’s. The one traces religion back to the belief in a Supreme God, the other to a reaction against the belief in magic. They are alike in one respect: they both derive it from an exercise of man’s reasoning faculties. It seems a just criticism to say that neither of them takes sufficient account of man’s emotional nature. Yet it must have played an important part in the evolution of religion. It is, if I may say so, the merit of another {xii} enquirer, Dr R. R. Marett, that he was the first to point this out. In an article published in _Folk-lore_ in the year 1900, he analyzed, with psychological knowledge and skill, the experiences that underlay Animism, and came to the conclusion that behind the logic was emotion, the recoil from the uncanny and the mysterious, “that basic feeling of awe, which drives a man, ere he can think or theorize upon it, into personal relations with the Supernatural.” Dr Marett’s views have been subsequently developed in a series of papers printed in different periodicals and collections, and republished in 1909 in a volume entitled _The Threshold of Religion_. This has been supplemented more recently by his inaugural lecture as Reader in Social Anthropology at Oxford, on _The Birth of Humility_ (1910), in which he takes the opportunity of criticizing with vivacity and effect Professor Frazer’s exposition of the relations of magic and religion. His opinions have been reinforced by the independent enquiries of two learned Frenchmen, MM. Hubert and Mauss, who in 1904 published in _L’Année Sociologique_ a remarkable “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la Magie,” reissued five years later among their collected essays entitled _Mélanges d’Histoire des Religions_. They approach the subject from the social side, insisting that religion is before everything a social matter, its judgements are social judgements, its rites social rites. They point out its intimate connection with magic, and by skilful analysis exhibit the parallelism between them.

More recently the psychological aspect of the problem has been considered by a group of American writers, notably by Professor James Leuba (_A Psychological Study of Religion_) and Dr Irving King (_The Development of Religion_, New York, 1910). The latter work is a most suggestive and judicious survey of the evidence afforded {xiii} by savage rites and belief. The writer insists on the priority of rites to belief, and finds their origin in social activities, largely in what he calls play-activities, and in spontaneous reactions to the environment. The religious attitude may be coeval with these activities, but organized beliefs were developed gradually. The particular forms they took were the result of different social situations, these in turn depending on the physical and cultural environment. “In and so far as they have elements which are similar functionally, religion and magic,” he holds, “originally formed a part of a primitive, undifferentiated attitude, and separated from each other as experience became more complex and the requirements of action more varied.” Magic became the individualist and antisocial application of the impulses and organized methods of which religion was the social expression and application.

Lastly, Professor Durkheim, taking Totemism as the most primitive religion known to us, has in _Les Formes Elémentaires de la vie Religieuse_ analyzed elementary conceptions, with the result that he derives religious ideas and practices entirely from a social origin. As I have considered his theory more fully on another page, it needs no further reference here.

Thus at the present moment the controversy stands--if it be legitimate to call it a controversy. Criticism, according to a pregnant saying of Andrew Lang’s, is a form of co-operation--of co-operation in the pursuit of truth. The following essays are intended in that spirit as a humble contribution to the discussion. Their primary intention is not controversial. They rather seek to express some of the results of a study of the phenomena, from the point of view of one who has been convinced that the emotions and the imagination--and {xiv} not merely the individual, but the collective emotions and imagination--have had at least as much to do with the generation of religious practices and beliefs as the reason, and that for the form they may have assumed, physical, social, and cultural influences must be held accountable.

The essay on “The Relations of Religion and Magic” is an expansion of two presidential addresses, one delivered to the Anthropological Section of the British Association at York in 1906, the other to the section on the Religions of the Lower Culture at the International Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford in 1908. The essay on “The Rite at the Temple of Mylitta” was contributed to the volume of _Anthropological Essays_ presented to Sir Edward Tylor, in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday, in 1907. That on “The Voice of the Stone of Destiny” was published in _Folk-lore_, 1903. Both of these have undergone revision. The remaining essays are new. One of them deals as a preliminary with some of the difficulties that beset the enquirer into the religious ideas of the lower races, with wandering fires that mislead him, with barriers that seem impassable. The others seek to concentrate attention on particular instances of ritual or belief, to elucidate the ideas and emotions that underlie them, or further to illustrate their evolution. I am indebted to the publishers of such as have been already published for their courtesy in facilitating reproduction here.

E. SIDNEY HARTLAND

Highgarth, Gloucester, _January_ 1914.

CONTENTS

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LEARNING TO “THINK BLACK” THE RELATIONS OF RELIGION AND MAGIC: I. THE COMMON ROOT II. THEORIES AND DEFINITIONS III. DEVELOPMENT IV. DIVERGENCE THE BOLDNESS OF THE CELTS THE HAUNTED WIDOW THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOURNING CLOTHES THE RITE AT THE TEMPLE OF MYLITTA THE VOICE OF THE STONE OF DESTINY BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST ENDNOTES

RITUAL AND BELIEF

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LEARNING TO “THINK BLACK”

Sir Edward Tylor begins the chapters on Animism in that great work which laid the foundation of the modern study of the history of civilization, by a discussion of the evidence for the existence of tribes destitute of religion. In some half-dozen pages he easily shows that the existence of such tribes, “though in theory possible, and perhaps in fact true, does not at present rest on that sufficient proof which, for an exceptional state of things, we are entitled to demand.” He convicts travellers and missionaries who have made the assertion, of contradicting themselves; and he renders probable that the denial of religion to peoples in the lower culture is begotten of a perverted judgement in theological matters, and “the use of wide words in narrow senses.”[1.1]

Other causes are equally prolific of error in regard to savage beliefs. Sir Edward Tylor refers to haste and imperfect acquaintance by the traveller with the people whose beliefs he is professing to repeat. These are obvious causes on which it is needless to dwell. Many peoples, too, are accustomed out of mere politeness to endeavour to divine what sort of answer to his remarks will please a guest, or what sort of answer an enquirer expects to his questions, and to make it accordingly, {2} regardless whether it has any relation to the facts or not. This courtier-like etiquette of agreement applies to every subject, and is emphasized when the enquirer is an official or social superior from whom favour may be looked for or displeasure apprehended. The Malayans, a jungle tribe of southern India, invariably say “Yes” in reply to a question by a government officer or a member of a higher caste, “believing that a negative answer might displease him.”[2.1] In such cases it is difficult to extract the truth on the most indifferent and trivial, to say nothing of weightier, matters.

Passing over these commonplaces, let us pause for a moment on another cause mentioned by Tylor, namely, the natural reluctance of savages to reveal “to the prying and contemptuous foreigner their worship of gods who seem to shrink, like their worshippers, before the white man and his mightier Deity.”[2.2] Very instructive is the account given by Kolben of the Hottentots. Writing in the early years of the eighteenth century, he says it is “a difficult thing to get out of the Hottentots what are really their notions concerning God and religion, or whether they have any at all. They keep all their religious opinions and ceremonies, as they do every other matter established among them, as secret as they can from Europeans, and when they are questioned concerning such matters are very shy in their answers and hide the truth as much as they can.” They take refuge from questions in “a thousand fictions,” which they excuse, when taxed with them, by alleging that “the Europeans are a crafty, designing people. They never ask a question for the sake of the answer only, but have other ends to serve, perhaps against the peace and security of the Hottentots.” From this source, we are told, have sprung {3} most of the contradictions to be found in authors upon the religion of the Hottentots.[3.1] More than a hundred years after Kolben’s day a British traveller, exploring Great Namaqualand under the auspices of the British Government and of the Royal Geographical Society, assembled some of the old men among the Namaqua and put them through an examination. His thirst for information was doubtless praiseworthy; and he was at least successful in proving, albeit unconsciously, the truth of the older traveller’s words. For the proceeding he adopted affords a brilliant example of “how not to do it.” I quote some of his questions: “What laws have the Namaqua?” Answer--“They have none; they only listen to their chiefs.” “Do the people know anything of the stars?” Answer--“Nothing.” “Do the Namaqua believe in lucky and unlucky days?” Answer--“They don’t know anything of these things.” “Are there rainmakers in the land?” Answer--“None.” “What do the old Namaqua think becomes of people when they die?” Answer--“They know nothing of these things; all they see is that the people die and are buried, but what becomes of them they know not; and before the missionaries came to the Great River the people had never heard of another world.”[3.2]