Part 11

Professor Durkheim’s theory of religion is exhibited in detail only in one type. He speaks of “the aptitude of society to erect itself into a god or to create gods”;[124.1] but he illustrates his thesis only in the case of totemism, which he takes as an example of the religion of the least advanced people hitherto thoroughly examined. He is careful to say that the question whether totemism has been more or less widespread is of secondary importance; it is at all events the most primitive and the simplest religion it is possible to reach.[124.2] But his whole argument, if it prove anything, goes to show the universality of totemism. For the idea of the soul, according to the data of ethnography, appears to him to have been coeval with humanity, and that not merely in germ but in all its essential characters; and the soul is nothing else than the totemic principle incarnated in each individual, a portion of the collective soul of the group, that is to say of the totem, individualized.[124.3] Now totemism is certainly a very archaic form of religion. That it was universal {125} is, however, very far from being demonstrated. It may well be that many branches of the human race have outgrown it, and that its traces have been obliterated. But among peoples very low down in culture there are many where it is unknown, or at least unrecognizable. It is more than possible, could we ascertain the facts, that Bushman society was organized on the basis of totemism. But there are other tribes no higher than Bushmen and Australian Blackfellows where we fail to discern it. The Veddas of Ceylon are indeed divided into clans with female descent. Yet no totem has emerged after the most careful enquiries. Their religion is essentially a cult of the dead, based on fear. The dead man is addressed as “Lord! New Driver-away of Vaeddas!” Sacrifices are offered and eaten as an act of communion with the deceased. In addition to the dead of the local group, “certain long-dead Veddas who may be regarded as legendary heroes” are invoked, of whom the most important are Kande Yaka, an ancient hunter whose assistance is implored for good hunting, and his brother Bilindi Yaka, a sort of pale double of himself. But they are not known among all the Vedda communities, though Kande is regarded by some as Lord or leader of the dead. There are also other spirits, who appear to be of foreign origin and superimposed upon the original cult of the dead, and are perhaps on their way to become nature-spirits.[125.1] The religion of the Andaman Islanders “consists of fear of the evil spirits of the wood, the sea, disease and ancestors, and of avoidance of acts traditionally displeasing to them.” There is besides an anthropomorphic being, Puluga, who is said to be “the cause of all things.” He receives no active worship, though acts thought to be displeasing to him are avoided “for fear of damage to {126} the products of the jungle.” There is some evidence that he is the north-east wind; and Sir R. C. Temple is of opinion that he is “fundamentally, with some definiteness, identifiable with the storm, mixed up with ancestral chiefs.” He acts by his daughters, the Morowin, who are his messengers; but he seems to content himself with pointing out to the evil spirits offenders against himself, without actually taking steps against them.[126.1] Totemism is nowhere hinted at by the enquirers who have busied themselves with this childlike, and on the whole harmless, but somewhat capricious people.

Still very low in the scale of civilization, though somewhat higher than these, are the tribes of the interior forests of Brazil. They people their environment with imaginary beings more or less hostile. The object of their ceremonies appears to be to conciliate the favour of these gentry, or to hold them at arm’s length. When once the death-rites are completed little account is taken of the departed. So much we may gather from the reports of two German expeditions, written by distinguished scientific men who led the expeditions. Although they penetrated different parts of the country, there was a general resemblance between the civilization of the Indians met with by both explorers. A French anthropologist has remarked that English and German observers do not interest themselves to the same degree, or in the same way, in the social life of peoples in the lower culture; for whereas the German explorers by preference describe, and that with praiseworthy minuteness, the nature of the country and the material civilization of the people, the English, on the other hand, interest themselves more in the intellectual products, the traditions and beliefs. In other words, he said, the German is {127} more of an ethnographer, the Englishman more of a student of folklore and psychologist. There is perhaps a measure of truth in this remark. It may go far to explain why more distinct and definite accounts have not been given either by Professor Karl von den Steinen or Dr Theodor Koch-Grünberg of the religions of the aboriginal tribes of Brazil. In any case, we miss much that we should have expected to find in their reports on the religious beliefs and ceremonies of these tribes. Among the omissions is that of any mention of totemism--an institution which concerns organization and government as much as religion. What renders the omission significant in the case of Professor von den Steinen, and not merely the result of want of interest in the subject, is that he has taken pains to ascertain and record the attitude of the natives towards the lower animals. He makes it clear that they draw no strict line of demarcation between man and brute. Nay, he goes the length of saying that we must think the boundary completely away. Human beings are indebted to the lower animals for the most important elements of their culture, many of which they have acquired from them by force or guile. More than that, the Bororó claim to be actually _araras_ (a kind of bird with brilliant red plumage); their neighbours the Trumai are believed to be water-animals; a certain cannibal tribe is descended from the jaguar; and so forth. These beliefs are not totemic, for they concern not clans but whole tribes.[127.1] Apparently, therefore, there is no totemism among the wild forest-tribes investigated.

If the concept of the soul (which, it is needless to say, all these peoples possess) were coeval with humanity, and if it were only the totemic principle individualized, then totemism must have been coeval with humanity, and it {128} must have been universal. If so, it is at least curious that the Veddas, the Andaman Islanders, and the forest-tribes of Brazil--all of them on the horizon of civilization on which totemism is found--should display no traces of it. If the concept of impersonal force, the substratum of religious and magical beliefs, be derived from the authority of society over the individual, and not merely strengthened and developed by it, it is odd that religious and magical beliefs should, so low down in culture, have issued in such widely divergent forms. The worship of the dead, the conciliation of hostile nature-spirits, the fear of an anthropomorphic being of enormous power, are all explicable as the result of the action of external conditions on human mentality and emotions. They are not explicable as the direct product of the authority of the group over the individual. And if totemism had originally held sway over the Veddas, the Mincopies and the Brazilian tribes, it is not easy to conceive how it could have evolved in directions so diverse,--and that without leaving any authentic witness to its past. It is quite another thing if the action of the group had been rather to combine and consolidate, to intensify and to organize the sensations and emotions awakened in its members by external nature, to give them a measure of definiteness in the process, and to habituate the individual to certain modes of reaction to the sensations, and to certain forms of expression of the beliefs engendered by the emotions thus awakened.

IV. Divergence

In the foregoing pages I have attempted to trace Magic and Religion to a common root. We have found them inextricably intertwined very low down in culture; {129} we have seen the difficulty of distinguishing them by way of scientific definition, and have been forced back upon ordinary usage. Both alike are concerned with the supernatural and the uncanny; but the one deals with it by compulsion, by the direct exertion of human _orenda_ upon the objects sought to be constrained, the other by the indirect method of appeal to mightier powers than human to exercise their _orenda_ upon those objects, in order to obtain the result desired. And I have contended that the opposition of Magic and Religion, on which writers of authority like Professor Frazer and the late Sir Alfred Lyall have so much insisted, is so far from being essential that it is a result of their concurrent development and of the general advance of civilization, and is even yet imperfectly accomplished. The argument seems to require some further illustrations.

First, let me observe that the definition of magic here adopted does by no means coincide with that of Professor Frazer, though, like his, it rests upon the method of compulsion as the distinguishing characteristic. That, however, is not because of any faith by primeval man in the invariable order of nature or in the inevitable sequence of cause and effect. The compulsion of magic, as I understand it, is wielded by, and dependent upon, the personal _orenda_ of the magician, either directly or through the medium of the powerful and uncanny beings whom he succeeds in bringing into play.

The idea of a god in our minds is associated with a reverential attitude that is very far from being universally adopted. In a later essay we shall see that threats of bodily injury, even (in the legends) actual hand-to-hand combats, and (in fact) chastisement of the material representatives of divinity, are often regarded as quite appropriate measures to be taken in dealing with beings {130} who are ordinarily the objects of worship. I have already referred to the constraining power attributed to sacrifice and other rites in some of the more advanced religions. Where ritual has undergone a long term of development, where it has been subjected for many ages to continuous thought, and to elaboration in order to provide for new needs or against unforeseen contingencies, there it is apt to acquire a proportionate value of its own, independent of the merits of the performer. The sacrifice which is a gift to the gods imperiously demands its looked-for repayment, and will not be denied. The penance, whether it be in the nature of a sacrifice or a spell, carries with it, like the Hindu rite of _dharna_, an implied curse if not responded to. In either case the deity to whom it is directed has no choice but to comply.

The constraining influence may take a variety of forms, and is by no means confined to one plane of civilization, or to one cultural area. Sometimes it is expressed in knots to which is widely attributed what we call magical power. In Morocco, where civilization has rather deteriorated than progressed for many ages, the cult of the dead is largely prevalent. Professor Westermarck records that a Berber servant of his told him that once when in prison he invoked a certain great female saint whose tomb was in a neighbouring district, and tied his turban, saying: “I am tying thee, Lälla Rah’ma Yusf, and I am not going to open the knot till thou hast helped me.” And a person in distress will sometimes go to her grave and knot the leaves of some palmetto growing in its vicinity, with the words: “I tied thee here, O saint, and I shall not release thee unless thou releasest me from the toils in which I am at present.”[130.1]

This perhaps also is, as Professor Westermarck suggests, {131} a conditional curse. Now a curse, like other magical proceedings before referred to, is primarily a relief of overcharged feelings. Uttered with all the strength of those feelings by an aggrieved or baffled adversary, it evokes even in our breasts to-day shuddering and horror. Much more then in days when the man’s _orenda_ was deemed to go out in speech with immediate result upon the object to which he directed it. When gods came to be adopted and worshipped, strength was added to the curse by invocation of the god. The god’s name added to the curse was an addition of the god himself. For the name is a part, and an important part, of the god, and cannot be used without effect. The god is bound to respond to it, and to act in accordance with the votary’s demand. For this reason the real names of gods were kept secret. Mystery thus attached to the name of the God of the Hebrews: hence the express prohibition to “take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Almost all over the world this belief in efficacy of the uttered name as a means of compulsion is responsible not merely for taboos on the names of gods, and of men living or dead, but also for the form and potency of magical formulæ. If you know the name of a spirit and utter it, or sometimes even threaten to utter it, you compel the owner’s attention to your wants. Or you may pretend to be some great personage, such as (wherever the Mohammedan tradition has penetrated) King Solomon or the angel Gabriel; and in that name you may issue your commands. Or, as among Christians, you call for the obedience of a spirit in the great name of God or the Lord Jesus Christ. In India to repeat the divine name aloud, or even by way of meditation, “is the most usual way of acquiring religious merit.… So much importance is given to this mode of meditation that Tulsidas in {132} his _Ramayan_ lays down that the name of Rama is greater than Rama himself.” In other words, its utterance compels him. “It is said of a certain Hindu who had notoriously lived a life of impiety that he obtained salvation by calling on his deathbed for his son by his name, which happened to be Nârâyan.”[132.1] The name Nârâyan is sacred. It was originally a title of Brahmâ, but is now usually applied to Vishnu, and is that under which he was first worshipped.[132.2]

The curse, if curse it were, involved in the rite practised by Professor Westermarck’s servant was not of the kind dependent on the utterance of a name. It was rather of that in which the curse is conveyed by a sign or figure deriving its power from the _orenda_ of the magician himself. I have already referred to one species of such curses intended for the protection of property by marking it as taboo to the owner.[132.3] In this form they are chiefly used by the Malayo-Polynesian and Melanesian peoples and on the eastern side of Central Africa, though they have their analogues elsewhere.[132.4] The leaden tablets of _defixiones_ employed by the ancient Greeks, of which numerous examples are known, show a similar practice founded on similar ideas. The tablet is inscribed with the name of the person intended to be injured, and it is then “defixed,” or bound, with a nail. The ceremony was doubtless accompanied by some words expressive of the intention. Indeed the expression of the intention was in course of time recorded on the tablet. A further stage in development was reached when the gods were invoked, {133} beginning with Hermes and Ge, and going on to other chthonic divinities. Later, apparently towards the end of the third century B.C., the custom began of devoting to various gods lost property and the thief who had stolen it. Such tablets affixed to the walls of temples doubtless served the purpose of our advertisements for the recovery of lost or stolen property. The difference is that, whereas we offer material rewards, the Greeks invoked the help of the gods and threatened the thief or receiver with supernatural vengeance.[133.1] The use of _defixiones_ spread into Italy, and has lasted into quite modern times, or, it may be truer to say, was revived under the influence of learned men who at the close of the Middle Ages became imbued with the astrology and magic of earlier days. One of these learned men, Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who attained high judicial office under the Emperor Charles the Fifth, but afterwards got into trouble for his occult studies, wrote a book on Occult Philosophy, which was translated into English in the middle of the seventeenth century. At that time the study of magic was falling into disrepute. Agrippa’s book was left to charlatans who preyed upon the ignorant. Some of the results have been found up and down the country in the form of leaden tablets inscribed with curses, mystical numbers and signs, names of the spirits invoked to make the curses effectual and of the victims against whom the curses were intended to operate.[133.2] In these modern cases {134} the powers appealed to are no longer beings recognized by the dominant religion. They are relics of religions passed away, or figments of the pedantic imagination. Magic, in short, has for purposes of private vengeance been ousted from religion and has set up for itself.

At any rate the Moroccan rite involves a threat; and a threat is near akin to a curse. Much may be done with gods, as with men, by means of a little judicious bluff. A certain Malay robber kept six tame spirits, to whom he made an offering from time to time. When he did so he called them by name, bidding them: “Come here! Eat my offering! Take you care that my body is not affected, that the flow of my blood is not stayed! Likewise with the bodies of my wife and children. (If not) I’ll turn the earth and the sky the wrong way round!” He was fully convinced of the power of these spirits and apparently of the value of his terrible threat, though, as Mr Annandale, who reports the case, points out, the spirits had been unable to save him from being convicted and imprisoned for his crimes.[134.1]

In ancient Egypt magic was practised in connection with religion from prehistoric times. Magic and religion “were two products of one and the same _Weltanschauung_, not disparate either in their methods or in their psychological basis. Nor were they differently estimated from the ethical point of view: magic was deemed permissible, so long as it was turned to no evil purpose. It follows that the classification of Egyptian superstitious practices as (_a_) religious, (_b_) magical, must be a purely external mode of classification: the distinction between religion {135} and magic in Egypt has not, and cannot be made to have, any deeper significance.”[135.1] The scholar from whom I quote these words, so far from exaggerating the close relationship between magic and religion, may be said to understate it. Magic was an integral part of religion. The priests of the gods were magicians. Magic was employed in the ritual of worship. It enabled the great god Ra to overcome the serpent Apep.[135.2] Magical ceremonies performed by the priests over the mummy, or over a statuette representing the deceased, were the means by which his success in passing the necessary tests and his lasting happiness after death were secured. The means employed were those universally known to magic: amulets, waxen and other figures, pictures, spells and words of power, the knowledge of names, rites imitating the results desired, and so forth. Concerning the dead we are told: “Few were those who remained for ever with the Sun, and they were not necessarily the great ones of the earth, nor yet the very good, but those who possessed the most minute information as to the next world, and who were best versed in magic. Thus the whole doctrine is based on a belief in the power of magic.”[135.3] “In the next world a correct knowledge of magic words and formulas was absolutely essential. There no door would open to him who knew not its name; no demon would allow the passage of the dead who did not call upon him correctly, nor would any god come to his help unless invoked by the right name; no food could be had so long as the exactly prescribed prayers were not uttered with the true intonations. But the dead who {136} knew these formulas, and who knew how to speak them correctly at the proper moment, who was _maâ kherû_ (right-speaking), might rest assured of immortality and of eternal blessedness.”[136.1] This led of course to the multiplication of spells, to the elaboration of ritual, during the long ages of Egyptian history, until at last they must have become extremely burdensome.

Moreover, sorcery was not only expended by man in the service of the gods and of the dead: it was used by the gods themselves. “Only by means of conjurations could Ra himself pass through” the divisions between the twelve hourly spaces of the night.[136.2] By the power of his name Neb-er-tcher or Khepera, often identified with certain aspects of Ra, the Sun, evolved himself and created the world.[136.3] The secret name of Ra was a word of might. Isis set herself with all her arts to learn it, that she might possess the world in heaven and upon earth as Ra did (that is, become a goddess); and when she had extorted it from the august divinity, she turned the weapon without hesitation upon himself.[136.4] By examples like these men were authorized to have recourse to magic in their own secular concerns, their loves and hates, their sickness, their social and business relations, their private enterprizes, their competitions and resentments. Kings consulted the soothsayers on public affairs; they employed magical processes to vanquish their enemies; {137} with the aid of soothsayers and magicians they governed their realm. It was only when sorcery was directed against the king’s life, when it aimed at the overthrow of his power, or the injury or death of others, that it was reckoned a crime, or even reprehended on moral grounds.

Nor did the magician hesitate to compel even the gods to perform his wishes, and to threaten them, like the Malay robber, with dire disaster to themselves and the universe as a punishment of their obstinacy. In one papyrus preserved to us, for example, a woman in labour declares herself to be Isis and summons the gods to her help. If they refuse to come, “Then shall ye be destroyed, ye nine gods; the heaven shall no longer exist, the earth shall no longer exist, the five days over and above the year shall cease to be, offerings shall no longer be made to the gods, the lords of Heliopolis. The firmament of the south shall fail, and disaster shall break forth from the sky of the north. Lamentations shall resound from the graves, the midday sun shall no longer shine, the Nile shall not bestow its waters of inundation at the appointed time.”[137.1] Such bombastic menaces as these continued to be part of the practitioner’s stock-in-trade in the Roman Empire to the downfall of paganism.

Among the ancient Greeks in Plato’s time there were soothsayers and medicine-men who professed to have power over the gods, so that they could compel them to do their bidding, even though it were to injure another person.[137.2] I am not aware whether any of their spells have been preserved.[137.3]

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