The Outline of History by H. G. Wells (good books to read TXT) 📕

Certain things appear in the mythology of mankind again and again. Neolithic man was enormously impressed by serpents"and he no longer took the sun for granted. Nearly everywhere that Neolithic culture went, there went a disposition to associate the sun and the serpent in decoration and worship. This primitive serpent worship spread ultimately far beyond the regions where the snake is of serious practical importance in human life.

11.6 Complex Origins of Religion

With the beginnings of agriculture a fresh set of ideas arose in men's minds. We have already indicated how easily and naturally men may have come to associate the idea of sowing with a burial. Sir J. G. Frazer has pursued the development of this association in the human mind, linking up with it the conception of special sacrificial persons who are killed at seedtime, the conception of a specially purified class of people to kill these sacrifices, the first priests, and the conception of a sacrament, a ceremonial feast in which the tribe eats portions of the body of the victim in order to share in the sacrificial benefits.

[Fig. 0101 Age Implements]

Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out of the emotions that surround Women for men and Men for women, out of the desire to escape infection and uncleanness, out of the desire for power and success through magic, out of the sacrificial tradition of seedtime, and out of a number of like beliefs and mental experiments and misconceptions, a complex something was growing up in the lives of men which was beginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a common life and action.

This something we may call religion (Lat. religare, to bind [3]). It was not a simple, or logical some thing, it was as a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods, about all sorts of musts and must-nots. Like all other human matters, religion has grown. It must be clear from what has gone before that primitive man"much less his ancestral apes and his ancestral Mesozoic mammals"could have had no idea of God or Religion; only very slowly did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable of such general conceptions. Religion is something that has grown up with and through human association, and God has been and is still being discovered by man.

This book is not a theological book, and it is not for us to embark upon theological discussion; but it is a part, a necessary and central part, of the history of man to describe the dawn and development of his religious ideas and their influence upon his activities. All these factors we have noted must have contributed to this development, and various writers have laid most stress upon one or other of them. Sir J. G. Frazer has been the leading student of the derivation of sacraments from magic sacrifices. Grant Allen, following Herbert Spencer, in his Evolution of the Idea of God, laid stress chiefly on the posthumous worship of the Old Man. Sir E. B. Tutor (Primitive Culture) gave his attention mainly to the disposition of primitive man to ascribe a soul to every object animate and inanimate. Mr. A. E. Crawley, in The Tree of Life, has called attention to other centres of impulse and emotion, and particularly to sex as a source of deep excitement. The thing we have to bear in mind is that Neolithic man was still mentally undeveloped, he could be confused and illogical to a degree quite impossible to an educated modern person. Conflicting and contradictory ideas could lie in his mind without challenging one another; now one thing ruled his thoughts intensely and vividly and now another; his fears, his acts, were still disconnected as children's are.

[Fig. 0103 Diagram showing the Duration of the Neolithic Period ]

[TIME DIAGRAM SHOWING THE GENERAL DURATION OF THE NEOLITHIC PERIOD IN WHICH EARLY THOUGHT DEVELOPED.

By this scale, the diagram on p. 47 of the period since the earliest subhuman traces would be 12 feet long, and the diagram of geological time (ch. ii, sec 2) somewhere between 1,500 feet and three miles.]

Confusedly under the stimulus of the need and possibility of co-operation and a combined life, Neolithic mankind was feeling out for guidance and knowledge. Men were becoming aware that personally they needed protection and direction, cleansing from impurity, power beyond their own strength.

Confusedly in response to that demand, bold men, wise men, shrewd and cunning men were arising to become magicians, priests, chiefs, and Kings.

They are not to be thought of as cheats or usurpers of power, nor the rest of mankind as their dupes. All men seek ascendancy over other men, but not all such motives are base or bad. The magicians usually believed more or less in their own magic, the priests in their ceremonies, the chiefs in their right. The history of mankind henceforth is a history of more or less blind endeavours to conceive, a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily, and to create and develop a common consciousness and a common stock of knowledge which may serve and illuminate that purpose. In a vast variety of forms this is appearance of kings and priests and magic men was happening all over the world under Neolithic conditions. Everywhere mankind was seeking where knowledge and mastery and magic power might reside; everywhere individual men were willing, honestly or dishonestly, to rule, to direct, or to be the magic beings who would reconcile the confusions of the community. Another queer development of the later Palolithic and Neolithic ages was the development of self-mutilation. Men began to cut themselves about, to excise noses, ears, fingers, teeth and the like, and to attach all sorts of superstitious ideas to these acts. Many children to-day pass through a similar phase in their mental development. There is a phase in the life of most little girls when they are not to be left alone with a pair of scissors for fear that they will cut off their hair. No animal does anything of this sort.

In many ways the simplicity, directness, and, detachment of a later Palolithic rock-painter appeal more to modern sympathies than does the state of mind of these Neolithic men, full of the fear of some ancient Old Man who had developed into a tribal God obsessed by ideas of sacrificial propitiations mutilations, and magic murder. No doubt the reindeer hunter was a ruthless hunter and a combative and passionate creature, but be killed for reasons we can still understand; Neolithic man, under the sway of talk and a confused thought process, killed on theory, he killed for monstrous and now incredible ideas, he killed those he loved through fear and under direction. Those Neolithic men not only made human sacrifices at seedtime there is every reason to suppose they sacrificed wives and slaves at the burial of their chieftains; they killed men, women, and children whenever they were under adversity and thought the gods were athirst. They practised infanticide. All these things passed on into the, Bronze Age.

Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not even dreaming in human history. Before it awakened it produced nightmares.

Away beyond the dawn of history, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, one thinks of the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a midsummer day's morning. The torches pale in the growing light. One has a dim apprehension of a procession through the avenue of stone, of priests, perhaps fantastically dressed with skins and horns and horrible painted masks"not the robed, and bearded dignitaries our artists represent the Druids to have been"of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth and bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with pins of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great peering crowd of shock-headed men and naked children. They have assembled from many distant places; the ground between the avenues and Silbury Hill is dotted with their encampments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails. And amidst the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive, helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which they are to die that the harvests may be good and the tribe increase. . . . To that had life progressed 3,000 or 4,000 years ago from its starting-place in the slime of the tidal beaches.

12.0 The Races of Mankind

12.1 Is Mankind Still Differentiating?

12.2 The Main Races of Mankind

12.3 The Heliolithic Culture of Brunet Peoples

12.1 Is Mankind Still Differentiating?

It is necessary now to discuss plainly what is meant by a phrase, used often very carelessly, The Races of Mankind.

It must be evident from what has already been explained in Chapter III that man, so widely spread and subjected therefore to great differences of climate, consuming very different food in different regions, attacked by different enemies, must always have been undergoing considerable local modification and differentiation. Man, like every other species of living thing, has constantly been tending to differentiate into several species; wherever a body of men has been cut off, in islands or oceans or by deserts or mountains, from the rest of humanity, it must have begun very soon to develop special characteristics, specially adapted to the local conditions. But, on the other hand, man is usually a wandering and enterprising animal for whom there exist few insurmountable barriers. Men imitate men, fight and conquer them, interbreed, one people with another. Concurrently for thousands of years there have been two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a multitude of local varieties, and another to remix and blend these varieties together before a separate series has been established.

These two sets of forces may have fluctuated in this relative effect in the past. Palolithic man, for instance, may have been more of a wanderer, he may have drifted about over a much greater area, than later Neolithic man; he was less fixed to any sort of home or lair, he was tied by fewer possessions. Being a hunter, he was obliged to follow the migrations of his ordinary quarry. A few bad seasons may have shifted him hundreds of miles. He may therefore have mixed very widely and developed few varieties over the greater part of the world.

The appearance of agriculture tended to tie those communities of mankind that took it up to the region in which it was most conveniently carried on, and so to favour differentiation. Mixing or differentiation is not dependent upon a higher or lower stage of civilization; many savage tribes wander now for hundreds of miles; many English villagers in the eighteenth century, on the other hand, had never been more than eight or ten miles from their villages, neither they nor their fathers nor grandfathers before them. Hunting peoples often have enormous range. The Labrador country, for instance, is inhabited by a few thousand Indians, who follow the one great herd of caribou: as it wanders yearly north and then south again in pursuit of food. This mere handful of people covers a territory as large as France. Nomad peoples also range very widely. Some Kalmuck tribes are said to travel nearly a thousand - miles between summer and winter pasture.

It carries out this suggestion, that Palolithic man ranged widely and was distributed thinly indeed but uniformly throughout the world, that the Palolithic remains we find are everywhere astonishingly uniform. To quote Sir John Evans, The implements in distant lands are so identical in form and character with the British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands. On the banks