Anthropology by Robert Ranulph Marett (top ten books to read txt) 📕

One more example of these rites may be cited, in order to bring out the earnestness of this type of religion, which is concerned with doing, instead of mere not-doing. There is none of the Toda perfunctoriness here. It will be enough to glance at the commencement of the ritual of the honey-ant totemites. The master of the ceremonies places his hand as if he were shading his eyes, and gazes intently in the direction of the sacred place to which they are about to repair. As he does so, the rest kneel, forming a straight line behind him. In this position they remain for some time, whilst the leader chants in a subdued tone. Then all stand up. The company must now start. The leader, who has fallen to the rear, that he may marshal the column in perfect line, gives the signal. Then they move off in single file, taking a direct course to the holy ground, marching in perfect silence, and with measured step, as if something of the profoundest import were about to take place.

I make no apology for describing these proceedings at some length. It is necessary to my argument to convey the impression that the essentials of religion are present in these apparently godless observances of the ruder peoples. They arise directly out of custom—in this case the hunting custom. Their immediate design is to provide these people with their daily bread. Yet their appeal to the imagination—which in religion, as in science, art, and philosophy, is the impulse that presides over all progress, all creative evolution—is such that the food-quest is charged with new and deeper meaning. Not bread alone, but something even more sustaining to the life of man, is suggested by these tangled and obscure solemnities. They are penetrated by quickenings of sacrifice, prayer, and communion. They bring to bear on the need of the hour all the promise of that miraculous past, which not only cradled the race, but still yields it the stock of reincarnated soul-force that enables it to survive. If, then, these rites are part and parcel of mere magic, most, or all, of what the world knows as religion must be mere magic. But it is better for anthropology to call things by the names that they are known by in the world of men—that is, in the wider world, not in some corner or coterie of it.

In order to bring out more fully the second point that I have been trying to make, namely, the close interdependence between religion and custom in primitive society, let me be allowed to quote one more example of the ritual of a rude people. And again let us resort to native Australia, though this time to the south-eastern corner of it; since in Australia we have a cultural development on the whole very low, having been as it were arrested through isolation, yet one that turns out to be not incompatible with high religion in the making.

Initiation in native Australia is the equivalent of what is known amongst ourselves as the higher education. The only difference is that, with them, every one who is not judged utterly unfit is duly initiated; whereas, with us, the higher education is offered to some who are unfit, whilst many who are fit never have the luck to get it. The initiation-custom is intended to tide the boys over the difficult time of puberty, and turn them into responsible men. The whole of the adult males assist in the ceremonies. Special men, however, are told off to tutor the youth—a lengthy business, since it entails a retirement, perhaps for six months, into the bush with their charges; who are there taught the tribal traditions, and are generally admonished, sometimes forcibly, for their good. Further, this is rather like a retirement into a monastery for the young men, seeing that during all the time they are strictly taboo, or in other words in a holy state that involves much fasting and mortification of the flesh. At last comes the time when their actual passage across the threshold of manhood has to be celebrated. The rites may be described in one word as impressive. Society wishes to set a stamp on their characters, and believes in stamping hard. Physically, then, the lads feel the force of society. A tooth is knocked out, they are tossed in the air to make them grow tall, and so on—rites that, whilst they may have separate occult ends in view, are completely at one in being highly unpleasant.

Spiritual means of education, however, are always more effective than physical, if designed and applied with sufficient wisdom. The bull-roarer, of which something has been already said, furnishes the ceremonies with a background of awe. It fills the woods, that surround the secret spot where the rites are held, with the rise and fall of its weird music, suggestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits in the air. Not until the boys graduate as men do they learn how the sound is produced. Even when they do learn this, the mystery of the voice speaking through the chip of wood merely wings the imagination for loftier flights. Whatever else the high god of these mysteries, Daramulun, may be for these people—and undoubtedly all sorts of trains of confused thinking meet in the notion of him—he is at any rate the god of the bull-roarer, who has put his voice into the sacred instrument. But Daramulun is likewise endowed with a human form; for they set up an image of him rudely shaped in wood, and round about it dance and shout his name. Daramulun instituted these rites, as well as all the other immemorial rites of the assembled tribe or tribes. So when over the heads of the boys, prostrated on the ground, are recited solemnly what Mr. Lang calls "the ten commandments," that bid them honour the elders, respect the marriage law, and so on, there looms up before their minds the figure of the ultimate law-giver; whilst his unearthly voice becomes for them the voice of the law. Thus is custom exalted, and its coercive force amplified, by the suggestion of a power—in this case a definitely personal power—that "makes for righteousness," and, whilst beneficent, is full of terror for offenders.

And now it may seem high time to pass on from the sociological and external view that has hitherto been taken of primitive religion to a psychological view of it—one that should endeavour to disclose the hidden motives, the spiritual sources, of the beliefs that underlie and sustain the customary practices. But precisely at this point the anthropological treatment of religion is apt to prove unsatisfactory. History can record that such and such is done with far more certainty than that such and such a state of mind accompanies and inspires the doing. Besides, the savage is no authority on the why and wherefore of his customs. "However else would a reasonable being think of acting?" is his sufficient reason, as we have already seen. Not but what the higher minds amongst savages reflect in their own way upon the meaning of their customs and rites. But most of this reflection is no more than an elaborate "justification after the event." The mind invents what Mr. Kipling would call a "Just-so story" to account for something already there. How it might have come about, not how it did come about, is all that the professed explanation amounts to. And when it comes to choosing amongst mere possibilities, the anthropologist, instead of consulting the savage, may just as well endeavour to do it for himself.

Now anthropological theories of the origin of religion seem to me to go wrong mainly because they seek to simplify too much. Having got down to what they take to be a root-idea, they straightway proclaim it the root-idea. I believe that religion has just as few, or as many, roots as human life and mind.

The theory of the origin of religion that may be said to hold the field, because it is the view of the greatest of living anthropologists, is Dr. Tylor's theory of animism. The term animism is derived from the Latin anima, which—like the corresponding word spiritus, whence our "spirit"—signifies the breath, and hence the soul, which primitive folk tend to identify with the breath. Dr. Tylor's theory of animism, then, as set forth in his great work, Primitive Culture, is that "the belief in spiritual beings" will do as a definition of religion taken at its least; which for him means the same thing as taken at its earliest. Now what is a "spiritual being"? Clearly everything turns on that. Dr. Tylor's general treatment of the subject seems to lay most of the emphasis on the phantasm. A phantasm (as the etymology of the word shows) is essentially an appearance. In a dream or hallucination one sees figures, more or less dim, but still having "vaporous materiality." So, too, the shadow is something without body that one can see; though the breath, except on a frosty day, shows its subtle but yet sensible nature rather by being felt than by being seen. Now there can be no doubt that the phantasm plays a considerable part in primitive religion (as well as in those fancies of the primitive mind that have never found their way into religion, at all events into religion as identified with organized cult). Savages see ghosts, though probably not more frequently than we do; they have vivid dreams, and are much impressed by their dream-experiences; and so on. Besides, the phantasm forms a very convenient half-way house between the seen and the unseen; and there can be no doubt that the savage often says breath, shadow, and so forth, when he is trying to think and mean something immaterial altogether.

But animism would seem sometimes to be used by Dr. Tylor in a wider sense, namely, as "a doctrine of universal vitality." In dealing with the myths of the ruder peoples, as, for example, those about the sun, moon, and stars, he shows how "a general animation of nature" is implied. The primitive man reads himself into these things, which, according to our science, are without life or personality. He thinks that they have a different kind of body, but the same kind of feelings and motives. But this is not necessarily to think that they are capable of giving off a phantasm, as a man does when his soul temporarily leaves him, or when after death his soul becomes a ghost. There need be nothing ghost-like about the sun, whether it is imagined as a shining orb, or as a shining being of human shape to whom the orb belongs. There is not anything in the least phantasmal about the Greek god Apollo. I think, then, that we had better distinguish this wider sense of animism by a different name, calling it "animatism," since that will serve at once to disconnect and to connect the two conceptions.

I am not sure, however, how far we ought to press this "doctrine of universal vitality." Does a savage, for instance, when he is hammering at a piece of flint think of it as other than a "thing," any more than we should? I doubt it. He may say "Confound you!" if it suddenly snaps in two, just as we might do. But though the language may seem to imply a "you," he would mean, I believe, to impute to the flint just as much, or as little, of personality as we should mean to do when using similar language. In other words, I believe that, within the world of his ordinary work-a-day experience, he recognizes both things and persons; without giving a thought, in either case, to the hidden principles that