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CHAPTER II

OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT

THE savage imagines that even lifeless things are animated by a will, a personality, a spirit, like his own; and, wherever he gets his conception of the supernatural from, to some at least of the objects which surround him, and which are supposed by him to be personal agents, he ascribes supernatural power (ch. iii. "The Supernatural "). Some writers have imagined that there was a time in the "prehistory" of man, when he could not tell the natural from the supernatural, and that consequently magic existed first and religion was developed out of it. But this view seems to proceed on a misconception of the nature of Sympathetic Magic (ch. iv.). Be this as it may, it was natural that man should wish to establish friendly relations with some of these supernatural powers; and the wish seemed one quite possible to carry out, because he was in the habit of communicating with certain beings, who, whether they possessed supernatural powers or not, at anyrate were spirits, namely, the souls of the departed (ch. v. "Life and Death"). But this assumes that ghosts, or at anyrate some ghosts, were friendly to the living, and were loved by them; whereas it is sometimes maintained that all ghosts are malevolent, and that the corpsetaboo is a proof of the universal dread of the ghost. But when we examine the institution of taboo generally, we find, first, that taboo is transmissible (e.g. the mourner is as dangerous as the corpse he has touched), and next, that its transmissibility implies no hostility-the mourner is as dangerous to those he loves as to those he hates (ch. vi. "Taboo: its Transmissibility"). Taboo is not fear of "the clinging ghost" nor of any physical emanation, but is the

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conviction that there are certain things which must-absolutely, and not on grounds of experience or "unconscious utility "be avoided (ch. vii. "Things Taboo "). It is the categorical imperative "Thou shalt not-" which is the first form assumed by the sense of social and moral obligation and by religious commandments (ch. viii. "Taboo, Morality and Religion ").

Primitive man, then, feeling it both necessary and possible to establish permanent friendly relations with some of the supernatural powers by which he was surrounded, proceeded to do so. He not only ascribed to natural objects a personality like his own; he also noticed that, as men were organised in kins (clans and families), so natural objects grouped themselves in natural kinds (genera and species). And as alliances between human kins were formed by means of the bloodcovenant which made all the members of the two contracting tribes blood-brothers, so he proceeded to make a blood-covenant between a human kind and an animal species. This is Totemism (ch. ix.). We may not be able to say à priori why he chose animals first rather than any other natural kind, but the hypothesis that he did so is the one which alone, or best, accounts for the facts to be explained, and therefore may be taken as a working hypothesis. It accounts for animal worship, for the animal or semi-animal form of many gods, for the "association" of certain animals with certain gods, for "sacred" and for "unclean" animals, and for the domestication of animals (ch. x. "Survivals of Totemism"). It also accounts for the altar and for the idol (ch. xi. "Animal Sacrifice: The Altar "), and for animal sacrifice and for the sacramental meal (ch. xii. "Animal Sacrifice: The Sacramental Meal").

Thus far we have been dealing with public worship, to which the individual was admitted, not on his private merits, but because he was a member of the tribe which had a blood-covenant with a totem-species. If the individual, however, wished to commend himself specially to supernatural protection, there were two ways in which he might do so, one illicit and one licit. He might address himself to one of the supernatural powers which had no friendly relations with his own tribe or any other-which was no "god"—and this was in itself a suspicious way of proceeding, which the

community resented, and if harm came of it, visited with punishment (ch. xiii. "Fetishism"). Or he might, with the approval of the community, and by the intermediation of the priest, place his family or himself under the immediate protection of one of the community's gods. In any case, however, licit or illicit, the ritual adopted was copied from that observed by the community in approaching its gods (ch. xiv. "Family Gods and Guardian Spirits "). Like all other private cults, the worship of ancestors was modelled on the public worship of the community; and as the family from at: is an institution of later growth than the tribe or clan, the worship of family ancestors is a later institution than the worship of the tribal god (ch. xv. "Ancestor Worship").

We now return to public worship. Species of trees and plants might be, and were, taken for totems, as well as species of animals. This led to the domestication of plants. Another result was that bread (or maize) and wine came to furnish forth the sacramental meal in the place of the body and blood of the animal victim hitherto sacrificed (ch. xvi. "Tree and Plant Worship"). The breeding of cattle and cultivation of cereals made man more dependent than heretofore on the forces of nature (conceived by him as supernatural powers), and led him to worship them with the same ritual as he had worshipped his plant or animal totems. (ch. xvii. "Nature Worship"). Agriculture made it possible to relinquish a wandering mode of existence for settled life; and settled life made it possible for neighbouring tribes to unite in a larger political whole, or "state." But this political union involved a fusion of cults, and that fusion might take one of two forms: if the resemblance between the gods worshipped by the two tribes was close, the two gods might come to be regarded as one and the same god; if not, the result was polytheism (ch. xviii. "Syncretism and Polytheism "). In either case the resulting modifications in the tribal worship required explanation, and were explained, as all things were explained by primitive man, by means of a myth (ch. xix. "Mythology "). Myths were not the work of priests-that is but a form of the fallacy that the priest made religion, the truth being that religion made the priest (ch. xx. "Priesthood ").

Sometimes the next life was conceived as a continuance of this life, under slightly changed and less favourable conditions (ch. xxi. "The Next Life"). Sometimes, by a development of the belief that man after death assumed the form of his totem, it was conceived as a transmigration of the soul (ch. xxii. "The Transmigration of Souls"). Neither belief, however, proved permanently satisfactory to the religious consciousness; and in the sixth century B.C. the conviction spread from Semitic peoples to Greece, that future happiness depended on communion with (some) God in this life by means of a sacrament, and consisted in continued communion after death (ch. xxiii. "The Mysteries "). In Greece this belief was diffused especially by the Eleusinian Mysteries (ch. xxiv. "The Eleusinia").

There remains the question, what we are to suppose to have been the origin of Monotheism (the subject of ch. xxv.), on which will depend largely our theory of the Evolution of Belief (discussed in ch. xxvi.).

CHAPTER III

THE SUPERNATURAL

THERE are no savages in existence to whom the use of implements and the art of making fire are unknown; and vast as is the antiquity of the earliest remains of man, they do not take us back to a time when he was ignorant of.. the art of making either fire or stone-implements. It is therefore mere matter of speculation whether there ever was such a period of ignorance. It was man's physical inferiority to his animal competitors in the struggle for existence which made it necessary that he should equip himself with artificial weapons, if he was to survive; and the difficulty of maintaining existence under the most favourable natural conditions is so great for the savage even now, when he has fire and tools at his command, that we may imagine he could not, in the beginning, have long survived without them, if at all. But as there must have been one weapon which was the first to be made, one fire which was the first ever kindled, we must either infer that for a time man was without fire and without implements, or else we must assign this discovery to some hypothetical, half-human ancestor of man. Whichever was the case, whether there was ever or never such a period of human ignorance, the object of this chapter is to argue that from the beginning man believed in a supernatural spirit (or spirits) having affinity with his own spirit and having power over him. It is of course only with the existence of this belief that a history of religion has to do. Its validity falls to be discussed by the philosophy of religion.

Thanks to the assiduous labours of a long line of men of science, the laws of nature have been so exactly laid down, and the universe works with such regularity nowadays, that

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