hostile one to another, so were their gods. Hence the god of each tribe protected his own men, and went in person with them to war-an idea which totemism bequeathed to more advanced stages in religion, for instance to Peruvian polytheism. 'During the revolt of the Collao . . . the Colla warriors. . . carried an idol of the Sun during the campaign"; and to the polytheistic negroes of the Gold Coast, where "in time of war the struggle is not carried on by the opposing tribes alone, for the protecting deities of each side are believed also to be contending together, each striving to achieve success for his own people; and they are believed to be as much interested in the result of the war as the people engaged." 2 As loyalty to the god of the community is a sentiment without which monotheism could never have triumphed over lower forms of belief, so the recognition that there could be other (hostile) gods as well as the god of a man's own clan was the germ of polytheism. It is only by the fusion of several tribes that a nation can be created, and this fusion carries with it-or is caused by-the amalgamation of their respective cults. But this only takes place after totem times, when the nomad clan has become the village community. The relation between the human kin and the totem species, which at first is one of alliance, and therefore, in consequence of the blood-covenant, one of blood-relationship, eventually changes its character somewhat, for the kinship between men and animals comes to require explanation. The requisite explanation is afforded by a myth which makes the original ancestor of the two kins an animal. Hence the members of the human community become the god's children, and the god their father-not the actual, human father who begat them, for he is alive (and when he dies, his death makes no difference), but a hypothetical father, so to speak, i.e. one that reason led them to assume, as the only way of accounting for the actual facts (namely, their kinship with their totem); and the verification of this primitive hypothesis was found by them in their inner experience, ie. in the filial reverence and affection which they felt towards him. Doubtless it was not all or most men who had this experience, or 1 Payne, New World, i. 515. 2 Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 77. rather it was but few who attended to the feeling, but the best must have paid heed to it and have found satisfaction in dwelling on it, else the conception of the deity would never have followed the line on which as a matter of fact it developed. The result was that the god tended to be conceived—and, when the time for art came, to be represented-no longer in animal but in human form. The compact between the clan and its supernatural ally not only altered the relation of each to the rest of the universe, but it also changed the relation of the clansmen to one another. Henceforth they were united not only by blood but by religion: they were not merely a society but a religious community. The aid rendered by the god to the clan in its conflicts with its enemies, human or superhuman, and his habitual affection for his own people, constituted a claim both upon each member of the community and upon the community as a whole. Hence, if any man offended the clan-god, the god's quarrel was taken up by the whole of the rest of the community, and by them, if necessary, the offender was punished and the god avenged. The acts which offended him were, roughly speaking, things which, according to the savage's à priori feeling, "must not be done," i.e. are taboo, such as intruding upon the god's privacy, or having to do with persons outside the community, namely, new-born children, strangers, and outlaws, or coming into contact with blood, and so on. Some of these acts, e.g. the shedding of kindred blood, are condemned by us as immoral and sinful; we can therefore hardly blame the savage, to whom they were all equally repugnant, for treating them all as offences both against the community and against the god, and punishing them as such. In this joint action of the community as a collective whole, prompted by religion, we have the first appearance of what was hereafter to be the state-the first, because here the authority of the community is not delegated, as it is when a war-leader is elected: the method of executing the criminal is stoning, in which the whole community joins. If it is in love and not in fear that religion in any true sense of the word has its origin, it is none the less true that fear-not of irrational dangers, but of deserved punishment is essential to the moral and religious education of man: it is "the fear of the Lord" that is "the beginning of wisdom." That the lowest savages are a perpetual prey to irrational terror, and believe sickness and death to be unnatural and to be the work in all cases of evil spirits, is matter of common knowledge. It was inevitable, therefore, that the supernatural ally of a human kin should continue to exercise this power of causing disease and death. But whereas the belief that disease is due to evil spirits is fatal not only to a right understanding of the action of natural causes and to all intellectual progress, but also prevents fear from becoming an instrument in the moral education of man, the ascription of sickness to the agency of a friendly power has a different result. This action on his part, his departure from the usually benevolent behaviour shown by him to his own people, can only be explained by the assumption that he has been in some way offended by them. The possible modes of offence are known; they are such as have been mentioned in the last paragraph, and though they at first include many which religion, as it advances, sets aside by a process of "supernatural selection," they include offences which we recognise to be immoral, and on the checking of which the further progress of morality depended. But in that the earliest stage of society, unless the restrictions which we see to be irrational, and stigmatise as taboos, had been enforced, neither could those have been enforced which really contained the germs of morality. We have seen, at the beginning of this chapter, that there was one such restriction (against shedding kindred blood) on which not merely the morality but the very existence of the clan depended, and that the mere fact of a clan's survival in the struggle for existence is proof conclusive that the restriction was obeyed. But though a clan's survival proves that the restriction must have been obeyed, it does not show what it was that made the clansmen obey it. In some clans it was not obeyed, and those clans perished. That a dim perception of the utility, perhaps of the necessity, of curbing personal animosity may have existed, we will admit. But that a savage, smarting under personal resentment, would stay his hand, out of consideration for such a remote and uncertain contingency as the possibility of eventual injury to a future generation, is a supposition opposed to all we know of savages. There must have been some other motive, and that a strong one, appealing to personal fear. That motive was doubtless in part supplied by fear of punishment at the hands of the collective community. But such punishment was only meted out when the offence was against the god of the community; and what stimulated the community to its duty in this regard was the manifestation from time to time of the god's wrath, in the shape of pestilence, etc., betokening that an offence had been committed against him. Thus in Peru, in the time of the Incas, "when any general calamity occurred, the members of the community were rigorously examined, until the sinner was discovered and compelled to make reparation ";1 and the same interpretation was put upon private calamity, e.g. amongst the Abipones, at his first coming the physician overwhelms the sick man with an hundred questions: Where were you yesterday? says he. 'What roads did you tread? Did you overturn the jug and spill the drink prepared from the maize? What? have you imprudently given the flesh of a tortoise, stag, or boar [totem-gods] to be devoured by dogs?' Should the sick man confess to having done any of these things, 'It is well,' replies the physician, 'we have discovered the cause of your disorder.'" The same thing is reported from Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Yucatan, Salvador,3 and was common enough in other quarters of the globe. Nor must it be supposed that it was only offences against ritual that provoked the god to manifest his displeasure. "In Tahiti, sickness was the occasion for making reparation for past sins, e.g. by restoring stolen property." But sickness and public calamities are not perpetual, and as "sanctions" they are external at the best: they are too intermittent and accidental to exert the uniform pressure necessary if any permanent moral advance is to be made, and they rather punish than prevent transgression. It is not only external and physical 2 " 4 1 Payne, New World, i. 443. 2 Dobrizhoffer, History of the Abipones, ii. 18. 4 Waitz, Anthropologie, vi. 396. punishment which enforces the restrictions essential to the tribe's existence, but also the internal consciousness of having disregarded the claim which the affection of the protecting clan-god for his people establishes on one and all of the community. In a word, from the beginning, offences against the community are felt not only as immoral but also as sins. To the external sequence of calamity consequent upon transgression there corresponds the internal sense of lesion. in the bond of mutual goodwill which marks the alliance between the clansmen and their god. We have now examined the way in which men and gods were affected respectively by the alliance formed between them. But what shall we say of the third member to the alliance, the totem species of plant or animal? did it remain unaffected by the alliance? Mr. Frazer concludes his Totemism with the following pregnant passage: "Considering the far-reaching effects produced on the fauna and flora of a district by the preservation or extinction of a single species of animals or plants, it appears probable that the tendency of totemism to preserve certain species of plants and animals must have largely influenced the organic life of the countries where it has prevailed. But this question, with the kindred question of the bearing of totemism on the original domestication of animals and plants, is beyond the scope of the present article." 1 Neither has a history of religion anything apparently to do with the domestication of plants and animals. Yet it is only by taking it as our starting-point that we can solve the difficult and important problem, why so few traces of totemism are to be found in the great civilisations of the world. 1 Frazer, Totemism, 95, 96. |