CHAPTER XVII NATURE-WORSHIP WHAT raised man from savagery to civilisation was the transition from a natural to an artificial basis of food-supply, i.e. was the domestication of animals and cultivation of plants; and such domestication and cultivation was, as we have endeavoured to show, the outcome, not the designed but none the less the inevitable outcome, of the earliest form of religion, that is, totemism, the worship of plants and animals. Having shown that religion gave the first impetus to material progress, we have now to show how material progress reacted on religion, how the widening circle of human activity brought man into more extensive contact with the forces of nature, rendering their co-operation with him more necessary, and giving him fresh reasons to establish friendly relations and a permanent alliance with the powers on whose goodwill the increase of his flocks or the fertility of his fields depended. The hunter must have a knowledge of the habits of the quarry; the herdsman must know not only where to find pasture for his flocks, but, to some extent, the conditions which favour the growth of herbage: he has a very direct interest in the rains and the streams which water the earth. Further, he must be able to see some distance ahead, to be ready with his preparations to take care of the younglings of his herd when born; he must be able to compute time. Now, though it may appear to us that no very extensive observation would be required on the part of primitive man to discover that the same amount of time always elapsed between one new moon and the next, or to calculate how many days that period consisted of, yet when we remember that there still are savages unable to count more than five, and many who cannot count more than twenty, we shall see that very considerable mental effort must have been necessary before the savage could determine with certainty that the lunar month consisted of twenty-eight days; and from what we know of the natural man's aversion to exertion of any kind, we may be sure that he would not have taken this trouble except for some practical end and some manifest benefit to be derived from it. For the nomad, dependent on roots, berries, and the chase, the computation of time has no inducement. For the herdsman there is an evident advantage in being able to calculate in how many months he may expect his flocks to bring forth their young. there are several natural forces with which, and on which, the herdsman has to reckon: streams, fountains, clouds, the sky and the moon. In the pastoral stage, man's interests. have become wide enough to make him desire the co-operation of all these forces; and all, it is hardly necessary to remark, came to be worshipped by him in consequence. Thus For the agriculturist, even greater powers of prevision are necessary. "The cultivator must so arrange his labours that his land may be in tilth, and ready for the seed, at a time favourable to germination; the time of the growth of the plant must coincide with the season of rain, its blossoming with warm weather, and its maturity with the hottest sunshine." 1 To count by lunar months, in making all these calculations, would inevitably lead to error, for the interval from one midsummer to another is greater than twelve lunar months, and not so great as thirteen. We may conjecture that it was the loss and damage caused by the errors consequent on counting by lunar months that awoke early man to the necessity of better calculation, and led him to notice that from spring to summer the days grew longer, from summer to winter shorter, until eventually he discovered that the shadow of a familiar object cast by the noon-day sun is longest on the shortest day, the winter solstice; shortest on the longest day, the summer solstice, and then calculated the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Hence the four great festivals of the agricultural stage of 1 Payne, New World, i. 348. civilisation are the winter solstice (brumalia, Yule, Christmas), the vernal equinox (Easter, A.S. Eostra, a goddess), the summer solstice (the great festival of Olympian Zeus), and the autumn equinox. But the importance of the sun, as the cause of all growth, was to the cultivator even greater than its importance as a measurer of time. At the same time, the varying qualities of soil must have impressed man in the agricultural stage with the idea that the earth could yield or refuse increase to the crops at will. Thus the cultivator was compelled to feel his dependence on these two nature-powers, to seek their co-operation, and add two more to the list of deities inherited by him from the pastoral stage. 2 That this was the actual order of events, at any rate in the case of our own forefathers, seems to be indicated by the results of linguistic palæontology; the undivided IndoEuropeans were acquainted with the moon as the "measurer of time, they worshipped a sky-spirit, and they had not yet passed out of the pastoral stage; they had not learnt to calculate the solar year-that was reserved for the agricultural stage, ie. the period after the separation of the Indian from the European branch. That man in the pastoral and agricultural periods would be impressed with the desirability of winning the permanent favour of the spirit of the river, or clouds, earth, moon, sun, or sky, will hardly be doubted; nor can it be doubted, if the argument of our previous chapters be admitted, that the ritual employed by the totemist to unite himself with the new supernatural powers whose favour he desired would be formed on the analogy of the rites with which he worshipped his plant or animal totem-he knew no other way of worship. Those rites were first the sacrificial meal, by which the substance of the god was incorporated in the worshipper; second, the offerings by which the worshipper was placed in contact with the god. In the case of streams and fountains, it is the second method which obviously commended itself, and, as we have seen in the last chapter, it has actually left abundant survivals all over the world. 1 Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, 306 ff. 2 Op. cit. 417. 4 Op. cit. 309. Here we need only add that it is not merely offerings which the worshipper immerses, but on occasion his own body: bathing is throughout India regarded as a means of religious advancement "; and the world-wide use of water for purposes of (ceremonial) purification was in its origin, we may conjecture, simply a means of gaining for the worshipper the protection of the water-spirit against the consequences of pollution. From the practice of immersion, the stream or pool becomes a place of oracle and divination, the will of the deity being indicated according as the water swallows or rejects the offering cast into it-the origin of the ordeal of water as applied to witches. The principle of the sacramental meal is not indeed inapplicable to the waterspirit, but instances are not common: traces of it may be found in the belief that drinking the sacred water proves fatal or injurious to the criminal or the perjurer, as in Mexico or on the Gold Coast " eating fetish," i.e. eating sacred soil, does.3 In the case of non-totem deities which, like sun, moon, and sky, are beyond the reach of physical contact, it might be supposed that neither form of totem rites could be applied, that external, physical union was impossible, but this is not the case; there were various means of getting over the difficulty. In the first place, it is to be remembered that the basis of totemism is primitive man's discovery that, as men are united to one another in kindreds, so natural objects can be classed in natural kinds-hence the totem alliance between a human kin and a natural kind. Now, the waters on the earth and those in the sky obviously belong to the same kind, and communion with one member of the species is, according to the belief on which totemism is based, communion with all. Hence the worshipper who, wishing a river-god to grant a vow, unites himself with the god by throwing some "offering" into the water, follows exactly the same process when he wishes to commend himself to the waters above the earth. In Estland, when rain was wanted, something was cast into a certain sacred brook: "streams or lakes which, the moment wood or stones are 1 Crooke, Folk-Lore of Northern India, 20. 2 Robertson Smith, Religion of Semites, 178. * Supra, p. 64, thrown into them, cause rain and storm clouds to appear, occur all over Europe."1 On the same principle, in times of drought the agriculturist seeks to place his plants under the protection of the spirit of waters by immersing in a stream the representative (human or otherwise) of the vegetation spirit.2 But if communication could thus be effected with the spirits of sky and cloud, then neither were sun and moon inaccessible to would-be worshippers, for they are of the genus fire, and whatever is cast into a fire on earth would establish communion with the greater and the lesser lights in the sky, as in the case of the waters on and over the earth. It is, at anyrate, in this way that the Ainus make their offerings to the sun-all fire, including that of the sun, being divine to them.3 The parallel thus drawn between fire and water is confirmed by the purificatory powers of both; the person or thing that passes through or over a fire is brought in contact and in communion with the fire-god. When totemism has become so far disintegrated that it is forgotten that the animal sacrificed is the god himself, then animal sacrifice can be and is extended by analogy from totem to non-totem deities; the sacrifice of an animal is then the traditional mode of approaching certain deities, and is inferred to be the proper mode of worshipping all deities. Hence we get a second means of establishing union between man and gods who are spatially remote from him: animals are sacrificed to them as to other gods, but whereas tradition determined what animals should be sacrificed to totem gods, analogies (more or less fanciful) had to be sought to determine the proper sacrifices to non-totem gods,-horses were sacrificed to the sun, perhaps because of his motion, and also to the sea, perhaps from the shape and movements of its waves; river-gods were supposed to appear, often as bulls, often as serpents. The blood of sacrifice, in the case of non-totem as well as of totem gods, is then dashed upon an altar or stone, and the gods of both kinds are supposed to visit or 1 Mannhardt, W.F.K. 341, note 1, who, however, regards these as instances of sympathetic magic. B.K. 356, note, for instances. 3 Howard, Trans-Siberian Savages, 172, |