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VERSITI
INDUNU
THE UV
SU
AIT
HIGAN.
AL·LIBE
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
THE THRESHOLD OF .
RELIGION
BY
R. R. MARETT, M.A., D.Sc.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; UNIVERSITY READER
IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY; PRESIDENT OF THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY
SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1914
BL
430
.M33
1914
అని ఈ7/?FE
MY WIFE
TO
305055
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
AT the International Congress for the History
A of Religions held recently in Oxford, several
I friends who listened to the paper on “ The
Conception of Mana," which appears fourth in the
present collection, were kind enough to suggest that
it ought to be published under one cover with various
scattered essays wherein aspects of the same subject
had previously been examined. The essays in
question were : "Pre-Animistic Religion," Folk-
Lore, June 1900, pp. 162-182; “ From Spell to
Prayer," Folk-Love, June 1904, pp. 132-165; “ Is
Taboo a Negative Magic?” Anthropological Essays,
presented to Edward Burnett Tylov in honour of his
75th birthday, October 2, 1907, pp. 219-234; and “A
Sociological View of Comparative Religion," Socio-
logical Review, January 1908, pp. 48-60. By the kind
leave of the Editor of Folk-Lore, the Delegates of the
Clarendon Press, and the Editor of the Sociological
Review, it has been possible to proceed to the
realization of this idea, conceived as I have shown
amid the fervent courtesies of a festive occasion.
Now, however, that in cold blood one contemplates
the accomplished deed, the doubt not unnaturally
arises whether, after all, it was worth while to reprint
vii
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
articles that in their original form received, from
experts at all events, as full and favourable an atten-
tion as their author could venture to expect.
It is true that the veteran psychologist, Wilhelm
Wundt of Leipzig, has, in his important Völker-
psychologie (Vol. II., Pt. II., 171 foll.), done me the
honour of associating my name with what, under the
designation of die präanimistische Hypothese, he
treats as a representative theory of the origin of
religion, formulated in direct opposition to the
Tylorian " animism.” Had I any such ambitious
doctrine to promulgate, I suppose I ought to embrace
every opportunity of sowing my opinions broadcast.
But, to be frank, I scarcely recognize myself in the
vôle imputed to me. In the paper on “ Preanimistic
Religion ” I had no intention of committing myself
to a definite solution of the genetic problem. For
me the first chapter of the history of religion remains
in large part indecipherable. My chief concern was
simply to urge that primitive or rudimentary religion,
as we actually find it amongst savage peoples, is at
once a wider, and in certain respects a vaguer, thing
than“ the belief in spiritual beings” of Tylor's famous
“minimum definition.” It therefore seemed advisable
to provide the working anthropologist with a new
category under which he could marshal those residual
phenomena which a strictly animistic interpretation of
rudimentary religion would be likely to ignore, or at all
events to misrepresent. Before our science ventures to
dogmatize about genesis, it must, I think, push on with
viii
PREFACE
the preliminary work of classifying its data under
synoptic headings. My essay, then, more immediately
served its turn when it succeeded in introducing a new
classificatory term into the vocabulary of the work-
ing anthropologist. This, I think, it can be said to
have done in view of the use to which the word " pre-
animistic" has been put by writers such as . Dr
Preuss, Dr Farnell, Mr Clodd, Mr Warde Fowler,
Mr Hodson, and others. I take it, however, that
“non-animistic ” would have served most of their
purposes almost as well.
At the same time it would be untrue to deny
that the term “pre-animistic” was used by me
designedly and with a chronological reference.
What I would not be prepared to lay down dogmati-
cally or even provisionally is merely that there was
a pre-animistic era in the history of religion, when
animism was not, and nevertheless religion of a kind
existed. For all I know, some sort of animism in
Tylor's sense of the word was a primary condition
of the most primitive religion of mankind. But I
believe that there were other conditions no less
primary. Moreover, I hold that it can be shown
conclusively that, in some cases, animistic interpre-
tations have been superimposed on what previously
bore a non-animistic sense.
I would go further still. I hold that religion in its
psychological aspect is, fundamentally, a mode of
social behaviour. To emphasize this point, which
scarcely receives explicit attention in the previous
ix
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
essays, the fifth paper of this series is appended.
Now I agree with those psychologists who hold that
the most deep-seated and persistent springs of social
behaviour are furnished less by our ideas than by
our emotions, taken together with the impulses that
are therein manifested. Thus awe, in the case of
religion, will, on this view, have to be treated as a
far more constant factor in religion than any par-
ticular conception of the awful. Such awe, we may
therefore expect, will be none the less of marked
effect on social behaviour, because the power of
representing the awful under clear-cut and consistent
ideal forms is relatively backward. Hence I am
ready to assume that, before animism, regarded as
an ideal system of religious beliefs, can have come
into its kingdom, there must have been numberless
dimly-lighted impressions of the awful that owned
no master in the shape of some one systematizing
thought. It is, I think, because Wundt mistakes
my“ pre-animistic religion” for a system of ideas,
of alleged priority to animism, that he accuses me
of making the evolution of thought proceed from
abstract to concrete instead of the other way about.
My theory is not concerned with the mere thought
at work in religion, but with religion as a whole, the
organic complex of thought, emotion and behaviour.
'I would refer especially to the recently-published work of my
friend, Mr William M.Dougall (An Introduction to Social Psychology,
Methuen & Co., 1908), where this position is set forth more lucidly and
plausibly than in any other psychological treatise known to me. His
account of the emotions that underlie religion is especially illuminating.
See 128 foll., and again 302 foll.
PREFAČE
In regard to religion thus understood I say, not that
its evolution proceeds from abstract to concrete-
which would be meaningless-, but that it proceeds
from indistinct to distinct, from undifferentiated to
differentiated, from incoherent to coherent. And
that, I claim, is a hypothesis which has the best part
of evolutionary science at its back.
I have said enough, I hope, to show that, in regard
to Tylor's animism, I am no irreconcilable foe who has
a rival theory to put forward concerning the origin
of religion. May I now be permitted to say a word
about the attitude adopted in my second, third and
fourth papers towards the views of another great
anthropologist-I mean Dr Frazer? It is more or
less of a corollary from the position taken up in the
first essay, that magic and religion are differentiated
out from a common plasm of crude beliefs about the
awful and occult. As far as Dr Frazer denies this,
so far I would declare against him. If he means,
for example, to exclude taboo from the sphere of
religion (as he seems to do when he identifies it with
a negative magic, and identifies magic in its turn with
the natural science of the primitive man), then in my
opinion he understands religion in so narrow a sense
that, for historical purposes, his definition simply will
not work. I cannot, for instance, imagine how the
British Sunday is to be excluded from the sphere of
British religion. On the other hand, if he would
consent not to press the analogy–for surely it is
hardly more between primitive man's magic and
xi
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
what we know as natural science, I venture to think
that his “magical” and my“ preanimistic” could
be used as well-nigh convertible terms. Be this as it
may, I would gratefully acknowledge that by far
the richest collection in existence of what are for me
pre-animistic phenomena is contained in that master-
piece of anthropological research, The Golden Bough.
Finally, I ought, perhaps, to say something about
the criticisms that have been levelled against the
principles my suggestions embody. Apart from
Wundt's objections, which have already been con-
sidered and, I hope, met, they amount to very little.
The flowing tide is with us. Thus the contentions
of my first essay were, some time after its first appear-
ance (it was read to the British Association in
September 1899, and published in Folk-Love in the
course of the following year), independently re-
affirmed by Mr Hewitt's important article," Orenda
and a Definition of Religion,” in the American
Anthropologist, N.S., Vol. IV. (1902), 33 foll. Again,
hardly had my essay “From Spell to Prayer" seen
the light in 1904, when MM. Hubert and Mauss
published their far more systematic “ Esquisse d'une
théorie générale de la Magie" in L'Année Sociologique,
Vol. VII., which no less independently reaffirmed
my view of the common participation of magic and
religion in notions of the mana type. Further, Mr
'I note also that Dr Haddon, in his useful little book, Magic and
Fetishism (A. Constable & Co., 1906), seems to find no difficulty in
accepting Dr Frazer's main findings about magic, whilst at the same
time endorsing my account of the psychology of the magical process.
xii
PREFACE
Hartland has lent his great authority to this group
of opinions, and has presented the whole case in the
most telling fashion in his brilliant “ Address to the
Anthropological Section of the British Association,"
York, 1906-a pamphlet which is unfortunately not
so accessible as could be wished. Thus on reviewing
the course of recent speculation concerning rudiment-
ary religion one is led to hope that these views have
come to stay. I ought to mention, however, that
Mr Lovejoy, in his interesting paper on “ The Funda-
mental Concept of the Primitive Philosophy” in
The Monist, Vol. XVI., No. 3, objects that in my
treatment of such a notion as mana I tend “to put
the emphasis on the wrong side," namely, on the
aspect in which it stands for the supernormal rather
than on that in which it stands for the efficacious.
His own view is that the perceived energy is mysteri-
ous because it is so potent, not potent because it is
mysterious in the first instance. Now I do not know
that, for the purposes of general theory, I would care
to emphasize either aspect at the expense of the other.
It seems to me, however, that, in certain instances,
at all events, say, in the case of a corpse, the awful-
ness is what strikes home first, the potency primarily
consisting in the very fact that the dead body is
able to cause such a shock to the feelings. A less
friendly critic is Father Schmidt, whose terrible
denunciations are even now in process of descending
upon my head in the pages of his excellent periodical,
Anthropos.? On the principle, I suppose, that “he
1
xiii
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
who is not with me is against me," he chooses to
regard me as an enemy of true religion. I wish he
would do me the honour to read my paper on “ Origin
see how, mutatis mutandis, I there in principle
contend that the function of a psychological treat-
ment of religion is to determine its history but not
its truth. Meanwhile, the chief objection of an
anthropological kind brought by him against my
views is that I take no account of the presence of
what Mr Lang calls“ high gods” in primitive religion.
Let me assure him that I have complete faith in
Mr Lang's “high gods”-or in a great many of
them, at all events. On the other hand, I am not at
present prepared to admit (as apparently Father
Schmidt would do) the postulate of a world-wide
degeneration from the belief in such beings, as ac-
counting for pre-animistic phenomena in general.
On the contrary, I assume for working purposes that
Mr Lang's "high gods" must have had a psycho-
logical pre-history of some kind which, if known,
would connect them with vaguer and ever vaguer
shapes—phantoms teeming in the penumbra of the
primitive mind, and dancing about the darkling rim
of the tribal fire-circle.2
The upshot of these somewhat discursive consi-
derations is that, if I am justified at all in publishing
I am now (1913) convinced that I must have misunderstood Father
Schmidt, seeing that his subsequent references to my views have been
perfectly fair and friendly.
2 See especially Essay VI.
xiv
PREFACE
these essays, it is because they belong to a movement
of anthropological thought which has for some time
demanded a more permanent vehicle of expression
than is afforded by periodical literature. Further,
in view of the fact that to me personally there has
been attributed in certain quarters a sweeping and
even revolutionary dogmatism about religious origins,
I gladly embrace the opportunity of showing, by
means of this handful of gleanings and suggestions,
what a small, humble and tentative affair my
theory—so far as I have a theory—is.
A note on a point of fact must be added. The
statement about Ngai, on p. 12, derived from Joseph
Thomson, appears to be incorrect. Mr Hollis, who
is thoroughly at home with the Masai language
(whereas Thomson, I believe, was not), informs me
that Eng-Aï is a thoroughly anthropomorphic god,
of much the same character as was the sky-god
Zeus for the ancient world. Thomson, he thinks,
must have misunderstood the Masai. They would
never have alluded to his lamp, or to himself, as
Eng-Aï. It is possible, on the other hand, that they
said e-'ng-Aï, or en-doki e-'ng-Aï, “it is of God, it is
something supernatural.” Mr Hollis tells me also
that the true form of the name of the volcano which
Krapf calls Donyo Engai, and which for years
figured on the maps as Donyo Ngai, is Ol-doinyo
le-ʼng-Aï, the mountain of God. If it were a hill, it
would be En-doinyo e-'ng-Aï.1
LV
See, however, note on p. 12,
XV
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION
HIS edition is enlarged to the following
extent: a short Introduction has been
written; an outline of the argument has been
prefixed to each paper; and three later essays have
been added. The essays in question are: “Savage
Supreme Beings and the Bull-Roarer," Hibbert
Journal, January 1910; “ The Birth of Humility,"
an inaugural lecture delivered by me as Reader in
Social Anthropology before the University of Oxford,
27th October 1910, and afterwards issued in pamph-
let form by the Clarendon Press; and “In a Pre-
historic Sanctuary," Hibbert Journal, January 1910,
I have to thank the Delegates of the Clarendon Press
and the Editor of the Hibbert Journal for kindly
allowing me to reprint them.
Revision has been limited to a few trifling emen-
dations of the form of expression and to a hand-
ful of explanatory notes. I have thought it fairer
to my readers, and indeed to myself, not to prune
away inconsistencies, but to allow the way in
which my thought has grown to declare itself. The
papers are arranged in the order of their first appear-
xvii
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
ance, with the exception of Essay V., which, being
of a slightly different tenour, was placed after, in-
stead of before, Essay IV. in the first edition, and.
has been allowed to retain its original position.
January 1914.
Xyi
CONTENTS
CHAP.
PAGE
XX
INTRODUCTION
1. PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION ..
II. FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
III. Is TABOO A NEGATIVE Magic?
IV. THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
V. A SOCIOLOGICAL View OF COMPARATIVE
RELIGION . . .
VI. SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS AND THE BULL-
ROARER.
VII. THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY.
VIII. IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY .
INDEX . . . . .
I 22
ROARER
145
16.9
203
221
221
xix
INTRODUCTION
SELF-RESPECTING play requires no pro-
logue, and it would, perhaps, be better
Ipolicy on my part to ring up the curtain
without more ado on these short studies in Com-
parative Religion. Yet it seems only fair, when old
work is about to be given a new lease of life, that the
author should state whether he still abides by what
he has written.
The papers here brought together bear one and all
on the same general topic, namely, the nature of the
experience involved in rudimentary religion. Again, -
all of them alike illustrate the same general thesis,
namely, that much of what has hitherto been classed
as magic--so far as it has been noticed at all-mis
really religion of an elementary kind.
In the earliest essay of the series I termed this
so-called “magical ” element, and the type of re-
ligion in which it prevails, “pre-animistic.” The
epithet has gained some currency; nay, the sub-
stantive expression“ pre-animism” has been coined
and brought into use, though not by me. Now, so
long as we are at one about the facts, the words may
take their chance. But I am as much concerned
xxi
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
to-day as I was fourteen years ago 1 to urge students
of Comparative Religion not to stop short at animism,
but to dig deeper into human nature in their search
for the roots of religion. Other writers have since
independently upheld the same contention, develop-
ing it with far greater thoroughness and skill. In
fact, I believe that most anthropologists of repute
would nowadays subscribe to the negative proposi-
tion that animism will not suffice as “a minimum
definition of religion.” More than that, there
would seem to be wide agreement also in regard to a
positive doctrine implicated therewith. According
to this doctrine, so-called “magical," that is to say,
more or less impersonal forces and qualities may and
do possess, not secondarily and by derivation, but
primarily and in their own right, religious value in
the eyes of the man of rudimentary culture; and even
tend to possess such value in a predominant degree.
This positive doctrine, which is sometimes
known as "the pre-animistic theory," needs, of
course, to be developed carefully and critically in the
light of evidence which, while it constantly accumu-
lates, must ever remain incomplete. No anthro-
pological theory can afford to stand still, least of
all one that seeks to be extremely comprehensive.
Hence I cannot be expected to profess myself fully
satisfied with any version of the pre-animistic
hypothesis which may from time to time be put
The essay on “ Pre-animistic Religion " was read for the first time
before the British Association in September 1899, and again to the
Folk-Lore Society some two months later.
xxii
INTRODUCTION
forward whether in my own name or in the name of
another. In this sense my earliest essay-and my
latest no less—may justly be dubbed “ tatonnante." I
I am supremely conscious that I am merely feeling
my way, merely groping in the dark. On the other
hand, it is only half true to describe my view of the
relation between the ideas peculiar to animism and
those of the mana type as “ hésitante et très réservée." 2
I do not hesitate to regard the general notion exem-
plified by mana as the category that most nearly
expresses the essence of rudimentary religion. But
this expression of opinion is subject to the perpetual
reservation that, in my view, we are not in a position
to dogmatize on the subject.
So long, however, as dogmatic assurance is not
asked of me, I am prepared as author of these essays
to accept present responsibility for method and results
alike.
As regards method, while my general attitude is
that of an anthropologist, my special interest is
psychological. I approach the history of religion as
a student of Man in evolution. But my more immedi-
ate aim is to translate a type of religious experience
remote from our own into such terms of our conscious-
ness as may best enable the nature of that which is so
translated to appear for what it is in itself. I would
compose a highly-generalized description of a certain
state of mind prevailing under conditions of the
As by Father Schmidt in Anthropos, 1909, 509.
? As by Professor Durkheim in Les Formes Elémentaires de la Vie
Religieuse, 2871.
xxiii
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
rudest culture. Such a description will necessarily
be analytic, in the sense that leading features must be
selected for emphasis in accordance with what is
found to be their relative predominance in the state
of mind in question. Such analysis in the hands
of an anthropologist is intended ultimately to sub-
serve a genetic treatment, since his final purpose
is no less than to construct a generalized history of
the evolution of Man. But science must proceed, as
Bacon says, continenter et gradatim. On the principle
of “one thing at a time,” psychological analysis may
be undertaken mainly for its own sake. Hence, on
grounds of method, I can see no reason why I should
not, as an anthropologist, concentrate my attention
on the psychological analysis of rudimentary religion.
But, suppose this principle conceded, it may actu-
ally be used as a weapon of offence against me. It
may be argued that I have sought to generalize too
widely-that "one thing at a time ” should signify
in such a case “one people at a time.” I must,
indeed, plead guilty to having cast about for clues
in many an odd corner of the savage world. For the
matter of that, since backward conditions exist
within the precincts of civilization, there are, doubt-
less, similar clues to be discovered even nearer home.
But I fully allow that a visit to an island inhabited
by pure "pre-animists' to be followed later on,
leť us say, by a visit to another island consisting of
pure animists--would facilitate research. It remains
to inquire whether such islands do, in fact, exist.
LA
xxiv
INTRODUCTION
The rudest savage can presumably be taught to
entertain conceptions and beliefs which everyone
would agree to call religious, even if these be, to
all appearance, absent from his mind beforehand.
Our common human nature, I believe, embraces a
permanent possibility of religion. But this is not to
say that the religious experience attainable by any
two individuals, or by any two peoples, is ever quite
the same in quality and range. Two variables enter
into the reckoning, namely, the innate mental
powers of those concerned, and the circumstances
in which their habits of life are formed. The
resultant differences cannot be grasped in all
their infinite detail. To think them at all is to
classify them, and to classify them is to simplify
them. I need not go here into the general logic of
the matter. Suffice it to say that we must sort out
the facts into bundles. These infinitely differing facts
must be so grouped together that there is a maxi-
mum of difference displayed between the various
bundles, and a minimum of difference displayed
within any one bundle taken by itself. When, for
purposes of analysis, a set of useful contrasts is ob-
tained by means of such bundles, each bundle, each
group, of relatively uniform facts is said to have
" type-value.”
Our problem, then, resolves itself into this: Can
the religious beliefs of a single people be assigned
type-value for the purposes of psychological analysis
as applied to rudimentary religion? I doubt it.
XXV
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
No island of pure "pre-animists" is to be found in
my anthropological atlas. Yet Australia, I freely
admit, comes nearest to the idea of such an island.
Hence, in point of method, Professor Durkheim ?
is doubtless justified in using Australian evidence
more or less exclusively to illustrate an elementary
dangerous, and, in the hands of any one but a master,
may serve but to darken counsel by confusing differ-
ent lines of research. A monograph on Australian
totemism is one thing; the determination of a type
of human religion is another thing. As Count Goblet
d'Alviella would have us say, the former task belongs
to “hierography," the latter to “hierology." The
danger—which the genius of Professor Durkheim can
afford to despise-is, on the one hand, lest those
elements in Australian religion which do not serve
to illustrate the type receive but scant justice; and,
on the other hand, lest the type itself be overloaded
with details that add nothing to its type-value. A
monograph coloured by doctrine, or a doctrine dis-
tracted by monographic irrelevancies, form the Scylla
and Charybdis of such a method. Hence, I prefer
the frankly generalizing procedure adopted by
another distinguished member of the same school
of thought, Professor Lévy-Bruhl.2 All peoples
living under conditions of rudimentary culture are im-
partially drawn upon to illustrate the type of men-
i In Les Forines Elémentaires de la Vie Religieuse (Paris, 1912), the
sub-title of which is Le Système Totémique en Australie.
? In Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures (Paris, 1910).
xxvi
INTRODUCTION
tality which he seeks to define in contradistinction
to our own type of mentality. Critics who object
that the type so constituted implies a certain homo-
geneity of mind, whereas the peoples to whom it
refers differ infinitely both in mind and in every
other respect, show themselves ignorant of the first
principles of typological classification. Science is
bound to read relative uniformity into this and that
aspect of the flux of things if it is to cope with it at
all; it remains for philosophy to make due allowance
for the imperfections of the instrument of thought.
I claim, then, the right to generalize as widely
as the facts permit in regard to the religion of the
peoples of the rudest culture. The method, I con-
tend, is sound enough, even if, from lack of sufficient
knowledge, I have put it to no very fruitful use.
When, then, of my results? If I seem half-hearted
about them it is not because they have ceased
to represent my opinions. So many others, how-
ever, have by this time said the same things in a
better way that I scarcely aspire to rank even
among the minor prophets of the gospel of mana.
My analysis of rudimentary religion sets forth
from the assumption that, as a form of experience,
it develops mainly within a sphere of its own. It
belongs, as it were, to a wonder-world, from which
the workaday world is parted by a sufficiently well-
marked frontier. Various reasons, some psycho-
logical, some sociological, might be offered to account
for this fundamental discontinuity pervading the
xxvii
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
I
activities and affairs of savage life. But I have not
sought to explain so much as to describe. We should
begin, I think, by trying to realize what sort of an
experience it is—how it " feels "-to live in such a
wonder-world.
My theory, then, of the nature of this experience
is that it is ultimately a binary compound, a duality
in unity, consisting in what may be comprehensively
termed a tabu element and a mana element.1 The
former is predominantly negative in its action; what
is negatived being the world of the workaday, the
world of ordinary happenings. Thus its function is
chiefly to provide the experience with its outward
limit. The action of the other is predominantly
positive; what is posited being something transcend-
ing the ordinary world, something wonderful and
awful. Thus its main function is to supply the
experience with its inward content.
So general a formula, I need hardly say, has
hardly more than the value of a memoria technica.
It is meant to serve primarily as a reminder that
psychological analysis as applied to any concrete
phase of rudimentary religion must allow for the
effective presence of these two elements in the total
complex. Now any concrete phase of experience may
be viewed either statically or dynamically; that is to
say, may be treated either as a state of mind or as
See my paper, “The tabu-mana Formula as a Minimum Definition
of Religion," in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, xii. (1909), 186 f. It
is not reprinted here, because it covers much the same ground as the
essay on “ The Conception of Mana" in the present series.
xxviii
INTRODUCTION
a movement of mind, according as the scientific
interest is directed to the intertexture, or else to the
interplay, of the elements. Again, in any such
concrete phase, processes of thinking, feeling and
willing are alike involved; and it may suit the
purpose of the analysis to lay stress now on the ideas,
now on the emotions, and now on the actions in
which the religious experience finds expression.
Hence, as the operations of the analytic psychologist
are diverse, so the applications of the tabu-mana
formula will be diverse too. Two expressions
borrowed from the savage, and having as their birth-
right the convenient property of serving as noun,
adjective, or verb, of denoting object, quality, or
action, have been boldly generalized, so as to estab-
lish constants as points of reference within a system
constructed out of a welter of variants.
Having duly drawn up my formula, and being
ready to offer it to others for whatever it may be
worth, I may, perhaps, be permitted to add that I
am in favour of a sparing use of all such technicalities
in anthropology as sąvouring at the present stage of
its development of pedantry and over-precision. In
these essays, therefore, I avoid as far as possible
harping on any set phrase. Thus I have used
“mysterious," " mystic,” “ occult," " supernatural,"
“sacred” and so forth to characterize the sphere of
the magico-religious according as my immediate
"An illustration of the use of both the static and the dynamic
methods of treatment is to be found in the essay on "The Birth of
Humility."
xxix
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
purpose might seem to demand. Or, again, if I
have referred to mana somewhat frequently, I can
assure the reader that I have a hundred times turned
aside to seek to render the same notion in other and
varying ways. Even as regards the use of the term
“magic,” which a student of rudimentary religion is
bound to define somewhat sharply, since it gives him
his natural counterfoil, I have tried to allow for the
popular use of the word, which is liberal to the
point of laxity. Hence in certain contexts I may
have failed to give it the meaning I would prefer it
to bear, namely, that of, not the impersonal, but the
bad, kind of supernaturalism; the impersonal and
the bad kinds by no means always coinciding, if my
theory of the possibility of a pre-animistic, or, as
others would say, “ dynamistic," type of religion be
correct. In a word, I have“ kept it loose," as artists
are advised to do when giving its first shape to a
picture. To change the metaphor, I feel that all tight
wrappings and swaddling-clothes cannot but prove
pernicious to an infant science, alive and kicking;
though they may be all very suitable for a mummy.
For the rest, the constructive part of my work
doubtless suffers somewhat in clearness of outline from
being appended and subordinated to the critical
portion. The excuse must be that, when I began to
write, certain representative theories dominated the
entire field of Comparative Religion, and had to be
forcibly induced to relax their claims before a " place
in the sun ” could be found for a new interpretation.
XXX
INTRODUCTION
I need not here refer to these theories specifically,
but may describe them generally as in my judgment
too intellectualistic, too prone to identify religion
with this or that doctrine or system of ideas. My
own view is that savage religion is something not so
much thought out as danced out; that, in other words,
it develops under conditions, psychological and socio-
logical, which favour emotional and motor processes,
whereas ideation remains relatively in abeyance.
Meantime, a difficulty that has beset me throughout
is how to avoid the appearance of setting up as a rival
to these too intellectualistic theories of rudimentary
religion another theory equally intellectualistic in
its way. Pre-animistic religion, according to my
meaning and intention, is not definable as the belief
in mana, in the way that animism is on Tylor's
showing definable as the belief in spiritual beings.
Mana is selected by me for special emphasis merely
because it comes nearer than any other available term
to the bare designation of that positive emotional
value which is the raw material of religion, and
needs only to be moralized—to be identified with
goodness-to become its essence. Formally, no
doubt, mana corresponds to an abstract notion. For
me, however, the degree of definiteness with which
the religious consciousness of the savage manages to
express itself by means of this notional form is an
almost negligible consideration, so long as an experi-
ence of the emotional value thereby signified can
otherwise be shown to be present.
xxxi
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
Similarly, from such a point of view, it is of
secondary importance whether an impersonal or a
personal nature be imputed to that which has and,
so to speak, is this unique value. The vital concern
of religion at any and every stage of its evolution is,
I believe, to keep its sense of direction to main-
tain an awareness of its unchanging end. How that
end is to be attained, whether by recognizing the
divine under this partial presentation or under that,
is at best a question of means, which as such admits
of a progressive solution. Thus there will be found
attributed to the sacred and divine now the imper-
sonal nature of a force, as in dynamism; now a
living nature in which the body and its indwelling
life are not distinguished, as in animatism; now a
nature of a dual kind, in which the body is sub-
ordinated to an independent animating principle, as
in animism; now a nature as of a living man, only
crowned with transcendent personality, as in anthro-
pomorphic theism: which attributions will tend to
overlap, and, at any rate as they occur in the con-
fused thought of savages, will correspondingly defy
precise analysis. Yet religion in its essence and soul
will remain relatively unaffected by these attempts
to characterize, whether by way of ideas or by means
of any other symbols, that abiding value which
throughout is felt to be there. Such at least is the
theory which, quite unsystematically, I try to set
forth in what now follows.
xxxii
THE
THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
ARGUMENT
ANTHROPOLOGY needs a wider exterior definition of
. rudimentary religion. Tylor's animism is too narrow,
because too intellectualistic. Psychologically, religion in-
volves more than thought, namely, feeling and will as well ; .
and may manifest itself on its emotional side, even when idea-
tion is vague. The question, then, is whether, apart from
ideas of spirit, ghost, soul and the like, and before such ideas
have become dominant factors in the constituent experience,
a rudimentary religion can exist. It will suffice to prove
that supernaturalism, the attitude of mind dictated by awe
of the mysterious, which provides religion with its raw
material, may exist apart from animism, and, further,
may provide a basis on which an animistic doctrine is
subsequently constructed. Objects towards which awe is
felt may be termed powers. Of such powers spirits con-
stitute but a single class amongst many ; though, being
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
powers in their own right, they furnish a type to which the
rest may become assimilated in the long run. Startling
manifestations of nature are treated as powers without the
agency of spirits being necessarily assumed. Even when
they are regarded as living beings, such animatism falls
short of animism in Tylor's sense, that is, a view which
distinguishes between the spirit and its vehicle, and holds
the animating principle to be more or less independent and
separable. Out of that awe-inspiring thing, the bull-
roarer, certain Australian supreme beings would seem to
have developed, who came to be conceived as supernatural
headmen, but not as spirits. Curious stones are apt to
rank as powers, and even as alive, but it is a long step from
a vague belief in their luckiness to the theory that they
have “ eaten ghost.” Animals are often accounted powers,
for instance, if associated with mystic rites, as in totemism,
or if of uncanny appeurance ; but animistic interpreta-
tions may supervene, as when the wearing of tooth or claw
is taken to imply an attendant animal spirit, or when
ancestral spirits are thought to be incarnated in animals.
Human remains seem to have mystic efficacy in themselves,
the dead as such inspiring awe ; though here we are near
the fountain-head of animism, namely, awe of the human
ghost, which hence is especially liable to be called in to
explain the efficacy of the “dead hand,” and so on. Of
diseases, some invite an animistic theory of causation
more readily than others, which are simply put down to
the powers set in motion by witchcraft. Blood, and notably
the blood of women, is a power in its own account, and not
because of any associated spirit. These examples are
enough to show that something wider than animism is
needed as a minimum definition of religion.
2
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
N HE object of the present paper is simply
to try to give relatively definite shape to
the conception of a certain very primitive
phase of religion, as religion may for anthropo-
logical purposes be understood. The conception
in question will strike many, I daresay, as familiar,
nay possibly as commonplace to a degree. Even
so, however, I venture to think that it is one
amongst several of those almost tacitly-accepted
commonplaces of Comparative Religion which serve
at present but to “crib, cabin and confine"
the field of active and critical research. Com-
parative Religion is still at the classificatory stage.
Its genuine votaries are almost exclusively occupied
in endeavouring to find “ pigeon-holes” wherein to
store with some approach to orderly and distinct
arrangement the vast and chaotic piles of "slips"
which their observation or reading has accumulated.
Now in such a case the tendency is always to start
with quite a few pigeon-holes, and but gradually, and,
as it were, grudgingly, to add to their number. On
the other hand considerable division and subdivision
of topics is desirable, both in the interest of special-
ized study, and in order to baffle and neutralize the
efforts of popularizers to enlist prejudice on the side
of one or another would-be synoptic version of the
subject, based on some narrow and fragmentary
view of the data as provided by current science. Nay,
so essential is it to detach "workable” portions of
the evidence for separate and detailed consideration,
that it is comparatively unimportant whether the
divisions at any moment recognized and adopted be
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
capable of exact co-ordination in respect to one
another, so long as each taken by itself is clearly
marked and leads immediately to business. Thus in
the present case I have ventured to call attention to
a phase of early religion which, I believe, only needs
clearly marking off by the aid of a few technical
designations to serve as a rallying point for a
quantity of facts that have hitherto largely “gone
about loose." I have therefore improvised some
technical terms. I have likewise roughly sur-
veyed the ground covered by the special topic in
question, with a view to showing how the facts
may there be disposed and regimented. Choicer
technical terms no doubt may easily be found.
Moreover, my illustrations are certainly anything
but choice, having been culled hastily from the
few books nearest to hand. May I hope, how-
ever, at least to be credited with the good inten-
tion of calling the attention of anthropologists to
the possibilities of a more or less disregarded theme
in Comparative Religion; and may I, conversely,
be acquitted of any design to dogmatize prematurely
about religious origins because I have put forward
a few experimental formulæ, on the chance of their
proving useful to this or that researcher who may
be in need of an odd piece of twine wherewith to tie
his scopa dissolutæ into a handy, if temporary,
besom?
Definitions of words are always troublesome;
and religion is the most troublesome of all words to
define. Now for the purposes of Anthropology at its
present stage it matters less to assign exact limits to the
PRE-ANIMISTIČ RELIGION
concept to which the word in question corresponds,
than to make sure that these limits are cast on such
wide and generous lines as to exclude no feature that
has characterized religion at any moment in the long
course of its evolution. Suffice it, then, to presup-
pose that the word stands for a certain composite
or concrete state of mind wherein various emotions
and ideas are together directly provocative of action.
Let it be likewise noted at the start, that these
emotions and ideas are by no means always harmoni-
ously related in the religious consciousness, and
indeed perhaps can never be strictly commensurate
with each other. Now for most persons, probably,
the emotional side of religion constitutes its more
real, more characteristic feature. Men are, how-
ever, obliged to communicate expressly with each
other on the subject of their religious experience by
the way of ideas solely. Hence, if for no other
reason, the ideas composing the religious state tend
to overlay and outweigh the emotional element, when
it comes to estimating man's religious experience
taken at its widest. Thus we catch at an idea that
reminds us of one belonging to an advanced creed
and say, Here is religion; or, if there be found
no clear-cut palpable idea, we are apt to say,
There is no religion here; but whether the subtle
thrill of what we know in ourselves as religious
emotion be present there or no, we rarely
have the mindfulness or patience to inquire,
simply because this far more delicate criterion is
hard to formulate in thought and even harder to
apply to fact.
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
Now the object of this paper is to grope about
amongst the roots of those beliefs and practices that
at a certain stage of their development have usually
been treated as forming a single growth which is
labelled animism, or more properly animistic religion.
It is a region hard to explore, because the notions
that haunt it are vague and impalpable; the religious
sense (if such it may be called) manifesting itself
in almost unideated feelings that doubtless fall to a
large extent outside the savage “ field of attention,"
and at anyrate fall wholly outside our field of direct
observation. Now, even where there undeniably
do exist precise ideas of the savage mind for Anthro-
pology to grasp and garner, everyone is aware how
exceedingly difficult it is to do them justice. How
much more difficult, therefore, must it be, in the
case of the earliest dim heart-stirrings and fancies
of the race, to truthfully preserve the indistinctness
of the original, and yet make clear the nature of that
germinal source whence our own complex beliefs and
aspirations must be supposed to have arisen.
Animism, as a technical term applied to religion,
calls attention to the presence of a more or less
definite creed or body of ideas. According to Dr
Tylor, who presented it to Anthropology, it signifies
“the belief in the existence of spiritual beings," 1
that is to say, of " spirits" in the wide sense that
includes “ souls.” A looser use of the word by some
writers, whereby it is made to cover the various
manifestations of what is commonly but cumbrously
· Prim. Cult. (3rd edition), i. 424.
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
styled the " anthropomorphic ”i tendency of savage
thought, will here be ignored, and a fresh expression
substituted, seeing that such an extension of its
meaning robs the term of its exacter and more con-
venient connotation, and, further, seeing that it has
failed to win general recognition from men of science.
No anthropologist, of course, has ever supposed
himself able fully and finally to explain the origin of
the belief in souls and spirits. Indeed, with regard
to absolute origins of all kinds, we had best say at
once with the philosopher that “Nothing is strictly
original save in the sense that everything is.” Dr
Tylor and others, however, have with great plausi-
bility put forward a view as to the specifically forma-
tive source of the idea, in what has been nicknamed
“the dream-theory.” This theory asserts that the
prototype of soul and spirit is to be sought especially
in the dream-image and trance-image-that vision
of the night or day that comes to a man clothed
distinctively in what Dr Tylor describes as“ vaporous
materiality," or, as the Greenland angekok puts it,
“pale and soft, so that if a man try to grasp it he feels
nothing”-par levibus ventis volucrique simillima
somno. Perhaps it is only due to Mr Lang's latest.
researches 2 to say with regard to this theory that
its centre of gravity, so to speak, has of late shown
signs of shifting from dream to trance, so that “the
hallucination-theory” might possibly now prove the
more appropriate descriptive title. I shall not,
'I was thinking more especially of anthropomorphic theism when I
wrote this, but "vitalistic" would more suitably describe the general
tendency signified by animism in this wider sense
2 The Making of Religion, Longmans, Green & Co., 1898.
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
however, pause to inquire whether the “ thrill ” of
ghost-seeing is likely to have given form and char-
acter to the religious emotions of the savage more
directly or forcibly than the less unfamiliar, yet more
kindly and sympathetic, appearance of " dream-
faces”; nor, again, whether the practical proofs, as
they may be called, of spiritualism (which after all
is but another name for animism), I mean clair-
voyance and the like, were brought into earlier or
greater prominence by normal dreamers or by ab-
normal “ seers.” It is enough for my present pur-
pose to assume that animism, the belief in the exist-
ence of visionary shapes, whether of the dead or sui
juris, became with the savage, at a certain stage of his
development, the typical, nay almost the universal,
means of clothing the facts of his religious experience
in ideas and words, and the typical and all but uni-
versal theory on which he based his religious practice.
And this being assumed, we reach our special pro-
blem: Before, or at any rate apart from, animism,
was early man subject to any experience, whether in
the form of feeling, or of thought, or of both com-
bined, that might be termed specifically" religious'?
Let us begin by asking ourselves what was the
precise ground originally covered by animistic belief.
The answer, if purely tentative, is soon made. The
savage as we know him to-day believes in an in-
finitely miscellaneous collection of spiritual entities.
“ To whom are you praying? ” asked Hale of a Sakai
chief at one of those fruit festivals so characteristic
of the Malay peninsula. “To the hantus (spirits),”
1 Prim. Cult., i. 426.
PRE-ANIMIŠTIĆ RELIGION
he replied " the hantus of the forest, of the moun-
tains, of the rivers, the hantus of the Sakai chiefs who
are dead, the hantus of headache and stomach-ache,
the hantus that make people gamble and smoke
opium, the hantus that send disputes, and the hantus
that send mosquitoes."1 Now are all these hantus,
animistically speaking, on a par, or are some original,
others derived? I take it that I am at one with
most orthodox upholders of animism in supposing
the hantus of the dead to be the original anima
whence the rest have derived their distinctively ani-
mistic, that is to say ghostly, characteristics. For
this view it will perhaps be enough to allege a single
reason. The revenant of dream and hallucination in
its actual appearance to the senses presents so
exactly and completely the type to which every
spirit, however indirect its methods of self-mani-
festation, is believed and asserted to conform, that I
am personally content to regard this conclusion as
one amongst the few relative certainties which
Anthropology can claim to have established in the
way of theory. Suppose this granted, then we find
ourselves confronted with the following important
train of questions, yielding us a definite nucleus and
rallying-point for our present inquiry: “How came
an animistic colour to be attached to a number of
things not primarily or obviously connected with
death and the dead? What inherent general char-
acter of their own suggested to man's mind the group-
ing together of the multifarious classes of so-called
spiritual' phenomena as capable of common ex-
J. A. I., xv. 300-1.
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
planation? Was not this common explanation the
outcome of a common regard, a common and yet
highly specific feeling or emotion? And is not this
feeling related to the ideas wherein it finds as it were
symbolical expression - as for example to the ani-
mistic idea-as something universal and fixed to
something particular and transitory? ”
Now, by way of answer to these questions, let me
repeat, I have no brand-new theory to propound.
The doctrine that I now wish to formulate unam-
biguously, and at the same time, so far as may be
possible within the limits of a short article, to supply
with a basis of illustrative fact, is one that in a vague
and general form constitutes a sort of commonplace
with writers on religious origins. These writers for
the most part profess, though not always in very plain
or positive terms, to discern beneath the fluctuating
details of its efforts at self-interpretation a certain
religious sense, or, as many would call it, instinct,
whereof the component “moments” are fear,
admiration, wonder, and the like, whilst its object is,
broadly speaking, the supernatural. Now that this is
roughly and generally true no one, I think, is likely
to deny. Thus, to put the matter as broadly as
possible, whether we hold with one extreme school
that there exists a specific religious instinct, or
whether we prefer to say with the other that man's
religious creeds are a by-product of his intellectual
development, we must, I think, in any case admit
the fact that in response to, or at anyrate in con-
nection with, the emotions of awe, wonder, and the
like, wherein feeling would seem for the time being
IO
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
I
to have outstripped the power of “natural,” that is,
reasonable, explanation, there arises in the region
of human thought a powerful impulse to objectify
and even personify the mysterious or“ supernatural”
something felt, and in the region of will a corre-
sponding impulse to render it innocuous, or better
still propitious, by force of constraint, communion,
or conciliation. Supernaturalism, then, as this uni-
versal feeling taken at its widest and barest may be
called, might, as such, be expected to prove not only
logically but also in some sense chronologically
prior to animism, constituting as the latter does but
a particular ideal embodiment of the former.
The appeal to fact that will occupy the rest of
this paper, cursory though it must be in view of our
space conditions, will suffice, I hope, to settle the
matter. First, let us remind ourselves by the help
of one or two typical quotations how widely and in-
discriminately supernaturalism casts its net. Thus
Ellis writes of the Malagasy: “Whatever is great,
whatever exceeds the capacity of their understand-
ings, they designate by the one convenient and com-
prehensive appellation, andriamanitra. Whatever
is new and useful and extraordinary is called god.
Silk is considered as god in the highest degree, the
superlative adjective being added to the noun-
andriamanitra-indrinda. Rice, money, thunder and
lightning, and earthquake are all called god. Their
ancestors and a deceased sovereign they designate
in the same manner. Tarantasy or book they call
god, from its wonderful capacity of speaking by
merely looking at it. Velvet is called by the singular
II
THE THRESHOLD OF RELÍGION
epithet, 'son of god.'"1 So, too, of the Masai,
though far lower than the Malagasy in the scale of
culture, the account given by Joseph Thomson is
precisely similar. “Their conception of the deity,"
he says, “ seems marvellously vague. I was ngai.
My lamp was ngai. Ngai was in the steaming holes.
His house was in the eternal snows of Kilimanjaro.
In fact, whatever struck them as strange or incom-
prehensible, that they at once assumed had some
connection with ngai.” 2 As I have said, such
quotations are typical and might be multiplied inde-
finitely. Andriamanitra and ngai reappear in the
wakan of the North American Indian, the mana of
the Melanesian, the kalou of the Fijian, and so on.3
It is the common element in ghosts and gods, in the
magical and the mystical, the supernal and the in-
fernal, the unknown within and the unknown with-
out. It is the supernatural or supernormal, as dis-
tinguished from the natural or normal; that in short
which, as Mr Jevons phrases it, " defeats reasonable
expectation.” Or perhaps another and a better
way of putting it, seeing that it calls attention to
the feeling behind the logic, is to say that it is the
awful, and that everything wherein or whereby it
* Ellis, Hist. of Madagascar, i. 391-2.
2 Thomson, Masailanit, 445. But see Preface to the first edition
ad fin. Since the passage in question was written, however, Mr and
Mrs Routledge have reported what seems a quite vague use of ngai by
the Akikuyu, neighbours of the Masai. Sec my note contributed to
their recent work, With a Prehistoric People (Macmillan, 1910), p. 357.
3 These examples are rather miscellaneous, and some of them might
have been better chosen. In any case they are meant simply to illus-
trate the vague application of some class-concept to a variety of objects
calling forth religious awe. It is not contended that these epithets
bear one and all the same sense.
12
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
ATA
manifests itself is, so to speak, a power of awfulness,
or, more shortly, a power (though this, like any other
of our verbal equivalents, cannot but fail to pre-
serve the vagueness of the original notion). Of all
English words awe is, I think, the one that expresses
the fundamental religious feeling most nearly. Awe
is not the same thing as "pure funk." "Primus in
orbe deos fecit timor " is only true if we admit wonder,
admiration, interest, respect, even love perhaps, to
be, no less than fear, essential constituents of this
elemental mood.
Now ghosts and spirits are undoubtedly powers,
but it does not follow that all powers are ghosts and
spirits, even if they tend to become so. In what
follows I propose that we examine a few typical cases
of powers, which, beneath the animistic colour that
in the course of time has more or less completely
overlaid them, show traces of having once of their
own right possessed pre-animistic validity as objects
and occasions of man's religious feeling.
Let us start with some cases that, pertaining as
they do to the “ unknown without” as it appears in
most direct contradistinction to the “unknown
within," are thus farthest removed from the proper
domain and parent-soil of animism, and may there-
fore be supposed to have suffered its influences least.
What we call “ physical nature" may very well be
“nature” also to the savage in most of its normal
aspects; yet its more startling manifestations,
"The Greek word that comes nearest to "power" as used above is
Tépas. Perhaps " teratism” may be preferred as a designation for
that attitude of mind which I have termed "supernaturalism.”
13
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
thunderstorms, eclipses, eruptions, and the like, are
eminently calculated to awake in him an awe that I
believe to be specifically religious both in its essence
and in its fruits, whether animism have, or have not,
succeeded in imposing its distinctive colour upon it.
Thus, when a thunderstorm is seen approaching in
South Africa, a Kaffir village, led by its medicine-
man, will rush to the nearest hill and yell at the
hurricane to divert it from its course. Here we
have awe finding vent in what on the face of it may
be no more than a simple straightforward act of per-
sonification. It is animism in the loose sense of some
writers, or, as I propose to call it, animatism : but it
is not animism in the strict scientific sense that im-
plies the attribution, not merely of personality and
will, but of “ soul” or “spirit,” to the storm. The
next case is but slightly different. The Point
Barrow natives, believing the Aurora Borealis to do
them harm by striking them at the back of the neck,
brandish knives and throw filth at it to drive it away.2
Now I doubt if we need suppose animism to be latent
here any more than in the African example. Never-
theless the association of the Aurora's banefulness
with a particular malady would naturally pave the
way towards it, whilst the precautionary measures
are exactly such as would be used against spirits.
The following case is more dubious. When a glacier
in Alaska threatened to swallow up a valuable
fishing stream, two slaves were killed in order to
Macdonald, J. A. I., xix, 283.
? Murdoch, Point Barrow Expedition, 432.
14
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
bring it to a standstill.1 Here the advanced char-
acter of the propitiatory rite probably presumes
acquaintance with some form of the animistic theory.
It may very well be, however, that sacrifice is here
resorted to as a general religious panacea, without
involving any distinct recognition of a particular
glacier spirit. And now let us take a couple of
instances where the theory behind the religious
observance is more explicit. The Fuegians abstain
from killing young ducks on the ground that, if they
do, “Rain come down, snow come down, hail come
down, wind blow, blow, very much blow.” The
.storm is sent by a " big man ” who lives in the woods.2
Now is this animism? I think not. What may be,
called a “coincidental marvel ” is explained by a
myth, and mythology need be no more than a sort
of animatism grown picturesque. When, however,
a Point Barrow Eskimo, in order to persuade the
river to yield him fish, throws tobacco, not into the
river, but into the air, and cries out“ Tuana, Tuana”
(spirit), then here is a full-fledged animism. Mean-
while, whatever view be taken of the parts respec-
tively played by animatism, mythology, animism,
or what not, in investing these observances with
meaning and colour, my main point is that the quality
of religiousness attaches to them far less in virtue of
any one of these ideal constructions than in virtue of
that basic feeling of awe, which drives a man, ere he
can think or theorize upon it, into personal relations
with the supernatural.
Peet, Am. Antiq., ix. 327; an instance, however, that might be better
authenticated.
* Fitzroy, ii. 180. 3 Murdoch, ib., 433.
N
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
In order to establish the thesis that the attitude of
supernaturalism towards what we should call inani-
mate nature may be independent of animistic inter-
pretations, much more is required in the way of
evidence than what I have the space to bring forward
here. In the case of matters so indirectly ascertain-
able as the first beginnings of human thought, the
cumulative testimony of very numerous and varied
data affords the only available substitute for crucial
proof. As it is, however, I must content myself
with citing but two more sets of instances bearing
on this part of my subject.
The first of these may be of interest to those who
have lent their attention to Mr Lang's recent dis-
covery of “pure”that is to say, ethical--religion
in the wilds of Australia. I have to confess to the
opinion with regard to Daramulun, Mungan-ngaua,
Tundun and Baiamai, those divinities whom the
Kurnai, Murrings, Kamilaroi and other Australian
groups address severally as “ Our Father," recogniz-
ing in them the supernatural headmen and lawgivers
of their respective tribes, that their prototype is
nothing more or less than that well-known material
and inanimate object, the bull-roarer. Its thunder-
ous booming must have been eminently awe-inspiring
to the first inventors, or rather discoverers, of the
instrument, and would not unnaturally provoke the
It is Mr Lang who would limit the epithets of pure and ethical to
this type of primitive religion. In my own view, all genuine religion,
whether distinguished by the cult of personal deities or not, is ethical;
inasmuch as it is of its essence to make the worshipper feel a stronger
and better man; cf. Essay VII. p. 190.
? See Essay VI.
IG
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
"animatistic” attribution of life and power to it.
Then mythology seems to have stepped in to explain
why and how the bull-roarer enforces those tribal
ceremonies with which its use is associated, and, after
the manner of myth, to have invented schemes and
genealogies of bull-roarers whose wonderful history
and dreadful powers it proceeded to chronicle. Thus,
for example, Baiamai kills Daramulun for devouring
some of the youths undergoing initiation, but puts his
voice into the wood of the bull-roarer. Or Mungan-
ngaua begets Tundun, who first makes the bull-roarers
in actual use amongst the Kurnai, and then becomes
a porpoise. Further, mythology is reinforced by
symbolistic ritual Figures made of logs are set up
on the initiation ground to represent Baiamai and his
wife; or the men throw blazing sticks at the women
and children as if it were Daramulun coming to burn
them. As for animism, however, we never get any-
where near to it, save perhaps when Daramulun's
voice is said to inhabit the bull-roarer, or when he is
spoken of as living in the sky and ruling the ghosts of
the dead Kurnai. Nevertheless, despite its want of
animistic colouring, a genuine religion (if reverence
shown towards supernatural powers and obedience to
their mandates be a sufficient test of genuineness) has
sprung up out of the awe inspired by the bull-roarer;
and Mr Lang's assertion may safely be endorsed that
animism, with the opportunities it affords for spiritu-
alistic hocus-pocus, could serve to introduce therein
a principle of degeneration only.
* Matthews, J. A. I., xxv. 298. ? Howitt, J.A.I., xiv. 312.
3 Matthews, J. A. I., xxiv.416; xxv. 298. Howitt, J. A. I., xiv, 321,
17
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
My other set of instances pertains to the fascinat-
ing subject of stone-worshipa subject, alas! from
which I would fain illustrate my point at far greater
length. Stones that are at all curious in shape,
position, size or colour--not to speak of properties
derived from remarkable coincidences of all sorts-
would seem specially designed by nature to appeal to
primitive man's “supernaturalistic” tendency. A
solitary pillar of rock, a crumpled volcanic boulder,
a meteorite, a pebble resembling a pig, a yam, or an
arrowhead, a piece of shining quartz, these and such
as these are almost certain to be invested by his
imagination with the vague but dreadful attributes
of powers. Nor, although to us nothing appears so
utterly inanimate as a stone, is savage animatism in
the least afraid to regard it as alive. Thus the
Kanakas differentiate their sacred stones into males
and females, and firmly believe that from time to
time little stones appear at the side of the parent
blocks. On the other hand, when a Banks' Islander
sees a big stone with little stones around it, he says
that there is a vui (spirit) inside it, ready if properly
conciliated to make the women bear many children
and the sows large litters. Now, this is no longer
animatism, but animism proper. A piece of sympa-
thetic magic is explained in terms of spirit-causation.
The following case from the Baram district of Borneo
is transitional. A man protects his fruit trees by
placing near them certain round stones in cleft
sticks. He then utters a curse, calling upon the
Ellis, Tour Round Hawaii, 113.
? Codrington, J. A. I., X. 276.
18
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
AT in
stones to witness it: “May he who steals this fruit
suffer from stones in the stomach as large as these."
Further, suppose a friend of the proprietor wish to
eat of the fruit, he will light a fire, and ask the fire to
explain to the stone that nothing wrong is being
done. Here we seem to have simple animatism, but
it may be said to tremble on the verge of animism,
inasmuch as by itself-that is, by the mere attribu-
tion of life and will it is unable to account for the
magical powers of the stone. How this may be done
with the help of animism is shown us by the Banks'
Islanders, already referred to, who, employing stones
of a peculiar long shape in much the same way to
protect their houses, do so on the explicit ground that
the stones have “ eaten ghost”-the ghost of a dead
man being not unnaturally taken as the type and
ne plus ultra of awful power. Not to multiply
instances, let me roundly state that, amid the vast .
array of facts relating to the worship of stones, there
will be found the most divergent ideal representa-
tions of their supernatural nature and powers, ranging
from the vaguest semi-conscious belief in their
luckiness 3 onwards, through animatism, to the dis-
tinct animistic conception of them as the home of
spirits of the dead or the unborn, or as the image and
visible presence of a god; but that underlying all
these fluctuating interpretations of thought there
' Hose, T. A. I., xxiii. 161.
2 Codrington, loc.
3 I am afraid it may be said that I have not given sufficient promi-
nence to that “moment” in religious feeling which corresponds to the
belief in luck. I do not, however, regard it as a specific emotion in
itself, but rather as a compound of the wonder produced by a coinci-
dence and of sufficient awe of the power therewith seemingly connected,
to make it appear worth while to try to conciliate it.
TI
19
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
may be discerned a single universal feeling, namely,
the sense of an awfulness in them intimately affecting
man and demanding of him the fruits of awe, namely,
respect, veneration, propitiation, service.
Passing now from the region of what we regard as
the inanimate to that of the sub-animate and the
animate, we come first in order of upward progress
to that tantalizing theme, the worship of plants and
animals. Now to a large extent this coincides with
the subject of totemism, about which I shall say
little, if only because it teems with controversial
matter. This much, however, I take to be now
relatively certain with regard to it, that in their
origin totemistic observances had a magical rather
than a strictly religious import. That is to say,
their object was not so much to conciliate powers in
plant or animal form, as to establish sympathetic
control over classes of serviceable plants and animals
regarded simply as such, namely, as clans or tribes
very much on a par with the human ones. Now I
am ready to suppose that sympathetic magic in the
eyes of the savage is, primarily, no exclusive instru-
ment of religion, but a means of causation on a level
with his other methods of exerting force—just as
with him talking is not confined exclusively to
praying. On the other hand, I believe that the
abnormal and mysterious element in magical causa-
tion is bound to strike him sooner or later, and to
call for explanation in the terms most familiar and
most satisfying to primitive mysticism. Thus, in
the case of totemism, the conception of an affinity
between the spirits of the plants and animals and
20
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
their human clients, as effected by transmigration
or some other animistic contrivance, is sure to arise,
with the result that the plants and animals by reason
of their “ spiritualization” forthwith assume the
plenary rank and attributes of powers. Meanwhile,
in order to show how this may come about, I shall
bring forward one or two illustrations that have no
direct connection with totemism, as they will then
at the same time serve to call attention to the
qualities that constitute an intrinsic as opposed to
a merely derivatory right to be revered as super-
natural and awful. There are many animals that
are propitiated by primitive man neither because
they are merely useful nor merely dangerous, but
because they are, in a word, uncanny. White
animals (for example, white elephants or white
buffaloes), birds of night (notably the owl), monkeys,
mice, frogs, crabs, snakes, and lizards, in fact a host
of strange and gruesome beasts, are to the savage,
of their own right and on the face of them, instinct
with dreadful divinity. To take a single instance,
a fishing party of Crees catch a new and terrible-
looking kind of fish. It is promptly returned to the
water as a manitu, and five days are wasted whilst
it is being appeased. Now in the case of powers such
as these, sympathetic magic will naturally suggest
the wearing of tooth or claw, bone or skin as a means
of sharing in the divine potency. Here is the chance
for animism to step in. Thus a Kennaiah chief, who
wishes to wear the skin of the Borneo tiger-cat for
luck in war, will wrap himself in it, and before lying
" Hind, Red River Exped., ii. 135.
21
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
down to sleep will explain to the skin exactly what
he wants, and beg the spirit to send him a propitious
dream.1 Or in other cases mere association and
coincidence will pave the way towards an animistic
version of the facts. Thus I have no doubt that
it is the uncanny appearance of the snake, combined.
with its habit of frequenting graves and of entering
dwellings, which has led more than one savage people
to treat it as the chosen incarnation of their ancestral
ghosts.2 And here let me leave this part of the
subject, having thus barely touched upon it in order
to confirm the single point that religious awe is
towards powers, and that these are not necessarily
spirits or ghosts, though they tend to become so.
At length we reach what I have roughly described
as the proper domain and parent-soil of animism,
namely, the phenomena that have to do with dream
and trance, disease and death. Here the question
for us must be, Do supernaturalism and animism
originally coincide in respect to these phenomena?
Or, in other words, Is the awful, in each and all
of them alike, primarily soul or spirit? My own
belief is that the two spheres do not originally coin-
cide, that the awful in dream and trance is at first
distinct from the awful in death and disease, though
the former readily comes to overlay and colour the
latter. Thus I conceive that the trance-image, alike
on account of its singularity, its accompaniments
in the way of physical no less than mental derange-
1 Hose, J. A. I., xxiii. 159.
2 E.g., Zulus, cf. Macdonald, J. A. I., xx. 122 ; Malagasy, cf. Sibree,
J. A. ., xxi. 227.
22
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
ment, and its coincidental possibilities, must have
been originally and of its own right awful; and that
so, though perhaps to a lesser extent, must have been
the dream-image, if only on the ground last men-
tioned. Nor would I deny that, in regard to death,
these two kinds of vision taken together would be
bound to suggest to the savage mind that there is a
something which survives the body. But have we
here a complete account of the influences whereby
there is produced that mingled fear and love of the
dead which culminate in manes-worship? I think
not. For one thing, it is almost an axiom with
writers on this subject, that a sort of solipsism, or
Berkleianism (as Professor Sully terms it as he finds
it in the child), operates in the savage to make him
refuse to recognize death as a fact, there being at
anyrate plenty of proof that he is extremely un-
willing to recognize the fact of natural death. The
influence, however, which I consider most funda-
mental of all is something else, namely, the awful-
ness felt to attach to the dead human body in itself.'
Here, I think, we probably have the cause of the
definite assignment to a passing appearance such as
the trance-image of real and permanent existence in
relation to a dead owner; and certainly the main
source of the ascription of potency to the soul thus
rendered substantive. The thrill of ghost-seeing
may be real enough, but I fancy it is nothing to the
horror of a human corpse instilled into man's heart
Several critics have objected to this theory of mine as unproved
which I admit--but themselves offer no proof to the contrary unless it
be that the living dog is unmoved by the sight of a dead dog. But
a dog is not a man.
23
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
by his instinct of self-preservation. In confirmation
of this view I would refer to the mass of evidence
dealing with the use of human remains for purposes
of protective or offensive magic. A skull, a human
hand, a scalp-lock, a portion of dried and pounded
flesh are potent medicine in themselves, so long as
sympathetic magic is at the stage at which it takes
itself for granted. Magical processes, however, as
we have seen, specially invite explanation. What
more natural, then, given an acquaintance with the
images of trance and dream, than to attribute the
mysterious potency of a dead man's body to that
uncanny thing his wraith? Let me quote just one
instance to show how easy is the transition from the
one idea to the other. A young native of Leper's
Island, out of affection for his dead brother, made his
bones into arrow-tips. Thereafter he no longer
spoke of himself as “ I," but as “we two,” and was
much feared. The Melanesian explanation was
that he had thus acquired the mana, or supernatural
power, of the dead man. Clearly it is but a hair's-
breadth that divides the mana thus personified from
the notion of the attendant ghost which elsewhere
so often meets us.
There remains the difficult question whether
animism is primarily, or only derivatively, connected
with the religious awe felt in the presence of most
kinds of disease. I am disposed to say,“ distinguo."
As regards delirium, epilepsy, and kindred forms of
seizure, the patient's experience of hallucinatory
images, combined with the bystanders' impression
* Codringlon, J. A. I., xix. 216-17.
IT
24
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
that the former is, as we say, “no longer himself,”
would, I think, well nigh immediately and directly
stamp it as a case of possession by a spirit. Then all
convulsive movements, sneezing, yawning, a ringing
in the ear, a twitching of the eyelid, and so on, would
be explained analogously. On the other hand there
is a large and miscellaneous number of diseases that
primitive man attributes to witchcraft, without at
the same time necessarily ascribing them to the
visitation of bad spirits. Thus a savage will imagine
that he has a crab or a frog, some red ants or a piece
of crystal in his stomach, introduced by magical
means, as for instance by burying the crab (perhaps
with an invocation to the crab-fetish) 1 in his path.
To remedy such supposed evils the native doctor
betakes himself to the sucking cure and the like,
while he meets spirits with a more or less distinct
set of contrivances, for instance the drum or rattle
to frighten them, and the hollow bone to imprison
them. Meanwhile animism undoubtedly tends to
provide a general explanation for all disease, since
disease to the savage mind especially connotes what
may be described as “infection” in the widest sense,
and infection is eminently suggestive of the workings
of a mobile aggressive agency such as spirit appears
intrinsically to be. Let me briefly refer, however,
to one form of malady which all the world over
excites the liveliest religious awe, and yet is, so far
as I know, but rarely and loosely connected with
animism by savage theorists. The horror of blood
I take to be strictly parallel to the horror of a corpse
Conolly, J. A. I., xxvi. 151.
25
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
<
<
VI
already alluded to; and I believe that in what
Westermarck has termed the “ mystic detestation”
of woman, or in the unreasoning dread which causes
a North American brave with a running sore to be
banned from the camp, we have a crucial case of a
pure and virtually uncoloured religious feeling.
The issue of blood "pertains to wakanda," as the
Omahas said. That is the primary vague utterance
of supernaturalism; and strictly secondary, I con-
ceive, and by way of ex post facto justification is the
belief in the magical properties of the blood, the
theory that the blood is the life, or the Maori notion
that it is full of germs ready to turn into malicious
spirits,3
At this point my list of illustrations must come
to a close; and it therefore only remains for me to
utter a last word in my own defence for having
called attention to a subject that many will be ready
to pronounce both trite and at the same time in-
capable of exact or final treatment.
As regards the charge of triteness, I would only
say that a disregarded commonplace is no common-
place at all, and that disregard is, anthropologically
speaking, to be measured by the actual use to which
a conception is put, when there is available evidence
in the shape of raw facts waiting to be marshalled
and pigeon-holed by its aid. I do not find that the
leading theorists have by the organization of their
material shown themselves to be sufficiently aware
*Adair, Hist. of Am. Ind., 124.
2 Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, 267.
3 Cf. Tregear, .; A. I., xix. 101.
26
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION
that the animistic idea represents but one amongst
a number of ideas, for the most part far more vague
than it is, and hence more liable to escape notice;
all of which ideas, however, are active in savage
religion as we have it, struggling one with the other
for supremacy in accordance with the normal ten-
dency of religious thought towards uniformity of
doctrinal expression. On the contrary, the impres-
sion left on my mind by a study of the leading
theorists is that animistic interpretations have by
them been decidedly overdone; that, whereas they
are prone in the case of the religions of civilization
to detect survivals and fading rudimentary forms,
they are less inclined to repeat the process when
their clues have at length led them back to that
stage of primitive thought which perforce must be
"original” for them by reason of the lack of earlier
evidence, but is not in the least " original ” in an
absolute sense and from the standpoint of the racial
history. .
As for the charge of inconclusiveness, this might
be in point were it a question of assigning exact
limits to the concept to which the word religion, as
employed by Anthropology, ought to correspond.
As I have said, however, the only real danger at
present can come from framing what is bound to
be a purely experimental and preliminary definition
in too hard-and-fast a manner. Thus Dr Frazer,
though he is doubtless well aware of all the facts
I have cited, prefers to treat of magic and religion
as occupying mutually exclusive spheres, while I
regard these spheres, not indeed as coincident by
27
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
any means, but still as overlapping. I, on the other
hand, would hold out for the widest possible render-
ing of the idea of religion on practical and theoretical
grounds alike. As regards the former, I should fear
to cut myself off prematurely from any group of
facts that might possibly bear upon the history of
man's religions evolution. As regards theory, I
would rest my case on the psychological argument
that, if there be reason, as I think there is, to hold
that man's religious sense is a constant and universal
feature of his mental life, its essence and true nature
must then be sought, not so much in the shifting
variety of its ideal constructions, as in that steadfast
groundwork of specific emotion whereby man is able
to feel the supernatural precisely at the point at
which his thought breaks down. Thus, from the
vague utterance of the Omaha," the blood pertains
to wakanda," onwards, through animism, to the
dictum of the greatest living idealist philosopher,
“the universe is a spiritual whole," a single impulse
may be discerned as active–the impulse, never
satisfied in finite consciousness yet never abandoned,
to bring together and grasp as one the That and the
What of God.
(D
II
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
ARGUMENT
HAS religion enough in common with magic for spell
in certain cases to develop into prayer ? Frazer's
account of magic is too intellectualistic, and this is why
he makes magic and religion utterly distinct in their psycho-
logical nature, so that, like oil and water, though juxtaposed,
they will not intermix ; and so that religion has to be
credited by him with an independent and later origin. He
regards magic as simply due to a misapplication of the
laws of the association of ideas. Magic, however, is not
merely an affair of misapplied ideas, but must be studied
likewise on its emotional side. Violent passion, such as
anger or love, is especially liable to misdirection, the pent-
up desire to act discharging itself on the mere shadow of
an object if the substance be not ready to hand. Such
blind acquiescence in a substituted object amounts, psycho-
logically, to a rudimentary magic. In developed magic,
however, the operator is more or less aware that he is dealing
with a symbol, yet, in his need for emotional relief, makes
himself believe that the desired effect, though enacted on
the symbol, is projectively transmitted to the real object;
while, apart from this psychological cause of self-justifica-
tion consisting in the need of relief, the sociological fact
29
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
11
that the belief is shared by others brings about its own
verification, since the credulous victim is apt to succumb
to his suggested fate. Now the spell on analysis is found
to express the spirit of the magical act, and, in particular,
to express that exertion of the will to believe which is the
psychological counterpart of the mana, oy mysterious
power, which the magician and his magic embody. A
typical spell distinguishes between symbol and ulterior
reality, but carries over the desired effect from the one to
the other by means of a projective act of which an uttered
"must" is the mainspring. Mana, which on its inner
side is just this seemingly mysterious power of putting the
magical act through, of willing semblance into reality, fur-
nishes a notion that may be used to explain supernatural
agency of any kind ; so that in this way magic readily
passes into religion, since supernaturalism provides a raw
material common to them both. Or again, the mana may
be transferred from its true vehicle, the uttered "must,"
to the symbol or instrument of the magician's purpose, in-
asmuch as he is wont to bid it to fulfil his will, and so,
having once attributed to it a power and will of its own,
readily passes from bluff to blandishment. Or, once more,
the ulterior reality, which is ordered to accommodate itself
to the prefigured desire, to take on the symbolized effect,
may be besought with prayer instead, the will involved in
the projection of desire conjuring up an answering will
in its object. At once, then, because it equally belongs to
the sphere of the occult and supernatural, and because it
tends to be conceived as an affair between wills, magic,
though distinct, has something in common with religion, so
that interpenetration and transfusion are possible between
them.
30
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
HIS paper represents the fruit of some
rather perfunctory, if only because in-
1 terrupted, meditation on the broader
and, so to speak, more philosophic features of
the contrast drawn between magic and religion
by Dr Frazer in the second edition of his Golden
Bough. Meanwhile, it is more immediately written
round the subject of the relation of incantation
to invocation, the spell to the prayer. I confess
to having reached my conclusions by ways that are
largely à priori. By this I do not mean, of course,
that I have excogitated them out of my inner con-
sciousness, as the Teutonic professor in the story is
said to have excogitated the camel. I simply mean
that the preliminary induction on which my hypo-
thesis is based consists partly in considerations per-
taining to the universal psychology of man, and
partly in general impressions derived from a limited
amount of discursive reading about savages. The
verification of my theory, on the other hand, by
means of a detailed comparison of its results with
the relevant evidence is a task beyond my present
means. As for my illustrations, these have been
hastily gathered from a few standard books and
papers, and most of all, I think, from that house
of heaped-up treasure, the Golden Bough itself. In
these circumstances my sole excuse for challenging
the views of an authority whose knowledge and com-
mand of anthropological fact is truly vast must be
that in the present inchoate state of the science there
can be no closed questions, nor even any reserved
ones--no mysteries over which expert may claim the
31
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
right to take counsel with expert, secure from the
incursions of the irresponsible amateur. I would
add that what I have to say is not intended in
any way to abrogate Dr Frazer's contrast between
magic and religion. On the contrary, I consider
it to embody a working distinction of first-
rate importance. I merely wish to mitigate this
contrast by proposing what, in effect, amounts to
a separation in lieu of a divorce. A working
principle, if it is to work, must not be pushed too
hard.
The question, then, that I propose to discuss is
the following: Does the spell help to generate the
prayer, and, if so, how? Now the spell belongs
to magic, and the prayer to religion. Hence
we are attacking, in specific shape, no less a
problem than this: Does magic help to generate
religion?
Perhaps it will make for clearness of exposition
if I outline the reply I would offer in what follows
to this latter question. First, I suppose certain
beliefs, of a kind natural to the infancy of thought,
to be accepted at face value in a spirit of naïve faith,
whilst being in fact illusory. The practice corre-
sponding to such naïve belief I call “rudimentary
magic.” Afterwards I conceive a certain sense of
their prima facie illusiveness to come to attach to
these beliefs, without, however, managing to in-
validate them. This I call the stage of “de-
veloped magic.” Such magic, as embodying a
reality that to some extent transcends appearance,
becomes to a corresponding extent a mystery.
32
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
As such, on my view, it tends to fall within
the sphere of religion. For I define the object
of religion to be whatever is perceived as a
mystery and treated accordingly. (Dr Frazer,
however, defines religion differently, and this
must be borne in mind in estimating the per-
tinence of such criticisms as I may pass on his
interpretations of the facts.)
Let us now turn to the Golden Bough to see what
light it throws on this same problem, viz., whether
magic is a factor in the genesis of religion. If I
understand Dr Frazer aright-and of this I am by
no means sure-his position comes to this. Magic
is a negative, but not a positive, condition of the
genesis of religion. The failure of magic is the
opportunity of religion. Hence it may be said to
help to generate religion in the sense in which
the idle apprentice may be said to help to set
up his more industrious rival by allowing him to
step into his shoes. But it makes no positive
contribution to religion either in the way of form
or of content.
More explicitly stated, Dr Frazer's theory runs
somewhat thus. (It is only fair to note that it is a
theory which he puts forward "tentatively” and
“with diffidence.”l) Originally, and so long as the
highest human culture was at what may be described
as an Australian level, magic reigned supreme, and
religion was not. But time and trial proved magic to
be a broken reed. “Man saw that he had taken for
causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts
G. B.,ai. 73 n., 75.
33
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
to work by means of these imaginary causes had been
vain. His painful toil had been wasted, his curious
ingenuity had been squandered to no purpose. He
had been pulling at strings to which nothing was
attached.” Whereupon“our primitive philosopher's
(and truly, we may say, did that savage of “deeper
mind” and “ shrewder intelligence” deserve this
title of " philosopher," if he could thus reason, as
Dr Frazer makes him do, about "causes" and the
like) advanced, “ very slowly,” indeed, and “step
by step,” to the following “ solution of his harassing
doubts.” “If the great world went on its way with-
out the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be
because there were other beings, like himself, but far
stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its course
and brought about all the varied series of events
which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on
his own magic."
Now the impression I get from these passages,
and from the whole of those twenty pages or so which
Dr Frazer devotes to the subject of the relation of
magic to religion as such, is that the epic vein de-
cidedly predominates therein. The glowing periods
in which the history of “the great transition” is
recounted are not easily translated into the cold
prose of science. Construed literally they appear
liable to not a few serious strictures. For example,
pure ratiocination seems to be credited with an
effectiveness without a parallel in early culture.
Almost as well say that, when man found he could
not make big enough bags with the throwing-stick,
he sat down and excogitated the bow-and-arrow.
IS
34
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
“mysterious powers ” sprung fully-armed from the
brain of man, and otherwise without assigned pre-
history.1 Finally, magic and religion appear to be
treated as in their inmost psychologic nature dis-
parate and unsympathetic forces, oil and water,
which even when brought into juxtaposition are so
far from mixing that the observer has no difficulty
in distinguishing what is due to the presence of each.2
One's first impression is that a purely analytic
method has escaped its own notice in putting on a
pseudo-genetic guise, that mere heads of classifica-
tion have first been invested with an impermeable
essence, and then identified with the phases of a
historical development which is thereby robbed of all
intrinsic continuity. But on second thoughts one
sees, I think, that to construe literally here is to
construe illiberally. Dr Frazer, in order to dispose
summarily of an interminable question, may be sup-
posed to have resorted to a kind of Platonic myth.
A certain priority and a certain absoluteness within
its own province had to be vindicated for magic as
against religion, if the special problem of the Golden
Bough was to be kept free of irrelevancies. This
vindication the myth contrives, and the rest is, so
to speak, literature. If Dr Frazer contemplates a
specific work on the early history of religion, he
doubtless intends to fill in what are manifest gaps in
the present argument. Meanwhile, as regards the
inquiry we are now embarked on, we may say that,
so far as he goes, Dr Frazer is against the view that
"G. B., ? i. 78.
? Cf. ib., 33, 45, etc.
35
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
I
magic is capable of merging in religion so as to become
part and parcel of it, but that he does not go very far
into the question, and leaves it more or less open to
further discussion. Wherefore to its further discus-
sion let us proceed.
Now in the first place it would clearly simplify
our task if we could find sufficient reason for assum-
ing that, whatever it may afterwards have become,
magic was originally something wholly unrelated to
religion—that, in short, it was originally sui generis.
I may point out that this is by no means the same
thing as to postulate, with Dr Frazer, an “age of
magic,” when religion simply was not. Our assump-
tion would not exclude the possibility of some sort
of religion having been coeval with magic. Which,
let me add, might have been the case, even were it
shown that magic can generate religion of a kind.
For religion has all the appearance of being a highly
complex and multifarious growth-a forest rather
than a tree.
That magic was originally sui generis might seem
a doctrine that hardly calls for establishment, so
universally is it accepted by anthropologists. Its
peculiar provenance is held to be completely known.
Thus Dr Frazer tells us that magic may be “ de-
duced immediately from elementary processes of
reasoning," meaning the laws of association, or,
specifically, the laws of association by similarity
and by contiguity in space or time.
Now it seems to me that, once more, these state-
ments need to be construed liberally. The psycho-
See G. B ,i. 73. 2 Tb., 70. Cf. 62.
- 36
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
logical purist might justly doubt whether Dr Frazer
is literally able to deduce magic immediately from
the laws of association. He would, at anyrate, deny
Dr Frazer's right to describe the laws of association
as“ processes of reasoning” or “laws of thought "
in any strict sense of these terms. A generation
ago, no doubt, when the self-styled school of “ex-
perience" dominated British psychology, these
expressions would have passed muster. In which
context it is perhaps relevant to remark that Dr
Frazer's theory of the associationalist origin of magic
would seem to have been influenced by that of Dr
Jevons, and that of Dr Jevons in its turn by that of
Dr Tylor, which was framed more than thirty years
ago, and naturally reflects the current state of
psychological opinion. To-day, however, no psy-
chologist worth seriously considering holds that
association taken strictly for just what it is suffices
to explain anything that deserves the name of
reasoning or thought, much less any form of practical
contrivance based on reasoning or thought. First
of all, association is no self-acting" mental chemistry,"
- but depends on continuity of interest. Secondly,
thought, that is, thought-construction, instead of
merely reproducing the old, transforms it into some-
thing new. The psychological purist, then, might
justly find fault with Dr Frazer's remarks as lacking
in technical accuracy, were technical accuracy to be
looked for in a passage that, to judge from its style,
is semi-popular in its purport. Even so, however,
this loose language is to be regretted. Seeing that
*G. B.,i. 70 and 62.
37
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
an all-sufficient associationalism has for sound reason
been banished from psychology, the retention of its
peculiar phraseology is to be deprecated as liable to
suggest that anthropology is harbouring an impostor
on the strength of obsolete credentials.
A word more touching the want of precision in Dr
Frazer's language. As in his account of the interior
history of the genesis of religion, so in his character-
ization of the inner nature of magic he seems to ex-
aggerate the work of pure ratiocination. Thus he
speaks of magic as a "philosophy” consisting in
“ principles " from which the savage “infers” and
“concludes " this and that; 1 magic“ proceeds
upon " such and such“ assumptions"; and so on.2
Now on the face of them these appear to be glaring
instances of what is known as “the psychologist's
fallacy.” The standpoint of the observer seems to
be confused with the standpoint of the mind under
observation. But there are indications that Dr
Frazer expects us to make the necessary allowance
for his metaphorical diction. Thus one of the
"assumptions” of magic is said to consist in a
“ faith” that whilst“ real and firm” is nevertheless
"implicit.” 3 Meanwhile, from the point of view
of the psychological purist, implicit, that is, uncon-
scious, inferences, assumptions, and so on, are little
better than hybrids. Now doubtless a considerable
amount of real inference may be operative at certain
stages in the development of magic. Nay, various
forms of magic may even be found to have originated
in a theorizing about causes that did not arise out of
G. B., i. 9. ? Ib., 49. 3 Ib. Cf. 62 with 61.
38
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
practice save indirectly, and was the immediate fruit
of reflection. I refer more especially to divination, if
divination is to be classed under magic, as Dr Tylor
thinks that it should. But, speaking generally, the
working principle we had better adopt as inquirers
into the origin of magic is, I suggest, the following:
to expect the theory to grow out of the practice, u
rather than the other way about; to try to start
from a savage Monsieur Jourdain who talks prose
whilst yet unaware that he is doing so.
In what follows I shall seek to observe this working
principle. Meanwhile, I cannot pretend to a syste-
matic and all-inclusive treatment of a subject which,
for me, I confess, has at present no well-marked
limits. Dr Frazer's division of magic into two kinds,
imitative and sympathetic, 2 is highly convenient for
analysis, but I am not so sure that it directly sub-
serves genesis. Not to speak of the question already
touched on whether divination falls under magic,
there are other practices quasi-magical in form, for
instance the familiar sucking-cure, which cannot be
easily reduced to cases either of imitative or sym-
pathetic magic, and which nevertheless, I believe,
are of connate psychological origin with practices
of one or other of the last-mentioned types. In
these circumstances my attempt at a derivation of
magic must be taken in the spirit in which it is offered
—namely, as illustrative merely. I shall keep as
closely as I can to undisputed forms of magical
practice, for instance the casting of spells by means
* See his article, "Magic,” in Encycl. Brit. (ninth edit.).
G. B., i. 9.
TT
39
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
of an image, in the hope that their development
moves along the central line of historical advance.
To start, then, as Dr Frazer seems to suggest that
we might, from the brutes. When a bull is in a rage
—and let us note that the rage as determining the
direction of interest has a good deal to do with the
matter 2-it will gore my discarded coat instead of
me, provided that the coat is sufficiently near, and I
am sufficiently remote, for the proximate stimulus
to dominate its attention. Of course it is very hard
to say what really goes on in the bull's mind. Pos-
sibly there is little or no meaning in speaking of
association as contributory to its act, as would be
the case supposing it be simply the sight of something
immediately gorable that lets loose the discharge of
wrath. On the other hand, suppose it to perceive
in the coat the slightest hint or flavour of the intrud-
ing presence of a moment before, suppose it to be
moved by the least aftertaste of the sensations pro-
voked by my red tie or rapidly retreating form, and
we might justly credit association with a hand in the
matter. And now to pass from the case of the ani-
mal to that of man, in regard to whom a certain
measure of sympathetic insight becomes possible.
With a fury that well-nigh matches the bull's in its
narrowing effect on the consciousness, the lover, who
yesterday perhaps was kissing the treasured glove of
his mistress, to-day, being jilted, casts her portrait
on the fire. Here let us note two things. Firstly,
i Cf. G. B.,? i. 70.
· Cf. Stout, Groundwork of Psychology, Section on “Emotion as
determining ideal revival," p. 120.
40
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
the mental digression, the fact that he is for the nonce
so“ blind,” as we say, with love or rancour, that the
glove or the portrait has by association become sub-
stituted for the original object of his sentiments,
namely, his mistress. Secondly, the completeness of
the digression. This dear glove fit only to be kissed,
this hateful portrait fit only to be burnt, occupies
his whole attention, and is therefore equivalent to an
irresistible belief that realizes itself as inevitably as a
suggestion does in the case of the hypnotic patient.
Such at least is the current psychological explanation
of the phenomenon known as “primitive credulity.”
Now can the man who throws the faithless maiden's
portrait into the fire, simply because the sight of it
irresistibly provokes him to do so, be said to be
practising magic? I think, hardly. Since, how-
ever, it is better that the class-concepts of anthro-
pology should be framed too wide rather than too
narrow, let us speak of a “rudimentary magic,” of
which the act of primitive credulity is the psycho-
logical terminus a quo.1 I contrast such "rudiment-
ary magic" with the “developed magic" whereof the
spirit is expressed in the formula: As I do this',
symbolically, so may something else like it be done in
reality. In the former naïve belief prevails, in the
latter a make-believe. In what immediately follows
we shall be concerned with the psychological history
of the transition from the rudimentary to the de-
veloped form.
It will be noted that I am dealing with magic almost exclusively
on its psychological side. The "rudimentary magic" of this passage
is not lo be identified with any social institution.
GI
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
The feature which it is most important for our
purpose to note in the act of primitive credulity is
that, to coin a phrase, it is not projective. This is
well illustrated by the case of the bull. The bull
does not gore my coat with any ulterior motive pre-
judicial to me. On the contrary, it contentedly
gores the coat, and, unless I am unfortunate enough
to recall the bull's attention to myself, I escape.
Thus there is none of that projectiveness to be
ascribed to the bull's motive which so characteristi-
cally enters into the motive of the act of developed
magic. We may be sure that the bull does not con-
ceive (a) that he is acting symbolically, that, in child-
language, he is “only pretending”; (6) that at the
same time his pretending somehow causes an ulterior
effect, similar as regards its ideal character, but
different in that it constitutes that real thing which is
the ultimate object of the whole proceeding.
And now let us go on to consider how such primi-
tive credulity is sundered from the beginnings of
enlightenment—if to practise projective magic is to
be enlightened-only by the veriest hair's-breadth.
The moment the bull's rage has died out of him, the
coat he was goring becomes that uninteresting thing
a coat must be to the normal animal whose interest
is solely in the edible. Now the bull, being a bull,
probably passes from the one perceptual context to
the other, from coat gorable to coat inedible, without
any feeling of the relation between them; they are
simply not one coat for him at all, but two. But
now put in the bull's place a more or less brute-like
man, with just that extra dash of continuity in his
42
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
mental life which is needed in order that the two
coats—the two successive phases of consciousness-
may be compared. How will they be compared?
We may be sure that the comparison will be, so to
speak, in favour of the more normal and abiding
experience of the two. If it be more normal to ignore
the coat than to gore it, there will arise a certain
sense—you may make it as dim as you will to begin
with, but once it is there at all it marks a step in
advance of primitive credulity—of the gorable aspect
of the coat as relatively delusive and unreal, of the
act of passion as relatively misdirected and idle.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding this new-found
capacity to recognize later on that he has been de-
luded, rage will continue to delude the subject so long
as its grip upon him lasts. Nay more, directly there
is a nascent self-consciousness, a sort of detached
personality to act as passive spectator, the deluding
passion may be actually accompanied by an aware-
ness of being given over to unreal imaginings and
vain doings. Doubtless your relatively low savage
might say with Kipling's philosopher of the barrack-
room:
“[I've] stood beside an’ watched myself
Be'avin' like a blooming fool.”
S
Make-believe, however, such as we meet with in v
developed magic, involves something more than mere
concurrent awareness that one is being fooled by one's
passion. It involves positive acquiescence in such
a condition of mind. The subject is not completely
mastered by the suggestion, as in the act of primitive
credulity. On the contrary, he more or less clearly
43
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
1
perceives it to be fanciful, and yet dallies with it and
lets it work upon him. Now why should he do this?
Well, originally, I suspect, because he feels that it
does him good. Presumably, to work off one's
wrath on any apology for an enemy is expletive, that
is, cathartic. He knows that he is not doing the real
thing, but he finds it does him good to believe he
is doing it, and so he makes himself believe it.
Symbol and ulterior reality have fallen apart in his
thought, but his “ will to believe” builds a bridge
from the one to the other. Symbolic act and ulterior
act symbolized are, we must remember, connected
by an ideal bond, in that they are more or less alike,
have a character partially identical which so far as it
is identical is provocative of one and the same type
of reaction. All that is required for the symbolic
act to acquire projectiveness is that this ideal bond
be conceived as a real bond. Since, however, the
appearance of mere ideality can ex hypothesi be
no longer ignored, it must instead be explained away.
Primitive credulity no longer suffices. In the place
of a naïve and effortless faith there is needed the kind
of faith that, to whatever extent it is assailed by
doubt, can recover itself by self-justification.
The methods of self-justification as practised by
the primitive mind, become aware that it is pretend-
ing, yet loth to abandon a practice rooted in impulse
and capable of affording relief to surcharged emotion,
are well worth the attention of the anthropologist.
The subject tends to be ignored in proportion as
association pure and simple is regarded as be-all and
end-all of the “art magic.” Now we need not sup-
44
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
pose that because the primitive mind is able to ex-
plain away its doubts, there is therefore necessarily
any solid and objective truth at the back of its ex-
planations. Given sufficient bias in favour of a
theory, the human mind, primitive or even civilized,
by unconsciously picking its facts and by the various
other familiar ways of fallacy, can bring itself to
believe almost any kind of nonsense. At the same
time there does happen to be an objectively true and
real projectiveness in the kind of symbolic magic we
have been especially considering—the discharge of
wrath on the image or what not. We know that as
a fact to be symbolically tortured and destroyed by
his enemy “gets on the nerves” of the savage, so
that he is apt really to feel torturing pains and die.1
The psychology of the matter is up to a certain point
simple enough, the principles involved being indeed
more or less identical with those we have already had
occasion to consider. Just as the savage is a good
actor, throwing himself like a child into his mime, so
he is a good spectator, entering into the spirit of
another's acting, herein again resembling the child,
who can be frightened into fits by the roar of what
he knows to be but a “pretended ” lion. Even if
the make-believe is more or less make-believe to the
victim, it is hardly the less efficacious; for, dominat-
ing as it tends to do the field of attention, it racks
the emotional system, and, taking advantage of the
relative abeyance of intelligent thought and will, sets
stirring all manner of deep-lying impulses and auto-
See, e.g., G. B.,? i. 13.
45
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
matisms. Well, this being objectively the fact,
are we to allow that the savage magician and his
victim may become aware of the fact? I think we
must. Of course the true reasons of the fact, namely,
that suggestion is at work, and so on, are beyond the
ken of primitive man. But I submit that the pro-
jectiveness of the magical act is grounded, not merely
on a subjective bias that “fakes” its facts, but on
one that is met half-way, so to speak, by the real
facts themselves. I would even suppose that the kind
of magic practised by man on man, since it lent itself
especially to objective verification, may very well have
been the earliest kind of developed magic--the earliest
kind to pass beyond the stage of impulse to that of
more or less conscious and self-justifying policy. Were
this the case, one would have to assume that the
savage extended his sphere of operations by some dim
sort of analogous reasoning. If, despite appearances
to the contrary, magic really answered in the case of
man, it would really answer in the case of the weather
and so on; to vent one's spleen on the weather being,
meanwhile, as a naïve impulsive act, hardly, if at all,
less natural than to do so in the case of one's human
foe.2 Thus I surmise that the proved effectiveness
of the social department of developed magic gave the
greater share of such logical support as was required
to the meteorological and other branches of the
business.
2
"At this point I might have gone into the confirmatory effect of the
credulity being shared by society at large. For psychological pur-
poses, however, it was sufficient to treat the magical experiment as
confined to the operator and his victim.
2 Cf. G. B.,i. 108-9.
46
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
It is high time that we address ourselves to the
more immediate subject of our interest, the spell,
the nature of which, however, could not fail to be
misunderstood so long as the magical act was vaguely
conceived on its psychological side, that is, the side
of its true inwardness, the side to which it is the
supreme business even of an anthropology that
prides itself on its “ objective methods ” to attend.
To begin, then, at the beginning, why should there
be an accompanying spell at all? Is it, in fact, an
indispensable part of the true magical ceremony?
Now it is true that not infrequently the absence of any
incantation from a piece of magical ritual as at any-
rate performed to-day is expressly noted. To give
but one example. Among the Khonds of Orissa a
branch cut by a priest in the enemy's country is
dressed up and armed so as to personate one of the
foe. Thereupon it is thrown down at the shrine of
the war god, but this “ appeal” to him for co-opera-
tion is, we are expressly told,“ silent," I and that
notwithstanding the semi-religious character which
the magical rite has put on. On the other hand, the
use of the spell as an accompaniment or rather in-
tegral portion of the magical performance is so pre-
valent, that I am inclined, merely on the strength
of the historical evidence, to regard its presence as
normal in the perfect and uncontaminated ceremony.
This supposition would, however, be immensely
strengthened if we could discover good psychological
reason why the spell ought to be there.
I preferred a moment ago to speak of the spell as an
J.A. I., ix. 362.
47
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
integral portion, rather than as the mere accompani-
ment, of the magical rite, since it is rather with de-
veloped than with rudimentary magic that we shall be
concerned when in the sequel we consider actual speci-
mens of the kind of spellin use. Corresponding to the act
of primitive credulity there may be, I conceive, a kind
of spell, if spell it can be called, which is no more than a
mere accompaniment. Such a verbal accompaniment
will either be purely expletive, or it may be what I
shall call “ descriptive,” as when a child making a
picture of a man says aloud to himself, “I am
making a man”; that is, supposing him to be merely
playing spectator to himself, and not to be assisting
himself to imagine that what he draws is a man.
Such descriptive accompaniments would of course
tend to pass, unaltered in form, into instruments of
make-believe as soon as the make-believe stage of
magic begins. Nevertheless, the whole psychological
character of the spell is from that moment changed.
It henceforth forms an integral part of the rite, since
it helps the action out.
What do I mean by “helping the action out”?
Let us recur to the notion of developed magic as a
more or less clearly-recognized pretending, which
at the same time is believed to project itself into an
ulterior effect. Now I cannot but suppose that such
projectiveness is bound to strike the savage as mys-
terious. “But no," says Dr Frazer; “magic is the
savage equivalent of our natural science.” This I
cannot but profoundly doubt. If it is advisable to
use the word “science” at all in such a context, I
should say that magic was occult science to the
T
48
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
savage,“ occult” standing here for the very antithe-
sis of “natural.” Dr Frazer proceeds to work out
his parallel by formulating the assumption he holds
to be common to magic and natural science. Both
alike imply " that in nature one event follows
another necessarily and invariably without the inter-
vention of any spiritual or personal agency”; or
again,“ that the course of nature is determined, not
by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by
the operation of immutable laws acting mechani-
in developed magic as revealed by the corresponding
type of spell, namely, the type of spell which helps
the action out, is surely something utterly distinct
in kind from what natural science postulates under
these same notoriously ambiguous names. It is
not the “is and cannot but be ” of a satisfied in-
duction. On the contrary, it is something that has
but the remotest psychological affinity therewith,
namely, such a "must" as is involved in “May so
and so happen,” or “ I do this in order that so and so
may happen.” Such a "must" belongs to magic in
virtue of the premonitory projectiveness that reveals
itself in the operator's act of imperative willing.
Meanwhile, so far as the process fails to explain itself
in this way- and it must always, I contend, be felt as
something other than a normal and ordinary act of
imperative willing—it will inevitably be felt to be
occult, supernormal, supernatural, and will participate
1
1
"G. B , i. 61, 63. In iii. 459, however, the view that magic and
science have any real presupposition in common seems virtually to bę
given up.
49
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
in, while pro tanto colouring, whatever happens to
be the general mode of accounting for supernatural-
istic events. But this, I take it, will always tend to
be some theory of quasi-personal agency.
Dr Frazer, however, is so far from allowing this
that he makes the implicit presupposition to be the
very opposite of the notion of personal agency,
namely, the idea of mechanical causation. He does
not, however, attempt to go into the psychology of
the matter, and the psychological probabilities, I
submit, will be found to tell dead against this view
of his. Mechanical causation is indeed by no means
unknown to the savage. From the moment he
employs such mechanical aids as tools he may be
supposed to perceive that the work he does with
them proceeds as it were directly and immediately
from them. He throws a spear at his enemy; it
hits him; and the man drops. That the spear makes
the man drop he can see. But when a wizard
brandishes a magic spear simply in the direction of
a distant, perhaps absent and invisible, person, who
thereafter dies, the wizard—not to speak of the by-
standers—is almost bound to notice something in the
action of the symbolic weapon that is indirect, and
as such calls aloud for explanation on non-mechani-
cal lines. The spear did not do it of itself, but some
occult power, whether in, or behind, the spear.
Further, his own consciousness cannot fail to give
him an intuitive inkling of what this power is, namely,
his projection of will, a psychic force, a manifestation
of personal agency, mana. It is a secondary con-
sideration whether he locate the personal agency,
50
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
the “devil,” in the spear, in himself, or in some
tertium quid that possesses it or him. In any case
the power is represented quasi-personally. I am
quite prepared to believe with Mr Lang that gods
tend at first to be conceived as exercising their power
precisely as a magician does. But it does not there-
fore follow, as it must if Dr Frazer's theory of magical
as mechanical causation be accepted, that in some
sense the early gods came down to men“ from out of
a machine.”
We have been hitherto considering the magical act
from the point of view of the operator. Let us now
inquire what sort of character is imposed by it on the
other party to the transaction, namely, the victim.
If our previous hypothesis be correct, that to the
operator the magical act is generically a projection
of imperative will, and specifically one that moves on
a supernormal plane, it follows that the position of the
victim will be, in a word, a position compatible with
rapport. As the operator is master of a supernormal
“must," so the victim is the slave of that same
“must." Now surely there is nothing in such a
position on the part of the victim that is incompatible
with the possession of what we know as will. On the
contrary, might we not expect that the operator, as
soon as he comes to reflect on the matter at all,
would think of his power as somehow making itself
felt by his victim, as somehow coming home to him,
as somehow reaching the unwilling will of the man
and bending it to an enforced assent? On this
theory a magical transaction ought, hardly if at all
* Myth, Ritual and Religion, i. 120,
51
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
less naturally than a religious transaction, to assume
the garb of an affair between persons. We shall see
presently whether there is evidence that it actually
does. On Dr Frazer's view, however, magic and
religion are systems based on assumptions that are
as distinct and wide apart as matter and mind, their
ultimate implications. Hence, if magic and religion
join forces, it is for Dr Frazer a mere contamination
of unrelated originals incapable of presenting the
inward unity of a single self-developing plot. He is
driven to allege a “confusion of ideas,” a “mixture,''
a “fusion," an "amalgamation," such as can take
place only under the pressure of some extrinsic
influence. For a satisfactory clue, however, to
the nature of the collocating cause we search his
writings in vain.
Meanwhile, Dr Frazer seems to admit the thin end
of the wedge into his case for a mechanically-causative
magic by allowing that the material on which it
works is composed not merely of “ things which are
regarded as inanimate," but likewise of “persons
whose behaviour in the particular circumstances is
known to be determined with absolute certainty.” 2
Now of course magic may be conceived as taking
effect on a person through his body, as when that
which is projected takes the form of an atnongara stone,
viz. a piece of crystal, or of something half-material,
half-personal, like the arungquiltha of the Arunta, or
the badi of the Malays. After all, magic in one of
i G. B.,' i. 67, 69.
? See G. B.,- i. 63, where this is clearly implied.
3 Cf. Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia,
531 and 537 ; Skeat, Malay Magic, 427.
52
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
its most prominent aspects is a disease-making. But
Dr Frazer's interest is not in these secondary notions.
He is seeking to elucidate the ultimate implication
of magic when he explains “determined with abso-
lute certainty" to mean-determined, as is "the
course of nature," " by the operation of immutable
laws acting mechanically.” i But a person con-
ceived as simply equivalent to an inanimate thing-
for that is precisely what it comes to-is a funda-
mentally different matter, I contend, from the
notion I take to be, not implicit, but nascently ex-
plicit 2 here, namely, that of a will constrained. No
doubt the modern doctrine of a psychological auto-
matism virtually forbids us to speak any longer of
"will" in such a connection. To naïve thought,
however, as witness the more popular explanations
of the phenomena of suggestion current in our own
time, the natural correlative to exercise of will on the
part of the operator will surely be submission, i.e. of
will, as we should say, on the part of the patient.
For the rest, it would seem that Dr Frazer bases his
case for it being a kind of physical necessity that is
ascribed by the savage to the workings of his magic on
the explanation which the medicine-man gives of his
failures, when he alleges that nothing but the inter-
ference of another more potent sorcerer could have
robbed his spell of its efficacy. But the excuse
"G. B.,? i. 63.
? Compare the effect on the woman ascribed to the lonka-lonka,
below, p. 65.
3 G. B.,. i. 61. See, however, Sp. and G., 532, from which it
appears that the medicine-man by no means sticks to a single form of
excuse.
53
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
appears to imply, if anything, a conditionality and
relativity of will-power, of mana, the analogy of the
scientific law being manifestly far-fetched. And
surely it is in any case somewhat rash to deduce the
implicit assumptions of an art from such a mere
piece of professional “ bluff.”
If, then, the occult projectiveness of the magical
act is naturally and almost inevitably interpreted as
an exertion of will that somehow finds its way to
another will and dominates it, the spell or uttered
“must” will tend, I conceive, to embody the very
life and soul of the affair. Nothing initiates an im-
perative more cleanly, cutting it away from the
formative matrix of thought and launching it on its
free career, than the spoken word. Nothing, again,
finds its way home to another's mind more sharply.
It is the very type of a spiritual projectile. I do not,
indeed, believe that what may be called the silent
operations of imitative magic are ultimately sign-
language and nothing more. I prefer to think, as I
have already explained, that they are originally like
the fire drawn from an excitable soldier by the tree-
stump he mistakes for an enemy, or, more precisely,
miscarriages of passion-clouded purpose prematurely
caused by a chance association; and that what
might be called their prefigurative function is an out-
growth. But I certainly do incline to think that,
when the stage of developed magic is reached and the
projectiveness of the mimic act is established as a
fact, a fact, however, that as mysterious, occult, calls
aloud for interpretation, the projective character of
the silent part of the magical ritual will come to under-
54
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
lie its whole meaning; and further, that the spell, as
being the crispest embodiment of the “must," as
spring and soul of the projection, will naturally
provide the general explanatory notion under which
the rest will be brought, namely, that of an imperative
utterance.
Let us now consider typical specimens of the vari-
ous kinds of spell in common use, partly in order to
test and substantiate the foregoing contentions, but
more especially so that haply we may observe the
spell pass by easy gradations into the prayer, the
imperative into the optative. To begin with, I
would suggest that at the stage of developed magic
the most perfect spell is one of the following form-
a form so widely distributed and easily recognized
that a single example will suffice to characterize it.
In ancient Peru, when a war expedition was contem-
plated, they were wont to starve certain black sheep
for some days and then slay them, uttering the in-
cantation: 1"As the hearts of these beasts are
weakened, so let our enemies be weakened.” Pre-
cisely the same type is found all over the world,
from Central Australia to Scotland. I call this form
perfect, because it takes equal notice of present sym-
bolization and ulterior realization, instrument and
end. Here the instrument is the weakening of the
beasts, the end the weakening of the enemy. Let
us not, however, overlook the explicitly stated link
between the two, the unifying soul of the process,
namely, the imperative " let them be weakened.”
It is apt to escape one's attention because the
Acosta, ii. 342. 2 Cf. Sp. and G., 536, and G. B., i. 17.
55
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
Y
I
I DYT
operator, instead of obtruding his personality upon
us, concentrates like a good workman on his instru-
ment, which might therefore at the first glance be
credited with the origination of the force it but
transmits. Not unfrequently, however, the personal
agency of the operator appears on the surface of the
spell, as when sunshine is made in New Caledonia by
kindling a fire and saying: “ Sun! I do this that you
may be burning hot." 1 Here the sun is treated as a
“ you," so that the operator is perhaps not unnatu-
rally led to refer to himself as the other party to this
transaction between persons. Meanwhile, though
our second instance is interesting as indicating the
true source of the mana immanent in the spell, namely,
the operator's exertion of will-power, it is better not
to insist too strongly on the difference between the
instrument and the force that wields and as it were
fills it. Both alike belong to what may be called the
protasis of the spell. The important logical cleavage
occurs between protasis and apodosis—the firing of
the projectile and the hitting of the target-the
setting-in-motion of the instrument and the realiza-
tion of the end. Every true spell, I submit, distin-
guishes implicitly or explicitly between the two. I
say implicitly or explicitly, for we find curtailed
spells of the kind " We carry Death into the water,"
no mention being made of the symbol.2 It would be
quite wrong, however, to argue that here is no make-
believe, no disjoining of instrument and end requiring
an exertion of credulity that simply takes the one act
for the other. This is shown by the occurrence of the
Cf. G. B.,21. 116.
2 [b., ii. 83.
56
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
same sort of spell in fuller form, e.g., “Ha, Koré, we
fling you into the river, like these torches, that you
may return no more.”] The participants in the rite
know, in short, that they are “only pretending.”
They have the thought which it is left to Mr Skeat's
Malays to express with perfect clearness: " It is not
wax that I am scorching, it is the liver, heart and
spleen of So-and-so that I scorch." 2
This relative disjunction, then, of instrument and
end, protasis and apodosis, being taken as character-
istic of the spell of developed magic, let us proceed to
inquire how each in turn is in general character fitted
to promote the development of the prayer out of the
spell (assuming this to be possible at all). First,
then, let us consider whether magic contributes any-
thing of its own to religion when we approach the
subject from the side of what has been called the
instrument. Under this head we have agreed to
take account both of the projective act and of the
projectile-in other words, both of the putting forth
of the "must" and of the symbol in which the
"must" is embodied.
Now the projective act, I have tried to show,
while felt by the operator as essentially a kind of
imperative willing, is yet concurrently perceived by
him to be no ordinary and normal kind of imperative
willing. Inasmuch as the merely symbolized and
pretended reproduces itself in an ulterior and
separate shape as solid fact, the process is manifestly
occult or supernormal. Now I have elsewhere tried
to show probable reason why the prime condition of
Cf. G. B.,- ii. 108.
2 M. M., 570.
57
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
the historical genesis of religion should be sought in
the awe caused in man's mind by the perception of
the supernatural, that is, supernormal, as it occurs
within him and about him. For the purposes of
the anthropologist I would have the limits of primitive
religion coincide with those of primitive "super-
naturalism.” To adopt a happy phrase coined by
Mr Hartland when noticing my view, the super-
natural is the original “ theoplasm, god-stuff.” 1
Is, then, the occult or supernatural as revealed in
magic at first the one and only form of supernatural
manifestation known to man? Emphatically I say,
No. To take but one, and that perhaps the most
obvious, example of an object of supernaturalistic
awe that anthropology must be content to treat as
primary and sui generis, the mystery of human death
may be set over against the miracle of the magical
projection as at least as original and unique a rally-
ing-point of superstition. On the other hand, I am
quite prepared to believe that magical occultism was
able of its own right to colour primitive super-
naturalism to a marked and noteworthy extent. I
suggest that the peculiar contribution of magic-
at all events of the kind of magic we have been con-
sidering—to religion was the idea of mana.” No.
doubt, the actual mana of the Melanesians will on
analysis be found to yield a very mixed and self-
contradictory set of meanings, and to stand for any
kind of power that rests in whatever way upon the
divine. I suppose it, however, to have the central
1 Folk-Lore, xii. 27.
? On the subject of " magomorphism," cf. p. 88.
58
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
21
and nuclear sense of magical power; and, apart from
the question of historical fact, let me, for expository
purposes at anyrate, be allowed to give the term this
connotation. The inwardness of such mana or
magical power we have seen reason to regard as
derived by the magician from a more or less intuitive
perception of his projective act of will as the force
which occultly transmutes his pretence into ulterior
reality. But if the essence of his supernormal power
lie in precisely this, then wherever else there be dis-
coverable supernormal power under control of a
person, will not its essence tend to be conceived as
consisting in the same? Meanwhile, all manifesta-
tions of the supernatural are likely to appear as in
some sense manifestations of power, and as in some
sense personally controlled. That they should be
noticed at all by man they must come within the
range of his practical interests, that is, be as agents
or patients in regard to him; and, if he is in awe of
them, it will assuredly be as agents, actual or poten-
tial, that is, as powers, that he will represent them to
himself. And again, whatever is able to stand up
against him as an independent and self-supporting
radiator of active powers will be inevitably invested
by him with more or less selfhood or personality like
in kind to what he is conscious of in himself. Thus
there is no difficulty in explaining psychologically
why mana, should be attributed to those quasi-
personal powers of awful nature by which the savage,
immersed in half-lights and starting like a child at
his own shadow, feels himself on every hand to be
surrounded.
59
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
Why, then, does Dr Frazer, whilst admitting that
for the magician to seek for mana at the hands of
ghosts of the dead, stones, snakes, and so on, is
characteristic of that “ earlier stage ” in the history
of religion when the antagonism between sorcerer
and priest as yet was not, nevertheless treat this as
a “confusion of magic and religion," and go on to
lay it down that “this fusion is not primitive "? 1
Is it not simply that he ignores the possibility of the
origin of the idea of mana itself in the inward ex-
perience that goes with the exercise of developed
magic? For Dr Frazer this seeking for supernatural
aid on the part of the sorcerer is a “passing into
another kind.” The sorcerer's exertion of power
and the mana he craves of his gods have no direct
psychological affinity. If, however, our argument
has not been all along proceeding on a false track,
there is a specific identity of nature common to the
force which animates the magical act as such, and
that additional force which in certain cases is sought
from an external supernatural source. Psycho-
logically speaking, there seems every reason why,
granting that the magical act is regarded as occult,
and as such falls into line with whatever else is occult
and supernatural, its peculiar inwardness as revealed
has the prima facie appearance of a quasi-personal
exertion of supernatural power. After all, we know
that, in point of fact, the savage is ready enough to
put down whatever effects he cannot rationally
account for (e.g., disease) to what may be termed
*G. B.,? i. 65-6, 69.
60
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
sorcery in the abstract. But, once it is established
that to feel like and inwardly be a supernatural
agent is to feel oneself exerting the will-power of
a human magician, then what more natural than
that a human magician when in difficulties should
seek, by any one of the many modes of entering
into relations with the divine, to reinforce his own
mana from the boundless store of self-same mana
belonging to those magicians of a higher order whom,
so to speak, he has created after his own image?
All this, however, I confess, it is easier to deduce
than to verify. When we try to study the matter
in the concrete, we soon lose our way amongst plural
causes and intermixed effects. For instance, it is
clear that the savage has inward experience of the
supernormal, not only in his feats of projective magic,
but likewise in his dreams, his fits of ecstasy, and so
on (though these latter seem to have no place within
the sphere of magic proper). Or again we have
been dealing with the act of magic from the point of
view of the operator. But there is also the point of
view of the victim, whose suggestibility will, we may -
suppose, be largely conditioned by the amount of
“asthenic” emotion-fear and fascination-induced
in him. Hence any sort of association with the
supernatural and awful which the sorcerer can
establish will be all to the good. An all-round
obscurantism and mystery-mongering is his policy,
quite apart from the considerations that make his
own acts mysterious to himself. However, the
quotations cited by Dr Frazer from Dr Codrington
seem fairly crucial as regards the hypothesis I am
DS
61
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
TTA
defending. Mana is at all events the power which
is believed to do the work in Melanesian magic, and
to obtain mana on the other hand is the object of the
rites and practices that make up what anthropologists
will be ready to call Melanesian “religion.” Or
once more we seem to find exactly what we want in
the following prayer of the Malay pawang at the
grave of a murdered man: “ Hearken, So-and-so,
and assist me . . . I desire to ask for a little magic.” 2
I submit, then, that mana, as I have interpreted it, ·
yields the chief clue to the original use of names of
power in connection with the spell, from " in the
devil's name "3 to “ Im Namen Jesu.” 4 Mr Skeat
has compared the exorcising of disease-demons by
invoking a spirit of some powerful wild beast, the
elephant or the tiger, to the casting out of devils
through Beelzebub their prince.5 Admitting the
comparison to be just and apt, is there not at the
back of this the notion of the magic-working power
the “control”-inherent in the supernatural being
as such? 6 Secondary ideas will of course tend to
superimpose themselves, as when, as Mr Skeat has
abundantly shown, the magician invokes the higher
power no longer as an ally, but rather as a shield.
“ It is not I who am burying him in the form of a
waxen image), it is Gabriel who is burying him.”7
Still Gabriel, I suggest, was primarily conceived as a
* G. B.,? i. 65-6. Cf. the same authority in J. A. I., xi. 309.
2 M. M., 60-1.
3 Cf. G. B.,? i. 121.
4 Cf. W. Heitmüller, Im Namen Jesut, Göttingen, 1903.
5 Folk-Lore, xiii. 159.
6 The Malay charm-book quoted by Mr Skeat puts the matter
typically, “God was the Eldest Magician.” 11. M., 2,
7 M. M., 571. Cf. G. B.,? i. 11.
1
62
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
magic-working power, and indeed as such is able
to bear all responsibility on his broad shoulders.
Compare the huntsman's charm addressed to the
(more or less divine) deer: “ It is not I who am hunts-
man, it is Pawang Sidi (wizard Sidi) that is hunts-
man; It is not I whose dogs these are, it is Pawang
Sakti (the 'magic wizard ') whose dogs these are.” 1
But I must move forward to another aspect of
the inherent tendency of the magical instrument
to generate religion. Instead of taking the form of
a divine fellow-operator who backs the magician,
the mana may instead associate itself so closely
with the magician's symbol as to seem a god whose
connection is with it rather than with him. The
ultimate psychological reason for this must be
sought, as I have already hinted, in the good work-
man's tendency to throw himself literally, as far as
his consciousness goes, into the work before him.
He is so much one in idea with his instrument that
the mana in him is as easily represented as resident
in it. Meanwhile the capacity of naïve thought to
personify whatever has independent existence must
help out the transference, as may be illustrated
abundantly from such a magnificent collection of
spells as we get in the Golden Bough. Contrast the
following pair of cases. In West Africa, when a
war party is on foot, the women dance with brushes
in their hands, singing, “Our husbands have gone to
Ashantee land; may they sweep their enemies off
the face of the earth.” 2 In much the same way in
the Kei Islands, when a battle is in progress, the
M. M., 175.
- G. B.,? i. 34.
63
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
women wave fans in the direction of the enemy.
What they say, however, is, “ O golden fans! let our
bullets hit and those of the enemy miss.”? 1 We
must not make too much of such a change from
impersonal mention to personal address. It implies
no more than a slight increase in vividness of idea.
Still, as far as it goes, I take it, it is all in the direction
of that more emphatic kind of personification which
gives the thing addressed enough soul of its own to
enable it to possess mana. In the following Russian
example we seem to see the instrument first created,
then invested with personality, and lastly filled with
mana more or less from without: "I attach five
knots to each hostile infidel shooter. ... Do ye,
O knots, bar the shooter from every road and way.
... In my knots lies hid the mighty strength of
snakes--from the twelve-headed snake.” 2 Here the
mana is added more or less from without, for, though
parison, yet the twelve-headed snake sounds like an
intensification definitely borrowed from mythology.
The example, however, is not sufficiently primitive
to bear close scrutiny as regards the thought it con-
tains. On the other hand, the Australians are, in Dr
Frazer's eyes at least, as primitive as you please, and
it is precisely amongst them that he finds a magic free
of religion. Yet Australia presents us with a crucial
case of the deification of the magical instrument. ?
To punish their enemies the Arunta prepare a
i G. B.,' i. 33.
2 G. B.,- i. 399.
serpent (Greek),
Cf. iii. 360, which introduces us to a ten-headed
64
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
magic spear. It is named the arungquiltha, this
name, let us note, being equally applicable to the
supernatural evil power that possesses anybody or
anything, and to the person or object wherein it is
permanently or for the time being resident. They
then address it, “ Go straight, go straight and kill
him," and wait till the arungquiltha is heard to reply,
“Where is he?"-being, we are told,“ regarded in
this instance as an evil spirit resident in the magic
implement." 1 Thereafter a crash of thunder is
heard, and a fiery appearance is seen streaking across
the sky—a beautifully concrete image, by the way, of
--the projectiveness ascribed by the savage to his magic.
It is but a step from this to the identification of the
arungquiltha with comets and shooting-stars.2 By
a converse movement of mythologizing thought,
when a man wishes to charm a certain shell ornament,
the lonka-lonka, so that it may gain him the affections
of a woman, he sings over it certain words which
convey an invitation to the lightning to come and
dwell in the lonka-lonka. The supposed effect of
this on the woman is precisely that we nowadays
attribute to suggestion. She, though absent in
her own camp, sees, with the inward eye as it were,
since she alone sees it, the lightning flashing on the
lonka-lonka, “and all at once her internal organs
shake with emotion.” 3 Now why these easy
transitions of thought from the magical instrument
to a celestial portent, and vice versa, not to speak of
the identification of arungquiltha with other mani-
festations of the supernatural embodied in stones,
* Sp. and G., 548-9. 16., 550. 3 16., 545.
65
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
alcheringa animals, and what not?i Simply, I
answer, because magic proper is all along an occult
process, and as such part and parcel of the “god-
stuff” out of which religion fashions itself. And
more than this, by importing its peculiar projective-
ness into the vague associations of the occult it pro-
vides one, though I do not say the only, centre round
which those associations may crystallize into relatively
clear, if even so highly fluid and unstable, forms.
We may see why the medicine-man is so ready to
press into his service that miscellaneous mass of
“plant,” dead men's bones, skins of strange animals,
and what not; and why these objects in their turn
come to be able to work miracles for themselves, and
in fact develop into non-human medicine-men. But
all these things were psychologically next door to
impossible, if magic were in origin a mechanical
"natural science” utterly alien in its inward essen-
tial nature to all religion, and as such capable only
of yielding to it as a substitute, and never of join-
ing forces with it as ally and blood-relation. Surely,
if we look at the matter simply from this side
alone, the side of the instrument, there is enough
evidence to upset the oil-and-water theory of Dr
Frazer.
Before we leave the subject of the instrument
let us finally note that concurrently with the personi-
fication and progressive deification of the instrument,
as it may be called, the spell evolves into the prayer.
Thus, on the one hand, the name of power associated
with the spell, instead of being merely quoted so as
Sp. and G., 550-1,
66
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
by simple juxtaposition to add mana to mana, may
be invoked as a personal agency by whose good grace
the charm as a whole is caused to work. Dr Frazer
provides us with an instance of this from the Kei
Islands. When their lords are away fighting, the
women, having anointed certain stones and fruits
and exposed them on a board, sing: “O lord sun
and moon let the bullets rebound from our hus-
bands . . . just as raindrops rebound from these
objects which are smeared with oil.” 1 Dr Frazer
speaks of “the prayer to the sun that he will be
pleased to give effect to the charm” as “a religious
and perhaps later addition.” No doubt in a sense
it is. We have seen reason to believe, however,
that such a development is natural to the spell;
and this particular development would be especially
natural if we regard the sun and moon as invoked
not merely as magic-working powers in general,
but as powers of the sky which send the rain and
are thus decidedly suggested by the spell itself.
At anyrate it seems quite certain that reflection on
the occult working of a spell will generate the notion
of external divine agency, and this notion in its turn
give rise to prayer. Thus the New Caledonia rain-
makers poured water over a skeleton so that it might
run on to some taro leaves. “They believed that
the soul of the deceased took up the water, con-
verted it into rain, and showered it down again."
From this belief it is but a step to prayer. And so
we find that in Russia, where a very similar rite is
practised, whilst some pour water on the corpse
G. B.;? i. 33.
67
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
through a sieve, others beat it about the head,
exclaiming, “Give us rain.”i In these cases the
power invoked is more or less external to the symbol.
On the other hand, it may be identical with the
symbol. Thus the Fanti wizard puts a crab into a
hole in the ground over which the victim is about to
pass, and sprinkles rum over it with the invocation:
"O Crab-Fetish, when So-and-so walks over you,
may you take life from him.”2 Here the crab, I
suggest, was originally a magical symbol on a par
with the stones which in Borneo serve to protect
fruit trees, the idea of which is that the thief may
suffer from stones in the stomach like to these.
These Borneo stones are similarly treated as personal
agencies. They are called on to witness the anathema.
Or again, if a friend of the proprietor wishes to
pluck the fruit, he first lights a fire and asks it to
explain to the stones that he is no thief.3 In short,
there is fairly crucial evidence to show how naturally
and insensibly the charm-symbol may pass into the
idol.4 All that is needed is that there should be
sufficient personification for prayer to be said,
It remains to speak very briefly of the correspond-
ing personification and gradual deification of what
in contrast to the “instrument” I have called the
“end.” Now clearly the curtailed form of spell
with suppressed protasis is to all outward appearance
a prayer and nothing else. Take a single very simple
"G. B.,? i. 100.
27. A. I., xxvi. 151. Cf. G. B.,2 ii. 69-70, where the divine
cuttle-fish is propitiated, lest it make a cuttle-fish grow in the man's
inside,
3 16., xxiii. 161.
4 Cf. Dr Haddon in 7. A. I., xix. 324.
68
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
example-the". Fruit, Fruit, Fruit, Fruit,” which
we find at the end of various Malay charms con-
nected with the practice of “productive” magic.)
According to our previous conclusions, however,
this is no prayer so long as the force which sets the
spell in motion is felt by the operator as an exertion
of imperative will and an attempt to establish control.
But, given a form of words which need suffer no
change though the thought at the back of it alter,
what more natural than that the mind of the charmer
should fluctuate between “ bluff" and blandish-
ment, conjuration and cajolery?
Mr Skeat provides us with examples of how easily
this transition effects itself in the course of one and
the same ceremony. Thus" Listen, o listen, to
my injunctions"-which is surely prayer-is im-
mediately followed by threat backed by the name of
power: “And if you hearken not to my instructions
you shall be rebels in the sight of Allah.” 2 And
that we need not suppose this transition to involve
a change of mind from overweening pride of soul to
it clear that prayer may be resorted to as a trick,
may be a civil request that but masks a decoy,4 a
complication which in itself shows how artificial
1
own classificatory purposes, between magic and re-
ligion. So far we have considered the transition
' Cf. Mr Skeat in Folk-Lore, xiii. 161.
2 Folk-Lore, xiii. 142.
3 Contrast what Dr Frazer says about man's new-found sense of his
own littleness, etc., G. B.,? i. 78.
4 M. M., 140, 308.
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
from the side of the operator. And now look at it
from the side of the patient or victim whose will he
seeks to constrain. That it is a question of a will con-
strained, and not of a person conceived as equivalent
to an inanimate thing, we have already argued. An
example of the way the savage figures to himself the
effects of the control he exerts was provided by the
Arunta description of the woman who with the in-
ward eye sees the lightning flashing on the lonka-
lonka, and all at once her inward parts are shaken
with the projected passion. Now savage thought
finds no difficulty in postulating will constrained
where we deny will and personality altogether.
And, once personify, you are on the way to worship.
Thus in China they sweep out the house and say,
“Let the devil of poverty depart.”In Timorlaut
and Ceram they launch the disease boat, at the same
time crying, “O sickness, go from here.” 2 Already
here we seem to find the spell-form changed over into
the prayer-form. Meanwhile in Buro the same
rite is accompanied by the invocation: “Grand-
father Small-pox, go away." 3 Here the “ Grand-
father” is clearly indicative of the true spirit of
prayer, as might be illustrated extensively. Or
so again the magical ploughing of the Indian women
is accompanied by what can only be described as a
prayer to “Mother Earth." 4 Clearly the cults of
the rice-mother, the maize-mother, the corn-mother,
and so on, wherein magic is finally swallowed up in
unmistakable religion, are the natural outcome of
"G. B , iii. 83.
3 Ib., 98.
2 16., 97-8.
4 16., i. 99.
70
FROM SPELL TO PRAYER
such a gradually-intensifying personification. But
this personification in its turn would follow naturally
upon that view of the magical act which we have all
along assumed to have been its ground-idea, namely,
the view that it is an inter-personal, inter-subjective
transaction, an affair between wills — something,
therefore, generically akin to, if specifically distinct
from, the relation which brings together the suppliant
and his god.
One word only in conclusion. I have been dealing,
let it be remembered in justice to my hypothesis,
with this question of the relation of magic to religion,
the spell to the prayer, abstractly. It is certain that
religion cannot be identified merely with the worship
directly generated by magic. Religion is a far wider
and more complex thing. Again, there may be other
elements in magic than the one I have selected for
more or less exclusive consideration. It is to some
extent a matter of definition. For instance, divina-
tion may, or may not, be treated as a branch of magic.
If it be so treated, we might, as has already been said,
have to admit that, whereas one kind of magic
develops directly out of quasi-instinctive practice,
namely, the act of primitive credulity, another kind
of magic, divination, is originally due to some sort
of dim theorising about causes, the theory engender-
ing the practice rather than the practice the theory.
Meanwhile, if out of the immense confusion of beliefs
and rites which the student of savage superstition is
called upon to face, we shall haply have contrived
to isolate, and more or less consistently keep in view,
a single abstract development of some intrinsic,
71
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
interest and importance, we shall have done very
well. Every abstraction that is “ won from the void
and formless infinite” is of value in the present vague
and shifting condition of Anthropology. Dr Frazer's
abstract contrast of magic and religion is a case in
point. But abstraction needs to be qualified by
abstraction that the ideal whole may at length be
envisaged as a unity of many phases. My object
throughout has been to show that, if from one point
of view magic and religion must be held apart in
thought, from another point of view they may
legitimately be brought together.
III
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC ?
ARGUMENT
FRAZER'S intellectualistic explanation of magic as a
misapplication of the association of ideas by similarity
and contiguity is extended by him to cover likewise the
whole doctrine of taboo, which on this view is just a negative
magic, a system of abstinences based on the avoidance of
certain calculated, and, as it turns out, miscalculated evil
consequences. But taboo can be shown to implicate a
feeling of the supernatural or mysterious, which as such
abounds in indefinite and incalculable effects. What is
tabooed is always a power whose modes of action transcend
the ordinary. Sympathy, that is, association by similarity
and contiguity, doubtless helps sometimes to prefigure the
type of danger to be feared ; but in any case it fails to
account for the full force of the sanction involved, which
indeed is, in one aspect, a sociological fact, namely, a pro-
hibition maintained by the strong arm of the law, the taboo
breaker being accounted a public danger. Even from the
psychological point of view, however, taboo is more than
the outcome of a false scheme of thought, since it is felt to
be essentially a mystic affair, relating to wonder-working
powers. Whether we term such wonder-working in general
magic, or, preferably, use the word magic to mean only a
73
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
bad or anti-social kind of wonder-working, we are in any
case carried beyond magic in the sense of the sympathetic
principle into that wider sphere of the supernatural or
mysterious, to which many savage expressions have re-
ference, as, for instance, the Pygmy oudah, and, notably,
the mana of the Pacific. To break a taboo is to set in
motion against oneself mana, or supernatural wonder-
working power ; but the particular form likely to be taken
by the visitation remains for the most part uncertain. Thus
the communal taboos of the Manipur region are organized
as a precaution against mystic perils all and sundry, the
chief motive at work being an indefinite anxiety. Mystic
evils, even if prefigured according to the sympathetic prin-
ciple, are always pregnant evils ; their end is not in sight.
Certain taboos may be considered in detail. The taboo on
contact with women is due to the fact that woman is re-
garded more or less as a witch ; the reason is not merely
lest she transmit her effeminacy to the male. The stranger
is taboo because of his inherent strangeness, and not merely
because he may import various sympathetic contagions
from without. The chief is taboo, not lest he pass on his
kingliness, but because he has mana, the immeasurable
power of a superman. Thus, instead of terming taboo
a negative magic, it would be truer to describe it as a
negative mana.
IT is always easier to criticize than to construct.
Many affirmative instances usually go to the
I founding of an induction, whereas a single con-
tradictory case suffices to upset it. Meanwhile, in
anthropology, it will not do to press a generaliza-
tion overmuch, for at least two reasons. The first
74
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC?
of these reasons is the fundamental one that
human history cannot be shown, or at anyrate
has not hitherto been shown, to be subject to
hard-and-fast laws. Hence we must cut our coat
according to our cloth, and be fully content if
our analysis of the ways and doings of man
discloses tendencies of a well-marked kind. The
second reason is that, in the present state of the
science, field-work, rightly enough, predominates
over study work. Whilst the weather lasts and the
crop is still left standing, garnering rather than
threshing must remain the order of the day. Work-
ing hypotheses, therefore, the invention of theorists
who are masters of their subject, are not so plentiful
that we can afford to discard them at the first hint
of an exception. If, then, some one comes forward
to attack a leading view, it is not enough to arm him-
self with a few negative instances. It is likewise
incumbent on the critic to provide another view that
can serve as a substitute. In the present case I have
sought to do this after a fashion, though I am pain-
fully aware that, in defining taboo by means of mana,
I am laying myself open to a charge of explaining
obscurum per obscurius. I can only reply propheti-
cally that the last word about mana has not yet been
said; that it represents a genuine idea of the primi-
tive mind, an idea no less genuine and no less widely
Cf. p. 132. A distinguished anthropologist writes to me that, if
anthropology be not subject to hard-and-fast laws, the subject would
not seem to him “worth touching with a barge-pole.” But my own
opinion is that the less the man of science (who usually is no philo-
sopher) has to do with a metaphysical postulate such as that of
determinism, the better.
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
distributed than the idea of taboo, as several writers
have recently suggested, and as further investigation
will, I believe, abundantly confirm. I would also
rejoin that if the accusation of obscurum per obscurius
hardly applies directly to the theory I am criticizing
-since to identify “magic ” with the sympathetic
principle yields a perfectly definite sense—yet the
natural associations of the word are so much at vari-
ance with this abstract use of the name of a social
institution that the expression “negative magic”
is more likely to cause confusion than to clear
it up.
So far back as when Dr Tylor published his epoch-
making Researches into the Early History of Mankind
we find the suggestion put forward of a certain com-
munity of principle between taboo and that "con-
fusion of objective with subjective connection”
which "may be applied to explain one branch after
another of the arts of the sorcerer and diviner, till it
almost seems as though we were coming near the end
of his list, and might set down practices not based
on this mental process as exceptions to a general
rule.” i “Many of the food prejudices of savage
races," continues Dr Tylor, “depend on the belief
which belongs to this class of superstitions, that the
qualities of the eaten pass into the eater. Thus,
among the Dayaks, young men sometimes abstain
from the flesh of deer, lest it should make them timid,
and before a pig-hunt they avoid oil, lest the game
should slip through their fingers, and in the same way
the flesh of slow-going and cowardly animals is not
* Op. cit., 3rd edit., 129.
76
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC?
to be eaten by the warriors of South America; but
they love the meat of tigers, stags and boars, for
courage and speed.” 1
Recently ? Dr Frazer has universalized Dr Tylor's
partial correlation, and has pronounced“ the whole
doctrine of taboo ” to be a negative magic, under-
standing by magic a misapplication of the association
of ideas by similarity and contiguity. A very similar
definition had already been proposed by MM. Hubert
and Mauss. They limit the identification, however,
to what they name “sympathetic taboo," implying
that taboo includes other varieties as well. Again,
although here they seem to make the sympathetic
principle the differentia of magic, the final gist of
their admirable essay is rather to find this in the anti-
social character ascribed to the magician's art.
Now, according to the foregoing view, taboo is a
ceremonial abstinence based on the fear of definite
consequences. Just as sympathetic magic says,
“As I do this, só may that which this symbolises
follow," taboo says, “I must not do this, lest there
follow that which is the counterpart of this."
In violent contrast we have the view of Dr Jevons,
which, at first sight at anyrate, seems to declare all
consideration of consequences to be foreign to the
taboo attitude. He bases his theory of taboo on an
alleged " fact that among savages universally there
i op. cit., 3rd edit., 131.
2 Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 52.
3 L'Année Sociologique, vii. 56. It is to be noted that Dr Frazer
arrived at his conclusion by independent means; cf. Man, 1906, 37.
See also Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions, Preface,
xxii.
77
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
are some things which categorically and uncondi-
tionally must not be done,” insisting, “ that this
feeling is a 'primitive ' sentiment."i Now it is not
easy to discover what is here meant, so great is the
departure from the recognized terminology of philo-
sophy. “ Categorically” and “unconditionally”
are expressions that smack of Kantian “rigorism”;
but Kant's famous analysis of duty as a categorical
and unconditional imperative makes obligation
directly antagonistic to sentiment of all kinds. A
sentiment as such has a history and assignable de-
velopment. The Kantian law of duty, à priori,
objective, absolute, has none whatever. Is Dr
Jevons, then, speaking here strictly according to
philosophic tradition? Or would he recognize a
growth of moral principle, say, on some such lines
as those which Dr Westermarck or Mr Hobhouse has
recently laid down? If he were of the former per-
suasion, then he would be irrelevantly interpolating
a non-genetic view of morality that for purposes of
have no value or significance at all. But if he is of
the other and less uncompromising faith-which
appears more probable, seeing that his book is pro-
fessedly dealing with religion from the historical
standpoint - then “categorical” and “uncondi-
tional,” in their application to a mere sentiment,
are to be given an elastic sense. No more is meant,
we must in that case suppose, than that the taboo
feeling of “Do not meddle" involves no very ex-
plicit condition, no very clear or specific idea of un-
* An Introduction to the History of Religion, 85.
78
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC?
pleasant consequences to be avoided, but as it were
threatens by aposiopesis—“Do not meddle, or, if
you do,...!” If this is as much as Dr Jevons
intends-and it seems at anyrate to be all that is
meant by MM. Hubert and Mauss when they speak
in very similar terms of the absolute, necessary, and
à priori character of the “magical judgment "
then I think this view has very much to be said for it.
My own contention is that, while there is always a
sanction at the back of taboo in the shape of some
suggestion of mystic punishment following on a
breach of the customary rule, yet the nature of the
visitation in store for the offender is never a measur-
able quantity. Even when the penalty is appa-
rently determinate and specific—which, however, is
by no means always the case, as I shall endeavour to
show laterman infinite plus of awfulness will, I
believe, be found, on closer examination, to attach
to it. Taboo, on my view, belongs, and belongs
wholly, to the sphere of the magico-religious. Within
that sphere, I venture to assert, man always feels
himself to be in contact with powers whose modes
of action transcend the ordinary and calculable.
Though he does not on that account desist from at-
tempting to exploit these powers, yet it is with no
assurance of limited liability that he enters on the
undertaking. In short, dealings with whatever has
mystic power are conducted at an indefinite risk;
and taboo but embodies the resolution to take no un-
necessary risks of this indefinite kind. This conten-
tion I shall now try to make good.
.Op. cit., vii. 125.
79
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
First, to attack the theory that taboo is negative
magic (in Dr Frazer's sense of the term “ magic '')
on the side on which that theory is strongest, namely,
where sympathy is most in evidence. I do not for
one moment deny that in some taboos a sympathetic
element is present and even prominent. Indeed, I
see no harm in speaking, with MM. Hubert and Mauss;
of sympathetic taboo, where “sympathetic” stands
for the differentia or leading character of a variety,
and the genus “taboo " is taken as already ex-
plained in independent terms. The presence of the
sympathetic principle is, to my mind, amply and
crucially proved in the case of those food restrictions
mentioned in the passage quoted from Dr Tylor, the
prohibition to eat deer lest one become timid, and so
on. Another telling set of examples is provided by
those remarkable taboos on the use of knots which,
as Dr Frazer has abundantly shown, are wont to be
observed at critical seasons such as those of child-
birth, marriage and death. But even here, I suggest,
the consequences tend to remain indefinite and
vague, and that for more than one kind of reason.
We can distinguish a sociological reason and a
hierological or religious reason, though for the pur-
poses of the historical study of religion, from the
standpoint of which taboo is usually considered, the
first may be treated as subordinate to the second.
To begin with, these, no less than any other taboos,
are customary observances, a portion of the un-
written law of society. To this fact, then, must be
ascribed part at least of the force that renders them
* The Golden Bough? i. 392 sqq.
80
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC?
effective. There are always penalties of a distinc-
tively social kind to be feared by the taboo-breaker.
In extreme cases death will be inflicted; in all cases
there will be more or less of what the Australian
natives call “growling,' 1 and to bear up against
public opinion is notoriously the last thing of which
the savage is capable. Moreover, this social sanc-
tion is at the same time a religious sanction. To
speak the language of a more advanced culture, State
and Church being indivisibly one, to be outlaw is
ipso facto to be excommunicate. Given the notion of
mystic danger-of which more anon—social disap-
proval of all kinds will tend to borrow the tone and
colour of religious aversion, the feeling that the
offender is a source of spiritual peril to the commu-
nity; whilst the sanctioning power remains social in
the sense that society takes forcible means to remove
the curse from its midst.
It may be argued that these social consequences
of taboo-breaking are secondary, and thus scarcely
bear on the question of the intrinsic nature of taboo.
Such an objection, however, will not be admitted
by anyone who has reflected at all deeply on the
psychology of religion. On the broadest of theoreti-
cal grounds religion must be pronounced a product
of the corporate life-a phenomenon of intercourse.
Confirmation à posteriori is obtained by the exami-
nation of any particular taboos of which we have
detailed information. Take, for example, the elabo-
rate list of food-restrictions imposed amongst the
Cf. B. Spencer and F. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central
Australia, 196.
81
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
Arunta on the ulpmerka or boy who has not yet been
circumcised. The sympathetic principle is pro-
bably not absent, though its action happens here not
to be easily recognizible. When we learn, however,
that eating parrots or cockatoos will produce a
hollow on the top of the head and a hole in the chin,
we may suspect that the penalty consists in becoming
like a parrot or cockatoo. On the other hand, the
same penalty, for instance premature old age,
follows on so many different kinds of transgression
that it looks here as if a tendency to dispense with
particular connections and generalize the effects of
mystic wrong-doing were at work. Meanwhile, in
regard to all these taboos alike our authorities assure
us that the underlying idea throughout is that of
reserving the best kinds of food for the use of the
elder men, and of thereby disciplining the novice and
teaching him to “know his place.” Here is a social
reason with a vengeance. Even if some suspect
that our authorities over-estimate the influence of
conscious design upon tribal custom, they will hardly
go the length of asserting that sympathy pure and
simple has automatically generated a code so favour-
able to the elderly gourmet. A number of succulent
meats to be reserved on the one hand, a number of
diseases and malformations held in dread by the tribe
on the other, and possibly a few sympathetic con-
nections established by tradition between certain
foods and certain diseases to serve them as a pattern-
with this as their pre-existing material the Australian
Spencer and Gillen, op. cit., 470 sqq. Here, by the way, in the
systematic assignment of penalties to offences we seem to have a
crucial disproof of the pure's unconditionality" of taboo.
824
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC ?
greybeards, from all we know about them, would be
quite capable of constructing a taboo-system, the
efficient cause of which is not so much mystic fear as
statecraft. Even if the principle of sympathy lurk
in the background, we may be sure that the elders are
not applying it very consciously or very strictly; and
again we may be sure that society in imposing its
law on the ulpmerka is at much greater pains to make
it clear that he must not eat such and such than why
he must not-if only because there are so many ex-
cellent reasons of a social kind why the young should
not ask questions, but simply do as they are bidden.
But there is, I believe, another and a deeper
reason why sympathy pure and simple cannot ac-
count for taboo. Taboo, I take it, is always some-
thing of a mystic affair. But I cannot see why there
should be anything mystic about sympathy under-
stood, as Dr Frazer understands it, simply as a mis-
application of the laws of the association of ideas.
After all, the association of ideas is at the back of all
our thinking (though by itself it will not account for
any of our thinking); and thinking as such does not
fall within the sphere of the mystic. Or does the
mystery follow from the fact that it is a" misapplica-
tion" of the laws aforesaid? 1 Then the savage must
1 Dr Frazer writes, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingshit,
53, “It is not a taboo to say, 'Do not put your hand in the fire'; it
is a rule of common sense, because the forbidden action entails a real,
not an imaginary, evil." It is not a taboo, but a rule of common
prudence, for the savage. But not for the reason alleged. In his eyes
There is nothing imaginary, but something terribly real, about ihe
death or other disaster he observes to overtake the taboo-breaker.
How, then, does he come to bring this kind of evil under a category of
its own? Surely it ought to be the prime concern of Anthropology to
tell us that,
83
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
be aware that he is misapplying these laws; for taboo
is for him a mystic affair. But if he knows he is in-
dulging in error, why does he not mend his ways?
Clearly Dr Frazer cannot mean his explanation of
magic or of taboo to be an explanation of what it is
for the savage. Now, perhaps he is entitled to say
that magic, in his sense, is not a savage concept or
institution at all, but merely a counter for the use of
the psychology that seeks to explain the primitive
mind not from within but from without. He is,
however, certainly not entitled to say that taboo is
not a savage concept or institution. In Polynesia
tabu is a well-recognized term that serves as perhaps
the chief nucleus of embryonic reflection with regard
to mystic matters of all kinds; in some of the islands
the name stands for the whole system of religion.i
Moreover, from every quarter of the primitive world
we get expressions that bear the closest analogy to
this word. How then are we to be content with an
explanation of taboo that does not pretend to render
its sense as it has sense for those who both practise
it and make it a rallying-point for their thought on
mystic matters? As well say that taboo is “super-
stition” as that it is “magic" in Dr Frazer's sense
of the word. We ask to understand it, and we are
merely bidden to despise it.
If, on the other hand, we cast about amongst
genuine primitive notions for such as may with
relative appropriateness be deemed equivalent to
the idea of magic, as that idea is to be understood and
*Cf. E. Tregear, Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary, s.v.
tapu.
84 .
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC ?
employed by a psychology that tries to establish
community between savage and civilized thought,
we have the choice between two alternative types.
My own preference is for those primitive expres-
sions that are definitely dyslogistic or condemnatory,
as when we speak of the “ black art.” The clearest
cases that I know are Australian. Thus the arung-
quiltha of the Arunta is “associated at bottom with
the possession of supernatural evil power."1 Per-
haps we may say, broadly that, as contrasted with
churinga, the term stands for magic as opposed to
religion-for magic, that is, as the witch-haunted
England of the seventeenth century understood it,
namely, as something anti-social and wholly bad.
The Kaitish ittha seems to be the exact analogue
of arungquiltha ;2 and so do the muparn of the Yerk-
lamining,3 the mung of the Wurunjerri,4 and the
gubburra of the Yuin. In all these cases the notion
seems to be that of a wonder-working of a completely
noxious kind. Amongst the Arunta a man caught
practising such magic is severely punished, and
probably killed.
Some, however, might choose rather to assign the
meaning of “magic” to the wonder-working in
general, and not simply to its bad variety. Thus
amongst the last-mentioned Yuin “evil magic ” may
be practised by the gommera or medicine-man; but
I Spencer and Gillen, op. cit., 548 n.
2 Spencer and Gillen, "The Northern Tribes of Central Australia,
464 n.
3 A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, 450.
4 Op. cit., 365.
5 Ib., 372.
6 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, 536.
85
THE THRESHOLD. OF RELIGION
in this tribe he is the leader of society, and a wielder
of good supernatural power no less than of evil. The
wonder-working power he possesses goes by the com-
prehensive name of joia, translated "magic" by
Howitt, and described as an “immaterial force"
set in motion not only by the gommera but also by
certain sacred animals. Here we seem to have a
case of that very widespread notion of which the most
famous representatives are the mana of the Pacific
and the orenda of the Iroquois. A good deal of atten-
tion has lately been paid by anthropologists to these
latter expressions, and I may perhaps be permitted
to take certain of their findings for granted. It
would appear that the root-idea is that of power-
a power manifested in sheer luck, no doubt, as well
as in cunning, yet, on the whole, tending to be con-
ceived as a psychic energy, almost, in fact, as what
we would call “will-power." 2 Further, though it
may be that every being possesses its modicum of
mana, the tendency is for the word to express extra-
ordinary power, in short a wonder-working.
Now between the ordinary and the extraordinary,
the work-a-day and the wonderful is a difference, if
you will, of degree rather than of kind. The sphere
of the miraculous is, subjectively, just the sphere of
'Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, 533, 560-1.
? It is very interesting to note, as Tregear's excellent dictionary, s.v.
mana, enables one to do at a glance, how the root mana underlies an
immense number of the terms by which psychical faculties and states
are rendered. Thus in Samoan we find mana's to desire, wish,
manatu to think, manamea to love, atuamaratu to have a good
memory; in Tahitian manao to think, manavaru eager desire ; in
Hawaiian manao to think, mananao thought, mianaoio to believe,
manaiva feelings, affections; and so on.
86
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC?
a startled experience, and clearly there are endless
degrees in the intensity of felt surprise; though
society tends to fix hard-and-fast limits within which
surprise is, so to speak, expected of one. How the
savage proceeds to differentiate the normal from the
abnormal was brought home to me in the course of an
interview I was accorded by the Pygmy “chief"
Bokane. I was trying to verify Col. Harrison's
statement 2 that if a Pygmy dies suddenly the body
is cut in two to see whether or not the death is caused
by oudah--the " devil," as Col. Harrison renders it,
though, for my part, I could not discover the slightest
trace of personality attaching to this evil principle.3
I asked Bokane how his people told whether the death
was due to oudah or not. He replied that, if an arrow-
head or a large thorn were found inside the body, it
was an arrow or a thorn that had killed the man; but,
if nothing could be found, then oudah must have done
it. If a dangerous animal killed a man, I learnt on
further inquiry, it was not oudah, but it was oudah
if you cut your finger accidentally. When strange
sounds were heard in the forest at night and the dogs
howled, that was oudah. On some such lines as
these, then, we may suppose other savages also to
have succeeded in placing the strange and unaccount-
able under a category of its own. In the case of
mana and orenda I am inclined to think that the core
'I spent about five hours in all in private talk with the Pygmies,
assisted, I need hardly say, by an interpreter, at Olympia in London,
Jan. 8 and 9, 1907.
2 Life among the Pygmies, Lond., 1906, 20.
3 Nothing, apparently, is done to avert or propitiate oudah. Bokane
denied that the pots of honey placed at the foot of trees were for oudah.
87
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
of the notion is provided by the wonderful feats-
wonderful to himself, no doubt, as well as to his audi-
ence-of the human magician; which notion is then
extended to cover wonder-working animals, nature-
powers, and the like by an anthropomorphism which is
specifically a “magomorphism," so to say. Of course
other elements beside that of sheer surprise at the un-
usual enter into the composition of a predominant
notion such as that of mana, which in virtue of its
very predominance is sure to attract and attach to it-
self all manner of meanings floating in its neighbour-
hood. For example, as the history of the word
“mystic” reminds us, the wonderful and the secret
or esoteric tend to form one idea. The Australian
wonder-worker owes no little of his influence over the
minds of his fellows to the fact that in most tribes
an exhibition of his power forms part and parcel of
the impressive mystery of initiation. Let it suffice,
however, for our present purpose to identify mana
with a wonder-working power such as that of the
magician-a power that may manifest itself in actions
of the sympathetic type, but is not limited to this type,
being all that for the primitive mind is, or promises
to be, extraordinarily effective in the way of the
exertion of personal, or seemingly personal, will-force.
Now, if "magic " is to mean mana (which, how-
ever, is not Dr Frazer's sense of "magic,” nor,
indeed, mine, since I prefer to give it the uniformly
bad meaning of arungquiltha, that is, of the anti-
social variety of mana), then in describing taboo as
negative magic we shall not, I believe, be far wide of
the mark. Taboo I take to be a mystic affair. To
88
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGİC ?
break a taboo is to set in motion against oneself mystic
wonder-working power in one form or another. It
may be of the wholly bad variety. Thus it is taboo
for the headman of the water-totem in the Kaitish
tribe to touch a pointing-stick lest the “evil magic”
in it turn all the water bad. On the other hand,
many tabooed things, woman's blood or the king's
touch, have power to cure no less than to kill; while
an almost wholly beneficent power such as the clan-
totem or the personal manitu is nevertheless taboo.2
Indeed, it is inevitable that, whenever society pre-
scribes a taboo in regard to some object in particular,
that object should tend to assume a certain measure
of respectability as an institution, a part of the social
creed; and, as the law upholds it, so it will surely
seem in the end to uphold the law by punishing its
infraction. It is to be remarked, however, that
many taboos prescribed by the primitive society
have regard to no object in particular, but are of the
nature of general precautions against mystic perils
all and sundry, the vaporous shapes conjured by un-
reasoning panic. It is instructive in this context
to consult the admirable account given by Mr Hodson
of the communal taboos or gennas observed through-
out the Manipur region. On all sorts of occasions
the gennabura or religious head of the village ordains
that the community shall keep a genna. The village
Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, 463.
? Is Dr Frazer henceforth prepared to explain totemism on purely
sympathetic principles? It would, on the other hand, be easy to show
that the ideas of mana and of nianitu and the like go very closely
together.
3 T. C. Hodson,." The Genna amongst the Tribes of Assam,"
J. A. I., xxxvi. 92 549.
89
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
gates are closed, and the friend outside must stay
there, whilst the stranger who is within remains.
The men cook and eat apart from the women during
this time. The food taboos are strictly enforced.i
All trade, all fishing, all hunting, all cutting of grass
and felling of trees are forbidden. And why these
precautions? Sometimes a definite visitation will
have occurred. “ Phenomena such as earthquakes
and eclipses, or the destruction of a village by fire,
occasion general gennas. ... We also find general
gennas occasioned by the death of a man from wounds
inflicted by an enemy or by a wild animal, by the
death of a man from snake-bite or from cholera or
small-pox, or by the death of a woman in child-birth.” 2
At other times nothing untoward has happened, but
something important and“ ticklish” has to be done-
the crops sown, the ghosts laid of those who have
died during the year. It is a moment of crisis, and
the tribal nerves are on the stretch. Mr Hodson,
indeed, expressly notes that "the effect of gennas
is certainly to produce in those engaged in them a
tension which is of great psychological interest." g
Is not what he takes for the effect rather the cause of
gennas? Anxiety says, “Let us abstain from all
Some of these food taboos have a sympathetic character. Thus
56 young unmarried girls are not allowed to taste the flesh of the male
of any animal or of female animals which have been killed while with
young" (ib., 98). Even here, however, an element of miracle enters,
unless the Manipuris find parthenogenesis no more odd than the
Arunta are by some supposed to do. Another taboo is on dog's
flesh, the mystic penalty being an eruption of boils. Here there is no
obvious sympathetic connection. Boils are uncanny, and have to be
accounted for on mystic lines—if not sympathetically, yet by some
reference to evil magic; for disease is always evil magic for the
savage; cf. Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, 548.
2 16., 96.
3 16., 101.
90
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC ?
acts that may bring upon us the ill-will of the
powers.” Anxiety sees every outlet of activity
blocked by a dim shape, endowed with no definite
attributes such as the sympathetic theory is obliged
to postulate, but stationed there as simply a name-
less representative of the environing Unknown with
its quite unlimited power of bringing the tribal mana
-its. luck and cunning—to nought by an output of
superior mana, to be manifested who knows how?
It may be objected that, whereas we have made
it of the very essence of mana that it should be
indefinite and mysterious in its effects, there can be
nothing indefinite or mysterious on the Dyak view
to recur to the example from which we started-
about the effect of deer-meat, since it produces
timidity exactly as it might be thought to produce
indigestion. Perhaps it is enough to reply that to
the savage a fit of indigestion would likewise be a
phenomenon explicable only in mystic terms. The
common sense of the primitive man may-to take
Dr Frazer's instance-recognize that normally and
as a matter of course the fire burns whoever thrusts
his fingers into it; but the moment that the fire burns
someone “ accidentally,” as we say, the savage mind
scents a mystery. Just so for the Pygmy.. His
knife acts normally so long as it serves him to trim
his arrow-shaft. As soon, however, as it slips and
cuts his hand, there is oudah in, or at the back of,
the "cussed” thing. Given, then, anything that
behaves" cussedly” with regularity, that is normally
abnormal in its effects, so to speak, and a taboo or
customary avoidance will be instituted. It becomes
91
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
the duty of society to its members to keep before
their eyes the nature of the direful consequences
attending violation of the rule. Society shakes its
head solemnly at careless youth, and mutters Moppia
Careless youth does not believe all it is told, yet is
nevertheless impressed and, on the whole, abstains.
Kafir children must not eat certain small birds.1
If they catch them on the veld, they must take them
to their grand-parents, who alone may eat the body,
though the children are given back the head. “ If
the parents catch children eating birds on the veld,
they tell them they will turn out witches or wizards
when they grow up." Here we have the mystic
sanction. And there is a social sanction in reserve.
“ The boys naturally get sound thrashings from their
fathers, who feel it their duty to prevent their sons
from turning out abandoned wretches in after life.”
Nevertheless, youth is sceptical, or at anyrate in-
tractable. “Children do not see the logic of this
rule, and consequently try to eat the bird on the
veld, when they think they will not be found out. ...
There is no time when boys and girls are so free from
observation as when watching the fields; conse-
quently, at such times they have glorious feasts
off the birds they catch.” Now the sympathetic
principle may underlie this food taboo, or it may not,
but clearly by itself it is not enough to account for
the customary observance in the concrete. Society
has to keep the taboo going, so to say; and to keep
it going it relies partly on the vis a tergo of brute
force, but still more on the suggestion of mystic evil
1 Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood, a Study of Kafir Children, 193.
92
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC ?
in store for the offender, not an imaginary evil, pace Dr
Frazer, but what is quite another thing, an evil that
appeals to the imagination, an indefinite, unmeasured,
pregnant evil, a visitation, a doom, a judgment.
Hitherto we have had in view mainly such cases
of taboo as seemed most closely bound up with the
sympathetic principle, minor matters of routine for
the most part, outlying and relatively isolated
portions of the social system, which for that reason
might be expected to contain their own raison d'être
unaffected by the transforming influence of any
higher synthesis. If, however, we turn to the major
taboos of primitive society, the classical well-nigh
universal cases of the woman shunned, the stranger
banned, the divine chief isolated, and so on, how
infinitely more difficult does it become to conceive
sympathy, and sympathy only, as the continuously,
or even the originally, efficient cause of the avoid-
ance. Unfortunately, considerations of space utterly
prohibit a detailed treatment of matters covering
so wide an area both of fact and of hypothesis. It
must suffice here to assert that the principles already
laid down will be found to apply to these major taboos
with even greater cogency. Here, too, there are at
work both a social and a mystic sanction (so far as
these can be kept apart in thought, the mystic
sanction being but the voice of society uttering
bodings instead of threats). As for the mystic
sanction, we shall be probably not far wrong if we
say that the woman has mana, the stranger has mana,
the divine chief has mana, and for that reason pre-
eminently are one and all taboo for those who have
93
THE THRESHOLD TI
OF RELIGION
the best right to determine the meaning of taboo,
namely, those who practise and observe it.
If there were room left in which to consider these
taboos in some detail—the three notable cases
mentioned do not, of course, by any means complete
the list of taboos of the first rank l-it might turn
out that in our running fight with the upholders of
the sympathetic theory serious opposition must be
encountered at certain points, yet never so serious,
let us hope, that it might not be eventually overcome.
Thus the first case on our list that of the taboo
on woman-provides our opponents with a really
excellent chance of defending their position. There
can be no doubt that a sympathetic interpretation
is often put upon this taboo by savages themselves.
Mr Crawley, who has made the subject of what he
terms the sexual taboo peculiarly his own, brings
forward evidence that, to my mind at least, is con-
clusive on this point. Among the Barea man and
wife seldom share the same bed, the reason they give
being that “the breath of the wife weakens her
husband." Amongst the Omahas if a boy plays
with girls he is dubbed “hermaphrodite.” In the
Wiraijuri tribe boys are reproved for playing with
girls, and the culprit is taken aside by an old man,
who solemnly extracts from his legs some “strands
of the woman's apron ” which have got in. And so
'Thus one of the most notable and widespread of taboos is that on
the dead. Sympathetic interpretations of this taboo are by no means
unknown amongst savages, but it would not be hard to show that they
do not exhaust the mystery of death, of all human concepts the most
thickly enwrapped in imaginative atmosphere.
2 E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 93, cf. 207 599.
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC ?
feared is the transmission of womanly characteristics,
in a word, of effeminacy. Mr Crawley even goes so
far as to speak of the belief in such transmission as
" the chief factor in sexual taboo."i Whether this
be so or not, 2 he likewise shows, with singular clear-
ness and force, that it is not the only factor. Owing,
he thinks, to a natural nervousness that one sex feels
towards the other, as well as to the unaccountable
nature of various phenomena in the life-history of
woman such as menstruation and child-birth, the
notion of her as simply the weaker vessel " is merged
in another conception of woman as a 'mysterious
person. ... She is more or less of a potential
witch." 3 With this I cordially agree, and shall
not labour the point more except to the extent of
asking the question, How, on the hypothesis that
what is dreaded is simply the transmission of woman-
liness, are we to account for the fact-to quote but
the best-known story of the kind—that when an
Australian black-fellow discovered his wife to have
lain on his blanket he wholly succumbed to terror
and was dead within a fortnight? 4 Only a twilight
fear, a measureless horror, could thus kill. And to
"E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 207.
? Mr Crawley does not tell us on what principle he would proceed
to estimate predominance as between such factors. I should have
thought that the moral of his excellent study, abounding as it does in
psychological insight, was to lay stress on the subconscious grounds of
action rather than on the reasons whereby more or less ex post facto
the dawning reflection of the savage seeks to interpret and justify that
action. I myself believe the sympathetic explanation to be little more
than such an ex post facto justification of a mystic avoidance already
in full swing.
37. A. I., ix. 458.
+ 1b., 206,
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THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
show how mixed a mode of thought prevails as to
the workings of the sanction set in motion, in a very
similar case from Assam it is not the man but the
woman who dies of fright.1
The case of the taboo on strangers seems at first
sight to afford a clear proof of the effect of mere
strangeness in exciting dread, especially when we
compare the results of contact with novelties of all
kinds. Dr Jevons, however, argues that“ strangers
are not inherently taboo, but, as belonging to strange
gods, bring with them strange supernatural influ-
ences.” 2 In support of this view he instances the
fact that newcomers are frequently fumigated to
drive away the evil influences they bear in their train.
But, after all, there are no taboos that religion has
not learnt to neutralize by means of one or another
ceremonial device. Woman, for example, is in-
herently taboo, yet with proper precautions she may
be married. So too, then, strangers may be enter-
tained after a purifying ceremony. It by no means
follows, however, that they have lost all their mystic
virtue, any more than it follows that woman has
ceased to be mysterious after the marriage ceremony.
Witness the power to bless or to curse retained by
the stranger within the gate-a matter for the first
time brought clearly to light by Dr Westermarck's
striking investigation of the religious basis of primi-
tive hospitality.4 Meanwhile, even if Dr Jevons's
Hodson, op. cit., 100.
2 An Introduction to the History of Religion, 71.
3 I accept Mr Crawley's hypothesis that “marriage ceremonies
neutralize the dangers attaching to union between the sexes." The
Mystic Rose, 322.
4 E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,
96
IS TABOO A NEGATIVE MAGIC ?
contention were to be granted that the taboo on
strangers is really a taboo on the tabooed things he
may have been in contact with, it is hard to see how
the sympathetic explanation of taboo is going to be
stretched to cover the indefinite possibility of definite
sympathetic contagions of all sorts. We are left
asking why mere uncertainty in itself can rouse
imaginative fears-a line of inquiry that must
presently lead to the conclusion that mere strange-
ness in itself can do the same.
The third of our cases that of the tabooed chief
-need not detain us long. At all events in Poly-
nesia, the eponymous home of taboo, they have no
doubt about the explanation. The chief has mana,
and therefore he is feared. Men do not dread con-
tact with the king lest they become kingly, but lest
they be blasted by the superman's supermanliness.
Such, at least, is the native theory of the kingly
taboo on its religious side. On its highly-developed
social side it is a fear of the strong arm of the State
mingled with a respect for established authority,
cringing terror, but rather an awe as towards mystic
powers recognized by society and as such tending to
be reputable.
We have cast but a rapid glance over an immense
subject. We have but dipped here and there almost
at random amongst the endless facts bearing on our
theme to see if the sympathetic principle-a per-
i. 583 599. Dr Westermarck's view, by the way, is that "the un-
known stranger, like. everything unknown and everything strange,
arouses a feeling of mysterious awe in superstitious minds."
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THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
fectly genuine thing in its way-would take us to
the bottom of the taboo feeling and idea. We con-
clude provisionally that it will not. Indefinite rather
than definite consequences appear to be associated
with the violation of a taboo, and that because what
is dreaded is essentially a mysterious power, some-
thing arbitrary and unaccountable in its modes of
action. Is, then, taboo a negative mana ? Yes—
if mana be somewhat liberally interpreted. Is it a
negative magic, understanding by magic sympathetic
action? With all my respect and admiration for
the great authority who has propounded the hypo-
thesis, I must venture to answer—No.
IV
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
: ARGUMENT
1
W HEN the science of Comparative Religión employs
a native expression such as mana, or tabu, as a
general category, it is obliged to disregard to some extent
its original or local meaning ; but this disadvantage is
outbalanced by the advantage of thus enabling savage
mentality to express itself as far as possible in its own
language. Moreover, the local meaning of mana justifies ;
its use as a term of wide application, covering all mani-
festations of mysterious, or supernatural, power in magic
and religion alike. Science, then, may adopt mana as a
general category to designate the positive aspect of the
supernatural, or sacred, or whatever we are to call that
order of miraculous happenings which, for the concrete
experience, if not usually for the abstract thought of the
savage, is marked off perceptibly from the order of ordinary
happenings. Tabu, on the other hand, may serve to design
nate its negative aspect. That is to say, negatively, the
supernatural is tabu, not to be lightly approached, because,
positively, it is mana, instinct with a power above the
ordinary. This tabu-mana formula will suffice to char-
acterize the supernatural in its purely existential dimension,
that is, as it is in itself, apart from its value to man. In
99
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
its moral dimension the supernatural manifests itself
variously as good or bad, and is accordingly subject to
further characterization of an explanatory kind on the part
of the savage, who, for instance, has special words to signify
evil supernatural power. Our stock antithesis between
magic and religion should, preferably, be employed to
denote a similar distinction between the bad and good kinds
of supernaturalism ; whereas the "magico-religious” is
equivalent to the supernatural in its good and bad aspects
taken together. If, then, the tabu-mana formula be sub-
stituted for animism as a minimum definition of religion,
does the latter category become obsolete? By no means.
To go no further for a proof, mana, in its local meaning,
proves to be capable of existing in combination with a
doctrine of spirits, souls and ghosts. Such a doctrine, in
fact, constitutes a rudimentary philosophy, the sphere of
which does not stand in determinate relation with that of
supernaturalism, inasmuch as, if spirits and ghosts tend
to be accounted supernatural, souls are by no means neces-
sarily so. Mana, on the other hand, which occasionally
comes near to meaning soul, since it may express indwelling
psychic power, though hardly personality, is always co-
extensive with the supernatural. For the rest, the line
drawn between the impersonal and the personal in rudi-
mentary religious thought is fluctuating and vague ; while
even in advanced religion, as notably in Buddhism, the
impersonal aspect of the supernatural, which notions of
the type of mana tend to emphasize, may predominate.
On the other hand, if the personal aspect be prominent,
such prominence may be due not to animism so much as
to anthropomorphic theism, which is, psychologically, a
more or less independent development.
O24
U
100
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
T I is no part of my present design to determine,
| by an exhaustive analysis of the existing evi-
(dence, how the conception of mana is understood
and applied within its special area of distribution,
namely, the Pacific region. Such a task pertains to
Descriptive Ethnology; and it is rather to a problem
of Comparative Ethnology that I would venture to
call attention. I propose to discuss the value-
that is to say, the appropriateness and the fruitful-
ness-óf either this conception of mana or some
nearly equivalent notion, such as the Huron orenda,
when selected by the science of Comparative Religion
to serve as one of its categories, or classificatory terms
of the widest extension.
Now any historical science that adopts the com-
parative method stands committed to the postulate
that human nature is sufficiently homogeneous and
uniform to warrant us in classifying its tendencies
under formulæ coextensive with the whole broad
field of anthropological research. Though the con-
ditions of their occurrence cause our data to appear
highly disconnected, we claim, even if we cannot yet
wholly make good, the right to bind them together
into a single system of reference by means of
certain general principles. By duly constructing such
theoretical bridges, as Dr Frazer is fond of calling
them, we hope eventually to transform, as it were, a
medley of insecure, insignificant sandbanks into one
stable and glorious Venice.
So much, then, for our scientific ideal. But some
sceptical champion of the actual may be inclined
to ask: "Are examples as a matter of fact forth-
ΙΟΙ
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
coming, at anyrate from within the particular de-
partment of Comparative Religion, of categories or
general principles that, when tested by use, prove
reasonably steadfast? ” To this challenge it may
be replied that, even when we limit ourselves to the
case of what may be described as “rudimentary”
religion in regard to which our terminology finds
itself in the paradoxical position of having to grapple
with states of mind themselves hardly subject to
fixed terms at all—there are at all events distinguish-
able degrees of value to be recognised amongst the
categories in current employment. Thus most of
us will be agreed that, considered as a head of gene-
ral classification, "tabu” works well enough, but
" totem” scarcely so well, whilst “fetish” is per-
haps altogether unsatisfactory. Besides, there is
at least one supreme principle that has for many
years stood firm in the midst of these psychological
quicksands. Dr Tylor's conception of "animism”
is the crucial instance of a category that successfully
applies to rudimentary religion taken at its widest.
If our science is to be compared to a Venice held
together by bridges, then "animism” must be
likened to its Rialto.
At the same time," lest one good custom should
corrupt the wcrld,” we need plenty of customs;
and the like holds true of categories. In what
follows I may seem to be attacking “animism," in
so far as I shall attempt to endow "mana" with
classificatory authority to some extent at the expense
of the older notion. Let me, therefore, declare at
the outset that I should be the last to wish our time-
102
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
honoured Rialto to be treated as an obsolete or
obsolescent structure. If I seek to divert from it
some of the traffic it is not naturally suited to bear,
I am surely offering it no injury, but a service.
One word more by way of preface. There are
those who dislike the introduction of native terms
into our scientific nomenclature. The local and
general usages, they object, tend to become confused.
This may, indeed, be a real danger. On the other
hand, are we not more likely to keep in touch with
the obscure forces at work in rudimentary religion
if we make what use we can of the clues lying ready
to hand in the recorded efforts of rudimentary re-
flection upon religion? The mana of the Pacific
may be said, I think, without exaggeration to em-
body rudimentary reflection-to form a piece of
subconscious philosophy. To begin with, the re-
ligious eye perceives the presence of mana here,
there, and everywhere. In the next place, mana
has worked its way into the very heart of the native
languages, where it figures as more than one part of
speech, and abounds in secondary meanings of all
kinds. Lastly, whatever the word may originally
have signified (as far as I know, an unsettled
question), it stands in its actual use for something;
lying more or less beyond the reach of the senses
something verging on what we are wont to describe
as the immaterial or unseen. All this, however,
hardly amounts to a proof that mana has acquired
in the aboriginal mind the full status of an abstract
idea. For instance, whereas a Codrington might
decide in comprehensive fashion that all Melanesian
103
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
T
religion consists in getting mana for oneself, it is
at least open to doubt whether a Melanesian sage
could have arrived, unassisted, at a generalisation
so abstract--a" bird's-eye view” so detached from
confusing detail. Nevertheless, we may well suspect
some such truth as this to have long been more or
less inarticulately felt by the Melanesian mind. In
fact, I take it, there would have been small difficulty
on Bishop Codrington's part in making an intelligent
native realize the force of his universal proposition.
What is the moral of this? Surely, that the science
of Comparative Religion should strive to explicate
the meaning inherent in any given phase of the
world's religious experience in just those terms that
would naturally suggest themselves, suppose the
phase in question to be somehow quickened into self-
consciousness and self-expression. Such terms I
would denominate " sympathetic”; and would,
further, hazard the judgment that, in the case of all
science of the kind, its use of sympathetic terms is
the measure of its sympathetic insight. Mana,
then, I contend, has, despite its exotic appearance,
a perfect right to figure as a scientific category by
the side of tabuma term hailing from the same
geographical area-so long as a classificatory function
of like importance can be found for it. That function
let us now proceed, if so may be, to discover.
Codrington defines mana, in its Melanesian use,
as follows: “a force altogether distinct from physical
power, which acts in all kinds of ways for good and
evil, and which it is of the greatest advantage to
R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians (Oxford, 1891), 119 11.
1
104
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
possess or control”; or again he says: “ It is a
power or influence, not physical, and in a way super-
natural; but it shows itself in physical force, or in
any kind of power or excellence which a man pos-
sesses.” It is supernatural just in this way, namely,
that it is “ what works to effect everything which is
beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the com-
mon processes of nature.” He illustrates his point
by examples: “If a man has been successful in
fighting, it has not been his natural strength of arm,
quickness of eye, or readiness of resource that has
won success; he has certainly got the mana of a
spirit or of some deceased warrior to empower him,
conveyed in an amulet of a stone round his neck
or a tuft of leaves in his belt, in a tooth hung upon a
finger of his bow hand, or in the form of words with
which he brings supernatural assistance to his side.
If a man's pigs multiply, and his gardens are pro-
ductive, it is not because he is industrious and looks
after his property, but because of the stones full of
mana for pigs and yams that he possesses. Of course
a yam naturally grows when planted, that is well
known, but it will not be very large unless mana
comes into play; a canoe will not be swift unless
mana be brought to bear upon it, a net will not catch
many fish, nor an arrow inflict a mortal wound.” 1
From Polynesia comes much the same story.
Tregear in his admirable comparative dictionary of
the Polynesian dialects 2 renders the word, which
Codrington, op. cit., 118-20.
2 E. Tregear, The Maori - Polynesian Comparative Dictionary
(Wellington, N.Z., 1891), s.v. mana.
105
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
may be either noun or adjective, thus: “super-
natural power; divine authority; having qualities
which ordinary persons or things do not possess.”
He seems to distinguish, however, what might be
called a "secular" sense, in which the term stands
generally for "authority,” or, as an adjective, for
“effectual, effective.” He cites copious instances
from the various dialects to exemplify the super-
natural mode of mana. Thus the word is applied,
in Maori, to a wooden sword that has done deeds so
wonderful as to possess a sanctity and power of its
own; in Samoan, to a parent who brings a curse on
a disobedient child; in Hawaiian, to the gods, or
to a man who by his death gives efficacy to an idol;
in Tongan, to whoever performs miracles, or be-
witches; in Mangarevan, to a magic staff given
to a man by his grandfather, or, again, to divination
in general; and so forth. In short, its range is as
wide as those of divinity and witchcraft taken to-
gether. If, on the other hand, we turn to what I
have called the secular sense attributed to mana,
as, for example, when it is used of a chief, a healer of
maladies, a successful pleader, or the winner of a race,
we perceive at once that the distinction of meaning
holds good for the civilized lexicographer rather than
for the unsophisticated native. The chief who can
impose tabu, the caster-out of disease-devils, and, in
hardly less a degree, the man who can exercise the
magic of persuasion, or who can command the luck
which the most skilled athlete does not despise, is
for the Polynesian mind not metaphorically“ gifted”
or“ inspired,” but literally. Of course, as in Europe,
106
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
so in Polynesia, the coin of current usage may have
become clipped with lapse of time. Thus Plato tells
us that both the Spartans and the Athenian ladies of
his day used to exclaim of any male person they
happened to admire, teños ávýp," what a divine man!”i
It need not surprise us, therefore, that in Mangarevan
you may say of any number over forty manamanana
-an “awful ” lot, in fact. Such an exception,
however, can scarcely be allowed to count against
the generalization that, throughout the Pacific region,
mana in its essential meaning connotes what both
Codrington and Tregear describe as the super-
natural.
Now mark the importance of this in view of the
possible use of mana as a category of Comparative
Religion. Comparative Religion, I would maintain,
at all events so long as it is seeking to grapple with
rudimentary or protoplasmic types of religious ex-
perience, must cast its net somewhat widely. Its
interest must embrace the whole of one, and, per-
haps, for savagery the more considerable, of the two
fundamental aspects under which his experience or
his universe (we may express it either way) reveals
itself to the rudimentary intelligence of man. What
to call this aspect, so as to preserve the flavour of
the aboriginal notion, is a difficulty, but a difficulty
of detail. The all-important matter is to establish
by induction that such an aspect is actually perceived
at the level of experience I have called “rudimentary.”
This, I believe, can be done. I have, for instance,
shown elsewhere that even the Pygmy, a person
Plato, Meno, 99 D.
TYTI
107
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
perhaps not overburdened with ideas, possesses in
his notion of oudah an inkling of the difference that
marks off the one province of experience from the
other. Of course he cannot deal with oudah ab-
stractly; provinces of experience and the like are
not for him. But I found that, when confronted
with particular cases, or rather types of case, my
Pygmy friend could determine with great precision
whether oudah was there or not. What practical
results, if any, would be likely to flow from this effort
of discernment my knowledge of Pygmy customs, un-
fortunately, does not enable me to say, but I take
it that the conception is not there for nothing. I
shall assume, then, that an inductive study of the
ideas and customs of savagery will show, firstly,
that an awareness of a fundamental aspect of life
and of the world, which aspect I shall provisionally
term "supernatural,” is so general as to be typical,
and, secondly, that such an awareness is no less
generally bound up with a specific group of vital
reactions.
As to the question of a name for this aspect differ-
ent views may be held. The term our science needs
ought to express the bare minimum of generic being
required to constitute matter for the experience
which, taken at its highest, though by no means at
its widest, we call “religious.” “Raw material for
good religion and bad religion, as well as for magic
white or black”-how are we going to designate
that in a phrase? It will not help us here, I am
afraid, to cast about amongst native words. Putting
aside oudah as too insignificant and too little under-
108
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
stood to be pressed into this high service, I can find
nothing more nearly adapted to the purpose than the
Siouan wakan or wakanda ; of which M'Gee writes:
" the term may be translated into 'mystery' per-
haps more satisfactorily than in [sic] any other single
English word, yet this rendering is at the same time
too limited, as wakanda vaguely denotes also power,
sacred, ancient, grandeur, animate, immortal.” I
But when vagueness reaches this pitch, it is time, I
think, to resort to one of our own more clear-cut
notions. Amongst such notions that of “ the super-
natural” stands out, in my opinion, as the least
objectionable. Of course it is our term; that must
be clearly understood. The savage has no word for
“nature.” He does not abstractly distinguish be-
tween an order of uniform happenings and a higher
order of miraculous happenings. He is merely con-
cerned to mark and exploit the difference when pre-
sented in the concrete. As Codrington says: “A
man comes by chance upon a stone which takes his
fancy; its shape is singular, it is like something, it is
certainly not a common stone, there must be mana
in it. So he argues with himself, and he puts it to
the proof; he lays it at the root of a tree to the fruit
of which it has a certain resemblance, or he buries
it in the ground when he plants his garden; an
abundant crop on the tree or in the garden shows
that he is right, the stone is mana, has that power
in it.” 2 Here, however, we have at all events the
* W. J. M'Gee, Fifteenth Annual Report of the U.S. Bureau of
Ethnology (Washington, 1898), 182.
2 Codrington, op. cit., 119.
109
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
germs of our formal antithesis between the natural
and the supernatural; which, by the way, is perhaps
not so nicely suited to the taste of the advanced
theology of our day that it would have much scruple
about dedicating the expression to the service of
rudimentary religion. I should like to add that in
any case the English word "supernatural” seems
to suit this context better than the word “sacred.”
L'idée du sacré may be apposite enough in French,
since sacré can stand either for “ holy” or for
"damned”; but it is an abuse of the English
language to speak of the “sacredness” of some
accursed wizard. Hence, if our science were to take
over the phrase, it must turn its back on usage in
favour of etymology; and then, I think, it would be
found that the Latin sacer merely amounts to tabu,
the negative mode of the supernatural-a point to
which I now proceed.
Tabu, as I have tried to prove elsewhere, is the
negative mode of the supernatural, to which mana
corresponds as the positive mode. I am not confin-
ing my attention to the use of these terms in the
Pacific region, but am considering them as trans-
formed, on the strength of their local use, into cate-
gories of world-wide application. Given the super-
* Indeed, in Melanesia at all events, rongo answers more nearly to
the purpose than does tambu (= tabu), since the laiter always implies
human sanction and prohibition. A place may, in fact, be tambii
without being rongo, as when a secret society taboos the approaches
to its lodge by means of certain marks, which are quite eflectual as
representing the physical force commanded by the association. So
Codrington, op. cit., 77. Surely, however, every secret society pos-
sesses, or originally possessed, a quasi-religious character, and as such
would have mana at its disposal."
IIO
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
.....
aria
natural in any form there are always two things to
note about it: firstly, that you are to be heedful in
regard to it; secondly, that it has power. The first
may be called its negative character, the second its
positive. Perhaps stronger expressions might seem
to be required. Tabu, it might be argued, is not
so much negative as prohibitive, or even minatory;
whilst mana is not merely positive but operative and
thaumaturgic. The more colourless terms, how-
ever, are safer when it is a question of characterising
universal modes of the supernatural. Given this
wide sense tabu simply implies that you must be
heedful in regard to the supernatural, not that you
must be on your guard against it. The prohibition
to have dealings with it is not absolute; otherwise
practical religion would be impossible. The warn-
ing is against casual, incautious, profane dealings. *
“ Not to be lightly approached” is Codrington's
translation for the corresponding term used in the
New Hebrides. Under certain conditions man may
draw nigh, but it is well for him to respect those
conditions. Thus “ prohibitive” and “minatory”
are too strong. Tabu, as popularly used, may in a
given context connote something like absolute pro-
hibition, but in the universal application I have given
to it can only represent the supernatural in its nega-
tive character—the supernatural, so to speak, on the
defensive.
We come now to mana. Here, again, we must
shun descriptions that are too specific. Mana is
often operative and thaumaturgic, but not always.
i Codrington, op. cit., 188; cf. 181.
O
III
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
Like energy, mana may be dormant or potential.
Mana, let us remember, is an adjective as well as
a noun, expressing a possession which is likewise
a permanent quality. The stone that looks like a
banana is and has mana, whether you set it working
by planting it at the foot of your tree or not. Hence
it seems enough to say that mana exhibits the super-
natural in its positive capacity-ready, but not neces-
sarily in act, to strike.
At this point an important consideration calls for
notice. Tabu and mana apply to the supernatural
solely as viewed in what I should like to call its first,
or existential, dimension. With its second, or moral,
dimension they have nothing to do whatever. They
register judgments of fact, as philosophers would say,
not judgments of value; they are constitutive cate-
gories, not normative. Thus, whatever is super-
natural is indifferently tabu-perilous to the unwary;
but as such it may equally well be holy or unclean,
set apart for God or abandoned to devil, sainted or
sinful, cloistered or quarantined. There is plenty of
linguistic evidence to show that such distinctions
of value are familiar to the savage mind. Nor is it
hard to see how they arise naturally out of the tabu
idea. Thus in Melanesia everything supernatural is
at once tambu and rongo, words implying that it is
fenced round by sanctions human and divine; but
there is a stronger term buto meaning that the sanc-
tions are specially dreadful and thereupon becoming
equivalent to “abominable," I where we seem to pass
without a break from degree of intensity to degree
'Codrington, op. cit., 31.
112)
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
of worth. Passing on to mana, we find exactly the
same absence of moral significance. The mystic
potentiality is alike for good and evil. Take, for
example, two Samoan phrases found side by side in
Tregear's dictionary: ' fa'a-mana, to show extra-
ordinary power or energy, as in healing; fa'a-mana-
mana, to attribute an accident or misfortune to super-
natural powers. Or again, in Melanesia European
medicine is called pei mana, but on the other hand
there is likewise mana in the poisoned arrow.2
Similarly, orenda is power to bless or to curse; and
the same holds good of a host of similar native expres-
sions, for instance, wakan, qube, manitu, oki, not to go
outside North America. Meanwhile, in this direction
also moral valuations soon make themselves felt.
Thus in the Pacific region we have plenty of special
words for witchcraft; and in Maori mythology we
even hear of a personified witchcraft Makutu dwell-
ing with the wicked goddess Miru, of whom Tregear
writes: “the unclean tapu was her power (mana)." 3
Or again, in Huron there is a word otgon denoting
specifically the malign and destructive exercise of
orenda ; and Hewitt notes the curious fact that the
former term is gradually displacing the latter-as if,
he observes, the bad rather than the good manifesta-
tions of supernatural power produced a lasting im-
pression on the native mind.4 Elsewhere I have
given Australian examples of a similar distinction
drawn between wonder-working power in general, and
Tregear, s.v. mana.
2 Codrington, op. cit., 198, 308.
3 Tregear, s.vv. Makutul, Miru.
. 4 J. N. B. Hewitt, The American Anthropologist (1902), N.S., iv.
37 17.
II3
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
1
a specifically noxious variety of the same, such as, for
instance, the well-known arungquiltha of the Arunta.
I have said enough, I trust, to show that there
exists, deep-engrained in the rudimentary thought of
the world, a conception of a specific aspect common
to all sorts of things and living beings, under which
they appear at once as needing insulation and as en-
dowed with an energy of high, since extraordinary,
potential-all this without any reference to the
bearing of these facts on human welfare. In this
connection I would merely add that our stock
antithesis between magic and religion becomes ap-
plicable only when we pass from this to the second
or moral dimension of the supernatural. Presented
in its double character of tabu and mana the super-
(natural is not moral or immoral, but simply unmoral.
It is convenient to describe its sphere as that of the
magico-religious; but strictly speaking it is that
which is neither magical nor religious, since these
terms of valuation have yet to be superinduced. I
am aware that the normative function of these ex-
pressions is not always manifest, that it is permissible
to speak of false religion, white magic, and so on.
But, for scientific purposes at anyrate, an evaluatory
use ought, I think, to be assigned to this historic dis-
junction, not merely in view of the usage of civilized
society, but as a consequence of that tendency to
mark off by discriminative epithets the good and
the bad supernaturalisms, the kingdoms of God and
of the Devil, which runs right through the hiero-
logical language of the world.
The rest of this paper will be concerned with a more
114
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
perplexing, and hence, probably, more controversial,
side of the subject. Put in a nutshell the problem is the
following: How does “animism” fit into the scheme?
Is the supernatural identical with the spiritual,
and is mana nothing more or less than spiritual
power? Or, on the contrary, are mana and “soul” or
“spirit " categories that belong to relatively distinct
systems of ideas-do the two refuse to combine?
As regards this latter question, our minds may
quickly be set at rest. Somehow these categories do
manage to combine freely, and notably in that very
Pacific region where mana is at home. The Mela-
nesian evidence collected by Codrington is decisive.
Wherever mana is found—and that is to say wher-
ever the supernatural reveals itself—this mana is
referred to one of three originating sources, namelyi
a living man, a dead man's ghost, or a “spirit”;
spirits displaying one of two forms, that of a ghost-
like appearance as a native put it, “ something
indistinct, with no definite outline, grey like dust,
vanishing as soon as looked at" or that of the
ordinary corporeal figure of a man. Other manifes-
tations of the supernatural are explained in terms
of these three, or rather the last two, agencies. A
sacred animal, or again, a sacred stone, is one which
belongs to a ghost or spirit, or in which a ghost or
spirit resides. Can we say, then, that " animism”
is in complete possession of the field? With a little
stretching of the term, I think, we can. Ghosts and
spirits of ghostlike form are obviously animistic to
the core. Supernatural beings of human and cor-
Codrington, op. cit., 151.
2 Tb., 178 sqq.
115
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
poreal form may perhaps be reckoned by courtesy as
spirits; though really we have here the rudiments
of a distinct and alternative development, namely,
anthropomorphic theism, a mode of conception that
especially appeals to the mythological fancy. Fin-
ally, animism can be made without much trouble to
cover the case of the living man with mana. If a
man has mana, it resides in his “spiritual part ”I
or “soul,” which after his death becomes a ghost.
Besides, it appears, no man has this power of him-
self; you can say that he has mana with the use of
the substantive, not that he is mana, as you can say
of a ghost or spirit. This latter“ puts the mana into
the man” (manag—a causative verb) or “ inspires "
him; and an inspired man will even in speaking of
himself say not"I" but“ we two." 2 There seems,
however, to be a certain flaw in the native logic, in-
volving what comes perilously near to argument in a
circle. Not every man has mana, nor every ghost; 3
but the soul of a man of power becomes as such a
ghost of power, though in his capacity of ghost he
has it in greater force than when alive.4 On the
ground of this capacity for earning, if not enjoying,
during life the right to be mana, I have ventured
provisionally to class the living man with the ghost
and with the spirit as an independent owner of mana ;
but it is clear that, in defiance of logic, animism has
contrived to "jump the claim.”
Having thus shown in the briefest way that mana
* Codrington: op. cit., 191.
2 16., 191, 210, 153.
3 Tö., 119, 125, 258 ; but 176 shows that even the burying-places
of common people are so far sacred that no one will go there without
due cause.
· 4 16., 258.
116
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
and "animism” can occur in combination, I proceed
to the awkward task of determining how, if treated
as categories applicable to rudimentary religion in
general, they are to be provided each with a classi-
ficatory function of its own. Perhaps the simplest
way of meeting, or rather avoiding, the difficulty is
to deny that “animism” is a category that belongs
intrinsically to our science at all. Certainly it might
be said to pertain more properly to some interest
wider than the magico-religious, call it rudimentary
philosophy or what we will. It makes no difference
whether we take animism in the vaguer Spencerian
sense of the attribution of life and animation-an
attitude of mind to which I prefer to give the dis-
tinguishing name of “animatism ”mor in the more
exact Tylorian sense of the attribution of soul, ghost,
or ghost-like spirit. In either case we are carried
far beyond the bounds of rudimentary religion, even
when magic is made co-partner in the system. There
is obviously nothing in the least supernatural in being
merely alive. On the other hand, to have soul is, as
we have seen, not necessarily to have mana here or
hereafter. The rudimentary philosophy of Mela-
nesia abounds in nice distinctions of an animistic
kind as follows. A yam lives without intelligence,
and therefore has no tarunga or“ soul.” A pig has
a tarunga and so likewise has a man, but with this
difference that when a pig dies he has no tindalo or
“ghost," but a man's tarunga at his death becomes
a tindalo. Even so, however, only a great man's
tarunga becomes a tindalo with mana, a "ghost of
worship," as Codrington renders it. Meanwhile, as
117
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
regards a vui or "spirit,” its nature is apparently
the same as that of a soul, or at anyrate a human
soul, but it is never without mana. Thus only the
higher grades of this animistic hierarchy rank as
supernatural beings; and you know them for what
they are not by their soul-like nature, but by the
mana that is in them.
It remains to add that mana can come very near
to meaning "soul ” or “spirit," though without
the connotation of wraith-like appearance. Tregear
supplies abundant evidence from Polynesia. Mana
from meaning indwelling power naturally passes into
the sense of “intelligence," “ energy of character,"
spirit”; and the kindred term manawa (manava)
expresses "heart," "the interior man," "conscience,
“soul”; whilst various other compounds of mana
between them yield a most complete psychological
vocabulary_words for thought, memory, belief,
approval, affection, desire and so forth. Meanwhile,
mana always, I think, falls short of expressing “in-
dividuality.” Though immaterial it is perfectly
transmissible. Thus only last week 3 a correspon-
dent wrote to me from Simbo in the Solomon Islands
to say that a native has no objection to imparting to
you the words of a mana song. The mere knowledge
will not enable you to perform miracles. You must
pay him money, and then ipso facto he will transmit
Codrington, op. cit., 249 ; cf. 123-6. In thus comparing tindalo
and vui in respect to their place in the animistic hierarchy," I do
not overlook the fact that they belong to different regions with distinct
cultures ; cf. p. 121.
2 Tregear, op. cit., s. vv. mana, manawa.
3 September 1909; the correspondent was Mr A. M. Hocart.
118
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
the mana to you—as we should say, the “good-will ”
of the concern. On the other hand, animism lends
itself naturally to this purpose. It is true that there
is often very little individuality attaching to the
nameless spirit (vui) that may enter into a man. But
the ghost (tindalo) that inspires you is apt to retain
its full selfhood, so that the possessed one speaks of
“we two-So-and-so and I.”
I conclude, then, that mana, or rather the tabu-
mana formula, has solid advantages over animism,
when the avowed object is to found what Dr Tylor
calls “a minimum definition of religion.” Mana
is coextensive with the supernatural; animism is
far too wide. Mana is always mana, supernatural
power, differing in intensity—in voltage, so to speak
—but never in essence; animism splits up into more
or less irreducible kinds, notably “soul," " spirit,"
and "ghost." Finally, mana, whilst fully adapted
to express the immaterial—the unseen force at work
behind the seen-yet, conformably with the in-!
coherent state of rudimentary reflection, leaves in
solution the distinction between personal and imper-
sonal, and in particular does not allow any notion of
a high individuality to be precipitated. Animism,
on the other hand, tends to lose touch with the super-
natural in its more impersonal forms, and is not well
suited to express its transmissibility nor indeed its
immateriality; but, by way of compensation, it can
in a specialized form become a means of representing
supernatural agents of high individuality, whenever
the social condition of mankind is advanced enough
to foster such a conception.
119
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
The last consideration paves the way for a con-
cluding observation. Throughout I have been in
search of classificatory categories applicable to rudi-
mentary religion as a whole. In other words, I have
assumed that the subject is to be treated as if it repre-
sented a single level of experience, and, moreover,
that the treatment is to limit itself to the work
of classifying—that is, arranging the facts under
synoptic headings. Now such, I think, must be the
prime object of our science at its present stage of de-
velopment. We must not try to move too fast.
Some day, however, when our knowledge is fuller and
better organized, we may hope to be able to deal with
the history of religion genetically-to exhibit the
successive stages of a continuous process of ortho-
genic or central evolution, whilst making at the same
time full allowance for the thousand and one side-
shoots of the wide-spreading family tree of human
culture. Now when it comes to exhibiting genesis, it
may well be, I think, that, along certain lines of
growth, and perhaps along the central line itself,
maná will at a certain point have to give way to one
or another type of animistic conception. Where
marked individualities tend to be lacking in society,
as in Australia, there it will be found that the super-
natural tends normally to be apprehended under
more or less impersonal forms. This holds true even
within the strict habitat of the mana doctrine. Thus
in the New Hebrides, where the culture is relatively
backward, the prevailing animistic conception is
that of the vui or "spirit," a being often nameless,
and, at the best, of vague personality. On the other
120
THE CONCEPTION OF MANA
hand, in the Solomon Islands, where the culture is
more advanced, the religious interest centres in the
tindalo mana or ghost of power--the departed soul
of some well-known individual. In effect, hero-
worship has, with the evolution of the hero, super-
induced itself upon some sort of polydaemonism
redolent of democracy. But I refrain from further
speculations about religious evolution. They are
tempting, but, in the present state of our knowledge,
hardly edifying. I would merely add, glancing for-
wards for a moment from rudimentary religion to
what we call “ advanced," that to the end animism
never manages to drive the more impersonal concep-
tions of the supernatural clean out of the field. The
"ghost," clearly, does not hold its own for long.
Anthropomorphic theism, on the other hand, a view
that is bred from animatism rather than from ani-
mism proper, dominates many of the higher creeds,
but not all. Buddhism is a standing example of an
advanced type of religion that exalts the impersonal
aspect of the divine. It is, again, especially notice-
able how a thinker such as Plato, with all his interest
in soul, human personality, and the subjective in
general, hesitates between a personal and an imper-
sonal rendering of the idea of God. Thus the am-
biguity that lies sleeping in mana would seem to
persist to some extent even when religious experience
is at its most self-conscious. In the meantime all
religions, low and high, rudimentary and advanced,
can join in saying with the Psalmist that “power
belongeth unto God.”
Codrington, op. cit., 122.
I21
A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF COMPARATIVE
RELIGION
ARGUMENT
BRITISH anthropologists, exception made of Spencer,
have always applied a psychological method to the com-
parative study of religion, that is, have treated psycho-
logical elements as fundamental in religious history.
Other schools have been more inclined to try to reduce the
psychological to presumed non-psychological, or objective,
conditions. Thus, of such objectivist theories, one regards
man as primarily determined by his instincts, another
as by his race, another as by his economic necessities,
another as by geographical conditions; all these views being
liable to the charge of apriorism and downright materialism.
The sociological school of Durkheim, on the other hand,
combines a genuine psychological interest with the gratui-
tous postulate of determinism, a position which leads them,
in their quest for objectivity, to abstract away, and hence
in effect to ignore and undervalue, that free moment in
human history of which individuality is the expression ;
whereas, as concretely presented, and hence for the pur-
poses of science as distinct from metaphysics, human ex-
perience exhibits the contradictory appearances of deter-
mination and freedom in conjunction. Hitherto, however,
British anthropologists have been content to adopt the
122
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
method of Individual Psychology, and hence are themselves
guilty of an abstract treatment of religion, seeing that
religion is in a leading aspect a social product, a phe-
nomenon of intercourse. To remedy this shortcoming, then,
the method of a Social Psychology is needed, and, for the
study of rudimentary religion, should even be made para-
mount. The religious society, rather than the religious
individual, must be treated as primarily responsible for
the feelings, thoughts and actions that make up historical
religion ; though, strictly, to speak of the religious society
as owning the soul thus manifested is no more than a
methodological fiction—just as the abstract soul of Individual
Psychology is, in another way, a fiction too. Exclusive
reliance on a Social Psychology being thus ruled out by
the abstractness of its point of view, room must be found for
the co-operation of the subsidiary disciplines. The first
is Individual Psychology, which as applied to history will
attach no small measure of explanatory value to the higher
nianifestations of individuality, individual initiation being,
however, less in evidence under the sway of primitive custom.
The second is Social Morphology, a line of inquiry most fruit-
fully prosecuted by the French sociologists aforesaid, which,
however, as such stops short at the external condition, the
social envelope ; the informing spirit of religion being the
concern of Social, assisted by Individual, Psychology.
I. Comparative Religion as a Branch of Psychology
ALTHOUGH anthropologists of the British
school have on the whole troubled little to
I make explicit to their readers, or even to them-
selves, the precise method of their researches in Com-
123
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
T
parative Religion, there is no doubt that one and all,
if challenged, would declare that method to be, broadly
speaking, psychological. In other words, they would
profess to be trying to understand the religious con-
sciousness, or religious experience, of mankind “from
the inside,” as the phrase is. Treating ritual, language,
organisation, and so on, as but the "outward signs”
of an “inward and spiritual” condition, they seek to
penetrate, they would say, beyond and beneath these
phenomena, by the only available, if indirect, means,
namely, the exercise of sympathetic insight, to those
subjective factors of which the objective manifesta-
tions form the more or less loose-fitting garment.
Further—though here might be found a greater
divergence of opinion-religious experience would be
characterized by most thinkers of this school as pre-
eminently of the practical rather than of the specula-
tive or mystic type, a mode of the life of purpose and
action rather than of the life of thought or faith.
After all, considering the national tendency to em-
phasize the ethical side of Christianity, it is not
surprising that the scientific conception of religion
should echo this pragmatic tone.
Does the rest of the world agree with the British
school in regarding psychological and subjective ele-
ments as fundamental in religious history? Of
course no one in their senses-not even a theorist
defending a thesis—would deny that subjective
elements are there to be taken stock of, or that,
when taken stock of, they have a certain value in
revealing ultimate conditions. But a profound dis-
trust of the subjective as providing altogether too
124
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
shifting a base for the philosophy of the human
sciences exists both here and abroad. Indeed, if
British anthropologists (from amongst whom Spencer
may for our present purpose be excluded as founder
of a distinct school of his own) have acquiesced in
purely psychological results, might not the reason be
that, busy with their beloved facts, they have not
troubled to look beyond the ends of their noses?
Hence, both here amongst admirers of the Synthetic
Philosophy, and abroad where system is more of a
cult, determined efforts of all sorts have been made
to reduce the psychological to its presumed non-
psychological and objective conditions. Sociological
or historical method in general rather than the
method of Comparative Religion in particular has
naturally furnished the immediate topic of most pro-
nouncements. Yet it would be easy to show that
Comparative Religion no less than any other of the
special departments of Social Science has been seri-
ously affected by this and that attempt to refer the
will and fancy of man to causes that transcend the
arbitrary.
To enumerate and classify the multitude of these
objectivist theories is too formidable a task to be
attempted here, but some representative views may
be cited by way of illustrating, and at the same time
criticising, their general tendency. First we have
the evolutionism of the biological school with its
organicist or even mechanist analogies, which ap-
plied wholesale and unconditionally to Sociology
have notoriously begotten a mythology. When all
has been said in favour of the suggestiveness of the
125
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
ideas of such writers as Novicow or Espinas, it
remains certain that sociological phenomena belong
primarily to a plane distinct from that of instinct,
and admit of specific explanation in terms not hetero-
geneous but appropriate. No doubt there are re-
moter conditions of a biological order that have a
certain relevancy. To exalt these, however, at
the expense of proximate conditions, as this school
is led by its a priori bias to do, is gratuitously to
hamper observation and description with a radically
false perspective. Closely associated with the line
of thought is the view of such thinkers as Lapouge
and Ammon, who make race the dominant factor in
human development—a notion which seems likewise
to underlie the somewhat different work of Gum-
plowicz. But, strictly taken, race is the vaguest and
most elusive of conceptions, as any physical anthro-
pologist is perfectly ready to admit.' The races of
mankind, it is plain, are a thoroughly mixed lot.
If on the other hand race be taken loosely in the sense
of nationality, it is clear that analysis has not yet
said its last word. In another category are the
economic interpretations of Loria and others, this
type of theory deriving itself from the “historical
materialism ” of Marx. Distinct, but of very similar
tendency, is the anthropogeography of Ratzel and his
school, a method that is rapidly gaining ground in
this country. Now, regarded in themselves, such
studies, whether of food-supply, or of soil or climate,
in relation to distribution of population and other
Compare, for instance, P. Topinard, Elements d'anthropologie
générale (1885), p. 202.
126
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
objective matters, are highly important, nay indis-
pensable. National character and policy are certainly
not to be understood apart from the consideration of
environing conditions of this kind. It is only when,
or so far as, they are taken to explain the national
history to all intents and purposes finally, milieu
or some prominent aspect thereof being regarded as
the determining cause of genius itself, that no soundly
empirical and tentative philosophy of man can bear
with them any longer. The trouble with all these
theories we have reviewed is their apriorism. It is
assumed offhand firstly, that for all the manifestations
of mind, individual and collective, there must be an
explanation in terms of necessary causation of a
physical and external type; secondly, that some one
cause must be more fundamental than the rest, and
must therefore be capable of accepting responsibility,
as it were, for the whole affair. But these are but
prejudices, begotten it may be by a passion for the
objective, but nevertheless deserving the denomina-
tion of subjectivist at its most abusive. As empiri-
cists we must work, not from metaphysical fancies,
but from facts—from that which, as Aristotle puts
it, is “ better known to us."
A defender of these views will retort: “But grant-
ing you that instinct and race are somewhat intan-
gible, here in food-supply or soil are the very facts you
profess to be after. Surely they are ' better known
to us,' because directly presented to the senses, than
the accompanying subjective states that sympathetic
insight must indirectly divine.” To this the reply is
that undoubtedly they are directly presented to us
127
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
as facts; but not as causes. Description may well
begin from them; it does not follow that explanation
will end with them. We begin, let us say, by describ-
ing in objective terms the proportion borne by the
agricultural to the manufacturing portion of the
population in this country, or its position as a group
of islands set over against a continent. Is it possible
for explanation to deduce therefrom without further
ado the amount of corn we import or the size of our
battle fleet? If this seem possible to some, it is only
because the middle term, a fact of another order,
a psychical fact, namely, the national desire for self-
preservation, is tacitly assumed as a constant factor
in the situation. But nations make mistakes. They
are capable of ignoring, or at least misconceiving, the
dictates of self-preservation. The “ free fooders”
and the “ blue-water school” do not have it all their
own way. But what becomes then of the " laws"
supposed objectively and necessarily to connect
preponderance of manufacturing population with
the importation of grain, or insular position with the
command of the sea? They turn out to be but laws
of the moral type, laws which ought to be kept if
certain ends are to be realized, but which actually
are broken as often as these ends are not affirmed by
the general will. In short, if we are not composing
in the slap-dash style of evolutionary biology some a
priori science of national health in general, but are
seeking empirically to describe in their detailed
relations to each other the actual conditions under
which the historical life of peoples is carried on,
psychical factors must not only be considered but
128
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
LLI
specially emphasized. For the peoples concerned,
and therefore for the observer, the psychical factors-
this sentiment, that policy, and so on-underlie and
condition the material factors. If more remotely the
psychical factors be themselves conditioned, it is
certainly not by the material factors as directly pre-
sented either to the observer or to those he is obsery-
ing, but by certain transcendent causes somehow.
discerned by the metaphysician at the back of these
factors. We may add that we have represented the
case for objective determinants of an economic and
geographical kind at its strongest, namely, where, as
when food or defence from foes is in question, the
psychical accompaniments are relatively simple and
constant. Where art or religion have to be accounted
for, material explanations at once become palpably
incomplete and arbitrary. It is true that we have
gone for our illustration to a civilized nation where
sentiments and policies are clearly in evidence. But
the primitive tribe has its sentiments and even its
policies likewise. That they are harder to discover
does not confer the right to treat them as directly
deducible from milieu.
There remains to be considered another group of
sociologists, the school of Durkheim and his brilliant
colleagues of L'Année Sociologique. These thinkers
are, or tend to be, objectivist, but theirs is a psycho-
logical not a materialistic objectivism. Their explana-
tions are framed in terms of idea, sentiment, and
purpose, which is the all-important matter. So long
as they do not force the psychology to suit their
metaphysical postulate of determinism-and they
129
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
show no strong inclination to do that, a test-case
being their handling of the association of ideas on
sound apperceptionist principles—there can be no
harm in believing, with at least half the psychologi-
cal world, that ultimately the subjective and objec-
tive orders are at one in a cause-bound necessary
series or system of correlated realities. If they admit
the phenomenal existence of the contingent in the
shape of human purpose, they are welcome to dis-
believe in its real existence, whatever that may mean.
Their merit is that they go straight to the facts,
objective and subjective, of human life as directly
or indirectly observed, philosophizing as to principles
of explanation as they go, that is, as the principles are
demanded by the actual work of specific and detailed
research. With these, therefore, the British school
of anthropology, with its radical empiricism that
puts facts before laws and is happy if it can see a
stride-length ahead in the dark, has no quarrel; nay
from them it has much to learn. What this school
names Morphologie Sociale, the study of the exterior
conditions and forms of social agglomeration, of all
in short that a statistical demography should describe,
is a branch of investigation to which more attention
might well be paid on this side of the Channel,
as witness sundry gaps in the questionnaires
our anthropologists are wont to circulate among
workers in the field. But you may have too much
of a good thing, if the other good things of life are
for its sake neglected. There are certain signs that
Psychology may in the long run suffer from one-
Cf. L'Année Sociologique, ix, 138.
130
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
sided explanations of morphological derivation.
Thus that most able and thoroughgoing of anthropo-
logical researchers, M. Mauss, in his Essai sur les
variations saisonnières des Sociétés Eskimos 1 goes so
far as to claim that he has here verified crucially, 2
the hypothesis that all the forms, including the
religious form, of the social life of the Eskimo are a
function of its material substrate, namely, the mass,
density, organization and composition of their modes
of agglomeration. All he shows, however, is that,
if the mode of agglomeration changes, the religious
custom and so on does as a fact alter. Just so in
the case of the individual, as the brain-matter is
modified, the ideas appear to change; but surely
it does not follow necessarily that thought is a func-
tion of the brain, if this is to mean that thought is the
effect, or even the unconditional correlate, of cerebra-
tion. Yet if it mean less than this, and unknown
conditions may possibly vitiate the correspondence,
explanation is not reached, since we are left with the
merely analogical. A similar tendency would seem
to be the stress laid by the school of Durkheim on the
objectivity of their method-on the fact that through-
out they are dealing with "things." They appear to
regard social phenomena, whether morphological or
psychological, as objective simply in the sense of in-
dependent of individual control. Now no doubt the
individual often finds himself powerless in face of the
mass, though the mass is probably in every case moved
by its ringleaders. No doubt, again, the subconscious
nature of most popular contagions favours a treat- -
Cf. L'Annee Sociologique, 39 sqq.
2 16., p. 129:
IZI
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
ment which verges on a mechanist dynamic. But do
these writers mean more than that in a certain
abstract aspect of society mechanism, or something
psychologically equivalent, prevails? Probably not.
But they at least show no wish or power (happily for
those who have profited largely from their re-
searches) to limit their science to the study of this
abstract element and its conditions—a bare fragment
at most, suppose it per impossibile isolated, of the
vast mass of sociological material calling for analysis.
The truth would seem to be that these thinkers, in
reacting against the ideological constructions of the
fancy-free anthropologist-a pretender who is fast
being hustled from the field even in this land of dis-
tinguished amateurs—have bent the stick over to
the other side. By all means let us avoid what
Bacon calls anticipatio as contrasted with interpre-
tatio natura—the flying to the widest axioms with-
out progressively graduated research. But at least
let Psychology as Psychology preserve its integrity
as a kind of bridge-work between the objective and
the subjective elements of our experience. Let no
premature abstraction cut up the field into strips
before the whole has been surveyed. One day,
perhaps, social explanations may be assimilated to
mechanical; or one day, as I incline to hope, the very
opposite may come about. In the meantime, how-
ever, whilst so much observation remains to be accom-
plished, let metaphysical questions, so far as they do
not immediately bear on the exigencies of practical
procedure, remain open. In particular, let neces-
sity and contingency be treated as complementary,
132
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
though antithetic, bases of explanatory construction
in dealing with a human experience that, in despite
of logic, empirically faces both ways at once and
together.
II. Comparative Religion as a Branch of
Social Psychology
There seems, then, to be good reason to respect
the British tradition which ordains that Psychology
must preside over the investigations of Comparative
Religion. It remains to make explicit what anthro-
pologists of the British school have hitherto recog-
nized but vaguely, that a Social, not an Individual,
Psychology can alone be invested with this function.
The ordinary Psychology bases itself on the assump-
tion that this soul of yours or mine is something
individual. There can be no great harm in this if
individual here mean no more than self-contained.
What is fatal, however, is to take it—as is often done
by inadvertence—in the sense of self-complete.1 It
is absolutely necessary to assume with common sense
that souls can communicate by indirect means, let
us say, putting aside the question of the possibility
of telepathy—and that by communicating they
become more or less complementary to one another
in a social system. For certain limited purposes,
however, Psychology has found it convenient to
make abstraction of the social dimension, as it may
be termed. In so doing it can never afford for a
i The words “self-complete" and "self-contained” were by an
accident transposed in the first edition.
133
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
moment to forget that it is dealing with what, being
highly abstract, it is safest to term a fiction—to wit, a
soul stripped of ninety-nine hundredths of its natural
portion of soul-life. Herodotus ? tells how King
Psammetichus of Egypt caused certain infants to be
isolated and in their inarticulate babbling sought for
the original tongue of man, with results more satisfy-
ing to himself than to a critical posterity. Such an
incubator-method, as it may be termed, is by no means
to be despised in certain psychological contexts. As
is well known, the instincts of new-born animals have
been distinguished by precisely this means. So, too,
in a somewhat similar if less exact way the psycholo-
gist who merely observes, having made abstraction
of the pabulum provided by society together with
such effects on the mental digestion as may be traced
to the particular nature of the food, may pay exclu-
sive attention to the digestive apparatus which the
individual is supposed to bring with him to the feast.
But apply this incubator-method to the origins of
language, of law, of morals, of religion, and how is
the fallacy of Psammetichus to be escaped? Yet on
all sides this application is being made.
To take but the case in which we are primarily
interested, namely, that of religion, what is commoner
than to imagine a religious instinct, inherent in our
individual nature, that out of itself by a sort of
parthenogenesis bears fruit in the shape of historical
religion? Or if the stimulus to religion is thought of
as coming not so much from within as from without,
from God by revelation, or from the world by the
Herodotus, ii, 2.
134
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
awakening of awe at its marvels, it is still the self-
sufficient individual who is thought of as the subject
of the experience. An example from a neighbouring
field is the claim of various anthropologists to be able
to deduce the phenomena of magic from the laws of
association as they work in the individual mind.1
And yet that very incubator-method which is here
parodied and abused might have taught these all too
simple theorists their mistake. We cannot, perhaps,
isolate an infant after the example of Psammetichus,
and watch to see whether proprio motu it not merely
talks but prays. We might, however, transplant the
infant from savage to civilized surroundings, or,
for the matter of that, might reverse the process.
With what result? Would a young totemist not-
withstanding evolve in the one case and a young
Christian in the other? Or would not the child
acquire the religion of its adopted home, of the
society that rears and educates it? Even when full
allowance is made for the fact that each child reacts
on its education in individual fashion, can there be
the slightest shadow of a doubt that the supreme
determining influence must rest with the social
factor?
If religion, then, is pre-eminently the concern of a
Social, and not an Individual, Psychology, in what
sort of shape will its natural laws or tendencies be
exhibited? It has just been pointed out that a
religion is so closely bound up with a particular
It is only when a psychological treatment (such as I have myself
pursued in Essay II.) claims to be a complete explanation that I
object to it.
135
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
organization of society that to abandon the one is to
break with the other. May we, therefore, go further
and say that a religion is identical with a particular
organization of society, that it is a social institution?
Certainly not, unless we are speaking loosely. We
must say that the religion is materialized, incorpo-
rated, enshrined, in the corresponding institution or
group of institutions. Perhaps an analogy may be
drawn (though analogies are always dangerous if
pressed) between a religion embodied in a social
structure and a piece of literature, the work of many
hands, consigned to a manuscript. In either case
the one depends for very existence on the other, yet
they differ as spirit from outer form; and the spirit
is to a greater or less extent functionally independent
of the form, since often it palpably governs it, stamps
it with its own pattern, makes it the instrument of
its own intent. Bad literature, indeed, will conform
itself to the manuscript; just so many pages are
wanted; the scribe must not be troubled to rewrite.
And so bad religion enslaves itself to the outer form,
truckles to a usage that imposes bounds, becomes
fossilized to suit its ministers' convenience. Judged
by which test, it must be admitted, there is a vast
amount of bad religion in existence. Nevertheless
world-literature and world-religion at their best and
most typical are by no means the hacks of publishers
and priests. In view, then, of the functional inde-
pendence of the spirit, that is, the ruling meaning and
purpose, of historical religion at its most essential, its
laws or tendencies must be described in terms appro-
priate to spirit, in terms of meaning and purpose. A
136
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
Social, no less than an Individual, Psychology is
concerned, primarily and directly, with soul only..
But at once the question occurs: Whose soul?
Whose spirit? Whose meaning and purpose? For
those who recognize the possibility of a Social
Psychology, there can be but one answer. Primarily
and directly, the subject, the owner as it were, of
religious experience is the religious society, not the
individual. Now the subject of psychical states
and processes as conceived by Individual Psychology
is in no small measure abstract and fictitious; and
there is no harm in this abstraction so long as In-
dividual Psychology knows what it is about and does
not claim substance for its shadow-pictures. It re-
mains to add, in fairness, that Social Psychology too
has to operate on a figment-a figment which it is
the business of Sociology to exhibit in its true nature,
namely, as a methodological device of an abstract
kind. Suppose we wish to explain the totemism of
an Australian tribe. There is only one possible way
to do this appropriately and essentially, namely, to
describe its general meaning and purpose by means
of what Seignobos would call a formule d'ensemble.2
Do we thereby commit ourselves to the assertion that
this meaning and purpose exist? Most certainly yes
'I do not mean to say that the two figments in question are all in
respects on a par. Thus most people will be ready, on the evidence of
introspection, to believe that there is a real individual soul with which
Individual Psychology deals, however abstractly; whereas they will
be inclined to doubt whether any social or trans-personal soul really
exists in its own right at all. But these questions about real existence
are better reserved for metaphysics.
? Cf. Langlois et Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques,
1898, p. 244.
137
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
in a sense. For whom, then, do they exist in this
sense? Not for the individual tribesman taken at
random, nor even for a leading elder, but for the
society as a whole. It is absolutely necessary, if we
would avoid the psychologist's fallacy, the mistake
of letting our own feelings mix with what has to be
impersonally observed, that we should fix our eyes
throughout on the meaning and purpose totemism
has, not for us, but for them, and for them not as so
many individuals but as a group. Totemism is one
of those psychical effects of intercourse which are
methodologically, that is, for the working purposes
of our science, specific. In terming such effects
specific, however, Empirical Psychology implies no
more than that they feel, think, and act in society
otherwise than if apart, in a degree and to an extent
deserving careful discrimination. It does not pro-
nounce, because it has no methodological interest in
pronouncing, on the metaphysical question whether,
as common sense inclines to hold, a society as such
has no self-contained unitary soul, or, as Green and
Bosanquet would affirm, the general will belongs to a
collective soul of another and higher power than this
soul of yours or mine.
Social Psychology, then, would appear to be im-
mediately concerned with the soul-life of this abstrac-
tion or figment, the social subject. It is the business,
however, of Sociology, understood as the general
philosophy of the social sciences, in which capacity
its concern is with method rather than results, to
remind Social Psychology of the abstract and con-
ditional nature of its findings; since it is notorious
1
138
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
that in science one is apt to hug one's pet abstraction
so devotedly that one's fool's paradise comes in the
end to be mistaken for the real world. Sociology,
therefore, will do well to insist that, in dealing with
such a subject as religion in the concrete variety of its
historical manifestations, Social Psychology should
qualify its results by making allowance for those of
an applied form of Individual Psychology on the one
hand, and for those of Social Morphology on the other,
Thus in the first place, though its interest is
primarily in the social subject, Social Psychology
must never for an instant ignore the qualifying fact
of the existence of the individual subject. We should
nts
LILU
the savage society as such assigns any consistent
meaning and purpose to its totemism, or, for the
matter of that, were we to impute consistency of
view and intention to the most intelligent and organic
religious society the world has ever known. Souls
communicate, but always imperfectly. They are
always more or less at cross-purposes and cross-
meanings. It is well to remember this when we feel
inclined to deify society, the collective intelligence,
the public conscience, the spirit of the age, and the
like. Objectively viewed, no doubt, society dwarfs
the individual, such is the impressiveness of its sheer
mass and momentum. Subjectively considered,
however, society compares badly with the best in-
dividuals. The social mind is not merely hazy but
even distraught, whether we look at it in its lowest
manifestation, the mob, or in its highest, namely, the
state. At its best it is the mind of a public meeting,
139
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
at its worst it is the mind of Babel. It is pointless
to retort that society is always right. Society is
always actually right (until physical catastrophe
occurs), in the sense that whatever happens happens.
But it does not know and will the ideally right, the
right that is not actual but to-be-actualized, to any-
thing like the same extent as do the best individuals.
So much is this the case that the historian of civiliza-
tion, when he seeks to render the inwardness of some
development or movement, will be tempted to aban-
don the strictly social standpoint for another which
may be termed the standpoint of the representative
individual. Thus how describe the spirit of the
French Revolution? Socially, it is a seething mass
of cross-currents. In a representative individual,
say Rousseau, at least we can distinguish the general
set of the tide. At the level of primitive culture,
however, where representative individuals are not
easily met with, where, to our eyes at least, one man
is very like another, the social method, the method
of the composite photograph, may and must have
the preference. Yet Social Psychology cannot afford
to forget that the individual members of a primitive
society find it extremely hard to communicate suc-
cessfully with each other, to understand what they
are severally or together after. Hence there is a
danger of ascribing a psychical tendency to a social
movement where there is none. The very word
tendency is ambiguous. It may stand for a drifting
together, which is physical, or for a pursuing or at
least a groping together, which is psychical. The
latter kind of tendency is the only one that concerns
140
COMPARATIVE RELIGION ::
a Social Psychology as such. If therefore the collec-
tive mind of a savage society is asserted to mean and
purpose this or that, proof must be forthcoming that
there actually is something of a mutual understanding
to this or that effect; and it will always be wise to
make allowance for the possibility of alternative
interpretations in regard to even the most firmly-
rooted custom, as well as for the possibility of inter-
ference on the part of that bugbear of Social Science,
the individual who has a view of his own.
A second qualifying circumstance to be constantly
borne in mind when working from the notion of a
social subject or collective mind is one that is likely
to appeal more strongly than the other to those who
are in sympathy with Continental sociology. This
is the fact already alluded to that social meanings
and purposes exist mainly as embodied in social
institutions. We have claimed for the former at their
best and most typical a certain functional independ-
ence that entitles them to be dealt with as phenomena
essentially psychical. At the same time this inde-
pendence, it is clear, can never be absolute; whilst
often it is purely titular, the form, a thing in itself
wholly soulless and material, ruling in the place of
the spirit. Moreover, religion in particular would
seem of all the spiritual activities of man the most
subservient to form; ritual is religion's second
nature. Hence a Social Psychology must beware lest
in religion or elsewhere it pretend to find living pur-
pose where there is none or next to none. The
organism may be lying dead in its shell. Or, as is the
commoner case, whilst the shell persists intact, the
141
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
original owner may have disappeared, and in its
place another more or less inappropriate and alien
tenant have crept in, to the confusion of honest
naturalists unpractised in detecting sports. Nay,
to pursue the metaphor, the empty shell may harbour
quite a crowd of such casual immigrants. Bad
religion is quite capable of saying: This is what you
must all do; but each may think as he likes. Now
it is perhaps the most characteristic feature of
civilization that it encourages the free meaning,
giving it the power to dispense, not indeed with form
altogether, but with this or that form whenever it is
found to hamper. But primitive culture is form-
bound through and through. A proof is the extreme
difficulty with which ideas travel from tribe to tribe,
So integrally are they embodied in the tribal customs
that apart from those customs they are but empty
ineffectual ghosts of themselves. No wonder that
many a sociologist says in his haste that they are
the customs, neither more nor less. But Social
Morphology cannot rightfully thus supersede Social
Psychology any more than grammar can supersede
logic. Yet Social Psychology must work with Social
Morphology ever at its elbow. Let us remember that
social purposing has a psychical nature of a very low
order, especially when, as at the level of savagery, it
is not continuously fed by contributions from the
minds of enlightened individuals. The policy of an
enlightened individual may be said to start from
some more or less definite character, mental disposi-
tion, or whatsoever we like to call it. At least we
cannot get behind this, however well-informed we
142
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
may be as to the man's heredity and milieu ; for us
there is in greater or lesser degree spontaneous
origination, a fresh cause to be reckoned with. All
this is far less true of the action of a society as such.
Nevertheless, in a civilized society genuine origina-
tors are to be found amongst the prophets and leaders
and other representatives of the social tendency to
progress, who, apart from their personal contribution
to its furtherance, stand as vouchers for the diffused
presence in the community at large of the power to
originate by conscious and reflective means. Turn,
however, to primitive society, and self-caused ideas
as moving forces are but rarely to be met with. In-
stead, we are for the most part thrown back on mental
processes of the lowest order-say, Tarde's “ cross-
fertilization of imitations," or something equally
crepuscular in its psychical quality. Meanwhile,
lest we civilized observers lose our way in these regions
of mist, there before our eyes stands the rite, objective,
persistent, of firm outline; and, however much we
desire to psychologize, we are bound to cling to it as
our makeshift standard of reference. Nor is our con-
venience the only excuse for working round to spirit
by way of form. For the savage society likewise the
rite forms a sort of standard of reference. Out of it
proceed the random whys; back to it go the indecisive
therefores; and at this the common centre the mean-
ings coalesce and grow ever more consistent, so that
at last, perhaps, they react as one systematic idea on
the supporting custom, and may henceforth rank as
an originating psychical force of the higher order.
Since, then, it falls to the lot of the social morphologist
143
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
to describe the rite as externally presented, his ways
and those of the social psychologist can never lie far
apart at the level of the lower culture. And, even
if the latter has a distinct and from the human stand-
point a higher task, at least he must check his account
of the tendencies of the social mind by constant use
of the data provided by his colleague.
To sum up. Comparative Religion is a branch of
empirical science which aims at describing in formula
of the highest generality attainable the historical
tendencies of the human mind considered in its
religious aspect. Its method will primarily be that
of a Social Psychology; since it will work directly
from the implied or explicit notion of a social subject,
to which the tendencies it describes will be held to
belong essentially. The use of this method will,
however, be qualified throughout by a secondary
attention to the methods of two allied disciplines,
namely,Individual Psychology and Social Morphology.
On the one hand, allowance will be made for the effects
of the indirectness and imperfection inherent in the
communications of the individual members of society
with one another, as also for the results of individual
initiative. On the other hand, there will be taken
into account the influence on sentiments, ideas, and
purposes of social forms and institutions in their
external character as rallying and transmitting
agencies, or again as agencies that fossilize and
pervert.
144
VI
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS AND THE
BULL-ROARER
ARGUMENT
I ANG'S account in that pioneer work, The Making of
'Religion (1898), of various savage Supreme Beings was
primarily directed against the all-sufficiency of Tylor's
animism as a definition of rudimentary religion, in so far
as it showed that anthropomorphic theism was in principle
distinct ; in other words, that these Supreme Beings were
magnified, non-natural men rather than ghosts or spirits.
Only in his second edition (1900) did he propose a general
theory of their origin, namely, that their common features
are due to etiology. Such an explanation is not incom-
patible with the present writer's theory, first put forth in
1899, that a special group of these Supreme Beings, associ-
ated with the initiation rites of South-East Australia, has
likewise in large part evolved out of a personification of the
bull-roarer. Indeed, such personification and etiology to-
gether are far from completing the list of originating causes,
since, although animism hardly comes in, we must allow
likewise for the influence of totemism, perhaps assisted by
the clashing of races, and also of a sky-love and sky-magic.
The bull-roarer, owing to the effect of its sound on the
emotions, naturally finds a place and use within the sphere
10
145
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
of the occult or magico-religious. At the initiation cere-
monies one of its functions is simply to frighten the unin-
itiated, and with that end in view it is personified as a terrible
Hobgoblin by those who conduct the ceremonies. When,
however, the central mystery of the initiation rites has been
enacted, which consists in revealing to the novices the means
of producing these terrifying sounds, awe of the bull-yoarer
is in no way quenched and exploded. On the contrary, the
element of fear becomes an ingredient in a richer emotional
complex corresponding to the sense of being mysteriously
helped to accomplish the passage from boyhood into man-
hood—of being filled with the mana that makes all things
grow and prosper, whereof the bull-roarer is the vehicle.
Meanwhile, the material vehicle is dimly distinguished
from the indwelling power, the inward grace, which it
embodies and imparts, and there has consequently occurred
an advance to a more appropriate type of symbolization.
An anthropomorphic being, similar in this respect to
Hobgoblin but unlike him in being associated with the
beneficent power set in motion by the initiation rite, whereof
he is held, ætiologically, to be the founder, is supposed to
speak through the bull-roarer ; and, further, as the bull-
roarer is an instrument for making the thunder and rain
that make things grow, so its anthropomorphic counterpart
is identified with the sky-god who makes thunder in the sky
and sends down the actual rain. Where the anthropo-
morphic ectype is duplicated we may suppose the differ-
ence between the esoteric and the exoteric names for the same
Supreme Being to have projected itself into myth. In any
case, the fluctuating doctrinal representation of the godhead
is less vital to this type of religion than is the abiding sense
of a power that makes for goodness.
146
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
THEN, in 1898, Mr Andrew Lang
published The Making of Religion, he
I did a great service to the science
of Man. He called attention to a class of
facts to which those who interested themselves in
the general theory of “primitive” religion had
hitherto been blind. These facts were such as to
show that many of the most savage of existing
peoples-Bushmen, Andamanese, Australians, and
so on-recognize Supreme Beings, who are, in
Matthew Arnold's well-known phrase, “magnified
non-natural men” rather than ghosts or spirits. It
followed that the Tylorian animism would not do as
an all-sufficient account of the essential nature of
rudimentary religion.
To make this point of general theory clear was,
unquestionably, Mr Lang's chief object in setting
forth these unnoticed facts with all the literary skill of
which he is master. And, considered in the light of
pure theory, this point of his is, surely, one of the
utmost importance. If there be those who harbour
a suspicion that Mr Lang was moved by ulterior
motives of a non-scientific kind-that, to employ a
current vulgarism, he was“ playing to the theological
gallery”--they are much to be pitied. Every true
anthropologist knows that Mr Lang has deserved
well of the science that no one has shown himself
more ready to “ follow the argument whithersoever
it leads.” It might, however, be suggested with
more appearance of reason that here and there he had
incautiously made use of somewhat perfervid lan-
guage, as notably when he attributed" omniscience”
147
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
and “omnipotence" to certain Supreme Beings
hailing from Australia. Yet he was herein but faith-
fully reproducing the very words of his authorities,
at the head of whom stands A. W. Howitt, a cool
and accurate observer.1 And, like Howitt, he has
since taken pains to qualify his original presentation
of the facts, so as expressly to guard against interpre-
tations coloured by the belief in a primitive revela-
tion-ä hypothesis of which he does not avail him-
self,3 and one that, rightly or wrongly, is excluded
from the present purview of the evolutionary science
of Man.
In the first edition of his book Mr Lang was con-
tent to demonstrate the fact that many savage peoples
are actually found to recognize such Supreme Beings.
The origin of these Supreme Beingsin other words,
the conditions under which the notion of them first
arose he did not attempt to explain. Where he
thus, not unwisely, “refused to tread," the present
writer ventured to "rush in ” with a guess relating
to Mr Lang's prerogative group of instances, namely,
the Supreme Beings that preside over the initiation
ceremonies of the South-Eastern region of Australia.
A paper read before the British Association in 1899
contained a passage on the subject beginning with
* See especially A. W. Howitt, Journal of the Anthropological Insti-
tute, xiii. 458.
2 Contrast, for instance, Howitt's tone in The Native Tribes of
South-East Australia, 488 f., and note esp. 503.
3 See Anthropos, iii. 559 599., where Father Schmidt, citing the
passage in which Mr Lang rejects the postulate in question, takes his
leader to task for this want of speculative courage. The idea goes.
back to the Rev. W. Ridley ; see his Kamilaroi and other Australian
Languages (N. S. Wales, 1875), 171.
148
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
these words: “ I have to confess to the opinion with
regard to Daramulun, Mungan-ngaua, Tundun, and
Baiamai, those divinities whom the Kurnai, Murrings,
Kamilaroi, and other Australian groups address
severally as 'Our Father,' recognizing in them the
supernatural headmen and lawgivers of their respec-
tive tribes, that their prototype is nothing more or
less than that well-known material and inanimate
object, the bull-roarer." i That guess other calls
upon his time have prevented the present writer
from trying to make good until now.
In 1900, when Mr Lang brought out the second
edition of his book, his theory of the origin of savage
Supreme Beings was at length given to the world.
Arguing from the fact that “it is notoriously the
nature of man to attribute every institution to a
primal inventor or legislator," he concluded that such
Supreme Beings were conceived by way of answer
to the question, "Why do we perform these rites? ” 2
Now, of this hypothesis it must at least be admitted
that it is thoroughly scientific, in the sense of being
in complete harmony with the ordinarily accepted
principles of anthropology. What the learned know
as “ætiological myths,” and juvenile readers of
Mr Kipling as “ Just-so Stories,” undoubtedly tend
to arise in connection with human institutions no
less than in connection with the rest of the more
perplexing or amazing facts and circumstances of life.
It is “the nature of man" (as it is of the child, the
1 The whole passage as it originally stood is to be found in the essay
on " Preanimistic Religion," p. 16.
? See Lang, loc., Preface, esp. xiv.
149
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
father of the man) to ask “ Why? " and, further, to
accept any answer as at anyrate more satisfactory
than none at all. Again, it is sound method, in
dealing with myth as associated with ritual at the
stage of rudimentary religion, to assume that for the
most part it is the ritual that generates the myth,
and not the myth the ritual.1 And not only is Mr
Lang's explanation constructed on scientific lines.
It is probably a true explanation so far as it goes.
Nay, more; perhaps it goes as far as any explana-
tion can, that seeks 'o cover the whole miscellaneous
assortment of Supreme Beings, of whom mention is
made in Mr Lang's pioneer chapters. It may be that
their family resemblance amounts to no more than
this, that ætiology working upon ritual, or upon
anything else of which the why and wherefore is not
obvious, has in every case evolved certain leading
features appropriate to the "primal inventor or
legislator."
Here, however, it is proposed simply to theorize
about the origin of a single, since apparently more or
less homogeneous, group of Supreme Beings, that
are closely associated with a particular ritual. In
this ritual the bull-roarer plays a leading part.
Ætiology, therefore, in this case, was confronted by
the specific question, “Why do we perform the bull-
roarer rite?" If it can be shown that the bull-
roarer was already on its way to become a Supreme
Being on its own account, before ætiology could be
there to provide its peculiar contribution, namely,
The locus classicus on this subject is Robertson Smith, Lectures on
the Religion of the Semites, 17 f.
150
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
1
the features of the primal inventor, then in the specific
explanation of this Australian group of instances at
least one other factor of first-rate importance must
be reckoned with besides ætiology, namely, the ten-
dency to elevate the bull-roarer into a personality
dominating the rite. If the facts are forthcoming to
establish the existence of such a tendency, Mr Lang
is the last person likely to refuse to do it justice; for
he is bound to keep a soft spot in his heart for that
bull-roarer which he was the first, if not to christen,
at all events to introduce to polite society.
Let it be fully admitted in passing that thus to
reduce the number of the co-operating factors to a
simple pair is to resort to a purely provisional simpli-
fication of the problem of origin. To anyone who .
glances at the available evidence, sadly fragmentary
as it is, it will be plain that other influences have like-
wise left their mark on these Supreme Beings of
South-Eastern Australia. It is for future investiga-
tion-for field-work, so far as it is any longer possible
in this region, and at anyrate for the most minute
and careful study-work—to decide how far any of
these stands out as something more than a merely
subordinate and secondary determinant. One of
them has certainly all the appearance of a side-
1 The reference is to Mr Lang's well-known essay in Custom and
Myth (1884). The first to apply the English folk-word “bull-roarer"
to the Australian instrument was Howitt; see his appendix on the
subject in Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880).
2 Howitt's “ last conscious effort was to dictate from his death-bed a
message to anthropologists impressing on them the importance of
caution in accepting information drawn from the Australian tribes in
their present state of decay” (J. G. Frazer in Folk-Lore, xx. 171).
The remark applies with peculiar force to the South-East region,
though hardly at all to large portions of the North and West,
151
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
influence, namely, animism. Whatever else they
may resemble, these Supreme Beings in their recorded
traits bear little likeness to ghosts or spirits. Mr
Lang has made this clear. Various analogies from
the Central tribes might indeed afford some ground
for the suspicion that what are now clearly defined
individuals were once groups of reincarnating an-
cestors, spirits, or what not. Thus M. van Gennep
thinks that Baiamai was at first a collective term.)
Such conjectures, however, cannot be verified so long
as Australian philology remains in its present scanda-
lously backward state. There is more to be said for
the part played by totemism in one or another of its
forms. Unfortunately, this is to seek to explain the
obscure by the more obscure. Amongst profminent
tribes of the South-East region clan-totemism would
seem to have been well on its way to disintegrate
from natural causes that for the most part escape our
analysis. The matrimonial class-system, on the other
hand, was on the whole vigorous, and the animal
names therewith connected undoubtedly find their
way into the mythology which enwraps these Supreme
Beings in a thick haze. Heaven help the inquirer
who at this point branches off into speculations con-
cerning the famous theory of a supposed race-conflict
for the possession of the country under the rival
"A. van Gennep, Mythes et Légendes d'Australie, ix. The writer
came to know this valuable book only after he had expounded his
theory in its present form, only with further detail, in two public
lectures delivered before the University of Oxford. He then found
that M. van Gennep held similar views on several points, notably on
the connection between the bull-roarer and thunder (see ib., lxviii. f.).
He is glad to be in such close agreement with an author for whose
working principles he has the greatest respect.
152
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
bannersmor perhaps“ badges” would be nearer the
mark—of Eaglehawk and Crow!1 He will discover
incidentally that opinions differ as to whether Vic-
toria has preserved through untold ages the racial
type most nearly allied to the Tasmanian, or was
occupied by man for the first time only some few
centuries ago. Finally, in connection with the
possible influence of totemism, it must not be for-
gotten that South-East Australia is the classic home
of that most puzzling of institutions, the sex-totem.
It would not be antecedently surprising, therefore, if
the special supernatural protector of the male sex took
some interest in the rite that brought the men as such
together for the making of men as such. A third
source of ideas that may have contributed to the
character of these Supreme Beings remains to be
noticed. It may be termed comprehensively sky-
lore. Certain it is that these Supreme Beings,
though in former days they are held to have walked
the earth, dwell at present in the sky, and overlook
the doings of men from that high place. Such and
such a star will be pointed to by a native in proof
of this watchfulness of theirs. (The curious will
observe that this association with the sky has no
small effect in commending the Supreme Beings of
Australia to the religious mind of Europe.) Here,
of course, is an opportunity not to be neglected by
i Recently great weight has been attached to such considerations,
and it would be in accordance with the " ethnological method” to
suggest that the association between certain Supreme Beings and the
bull-roarer is simply due to the fact that they were brought into the
country by one and the same people. But this method has yet to
justify itself by its fruits.
2 Cf. Howitt, N. T. of S.-E. A., 489, 492.
153
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
the votaries of the sun-myth, a school a while ago
ridiculed nearly out of existence, but of late given to
asserting its claims in a reasonable form that ought
to win them a hearing. In this case the main
difficulty is to conceive how mere sky-lore, unless a
secondary development of totemism, could have
moulded the character of Supreme Beings whose
relation to a rite is apparently vital. If sky-myth
is to count, it might be presumed, it must be asso-
ciated with what for want of a better term might
be called sky-magic. Later on, a suggestion will be
made that proceeds on these very lines. In the
meantime enough has perhaps been said to show how
impossible it would be, in the present state of our
knowledge, to take account of all the clues that might
conceivably prove of service in this veritable maze,
were they in working order. For simplicity's sake,
then, let it be assumed that the prime factors are two
only—Mr Lang's ætiology, and that tendency to
ascribe personality to the bull-roarer which will be
illustrated in what follows.
· For the benefit of the uninitiated it may be expe-
dient at this point to describe the precise nature of
a bull-roarer. No student of the history of religion
can afford to remain a stranger to it, seeing that it is,
as Professor Haddon has well said, “ perhaps the
most ancient, widely spread, and sacred religious
symbol in the world.” 2 Natives of these Islands,
'See W. Foy, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, viii. 526 f. Father
Schmidt develops a similar line of thought with great learning in
Anthropos, iv. 207 f.
2 A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man, 327. The word “symbol”
may strike some as inappropriate, but there is much to be said for it,
as will be shown presently.
154
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
TA
if country-bred, may have had the opportunity in
boyhood of cultivating a practical acquaintance with
the bull-roarer under this, or some other, local de-
signation of the toy, such as “roarer," or "bull,"
or "boomer," or " buzzer,” or “whizzer," or
"swish "-names one and all eloquently expressive
of its function. That function is, of course, to make
a noise, the peculiar quality of which is best described
by some such epithet as “ unearthly." The merest
amateur who cuts a thin slab of wood to the shape of
a laurel leaf, and ties to one end a good thick piece of
string three or four feet long, has only to whirl the
instrument on his forefinger and he will at once get
a. taste of its windy note. Naturally, however, it
is the privilege of the expert to command the full
range of its music. At Cape York, for instance,
where the native employs two sizes, a “male” that
growls and a “female” that shrieks, and where, to
get more purchase, he fastens the string to the end
of a stick, “first they are swung round the head,
which produces a buzzing noise, then the performer
turns rapidly, and, facing the opposite direction,
swings the bull-roarers horizontally with a sudden
backward and forward movement of the hand which
makes them give out a penetrating, yelping sound.” 1
So much for what the artist can do in the way of solo.
The possibilities of a concerto are even more over-
whelming. Amongst the Kurnai of Gippsland the
initiation ceremonies culminate in the following
performance. When the novices have been made to
Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres
Straits, v. 220.
155
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
kneel down in a row, with their blankets drawn over
their heads so that they are in complete darkness,
suddenly there burst in upon them, to the number of
sixteen, successive wielders of the bull-roarer, who,
after adding each in turn his quota to“ the roaring
and screeching din," wind up all together in a grand
“ finale of discordant sounds.” 1
It is not, however, the volume or variety of the
bull-roarer's utterance that is noteworthy, so much
as its fearsome quality. This may be judged from
its effect on animals. Thus a Scotch herdboy was
observed to "ca' the cattle hame" by an ingenious,
if somewhat violent, method. He swung a bull-
roarer of his own making, and instantly the beasts
were running frantically to the byre. They threw
their tails up, we are told, and rushed with fury
through the fields. The same device is employed in
Galicia. As soon as the bull-roarer gets to work,
first the calves stretch their tails into the air, and
kick out their hind legs as if they were dancing;
and presently their seniors follow suit, so that there
is a general stampede. Indeed, the cattle get into
quite an idiotic condition; so much so that the
Galician peasant will say of a man who is not quite
right in the head, "He has a bzik" (whence, by the
way, the title of the game bezique), the word being, of
course, modelled on the bull-roarer's buzz.3 Simi-
larly, in the Malay Peninsula the little instrument
sends the huge marauding elephants packing out of
the plantations. Indeed, who knows whether its
Howitt, N. T. of S.-E. A., 629.
? Haddon, loc., 281.
3 16., 286.
4 16., 298.
156
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
earliest use on the part of man was not to drive and
stupefy the game, as the primeval Bushman does
with it to this day.
Be this as it may, it is more immediately in point
here to inquire how and why the bull-roarer came to
serve a mystic, or magico-religious, purpose. The
"how" of the matter, indeed, will probably be
different in different cases; bụt the "why” is within
limits explicable in terms of general psychology.
Whereas in the animal consciousness fear and
curiosity are alternative, or at most combine momen-
tarily, so as to produce a painful vacillation, it is
otherwise with the human mind. Here, if the ob-
jective conditions are favourable, the two can unite
to form a blend. Even if the fear predominate so as
to rout, or else paralyse, the body, the curiosity is
capable at the same time of arresting and exciting
the imagination. Mystic fear, then, is a fear charged
with an overtone of wonder. It has a haunting
quality which, with the development of the specula-
tive powers, provides the sympathetic nexus for whole
systems of ideas and purposes. Thus, in particular,
it is the hotbed of magic and religion-systems that,
however we decide to delimit them, have this at
least in common, that both alike participate in the
occult.
This appears from the experience of those human
beings whose feelings towards the bull-roarer must
approach most nearly to pure fear. Good care is
taken by those who conduct the initiation ceremonies
of South-East Australia that the uninitiated, and,
? Haddon, loc., 290.
157
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
notably, the women and children, shall have the full
benefit of the terrifying noise of the bull-roarer,
without having a chance of discovering how that
noise is produced. The fact that this part of the
performance goes by the name of “ Frightening the
women” i affords an eloquent proof of an intention
on their part, which they are doubtless fully com-
petent to render effective. In short, they see to it
that the women“ have the bzik." It is conducive to
discipline. Just so at Abbeokuta, in West Africa,
the dread god Oro, who speaks through the bull-
roarer, punishes gadding wives with a thoroughness
characteristic of that blood-stained corner of the
world. It remains to note that, if feminine nerves
are weak, there is likewise a feminine curiosity which
is strong and must be satisfied. Hence myth is
resorted to, if that be the proper name for a bare-
faced piece of“ organized hypocrisy.” The shudder-
ing sound proceeding from the woods is explained to
be the voice of Hobgoblin. No bloodless wraith is
he, but an anthropomorphic being if ever there was
one. Presently, when the women's heads have been
duly smothered under their opossum rugs, he will
come tearing into the camp to fetch the boys, and
there will be heard not merely his thunderous voice,
but the trample of his feet as he hales off the novices
by main force, scattering the fire - brands as he
A
Howitt, J. A. I., xiv. 315; cf. {N. T. of S.-E. A., 631. It is
noticeable that this took place even amongst the Kurnai, where the
emancipation of woman" had gone further than anywhere else in
Australia.
2 See generally Mrs R. Braithwaite Batty in J. A. 1., xix. 160-3.
Cf. Haddon, Study of Man, 289.
158
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
goes. And throughout the initial stages of the initia-
tion rite the same farce is kept up for the benefit of the
novices. It is held to be good policy to daze and
terrorize them. Society has got them in its grip,
and wishes them to realize the fact. Therefore, when
a tooth is extracted, or filth has to be eaten, or some-
thing else of impressive unpleasantness takes place
at the expense of the hapless youths, the voice of
Hobgoblin proceeding from some hidden spot adds a
dreadful sanction to the ordeal. At last, when the
preliminary work of mortifying the “old Adam” is
accomplished, the privileges of manhood are disclosed.
What Howitt calls “ the central mystery" 2 is en-
acted. It takes the form of an anonáduntos. The bull-
roarer is shown for what it is, and Hobgoblin is no
more. “ Here is Twanyirika, of whom you have
heard so much," explain the blameless Arunta to
the newly-circumcised boys, adding (let it not be
forgotten), “ They are Churinga, and will help to
heal you quickly.” 3 The esoteric cult of the
Churinga now begins, say they in effect; but, as for
that exoteric name of fear, Twanyirika, 'tis but a
means of keeping little boys, and our female relatives,
in order. In the South-East these methods may be
less direct than in the centre of the continent, but the
transition from exoteric to esoteric doctrine is just as
See R. H. Mathews in J. A. I., xxvi. 274. It might be worth
while to inquire how far a universal source of anthropomorphic, as
contrasted with animistic, that is, wraith-like, characters in super-
natural beings is to be sought in personation. Thus there is reason to.
suspect that the manitu, whom the young American goes out into the
woods to find, appears to him more often than not in the shape of a
masked man.
2 Howitt, N. T. of S.-E. A., 628.
3 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 497.
159
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
sharp; nor is the confession of pious fraud less re-
freshingly explicit. It is solemnly declared that
Daramulun, the Hobgoblin of the women's camp,
behaved in days gone by so badly, making away
with the boys and so on, just as Hobgoblin is even
now reputed to do, that Baiamai killed him. Then
Baiamai put Daramulun's voice into the trees, and
told mankind that they might cut bull-roarers from the
wood of the trees in order to “represent” Daramulun,
but that they must not on any account communicate
the “imposition” to uninitiated womankind.
So much for the attitude towards the bull-roarer of
those human beings who merely hear its sound. Like
the animals they are thoroughly frightened. With
the animals, however, the process reaches its end here.
It is probably quite incorrect to say that the Scotch
cattle " think” it is the “ bot-fly” or “ cleg”; or that
the elephants of Malaya " mistake” it for a tiger.
It is more likely that they merely hear danger in its
note, just as the burnt child, or burnt puppy, comes to
“ see” that the fire is hot. The human beings, on
the other hand, can think," and insist on doing so.
Hence, with a friendly jog from the masculine quarter,
the female imagination creates Hobgoblin. But what
is the psychological result of the inoxáðunfis ? That
is the next question. When every mother's son of
them has been shown the piece of wood that makes
the noise, and further has had the instrument in his
hands and learnt how to whirl it round, is mystic
fear at an end, and the magico-religious character
of the bull-roarer as such abolished?
'R. H. Mathews, J. A. I., xxv. 298.
Ібо
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
It would be easier to reply to this question did
we know with approximate certainty how the bull-
roarer first came to be used in these rites, or even
what precise function it is supposed to fulfil in regard
to them now. There is, indeed, evidence enough to
show that its use is somehow vital to the initiation
ceremony. This might truly be termed the bull-
roarer rite. The messenger who summons the meet-
ing carries a bull-roarer. The possession of one
constitutes a passport, as Howitt found when he
sought entry into the inner circle. In the revelation
of its nature the “central mystery” consists. Or
again, whereas in other respects Australian initiations
are of divergent type (so that, for instance, in the
West there prevails circumcision, but in the East
the knocking out of a tooth), the use of the bull-
roarer is more or less strictly common to all.
What, then, is the secret of this intimate and widely-
distributed connection of the bull-roarer with the
making of men? In a valuable but perhaps little-
known paper entitled On some Ceremonies of the
Central Australian Tribes,1 Dr J. G. Frazer puts
forward an interesting theory bearing on this subject.
“When we remember," he says, “ that the great
change which takes place at puberty both in men and
women consists in the newly-acquired power of re-
producing their kind, and that the initiatory rites of
savages are apparently intended to celebrate, if not
to bring about that change, and to confirm and
establish that power, we are tempted to conjecture
Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Mel-
bourne, 1901, No. 7.
II
161
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
that the bull-roarer may be the implement by which
the power in question is supposed to be imparted, at
least to males." i In support of this view he quotes
. from Ridley a statement conveyed to the latter as a
great favour by a native elder. This was to the effect
that the sight of the bull-roarer" inspires the initi-
ated with manhood,” or, in other words, " imparts
manly qualities.”2 Dr Frazer goes on to cite
evidence from Australia, and from the adjoining
region of Torres Straits and New Guinea, showing
that the bull-roarer is used to promote fertility in
general, as represented by an abundance of game-
animals, or snakes, or lizards, or fish, oi yams, as the
case may be; so much so that Professor Haddon has
conjectured that, in the Torres Straits at least, the
initiation ceremony “is primarily a fertility cere-
mony, perhaps originally agricultural and then
social.”3 Dr Frazer, however, would reverse the
assumed order of development, conjecturing for his
own part that processes originally directed to the
multiplication of the species were afterwards ex-
tended, on the principle of sympathetic magic, to the
promotion of the fertility of the earth.4
Now this hypothesis of Dr Frazer is, unfortunately,
in direct conflict with another theory with which his
name and authority are associated, namely, the view
that many Australian tribes are wholly unaware of
Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 319.
? Ib., 320. Ridley's native informant actually referred to the instru-
ment itself as Dhurumbului (presumably a variant for Daramulun),
just as amongst the Kurnai of Gippsland Tundun is the name both of
the bull-roarer and of the eponymous hero there with connected.
3 1b., 321, the reference being to Haddon, The Study of Man, 305.
4 76., 321.
162
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
the part played by the male in the reproduction of
the race. On the other hand, Professor Haddon's
attribution of an agricultural origin to the initiation
ceremonies will scarcely bear to be transferred from
Torres Straits to Australia, where agriculture is un-
known to the aborigines. The truth not improbably
lies somewhere midway between these rival doctrines.
Savages ignorant of agriculture have nevertheless
enough sense to perceive that, for things to grow,
there must be sun or rain-sun in a rainy land, rain
in a. parched land like Australia, where a thunder-
storm causes the desert to blossom as the rose, truly
as if by magic.1 And in Australia the bull-roarer
is, as they call it to this day in Scotland, a “ thunner-
spell.” Its roaring, says Howitt, “represents the
muttering of thunder, and the thunder is the voice of
Daramulun.” In the words of Umbará, headman
and bard of the Yuin tribe,“ Thunder is the voice of
Him (and he pointed upwards to the sky) calling on
the rain to fall and make everything grow up new.”3
Surely Umbara here puts the whole truth of the
matter into a nutshell. The entire object of the
initiation rite is to make the youths not merely grow
but" grow up new.” It is, as M. van Gennep would
say, a rite de passage,4 a carrying-over from an old
Compare Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central
Australia, 4.
? Haddon, Study of Man, 281. In Scotland, by a not uncommon
inversion, it is used to keep the thunder away. The word "spell,” by
the way, may simply be the same as "spill,” referring to the thin strip
of wood; so at least suggests a writer in the Aberdeen Free Press of
August 22, 1913.
3 Howitt, N. T. of S.-E. A., 538.
4 A. van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage, Paris, 1909.
163
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
life to a new life which is better and stronger. Hence
that leit-motif of " dying to live” which, as MM.
Hubert and Mauss have abundantly proved, runs
right through the initiation ceremonies of Australia.i
The idea is not merely that the boys may be specifi-
cally invested with the “ power of reproducing their
kind”; not merely that they shall acquire deep voices
as the bull-roarer's voice is deep. It is something
far more universal, something, it might almost be
said, of cosmic import. “What renews, replenishes,
reinvigorates, reproduces everywhere and always?
The power in the sky. What sets the sky-power in
motion? The power in the bull-roarer.” Such is
the Shorter Catechism implicit in the initiation rite
of Australia, unless the hypothesis err.
We are now in a better position to estimate the
psychological effect on the novice of that åtoxáhunfis
which is at the same time no small disillusionment.
When he is told, nay, sees with his own eyes, that
Hobgoblin is a simple cheat, does he thereupon adopt
as the religion that is to serve him in his new and
better life the enlightened cult of the great god
Humbug? By no means. To begin with, the bull-
roarer taken in itself is a sufficiently mysterious
instrument. Howitt notes the curious fact that, for
the Australian, his club and his spear have no
“ virtue” in themselves. Hence, to render them
mystically potent, he anoints them with “medicine."
His spear-thrower, on the other hand, which for no
I
H. Hubert et M. Mauss, Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions, Paris,
1909, 131 f., who are, however, primarily concerned with the further
initiation of the medicine-man.
? Compare Frazer, ib., 320.
164
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
palpable reason lengthens his cast to a hundred and
fifty yards, or the bull-roarer which produces the
noise of thunder out of a chip of wood, is magical in
its own right. And that, adds Howitt reflectively,
is a very good example of how the native mind works.1
At the same time swinging the bull-roarer is rude
exercise, and brings a man into too close quarters
with the thunder-maker to afford entire satisfaction
to the spirit of awe. Hence the Central Australian,
whilst thoroughly believing in the fortifying 2 virtue
of the bull-roarer that he actually swings,3 would
seem to reserve the best of his reverence for bull-
roarers of wood or stone that are not swung at all,
nor perhaps could be swung with any effect; 4 just
as the pastoral Toda venerates sacred cattle-bells
which are invariably found to lack, or have lost, their
tongues.5 Meanwhile, this want of functional sig-
nificance does not in the least impair the mystic
efficacy of the churinga. Mere contact with it, as
for instance by rubbing it against the stomach,
will make a man "good." The act “softens the
stomach”;6 whilst, conversely, to rub the instru-
ment with red ochre (probably a substitute for blood)
“ softens” the churinga, that is, soothes it as if it
"Howitt in J. A. 1., xvi. 29 11.
2 One way of describing the magic power of the bull-roarer is to say
that it is " very strong” (Howitt, N. T. of S.-E. A., 557).
3 See, for instance, Spencer and Gillen, Northern T. of C. A., 342,
373, 497, etc. Compare Howitt in J. A. 1., xx. 23.
* The writer was able to extract a certain amount of sound from a
stone bull-roarer made by an assistant at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but
it fell a long way short of the real thing.
5 W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 424.
"On a similar development in modern religion see E. Towne, Just
How to Wake the Solar Plexus, 1904. Cf. Hibbert Journal, January
1908, this reference being due to the kindness of the Editor.
165
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
had feelings. Or again, the bull-roarer may be
regarded as instinct with an immaterial force more
or less detachable from it, a man being said to be
“full of churinga," that is, of the magic power
derived therefrom. These instances will suffice to
show that in Central Australia the spirit of awe-
not to say the religious spirit-is by no means utterly
discomfited by the discovery that the bull-roarer, in
its outward and visible form, is a thing of wood and
string. On the other hand, the native mind struggles
hard against materialism, seeking to distinguish the
inward grace from its external vehicle, though all
uncertain whether to ascribe to this indwelling
vitalizing force a personal or a quasi-impersonal
nature.
Now in the South-East they would appear to have
felt the same difficulty concerning outwardness and
inwardness, but to have cast about for a solution in
a different direction. All true magic is aware of the
symbolic character of its procedure-in other words,
that make-believe thunder is not real thunder, even
if the appearance can represent the reality so effec-
tively as somehow to set the sky rumbling. There
is always a tendency, therefore, for means and end
to fall apart in thought, and religious interest will
sometimes concentrate on the one (as in Central
Australia, where the instrument, as has been shown,
Spencer and Gillen, ib., 265. Outside Australia we find the bull-
roarer carved into the human form, e.g. in New Guinea (see specimens
in Pitt Rivers Museum; also Figs. 100-103 in Haddon, Royal Irish
Academy, Cunningham Memoirs, No. X., 1894), or in North America
(Haddon, Study of Man, 293).
2 Spencer and Gillen, ib., 293.
3 Cf. p. 41.
166
SAVAGE SUPREME BEINGS
M
is all in all) and sometimes on the other. In the
South-East, then, Daramulun, the bull-roarer, gave
way to Daramulun, the thunder-god of the heavens.
Real thunder is awe-inspiring enough in all conscience
for mystic fear to provide the ground-work of the
conception. Anthropomorphism supervenes, one, if
not the sole, cause of this being doubtless ætiology,
which, as the story-telling habit of mind, has recourse
to forms that fill the eye. And since, for the initiated
at least, Daramulun himself abides above, an image
of him recalling his human shape has to do duty for
him on earth. . Round this the old men dance, shout-
ing his name, and with gestures drawing magic in-
fluence from him to themselves; 2 just as with
similar gestures they hand on the influence to the
novices to make them “good.” 3
Meanwhile, Daramulun, the Supreme Being on
high, has trouble to preserve his dignity, because of
his association with two discredited aliases of his
own, namely, the material bull-roarer and again
Hobgoblin, the women's bugbear. Hence, although
amongst some tribes he retains his high position
as best he can, amongst others he is found to yield
to a superior. Ætiology provides Daramulun, or
his homologue Tundun, with an anthropomorphic
double, who in the first instance is probably no more
than a circumlocution used in order to avoid mention
of his secret name, so magically potent as this is,
and hence so dangerous; and with abundant play of
*For examples of the deification of the end, as contrasted with the
instrument or means, see p. 68.
* See R. H. Mathews in American Anthropologist, ix. 336.
3 Howitt, N. T. of S.-E. A., 535.
167
THE THRESHOLD .
OF RELIGION
fancy a myth explains how Dayamulun was killed by
Baiamai, or how Tundun was obliged to turn into
a porpoise because Mungan-ngaua sent a great flood.2
The type of the Supreme Being, however, remains
unaltered. He is always the personified power that
is manifested in the initiation rite. This power
causes everything, including man, to “grow up new.”
It is a power of making “good,” that is, full of
vitality and manly qualities, and luck and magical
gifts, and whatever else the heart of man craves from
a Universe, of which the “central mystery” per-
haps is that those who seek shall find.
"R. H, Mathews in J. A. I., xxv. 298. The derivation of the word
Baianai is uncertain. In Kamilaroi there is a word baia, “cut,"
hence "make" (Ridley, Kamilaroi, 34); so that Baiamai has become
the missionary term for “the Creator." In Euahlayi, according to Mrs
K. L. Parker, Byamee means literally “great one" (The Ēuahlayi
Tribe, 4). In the Australian Legendary Tales, 94, of the same
authoress, Byamee's tribe are the Byahmul, “black swans.” Is this
the source of M. van Gennep's supposed “collective term”? Compare
Mythes et Légendes d'Australie, ix. and 164.
2 Howitt, N. T. of S.-E. A., 493. Mungan-ngaua means “father-
our.” It was not a secret name (N. W. Thomas, Natives of Australia,
219, makes a slip on this point), but known to the women (Howitt, ib.,
492), and hence comparable to Papang, “father," and Wehntwin,
“grandfather," circumlocutions applied to Daramulun and Tundur
respectively (ib., 493, 628-30). One and all are terms of group-relation-
ship; these founders of the mysteries are naturally “Elders,” just as
they are “Grand Masters” (Biamban, ib., 507), and “Worshipful
Brethren” (Muk-brogan, ib., 628).
168
VII
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
Y
ARGUMENT
A REVIEW of modern developments in Anthropology
* shows, on the one hand, a tendency to refer the facts of
human history in the name of Social Psychology to certain
primary impulses to which the study of the emotions affords
a key, as according to M‘Dougall's theory; and, on the
other hand, a corresponding tendency to abjure intellectu-
alism, whether the counter-stress be laid on the influence
of the emotions, as by Westermarck, or on the influence of
the social environment, as by Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl.
Now when Dr Frazer makes humility the distinguishing
mark of religion, as contrasted with magic, he is right;
but in tracing the birth of religion, and consequently of
humility, to a change of mind consequent on the recognized
failure of a certain pseudo-scientific theory of causation,
he is wrong, because too intellectualistic, too inclined to
treat emotion, whether in its individual or its social mani-
festations, as the offspring of thought instead of as its
parent. If we analyse the religious experience of the
savage, which is characteristically mobbish, we find a pre-
dominantly emotional and motor interest reflected in the
character which he assigns to the object of his religious
regard. This object may be termed the sacred (or super-
169
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
natural). Let us consider it first statically, then dynami-
cally. Statically viewed, then, the sacred, in its negative
aspect, is usually more or less uncanny, often more or less
secret, and always more or less tabu. Such qualities in
the object imply in the subject of the experience asthenic
emotion, or heart-sinking, which may be regarded as the
psycho-physical basis of humility. In its positive aspect
the sacred is always mana, usually ancient, and often
personal. Even when personality is not predicated, how-
ever, the mystic potency attributed to the sacred is such that
the experient feels himself strong, wise, glad, and good
upon contact with it according to the approved form of
religion. Dynamically viewed, experience of the sacred
resolves itself into a passage out of depression through a
chrysalis-like passivity into renewed vitality. Those rites
of passage first noted and described by van Gennep involve
such an inner movement, initiation being the typical in-
stance of the needful socializing process, while matrimony,
parenthood, and even birth and death are likewise the
occasions of rites involving spiritual transitions and
transformations of a similar nature. The upshot of these
considerations is to prove that humility, as the child of fear
and misgiving, is born of emotions and impulses forming
basic elements in the experience of the magico-religious.
These elements, being moralized by association with social
customs of a salutary kind, beget a mood of chastened
striving which, psychologically, will serve better than any
system of doctrine as the differentia of genuine religion ;
though it must be added that to attempt a final account of
religion is beyond the competence of psychology or of any
form of science.
170
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
THEN a savage launches a canoe, or lays
the foundations of a dwelling-place, or
starts forth on the chase, or samples
his harvest of ripe yams--when, in short, he
takes the first step in any enterprise of import-
ance—he is accustomed to perform a ceremony of
inauguration. The moment is critical, or in other
words he feels nervous. Therefore he performs
a ceremony, the object of which would seem to
be, in all cases alike, to bring him into communion
with something sacred, something full of mana, that
is to say, supernatural power or “grace”; for, thus
strengthened, he can face the future with good hope.
The ways of effecting such communion, to judge by
the known diversities of savage ritual, are almost
infinite in number. The simplest of all, perhaps,
consists in making solemn mention of that with which
communion is sought. Conformably, then, with
principles that every anthropologist is bound to
respect, let this inaugural lecture be devoted to the
subject of humility. Humility is a virtue full of
saving grace; and for the student who gazes diffi-
dently on the vast field of Social Anthropology that
lies before him, a region full of mists and briars and
pitfalls, there is positive assurance to be gained from
the thought that in science, and especially in Anthro-
pology, it is well to walk humbly, when the alter-
native is to ride the high horse of prejudice and
dogmatism to a certain fall.
Apart from its suitability for inaugural purposes,
the subject of humility is one to which the attention
of anthropologists should be directed, in view of the
171
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
latest developments both of Social Psychology and
of Comparative Religion.
Thus, on the one hand, Mr M‘Dougall has recently
instituted a method of studying the facts of society
which has for its point of departure a new theory of
the human instincts. According to his hypothesis,
our emotions correspond to the relatively stable and
“central” part of a system of instinctive processes
that are more or less common to mankind. He
therefore attempts by analysis to reduce the endless
shades of man's emotional experience to a few
primary tendencies, from which the former result by
a sort of fusion or blending; just as the many delicate
varieties of the colour-sensations are produced by
the compounding of a few primary colour-qualities
in all kinds of proportions. Now such a chemical
method, as it might be termed, of studying our higher
and more complex emotional states is doubtless liable
to abuse. It may easily come to be exploited in
favour of a “psychology without a soul," namely, a
psychology which represents the synthetic power of
the mind as no better than a superfluity and a sham.
Nevertheless, a given method of science, though in-
variably a bad master, can yet prove exceedingly
useful as a servant. Its function is to simplify; and,
though to simplify must always be in a sense to
falsify, yet it is only by the use of complementary
methods of simplification that we can attain, if at all,
to a complete grasp of the many-sided truth. From
TW. M.Dougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology, see especially
26 ff.
172
THE TTTT
BIRTH OF HUMILITY
Mr M‘Dougall's method, then, we may hope to learn
much, though of course not everything, concerning
the nature of the human emotions, whether as in-
dividually or as socially manifested.
On the other hand, modern research in Social
Anthropology reflects in various ways a more or less
conscious effort to counteract what can only be
termed the “intellectualism” of the past generation
of theorists. Dr Westermarck, for instance, has
sought to show, by means of a most extensive induc-
tion, that our moral judgments have an emotional
origin and foundation, Incidentally, his results
confirm Mr M‘Dougall's contention that the emotions
represent that part of human nature which changes
least; for he proves that, despite variations on the
surface, the moral feelings of man are remarkably
uniform in type all the world over. More significant
still is the widespread movement, which the school of
sociologists led by Professor Durkheim has done so
much to initiate, in support of a method of Anthro-
pology that lays due emphasis on the social factor.
The old way was to arrive at the savage mind by
abstraction. The sociologist of yesterday was con-
tent to picture what the outlook of a man like himself
would be, should the whole apparatus of civilization
have been denied him, including a civilized man's
intellectual and moral education. Naturally his
results bordered on romance. The new way, on the
contrary, is to proceed constructively. Whilst full
account is taken of the effects both of heredity and
'E. Westermarck. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,
chap. i., etc.
173
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
of the physical environment, yet the effects of the
social environment are reckoned to be determinative .
in an even higher degree. The mass of cultural
institutions, it is held, embody and express a kind of
collective soul. In this social selfhood each indi-
vidual must participate in order to realize an indi-
viduality of his own. It is a corollary that no isolated
fragment of custom or belief can be worth much for
the purposes of Comparative Science. In order to
be understood, it must first be viewed in the light
of the whole culture, the whole corporate soul-life,
of the particular ethnic group concerned. Hence
the new way is to emphasize concrete differences,
whereas the old way was to amass resemblances
heedlessly abstracted from their social context.
Which way is the better is a question that well-nigh
answers itself.
Nevertheless, there are signs that the social method
is being pursued to extravagant lengths. Thus Pro-
fessor Lévy-Bruhl, in a recent work of consummate
ability,' seems prepared to substitute for the old-
fashioned assumption of the absolute homogeneity
of the human mind a working hypothesis to the effect
that there are as many distinct" mentalities” as there,
are distinct social types, since each social type pos-
sesses a " mentality” that is wholly its own. Such
a view is tolerable only if it be conceded that what
is here called a “mentality” is a good deal less than
a human mind proper. It would be fatal to deny
to the anthropologist the right to project himself
L. Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inferieures,
7 ff.
174
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
into the spiritual life of others of his kind, simply
because he and they are members of different
societies. After all, it is not impossible for the same
man to be an efficient and sympathetic member of
different societies in turn. Now the fundamental
characteristic of savage society and savage mentality
is that they are mobbish. But every civilized man
has at some time felt and cared as a member of a mob.
Granted that the difference of conditions is consider-
able. For instance, a mob is occasional amongst
civilized people; whereas the savage mob is perma-
nent and has a tradition. At the same time, there is
enough of the savage in the civilized man, or of the
civilized man in the savage-for as much is to be
said for putting it in the one way as in the other to
render possible a genuine introjection, that is, a sym-
pathetic entry into the mind and spirit of another.
Thus the new method of Social Anthropology
comes not to destroy but to fulfil. It does not
quarrel with the old method for making introspection,
or self-analysis, its terminus a quo; since that is
inevitable. Its novelty consists merely in its greater
insistence on the control of introspection by objective
methods. “Realize the social conditions," it says
in effect; " for instance, take firm hold of the fact
that the savage does not preach - his religion, but
dances it instead: then put yourself in his place as
best you can.” If this were not possible, because
the mentalities of different men at different levels
of culture are in all respects as incommunicable
as their passing dreams, then Social Anthropology
would be utterly inconceivable.
175
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
To approach a stage nearer to the subject in hand,
let a single illustration be given of the intellectualism
deprecated by the upholders of the social method of
which mention has just now been made. In his
famous book, The Golden Bough, Dr Frazer has pro-
pounded a theory—and there is no reason to think
that he has subsequently withdrawn from it—which
deals with the way in which what he calls an age of
magic has been everywhere followed and supplanted
by an age of religion. As not a little turns on the
meaning given to the words magic and religion, it will
be necessary to examine Dr Frazer's notion of each.
To take his definition: religion first, on the ground
that it is less open to criticism: he understands by
this term “a propitiation or conciliation of powers
superior to man which are believed to direct and
control the course of nature and of human life.” 2
Here Dr Frazer says in effect that humility is the
differentia of religion.
This point is brought out more clearly by the
following passage: “ Religion, beginning as a slight
and partial acknowledgment of powers superior to
man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen
into a confession of man's entire and absolute de
pendence on the divine; his old free bearing is ex-
changed for an attitude of lowliest prostration before
the mysterious powers of the unseen. But this
deepening sense of religion, this more perfect sub-
mission to the divine will in all things, affects only
those higher intelligences who have breadth of view
enough to comprehend the vastness of the universe
* See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough,2 i. 75 ff. ? Ib., i. 63.
11m
TUIIII
176
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
and the littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp
great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their
purblind vision, nothing seems really great and
important but themselves. Such minds hardly
rise into religion at all. They are, indeed, drilled by
their betters into an outward conformity with its
precepts and a verbal profession of its tenets; but
at least they cling to their old magical superstitions,
which may be discountenanced and forbidden, but
cannot be eradicated by religion, so long as they have
their roots deep down in the mental framework and
constitution of the great majority of mankind.” 1
Now this passage is not only a fine piece of rhetoric,
but, in seizing as it does upon humility as the dis-
tinguishing mark of the religious spirit, it probably
touches the heart of the truth. Yet Dr Frazer surely
errs in confining the capacity for humility and for
religion to the “ higher intelligences," as well as, con-
versely, in finding nothing but a narrow self-com-
placency, the tap-root of magical superstition, when he
seeks “ deep down in the mental framework and con-
stitution” of the average man.
Let us pass on to consider Dr Frazer's definition of
magic. To reach this, some scattered statements
must be brought together. Magic is the same thing
as sympathetic magic, 2 being“ nothing but a mistaken
application of the very simplest and most elementary
processes of the mind," namely, the association of
ideas by virtue of resemblance or contiguity.3 Its
fundamental presupposition is identical with that
of science, consisting of “ a faith, implicit, but real
* The Golden Bough,? i. 78. 31b., i. 9. 3 Iba, i. 70,
I ?
177
3
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
S
and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature.” 1
As dealing therefore with a matter subject to immut-
able laws which act mechanically, it neither propiti-
ates nor conciliates, but coerces and constrains. Its
spirit is one of haughty self-sufficiency and arrogance.2
It remains to add that, “knowing or recking little
of the theoretical inconsistency of his behaviour,"
man at a relatively early stage of culture is apt to
perform magical and religious rites simultaneously; 3
though Dr Frazer discovers grounds for thinking
" that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was
a time when man trusted to magic alone for the
satisfaction of such wants as transcended his imme-
diate animal cravings." 4 Now it may perhaps be
granted that a certain masterfulness is inseparable :
from the attitude of one who more or less consciously
sets out to establish control by means of suggestion.
Since suggestion works almost entirely by means of
the automatic association of ideas, owing to the tem-
porary paralysis undergone by the higher powers of
thought, such a view of the magical function would
seem to agree in the main with that of Dr Frazer.
Thus understood, however, the magical frame of
mind is perceived at once to be utterly distinct from
the scientific. Nay, if science were indeed but
another sort of magic that happened to work, then
presumably the “haughty self-sufficiency” of the
old magic would survive, justified after a fashion, per-
haps, but certainly in no way diminished by success.
Happily it is far otherwise with the spirit of true
i The Golden Bough, i. 61.
2 Ib., i. 64
3 Ib., i. 65.
4 16., i. 70.
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THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
Science—that spirit which breathes in Bacon's
phrase Homo Naturæ minister.
We have still to take note of Dr Frazer's highly
speculative history of what he calls “ the great tran-
sition” from the age of magic to the age of religion.
His full account would be lengthy to quote, and,
besides, is familiar to all. Suffice it to say, then,
that, according to his hypothesis, “a tardy recog-
nition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of
magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to
cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more
fruitful method of turning her resources to account.”
Certain “shrewder intelligences " hit upon "a new
system of faith and practice” in the following
way. If, they argued, the great world went on its
way without the help of man," it must surely be
because there were other beings, like himself, but
far stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its
course.” Before these mighty beings, then, man-
kind, abashed by failure and misfortune, bowed in
a new-found spirit of humility. Such, in brief, is
Dr Frazer's theory of the birth of religion, and, by
implication, of the birth of humility as well.
What, then, if anything, is wrong with this theory
of Dr Frazer? Clearly it does not fail altogether to
fit the observed facts. An indefatigable and accom-
plished student such as Dr Frazer, by sheer dint of
hanging over his stirabout and watching the evidence
collect of itself into masses, is bound to acquire a
special intuition of the relative values of these
masses. For instance, the known facts certainly
1 The Golden Bough,2 i. 75-8.
179
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
(
tend to create the impression that the Australians,
as compared, say, with the North American Indians,
both represent a lower, and presumably earlier, stage
of cultural evolution, and at the same time display
an attitude towards " the mysterious powers of the
unseen ” which is on the whole more magical and
less religious, more dictatorial and less humble. So
long as Dr Frazer judges cumulatively, then, we may
hold him to be right, assuming, as we surely may,
that the evidence to which he trusts is in quantity
and quality sufficient. On the analytic side of his
thinking, however, there may be weakness notwith-
standing. He may have duly appreciated the effects,
without sufficiently discriminating the conditions.
Given, therefore, an improved method of psycho-
logical explanation, may it not be possible to refine
on this intellectualistic theory of the birth of humility?
Now the fallacy of intellectualism consists in mag-
nifying the intellect at the expense of feeling and will.
It is quite possible, however, for the psychologist to
succumb to the opposite fallacy, and to make too
little of the function of thought in religion. A pre-
dominantly rational habit of mind must be counted
as one at least amongst the possible varieties of re-
ligious experience. Indeed, it would surely be appro-
priate on the whole to speak of the Prophets of Israel
as " higher intelligences" and so forth. The diffi-
culty here is simply that Dr Frazer antedates the age
of the Prophets. The civilized thinker in his study
must somehow get into touch with the mind of another
type of man who, as it has been put already, does
not reason out his religion, but dances it out instead. -
180
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
Y
To express the same thing more technically, the
emotional and motor elements in close combination
prevail over the element of conceptual thought at
the lower stages of religious evolution. There is
another point on which the new method would insist;
as being pre-eminently a social method. At the level
of the rudest culture society could not use the intellec-
tual genius, did he happen to arise. Even the higher
barbarism finds its religious leader in a Mahomet, half --
thinker and half dervish. Savagery, on the other
hand, which dances its religion, follows a leader of
the dance who is wholly dervish, who lives with his
head in a perpetual whirl. Negative and positive
considerations alike support this view. Negatively,
the languages of savage peoples do not promote the
communication of universal ideas; whilst, again, a
purely oral form of tradition is not suited to the per-
petuation of notions that are at all above the com-
prehension of the many. Positively, savage folk are
mobbish; their mode of existence admits of no true
privacy. Now, for those who are never away from
the crowd, imitation is the mainspring of education;
and the well-known law of crowds, that with them
emotions propagate themselves more readily than
ideas, is explained psychologically by the ease with
which a mood can be acquired by imitating its out-
ward expression. That ritual, or in other words a "
routine of external forms, is historically prior to
dogma was proclaimed years ago by Robertson Smith
and others. Yet Social Anthropology is but to-day
beginning to appreciate the psychological implica-
tions of this cardinal truth.
181
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
ST
In the light of the foregoing principles, then, how
will it be possible, in a short space, to show that
humility and religion are neither the discovery nor the
private possession of a few “higher intelligences,"
but are bound up with the native tendencies and with
the social development of ordinary humanity? It
will, perhaps, be “ sufficient unto the day” if proofs
are sought in two directions.
On the one hand, it should be worth while to try
to analyse that sense of sacredness of which even the
most uncivilized peoples are well known to be cap-
able. What the subject of the experience perceives
is of course not directly ascertainable. The savage
is no hand at describing his feelings. Besides, even
the trained observer is hard put to it to analyse
such states of his own mind as are mainly affective.
In all such cases, then, the working rule of the
psychologist must perforce be to deduce the sub-
jective experience from the qualities attributed to the
corresponding object. The heat attributed to the
red-hot poker is a replica of the feeling of being burnt.
The beauty ascribed to a work of art reflects the
nature of the æsthetic impression. Similarly, there-
fore, the group of qualities that make an object
sacred for the savage ought to prove a faithful coun-
terpart of that grouping of psychical elements, pre-
dominantly emotional and motor, which constitutes
his mobbish type of religious experience.
Viewed thus, however, as the duplicate of the
qualities grouped in the object, the psychical ele-
ments in question will necessarily display a purely
static order of arrangement. Any succession of
182
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BIRTH OF HUMILITY
stages that there may be in the development of the
total phase of consciousness is likely to escape notice.
Hence, on the other hand, some endeavour should be
made to trace the passage of the human soul, under
conditions of the rudest culture, through a typical
phase of religious experience from its first inception
to its culminating moment. It is an axiom of the
modern psychologist that in the last resort any given
mental state must be construed dynamically, that is,
by reference to the mental process of which it is part.
Thus it may well be that the state of mind known
as humility represents, in a religious context, but
one stage of a complex process; and that there nor-
mally follows as the further stage of the same process
a second state of mind which is actually in sharp
contrast to the other, being related to it very much
as the feeling of being lifted up is related to the
feeling of being down.
In what follows, then, the attempt, necessarily
brief and general, will be made to analyse the primi-
tive experience of sacredness under these two com-
plementary aspects; the static view being taken
first, the dynamic afterwards.
Amongst peoples of the lower culture, sacredness
attaches to all sorts of objects—to inorganic things
and their manifestations; to plants, and animals
and their parts or products; to men and whatever
they make, wear, do or say; to incorporeal agents
and influences; and, finally, to bare conditions such
as time and place. Or, to speak collectively instead
of distributively, everything is sacred in so far as it
183
THỂ THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
in any way belongs to the sacred world. This world
exists as it were side by side with the profane world,
so that it is possible to pass backwards and forwards
from the one to the other. Sacred objects, then, as
thus understood, have certain features in common.
One group of qualities may be distinguished as nega-
tive, the other as positive. This can best be shown
by rapidly reviewing each in turn.
Negative qualities of the sacred are that it is
usually more or less uncanny, often more or less
secret, and always more or less tabu.
Of these attributes uncanniness is perhaps the most
elementary. It corresponds to the mental twilight
which circumscribes the experience of beast and
man alike. Whatever is marginal is strange, and as
such preys on the imagination and troubles the nerves.
Some things, being highly unusual, are weird in
themselves; such as the ghosts that flit, or the comets
that flare. Moreover, even everyday things, accord-
ing as the situation or the mood varies, may come
to wear an unnatural appearance. Just as dogs,
when familiar objects loom under the moon, are
moved to howl dismally, so men are daunted by half-
lights, whether they express their disquietude in
this vocal manner or otherwise. Answering, then,
to this root-feeling there is a world of awesome
mystery through which all men walk at times, and
the savage at frequent intervals. In this way, then,
uncanniness represents negation, being a danger-
signal and little more.
When, however, the sacred is conceived as secret,
though negation still predominates, it is qualified by
184
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
a positive interest. For purposes of psychological
explanation it is no longer enough to take stock of
root-feelings. Social conditions become important.
A relation is implied between those members of the
tribe who are not, and those who are, in intimate
touch with the sacred would. Sex, age and social
standing, as well as special capacity for experience
of the mystic type, help to divide the community
more or less sharply into religious leaders and their
followers. The former, usually a minority, and
themselves not infrequently subdivided into grades
according to some hierarchical principle, are, in
regard to the rest, the more or less exclusive re-
positories of the tribal stock of sacred lore as appre-
hended, so to speak, from the inside. Yet the nature
of their esoteric enlightenment hardly permits us to
speak of “higher intelligences” in this context.
The expert is mostly concerned to perpetuate the
niceties of sacred custom. “ Thus and thus did the
men of old,” he says, “wherefore go ye and do like-
wise." If he innovates at all, that which is origi-
nated is not so much a doctrine as a ceremony; and
the mode of its origination he describes accurately
enough when he explains that it came to him " in a
vision."i Meanwhile, the attitude of the relatively
unenlightened layman, though negative and as it
were passive, is by no means wholly incurious, as is
proved by the need of providing him with some
exoteric version of the purport of the mysteries. The
difference in the mode and extent of spiritual insight
Cf. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central
Australia, 451.
185
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
is one of degree. In the case of each class the main
force at work is an emotional and motor suggesti-
bility; only the people follow their leaders, whilst -
the leaders directly follow tradition.
Hence for all alike the sacred is pre-eminently tabu
and the occasion of tabu observances. It is hedged
round with a sanctity that in its proximate aspect
appears as a categorical injunction to submit, to be-
come passive and suggestible. Not only has primi-
tive ritual a negative side, but the negative side
decidedly predominates. · A full discussion of the
function of tabu, however, may be conveniently de-
ferred until we come to examine the dynamic phase
of primitive religion.
How do the foregoing considerations bear on the
subject of humility? Three instincts of a highly
negative type are observable in the frightened
animal. It runs away, or it cowers in its tracks, or
it prostrates itself in abject self-surrender. Now it
would, perhaps, be fanciful to say that man tends to
run away from the sacred as uncanny, to cower before
it as secret, and to prostrate himself before it as
tabu. On the other hand, it seems plain that to these
three negative qualities of the sacred taken together
there corresponds on the part of man a certain nega-
tive attitude of mind. Psychologists class the feel-
ings bound up with flight, cowering, and prostration
under the common head of "asthenic emotion.” In -
plain English they are all forms of heart-sinking, of
feeling unstrung. This general type of innate dis-
position would seem to be the psycho-physical basis
of humility. Taken in its social setting, the emotion
186
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
will of course show endless shades of complexity;
for it will be excited, and again will find practical
expression, in all sorts of ways. Under these vary-
ing conditions, however, it is reasonable to suppose
that what Mr M.Dougall would call the “ central
part” of the experience remains very much the same.
In face of the sacred the normal man is visited by a
heart-sinking, a wave of asthenic emotion. If that
were all, however, religion would be a matter of pure
fear. But it is not all. There is yet the positive side
of the sacred to be taken into account.
Positively viewed, whatever is sacred is always
mystically potent, usually ancient, and often per-
sonal, or at least closely connected with personal
beings.
The mystic potency of the sacred is perhaps ulti-
mately grounded on the fact that by its strangeness it
causes trepidation. By simple reason of the asthenic
condition it excites, it appears, if not actively aggres-
sive, at least to have the upper hand. Yet a merely
fear-causing and therefore wholly noxious potency
does not attach to the sacred, unless possibly in
extreme cases. That which is uncanny, or, in an
even more obvious way, that which is secret, attracts
at the same time that it repels; so that a shy curi-
osity may come in the end to prevail over the first
fright. Besides, there is no getting away from the
sacred in many of its forms—for instance, from be-
wildering and potent things such as disease or death.
Society must somehow live them down, the braver
and more ingenious spirits showing the way. There-
upon it is found that crisis may turn to good. As-
187
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
sociation with the sacred as conditioned by the dis-
cipline of tabu breeds a social habit of obedience which
by steadying the nerves and bracing the will becomes a
source of spiritual relief. Being now valued for its own
sake, obedience rises from mere cowardly subservience
into a freely-accorded respect as towards the sacred
powers. Correspondingly these gradually abandon
their character of occasional and portentous visita-
tions to become integral elements in the social order.
Thus the sacred becomes typically the ancient and
traditional. It now stands for the power that
accrues to those who faithfully hold by their old-time
customs. This power tends to be immanent in the
tribal tradition as a whole. Therefore it is never
safe to say of savage institutions that sacredness is
here but not there; for it is more or less omnipresent,
although not always equally manifest. Even its
most striking manifestations, however, testify to its
latent ubiquity; for they are subject to a perpetual
shape-shifting, which is a standing puzzle to those
civilized observers whose logical minds demand
fixed points of reference. Now it is the whole body
of ancestors that appear to have the tribal luck in
their keeping; now it is some legendary personage in
particular; now it is a living functionary; and now it is
a material cult-object, or a rite, or a verbal formula.
One more aspect of the sacred calls for notice:
to assert that the sacred as it is for the savage is
always in the last resort personal or connected with
personality would be to require consistency where
there is none. At most a strong tendency can be
discerned to identify the power behind the laws of
188
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
society with some sort of will, or, one might even say,
some sort of good will, since good is gained in its
service.
A conspicuous instance of such personification, at
the level of what in most respects is the lowest culture,
is afforded by those gods of the mysteries hailing
from South-East Australia, which head the list of
savage supreme beings of benevolent tendency com-
piled by Mr Lang in The Making of Religion. There
can be no doubt that Daramulun, Baiamai and their
compeers are on the whole conceived after the like-
ness of some tribal headman, with his supernatural.
gifts raised as it were to infinity. Such a divine
superman has ordained the tribal laws in the begin-
ning, and insists to-day upon their due observance.
Alike in life and in death the tribesmen are his care.
In particular, he presides over the ceremony which
converts the boys into responsible men, his power
being supernaturally communicated to them so that
they enter the new life “strong” and “good.” 2 It
remains to add that, whilst the religion of these tribes
is morally stimulating and noble in the extreme, their
theology is intellectually bewildering in its contra-
dictions. Totemic animals, or the sun, the stars,
and the thunder, or, again, the bull-roarer whose
windy roar is the sign that the mysteries are in pro-
cess—all these are aspects, or, one might almost say,
aliases of the sacred power that is also like unto a
great headman in the sky. Moreover, there reigns
'A. Lang, The Making of Religion,2 175 ff.
2 A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, 535,
557, etc.
189
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
0
a large and liberal confusion of ideas touching the
means whereby communion with the sacred power
is achieved. Civilized theorists may with admirable
clearness draw a logical line between conciliation and
control, religious worship and magical manipulation.
These undiscriminating savages, however, indulge
little if at all in prayer, for us the foremost criterion
of true religion; nor do they know the somewhat
more ambiguous rite of sacrifice. They set up
anthropomorphic images, indeed, if that be a mark
of religion rather than of magic. But their favourite
habit is dancing to the sound of the sacred name:
Such'a practice is usually reckoned magical. Yet
they perform the ceremony in no masterful or
arrogant way, but solemnly, earnestly, in short, in
a spirit of reverent humility which is surely akin to
homage.
Now it is possible to convince ourselves that such
a spirit is naturally evoked by contact with sacred-
ness as such, and is not simply a consequence of the
attribution of personality. For we have only to turn
to another instance from Australia, namely, that
afforded by the now famous Arunta of the central
deserts. As is well known, their cult, whether it be
classed as magic or religion, centres in the ceremonies
connected with certain objects of stone or wood that
they call churinga, the word meaning “secret" or
“sacred.” A theology abounding in terminological
inexactitudes enables all sorts of other sacred things
to be somehow associated by the Arunta with these
churinga ; for instance, totem animals, their legen-
dary ancestors, and their own personal names. Never-
190
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
theless the fact remains that the material objects
taken in themselves are reckoned as a means of grace
of altogether superlative importance. Now when
the civilized observer watches the black-fellow rub
one of these sacred stones against his stomach he is
apt to smile, or perhaps weep, at so crude a ritual
act. Let him, however, mark the black-fellow's
earnest and devotional manner. Better still, let him
attend to the account he gives in his halting language
of the inward experience accompanying the rite.
For he asserts in so many words that it makes him
“strong” and “wise" and "glad ” and “good.” 1
This is not prayer, of course. Yet in a very real
sense the savage asks humbly and is answered.
We now pass to the dynamic aspect of the primi-
tive man's relations with the sacred. From this
quarter ample evidence might be produced, did time
allow, in confirmation of the view that, under normal
and healthy conditions of savage society, the religi-
ous life involves a sort of progress from strength to
strength, with serious recognition of vital need as its
efficient cause. In a dynamic context it becomes
plainer than it could be made before how the very
expectancy of benefit, and felt need to be improved,
carry with them a certain depression, a certain re-
laxed tension, which is, however, but a prelude to
restored innervation and fresh adjustment.
M. van Gennep in his Rites de Passage argues with
I B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central
Australia, 165, and The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 264
ff., 293, etc.
191
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
much force that a persistent-we may almost say the
leading motive of primitive ritual is the ceremonial
enactment of a passage from the profane world of
workaday experience into and through a sacred world
of religious experience. The book, close packed as it
is with illustrative matter, is a mere preamble to a
vast theme; and it is much to be hoped that the
ingenious author will hereafter be at pains to drive
the argument home. In particular, there is at pre-
sent lacking to his account of these organized periods
of retreat a theory of the psychological needs out of
which they arise and to which they afford satis-
faction. Abstractly considered as rites, they are
merely so much external mechanism for bringing
about a pause in the ordinary life of the tribe or of
its individual members. Here let us rather inquire
briefly into the inward springs of these customary
processes, with the special object of discovering
whether humility in one or another shape is germane
to the mood of which they are the outward expres-
sion. Why does a primitive society undergo at
certain times a communal tabu, as in the well-known
case of the Nagas of Assam? i Or, again, for what
reason is the novice tabu during initiation, or the
candidate for priestly office, or the person about to be
married?-to cite but a few of the most striking
instances of a tabu affecting the individual as such.
Now to be tabu is to be sacer, or consecrated. In its
more prominent aspect, this condition appears as the
purely negative state of being banned or put into
IT. C. Hodson, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxxvi,
92 ff.
192
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
quarantine. The positive implication, however,
must not be overlooked, namely, that the subject of
the ban is for the time being in contact with some
source of mana or supernatural power. All such
power as conceived by the primitive mind is some-
thing of an ambiguous and two-edged force, a power
to bless or to blast. Nevertheless, even in the
religious vocabulary of the backward Australian,
there is ample evidence that the distinction is already
in the making between a good and a bad kind of
supernatural influence, that is, between holiness on
the one hand and spiritual uncleanness on the other.
We therefore have a perfect right to put into a class
apart such a tabu as that upon the homicide or upon
the violator of the sacred marriage law. Such
persons are not consecrated, but rather execrated.
The “sacralization” or sacrament that applies to
them is like commination intended to hurt, not like
penance intended to heal. Concentrating our atten-
tion, then, on the other set of cases, in which those
who pursue objects approved by society are notwith-
standing subjected to enforced withdrawal from
intercourse with their neighbours and from all secular
pursuits, let us see if we can possibly divine a reason
for such strange customs. This is not, indeed, the
oocasion to inquire what reason, in the sense of ulti-
mate justification, there may be for practices that
doubtless are bound up with all sorts of outworn
superstitions. Such a question must be reserved
for Philosophy and Theology. The task of Social
Anthropology is at most to suggest the psychological
reason, the tendency induced by certain special con-
TY
13
193
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
ditions of mind and of society considered simply in
themselves. Of course, if it were to turn out that
such sacramental observances, as they may fairly
be termed, answer to some permanent need of the
human spirit, we should have established a point
that could scarcely fail to influence the final evalua-
tion of the philosopher and the theologian.
Let us start our psychological inquiry, then, from
the fact that, in the case of a consecration, as distinct
from an execration, the tabu is as a rule a mutual
affair. The common account of the matter, which
assumes the man in a state of holiness to be banned
by the rest simply because holiness is an unpleasant
thing and likely to be catching, overlooks a good half
of that which has to be explained. For the tabued
person himself conversely practises many a tabu
as against the profane world. If society closes the
door of his cell upon him, certain it is that he likewise
shoots the bolt on the inside. So it is, for instance,
in all conditions of society, with the mourner. Those
who are not near enough to participate in his grief turn
respectfully away, whilst it comes just as naturally
to him to avert his face. Is it too much to say that,
whether original or by degrees evolved, a genuine
respect for the privacy of those who journey
through the sacred world is in no small part re-
sponsible for the attitude of the lay world towards
them?
Expressed in terms of Individual Psychology, the
inward state of the tabued man may be described
as one of spiritual crisis. The candidate for initiation
affords a test case. Researches such as those of
194
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
Professor Starbuck 1 have made it clear that adoles-
cence is a period of psycho-physical change, when
mind and body in intimate conjunction undergo the
disturbances incidental to a veritable moulting-
season. To speak in this connection, as savages do
ałóver the world, of a re-birth is hardly to exagger- -
ate the facts. Again, the tabu incurred by mother-
hood corresponds without question to a period of
psycho-physical transformation. That the candi-
date for matrimony is in the same way normally sub-
ject to a crisis of nerves may not be so clear, though
even amongst civilized persons calf-love and the
sheepishness that follows in its train are not wholly
unknown. Mr Crawley has, meanwhile, collected
much telling evidence in regard to the feelings of the
savage about to marry; though his doctrine of a
“physiological thought” as the source of this special
kind of crisis loses much of its force through not being
combined with the qualifying considerations to be
drawn from Social Psychology. Or, once more, it
may be hardly obvious that the candidate for priestly
office passes through a more or less violent convul-
sion of his mental and even his bodily nature, until
we remember that the capacity for ecstatic experi-
ences forms amongst the ruder races the chief pass-
port to holy orders. Without further citation of
instances, then, it will perhaps be taken for granted
that the psycho-physical study of the individual
discloses sundry types of well-marked derangement
of the vital equilibrium, under stress of which a
* E. D. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion.
? E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 22, 57, 179, 200.
195
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
characteristic inertia or brooding is normally in-
duced. The physiological explanation of this would
seem to be that the organism needs to lie dormant
whilst its latent energies are gathering strength for
activity on a fresh plane. It is important, moreover,
to observe that, so long as there is growth, the fresh
plane is likewise a higher plane. Regeneration, in
fact, typically spells advance, the pauses in the
rhythm of life helping successively to swell its
harmony.
So much for the mere psycho-physics of the matter.
Until Social Psychology lends its aid to the interpre-
tation, we are far from being able to explain the facts
of religion-even as they are for the anthropologist
who confines his attention to their purely evolution-
ary aspect. The contribution of Social Psychology
to the subject consists especially in the proof that
society provides arrangements for dealing with these
times of psycho-physical crisis, whereby in the end
their nature is profoundly modified. A single in-
stance will make the point clear. It has been shown
at length by M. van Gennep that, whereas most
primitive societies organize initiation ceremonies
at intervals of a few years, these do not and cannot
coincide with the actual arrival of puberty in the
case of the vast majority of the individual candidates.
Whether this or that novice happens to be feeling
unhinged and "broody” at the moment or not, into
retirement he must go on the appointed day for the
appointed period, in accordance with the immemorial
usage of his tribe. At first sight this absence of
strict correlation between psycho-physical demand
196
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
and social supply might seem to presage nothing but
absolute fiasco. The novice, one might imagine,
will simply be induced by social pressure to profess a
" conversion" that he does not feel. By extension
of the same argument the intending priest, or the
bridegroom, or the mourner, might be supposed to
have emotional stress dictated to him by convention
from without, rather than by his personal sentiments.
Now doubtless some grain of truth lurks in this ob-
jection. Be they, on the face of them, periodic or
occasional, public or private, there are socially-
organized occasions for the retreat into the inner
sanctuary of self which are never so well adjusted to
individual needs that in particular cases they may
not fail to meet with a genuine response. On the
whole, however, it is surely for better rather than
for worse that social routine interposes, as it were,
between a man and the brute propensions of his body.
To socialize the psycho-physical crisis goes a long
way towards spiritualizing it. The force of social
suggestion being simply enormous, the soul that is
invited and expected by society to pass through
sickness towards increased strength does so, though
in an ideal and moral way, rather than under literal
compulsion of the animal nature. Pause is the
necessary condition of the development of all those
higher processes which make up the rational being.
The tendency of pent-up energy to discharge itself
along well-worn channels or quite at random must be
inhibited at all costs; and the ritual of tabu is, of all
the forces of social routine, the greatest inhibitor,
and therefore the greatest educator, of that explosive,
197
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
happy-go-lucky child of nature whom we call the
savage.
What, then, of humility? It is unfortunately im-
possible in this barest sketch of a vast topic to illus-
trate in due detail the psychology of the various
well-marked forms of passage through the sacred
world, which begin with the negative experience of
tabu, and are consummated in the positive fruition
of mana. That the earlier stage is through a veri-
table valley of humiliation is directly indicated by the
tabu observances themselves. For instance, in the
typical case of initiation the novice is starved, purged,
made to confess his sins, and, in particular, thoroughly
frightened. The natural shyness that may be in
him is so aggravated by art that, as all observers
agree, he spends much of his time of spiritual retreat
in what appears to be an utterly dazed condition.
Not until the days of this period of chrysalis life have
been painfully accomplished can he emerge a new
and glorified creature, who, by spiritual transforma-
tion, is invested alike with the dignities and with the
duties of manhood. Now the psychological affinities
of humility are, as we have seen, with fear and the
other closely related forms of asthenic emotion. An
element of fear or misgiving has always been recog-
nized to be of the essence of religion as historically
manifested. But the function of this element as a
spiritual lever has been far less generally understood.
The suggestion here made, then, is that the heart-
sinking, the loss of tone, the aloofness, inertia and
disorientation, which are the well-known symptoms
of all psycho-physical crisis, and especially of such
198
THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
crisis as accompanies organic growth and transforma-
tion, have been with more or less success dissociated
from their physiological base by a system of religious
ritual covering the whole life of primitive man. The
physical means of ministering to crisis that consists
in humouring prostration and passivity whilst the
recreative processes are coming to a head has been,
in the course of social evolution, transferred into the
moral sphere, so that spiritual crisis comes to be
furnished with an analogous remedy. The indi-
vidual tribesman and the tribe as a whole must, by
a usage that they respect if they do not understand,
seek retirement from the world on the eve of any
fresh start in the onward movement of life. Initia-
tion, matrimony, parenthood, even birth and death,
which on the cyclical view of life are construed as
preparations, have each their appropriate sacrament
or consecration which prescribes rest, abstinence,
and isolation for the sick soul. More especial or
occasional calls upon the individual, as when he is
about to enter the priesthood, or join in battle, or
take part in solemn sacrifice and converse with the
gods, involve a similar treatment. So, too, the com-
munity as a whole, both at stated times, as before the
planting or gathering of the crops, and at sudden
junctures, as when face to face with drought or
- plague, betakes itself to its spiritual sick-bed for a
stated term of days.
Now to look for clearly-defined ideas behind these
observances of the savage is, as has been said, false
method. It is chiefly the emotional and motor factors
that provide the key to the psychological problem.
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TEATT
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
To cease from active life, and consequently to mope,
as it were, and be cast down—such during the early
and unreflective stages of religion is no subtle device
of the “higher intelligences," but the normal tribes-
man's normal way of reacting on a world that is ever
making serious and fresh demands upon his native
powers. By sheer force of that vital experience
which is always experiment, he has found out-or
rather society has found out for him—that thus to be
cast down for a season means that afterwards he will
arise a stronger and better man. That this happens,
or tends to happen, he knows; how it happens he also
knows, in the sense that the traditional machinery
of ritual retreat can be unfailingly set in motion by
the tribal experts. But why it happens, that is to say,
what the ultimate meaning and purpose may be of this
widespread human capacity to profit by the pauses
in secular life which religion seems to have sanc-
tioned and even enforced in all periods of its historya
such a question lies utterly beyond the range of the
savage. Neither is it within the province of Social
Anthropology to venture on a final answer.
Enough has, perhaps, been said to show that,
amongst peoples of rude culture, who possess no
Theology worthy of the name, and can scarcely be
said to pray, whilst they are given over to ritual
performances which to us seem mechanical, inas-
much as we can discern no clear ideas behind them,
nevertheless there is at work in every phase of their
life a spiritual force of alternating current; the
energy flowing not only from the positive pole, but
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THE BIRTH OF HUMILITY
likewise from the negative pole in turn. The savage
is a healthy animal with plenty of rude energy to
dispose of. At times, however, a vital spurt dies
out and the outlook is flat and dreary. It is at such
times that there is apt to occur a counter-movement,
which begins, paradoxically, in a sort of artificial
prolongation and intensification of the natural de-
spondency. Somehow the despondency thus treated
becomes pregnant with an access of new vitality.
Moreover, this counter - movement would seem,
historically and psychologically, to be the character-
istic process or phase of life corresponding to religion
—or at least to what deserves to be called religion
as soon as the associated content of ideas becomes
sufficiently explicit to make good its place in the
rational life of mankind.
Finally, a word concerning arrogance, the vice
which is antithetic to the virtue of humility. Arro-
gance, alas! is not the peculiar attribute of primitive
magic. Rather it is the nemesis attendant on all
forms of the positive output of vital force which are
not occasionally chastened and purified by means
of a pilgrim's progress through the valley of humilia-
tion. Philosophy, since the days of Socrates, has
held it essential for the inquirer to pass through
doubt and despond. Science, too, and not least of
all the Science of Man, should beware of the arrogance
that is a defect of its very qualities of courage and
the desire to push ahead. Thus Sociology in the past
has indulged in facile generalizations that have done
its cause much harm in the eyes of thinking men.
To-day, when concrete methods have at last come to
201
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
the fore, there is every hope of success for the sociolo-
gist, if he can but endure that confusion and bitterness
of spirit which must be his lot for a season whilst
the regenerative processes are slowly maturing. Or
again, in another and a no less important respect it
may be that the Science of Man is still insufficiently
penetrated with humility. It perhaps is a little
unwilling to allow that the plane on which it works
is not the highest plane. Science is not Philosophy,
nor Science of Religion Theology. The horizon of
thought is altogether narrower, being bounded by
assumptions which for their full justification need to
be accommodated to the rest of knowledge. The
principle of the economy of labour excuses the man of
science as such from this synthetic task. Thus, in
the present case, whilst in the name of Social An-
thropology a psychological explanation of certain
functions of religion has been hazarded, no claim is
made, ncr could legitimately be made, to account for
the facts completely. It is proper and right that,
in an inaugural lecture, these limitations of com-
petency should be frankly and humbly acknow-
ledged. It only remains to add that universities
might well imitate the customs of savagery by impos-
ing a strict tabu on the lecturing activities of newly-
appointed Readers; such tabu to be removed only
when the bemused faculties of the novice should
have recovered tone, after long and disconsolate
brooding in the darkest corner of his workshop.
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VIII
IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
ARGUMENT
A VISIT to certain prehistoric sites of France will suffice
to persuade us that there was rudimentary religion
amongst ancient no less than there is amongst modern savages,
and that its spirit was essentially the same. At Niaux,
for instance, there are pictographs and paintings which,
so far as can be made out, are connected with rites intended
to secure good hunting. The fact, too, that they occur deep
within the dark recesses of a mountain, where a certain
awe is felt even by a modern mind, afford an additional
proof that solemnities were being celebrated ; that fine art
in this case was but the secondary product of religion.
Again, at Gargas, the hand-prints stencilled on the walls
possibly record some charm or vow ; while the arabesques
on the ceiling may have sonre totemic significance. Our
present knowledge does not enable us to establish the mean-
ing of such symbols with any precision ; but on the face of
them they bear a close analogy to those sacred designs which
the Australians employ to-day in their magico-religious
ceremonies. Hence we may justly speak of prehistoric
sanctuaries. In entering one of these caves to encompass
his hope by means of its solemn prefiguration the ancient
savage was crossing the threshold that divides the world of
203
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
the workaday from the world of the sacred ; and these rites,
whether the mechanism of spell or of prayer predominated
in them, were genuinely religious in so far as they involved
a mood and attitude consisting in a drawing near in awe,
according to approved traditional usage, to an unseen
source of mana.
N OR a week it had been warm work in the
K Onzième Section. Toulouse under an August
U sun was hot. Hotter still, however, was
the daily discussion in the Lycée. Does the Aurig-
nacian horizon antedate the Solutrian? Are eoliths
man-made, or can mere earth - pressure produce
their like? Such questions fire the blood, especi-
ally if there is a strain of the South in it.
Decidedly it was time that the protagonists of
the prehistoric department of the Association
Française should betake themselves to the cooler
air of the mountains.
So long as its train-service lasts, France is secure
against national decadence. The rendezvous was
for 5 a.m. We all turned up at the station notwith-
standing. A few of us are strangers, the much-
honoured invités du Congrès. The rest, our guides,
are a band of the foremost archæologists of France
led by the veteran M. Cartailhac. At that hour it
was deliciously cool. Yet, as we rolled through the
plain by the Garonne, an unclouded sun already lit
up the white backs of the oxen straining at the wheat-
cutting machines, and glittered from the surface of
the cisterns from which the long rows of vines draw
their freshness. We thread the valley of the Ariège,
C
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IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
and, a little after Foix, catch sight of the piled-up
blocks of a long moraine. It is a grim reminder that
we are about to step back into the neighbourhood of
the great Ice Age. We leave the train at Tarascon.
This is not the home of the immortal Tartarin. Far
away by the Rhone is the sleepy provincial town
where the Tarasque is stabled, that last of prehistoric
monsters. The other and smaller Tarascon of the
Little Pyrenees nestles amongst greenery under crags
and mountain masses at the confluence of the Ariège
and the brawling Vic-de-Sos. Thrice-blessed stream,
whichever of the two it was that furnished those
excellent trout wherewith our breakfast at the inn
was graced! The ancestor of these well-born fish
was to appear presently.
After breakfast, business. We must mount several
miles up the valley of the Vic-de-Sos to our left.
There wait on us conveyances of a sort. The leading
vehicle under the weight of four prehistorians-
brain is heavy-collapses. The prehistorians are
flung into the dust. But no bones are broken. We
are soon on our way up the defile. It is a scene of
desolation. On every side are the remains of
deserted iron-works. These were formerly nourished
by the “ Catalan” system of wood-fuel, but alas! it
no longer pays. The mountain walls on either side
are scored and polished for the greater part of the
way up-say, for 500 metres above our head, that is,
about 1000 metres above sea-level-by the action of
former glaciers. The cave we are about to visit,
Niaux, is at least 200 metres below the high-water
mark left by the ice. Clearly, then, we have here
205
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
an upper limit of time for its wall-paintings. While
the cave was below the level of the glaciers, torrents
must have torn through its galleries, scarifying the
sides from top to bottom.
But this is to anticipate. There remains for us the
problem of reaching Niaux from the halting-place of
the carriages. It is solved-scrambulando. If the
intrepid M. Daleau, owner and explorer of the famous
Grotte de Pair-non-pair at Bourg-sur-Gironde, near
Bordeaux, can manage the climb, lame as he is, we
others have no excuse. The sun blisters our backs,
but as a compensating boon it has filled the rocks
with wide-open white daisies, and has brought out
the smell of the wild lavender. Besides, as we ascend,
we rejoice in an ever-widening prospect, as, for
example, up the valley, where the ruins of the
mediæval castle of Miglos are seen sitting crestfallen
upon their lonely rock.
To stand at the door of Niaux yields no foretaste
of a mile-long subterranean cathedral with pillars,
side-chapels, and confessionals all complete. It is
only fair to state that nature designed a more im-
posing entrance somewhere to our left. This, how-
ever, it closed again with a landslip, as it likewise
closed many another cave, about the time when the
curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama
of pleistocene humanity-l'époque du grand détritique,
as M. Rutot has ventured to name it. Nevertheless
the present rat-hole of a mouth is of respectable
antiquity. For it has been fenced round with a
cyclopean wall by men who here sought shelter from
an enemy, Visigoth or Roman or still earlier invaders.
206
IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
Moreover, within the cavern, near the opening, coarse
sherds of neolithic or bronze-age pottery are to be
found. To post-palæolithic man, however, the ingress
to the inner sanctuary was not improbably barred.
A little way in there is a drop in the level, which
rises some 25 metres on the further side, and in even
moderately wet weather the dip becomes a lake. If,
then, the holocene epoch was ushered in, as there is
reason to believe, by a “pluvial period” of consider-
able duration, the chances are that the spirits of the
Magdalenian men were free to carry on their mysteries
undisturbed long after their bodies were dust; nay,
probably right up to the day when modern science
burst in upon the darkness with its acetylene lamps.
The lamps in question took some time to light. In
the meantime some of us donned as a protection
against wet and slippery places the local espadrilles,
rough canvas shoes with soles of string. Others
prudently turned their coats inside out, a simple
and effective device for keeping clean, but with a
countervailing tendency to cause inside pockets to
void their contents. Thereupon we bow our heads
that we may clamber down a precipitous descent
into the grave-like depths that gape for us. Very
chill these are, away from the summer sun, and very
still, but for the occasional dripping of water. Be-
hind the wavering lamps of our guides we stumble
over stepping-stones across what remains of the lake.
Then, leaving a mass of boulders and erratic blocks
behind, we steer our way amid fantastic stalactites
and stalagmites along an exceedingly narrow passage
known as le passage du diable. Next, more boulders
207
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
have to be tackled. We note in passing that we are
in the channel of a former rushing river. Especially
at the junction of two arms of this many-branched
cave can it be seen how a conflux of swirling streams
has carved out a mighty basin, using stones and sand
as its excavating tools. So far there are no signs of
man. At last, at a point about 500 metres from the
entrance, where an opening in the vault above our
heads affords a glimpse of a set of upper galleries,
our guide cries Halt!
The demonstration opens quietly. On the wall to
the left, at about shoulder-level, underneath a glazing
of stalactite, are five round marks such as might be
made by the end of a finger dipped in paint-that
and nothing more. We are bidden to possess our
souls in peace and move forward. A short way on,
to the right, are more of these marks, some black, the
product of manganese, others a warm red, showing
ochre to have been used. Nor is it a question of
round marks only. There are likewise upright lines,
not unlike those whereby the Australian natives
represent throwing-sticks in their caves and rock-
shelters. Other similar upright lines have a boss on
the upper part of one side, and recall the shape of a
certain type of Australian throwing-club. Finally,
there is a thick oblong smudge indented at one of its
narrow ends. Just as the upright marks have been
classified as “claviform," so the oblong mark en-
joys the unconvincing designation of “naviform."
Similarly, in remoter parts of the cave we are shown
other marks to which distinguishing names have been
assigned. For instance, uprights with many branch-
208
IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
ing lines on both sides at the top or bottom are called
“ dendriform,” though it is almost certain that we are
dealing here with the representation of missile
weapons and not of trees. Or, again, an arrange-
ment of crossed lines, not unlike the skeleton of a
sledge, is termed "tectiform.” Lastly, it may be
mentioned here that the round dots, with which lines,
circles and other patterns are composed, go by the
name of “ Azilian points,” because of their undoubted
resemblance to the marks on the painted pebbles of
the decadent pleistocene people who inhabited the
cave, or rather river-tunnel, of Mas d'Azil.
Such names are necessarily bestowed “without
prejudice." Doubtless there is meaning in these
marks. All analogies support the view that they are
signs, symbols, pictographs, embodying veritable
inscriptions. But we are quite unable, at present,
to read their message. At most in one instance is
this at all possible. When we proceed along the main
artery of the cave, 100 metres or so past the place
where the vast ante-chapel of the Salon Noir opens to
the right, we are presented with a rebus, as M. Car-
tailhac might well call it, which is not entirely beyond
conjectural interpretation. Reading from right to
left, we have what look like one throwing-stick of
the straight kind and two of the sort furnished with a
boss. A multitude of “ Azilian points,” thirty-one
in all, grouped more or less irregularly, follow, then an
upright throwing-stick, then eight more points in
two parallel rows, then fourteen other points enclos-
ing a central one, an arrangement probably to be
discerned also amongst some of the preceding thirty-
14
209
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
one points. Last of all comes a cleverly-designed
little bison, the dorsal line of which is merely a pro-
jecting ridge of rock. A natural accident has been
utilized—nay, has perhaps suggested the representa-
tion. This bison, unlike any other that is figured
in this cave, has its legs drawn up close to the body,
and this rearing position, so suggestive of a death-
struggle, together with the large red mark on the
flank, for all the world like an open wound, makes
the intention of the primitive artist passing clear.
He here portrays the slaying of the bison. The other
marks are presumably meant to lead up to this, and
signify the weapons that are to deal the blow, the
circling movements of the hunters, and who knows
what besides? But why such a hunting scene at all?
Let us defer the discussion of this question until we
have had time to finish our visit of inspection.
Pursuing the main artery, we encounter few draw-
ings but many symbols, until, about 1100 metres
from the mouth, we are pulled up short by a lake
into which the vault dips. It is possible by diving
to penetrate into still remoter recesses of the cave,
which, moreover, are not without their prehistoric
designs. M. l'Abbé Breuil has done it. We prefer,
however, to trouble neither the lake nor the inhabi-
tants thereof. For M. Viré, an expert in subterranean
biology, finds in the water four kinds of myriapods,
all blind. So we retrace our steps, and brace our-
selves for the culminating experience, the sight of the
Salon Noir.
This side gallery is truly magnificent. As one
mounts steadily up a long slope of billowy sand, the
210
IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
walls fall back till they are beyond the range of the
lamps, whilst overhead there is positive nothingness,
not a glimmer, not a sound, no motion, no limit.
Suddenly M. Cartailhac scares us out of our senses by
kindling a Bengal light. Not only are we scared;
we are slightly shocked. Is this a place for pyro-
technics? But we see by this means what we could
never have seen with our powerful lamps, and what
primitive man could certainly have never seen with
his feeble ones; for a hollowed pebble holding grease,
with a piece of moss for wick, was all he had. We
behold a cathedral interior such as a mediæval
architect might have seen in his dreams, aerial, carven,
and shining white.
We reach our destination, an immense rotunda.
The circular wall descends almost vertically until it
is a little more than the height of a man from the
ground. At this point it breaks back into concave
niches with smooth surfaces, thus forming, as it were,
a series of side-chapels all waiting to be adorned.
Here the primitive painter worked at ease. On the
contrary, to produce the beautiful ceiling-pieces in
the cave at Altamira, in Spain, he must have lain
more or less on his back, as Michael Angelo did in the
Sistine Chapel. Again, at Niaux he did not, as the
Altamira artist, seek polychrome effects, but was
content with simple black-and-white. In a hollow
stone he mixed oxide of manganese with charcoal
and a little fat, and laid it on with such an apology
for a brush as the modern savage uses to-day. What
matter the materials, if the artist sees? This man
had the eye.
2II
TIT
THE THRESHOLD TYY
TRI
OF RELIGION
We were led straight up to the chef-d'auvre of the
Salon Noir. Under a low vault is a snub-nosed horse,
or rather pony, of grand workmanship, measuring
about a metre and a half from the forehead to the
root of the tail. Back, belly and legs are outlined
in thick black. Muzzle, neck, throat and saddle
are covered with shaggy hair, indicated by no less
bold, but finer strokes, so blended as to convey the
happiest impression of muscular chest and glossy
barrel. It is the living image of Prjewalski's wild
horse of the Mongolian deserts. The picture stands
out strongly, despite the fact that it is cluttered
up with not a few rival frescoes. A springbok
(bouquetin), a brace of bisons, and a couple of smaller
horses independently compete for the scanty room
available in this apparently much-coveted corner.
As the primitive artist has no notion of grouping, but
concentrates on the single figure, so he likewise seems
to ignore the rights of prior occupancy, and is apt to
paint right over another work of art. The cayes of
the Bushmen of South Africa present similar palimp-
sests, though we are told that with them a master-
piece was in violate until three generations had
passed. In Niaux, exigencies of wall-space could
hardly account for the crowding and over-lapping
of animal designs, unless indeed there was more
mystic virtue attaching to one spot than to another.
Thus it is easy to suppose that where the rock bulges
out in the likeness of an animal's body, with all the
effects of bas-relief, so that only a little paint is re-
quired to help the illusion out, or again, where a hole
in the rock may be converted with a stroke or two of
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IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
a stone chisel into the front view of a stag's face, to
which antlers are added in colour-devices which are
both to be met with in the Salon Noir—the lead given
by nature to art should be regarded as full of good
omen.
We have been the round of the wall-paintings from
right to left, and studied them carefully, as their
merits deserve; for, of some seventy or eighty as
there are in all, hardly one shows a lack either of care
or of downright skill. Let us note before we leave
them that nearly all have what look like weapons-
spears of various shapes or a throwing club-attached
to their sides or overlying the region of the heart.
But the best wine has been kept for the end of the
feast. Away to the left the wall bends back a little
above the level of the floor and overarches a small
tract of sand, by this time of day coated with stalag-
mite, though not thickly. We stoop, and behold
traced on the sand the unmistakable forms of two
trout, own brethren to this morning's trout of tender
memory. At last we were in touch with the spirit
of our pleistocene forerunner. He knew those trout,
we knew those trout, and his emotion was ours. But
a stranger thing was at hand. Hard by, similarly
sheltered by an overhanging ledge, might be seen
the much-bestalagmited print of a naked human foot
-rather a small foot, it seemed. Silently and in
awe we turned to retrace the long journey to the
outer world. At last we had met the ghost of pre-
historic man.
And now that at length we are back again in the
light and warmth of the good sun, which by this time
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THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
1
is westering redly, we talk theory. And the question
that seems to sum up all the others is, In what
sense, if any, is this painted cave a sanctuary?
For the more cautious of us, the answer to this
question was not formulated all at once. Our
education in prehistoric art and its purposes had
scarcely begun. Next day we must be spirited off
from Toulouse by a no less early train in quite another
direction-into the department of Hautes-Pyrénées,
to view the cave of Gargas, near Aventignan, in the
valley of the Neste, in a hill surrounded by all the
débris of the Ice Age, moraines, rolled stones, and
erratic blocks. Afterwards we abandoned Toulouse
for Périgueux as our centre, and under the guidance
of M. l'Abbé Breuil crawled painfully through the
long narrow gully of Les Combarelles to inspect its
numerous rock-engravings of animal and human, or
at least semi-human, forms; whilst at Font-de-
Gaume the impressive, if somewhat obliterated, poly-
chromes were made clear as noonday for us by their
discoverer, M. Peyrony. To describe our delightful
experiences in detail is impossible here. It must
suffice to draw freely upon them in order to assist the
suggestion that such a cave as Niaux is truly a pre-
historic sanctuary.
First of all, how is a sanctuary to be defined? A
sanctuary is a sacred place, whether sacred in its
own right, or because sacred ceremonies are there
celebrated. And sacred, in its primary meaning at
least, is equivalent to tabu, that is, “not to be lightly
approached.” Was such a cave as Niaux a place of
mystery, a place to be entered only when solemn and
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IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
esoteric rites were to be accomplished? That is the
question.
Let us approach the subject of Niaux by way of
Gargas. At Gargas we are amongst the pioneers of
pleistocene art, the so-called Aurignacians. An
hour's exciting excavation in the remains of the
hearth near the mouth of the cave made me the happy
possessor of a very typical Aurignacian scraper; and,
without going further into the evidence, I may refer
the reader to the paper on Gargas of Messrs Cartailhac
and Breuil for sufficiently persuasive reasons for
thinking not only that the Aurignacians had set to
work on the cave walls, but further that, before the
later Magdalenians could even aspire to improve
on their designs, a fall of rock hermetically closed the
cavern from that early date up to the present day.
Now, the Aurignacian was no great hand at drawing.
He makes the child's mistake of confusing what he
knows with what he merely sees. Thus at Gargas we
noticed the side-face of a bison surmounted with two
branching horns such as could only go with the full
face. Similarly, the artist was apt to pause as soon
as he had made his intention manifest. Thus a
horse's head stands for the entire horse. In par-
ticular, he neglects to finish off the legs of his animals.
Now, this principle is excellent in magic, if question-
able in art for art's sake. Magically, the part can
stand quite well for the whole.
Perhaps it is an application of the same rule, in its
magico-religious bearing, that will account for the
numerous hands, a hundred and fifty at the least,
In l'Anthropologie, xxi. (1910).
215
THỂ THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
stencilled in red or black on the cave-walls. It is
provoking that, when the Australian is found to do
the like at the present day, it should be so hard to be
sure of his motives. Thus Mr Roth informs us that
his Queensland natives told him that this practice,
which they called kapan-balkalkal, “mark-imitate
(or make)," was a mere amusement, though one that
is special to boys and young men. Even if it be an
amusement now—and the savage is an adept in dis-
guising his mysteries—it does not follow that it was
always so. Undoubtedly at Gargas a good many of
these stencilled hands occur near the entrance, where
the well-developed hearth shows that the people
camped. Yet the designs are even here mostly in
dark corners and alcoves, whilst other examples are
met with in devious recesses far from the mouth. It
is at least possible that primitive man was here
registering, so to speak, by contact with a holy spot,
some charm or vow making for his personal better-
ment. It may be asked, too, at this point why so
many of the hands appear to lack one finger or
several. My friend, Sr. Alcalde del Rio, the ex-
plorer of so many Spanish caverns, has made the
rather gruesome suggestion that the owners of the
imperfect hands were sufferers from leprosy. It
is to be remembered, however, that Australians and
Bushmen maim their hands for ceremonial reasons.
Besides, is it so certain as the French archæologists
suppose it to be that a man with a sound hand cannot
produce these effects of stencilling? Professor Sollas
IW. E. Roth, N. Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 4, 12,
26 Apuntes sobre Altamira,” Limia, No. 5, Fev. 1911, 2.
216
ÎN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
of Oxford, without sacrificing a single finger-joint in
the cause of science, has by straightforward stencilling
admirably mimicked the mutilated hands of Gargas,
as I can personally vouch.
Again, what is the meaning of those strange
arabesques or" meanders ” with which the walls and
roof of Gargas are decorated in its remoter depths?
Sometimes they appear to have been made simply
with the fingers in gluey clay which has since been
mostly glazed over by stalactite, and sometimes they
are traced by means of an instrument shaped like a
trident. These marks are so uncommonly like the
scratches which the cave-bears have left in the same
cave, as a result of sharpening their great claws, that
one is almost tempted to wonder whether Aurignacian
man had a cave-bear totem, or otherwise had a
ritual reason for assimilating himself to a creature so
full of obvious mana.
Enough of Gargas and its problems, with their hint
of magical, striving with purely decorative and artistic,
purposes. At Niaux we are amongst later Mag-
dalenian artists who could, and did, draw true to life.
Did they live at the mouth of their cave? It appears
not. Certainly, if their art was play, they sought a
remote playground, penetrating half a mile or more
into the underground world, with narrows to squeeze
through which even in the mind of modern man are
associated with the devil. At Font-de-Gaume there
is a similar needle's eye to negotiate, for which fast-
ing would be a very suitable preparation. Les Com-
barelles, again, is literally inaccessible except on
one's knees, and no artist ever graved animals, or
217
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
men with the heads of animals-masked dancers, it
may be for simple fun in such a place. These, then,
must have been sanctuaries, if only because no one
would dream of hedging round a mere picture-gallery
with such trying turnstiles.
The great difficulty is to make intelligible to our.
selves the spiritual motives that could lead men in
dark and remote places to celebrate mysteries that
involve the designing of animal forms, the use of
symbols, and so forth. Our hope of one day throwing
light on these obscure matters lies in either of two
directions. The prehistorians, by comparing to-
gether all that remains of this widespread culture-
one might almost say civilization-of late pleistocene
times, may inductively acquire a set of clues. The
material is, in its way, rich. There are some nine-
teen painted caves known in France, and the dis-
coveries in Spain, which every day increase, bring up
the total number of such caves and rock-shelters to at
least fifty. Nor must we forget that there are in-
numerable other sites which, though without paint-
ings, illustrate the customs and ideas of the same
period.
Or, again, there is possibly assistance to be afforded
by the student of existing savages. These are so
much alike in their fundamental ways of action and
thought all the world over, that it is not extravagant
to conclude that the inhabitants of prehistoric
Europe had likewise the type of mind that to-day
seems to go regularly and inevitably with a particular
stage of social development. On such a working
hypothesis, those ceremonies, best known to ethno-
218
IN A PREHISTORIC SANCTUARY
logists in their Australian form, whereby savages, by
magico-religious means, including the use of sacred
designs, endeavour to secure for themselves good
hunting and a plentiful supply of game animals, take
us by analogy straight back to the times of prehistoric
artistry.
Magdalenian man drew better, it is true, than does
the Australian, though perhaps not better than the
Bushman, about whose ceremonies we unfortunately
know so little. And, sad to say, it is too often the
case that good religion and good art tend to thrust
each other out; so that the religious man turns
towards his ugly Byzantine Madonnas, while the
Florentine artist makes glorious pictures and statues
for popes and cardinals who are men of the world in
the worst sense. We may allow ourselves to con-
ceive, however, that sometimes religion and art may
go together, that the artist may try to serve God by
drawing nobly. Perhaps, then, the artist of Niaux
may have felt in a vague way that the better he drew
his beast the surer he was to have at his back the
kindly powers that send the spear straight at the
quarry.
For man of the primitive pattern there are two
worlds, a workaday and a sacred. Whenever he
needs help in the one, he resorts to the other. The
threshold between the two is clearly marked. He
crosses it always in a ceremonial way, with nice
attention to the traditional details of behaviour;
and his ceremonies enhance, as they certainly reflect,
the mood in which he draws near to the unseen source
of his spiritual comfort. It matters not at all whether
219
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
1
we classify as magic or religion the practices that
result, so long as we recognize that all genuine rites
involve one and the same fundamental mood and
attitude, a drawing near in awe. Thus, then, we
must suppose it was at Niaux. The man who left
his footmark there had drawn near in awe, whether
it was spell or prayer that accompanied his painting.
And perhaps the best proof of all is that the spirit
of awe and mystery still broods in these dark galleries
within a mountain, that are, to a modern mind, sym-
bolic of nothing so much as of the dim subliminal
recesses of the human soul.
220
INDEX
Native words in italics.
Proposed technical terins in inverted commas,
O
ÆTIOLOGY, 149, 150, 154, 167 | Churinga, 85, 159, 165, 166,
Altamira, cave of, 211
190
Alviella, Goblet d', xxvi
Circumcision, 82
Ammon, O., 126
Classificatory method, 3, 26, 101,
Andriamanitra, 11, 12
120
- Animatism,” xxxii, 14, 15, 17, Clodd, E., ix
18, 19, 117
Codrington, R. H., 61, 103, 104,
Animism. See Tylor
109, 115, 117
Anthropomorphism, xxxii, 71, Collective soul, 137, 138, 174
121, 146, 167
Comparative Religion, xxx, 3
Apodosis” of spell, 56
Conversion, 196
Arungquiltha, 52, 65, 85, 88, Corpse, uncanny, 23
114
Crab-fetish, 25, 68
Association of Ideas. See Magic Crawley, E., 94, 195
Asthenic” emotion, 61, 170, Credulity. See Primitive credu-
186, 198
lity
Aurora Borealis, 14
Crisis and religion. See Religion
Awe, x, 121, 13, 20, 24, 58, 97,
220
DALEAU, F., 206
Daramulun, 16, 17, 149, 160,
BACON, F., xxiv, 132, 179
163, 167, 168, 189
Badi, 52
Dead hand, 2
Baiamai, 16, 17, 149, 152, 160, Death, to the savage, 23
168, 189
Degeneration, xiv
Berkleianism. See Solipsism Determinism, 75n
Blood, in religion, 2, 25
- Developed magic.” See Magic
Bosanquet, B., 138
Divination, 39, 71
Breuil, H., 210, 214, 215
Dream, 7
Buddhism, 100, 121
Durkheim, É., xxiiin, xxvi, 123,
Bull-roarer, 2, 16, 17, 145, 146, 129, 131, 169, 173
150, 151n, 154, 155, 156, 157, “Dynamic" aspect of religion,
158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, xxxii, 170, 183
164, 189
“Dynamism,” xxxi, xxxii
Buto, II2
Bzik, 156, 158
EMOTION, in magic. See Magic
in religion. See Religion
CARTAJLHAC, E., 204, 209, 211,
"Endof spell, 55, 68
215
Eng-Aï, xv, 12
Causation, to the savage, 50
Espinas, A., 126
Chief, in religion, 97, 106
“Ethnological method," 153n
221
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
FARNELL, L. R., ix
| Humility, 69, 170, 171, 176, 177,
Fetish, 102
179, 198
Fire, personification of, 19
Font-de-Gaume, cave of, 214, 217 IDEAS, association of. See Magic
Food-taboos, 81, 92
, in religion. See Religion
Fowler, W. W., ix
Individuality, xxv
Frazer, J. G., on the bull Initiation ceremonies, 17, 157,
roarer, 161, 162 158, 159, 168, 194, 196
on magic and re “ Instrument” of spell, 55, 64,
ligion, xi, 27, 31, 166
33-35, 64, 169, Intellectualism, i, 29, 38, 73,
176, 177, 178, 179 169, 177, 180, 200
on magic and Ittha, 85
science, xii, 48,
49, 52
JEVONS, F. B., on magic, 37
on taboo, 73, 83,
on supernatural, 12
on taboo, 77, 196
84
Joia, 8ő
GARGAS, cave of, 203, 215, 216,
217
KALOU, 12
Genna, 74, 89, 90, 192, 199 Kant, I., 78
Gennep, A. van, 152, 163, 170, Knots, 64, 80
191, 196
Green, T. H., 138
LANG, A., on animism, 7
Gubburra, 85
on gods as magicians,
Gumplowicz, L., 126
51
on supreme beings,
HADDON, A. C., xiin, 1541, 162,
xiv, 2, 16, 17, 145,
163
147, 148, 149, 150,
Hallucination. See Trance
151, 189
Hand-prints, 215, 216
on trance, 7
Hantus, 8,9
Lapouge, G. de, 126
Harrison, J., 87
Les Combarelles, cave of, 214,
Hartland, E. S., xiii, 58
217
Heitmüller, W., 62
Lévy-Bruhl, L., xxvi, 169, 174
Herodotus, 134
Lonka-lonka, 65, 70
Hero-worship, 121
Loria, A., 126
Hewitt, J., xii
Lovejoy, A. , xiii
Hierography, xxvi
Luck, 2, 19n
Hierology, xxvi, 80
Hobhouse, L., 78
MAGIC, age of, 34, 35, 176
Hocart, A., 118n
, and religion, xi, xxii, 27,
Hodson, T., ix, 74, 89, 90, 192
31, 33-35, 52, 66, 69,
Hollis, A. C., XV
71, 72, 114, 176, 190,
Hospitality, 96
220
Howitt, A. W., 148, 151N, 159, , and science, xii, 48, 491,
163, 164
66, 178
Hubert, H., xii, 77, 79, 80, 164 „ and taboo, 77, 98
222
INDEX
54
99
Magic, anti-social character of, 85 | Ngai. See Eng-Aï
, as between persons, 53, 70 Niaux, cave of, 203, 206-13, 217
, association of ideas in, 36, Novicow, J., 126
37, 40, 83, 135, 177
y definition of, XXX
OKI, 113
developed, 29, 32, 41, 54 | Orenda, xii, 86, 87, 101, 113
emotion in, 29, 40, 44 Origins, no absolute, viii
imitative, 39, 54
Origin and validity, xiv
make-believe in, 43, 45 Oro, 158
occultness of, 157
Otgon, 113
e projectiveness of, 29, 42, Oudah, 74, 87, 91, 108
rudimentary, 29, 32, 4in Parthenogenesis, gon
suggestion in, 43, 53 Passage, rites of, 163
symbolism in, 63
Personation, 1591, 190
s sympathetic, 18, 20, 39, Pictographs, 208, 209, 219
76, 77, 951, 177, 215 Plato, 107, 121
, verification in, 46
Possession, 25
will in, 53, 71
“ Powers,” 1, 13
"Magomorphism,” 51, 88
Prayer, 67, 68, 69, 70
Mahomet, 181
Pre-animism, xxi
Makutu, 113
“Pre-animistic," viii, ix, x, xxi,
Mana, xii, xiii, xxiii, xxvii, xxx, xxii, xxxi, II, 13
xxxi, 12, 24, 30, 50, 56, 58-63, Preuss, T. K., ix
70, 74, 75, 86-88, 91, 93, 97 “Primitive credulity," 41, 43,
101, 103, 106, 107, 110, 112, 461, 48
113, 115, 121, 146, 170, 171, " Projective." See Magic
193, 198, 217
“Protasis” of spell, 56
Manitu, 21, 89,113
Psammeticus, 134
Marx, K., 126
“ Psychologist's fallacy,” 38, 138
Mas d'Azil, cave of, 209
Pygmy. See Oudah
Mauss M., xii, 77, 79, 80, 131,
QUBE, 113
M'Dougall, W., xn, 169, 172,
173, 187
RACE 116, 152
M'Gee, W. J., 109
Ratzel, F., 116
Miru, 113
Religion and crisis, 90, 194, 195,
"Moral dimension" of the super-
197, 199
natural, 112
and magic. See Magic
Mung, 85
and taboo. See Taboo
Mungan-ngaua, 16, 17, 149, 168
and tradition, 188
Muparn, 85
and philosophy, 202
Mythology, 15, 17, 116, 149, 152
complexity of, ix, 27
definition of, viii, 4, 5,
Names, in magic, 62, 66, 67
Nature, to the savage, 13, 109
emotion in, x, I, 5, 10,
Negative magic, xi
220
"Negative mana," 98
» ethical, in Australia, 16
164
6,27
223
THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION
Religion, fear as element in, 13,1 "Sympathetic” terminology, 104
157, 160, 187
Sympathy. See Magic
ideas, in x, xxxii, 5
motor element in, 175, TABOO (tabu, tambu, tapu), xi, 73,
180, 182, 190
76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81-98, 102,
w psychological view of, 106, IION, III, 112, 170, 184,
ix, 133, 134, 201
186, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198,214
» social character of, ix, 1 “ Tabu-mana formula,” xxviiin,
80, 81, 96, 123, 135 xxix, 100, 114, 119
universality of, xxv, 28 Tarde, G., 113
Ridley, W., 148n, 162
Tarunga, 117
Ritual, prior to dogma, 181
" Teratism," 13n
Rongo, 110N, 112
“Theoplasm," 58
"Rudimentary magic.” See Thomson, J., XV
Magic
Thunder, in religion, 14, 163
Rutot, A., 206
Tindalo, 117, 119, 121
Totemism, 2, 20, 138, 152, 154,
SACER, 110, 192
189, 190
Sacré, IIO
Trance, 7, 22, 24
Schmidt, W., xiii, xiyn, xxiiin, Transmigration, 21
14812
Tregear, E., 105, 113, 118
Science and magic. See Magic Tuana, 15
Seignobos, C., 137
Tundun, 16, 17, 149, 167, 168
Sex-totem, 153
Twanyirika, 159
Skeat, W. W., 57, 62, 69
Tylor, E. B., on animism, viii,
Smith, W. Robertson, 181
ix, x, xi, xxii,
Snakes, in religion, 22, 60, 90
xxxi, xxxii, I,
“Social Morphology,” 130, 139,
2, 6-9, 13, 15,
142, 144
17, 102, 115-
Solipsism, of savage, 23
117, 119, 147
Sollas, W. J., 216
on divination, 39
Spell and prayer, 29, 30, 31
on taboo, 76, 80
, function in magic, 47, 54 "Type-value," XXV
9 types of, 55
Spencer, H., 117, 125
VALIDITY, xiv.
Starbuck, E., 195
Vai, 18, 18, 199
"Static" aspect of religion, xxix,
170, 183
WAKAN (wakanda), 12, 26, 28,
Stones, in religion, 18, 19, 60
109, 113
Stranger, in religion, 96
Westermarck, E., 78, 96, 169, 173
Sucking-cure, 25, 39
Will, in magic. See Magic
Suggestion. See Magic
Woman, in religion, 26, 94, 95,
Sully, J., 23
96
"Supernaturalism," II, 13N, 18, Women, frightening the, 158
30, 58
Wundt, W., viii, x
Supreme beings. See Lang
Survivals, 27
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