Читать книгу Religions of Primitive Peoples - Daniel G. Brinton - Страница 4

Contents:—Ethnology Defined—The Scientific Study of Religions—It is not Theology—Its Methods: 1. The Historic Method; 2. The Comparative Method; 3. The Psychologic Method—Strange Coincidences in Human Thought—Conspicuous in Primitive Religions—“Primitive” Peoples Defined—The Savage Mind—Examples—Means of Study: 1. Archæology; 2. Language; 3. Folk-Lore; 4. Descriptions of Travellers—Examples: The Early Aryans, Etruscans, Semites, Egyptians, American Tribes, Australians, Polynesians, etc.—“Religions” Defined—Compared with “Superstitions”—No One Belief Essential to Religion—Atheistic Religions—Fundamental Identity of Religions—No Tribe Known Devoid of a Religion—How the Opposite Opinion Arose—Earliest Men probably had No Religion—No Signs of Religion in Lower Animals—Power of Religion in Primitive Society—True Source of Religion.

The youngest in the sisterhood of the sciences is that which deals with Man. In its widest scope it is called Anthropology, and as such includes both the physical and mental life of the species, from the beginning until now. That branch of it which especially concerns itself with the development of man as indicated by his advance in civilisation, is known as Ethnology.

When we analyse the directive forces which have brought about this advance, and whose study therefore makes up Ethnology, they can be reduced to four, to wit, Language, Laws, Arts, and Religion. Do not imagine, however, that these are separable, independent forces. On the contrary, they are inseparable, constituent elements of an organic unity, each working through the others, and on the symmetrical adjustment of all of them to the needs of a community depend its prosperity and growth. No one of them can be omitted or exaggerated without stunting or distorting the national expansion. This lesson, taught by all ages and confirmed by every example, warns us to be cautious in giving precedence to one over the others in any general scheme; but we can profitably separate one from the others, and study its origins and influence.

On this occasion I invite your attention to Religion, and especially as displayed in its earliest and simplest forms, in the faiths and rites of primitive peoples. I shall present these to you in accordance with the principles and methods of Ethnology.

There is what has been called the “science of religion.” The expression seems to me a little presumptuous—or, at least, premature. We do not yet speak of a “science of jurisprudence,” although we have better materials for it than for a science of religion. I shall content myself, therefore, in calling what I have to offer a study of early religions according to scientific methods.

I need not remind you that such a method is absolutely without bias or partisanship; that it looks upon all religions alike as more or less enlightened expressions of mental traits common to all mankind in every known age.[1] It concedes the exclusive possession of truth to none, and still less does it aim to set up any other standard than past experience by which to measure the claims of any. It brings no new canons of faith or doctrine, and lays no other foundation than that which has been laid even from the beginning until now.

But just there its immediate utility and practical bearings are manifested. It seeks to lay bare those eternal foundations on which the sacred edifices of religion have ever been and must ever be erected. It aims to accomplish this by clearing away the incidental and adventitious in religions so as to discover what in them is permanent and universal. Those sacred ideas and institutions which we find repeated among all the early peoples of the earth, often developing in after ages along parallel lines, will form the special objects of our investigation. The departures from these universal forms, we shall see, can be traced to local or temporary causes, they turn on questions of environment, and serve merely to define the limits of variability of the ubiquitous principles of religion as a psychic phenomenon, wherever we find it.

This is not “theology.” That branch of learning aims to measure the objective reality, the concrete truth, of some one or another opinion concerning God and divine things; while the scientific study of religions confines itself exclusively to examining such opinions as phases of human mental activity, and ascertaining what influence they have exerted on the development of the species or of some branch of it. Therefore it is never “polemic.” It neither attacks nor defends the beliefs which it studies. It confines itself to examining their character and influence by the lights of reason and history.

The methods which we employ in this process of reduction are three in number: 1. The Historic Method; 2. The Comparative Method; 3. The Psychologic Method. A few words will explain the scope of each of these.

The Historic Method studies the history of beliefs and the development of worship. It seeks to discover what influences have been exerted on them by environment, transmission, heredity, and conquest, and to bring into full relief what is peculiar to the tribe or group under consideration, and what is exotic. For in one sense it is true that every nation and tribe, even every man, has his own religion.

Such ethnic traits merit the closest scrutiny. They are so marked and constant as to modify profoundly the history of even the ripest religions. It is quite true, as has been observed by an historian of Christianity, that “there is in every people an hereditary disposition to some particular heresy,”[2] that is, to altering any religion which they accept in accordance with the special constitution of their own minds.

The Comparative Method notes the similarities and differences between the religions of different tribes or groups, and, gradually extending its field to embrace the whole species, endeavors, by excluding what is local or temporal, to define those forms of religious thought and expression which are common to humanity at large.

The Psychologic Method takes the results of both the previous methods and aims to explain them by referring the local manifestations to the special mental traits of the tribe or group, and the universal features to equally universal characteristics of the human mind.

The last, the Psychologic Method, is the crown and completion of the quest; for every advanced student of religion will subscribe to the declaration of Professor Granger, that “all mythology and all history of beliefs must finally turn to psychology for their satisfactory elucidation.”[3] In other words, the laws of human thought can alone explain its own products.

And here I must mention a startling discovery, the most startling, it seems to me, of recent times. It is that these laws of human thought are frightfully rigid, are indeed automatic and inflexible. The human mind seems to be a machine; give it the same materials, and it will infallibly grind out the same product. So deeply impressed by this is an eminent modern writer that he lays it down as “a fundamental maxim of ethnology” that, “we do not think; thinking merely goes on within us.”[4]

These strange coincidences find their explanation in experimental psychology. This science, in its modern developments, establishes the fact that the origin of ideas is due to impressions on the nerves of sense. The five senses give rise to five classes of ideas, the most numerous of which are those from the sense of sight, visual ideas, and those from the sense of hearing, auditory ideas. The former yield the conceptions of space, motion, and lustre (colour, brightness, etc.), the latter that of time. From the sense of touch arise the “tactual” impressions, which yield the ideas of power and might, through the sensations of resistance and pressure, pleasure and pain. From these primary ideas (or perceptions), drawn directly from impressions, are derived secondary, abstract, and general ideas (apperceptions) by comparison and association (the laws of Identity, Diversity, and Similarity).

Under ordinary conditions of human life there are many more impressions on the senses which are everywhere the same or similar, than the reverse. Hence, the ideas, both primary and secondary (perceptions and apperceptions), drawn from them are much more likely to resemble than to differ.

The consequence of this is that the same laws of growth which develop the physical man everywhere into the traits of the species, act also on his psychical powers, and not less absolutely, to bring their products into conformity.

This is true not only of his logical faculties, but of his lightest fancies and wildest vagaries. “Man’s imagination,” observes Mr. Hartland, “like every other known power, works by fixed laws, the existence and operation of which it is possible to trace; and it works upon the same material,—the external universe, the mental and moral constitution of man, and his social relations.”[5]

In reference to my particular subject, Professor Buchmann expressed some years ago what I believe to be the correct result of modern research in these words: “It is easy to prove that the striking similarity in primitive religious ideas comes not from tradition nor from the relationship or historic connections of early peoples, but from the identity in the mental construction of the individual man, wherever he is found.”[6]

We can scarcely escape a painful shock to discover that we are bound by such adamantine chains. As the primitive man could not conceive that inflexible mechanical laws control the processes of nature, so are we slow to acknowledge that others, not less rigid, rule our thoughts and fancies.

Nowhere, however, is the truth of it more clearly demonstrated than in primitive religions. Without a full appreciation of this fact, it is impossible to comprehend them; and for the lack of it, much that has been written upon them is worthless. The astonishing similarity, the absolute identities, which constantly present themselves in myths and cults separated by oceans and continents, have been construed as evidence of common descent or of distant transmission; whereas they are the proofs of a fundamental unity of the human mind and of its processes, “before which,” as a German writer says, “the differences in individual, national, or even racial divisions sink into insignificance.”[7] Wherever we turn, in time or in space, to the earliest and simplest religions of the world, we find them dealing with nearly the same objective facts in nearly the same subjective fashion, the differences being due to local and temporal causes.

This cardinal and basic truth of the unity of action of man’s intelligence, which is established just as much for the arts, the laws, and the institutions of men as for their religions, enables me to present to you broadly the faiths of primitive peoples as one coherent whole, the product of a common humanity, a mirror reflecting the deepest thoughts of the whole species on the mighty questions of religious life and hope, not the isolated or borrowed opinions of one or another tribe or people.

Of course, the recognition of this principle does not diminish the attention to be paid to the ethnic or local developments of culture and to the borrowing or transference of myths and rites. Wherever this can be shown to have occurred, it is an adequate explanation of identities; but in tribes geographically remote, the presumption is that such identities are due to the common element of humanity in the species.

Such similarities are by no means confined to the primitive forms of religion; but in them they are more obvious, and their causes are more apparent; so for that reason, a study of such primitive forms is peculiarly remunerative to one who would acquaint himself with the elements of religion in general. No one, in fact, can pretend to a thorough knowledge of the great historic religions of the world who has not traced their outlines back to the humble faiths of early tribes from which they emerged.

He must have recourse to them for like reasons that the biologist, who would learn the morphology of a mammal, betakes himself to the study of the cells and fibres of the simplest living organisms; for in their uncomplicated forms he can discover the basic activities which animate the highest structures.

I must define, however, more closely what ethnologists mean by “primitive peoples”; because the word is not used in the sense of “first” or “earliest,” as its derivation would indicate. We know little, if anything, about the earliest men, and their religion would make a short chapter. “Primitive” to the ethnologist means the earliest of a given race or tribe of whom he has trusty information. It has reference to a stage of culture, rather than to time. Peoples who are in a savage or barbarous condition, with slight knowledge of the arts, lax governments, and feeble institutions, are spoken of as “primitive,” although they may be our contemporaries. They are very far from being the earliest men or resembling them. Hundreds of generations have toiled to produce even their low stage of culture up through others, far inferior, of which we can form some idea by the aid of language and prehistoric archæology.

They are therefore not degenerates, ruins fallen from some former high estate, some condition of pristine nobility. That is an ancient error, now, I hope, exploded and dismissed from sane teaching. Even the rudest of savages is a creation of steady, long-continued advancement from the primeval man. We have the evidence of what he was, in his implements and weapons preserved in pre-glacial strata and in the mud-floors of the caves he inhabited.

These announce to us a law of progressive advancement for all races, over all the earth, on the same lines of progress, toward the same goals of culture, extremely slow at the outset, and unequal especially in later ages, but vindicating the unity of the species and the identity of its hopes and aims everywhere.

You will understand, therefore, that by “primitive peoples,” I mean savage or barbarous tribes, wherever they are or have been, and that I claim for them brotherhood with ourselves in all the traits that go to make up oneness of species. A few hundred years ago the ancestors of the English-speaking nations were as savage as the savagest, without temples to their gods, in perpetual and bloody war, untamed cannibals; add a few thousand years to the perspective, and man over the whole globe was in the same condition.

The savage state was the childhood of the race, and by some the mind of the savage has been likened to that of the child. But the resemblance is merely superficial. It rather resembles that of the uncultivated and ignorant adult among ourselves. The same inaccurate observation and illogical modes of thought characterise both. These depend on certain mental traits, which it is well to define, because they explain most of the absurdities of primitive religions.

The first is, that the idea is accepted as true, without the process of logical reasoning or inductive observation. In other words, what appears true to the individual is accepted by him as true, without further question. His dreams seem real to him; therefore they are real. What the tribe believes, he believes, no matter what his senses tell him.

When an Australian Black is on a journey and fears being overtaken by the night, he will place a lump of clay in the forks of a tree, believing that thus he can arrest the motion of the sun and prolong the day. It is not a religious act, but a piece of natural science current in the tribe, which no experience will refute in their minds.[8]

Just such a notion recurs among the Mandan Indians. Captain Clark observed near their villages upright poles fifteen or twenty feet long with bundles of female clothing tied to them. He asked what they signified, and one of the old men explained thus: “If you watch the sun closely, you will see that he stops for a short time just as he rises, and again at midday, and as he sets. The reason is that he rests a few moments to smoke in the lodges of three immortal women, and we offer them this clothing that they may be induced to say a kind word to him in our behalf. We were told by our ancestors not to forget this.”[9] The fact that the orb does not stop was of no consequence in the face of this tradition.

The second trait is the extreme nervous susceptibility of savages. It is much higher than ours, although the contrary is often taught. Their emotions or feelings control their reasoning powers, and direct their actions. Neurotic diseases, especially of a contagious character, are very frequent among them, and they are far more prone than ourselves to yield to impressions upon their sensory organs. The traveller Castren relates that a sudden blow on the outside of a tent of the Samoyeds will sometimes throw the occupants into spasms; and the missionary Livingstone draws a touching picture of young slaves dying of “a broken heart,” when they heard the song and music of the villagers and could not join in the revelry.[10]

These two traits, therefore, the acceptance of the idea as subjectively true, and the subordination of reason to the feelings, are the main features of the undeveloped mind. They are common in civilised conditions, but are universal in savagery.

The question has often been considered whether the mental powers of the savage are distinctly inferior. This has been answered by taking the children of savages when quite young and bringing them up in civilised surroundings. The verdict is unanimous that they display as much aptitude for the acquisition of knowledge, and as much respect for the precepts of morality, as the average English or German boy or girl; but with less originality or “initiative.”

I have been in close relations to several full-blood American Indians, who had been removed from an aboriginal environment and instructed in this manner; and I could not perceive that they were either in intellect or sympathies inferior to the usual type of the American gentleman. One of them notably had a refined sense of humour, as well as uncommon acuteness of observation.

The assertion, however, is frequently advanced that in their savage state they are of the earth earthy, that their whole time is taken up with the gratification of sensuous desires, and that they neither think nor care for speculations of a super-sensuous or spiritual character.

The investigation of this point is desirable in a study of their religions, for upon it depends the decision whether we can assign to their myths and rites a meaning deeper than that of deception, or passion, or frivolity.

To reach a decision, I take the most unfavourable example which can be suggested,—the Australian Blacks. Considering their number and the extent of their territory, they were, when discovered, the most degraded people on the globe. They had nothing which could be called a government, and some dialects have no word for chief. None of them could count the fingers on one hand, for none of the dialects had any words for numerals beyond three or four. Mr. Hale, the eminent ethnographer, who was among them in 1843, says that they evinced “an almost brutal stupidity,” “downright childishness and imbecility.”[11]

Their natural feelings and moral perceptions seem incredibly blunted. I can best illustrate this by narrating an incident which happened at a frontier station, one of many of the same character.

The white family employed a native girl named Mattie about fifteen years old. She had a baby, which one day disappeared. On inquiry she stated that her mother had said that she was too young to take care of a baby, and had therefore cooked and eaten it with some of her cronies. Mattie cried in telling this. Because her baby had been killed? Oh no! but because her mother had given her none of the tidbits, but only the bones to pick![12]

Yet even these seemingly hopeless brutes have an intricate system of kinship and marriage laws, the most rigid of any known. Marriage with sisters or first cousins is not only forbidden, “It is not conceived as possible.” The prohibitions about food are so absolute that the natives would perish of hunger rather than break them. Some of their religious ceremonies entail voluntary mutilations of the most dreadful description. Their mythology is extensive, and I shall have frequent occasion to quote it. And so far are they from an obtuse indifference to the future and the past, an accurate observer who lived among them says: “They wonder among themselves and talk at night about these things, and the past existence of their race, and how they came here.”[13]

Savage tribes are distinctly unlettered. They belong in a stage of culture where the art of writing, as we understand it, is unknown. They have no bibles, no sacred books, by which to teach their religions. What means have we, therefore, to learn their opinions about holy things?

The question is one which demands an answer, the more because I shall often refer to the religions of tribes long since extinct, and whose very names are forgotten. How do we dare to speak with confidence of what they thought about the gods?

We can do so, and it is one of the marvels of modern scientific research, quite as admirable as its more familiar and practical results.

Our sources of information regarding primitive peoples may be classed under four titles, Archæology, Language, Folk-lore, and Ethnographic descriptions.

By the first of these, archæology, we become acquainted with the objective remains of beliefs long since extinguished. The temples, idols, and altars of dead gods reveal to us the attributes assigned to them by their votaries and the influences they were believed to exert. We can interpret their symbols, and from rude carvings re-construct the story of their divine struggles. Especially, from ancient sepulchres and the modes of disposal of the dead which they reveal, can we discern what hopes vanished nations held of a life to come.

In this direction, we are powerfully aided by that close similarity of mental products in like stages of culture, to which I have referred, and shall often refer. By comparing a living tribe with one which ten thousand years ago was in a similar condition as shown by its relics, we can with the highest probability interpret the use and motives of the latter’s remains.

We are further assisted in such research by the critical analysis of the early forms of language, which is one of the achievements of modern linguistics. By establishing the identities of names, we can trace the diffusion of myths, and by tracing such names to their proper dialect and original meaning, we can locate geographically and psychologically the origin of given forms of religions. In fact, the value of linguistics to the study of religions cannot be overestimated. No one is competent to describe the sacred beliefs of a nation, its myths and adjurations, unless he has a sufficient knowledge of its tongue to ascertain the true sense of the terms employed in its liturgies.

But these so obvious applications are the least that language can furnish. Its impress on religions goes much deeper. It was well remarked by the Chevalier Bunsen that in primitive conditions the two poles of human life, around which all else centres, are language and religion, and that each conditions the other, that is, imparts to it special forms and limits.

For instance, those languages which have grammatic gender almost necessarily divide their deities according to sex[14]; those in which the passive voice is absent or feebly developed, will be led to associate with their deities higher conceptions of activity than where the passive is a favourite form: those which have no substantive verb cannot express God as pure being, but must associate with Him either position, action, or suffering.

In the speech of the Algonquin Indians, there is no grammatic distinction of sex; but there is broad discrimination between objects which are animate and those which are inanimate. When the Catholic missionaries brought to them the rosary, the natives at first spoke of it as inanimate; but as their reverence for it grew, it was transferred to the animate gender, and was thus on its way to a personification.[15]

The third source of information is that which is called folk-lore. Its field of research is to collect the relics and survivals of primitive modes of thought and expression, beliefs, customs, and notions, in the present conditions of culture. It is, therefore, especially useful in a study like the present, the more so on account of the extraordinary permanence and conservative character of religious sentiments and ceremonies. Among the peasantry of Europe, the paganism of the days of Julius Cæsar flourishes with scarcely abated vigour, though it may be under new names. “The primitive Aryan,” writes Professor Frazer,[16] “is not extinct; he is with us to-day.” And another English writer does not go too far when he says: “There is not a rite or ceremony yet practised and revered among us that is not the lineal descendant of barbaric thought and usage.”[17] It is this which gives to folk-lore its extremely instructive character for the student of early religion.

The fourth source of information is the description of native religions by travellers. You might expect this to be the most accurate and therefore valuable of all the sources; but it is just the reverse. Omitting the ordinary tourist and globe-trotter, who is not expected to know anything thoroughly, and never deceives the expectation, even painstaking observers, who have lived long with savage tribes, sometimes mastering their languages, are, for reasons I shall presently state, constantly at fault about the native religions. We must always take their narratives with hesitation, and weigh them against others by persons of a different nationality and education. Indeed, of all elements of native life, this of religion is the most liable to be misunderstood by the foreign visitor.

Bearing in mind these various sources of information, what tribes, about which we have sufficient knowledge, could fairly be considered as examples of primitive conditions?

Beginning with those remotest in time, I believe we know enough about the early Aryans to claim it for them. The acute researches of recent scholars, so admirably summed up in the work of Professor Schrader, have thrown a flood of light on the domestic, cultural, and religious condition of the pristine epoch of Aryan society from the side of language; while the tireless prosecution of prehistoric archæology in Europe has put us into possession of thousands of objects illustrating the religious arts and usages then in vogue. Classical mythology and ritual, as well as modern folk-lore, lend further efficient aid toward reconstructing the modes and expressions of their sacred thought.

A very ancient people, possibly of Aryan blood, but more likely, I believe, to have come from North Africa and to be of Libyan affinities, were the Etruscans. They were extremely religious, and their theological opinions deeply coloured the worship of the Romans. We know the general outlines of their doctrine of the gods, and its simplicity and grandeur bespeak our admiration. I shall draw from this venerable “Etruscan discipline” from time to time for illustrations.

Quite as much may be said of the diligence of the explorers and scholars in the field of Semitic antiquity. We can without room for doubt trace the stream of Semitic religious thought through the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets to a possibly non-Semitic source among the Accadian or Sumerian population, which ten thousand years ago had already begun to develop an artistic and agricultural life on the Babylonian plain. Numerous students have restored the outlines and motives of this ancient faith, whose forms and doctrines bind and shape our lives in America to-day.

Of the possibly still older culture of Egypt, so much cannot be said. The original creeds of its religion have been less successfully divined. Like its early inscriptions, they were erased and overlaid so often by the caprice or prejudice of successive dynasties, and so profoundly modified by foreign influences, that with our present knowledge they are no longer legible.[18]

Turning to the religions which have preserved their primitive forms to modern times, the first place should be conceded to those of America. Up to four hundred years ago, all of them, throughout the continent, had developed from an unknown antiquity untouched by the teachings of Asian or European instructors; for no really sane scholar nowadays believes either that St. Thomas preached Christianity in the New World in the first century, or that Buddhist monks in the seventh or any other century carried their tenets into Mexico and Guatemala.

Many of the American tribes, moreover, lived in the rudest stages of social life, ignorant of agriculture, without fixed abodes, naked or nearly so, in constant bloody strife, destitute even of tribal government. Here, if anywhere, we should find the religious sentiment, if it exists at all, in its simplest elements.

On the other hand, the first European explorers found in Peru, Yucatan, and Mexico numerous tribes in almost a civilised condition, builders of huge edifices of carved stones, cultivating the soil, and acquainted with a partly phonetic system of writing. Their mythology was ample and their ritual elaborate, so that it could scarcely be called primitive in appearance; but in all these instances, myth and ritual were so obviously identical in character with those of the vagrant tribes elsewhere, that we shall make no mistake in classifying them together.

Equally isolated and surely as rude as the rudest were the native Australians, the wavy-haired, bearded, black people who sparsely inhabited that huge island, two thousand miles wide by two thousand five hundred miles long. Isolated by arid stretches of desert, the struggle for life was incessant, and there is little wonder that we find them in an incredibly debased condition associated with unending war and cannibalism. For these very reasons, their religious notions deserve our closest scrutiny.

The vast island-world of Polynesia was peopled by related tribes, usually of limited cultivation, but with a rich mythology, of which we have many strange and beautiful fragments. They are primitive in form and expression, with singular differences as well as analogies to the beliefs of continental tribes.

Africa, with its countless dusky hordes, offers a less promising field to the student of the earliest phases of religion than we might expect. The conditions of the arts, and the ruins of foreign-built cities unite with the classic historians to show that in remote ages the influence of distant nations, from Egypt, Arabia, and India, on the typical black population was profound and far-reaching. The white Hamites of the north crossed the Sahara and extended their arms far into the Soudan; while on the east coast, the black Hamites and Arabic Ethiopians drove the aborigines far to the South. Later, Arabic influences penetrated into the interior, dissolving the older faiths or discolouring them. Thus, little of the independent development of religious thought remains in Africa. Its most primitive features are probably best preserved in the extreme South, among the Hottentots, Bushmen, and Zulus.

On the Asian continent, some of the Sibiric tribes in the north and some of those of Dravidian descent in the mountains of Hindoostan preserved to a late day their primitive traits; while the fading remnants of the Veddahs in Ceylon and the black islanders of Melanesia still continue in the simple faiths of their ancestors.

These hints will indicate the chief sources from which I shall draw the material to illustrate the rudimentary stages of religious thought and act, the embryonic period, as it were, of those emotions and beliefs which to us, in riper forms, are so dear and so holy.

Here I must define what is meant in these lectures by “religions.” Most people confine that term to the historic faiths and cults, calling others “superstitions” and “paganisms.” Some will not acknowledge that there is any religion whatever except their own; all other beliefs are heresies, apostasies, or heathenisms. Even such an intelligent writer as Sir John Lubbock expressed doubts in one of his works whether he ought to apply the word “religions” to the worship tendered their deities by savages.

On the other hand, a Protestant will freely denounce the practices of the Roman Church as “superstitions,” and will claim that they are degenerations of religion; while among Protestants, the Quaker looks upon all external rites as equally “superstitious.”

No such distinctions can be recognised in ethnology. The principle at the basis of all religions and all superstitions is the same, as I shall show in the next lecture, and the grossest rites of barbarism deserve the name of “religion” just as much as the refined ceremonies of Christian churches. The aims of the worshipper may be selfish and sensuous, there may be an entire absence of ethical intention, his rites may be empty formalities and his creed immoral, but this will be his religion all the same, and we should not apply to it any other name.[19]

There is no one belief or set of beliefs which constitutes a religion. We are apt to suppose that every creed must teach a belief in a god or gods, in an immortal soul, and in a divine government of the world. The Parliament of Religions, which lately met at Chicago, announced, in its preliminary call, these elements as essential to the idea of religion.

No mistake could be greater. The religion which to-day counts the largest number of adherents, Buddhism, rejects every one of these items.[20] The Jewish doctrine of the Old Testament, the Roman religion of the time of Julius Cæsar, and many others, have not admitted the existence of a soul, or the continuance of the individual life after death.[21] Some believe in souls, but not in gods; while a divine government is a thought rarely present in savage minds. They do not, as a rule, recognise any such principle as that of good and evil, or any doctrine of rewards and punishment hereafter for conduct in the present life.

There is, in fact, not any one item in any creed which is accepted by all religions; yet a common source, a common end in view, and the closest analogy of means to that end, bind all in one, representing an indefeasible element of human nature, the lowest containing the potentiality of the highest, the highest being but the necessary evolution of the lowest. The same promptings which led the earliest of men to frame their crude ideas about the super-sensuous around them have nourished and developed religions ever since, and keep them alive to-day. Temples may crumble and creeds decay, but the spirit remains the same.

This inherent unity of all religious feeling and expression was long ago perceived by St. Augustine. In a well-known passage of his Retractations he makes the striking remark: “Res ipsa, quæ nunc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis humani”; “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and in fact was with the human race from the beginning.”

This is, essentially, the maxim of modern ethnology. The religiosity of man is a part of his psychical being. In the nature and laws of the human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions, and passions, lie the well-springs of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen. To these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors, falsehoods, bigotry, or cruelty have stained man’s creeds and cults: to them we must credit whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have hallowed and glorified his long search for the perfect and the eternal.

If this opinion of the place of religion in ethnology is correct, we should not expect to find any considerable number of men, in the present epoch of the race’s development, devoid of some form of worship and belief.

The fact is that there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude, known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of religion, under some form.

The contrary of this has been asserted by various modern writers of weight, for example by Herbert Spencer and Sir John Lubbock, not from their own observation, for neither ever saw a savage tribe, but from the reports of travellers and missionaries.

I speak advisedly when I say that every assertion to this effect when tested by careful examination has proved erroneous.[22]

What led to such a mistaken opinion is easily seen. The missionaries would not recognise as religion the beliefs which were so different from and inferior to their own. The god of the heathens was to them no god whatever. When they heard stories of ghosts, magic, and charms, they spurned these as old wives’ fables, and confidently proclaimed that the tribe had no religion. Thus it was with those who first worked in South Africa. They returned and proclaimed that atheism was “endemic” among the tribes of that region. Later observers, acquainting themselves with the languages of the Blacks, found an ample mythology and an extensive ritual of worship.[23]

Another example may be quoted from a recent description of the Motu tribe of New Guinea. The writer, a missionary, denies that they have any religion whatever; but immediately proceeds to describe their numerous “superstitious” rites, their belief in spirits, their ceremonial law, etc.![24]

Another and potent cause of error was the unwillingness of the natives to speak to foreigners of the sacred mysteries. This is not peculiar to them, but obtains everywhere. In the polite society of our own cities, it is held to be an infraction of etiquette to question a person about his religious opinions and practices. Greater repugnance would be felt were it known that the questioner could have no sympathy with one’s opinions, and would probably hold them up to derision and contempt.

Even a stronger deterrent motive closes the mouth of most savages giving such information. It is tabu, prohibited under severe penalties, to impart it to any stranger, or even to another tribesman. The tendency to secrecy, to the esoteric, belongs to all religions, and especially to those in which the emotions are predominant, as is the case with primitive cults.

Even with a willing narrator, it is impossible to acquire a true understanding of a religion without a knowledge of the language in which its myths and precepts are couched. Ordinary interpreters are worse than useless. Captain Bourke tells us that time and again he was assured by Mexican interpreters who had lived for years among the Apaches that this tribe had no religion and no sacred ceremonies.

“These interpreters,” he adds, “had no intention to deceive; they were simply unable to disengage themselves from their own prejudices; they could not credit the existence of any such thing as religion save and except that taught them at their mother’s knees.”[25] If these Spanish-Mexicans, who had passed half their lives among the natives, denied them religion, what can we expect the ordinary traveller to learn in a few weeks’ visit?

Religion, therefore, is and has been, so far as history informs us, universal in the human race. Can we go farther back in time than history leads us, and say that it has ever been an element of humanity?

The resources at our command to answer this inquiry lie in prehistoric archæology and linguistics.

Beyond historic ages, and beyond those referred to by vague tradition, which we may call semi-historic, lies the epoch of culture called from its chief industry the Stone Age, divided into the more recent or “neolithic” period, and the older or “palæolithic” period.

Concerning the former, there can be no doubt whatever that religion exercised a tremendous influence on men’s minds. We have numberless sepulchres of peoples then living, mighty mounds and massive temples, such as Stonehenge and Karnac; we have them by the tens of thousands, over vast areas, remaining as indubitable proofs that the chief market of the time of those early sons of the soil was to worship the gods and prepare for death. We have their idols, amulets, and mystic symbols, their altars and their talismans, so as to leave no doubt of their deep devotion. No archæologist questions this.

When we come to palæolithic man, however, especially to those ancient tribes who lived in Western Europe when the great continental glacier chilled the air of Southern France to an arctic frigidity, or still earlier, in that pre-glacial summer when the hippopotamus found a congenial home in the river Thames, we are not so sure. Among the many thousands of artificially shaped stone and bone objects which have been collected from that horizon, there is not one which we can positively identify as of religious purport, as a charm, amulet, fetish, or idol. The rare instances in which the bones of the men of that age have been preserved reveal no positive signs of funerary rites.

For these reasons some able archæologists, such as Professor G. de Mortillet, have maintained that man, as he then was, had not yet developed his religious faculties. The evidence for this, is, indeed, negative, and fresh discoveries may refute it, but the present probability is that in the infancy of the race there was at least no objective expression of religious feeling.[26]

This appears supported by testimony from another quarter. When we can trace back the sacred words of a language to their original roots, we find that these roots do not have religious associations, but refer to concrete and sensuous images. There must have been a time, therefore, when those who spoke that original dialect employed these words without any religious meaning attached to them, and therefore had no religious ideas expressed in their language, and presumably none defined in their minds.

I am not sure, however, that this argument is so valid as some writers claim. Those early men may have had other religious terms, now lost; and the current belief among linguists that all radicals had at first concrete meanings is one I seriously doubt. Mental processes and feelings are just as real as actions, and in the aboriginal tongues of America are expressed by radicals as distinct and as ancient as any for sensuous perception.

There must, however, have been a time in the progress of organic forms from some lower to that highest mammal, Man, when he did not have a religious consciousness; for it is doubtful if even the slightest traces of it can be discerned in the inferior animals.

Mr. Darwin, indeed, put in a plea that his favourite dog manifested the same psychical traits which lead savages to believe in gods or spiritual agencies[27]; and lately Professor Pinsero, of Palermo, has argued that the anthropoid apes cultivate a worship of serpents, even burying them with considerable ceremony, and placing in their tombs a provision of insects for their consumption in their future life![28]

But these scientific speculations have not found general acceptance, and even Professor Pinsero himself, while conceding religion to the ape, denies it to prehistoric man of the earlier epochs.

We may conclude, therefore, that the development of the religious side of man’s nature began at a very early period in his history as a species, though probably it was extremely vague or practically absent in his first stadia; and that it is something distinctly human, and not shared in any definite form by even the best developed of the lower animals.

It is the only trait in which he is qualitatively separated from them. They, too, communicate knowledge by sounds; they have governments and arts; but never do we see anywhere among them the notion of the Divine. This was the spark of Promethean fire which has guided man along the darksome and devious ways of his earthly pilgrimage to the supremacy he now enjoys.

The Greek fable tells us of the shepherd lad Endymion, who fed his sheep on Mt. Latmus, and dreamed of no higher ambition, until in his sleep the goddess Selene descended from heaven and embraced him. Inspired by her divine touch, he waked to noble aspirations, and went forth to become monarch of Elis and father of a line of kings.

So the human mind groped for dateless ages amid brutish toils and pleasures, unconscious of grander aims; until the thought of God, rising to consciousness within the soul, whispered to it of endless progress and divine ideals, in quest of which it has sought and will ever continue seeking, with tireless endeavour and constantly increasing reward.

This question settled, another arises. The religions thus found everywhere among the rudest tribes, did they take root and exert a deep influence on the individual and society, or were they superficially felt, and of slight moment in practical life?

In reference to this I can scarcely be too positive. No opinion can be more erroneous than the one sometimes advanced that savages are indifferent to their faiths. On the contrary, the rule, with very few exceptions, is that religion absorbs nearly the whole life of a man under primitive conditions. From birth to death, but especially during adult years, his daily actions are governed by ceremonial laws of the severest, often the most irksome and painful characters. He has no independent action or code of conduct, and is a very slave to the conditions which such laws create.

This is especially visible in the world-wide customs of totemic divisions and the tabu, or religious prohibitions. These govern his food and drink, his marriage and social relations, the disposition of property, and the choice of his wives. An infraction of them is out of the question. It means exile or death. The notions of tolerance, freedom of conscience, higher law, are non-existent in primitive communities, except under certain personal conditions which I shall mention in a later lecture.

As has been tersely said by Professor Granger, “Religion in the ancient world comprised every social function”; and the identity of its rules with those of common life is correctly put by Professor Thiele in these words: “The idea of a separation between Church and State is utterly foreign to all the religions of antiquity.”[29]

What was true in those ancient days is equally so in this age among savage peoples. Let us take as an example the Dyaks of Borneo. A recent observer describes them as utter slaves to their “superstitions,” that is, to their religion.[30] “When they lay out their fields, gather the harvest, go hunting or fishing, contract a marriage, start on an expedition, propose a commercial journey, or anything of importance, they always consult the gods, offer sacrifices, celebrate feasts, study the omens, obtain talismans, and so on, often thus losing the best opportunity for the business itself.”

This is equally the case with most savage tribes. Mr. J. Walter Fewkes informed me that it was a severe moral shock to the Pueblo Indians to see the white settlers plant corn without any religious ceremony; and a much greater one to perceive that the corn grew, flourished, and bore abundant crops! The result did more to shatter their simple faith than a dozen missionary crusades.

To the simple mind of the primitive man, as to the Mohammedan to-day, there is no such thing as an intermediate law, directing phenomena, and capable of expression in set terms. To him, every event of nature and of life is an immediate manifestation of the power of God, eine Kraftprobe Gottes.[31]

Religion, however, does not begin from any external pressure, no matter how strong this may be. If it has any vitality, if it is anything more than the barrenest ceremonial, it must start within, from the soul itself. Thus it did in primordial ages in all tribes of men.

Therefore in studying its origin and pursuing its development we must commence with its fonts and springs in the mind of man, its psychic sources. These understood, we can proceed to its three chief expressions, in Words, in Objects, and in Rites.