The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3)

S >> Sir James George Frazer >> The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3)

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[Sidenote: The need is all the more urgent because savages are rapidly
disappearing or being transformed.]

That is why the study of existing savages at the present day engrosses
so much of the attention of civilised peoples. We see that if we are to
comprehend not only our past history but our present condition, with all
its many intricate and perplexing problems, we must begin at the
beginning by attempting to discover the mental state of our savage
forefathers, who bequeathed to us so much of the faiths, the laws, and
the institutions which we still cherish; and more and more men are
coming to perceive that the only way open to us of doing this
effectually is to study the mental state of savages who to this day
occupy a state of culture analogous to that of our rude progenitors.
Through contact with civilisation these savages are now rapidly
disappearing, or at least losing the old habits and ideas which render
them a document of priceless historical value for us. Hence we have
every motive for prosecuting the study of savagery with ardour and
diligence before it is too late, before the record is gone for ever. We
are like an heir whose title-deeds must be scrutinised before he can
take possession of the inheritance, but who finds the handwriting of the
deeds so fading and evanescent that it threatens to disappear entirely
before he can read the document to the end. With what keen attention,
what eager haste, would he not scan the fast-vanishing characters? With
the like attention and the like haste civilised men are now applying
themselves to the investigation of the fast-vanishing savages.

[Sidenote: Savage religion is to be the subject of these lectures.]

Thus if we are to trace historically man's conception of God to its
origin, it is desirable, or rather essential, that we should begin by
studying the most primitive ideas on the subject which are accessible to
us, and the most primitive ideas are unquestionably those of the lowest
savages. Accordingly in these lectures I propose to deal with a
particular side or aspect of savage religion. I shall not trench on the
sphere of the higher religions, not only because my knowledge of them is
for the most part very slight, but also because I believe that a
searching study of the higher and more complex religions should be
postponed till we have acquired an accurate knowledge of the lower and
simpler. For a similar reason the study of inorganic chemistry naturally
precedes the study of organic chemistry, because inorganic compounds are
much simpler and therefore more easily analysed and investigated than
organic compounds. So with the chemistry of the mind; we should analyse
the comparatively simple phenomena of savage thought into its
constituent elements before we attempt to perform a similar operation on
the vastly more complex phenomena of civilised beliefs.

[Sidenote: But only a part of savage religion will be dealt with.]

But while I shall confine myself rigidly to the field of savage
religion, I shall not attempt to present you with a complete survey even
of that restricted area, and that for more reasons than one. In the
first place the theme, even with this great limitation, is far too large
to be adequately set forth in the time at my disposal; the sketch--for
it could be no more than a sketch--would be necessarily superficial and
probably misleading. In the second place, even a sketch of primitive
religion in general ought to presuppose in the sketcher a fairly
complete knowledge of the whole subject, so that all the parts may
appear, not indeed in detail, but in their proper relative proportions.
Now though I have given altogether a good deal of time to the study of
primitive religion, I am far from having studied it in all its branches,
and I could not trust myself to give an accurate general account of it
even in outline; were I to attempt such a thing I should almost
certainly fall, through sheer ignorance or inadvertence, into the
mistake of exaggerating some features, unduly diminishing others, and
omitting certain essential features altogether. Hence it seems to me
better not to commit myself to so ambitious an enterprise but to confine
myself in my lectures, as I have always done in my writings, to a
comparatively minute investigation of certain special aspects or forms
of primitive religion rather than attempt to embrace in a general view
the whole of that large subject. Such a relatively detailed study of a
single compartment may be less attractive and more tedious than a
bird's-eye view of a wider area; but in the end it may perhaps prove a
more solid contribution to knowledge.

[Sidenote: Introductory observations. The question of a supernatural
revelation excluded.]

But before I come to details I wish to make a few general introductory
remarks, and in particular to define some of the terms which I shall
have occasion to use in the lectures. I have defined natural theology as
that reasoned knowledge of a God or gods which man may be supposed,
whether rightly or wrongly, capable of attaining to by the exercise of
his natural faculties alone. Whether there ever has been or can be a
special miraculous revelation of God to man through channels different
from those through which all other human knowledge is derived, is a
question which does not concern us in these lectures; indeed it is
expressly excluded from their scope by the will of the founder, who
directed the lecturers to treat the subject "as a strictly natural
science," "without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special
exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation." Accordingly, in
compliance with these directions, I dismiss at the outset the question
of a revelation, and shall limit myself strictly to natural theology in
the sense in which I have defined it.

[Sidenote: Theology and religion, how related to each other.]

I have called natural theology a reasoned knowledge of a God or gods to
distinguish it from that simple and comparatively, though I believe
never absolutely, unreasoning faith in God which suffices for the
practice of religion. For theology is at once more and less than
religion: if on the one hand it includes a more complete acquaintance
with the grounds of religious belief than is essential to religion, on
the other hand it excludes the observance of those practical duties
which are indispensable to any religion worthy of the name. In short,
whereas theology is purely theoretical, religion is both theoretical and
practical, though the theoretical part of it need not be so highly
developed as in theology. But while the subject of the lectures is,
strictly speaking, natural theology rather than natural religion, I
think it would be not only difficult but undesirable to confine our
attention to the purely theological or theoretical part of natural
religion: in all religions, and not least in the undeveloped savage
religions with which we shall deal, theory and practice fuse with and
interact on each other too closely to be forcibly disjoined and handled
apart. Hence throughout the lectures I shall not scruple to refer
constantly to religious practice as well as to religious theory, without
feeling that thereby I am transgressing the proper limits of my subject.

[Sidenote: The term God defined.]

As theology is not only by definition but by etymology a reasoned
knowledge or theory of a God or gods, it becomes desirable, before we
proceed further, to define the sense in which I understand and shall
employ the word God. That sense is neither novel nor abstruse; it is
simply the sense which I believe the generality of mankind attach to the
term. By a God I understand a superhuman and supernatural being, of a
spiritual and personal nature, who controls the world or some part of it
on the whole for good, and who is endowed with intellectual faculties,
moral feelings, and active powers, which we can only conceive on the
analogy of human faculties, feelings, and activities, though we are
bound to suppose that in the divine nature they exist in higher degrees,
perhaps in infinitely higher degrees, than the corresponding faculties,
feelings, and activities of man. In short, by a God I mean a beneficent
supernatural spirit, the ruler of the world or of some part of it, who
resembles man in nature though he excels him in knowledge, goodness, and
power. This is, I think, the sense in which the ordinary man speaks of a
God, and I believe that he is right in so doing. I am aware that it has
been not unusual, especially perhaps of late years, to apply the name of
God to very different conceptions, to empty it of all implication of
personality, and to reduce it to signifying something very large and
very vague, such as the Infinite or the Absolute (whatever these hard
words may signify), the great First Cause, the Universal Substance, "the
stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their
being,"[1] and so forth. Now without expressing any opinion as to the
truth or falsehood of the views implied by such applications of the name
of God, I cannot but regard them all as illegitimate extensions of the
term, in short as an abuse of language, and I venture to protest against
it in the interest not only of verbal accuracy but of clear thinking,
because it is apt to conceal from ourselves and others a real and very
important change of thought: in particular it may lead many to imagine
that the persons who use the name of God in one or other of these
extended senses retain certain theological opinions which they may in
fact have long abandoned. Thus the misuse of the name of God may
resemble the stratagem in war of putting up dummies to make an enemy
imagine that a fort is still held after it has been evacuated by the
garrison. I am far from alleging or insinuating that the illegitimate
extension of the divine name is deliberately employed by theologians or
others for the purpose of masking a change of front; but that it may
have that effect seems at least possible. And as we cannot use words in
wrong senses without running a serious risk of deceiving ourselves as
well as others, it appears better on all accounts to adhere strictly to
the common meaning of the name of God as signifying a powerful
supernatural and on the whole beneficent spirit, akin in nature to man;
and if any of us have ceased to believe in such a being we should
refrain from applying the old word to the new faith, and should find
some other and more appropriate term to express our meaning. At all
events, speaking for myself, I intend to use the name of God
consistently in the familiar sense, and I would beg my hearers to bear
this steadily in mind.

[Sidenote: Monotheism and polytheism.]

You will have observed that I have spoken of natural theology as a
reasoned knowledge of a God or gods. There is indeed nothing in the
definition of God which I have adopted to imply that he is unique, in
other words, that there is only one God rather than several or many
gods. It is true that modern European thinkers, bred in a monotheistic
religion, commonly overlook polytheism as a crude theory unworthy the
serious attention of philosophers; in short, the champions and the
assailants of religion in Europe alike for the most part tacitly assume
that there is either one God or none. Yet some highly civilised nations
of antiquity and of modern times, such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks,
and Romans, and the modern Chinese and Hindoos, have accepted the
polytheistic explanation of the world, and as no reasonable man will
deny the philosophical subtlety of the Greeks and the Hindoos, to say
nothing of the rest, a theory of the universe which has commended itself
to them deserves perhaps more consideration than it has commonly
received from Western philosophers; certainly it cannot be ignored in an
historical enquiry into the origin of religion.

[Sidenote: A natural knowledge of God can only be acquired by
experience.]

If there is such a thing as natural theology, that is, a knowledge of a
God or gods acquired by our natural faculties alone without the aid of a
special revelation, it follows that it must be obtained by one or other
of the methods by which all our natural knowledge is conveyed to us.
Roughly speaking, these methods are two in number, namely, intuition and
experience. Now if we ask ourselves, Do we know God intuitively in the
same sense in which we know intuitively our own sensations and the
simplest truths of mathematics, I think most men will acknowledge that
they do not. It is true that according to Berkeley the world exists only
as it is perceived, and that our perceptions of it are produced by the
immediate action of God on our minds, so that everything we perceive
might be described, if not as an idea in the mind of the deity, at least
as a direct emanation from him. On this theory we might in a sense be
said to have an immediate knowledge of God. But Berkeley's theory has
found little acceptance, so far as I know, even among philosophers; and
even if we regarded it as true, we should still have to admit that the
knowledge of God implied by it is inferential rather than intuitive in
the strict sense of the word: we infer God to be the cause of our
perceptions rather than identify him with the perceptions themselves. On
the whole, then, I conclude that man, or at all events the ordinary man,
has, properly speaking, no immediate or intuitive knowledge of God, and
that, if he obtains, without the aid of revelation, any knowledge of him
at all, it can only be through the other natural channel of knowledge,
that is, through experience.

[Sidenote: The nature of experience.]

In experience, as distinct from intuition, we reach our conclusions not
directly through simple contemplation of the particular sensations,
emotions, or ideas of which we are at the moment conscious, but
indirectly by calling up before the imagination and comparing with each
other our memories of a variety of sensations, emotions, or ideas of
which we have been conscious in the past, and by selecting or
abstracting from the mental images so compared the points in which they
resemble each other. The points of resemblance thus selected or
abstracted from a number of particulars compose what we call an abstract
or general idea, and from a comparison of such abstract or general ideas
with each other we arrive at general conclusions, which define the
relations of the ideas to each other. Experience in general consists in
the whole body of conclusions thus deduced from a comparison of all the
particular sensations, emotions, and ideas which make up the conscious
life of the individual. Hence in order to constitute experience the mind
has to perform a more or less complex series of operations, which are
commonly referred to certain mental faculties, such as memory,
imagination, and judgment. This analysis of experience does not pretend
to be philosophically complete or exact; but perhaps it is sufficiently
accurate for the purpose of these lectures, the scope of which is not
philosophical but historical.

[Sidenote: Two kinds of experience, the experience of our own mind and
the experience of an external world.]

Now experience in the widest sense of the word may be conveniently
distinguished into two sorts, the experience of our own mind and the
experience of an external world. The distinction is indeed, like the
others with which I am dealing at present, rather practically useful
than theoretically sound; certainly it would not be granted by all
philosophers, for many of them have held that we neither have nor with
our present faculties can possibly attain to any immediate knowledge or
perception of an external world, we merely infer its existence from our
own sensations, which are as strictly a part of our mind as the ideas
and emotions of our waking life or the visions of sleep. According to
them, the existence of matter or of an external world is, so far as we
are concerned, merely an hypothesis devised to explain the order of our
sensations; it never has been perceived by any man, woman, or child who
ever lived on earth; we have and can have no immediate knowledge or
perception of anything but the states and operations of our own mind. On
this theory what we call the world, with all its supposed infinitudes of
space and time, its systems of suns and planets, its seemingly endless
forms of inorganic matter and organic life, shrivels up, on a close
inspection, into a fleeting, a momentary figment of thought. It is like
one of those glass baubles, iridescent with a thousand varied and
delicate hues, which a single touch suffices to shatter into dust. The
philosopher, like the sorcerer, has but to wave his magic wand,

"And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

[Sidenote: The distinction rather popular and convenient than
philosophically strict.]

It would be beyond my province, even if it were within my power, to
discuss these airy speculations, and thereby to descend into the arena
where for ages subtle dialecticians have battled with each other over
the reality or unreality of an external world. For my purpose it
suffices to adopt the popular and convenient distinction of mind and
matter and hence to divide experience into two sorts, an inward
experience of the acts and states of our own minds, and an outward
experience of the acts and states of that physical universe by which we
seem to be surrounded.

[Sidenote: The knowledge or conception of God has been attained both by
inward and by outward experience.]

Now if a natural knowledge of God is only possible by means of
experience, in other words, by a process of reasoning based on
observation, it will follow that such a knowledge may conceivably be
acquired either by the way of inward or of outward experience; in other
words, it may be attained either by reflecting on the processes of our
own minds or by observing the processes of external nature. In point of
fact, if we survey the history of thought, mankind appears to have
arrived at a knowledge, or at all events at a conception, of deity by
both these roads. Let me say a few words as to the two roads which lead,
or seem to lead, man to God.

[Sidenote: The conception of God is attained by inward experience, that
is, by the observation of certain remarkable thoughts and feelings which
are attributed to the inspiration of a deity. Practical dangers of the
theory of inspiration.]

In the first place, then, men in many lands and many ages have
experienced certain extraordinary emotions and entertained certain
extraordinary ideas, which, unable to account for them by reference to
the ordinary forms of experience, they have set down to the direct
action of a powerful spirit or deity working on their minds and even
entering into and taking possession of their bodies; and in this excited
state--for violent excitement is characteristic of these
manifestations--the patient believes himself to be possessed of
supernatural knowledge and supernatural power. This real or supposed
mode of apprehending a divine spirit and entering into communion with
it, is commonly and appropriately called inspiration. The phenomenon is
familiar to us from the example of the Hebrew nation, who believed that
their prophets were thus inspired by the deity, and that their sacred
books were regularly composed under the divine afflatus. The belief is
by no means singular, indeed it appears to be world-wide; for it would
be hard to point to any race of men among whom instances of such
inspiration have not been reported; and the more ignorant and savage the
race the more numerous, to judge by the reports, are the cases of
inspiration. Volumes might be filled with examples, but through the
spread of information as to the lower races in recent years the topic
has become so familiar that I need not stop to illustrate it by
instances. I will merely say that among savages the theory of
inspiration or possession is commonly invoked to explain all abnormal
mental states, particularly insanity or conditions of mind bordering on
it, so that persons more or less crazed in their wits, and particularly
hysterical or epileptic patients, are for that very reason thought to be
peculiarly favoured by the spirits and are therefore consulted as
oracles, their wild and whirling words passing for the revelations of a
higher power, whether a god or a ghost, who considerately screens his
too dazzling light under a thick veil of dark sayings and mysterious
ejaculations.[2] I need hardly point out the very serious dangers which
menace any society where such theories are commonly held and acted upon.
If the decisions of a whole community in matters of the gravest
importance are left to turn on the wayward fancies, the whims and
vagaries of the insane or the semi-insane, what are likely to be the
consequences to the commonwealth? What, for example, can be expected to
result from a war entered upon at such dictation and waged under such
auspices? Are cattle-breeding, agriculture, commerce, all the arts of
life on which a people depend for their subsistence, likely to thrive
when they are directed by the ravings of epilepsy or the drivellings of
hysteria? Defeat in battle, conquest by enemies, death by famine and
widespread disease, these and a thousand other lesser evils threaten the
blind people who commit themselves to such blind guides. The history of
savage and barbarous tribes, could we follow it throughout, might
furnish us with a thousand warning instances of the fatal effects of
carrying out this crude theory of inspiration to its logical
conclusions; and if we hear less than might be expected of such
instances, it is probably because the tribes who consistently acted up
to their beliefs have thereby wiped themselves out of existence: they
have perished the victims of their folly and left no record behind. I
believe that historians have not yet reckoned sufficiently with the
disastrous influence which this worship of insanity,--for it is often
nothing less--has exercised on the fortunes of peoples and on the
development or decay of their institutions.

[Sidenote: The belief in inspiration leads to the worship of living men
as gods. Outward experience as a source of the idea of God.]

To a certain extent, however, the evil has provided its own remedy. For
men of strong heads and ambitious temper, perceiving the exorbitant
power which a belief in inspiration places in the hands of the
feeble-minded, have often feigned to be similarly afflicted, and trading
on their reputation for imbecility, or rather inspiration, have acquired
an authority over their fellows which, though they have often abused it
for vulgar ends, they have sometimes exerted for good, as for example by
giving sound advice in matters of public concern, applying salutary
remedies to the sick, and detecting and punishing crime, whereby they
have helped to preserve the commonwealth, to alleviate suffering, and to
cement that respect for law and order which is essential to the
stability of society, and without which any community must fall to
pieces like a house of cards. These great services have been rendered to
the cause of civilisation and progress by the class of men who in
primitive society are variously known as medicine-men, magicians,
sorcerers, diviners, soothsayers, and so forth. Sometimes the respect
which they have gained by the exercise of their profession has won for
them political as well as spiritual or ghostly authority; in short, from
being simple medicine-men or sorcerers they have grown into chiefs and
kings. When such men, seated on the throne of state, retain their old
reputation for being the vehicles of a divine spirit, they may be
worshipped in the character of gods as well as revered in the capacity
of kings; and thus exerting a two-fold sway over the minds of men they
possess a most potent instrument for elevating or depressing the
fortunes of their worshippers and subjects. In this way the old savage
notion of inspiration or possession gradually develops into the doctrine
of the divinity of kings, which after a long period of florescence
dwindles away into the modest theory that kings reign by divine right, a
theory familiar to our ancestors not long ago, and perhaps not wholly
obsolete among us even now. However, inspired men need not always
blossom out into divine kings; they may, and often do, remain in the
chrysalis state of simple deities revered by their simple worshippers,
their brows encircled indeed with a halo of divinity but not weighted
with the more solid substance of a kingly crown. Thus certain
extraordinary mental states, which those who experience and those who
witness them cannot account for in any other way, are often explained by
the supposed interposition of a spirit or deity. This, therefore, is one
of the two forms of experience by which men attain, or imagine that they
attain, to a knowledge of God and a communion with him. It is what I
have called the road of inward experience. Let us now glance at the
other form of experience which leads, or seems to lead, to the same
goal. It is what I have called the road of outward experience.