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: Tendency of the mind to search for causes, and the necessity
for their discovery.]

When we contemplate the seemingly infinite variety, the endless
succession, of events that pass under our observation in what we call
the external world, we are led by an irresistible tendency to trace what
we call a causal connexion between them. The tendency to discover the
causes of things appears indeed to be innate in the constitution of our
minds and indispensable to our continued existence. It is the link that
arrests and colligates into convenient bundles the mass of particulars
drifting pell-mell past on the stream of sensation; it is the cement
that binds into an edifice seemingly of adamant the loose sand of
isolated perceptions. Deprived of the knowledge which this tendency
procures for us we should be powerless to foresee the succession of
phenomena and so to adapt ourselves to it. We should be bewildered by
the apparent disorder and confusion of everything, we should toss on a
sea without a rudder, we should wander in an endless maze without a
clue, and finding no way out of it, or, in plain words, unable to avoid
a single one of the dangers which menace us at every turn, we should
inevitably perish. Accordingly the propensity to search for causes is
characteristic of man in all ages and at all levels of culture, though
without doubt it is far more highly developed in civilised than in
savage communities. Among savages it is more or less unconscious and
instinctive; among civilised men it is deliberately cultivated and
rewarded at least by the applause of their fellows, by the dignity, if
not by the more solid recompenses, of learning. Indeed as civilisation
progresses the enquiry into causes tends to absorb more and more of the
highest intellectual energies of a people; and an ever greater number of
men, renouncing the bustle, the pleasures, and the ambitions of an
active life, devote themselves exclusively to the pursuit of abstract
truth; they set themselves to discover the causes of things, to trace
the regularity and order that may be supposed to underlie the seemingly
irregular, confused, and arbitrary sequence of phenomena. Unquestionably
the progress of civilisation owes much to the sustained efforts of such
men, and if of late years and within our own memory the pace of progress
has sensibly quickened, we shall perhaps not err in supposing that some
part at least of the acceleration may be accounted for by an increase in
the number of lifelong students.

[Sidenote: The idea of cause is simply that of invariable sequence
suggested by the observation of many particular cases of sequence.]

Now when we analyse the conception of a cause to the bottom, we find as
the last residuum in our crucible nothing but what Hume found there long
ago, and that is simply the idea of invariable sequence. Whenever we say
that something is the cause of something else, all that we really mean
is that the latter is invariably preceded by the former, so that
whenever we find the second, which we call the effect, we may infer that
the first, which we call the cause, has gone before it. All such
inferences from effects to causes are based on experience; having
observed a certain sequence of events a certain number of times, we
conclude that the events are so conjoined that the latter cannot occur
without the previous occurrence of the former. A single case of two
events following each other could not of itself suggest that the one
event is the cause of the other, since there is no necessary link
between them in the mind; the sequence has to be repeated more or less
frequently before we infer a causal connexion between the two; and this
inference rests simply on that association of ideas which is established
in our mind by the reiterated observation of the things. Once the ideas
are by dint of repetition firmly welded together, the one by sheer force
of habit calls up the other, and we say that the two things which are
represented by those ideas stand to each other in the relation of cause
and effect. The notion of causality is in short only one particular case
of the association of ideas. Thus all reasoning as to causes implies
previous observation: we reason from the observed to the unobserved,
from the known to the unknown; and the wider the range of our
observation and knowledge, the greater the probability that our
reasoning will be correct.

[Sidenote: The savage draws his ideas of natural causation from
observation of himself. Hence he explains the phenomena of nature by
supposing that they are produced by beings like himself. These beings
may be called spirits or gods of nature to distinguish them from living
human gods.]

All this is as true of the savage as of the civilised man. He too
argues, and indeed can only argue on the basis of experience from the
known to the unknown, from the observed to the hypothetical. But the
range of his experience is comparatively narrow, and accordingly his
inferences from it often appear to civilised men, with their wider
knowledge, to be palpably false and absurd. This holds good most
obviously in regard to his observation of external nature. While he
often knows a good deal about the natural objects, whether animals,
plants, or inanimate things, on which he is immediately dependent for
his subsistence, the extent of country with which he is acquainted is
commonly but small, and he has little or no opportunity of correcting
the conclusions which he bases on his observation of it by a comparison
with other parts of the world. But if he knows little of the outer
world, he is necessarily somewhat better acquainted with his own inner
life, with his sensations and ideas, his emotions, appetites, and
desires. Accordingly it is natural enough that when he seeks to discover
the causes of events in the external world, he should, arguing from
experience, imagine that they are produced by the actions of invisible
beings like himself, who behind the veil of nature pull the strings that
set the vast machinery in motion. For example, he knows by experience
that he can make sparks fly by knocking two flints against each other;
what more natural, therefore, than that he should imagine the great
sparks which we call lightning to be made in the same way by somebody up
aloft, and that when he finds chipped flints on the ground he should
take them for thunder-stones dropped by the maker of thunder and
lightning from the clouds?[3] Thus arguing from his limited experience
primitive man creates a multitude of spirits or gods in his own likeness
to explain the succession of phenomena in nature of whose true causes he
is ignorant; in short he personifies the phenomena as powerful
anthropomorphic spirits, and believing himself to be more or less
dependent on their good will he woos their favour by prayer and
sacrifice. This personification of the various aspects of external
nature is one of the most fruitful sources of polytheism. The spirits
and gods created by this train of thought may be called spirits and gods
of nature to distinguish them from the human gods, by which I mean the
living men and women who are believed by their worshippers to be
inspired or possessed by a divine spirit.

[Sidenote: In time men reject polytheism as an explanation of natural
processes and substitute certain abstract ideas of ethers, atoms,
molecules, and so on.]

But as time goes on and men learn more about nature, they commonly
become dissatisfied with polytheism as an explanation of the world and
gradually discard it. From one department of nature after another the
gods are reluctantly or contemptuously dismissed and their provinces
committed to the care of certain abstract ideas of ethers, atoms,
molecules, and so forth, which, though just as imperceptible to human
senses as their divine predecessors, are judged by prevailing opinion to
discharge their duties with greater regularity and despatch, and are
accordingly firmly installed on the vacant thrones amid the general
applause of the more enlightened portion of mankind. Thus instead of
being peopled with a noisy bustling crowd of full-blooded and
picturesque deities, clothed in the graceful form and animated with the
warm passions of humanity, the universe outside the narrow circle of our
consciousness is now conceived as absolutely silent, colourless, and
deserted. The cheerful sounds which we hear, the bright hues which we
see, have no existence, we are told, in the external world: the voices
of friends, the harmonies of music, the chime of falling waters, the
solemn roll of ocean, the silver splendour of the moon, the golden
glories of sunset, the verdure of summer woods, and the hectic tints of
autumn--all these subsist only in our own minds, and if we imagine them
to have any reality elsewhere, we deceive ourselves. In fact the whole
external world as perceived by us is one great illusion: if we gave the
reins to fancy we might call it a mirage, a piece of witchery, conjured
up by the spells of some unknown magician to bewilder poor ignorant
humanity. Outside of ourselves there stretches away on every side an
infinitude of space without sound, without light, without colour, a
solitude traversed only in every direction by an inconceivably complex
web of silent and impersonal forces. That, if I understand it aright, is
the general conception of the world which modern science has substituted
for polytheism.

[Sidenote: But while they commonly discard the hypothesis of a deity as
an explanation of all the particular processes of nature, they retain it
as an explanation of nature in general.]

When philosophy and science by their combined efforts have ejected gods
and goddesses from all the subordinate posts of nature, it might perhaps
be expected that they would have no further occasion for the services of
a deity, and that having relieved him of all his particular functions
they would have arranged for the creation and general maintenance of the
universe without him by handing over these important offices to an
efficient staff of those ethers, atoms, corpuscles, and so forth, which
had already proved themselves so punctual in the discharge of the minor
duties entrusted to them. Nor, indeed, is this expectation altogether
disappointed. A number of atheistical philosophers have courageously
come forward and assured us that the hypothesis of a deity as the
creator and preserver of the universe is quite superfluous, and that all
things came into being or have existed from eternity without the help of
any divine spirit, and that they will continue to exist without it to
the end, if end indeed there is to be. But on the whole these daring
speculators appear to be in a minority. The general opinion of educated
people at the present day, could we ascertain it, would probably be
found to incline to the conclusion that, though every department of
nature is now worked by impersonal material forces alone, the universe
as a whole was created and is still maintained by a great supernatural
spirit whom we call God. Thus in Europe and in the countries which have
borrowed their civilisation, their philosophy, and their religion from
it, the central problem of natural theology has narrowed itself down to
the question, Is there one God or none? It is a profound question, and I
for one profess myself unable to answer it.

[Sidenote: Whether attained by inward or outward experience, the idea of
God is regularly that of a cause inferred, not perceived.]

If this brief sketch of the history of natural theology is correct, man
has by the exercise of his natural faculties alone, without the help of
revelation, attained to a knowledge or at least to a conception of God
in one of two ways, either by meditating on the operations of his own
mind, or by observing the processes of external nature: inward
experience and outward experience have conducted him by different roads
to the same goal. By whichever of them the conception has been reached,
it is regularly employed to explain the causal connexion of things,
whether the things to be explained are the ideas and emotions of man
himself or the changes in the physical world outside of him. In short, a
God is always brought in to play the part of a cause; it is the
imperious need of tracing the causes of events which has driven man to
discover or invent a deity. Now causes may be arranged in two classes
according as they are perceived or unperceived by the senses. For
example, when we see the impact of a billiard cue on a billiard ball
followed immediately by the motion of the ball, we say that the impact
is the cause of the motion. In this case we perceive the cause as well
as the effect. But, when we see an apple fall from a tree to the ground,
we say that the cause of the fall is the force of gravitation exercised
by the superior mass of the earth on the inferior mass of the apple. In
this case, though we perceive the effect, we do not perceive the cause,
we only infer it by a process of reasoning from experience. Causes of
the latter sort may be called inferential or hypothetical causes to
distinguish them from those which are perceived. Of the two classes of
causes a deity belongs in general, if not universally, to the second,
that is, to the inferential or hypothetical causes; for as a rule at all
events his existence is not perceived by our senses but inferred by our
reason. To say that he has never appeared in visible and tangible form
to men would be to beg the question; it would be to make an assertion
which is incapable of proof and which is contradicted by a multitude of
contrary affirmations recorded in the traditions or the sacred books of
many races; but without being rash we may perhaps say that such
appearances, if they ever took place, belong to a past order of events
and need hardly be reckoned with at the present time. For all practical
purposes, therefore, God is now a purely inferential or hypothetical
cause; he may be invoked to explain either our own thoughts and
feelings, our impulses and emotions, or the manifold states and
processes of external nature; he may be viewed either as the inspirer of
the one or the creator and preserver of the other; and according as he
is mainly regarded from the one point of view or the other, the
conception of the divine nature tends to beget one of two very different
types of piety. To the man who traces the finger of God in the workings
of his own mind, the deity appears to be far closer than he seems to the
man who only infers the divine existence from the marvellous order,
harmony, and beauty of the external world; and we need not wonder that
the faith of the former is of a more fervent temper and supplies him
with more powerful incentives to a life of active devotion than the calm
and rational faith of the latter. We may conjecture that the piety of
most great religious reformers has belonged to the former rather than to
the latter type; in other words, that they have believed in God because
they felt, or imagined that they felt, him stirring in their own hearts
rather than because they discerned the handiwork of a divine artificer
in the wonderful mechanism of nature.

[Sidenote: Besides the two sorts of gods already distinguished, namely
natural gods and living human gods, there is a third sort which has
played an important part in history, namely, the spirits of deified dead
men. Euhemerism.]

Thus far I have distinguished two sorts of gods whom man discovers or
creates for himself by the exercise of his unaided faculties, to wit
natural gods, whom he infers from his observation of external nature,
and human gods or inspired men, whom he recognises by virtue of certain
extraordinary mental manifestations in himself or in others. But there
is another class of human gods which I have not yet mentioned and which
has played a very important part in the evolution of theology. I mean
the deified spirits of dead men. To judge by the accounts we possess not
only of savage and barbarous tribes but of some highly civilised
peoples, the worship of the human dead has been one of the commonest and
most influential forms of natural religion, perhaps indeed the commonest
and most influential of all. Obviously it rests on the supposition that
the human personality in some form, whether we call it a soul, a spirit,
a ghost, or what not, can survive death and thereafter continue for a
longer or shorter time to exercise great power for good or evil over the
destinies of the living, who are therefore compelled to propitiate the
shades of the dead out of a regard for their own safety and well-being.
This belief in the survival of the human spirit after death is
world-wide; it is found among men in all stages of culture from the
lowest to the highest; we need not wonder therefore that the custom of
propitiating the ghosts or souls of the departed should be world-wide
also. No doubt the degree of attention paid to ghosts is not the same in
all cases; it varies with the particular degree of power attributed to
each of them; the spirits of men who for any reason were much feared in
their lifetime, such as mighty warriors, chiefs, and kings, are more
revered and receive far more marks of homage than the spirits of common
men; and it is only when this reverence and homage are carried to a very
high pitch that they can properly be described as a deification of the
dead. But that dead men have thus been raised to the rank of deities in
many lands, there is abundant evidence to prove. And quite apart from
the worship paid to those spirits which are admitted by their
worshippers to have once animated the bodies of living men, there is
good reason to suspect that many gods, who rank as purely mythical
beings, were once men of flesh and blood, though their true history has
passed out of memory or rather been transformed by legend into a myth,
which veils more or less completely the real character of the imaginary
deity. The theory that most or all gods originated after this fashion,
in other words, that the worship of the gods is little or nothing but
the worship of dead men, is known as Euhemerism from Euhemerus, the
ancient Greek writer who propounded it. Regarded as a universal
explanation of the belief in gods it is certainly false; regarded as a
partial explanation of the belief it is unquestionably true; and perhaps
we may even go further and say, that the more we penetrate into the
inner history of natural religion, the larger is seen to be the element
of truth contained in Euhemerism. For the more closely we look at many
deities of natural religion, the more distinctly do we seem to perceive,
under the quaint or splendid pall which the mythical fancy has wrapt
round their stately figures, the familiar features of real men, who once
shared the common joys and the common sorrows of humanity, who trod
life's common road to the common end.

[Sidenote: The deification of dead men presupposes the immortality of
the human soul, or rather its survival for a longer or shorter time
after death.]

When we ask how it comes about that dead men have so often been raised
to the rank of divinities, the first thing to be observed is that all
such deifications must, if our theory is correct, be inferences drawn
from experience of some sort; they must be hypotheses devised to explain
the unperceived causes of certain phenomena, whether of the human mind
or of external nature. All of them imply, as I have said, a belief that
the conscious human personality, call it the soul, the spirit, or what
you please, can survive the body and continue to exist in a disembodied
state with unabated or even greatly increased powers for good or evil.
This faith in the survival of personality after death may for the sake
of brevity be called a faith in immortality, though the term immortality
is not strictly correct, since it seems to imply eternal duration,
whereas the idea of eternity is hardly intelligible to many primitive
peoples, who nevertheless firmly believe in the continued existence, for
a longer or shorter time, of the human spirit after the dissolution of
the body. Now the faith in the immortality of the soul or, to speak more
correctly, in the continued existence of conscious human personality
after death, is, as I remarked before, exceedingly common among men at
all levels of intellectual evolution from the lowest upwards; certainly
it is not peculiar to adherents of the higher religions, but is held as
an unquestionable truth by at least the great majority of savage and
barbarous peoples as to whose ideas we possess accurate information;
indeed it might be hard to point to any single tribe of men, however
savage, of whom we could say with certainty that the faith is totally
wanting among them.

[Sidenote: The question of immortality is a fundamental problem of
natural theology in the wider sense.]

Hence if we are to explain the deification of dead men, we must first
explain the widespread belief in immortality; we must answer the
question, how does it happen that men in all countries and at all stages
of ignorance or knowledge so commonly suppose that when they die their
consciousness will still persist for an indefinite time after the decay
of the body? To answer that question is one of the fundamental problems
of natural theology, not indeed in the full sense of the word theology,
if we confine the term strictly to a reasoned knowledge of a God; for
the example of Buddhism proves that a belief in the existence of the
human soul after death is quite compatible with disbelief in a deity.
But if we may use, as I think we may, the phrase natural theology in an
extended sense to cover theories which, though they do not in themselves
affirm the existence of a God, nevertheless appear to be one of the
deepest and most fruitful sources of the belief in his reality, then we
may legitimately say that the doctrine of human immortality does fall
within the scope of natural theology. What then is its origin? How is it
that men so commonly believe themselves to be immortal?

[Sidenote: If there is any natural knowledge of immortality, it must be
acquired either by intuition or experience; it is apparently not given
by intuition; hence it must be acquired, if at all, by experience.]

If there is any natural knowledge of human immortality, it must be
acquired either by intuition or by experience; there is no other way.
Now whether other men from a simple contemplation of their own nature,
quite apart from reasoning, know or believe themselves intuitively to be
immortal, I cannot say; but I can say with some confidence that for
myself I have no such intuition whatever of my own immortality, and that
if I am left to the resources of my natural faculties alone, I can as
little affirm the certain or probable existence of my personality after
death as I can affirm the certain or probable existence of a personal
God. And I am bold enough to suspect that if men could analyse their own
ideas, they would generally find themselves to be in a similar
predicament as to both these profound topics. Hence I incline to lay it
down as a probable proposition that men as a rule have no intuitive
knowledge of their own immortality, and that if there is any natural
knowledge of such a thing it can only be acquired by a process of
reasoning from experience.[4]

[Sidenote: The idea of immortality seems to have been suggested to man
both by his inward and his outward experience, notably by dreams, which
are a case of inward experience.]

What then is the kind of experience from which the theory of human
immortality is deduced? Is it our experience of the operations of our
own minds? or is it our experience of external nature? As a matter of
historical fact--and you will remember that I am treating the question
purely from the historical standpoint--men seem to have inferred the
persistence of their personality after death both from the one kind of
experience and from the other, that is, both from the phenomena of their
inner life and from the phenomena of what we call the external world.
Thus the savage, with whose beliefs we are chiefly concerned in these
lectures, finds a very strong argument for immortality in the phenomena
of dreams, which are strictly a part of his inner life, though in his
ignorance he commonly fails to discriminate them from what we popularly
call waking realities. Hence when the images of persons whom he knows to
be dead appear to him in a dream, he naturally infers that these persons
still exist somewhere and somehow apart from their bodies, of the decay
or destruction of which he may have had ocular demonstration. How could
he see dead people, he asks, if they did not exist? To argue that they
have perished like their bodies is to contradict the plain evidence of
his senses; for to the savage still more than to the civilised man
seeing is believing; that he sees the dead only in dreams does not shake
his belief, since he thinks the appearances of dreams just as real as
the appearances of his waking hours. And once he has in this way gained
a conviction that the dead survive and can help or harm him, as they
seem to do in dreams, it is natural or necessary for him to extend the
theory to the occurrences of daily life, which, as I have said, he does
not sharply distinguish from the visions of slumber. He now explains
many of these occurrences and many of the processes of nature by the
direct interposition of the spirits of the departed; he traces their
invisible hand in many of the misfortunes and in some of the blessings
which befall him; for it is a common feature of the faith in ghosts, at
least among savages, that they are usually spiteful and mischievous, or
at least testy and petulant, more apt to injure than to benefit the
survivors. In that they resemble the personified spirits of nature,
which in the opinion of most savages appear to be generally tricky and
malignant beings, whose anger is dangerous and whose favour is courted
with fear and trembling. Thus even without the additional assurance
afforded by tales of apparitions and spectres, primitive man may come in
time to imagine the world around him to be more or less thickly peopled,
influenced, and even dominated by a countless multitude of spirits,
among whom the shades of past generations of men and women hold a very
prominent, often apparently the leading place. These spirits, powerful
to help or harm, he seeks either simply to avert, when he deems them
purely mischievous, or to appease and conciliate, when he supposes them
sufficiently good-natured to respond to his advances. In some such way
as this, arguing from the real but, as we think, misinterpreted
phenomena of dreams, the savage may arrive at a doctrine of human
immortality and from that at a worship of the dead.