Edward B. Tylor

“ Some tribes say that the soul continues to haunt the hut where it died, which is accordingly deserted for it; or it hovers near the burial-ground, which is sometimes the place of village resort, so that the souls of ancestors can look on kindly, like the old people sitting round the village green watching the youngsters at their sports; or the ghosts flit away to some region of the dead in the deep forests or on mountain-tops or far-away islands over the sea, or up on the plains above the sky, or down in the depths below the ground where the sun descends at night. ”

“ Among the relics of the ancient cave-men of Europe are hollowed stones, which were their primitive mortars for grinding the ochre and other colours for painting themselves. Indeed, few habits mark the lower stages of human life so well as the delight in body-patterns of bold spots and stripes in striking colours, familiar to us in pictures of Australians dancing at a corroboree, or Americans working themselves up to frenzy in the scalp-dance. ”

“ Although what a man’s language really proves is not his parentage but his bringing-up, yet most children are in fact brought up by their own parents, and inherit their language as well as their features. So long as people of one race and speech live together in their own nation, their language will remain a race-mark common to all. And although migration and intermarriage, conquest and slavery interfere, from time to time, so that the native tongue of a nation can never tell the whole story of their ancestry, still it tells a part of it, and that a most important part. ”

“ On this same power of make-believe or imagination are founded the two other fine arts, sculpture and painting. Their proper purpose is not to produce exact imitations, but what the artist strives to bring out is the idea that strikes the beholder. Thus there is often more real art in a caricature done with a few strokes of the pencil, or in a rough image hacked out of a log, than in a minutely painted portrait, or a figure at a waxwork show which is so like life that visitors beg its pardon when they walk up against it. ”

“ The natives of the Brazilian forests, to whom tracking game is the chief business of life, do it with a skill that fills with wonder the white men who have watched them. The Botocudo hunter, gliding stealthily through the underwood, knows every habit and sign of bird and beast; the remains of berries and pods show him what creature has fed there; he knows how high up an armadillo displaces the leaves in passing, and so can distinguish its track from the snake’s or tortoise’s, and follow it to its burrow by the scratches of its scaly armour on the mud. ”

“ The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate melody, the setting of lovely thought in harmonious language, at once pictures for the imagination and [290] music for the ear. But besides this, it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping alive in our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world. Much of poetic art lies in imitating the expressions of earlier stages of culture, when poetry was the natural utterance of any strong emotion, the natural means to convey any solemn address or ancestral tradition. ”

“ So a Greek or Roman general, before embarking on the dangerous waves, would sacrifice a bull to Poseidōn or Neptune. To men who could thus look on the sky, earth, and sea as animated, intelligent beings, the Sun, giver of light and life to the world, rising and crossing the sky and descending at night into the under-world whence he arose, has the clearest divine personality. ”

“ The student who seeks to understand how mankind came to be as they are, and to live as they do, ought first to know clearly whether men are new-comers on the earth, or old inhabitants. Did they appear with their various races and ways of life ready-made, or were these shaped by the long, slow growth of ages? In order to answer this question, our first business will be to take a rapid survey of the varieties of men, their languages, their civilization, and their ancient relics, to see what proofs may thus be had of man’s age in the world. ”

“ Military government in civil affairs is, in fact, despotism; and if the military leader can thus become the tyrant of his own land, still more can he rule with a rod of iron a conquered country. The negro kingdom of Dahome, the result of two centuries of barbaric military rule, is an astounding specimen of what a people will submit to from a despot whom they regard as a kind of deity; they approach him grovelling on all-fours, and throwing dust over their heads; the whole nation are his slaves, whose lives he takes at will ”

“ It is usual, however, for oaths to call down future punishment, in this life or after death, as when, in Russian law-courts in Siberia, the curious spectacle may be seen of bringing in a bear’s head that an Ostyak may bite at it, thereby calling on a bear to bite him if he is forsworn. The legal oaths in our own country bear in their gestures the traces of high antiquity. In Scotland the witness holds up his hand toward heaven, the gesture by which Greek and Jew took the supreme Deity to witness, and called down divine vengeance on the perjurer. ”

“ Games which exercise either body or mind have been of high value in civilization as trainers of man’s faculties. Games of pure chance played for money stand on quite a different footing; they have been from the first a delusion and a curse. In our own time, there is perhaps no more pitiable sign of the slowness with which scientific ideas spread, than to hear the well-dressed crowds round the gaming-table at Monaco talking about runs of luck, and fancying that it makes a difference whether one backs the black or the red. ”

“ Among the simplest of weapons is the thick stick or cudgel, which when heavier or knobbed passes into the club. Rude champions have delighted in the ferocious roughness of such a gnarled club as Herkules in the pictures carries on his shoulder, while others spent their leisure hours in elegant shaping and carving, like that of the South Sea Island clubs to be seen in museums. From savage through barbaric times the war-club lasted on into the middle ages of Europe, when knights still smashed helmets in with their heavy maces. ”

“ Looking at their ancient civilization, it seems to have been formed by men whose minds worked much like our own. No super-human powers were required for the work, but just human nature groping on by roundabout ways, reaching great results, yet not half knowing how to profit by them when reached; solving the great problem of writing, yet not seeing how to simplify the clumsy hieroglyphics into letters; devoting earnest thought to religion and yet keeping up a dog and cat worship which was a jest even to the ancients; cultivating astronomy and yet remaining mazed in the follies of astrology. ”

“ It is not likely that these negro slaves had ever heard of the twenty-first Iliad, to know how the same world-old contest of the elements is told in the great battle between the Fire-god and the Rivers, when the Winds were sent to help, and carried the fierce flames onward, and the eels and fish scuttled hither and thither as the hot breath of the blast came upon them. ”

“ The state of mind to which these nature-spirits belong must have been almost as clearly remembered by the Greeks, when they could still fancy the nymphs of the lovely groves, and springs, and grassy meadows, coming up to the council of the Olympian gods and sitting around on the polished seats, or the dryads growing with the leafy pines and oaks, and uttering screams of pain when the woodman’s axe strikes the trunk. ”

“ In ancient Egypt, the masons hewed and smoothed even granite and porphyry to a finish which is envied by the architects of our own day, and the pyramids of Gizeh are as wonderful for the fine masonry of their slopes, chambers, and passages, as for their prodigious size. Our modern notion of a stone building is that the blocks of stone are to be fixed together with a layer of mortar to bind them, but in the old and beautiful architecture of Egypt and Greece the faced stone blocks lie on one another, having no cement to hold them, and needing none. ”

“ It remains to notice myth, the stumbling-block which historians have so often fallen over. Myth is not to be looked on as mere error and folly, but as an interesting product of the human mind. It is sham history, the fictitious narrative of events that never happened. Historians, especially in writing of early ages, have copied down the traditions of real events so mixed up with myths, that it is one of the hardest tasks of the student to judge what to believe and what to reject. ”

“ If a human soul seen in a dream is a real object, then the spear and shield it carries and the mantle over its shoulders are real objects too, and all lifeless things must have their thin flitting shadow-souls. ”

“ It would be impossible to put more clearly the great principle of old-world morals, that a man owes friendship not to mankind at large but only to his own kin, so that to entitle a stranger to kindness and good faith he must become a kinsman by blood. With much the same thought even rude tribes hold that eating and drinking together is a covenant of friendship, for the guest becomes in some sort one of the household, and has to be treated as morally one of the family. ”

“ Such are the souls of canoes and weapons and earthen pots that the Fijians fancy they see swimming down the stream pellmell into the life to come, and the ghostly funeral gifts with which the Ojibwas imagine the souls of the dead laden on their journey to the spirit-land—the men carrying their shadowy guns and pipes, the women their baskets and paddles, the little boys their toy bows and arrows. ”

“ At low levels in civilization it is clear that dancing and play-acting are one. The North American dog-dance and bear-dance are mimic performances with ludicrously faithful imitations of the creatures’ pawing and rolling and biting. So the scenes of hunting and war furnish barbarians with subjects for dances, as when the Gold Coast negroes have gone out to war, and their wives at home dance a fetish-dance in imitation of battle, to give their absent husbands strength and courage. Historians trace from the sacred dances of ancient Greece the dramatic art of the civilized world. ”

“ It seems plain how the rudiments of these sciences began from the evidence of men’s senses. Children living unschooled in some wild woodland would take it as a matter of course that the earth is a circular floor, more or less uneven, arched over with a dome or firmament springing from the horizon. Thus the natural and primitive notion of the world is that it is like a round dish with a cover. Rude tribes in many countries are found thinking so, and working out the idea so as to account for such phenomena as rain, which is water from above dripping in through holes in the sky-roof. ”

“ Odysseus walks through the streets of the seafaring Phaiakians, wondering at the haven and the mighty walls and bastions, till he crosses the bronze threshold of the palace of Alkinoos, and entering, clasps the knees of Queen Arētē; then he crouches on the hearthstone in the ashes, till the king, mindful of Zeus the Thunderer standing near to care for the suppliant, takes the guest by the hand, and makes him sit by him on his own son’s glittering seat. ”

“ The rude man knows much of the properties of matter, how fire burns and water soaks, the heavy sinks and the light floats, what stone will serve for the hatchet and what wood for its handle, which plants are food and which are poison, what are the habits of the animals that he hunts or that may fall upon him. He has notions how to cure, and much better notions how to kill. In a rude way he is a physicist in making fire, a chemist in cooking, a surgeon in binding up wounds, a geographer in knowing his rivers and mountains, a mathematician in counting on his fingers. ”

“ The convulsions, the unearthly voice in which the possessed priest answers in the name of the deity within, and his falling into stupor when his god departs, all fit together, and in all quarters of the world the oracle-priests and diviners by familiar spirits seem really diseased in body and mind, and deluded by their own feelings, as well as skilled in cheating their votaries with sham symptoms and cunning answers. The inspiration or breathing-in of a spirit into the body of a priest or seer appears to such people a mechanical action, like pouring water into a jug. ”

“ But the reality is quite as instructive, that the laws of virtue and happiness may be found at work in simple forms among tribes who make hatchets of sharpened stones and rub sticks together to kindle fire. Their life, seen at its best, shows with unusual clearness the great principle of moral science, that morality and happiness belong together—in fact that morality is the method of happiness.
It must not be supposed that in any state of civilization a man’s conduct depends altogether on his own moral sense of right and wrong. ”

“ Every people, even the smallest and most savage tribe, has an articulate language, carried on by a whole system of sounds and meanings, which serves the speaker as a sort of catalogue of the contents of the world he lives in, taking in every subject he thinks about, and enabling him to say what he thinks about it. What a complicated and ingenious apparatus a language may be, the Greek and Latin grammars sufficiently show. ”