Robert Ranulph Marett and Joseph Estlin Carpenter

“ The Order of Nature.—Polytheism is here on the way to monotheism, and this tendency receives significant support from the recognition of an order in nature which is the ground and framework of social ethics. Not only does a sky-god like Varuna, or a sun-god like the Babylonian Shamash, survey all human things, and take cognizance of the evil-doer, but the daily course of the world is itself the expression of an intellectual and moral power. ”

“ Nagualism, or the acquisition of a mystic guardian, is a widely distributed custom, the essence of which probably consists in the procuring of a personal name having potency. The exceptional man is recognized as having mana in a special degree, and a belief thus held at once by others and by himself is bound to stimulate his individuality. The primitive community is not so custom-bound that personality has no chance to make itself felt, and the leader of men possessed of an inner fund of inspiration is the wonder-worker who encourages all forms of social advance. ”

“ Almost every tribe has its initiation ceremonies, and in many tribes adult life may almost be described as a continuous initiation. The object of these rites is primarily to impart mystic virtue to the novice, such virtue, in the eyes of the primitive man, being always something more than social usefulness, amounting as it does to a share in the tribal luck by means of association with all it holds sacred. Incidentally the candidate is trained to perform his duties as a tribesman, but religion presides over the course, demanding earnest endeavour of an impressionable age. ”

“ However, as the students of mob-psychology have shown, every crowd tends to have its meneur, its mob-leader, the man who sets the cheering or starts the running-away. So too, then, with the primitive society. Grossly ignorant of all that fails outside “the daily round, the common task,” they are full of panicky fears in regard to this unknown, and the primary attitude of society towards it is sheer avoidance, taboo. ”

“ In the earliest literary record of Greek religion Homer distinguishes between the θεός and the δαίμων, the personalized god and the numen or divine power. In Homer the element of time is definitely recognized. The gods are the “Immortals.” They are born, and their parentage is known, but they do not die. Zeus is not self-existent in the sense in which the Indian Brahmā is svayambhū, but certain questions have been by implication asked and answered, which the demonology of the savage has not yet raised. ”

“ Again, the savage universe is no preserve of man, but is an open field wherein human and non-human activities of all sorts compete on more or less equal terms, yet so that a certain measure of predominance may be secured by a judicious combination of forces. (2) Concentration. Hence the magico-religious society or individual practitioner piles ceremony on ceremony, name of power on name of power, relic on relic, to consolidate the forces within reach and assume direction thereof. The transmissibility of the sacred ensures the fusion of powers drawn from all sources, however disparate. ”

“ Through the dream the living was put into communication with the dead, which sometimes embodied itself in peculiar and pathetic literary forms, such as the Icelandic dream-verses imparted by the spirits of those who had been lost at sea or overwhelmed by the snow; and a whole series of steps leads up from necromancy to prophecy and oracle, as the higher gods become the teachers of men. ”

“ It may be added that we have here no generalization imported from a higher level of culture, but an idea or blend of ideas familiar to primitive thought. An important consequence of thus giving the study of primitive religion the wide scope of a comparative hierology is that magic is no longer divorced from religion, since the sacred will now be found to be coextensive with the magico-religious, that largely undifferentiated plasm out of which religion and magic slowly take separate shape as society comes more and more to contrast legitimate with illicit modes of dealing with the sacred. ”

“ It is an age of conscious selection as between ideal systems. Instead of necessitating a wasteful and precarious elimination of inadequate customs by the actual destruction of those who practise them—this being the method of natural selection, which, like some Spanish Inquisition, abolishes the heresy by wiping out the heretics one and all—progress now becomes possible along the more direct and less painful path of conversion. ”

“ It is hard to say whether the unit of primitive society is the tribe or the group of kinsmen. Both are forms of union that are consolidated by means of religious usages. Thus in Australia the initiation ceremonies, concerned as they partly are with marriage, always an affair between the kin-groups, are tribal, whilst the totemic rites are the prime concern of the members of the totem clans. The significance of a common name and a common blood is immensely enhanced by its association with mystic rights and duties, and the pulse of brotherhood beats faster. ”

“ As religion advances with improved social organization, a series of figures, partly human, partly divine, embodies the idea that the command of nature implied in the progress of the arts is due to some kind of instruction from above, and that the obligations of law are of more than human origin. ”

“ A new heaven and a new earth would be created: a general resurrection should take place; the powers of evil should be overthrown and extinguished; and hell should be brought back for the enlargement of the world. Eschatology has again and again expressed the alliance between ethics and religion. ”

“ It is the price that must be paid for social discreteness and incoherency. And the consequence of this atomism is not what a careless thinker might be led to assume, extreme diversity, but, on the contrary, extreme homogeneity of culture. It has been found unworkable, for instance, to classify the religions of really primitive peoples under a plurality of heads, as becomes necessary the moment that the presence of a distinctive basis of linked ideas testifies to the individuality of this or that type of higher creed. ”

“ Where society is most primitive it is most democratic, as in Australia, and magico-religious powers are possessed by the whole body of fully initiated males, age, however, conferring increase of sacred lore and consequently of authority; whilst even at this stage the experts tend to form an inner circle of rulers. The man with mana is bound to come to the top, both because his gifts give him a start and because his success is taken as a sign that he has the gift. ”

“ On the other hand, if those in authority perpetrate in the name of what their society holds sacred, and therefore with its full approval, acts that to the modern mind are cruel, silly or revolting, it is bad science and bad ethics to speak of vice and degradation, unless it can be shown that the community in which these things occur is thereby brought nearer to elimination in the struggle for existence. ”

“ A child of civilized parents brought up from the first amongst savages is a savage, neither more nor less. Though race may count for something in the matter of mental endowment—and at least it would seem to involve differences in weight of brain—it clearly counts for much less than does milieu, to wit, that social environment of ideas and institutions which depends so largely for its effectiveness on mechanical means of tradition, such as the art of writing. ”

“ Envy, malice and uncharitableness are found in primitive society, as elsewhere, and in their behoof the mystic forces are not infrequently unloosed by those who know how to do so. To use the sacred to the detriment of the community, as does, for instance, the expert who casts a spell, or utters a prayer, to his neighbour's hurt, is what primitive society understands by magic (cf. arungquiltha, above) , and anthropology has no business to attach any other meaning to the word if it undertakes to interpret the primitive point of view. ”

“ His definition improves on Tylor’s in so far as it makes worship integral to the religious attitude. By regarding the object of religion as necessarily personal, however, he is led to exclude much that the primitive man undoubtedly treats with awe and respect as exerting a mystic effect on his life. Further, in maintaining that the powers recognized by religion are always superior to man, he leaves unclasped a host of practices that display a bargaining, or even a hectoring, spirit on the part of those addressing them (see Prayer) . ”

“ The evidence rather implies that, so far as the sanctions of religion affect the savage at all, they affect him with unusual force. In the absence of other competing interests his religious beliefs and duties occupy a much larger share of his attention than the votaries of many higher faiths bestow on theirs; and though his ethical range may be very limited, yet the total influence of his religion in determining for him what he may do and what he may not, brings the greater part of conduct under its control. ”

“ Early Greek religion recognized a class of gods of Aversion and Riddance, ἀποτρόπαιοι and ἀποπομπαῖοι. Neither the spirit nor the god is conceived as immaterial. They can take food, though the crudest form of this belief soon passes into the more refined notion that they consume the impalpable essence of the meals provided for them. The ancient Indian ritual for the sacrifice to the Fathers required the officiating priest to turn away with bated breath that he might not see the spirits engaged upon the rice-balls laid out for them. ”

“ Far otherwise is it with man at the stage of savagery—the stage of petty groups pursuing a self-centred life of inveterate custom, in an isolation almost as complete as if they were marooned on separate atolls of the ocean. ”

“ The prominence of the notion of the Alcheringa “dream time,” or sacred past, in Central Australian religion illustrates the essential connexion perceived by the savage to lie between the sacred and the traditional. Ritualistic conservatism may be instanced as a practical outcome of this feeling. Another development is ancestor-worship, the organized cult of ancestors marking, however, a certain stage of advance beyond the very primitive, though the dead are always sacred and have mana which the living may exploit for their own advantage. ”

“ Definition of Primitive Religion.—In dealing with a development of culture that has no immutable essence, but is intrinsically fluid and changing, definition must consist either in a definition of type, which indicates prevalence of relevant resemblance as between specimens more or less divergent, or in exterior definition, which delimits the field of inquiry by laying down within what extreme limits this divergence holds. ”

“ The sacred literature's of India and Israel, however, present many analogies, and emerge out of a wide range of phenomena which have their roots in the practices of the lower culture. The belief that the Powers controlling man's life are willing upon occasion to disclose something of their purpose, has led to widespread rites of divination, which Plato described as the “art of fellowship between gods and men,” and the Stoics defended on grounds of a priori religious expectation as well as of universal experience. ”

“ And from the social side the development of law, the influence of city life, the formation of priesthoods, the connexion of particular deities with the fortunes of dynasties or the vicissitudes of nations, the processes of migration, of conquest and political fusion, the deportations of vanquished peoples, even the sale of slaves to distant lands and the growth of trade and travel, all contribute to the processes which expand and modify different pantheons, and determine the importance of particular deities. ”

“ Psychology of the Primitive Attitude towards the Sacred.—We are on firmer ground when simply describing the phenomena of primitive religion than when seeking to account for these in terms of natural law—in whatever sense the conception of natural law be applicable to the facts of the mental life of man. One thing is certain, namely, that savages stand on virtually one footing with the civilized as regards the type of explanation appropriate to their beliefs and practices. ”

“ Many are the clues by which it has been sought to explain the secret of primitive religion. Hegel, before the anthropological stage, found it in magic. Max Müller, building on philosophy and mythology, affirmed that “Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man” (Natural Religion, 1899, p. 188) . Herbert Spencer derived all religion from the worship of the dead (Principles of Sociology, i.) ”

“ In the numberless transitions that, whilst connecting, separate the spell and the prayer we observe as the accompaniment of every mood from extreme imperiousness to extreme humility an abiding will and desire to help the action out. ”

“ In the Chinese combination of Heaven and Earth as the parents and nourishes of all things, the energy and action lie with Tien, Earth being docile and receptive. Tien is intelligent and all-observing, and its “sincerity” or steadfastness, displayed in the courses of the sun and moon and the succession of the seasons, becomes the basis of right human conduct, personal and social. ”

“ Fetishism; Magic; Mythology; Prayer; Ritual; Sacrifice; and Totemism. In this article religions are treated from the point of view of morphology, and no attempt can be made in the allotted limits to connect them with the phases of ritual, sociological or ethical development. See the separate articles on each religious system, and the separate headings for different forms of ritual.
1. Developments of Animism.—Animism is not, indeed, itself a religion; it is rather a primitive kind of philosophy which provides the intellectual form for the interpretation alike of Man and of Nature. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the earlier and more democratic types of primitive society, uncontaminated by our civilization, do not present many features to which the modern conscience can take exception, but display rather the edifying spectacle of religious brotherhoods encouraging themselves by mystical communion to common effort. ”

“ In short, from the standpoint of lay society, the manipulator of the sacred is himself sacred, and shares in all the associations of sacredness. An anthropomorphism which is specifically a “magomorphism” renders the sacred powers increasingly one with the governing element in society, and religion assumes an ethico-political character, whilst correspondingly authority and law are invested with a deeper meaning. ”

“ Their notions stick fast because there are no competing notions to dislodge them. Society suffers a sort of perpetual obsession, and remains self-hypnotized as it were within a magic circle of traditional views. ”