CHAPTER I THE ORIGINS OF RELIGION RELIGION, as we view it historically, is a complex composite, woven of many strands that stretch back into the remote past. Our task in this chapter is to trace some of the more important of these sources, and give a rapid pen-picture of the mental attitudes of primitive man that combined to make him religious. The sources of primitive religious ideas and practices I. The precarious situation of primitive man. When man, scarcely yet more than a brute, begins to think about his needs and to strive consciously for those ends toward which blind instinct has hitherto driven him, he finds himself in a precarious and uncertain situation. He rears a rude shelter -the storm batters it, the winds shake it, the lightning threatens to destroy it; he plants a few seeds to insure himself food - the sun scorches them and the drought spoils the fruit of his labors; the tempest buffets him, the thunder terrifies him he realizes his helplessness before these powers that are so much greater than he, and on whose kindly aid he is dependent for his prosperity, nay, his very existence. Lucretius observes that men "much more keenly in evil days turn their minds to religion.” 1 And, indeed, that robust old atheist elsewhere confesses, "Who is there whose mind does not shrink into itself with fear of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with terror when the parched earth rocks under the terrible blast of the thunderbolt, and the roaring sound 1 De Rerum Natura, III, 53. sweeps across the heavens? . . . Or when the full fury of the wild wind scours the sea and drives across its expanse the commander with his brave legions and his elephants, does he not in prayer seek peace with the gods?" Thus it was commonly repeated in antiquity that fear made the gods; fear, and, we may add, hope; that despair of man at his own frail faculties that cries out to some one, to any one, for help. When it is fear of his fellow man, or of the brutes, he is not without means of self-protection; but when his apprehension is of those physical forces by which he is surrounded, which so often menace his welfare and his life, he knows not how to save himself. Ignorant for the most part as yet how to meet these dangers by physical means, and under the need of doing something to ward off the evil, he cries out, he gesticulates, he commands, he beseeches these Powers not to harm him.2 All this is prior to any definite formulation of the idea of a god or spirit; it is mere spontaneous psychological reaction. Magic, the attempt to coerce the surrounding Powers by incantations and mysterious rites, prayers, sacrifices for appeasement, vows all such activities antedated articulate belief; it was in his quieter and more reflective moments, no doubt, and as an explanation and justification of these instinctive acts, that primitive man attained to a definite and steady belief in quasi-human Beings behind the blessings and catastrophes that befell him. Indeed, among many savage races but lately studied, there has been no real personalizing 1 De Rerum Natura, v, 1210. 2 Animals also may whine and tremble in the presence of danger. But man alone, with his dawning self-consciousness, remembers the danger, reflects upon it, realizes the precariousness of his situation and his dependence upon the Powers about him. It is man's faculty of imagination, constructive thought, and auto-suggestion, his ability to react to unperceived and merely imagined objects, that develops out of these otherwise transitory and vague moods a permanent, if flickering, conception of superhuman Powers besetting him. of nature-forces. We have in the Algonkin "manitou❞ and the Melanesian "mana" a mysterious potency, a vital power, recognized in things, to be reckoned with and dealt with cautiously, but not clearly personal. Of the aborigines of Australia we are told by various observers that they offer no sacrifices or prayers to any personal Beings. But "even though they appeal to no spirits in their ceremonies, these ceremonies do express valuational attitudes of a definitely religious character." That cultural stage characterized by vague fears of the supernatural, when man was as yet hardly conscious of the fact of personality in himself, and so hardly postulating personality of natural forces, has been termed by recent writers the pre-animistic stage.2 1 II. The spontaneous attribution of life and will to inanimate objects. As man's mental life became more acute, there was an inevitable tendency toward the genuine personification of the powers of nature. William James tells us how irresistibly he was dominated by the impulse to think of the great San Francisco earthquake which he felt at Palo Alto - as a living being. It was The Earthquake; it stole into his room, it shook him as a terrier shakes a rat; it exulted in its power. He reports, further, that practically every one experienced a similar psychological reaction, even those who, like him, were most accustomed to scientific concepts and abstract analysis. It is, thus, only our sophistication and intellectual maturity that prevent us from feeling all natural forces, or at least the violent and dangerous ones, as endowed with personality. So an English writer, describing his own experience as a boy: "Sitting on the hillside when the hot season was coming near its end he saw the 1 King, p. 171, footnote. Throughout this book, works named in the bibliography at the close of a chapter will be referred to in the footnotes of that chapter by the author's name only. 2 See Marett, chaps. I, IV. 3 "The Earthquake," in Memories and Studies. |