Part 6 (2/2)
Observations of this kind were naturally made by the ablest members of the tribe--who were in all probability the medicine-men and wizards--and brought in consequence power into their hands. The road to power in fact--and especially was this the case in societies which had not yet developed wealth and property--lay through Magic. As far as magic represented early superst.i.tion land religion it laid hold of the HEARTS of men--their hopes and fears; as far as it represented science and the beginnings of actual knowledge, it inspired their minds with a sense of power, and gave form to their lives and customs. We have no reason to suppose that the early magicians and medicine-men were peculiarly wicked or bent on mere self-aggrandizement--any more than we have to think the same of the average country vicar or country doctor of to-day. They were merely men a trifle wiser or more instructed than their flocks.
But though probably in most cases their original intentions were decent enough, they were not proof against the temptations which the possession of power always brings, and as time went on they became liable to trade more and more upon this power for their own advancement. In the matter of Religion the history of the Christian priesthood through the centuries shows sufficiently to what misuse such power can be put; and in the matter of Science it is a warning to us of the dangers attending the formation of a scientific priesthood, such as we see growing up around us to-day. In both cases--whether Science or Religion--vanity, personal ambition, l.u.s.t of domination and a hundred other vices, unless corrected by a real devotion to the public good, may easily bring as many evils in their train as those they profess to cure.
The Medicine-man, or Wizard, or Magician, or Priest, slowly but necessarily gathered power into his hands, and there is much evidence to show that in the case of many tribes at any rate, it was HE who became ultimate chief and leader and laid the foundations of Kings.h.i.+p. The Basileus was always a sacred personality, and often united in himself as head of the clan the offices of chief in warfare and leader in priestly rites--like Agamemnon in Homer, or Saul or David in the Bible. As a magician he had influence over the fertility of the earth and, like the blameless king in the Odyssey, under his sway
”the dark earth beareth in season Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and alway Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in abundance.” (1)
(1) Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill.
As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare; and Schoolcraft, in a pa.s.sage quoted by Andrew Lang, (1) says of the Dacotah Indians ”the war-chief who leads the party to war is always one of these medicine-men.” This connection, however, by which the magician is transformed into the king has been abundantly studied, and need not be further dwelt upon here.
And what of the transformation of the king into a G.o.d--or of the Magician or Priest directly into the same? Perhaps in order to appreciate this, one must make a further digression.
For the early peoples there were, as it would appear, two main objects in life: (1) to promote fertility in cattle and crops, for food; and (2) to placate or ward off Death; and it seemed very obvious--even before any distinct figures of G.o.ds, or any idea of prayer, had arisen--to attain these objects by magic ritual. The rites of Baptism, of Initiation (or Confirmation) and the many ceremonies of a Second Birth, which we a.s.sociate with fully-formed religions, did belong also to the age of Magic; and they all implied a belief in some kind of re-incarnation--in a life going forward continually and being renewed in birth again and again. It is curious that we find such a belief among the lowest savages even to-day. Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Central Australian tribes, says the belief is firmly rooted among them ”that the human soul undergoes an endless series of re-incarnations--the living men and women of one generation being nothing but the spirits of their ancestors come to life again, and destined themselves to be reborn in the persons of their descendants. During the interval between two re-incarnations the souls live in their nanja spots, or local totem-centres, which are always natural objects such as trees or rocks.
Each totem-clan has a number of such totem-centres scattered over the country. There the souls of the dead men and women of the totem, but no others, congregate, and are born again in human form when a favorable opportunity presents itself.” (2)
(1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113.
(2) The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96.
And what the early people believed of the human spirit, they believed of the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation spirits also. At the great Spring-ritual among the primitive Greeks ”the tribe and the growing earth were renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead seeds, the tribe from its dead ancestors.” And the whole process projects itself in the idea of a spirit of the year, who ”in the first stage is living, then dies with each year, and thirdly rises again from the dead, raising the whole dead world with him. The Greeks called him in this stage 'The Third One' (Tritos Soter) or 'the Saviour'; and the renovation ceremonies were accompanied by a casting-off of the old year, the old garments, and everything that is polluted by the infection of death.” (1) Thus the multiplication of the crops and the renovation of the tribe, and at the same time the evasion and placation of death, were all a.s.sured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial magic. (2)
(1) Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46.
(2) It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or male members of those who died were deposited in the above-mentioned nanja spots--the idea evidently being that like the seeds of the corn the seeds of the human crop must be carefully and ceremonially preserved for their re-incarnation.
In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned--of the magical wors.h.i.+p of Bulls and Bears and Rams and Cats and Emus and Kangaroos, of Trees and Snakes, of Sun and Moon and Stars, and the spirit of the Corn in its yearly and miraculous resurrection out of the ground--there is still the same idea or moving inspiration, the sense mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the feeling (hardly yet conscious of its own meaning) of intimate relations.h.i.+p and unity with all this outer world, the instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed by the spirit of Man, if the man can only find the right ritual, the right word, the right spell, wherewith to move it. An aura of emotion surrounded everything--of terror, of tabu, of fascination, of desire.
The world, to these people, was transparent with presences related to themselves; and though hunger and s.e.x may have been the dominant and overwhelmingly practical needs of their life, yet their outlook on the world was essentially poetic and imaginative.
Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and the belief in spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being alive, the G.o.ds, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed (1)--that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being--though there might be orders and degrees of spirits (and of G.o.ds)--every such being was only conceived of, and could only be conceived of, as actually a part of Nature, dwelling in and interlaced with some phenomenon of Earth and Sky, and having no separate existence.
(1) For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC, see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.
How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and separable G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses--each with his or her well-marked outline and character and function, like the divinities of Greece, or of India, or of the Egyptian or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To this question Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations (in the Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined to adopt. It is that the figures of the supranatural G.o.ds arose from a process in the human mind similar to that which the photographer adopts when by photographing a number of faces on the same plate, and so superposing their images on one another, he produces a so-called ”composite” photograph or image.
Thus, in the photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members of the same family superposed upon one another may produce a composite image or ideal of that family type, or the portraits of a number of Aztecs or of a number of Apache Indians the ideals respectively of the Aztec or of the Apache types. And so in the mental sphere of each member of a tribe the many images of the well-known Warriors or Priests or wise and gracious Women of that tribe did inevitably combine at last to composite figures of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses--on whom the enthusiasm and adoration of the tribe was concentrated. (1) Miss Harrison has ingeniously suggested how the leading figures in the magic rituals of the past--being the figures on which all eyes would be concentrated; and whose importance would be imprinted on every mind--lent themselves to this process. The suffering Victim, bound and scourged and crucified, recurring year after year as the centre-figure of a thousand ritual processions, would at last be dramatized and idealized in the great race-consciousness into the form of a Suffering G.o.d--a Jesus Christ or a Dionysus or Osiris--dismembered or crucified for the salvation of mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man--or rather the succession of Priests or Medicine-Men--whose figures would recur again and again as leaders and ordainers of the ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the composite-image of a G.o.d in whom were concentrated all magic powers.
”Recent researches,” says Gilbert Murray, ”have shown us in abundance the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain.”
Here is the germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual representative of the glorified and composite being who exists in the mind of the tribe (just as a present-day King may be unworthy, but is surrounded all the same by the agelong glamour of Royalty). ”The real [gr qeos], tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the mountain is once climbed the G.o.d will move to the upper sky. The medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some connection with the great G.o.d more intimate than that of other men... he knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him.” (2) Thus did the Medicine-man, or Priest, or Magician (for these are but three names for one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the G.o.d.
(1) See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, ”The G.o.ds as Apparitions of the Race-Life.”
<script>