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I
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THEORIES OF
PRIMITIVE
RELIGION
BY
EV NS PRITCH RD
PROFESSOR
OF SO I L
NTHROPOLOGY
IN
THE UN IVERS ITY OF
OXFORD
OXFORD
AT
THE
CL RENDON PRESS
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i
Oxford
University
Press
Amen
House London E C 4
GL SGOW
NEW
YORK
TORONTO MEL OURNE WELLINGTON
OM Y C LCUTT M DR S K R CHI
L HORE D CC
C PE TOWN S LIS URY
N mC I m D N
KU L LUMPUR HONG KONG
Oxford University Press
965
/ : J 1 7 ~ 3 5
::1;0
3 ~ ~
P R IN T ED I N
GREAT
BRITAIN
Ai:: TH E
UNIV RSITY PR ESS
OXFORD
BY VIVIAN RI L R
PRINT R
TO TH E
UNIV RSITY
I
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FOREWORD
F
0 U R
of
these SirD. Owen Evans Lectureswere delivered
at
the University College
of
Wales, Aberystwyth,
in
th e
spring
of 1962. They
are presented almost entirely as
written for
that
occasion, though some paragraphs were not
spoken because the lectures would otherwise have exceeded
t he ti me al lot ted to me. The Lecture appearing as no.
IV
here was written at t he s am e t im e, bu t as I was asked to
give only four lectures,
it
was not delivered.
It will be appreciated that these lectures were for the ear
andnot for the eye; and also that they were spokento a highly
educated, but none the less a non-specialist, that is, n on
anthropological, audience.
Had
I been speaking to pro
fessional colleagues or even to anthropological students,
I w ou ld sometimes h av e expressed m ysel f
in
somewhat
different language, though to the same import.
In my comments on Tylor and Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, and
Pareto I have drawn heavily on articles published very many
years ago in the
Bulletin
the
Faculry
Arts
Egyptian
University Cairo),
in
w hi ch I on ce h el d t he Chair
of
Socio
logy articles
which have circulatedbetween then and now
in
departments
of
Social Anthropology in a mimeographed
form,
and
the main points
of
which are here set forth.
For criticism
and
advice I
thank Dr. R.
G. Lienhardt,
Dr.
J
H. M. Beattie, Dr. R. Needham, Dr. R. Wilson,
and
M r. M . D. McLeod.
E . E. E. -P.
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CONTENTS
I
INTRODUCTION
I
II
PSYCHOLOGICAL
THEORIES
20
III SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES
4
8
IV LEVY BRUHL
7
8
v
CONCLUSION
10 0
BIBLIOGRAPHY
12
3
INDEX
13
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INTRO U TION
T
HESE lectures examine the
manner
in which various
writers who can be regarded s anthropologists,
or
at
any
rate
s writing
in
the anthropological field, have
attempted to understand and account for the religious be-
liefs
and
practices
of
primitive peoples. I should make it clear
. at the outset that I shal l be primari ly concerned only with
theories
about
the religions
of
primitive peoples. More general
discussions
about
religion outside those limits are peripheral
to
my
subject. I shall therefore keep to what
may
broadly
be considered to be anthropological writings, and for the
most
part
to British writers.You
w
note
that our
present \
interest
is l ss in
primitive religions
than i n
the various
theories which have been put forward purporting to offer
an
explanation
of
them.
If
anyone were to ask what interest the religions of the
simpler peoples can have for us, I would. reply in the first
place
that
some
of
the most
important
political, social,
and
moral philosophers from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to
Herbert
Spencer, Durkheim, and Bergson have considered
the facts
of
primitive life to have great significance for the
understanding of social life in general; and I would remark
further
that
the men who have been most responsible for
changing the whole climate
of
thought
in our
civilization
dur ing the last century, the g reat myth-makers Darwin,
Marx-Engels, Freud, and Frazer and perhaps I should add
Comte , all showed
an
intense interest
in
primitive peoples
and
used
what
was known
about them
in their endeavours to
convince us that, though what had given solace and en
couragement in the pas t could do
so
no more, all was
not
lost; seen down the vistas
of
history the struggle
did
avail.
In the second place, I would reply
that
primitive religions
;
are species
of
the genus religion, and
that
al l who have
any
823123 B
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2 INTRODUCTION
interest in religion must acknowledge
that
a study
of
the
religious ideas
and
practices of primitive peoples, which are of
great variety, may help us to reach certain conclusions about
the
nature
of religion in general, and therefore also
about
the
so-called higher religions or historical and positive religions
or
the religions of revelation, including ou r own. Unlike
these h ig he r religions, wh ic h a re genet ically
related-
I
udaism, Christianity, and Islam, or Hinduism, Buddhism,
and J ainism-primitive religions in isolated and widely
separated parts of the world can scarcely be other than in
fiependent developments without historical relations between
I
them, so they provide all the more valuable data for a com
I parative analysis aiming
at
determining the essential charac
, teristics of religious phenomena and making general, valid,
and significant statements about them.
I am of course aware that theologians, classical historians,
Semitic scholars,
and other students
of
religion often ignore
primitive religions as being of little account, but I take
comfort in the reflection that less than a hundred years ago
Max
iiller
was b at tl in g a ga in st t he s ame c om pl ac en tl y
entrench ed forces for the recognition of the languages and
religions o f Ind ia and
China as important
for
an
under
standing oflanguage and religion in general, a fight which it
is
t ru e h as y et t o be won where are the departments of com
parati ve linguisticsand comparativereligionin this country?),
but
in which some advance has been made. Indeed I w ou ld
go further and s ay t ha t, t o u nd er st an d fully
the nature of
l : e v e a l e c ~ ~ e l i g i o n , we h ave to u nd er st an d t he nature of so
c a l l e a i J . a t u r a L [ ~ l i g i o n , for nothing could have been revealed
about
anything
men
had not
already
had a n
idea
about
that
thing. Or rather, perhaps we should say,
t h ~ J ; l i c h o J 9 m y
between natural and revealed r e l i g i o n i s : . J ) J g : ~ p - d makes for
obscurity, for there
is
a good sense in which
it
may b e s ai d
that all religions are religions
of
revelation: the world around
them and t he ir r ea so n h av e e ve rywh ere re ve al ed t o
men
something of
the
divine and of their own
nature
and destiny.
We
might
ponder
the words
of
St. Augustine: What
is
now
called the Christian religion, has existed among the ancients,
and was not absent from the beginning
of
the human race,
..
INTRODUCTION 3
u nt il C hr is t c am e in t he flesh: from which time the true
religion, which existed already, began to
be
called Christian. I
I have no hesitation
in
claiming furthermore that though
students ofthehigher religions
may
sometimes look down their
noses at us anthropologists and our primitive
religions-we
have no texts-it is we more than anyone who have brought
together the vast material
on
a s tu dy
of
which the science
of
comparative religion has been, however insecurely, founded;
and, however inadequate the anthropological theories based
on it
may
be, they could serve, and sometimes have served,
classical,Semitic, and Indo-European scholars, and also
Egyptologists
in
the interpretation of their texts.
We
shall
be reviewing some
of
these theories in t he course
of
these
lectures, so I
may
here merely say
that
I have
in mind the
impact on many learned disciplines of the writings of Tylor
and Frazer in this country and of Durkheim,
Hubert
and
Mauss, and LeVy-Bruhl ill; France. We may not today find
them acceptable,
but
in the ir time the y have played
an
important
part
in th storyof thought.
It
is not
eas t define) what we are to understancl.by re
ligion for the purp2.se of these lectures. theirempl1a-sls- ---
fu-oe-on
beliefs and practices, we might well accep lnitially
Sir Edward Tylor s minimum definition of religion though
t he re a re
diffi iiiti es
attached to it) as beliefin spiritual
. beings, but since the emphasis is rather on theories of primi
tive religion, I am not free to choose one definition rather
than
another, since I have to discuss a
number
of hypotheses
whjch go beyond Tylor s minimum definition. Some
wouldrr
include under t he re ligi ous r ub ri c s uc h topi cs as magic,
l
totemism, taboo,
and
even
witchcraft-everything
that
is, )
which may be covered by the expression primitive men
tality or wha t to t he E ur op ea n s cho la r h as a pp ea re d t o e
irrational or superstitious. I shall have in p ar ti cu la r t o m ak e :
repea1ecf references to magic, because several influential
writers do not differentiate between magic
and
religion
and
speak of the magico-religious, or regard them as genetically
related in
an
evolutionary development; others again,
1 August.
etr
i.
13.
Quoted
in
F.
M.
Miiller, Selected ssu ys onLanguage
Mythology and Religion
1881,
5.
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\ \
I NT R ODUC T I ON 5
for primitive man s beliefs an d for the origin an d develop
m en t o f religion could ever have been propounded. It is no t
just
that we now know in the light ofmodern research what
their authors could not then have known. That
of
course, is
true; bu t even on the facts available to them
it
is astounding
that so much could have been written which appears to be-
contrary to common sense. Yet these men were scholars
an d
of great learning an d ability. To comprehendwhat now seem
to be obviously faulty interpretations
an d explanations, we
would have to write a treat ise on the climate of thought of
their time, the intellectual circumstances which set bounds
.J t? their thought, a curious mixture of positivism, evolution-
J;f-: -ism; an d the remains of a sentimental religiosity. We shall
be
l\
surveying some of these theories in later lectures,
bu t
I should
like here
an d
now to commend to you as a locus classicus the
at-one-time widely read an d influential Introduction to
the
istory Religion by F. Jevons, then (1896) a teacher of
philosophy
in
the University of Durham. Religion for hi m
was a uniform evolutionary development from
totemism
animism being rather a primitive philosophical theory than
a
rm
of religious
belief l-to
polytheism to monotheism;
bu t I do not intend to discuss, or disentangle, his theories.
I only ins tance the book as the best example I know for
illustrating how erroneous theories
about
primitive religions
can be, for I believe
it
would be t rue to say that there
is
no
general, or theoretical, statement ab ou t t hem i n it which
would pass muster today. It is a collection of absurdrecon
structions, unsupportable hypotheses arid conjectures, wild
--speculations, suppositions an d assumptions, inappropriate
analogies, misunderstandings
an d
misinterpretations, and,
especially in what he wrote about totemism, just plain non
sense.
If some
of
the theories pu t before you appear rather naIve,
I would ask you to bear certain facts in mind. Anthropology
was still in its
infancy-it
has ha rdly ye t grown up. Ti ll
recendy
it
has been the
happy
hunting ground of me n of
letters an d has been speculative
an d
philosophical in a rather
old-fashioned way. If psychology c an b e said to have taken
F. Jevons,
n Introduction to
the
istory Religion
18g6, p. 206.
4 I NT R ODUC T I ON
whilst distinguishing between them, give a similar type of
explanation of both.
Victorian an d Edwardian scholars were intensely inter-
ested in religions of
rude
peoples, largely, I suppose, because
they faced a crisis
in their own;
an d
many books an d articles
have been written on the subject . Indeed, were I to refer to
all their authors , these lectures would
be
clogged with a
recitation of names an d tides. Th e alternative I shall adopt
is
to select those writers who have been most influential or
who are most characteristic of one
or
other way of analysing
the facts, an d discuss their theories as representative
of
varieties of anthropological thought. What
ma y
be lost by
this procedure in detailed treatment
is
compensated for by
greater clarity.
Theories of primitive religion ma y conveniendy be con
sidered under the headings of psychological an d sociologi
_ _ _ the psychological being further divided in to - an d here I
use Wilhelm Schmidt s terms-intellectualist and emotion-
_-----alist theories. This classification, which also accords roughly
with historical succession, will serve its expository purpose,
though some writers fall between these headings
or
come
under more than one of them.
M y t re at me nt o f them may seem to you severe an d nega
tive. I think you will no t regard my strictures as too severe
when you see how inadequate, even ludicrous, is m uch o f
what has been written in explanation
of
religious phenomena.
Laymenmaynot be aware
that
most ofwhat has been written
in
the past, an d with some assurance, an d
is
still trotted ou t
in colleges
an d
universities, about animism, totemism,
magic, c., has been shown to
be
erroneous or
at
l e s ~
dubious. My task has therefore to
be
critical
rather
than
constructive, to show why theories
at
one time accepted are
unsupportable an d
had
or have, to be rejected wholly o r i n
part. If I can persuade you
that
much is still very uncertain
an d obscure, my labour will no t have been in vain. You w
then no t be under any illusion that we have final answers to
the questions posed.
Indeed, looking backwards, it is sometimes difficult to
understand howm an y o f the theories pu t forward to account
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6 I N T R O D U C T I O N
th e first steps towards scientific autonomy round about 1860
an d
no t to have rid itself
of
the trammels
of
its philosophical
past till forty or fifty years later, social anthropology, which
took its first steps at about the same time, has yet more
recently shed similar encumbrances.
It
is
a remarkable fact that none
of
the anthropologists
whose theories
about
primitive religion have been most in
fluential
ever been near a
p . i ~ t i v e
people. It is as though
a chemist hacf rever1irouglifit necessary-tOenter a labora
tory. They had consequently to rely for their information on
what
European explorers, missionaries, administrators,
an d
traders told them. Now, I want to make it clear
that
this
evidence is highly suspect. I do not say that it was fabricated,
though sometimes it was; an d even such famous travellers
as Livingstone, Schweinfurth,
an d
Palgrave were given to
gross carelessness. But much o f i t was false
an d
almost all
ofit was unreliable and, by modern standards of professional
research, casual, superficial, ou of
e ~ s p e c t i v e ,
o)ltof
c ) E < ; ~ t ;
an d
to some extent this was t rue
everiof
th e
earlier profes
sional anthropologists. I say with the greatest deliberation
about early descriptions of the simpler peoples ideas an d
behaviour,
an d
even more
of
the interpretations of them pu t
forward, that statements cannot be taken at their face value
an d
should n ot be accepted without critical examination
of
their sources an d without weighty corroborative evidence.
Anyone who has done research among primitive peoples
earlier visited by explorers an d others can bear witness that
their reports are only too often unreliable, even
about
mat
ters which
can
be noted by
bare
observation,while about such
matters as religious beliefs which
c an no t b e
so
noted their
statements may be qui te untrue . I give a single example
from a region with which I
am well acquainted.
In
view of
recent papers an d extensive monographs on the religions of
the Northern Nilotes, it is strange to read what the famous
explorer Sir Samuel Baker said about them in an address to
,the Ethnological Society of London
in
1866: Without an y
exception, they are without a beli ef in a Supreme Being,
nei ther have they an y form
of
worship or idolatry; nor is
th e darkness
qf
the ir minds enl ightened by even a
ra y
of
I
r
i
r
\
,
t
I N T R O D U C T I O N
7
superstition. Th e mind is as stagnant as the morass which
forms its
puny
world. l As early as 1871 Sir Edward Tylor
was able to show from the evidence even then available that
this could no t
be
true.
2
Statements
about
a people s religious
beliefs must always
be
treated with the greatest caution, for
we are then dealing with what ~ u r o p e ~ no r native
can directly observe, with C O I J ~ < ; p i o n s ,
i m a g ~ s w Q i . q ~
which
require for understanding a thorough knowledge
of
apeople s
langUage. an.d also
an
aw.arenes
.
s.of
_ . t . b e . ~ n t i r ~ ~ y ~ ~ e _ ~ 9 f i d e a s _
(
\\:
of which a n y ~ j : i c l J l a d i e . l i e L i s _ . p - a r t
for it m ay b e meaning-
-Tess wnen-dhrorced from the set o f beliefs an d practices to.
which it belongs. Very rarely could it be said
t h at i n
addition
to these qualifications the observer ha d a scientific habit
of
mind. It is true that some missionaries were well educated
m en a nd h ad l ea rn t to speak native languages with fluency,
bu t speaking a language fluently is very differe., lt f ~ . o m under-
standing it, as I have often obserVed in converse-between \
\ Europeans
an d
Africans
an d
Arabs.
Fo r
here there is
anew
\
1) ,ca 1se.of misunderstanclip.g,._a
frc:,s t:...
haza.rd, N a t i v e . a n d . )
missionary are using the same words bu t the. connotations.
are different , they carry different loads
of
zrieaillng:
someone who has not made an intensive study of na t ive [
institutions, habits, an d customs i n t he native s
oWn
milieu i
( that is, well away from adminis trat ive, missionary,
an d
trading posts) at best there can emerge a sort of middle,- . c
f ld ialect
in which it is possible to communicate about matters -
of
common experience an d interes t. We need only take for
example the use
of
a nat ive word for ou r God .
Th e mean-
ing of the word for the nat ive speaker ma y have only the
slightest coincidence,
a nd i n
a very restricted context, with
the missionary s conception
of
God. Th e late Professor Hocart
cites
an
actual example of such misunderstandings, from
Fiji: \ .
W he n t he missionary speaks of God as ndin he means that
all other gods ar e non-existent. Th e native understands that He
is
the only effective, reliable god; the others ma y be effective at
S. W. Baker,
T he
Races
of
the Nile Basin ,
Transaction
the Ethnological
Society
London N.S.
v (r867), 231.
2 E. B.
Tylor,
Primitive ulture 3rd
edit. (18g1), i. 423-4.
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-
8 INTRODUCTION
times, but are not to be depended upon. This is but one example
ofhow the teacher may mean one thing and his pupil understand
another. Qenerally the
t w 0 E < t J : ~ e _ ~ ~ Q l t i . . I l ~ e
b l i ~ s f u l l y i g n o r a n t of
the misunderstanding;-11lere is no remedy
for
i t, except in the
m i s ~ ~ i n g a thorough knowledge of native customs
and beliefs.
I
r
Furthermore, the reports.used
by
scholars to illustrate
I
their theories were not--only h i g . ~ l y i I . ~ < < : g u a t e but-and
I this is what chiefly relates to the topic of these lectures-
they were also highly selectAve . What travellers liked to put
i on paper
was
what
most struck
them
as curious, crude, and
I sensational. Magic, barbaric religious rites, superstitious
beliefs, took precedence over the daily empirical, humdrum
routines which comprise nine-tenths of the life of primi
tive man and are his chiefintexest andco:llcern: his hunting
and fishing and collecting of roots and fruits, his cultivating
and herding , his building, his fashioning of tools and
\ weapons, and
in
general his occupation in his daily affairs,
domestic
and
public. These were
not
allotted the space they
fill, in both time and importance, in the lives
of
those whose
way of
life was being described. Consequently, by..$Yins-__
i
undue
attention--to what they regarded as curious supersti
t ions, the occult and mysterious, observers tended to paint
a p ic tu re in which the mystical (in Levy-Bruhl' s sense of
that word) took up a far greater portion of the canvas than
i t has
in
the lives of primitive peoples,
so
that the empiri
cal, the ordinary, the common-sense, the workaday world
seemed to have only a secondaryimportance, and the natives
. were made to look childish and in obvious need of fatherly
J administration
and
missionary zeal, especially
there was
_ \
ayelcome bi t
of obscenity in their rites.
.-/
T ~ e n
the scholars got to work on the pieces of information
I I prOVIded for them haphazardly and from all over the world,
i
and built them into books with such picturesque ti tles as
1
The Golden
Bough and
The
ysticRose. These books presented
composite image,
or
r a t h ~ a r i c a t u r e , ofthe primitive
mind:
superstitious, childlike, incapable of eithercritical or sustained
thought. Examples of this procedure, this promiscJlOUS-...use
A. M. Hocart,
Mana , an
1914,46.
INTRODUCTION 9
of
evidence, might be culled from
any
writer
of
the period:
thus
The Amaxosa drink the gall ofan ox to make themselves fierce.
The notorious Mantuana drank the gall ofthirty chiefs believing
it
would render him strong. Many peoples, for instance the
Yorubas, believe that the 'blood
is
the life'. The New Caledonians
eat slain enemies
to
acquire courage and strength. The
flesh
of a
slain enemy is eaten in Timorlaut to cure impotence. The people
ofHalmahera drink the blood ofslain enemies in order to become
brave. In Amboina, warriors drink the blood ofenemies they have
killed to acquire their courage. The people of Celebes drink the
blood of enemies to make themselves strong. The natives of the
Dieri and neighbouring tribes will eat a man and drink his
blood
in order to acquire
his
strength; the fat
is
rubbed on sick people}
And
so
on an d on and on through volume after volume.
How well was this procedure satirized
by
Malinowski, to ,
whom
must go
much of
the credi t for having outmoded by
ridicule
and
example
both
the sort of inquiries which had
previously been prosecuted among the simpler peoples
and
the use scholars had
made of
them.
He
speaks
of
the lengthy
,litanies of threaded statement,
~
make us
n t r o p o l o ~ t s
l silly
and t h ~ s a , \ , , ~ g ~ J _ Q o k - r i d i G - 1 : l r o U S ;
such as
Among
the Brobdignacians sic whena
man
meets his
mother-in-law,-
the two abuse each other and each retires with a black eye';
When a Brodiag encounters a polar
bear
he runs away and
sometimes the
bear
follows'; In old Caledoniawhen a native
accidentally finds a whisky bottle by the road-side
he
empties
it at one gulp, after which he proceeds immediate ly to look
for another.'2 \
We have observed that selection on the level of bare (
observation
had
already prOCtucee(an initial distortion.
The
_
~ - - - -
'sctsSOIs-a iQ-paste method of c o m p i l a t i 6 i i - l 5 y ~ m c h a i r
scholars
at
home led to further distortion.
On
the whole, they
lackedany sense
2 f . b . i s t o r : i c a l ~ G . . i ~ m ,
the rules--anhistorian--
11
applies ~ l u a t i n g documentary evidence. Then, a
false impression was created by observers of primitive peoples
giving undue prominence to the mystical
in
their lives, it was
I A. E . Crawley, The
ysticRose
1927 edit. (revised
and
enlarged
by
Theodore Besterman),
134-5.
2
B.
Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society 1926, p. 126.
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developments, decadence, survivals, o rby some other ev Q1 U:::_
Jionary trEk. For early anthropological theories, as you will
see in
my
next lecture, not only sought explanations ofprimi-
tive religion in psychological origins, bu t also attempted to
place it in an evolutionary gradation or as a stage in social
development. A chain oflogical developmentwasdeductively
constructed.
In
the absence
of
historical records
t
could
not
be
said withany conviction that
in
any particular instance his
torical development corresponded to the logical paradigm-
indeed from the middle
of
la st century there raged a bat tl e
between those in favour
of
the theory
of
progression
and
those
in favour of the theory of degradation, the former holding
that
primitive societies were
in
a state
of
early and, retarded
though it might be, progressive development towards civili
zation, and the latter
that
they had once been in a more
highly civilized condition and ha d regressed from it. The
debate especially concerned religion, it being held by the
one
party that
what they considered to be
rather
elevated
theological ideas found among some primitive peoples were
a first glimpse
of
truth
that
would eventually lead to higher
'things, and by the other party that those beliefs were a relic
o f an earlier and more civilized state. Herbert Spencer pre
served
an
open
mind on
this
issue 1 but
the other anthropo
logists, except Andrew Lang and to some extentMaxMiiller,
and sociologists were progressionists.
In
the absence
of
his torical evidence to show the phases rude societies have
in fact passed through, they were assumed to be of
an
ascend
ing,
and
very often
an
invariable, order. All
that
was required
was to find an example somewhere, no matterwhere, which
more
or
less
corresponded to one
or
other stage
of
logical de
velopment and to insert it as an illustration, or as the writers
seemed to regard it, as proof, of the historical validity of
this or
that
scheme ofunilinear progression. Were I address
ing a purelyanthropological audience, even to allude to such
past procedures might be regarded as flogging dead horses.
The difficulties were, I believe, i n G r e ~ s e d and the resultant
distortion
made
greater, by the ~ i _ : Q i I l g . x > - f . - s p c ~ to
-dq'cnJ?'i'frlln itive religions,
t r ~ t l i
mind
H. Spencer,
h
rinciples Sociology 1882, 106.
10 INTRODUCTION
embossed by scrap-book treatment, which was dignified by
being labelled
t :.e
'comparative method'. This consisted,with
respect to our
subject,
of
taking from the first-hand records
about primitive peoples, and willy-nil ly from all over the
world, wrenching the facts yet further from their contexts,
.
- . . ._u
__
. = =
only what referred to the s trange, weird, m y s t i c a l ~ super-
stitious use
which words we
may and
piec ing the bits
together in a monstrous mosaic, which was supposed to por
tray
the mind o - r - - p n m m v e - ~ m a n . Primitive man was thus
made
to appear, especially in Levy-Bruhl's earlier books, as
quite irrational (in the usual sense ofthat word), living in a
mysterious world of doubts and fears, in terror of the super
natural
and
ceaselessly occupied
in
coping with it. Such a
picture, I think any anthropologist of today would agree,
is
a tQ@1 distortion.
As
a matte r of fact, the 'comparat ive method' when so
used is a misnomer. There was precious little comparison,
, we
mean
a lytical c:pmparison. There wasmerelya 'E)iir;ging
together of items which appeared to have something in
coIIlmon. We can indeed say for
t
that i t
enaoledthewriters
to make preliminary classifications
in
which vast numbers
of
observations could be placed under a limited number
of
rubrics, thereby introducing some sort of order;
~ ~ u j h i
_ ~ _ l ~ e
But
t
was an ~ ~ ~ r a W e r than a compara
tIve metnbd, almost what psychologists used to cal l the
a n ~ c d o t a l IIlethod'. A large number of miscellaneous exam
ples W e r e < b r ~ g h t
together to i llus trate some general idea
and in support
of
the author's thesis about that idea. There
7was
no attempt to test theories by unselected examples.
The
~ ~ s t
elementary precautions were neglected as wild surmise
followed on wild surmise (called hypotheses).
The
simplest
rules
of
inductive logic (methods
of
agreement, difference,
and concomitant variations) were ignored. Thus, to give a
single example, if God is, as Freud would have i t, a projec
tion of the idealized and sublimated image of the father, then
clearly
it
is necessary to show
that
conceptions of deities vary
\ ~ i t the very different places the father has in the family in
different types of society. Then again, negative instances, if
considered at all, which was rare, were dismissed as later
INTRODUCTION
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\-
2 I NT R ODUC T I ON
of
the primitive was
so
different from ours
that
its ideas could
no t
be expressed in
ou r
vocabularies and categories. Primi
tive religion was 'animism', 'pre-animism', 'fetishism', an d
the like.
Or
terms were taken over from native languages,
as though none could be found in
ou r
own language re
sembling
what
ha d
to be described, such terms
as
taboo
(from
Polynesia), mana (from Melanesia), totem (from the Indians
o f N or th
America), an d baraka (from the Arabs
of North
Africa). I am
no t
denying that the semantic difficulties in
---a-anslation are great.
They
are considerable enough between,
shall we say, French an d English; bu t when some primitive
language has to be rendered into
ou r
own tongue they are,
and for obvious reasons,
much
more formidable.
They
are in
fact the major problem we are confronted with in the subject
we are discussing,
so
I hope I
m ay b e
allowed to pursue the
'\.
matter
a little further. an ethnographer says t ha t i n the
I: \
language
of
a Central African people the word
ango
means
dog, he would
be
entirely correct,
bu t
he has only to a very
~ m i t e d
degree thereby conveyed the meaning
of ango
for
what
it m e a B S t o ~ who use the word is very differ
en t
to
what
'dog' means to
an
Englishman.
Th e
significance
d W have for
~ t h e y
hunt with them, ffiey
ea t
tnem;
an d so o n -i s n ~ ~ m . ~ ~ i g n i f i . c a n c e . . t b . e 1 l a \ l e f o r _ u s . Ho w
much
greater
is t h e ~ l s p l a c e m e n t
likely to be whenwecome toterms
which have a I ? ~ ~ y s i ~ ~ ~ e r e n c e
On e
can, as has been
done, use native w o r d s ~ m d then demonstrate their meani .Ig
by their u s ~ i n d i f f e r e n 1 : q ~ n a U s i t u a _ t i o n s . But there
is
clearly a limit to this expedient. Reduced to an absurdity it
would
mean
writing an account of a people in their own ver-:
n a c u l a r . ~ h e
alternatives are perilous.
On e
can standardize
a word taken from a primitive vernacular, like totem:ana use
it
to describe phenomena among other peoples which re
semble
what
it refers to in its originarl:i 'ome; bu t this can
~ h e cause Qf
great confusion, because
t h e ~ i J l a n c e s .
ma y s u ~ f i c i a l and the phenomena in question so dl
~ e r s i f i e d t h a t tIreteirn loses all meaning,
which mdeed
as
Goldenweiser showed,rJias beent:6:efate
of
theword
totem
rIA. A. Goldenweiser,
Early Civilization
1921, pp. 282
fr
See al so
his
paper For m
and Content in Totemism',
American Anthropologist
N S xx (19
8
).
l
i
t,
I NT R ODUC T I ON 3
I emphasize this predicament because it has some impor
tance for an understanding of theories of primitive religion.
One may, indeed, find some word
or
phrase in one's own
language
by
which to translate a nat ive concept .
We m ay
translate some word
of
theirsoy god
or
'spirit'
or
'soul'
or
\ .::
'ghost',
bu t
then we have to ask
no t
only
what
theword we
so
,
y ~
__
\
translate means to the natives
bu t
also
what
thewordb y w h i c h /
.
it
is
translated means to the
translator
and his readers. We I
have to
dcterffiineadouble
_
e : E i l l g ; ~ ; c i . ~ i s t t l f e r e
can
be no more
than
a ~ r t i a l overlapof meaning between the
two
w o r ~
emantic difficulties
re
always considerable an d
ca n
only b e p overcome. he p roblem t hey p resent
m ay b e
viewed also in reverse, in the
a tt em pt b y
missionaries to
translate the Bible into native tongues.
It
was
ba d
enough
when Greek metaphysical concepts
ha d
to
be
expressed
Latin, and,
as
we know, misunderstandings arose from this
transportation
of
concepts from the one language into
th e
other.
Then
the Bible was translated into various other Euro-
I
pean languages, English, French, German, Italian, &c., an d
I have found it an i lluminating experiment to take some
portion
of
it, shall we say a Psalm, an d see how these different
languages have stamped it with their particular characters.
Those who know Hebrew or some other Semit ic language
ca n
complete the game
by
then translating these versions
back into its idiom an d seeing
what
they look like then.
H ow m uc h more desperate is the case of primitive lan
guages I have
read
somewhere
of
the predicament
of
mis
sionaries to the Eskimoes in trying to render into their tongue
the word ' lamb',
as
in
the sentence 'Feed
my
lambs'. You
can,
of
course, render it
by
reference to some animal with
which the Eskimoes are acquainted,
by
saying, for instance,
'Feed
my
seals', bu t clearly if you do
so
you replace the
r e p r e s e ~ i o n of what
a lamb was for a
Hebrew
shepherd
oY fl:la t of
what a seal may
be
to
an
Eskimo.
Ho w is
one
to convey the meaning of the statement that the horses of
the Egyptians
ar e
flesh and not spirit' to a people which
has never seen a horse
or
anything like one,
an d ma y
also
have no concept corresponding to the Hebrew conception of
7/21/2019 E. E. Evans-Pritchard-Theories of Primitive Religion (1965)
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I Bergson
The
Two Sources Morality
and Religion,
1956 edit. p 103.
2 Religion and the Anthropologists Blackfriars Apr. 1 960 . R eprinted in
Essays in Social
Anthropology,
1962
been the persons whose writings have been most influen
t ia l h av e b ee n at the time they wrote agnostics or atheists.
Primitive religion was with regard to its validity no different
from any other religious faith
an
illusion. It was notjust
that
they asked as Bergson
pu t
it how
it is
that beliefs
an d
prac
tices which are anything bu t reasonable could have been
an d still are accepted by reasonable beings .I It was rather
that implicit in their thinking were the optimistic convic
tions
of
the eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers that
people are stupid a nd b ad only because they have
ba d
in
stitutions an d they have ba d institutions only because they
are ignorant an d superstitious an d t he y a re i gn or an t an d
superstitious because they have been exploited in the name
of
religion
by
cunning an d avaricious priests an d the unscru
p ul ou s classes w hi ch h av e s up po rt ed t he m. We s houl d I
think realize what was the intention of many of these scholars
we are to understand their theoretical constructions. They
sought
an d
found
in
primitive religions a weapon which
could they thought
be
use d w it h dea dl y. effec t a ga in st
Christianity. Ifprimitive religion could be explained away as
an intellectual aberration as a mirage-induced
by
emotional
stress o r b y its social function it was implied that the higher
religions could be discredited an d disposed
o f i n
t he s am e
w ~ h i s
intention
is
scarcely concealed
in
some cases-
F r ~ _ ~ r King an d Clodd for example. I do no t doubt their
sincerity and as I have indicated elsewhere 2 they have
my
sympathy though not my assent. However whether they
were right or wrong is beside the point which is t ha t t he
impassioned rationalism
of
the time has coloured their assess
ment
of
primitive religions
and
has given their writings as
we r ea d t he m today a flavour of smugness which one may
find either irritating or risible. _
Religious beliefwas to these anthropologists absurd an d
it
is so to most anthropologists
of
yesterday an d today. But
some explanation of t he a bs ur di ty s ee me d t o b e r eq ui re d
a nd i t was offered in psychological or sociological terms. It
I
14 I NT R ODUC T I ON
spirit? These are trite examples. Ma y I give two m or e com
plicated ones? How do-yo.1l..tr.anslateinto Hottentot Though
_
.
I speak with the tongues
of men
an d
of
angels an d have no t
charity ? In the first place you have to determine what
the passage
meant
to St. Paul s hearers; and apart from
t he
tongues of m en a nd of angels what exegetical learning has
gone to the elucidation of eros,
agape,
an d caritas Then you
have to find equivalents in Hottentot and since there are
n on e y ou d o t he best y ou c an . Or h ow do y ou render into
an Amerindian language I n the beginning was the word ?
... Even in its English form the meaning can o nl y b e se t f or th
~
theological disquisition. Missionaries have battled hard
an d with great sincerity to overcome these difficulties bu t
in my experience much of what they t e ~ ~ 1 1 . n a t i Y : e s j ~ _ 9 . 1 A ~
. u . n i u t d J i Z i Q ~ e to those among whomthey labour a nd m an y
of them would I think recognize this. The solution often
adopted
is
t o t ra ns fo rm t he mi nd s
of
native children into
European minds
bu t
t he n this
is
only i n a ppea ranc e a
solution. I must ha vi ng I ho pe b ro ug ht this missionary
problem to your attention now leave it for these lectures are
n ot o n missiology a fascinating field
of
research unhappily
as yet little tilled.
Nor do I t he re for e discuss t he m or e g en er al q ue st ion of
translation any further here for it cannot be treated priefly.
We all knowthe tag traduttore, traditore . I mention the matter
in my introductory lecture partly b ec aus e we h av e to bear
in mind in estimating theories of primitive religion what
the words used in them meant to the scholars who used them.
I f
one is to understand the interpretations
of
primitive men
tality they
pu t
forward one has to know t he ir own me n
tality broadly where they stood; to enter into their way of
looking at things a way
of
thei r class sex
an d
period. As far
as religion goes they all had as far as I know a religious
background in one form
or
another. To mention some names
which are most likely to be familiar to you: Tylor
ha d
been
brought
up
a Quaker Frazer a Presbyterian
Marett in
the
Church of
England Malinowski a Catholic while Durkheim
Levy-Bruhl a nd F re ud h ad a Jewish background; bu t with
one
or
two exceptions whatever the background
may
have
I NT R ODUC T I ON
15
I
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Christian theology, history, exegesis, apologetics, symbolic
thought,
and
ritual, they would have be en much better
p la ce d to assess accounts of primitive religious ideas
and
practices. But it was rare indeed that those scholars who set
themselves up as authorities on primitive religion showed in
their interpretations that they had more than a superficial
understanding
of
the historical religions
and
of
wha t the
ordinary worshipper in them believes, what meaning what
he does h as for h im,
and
h ow h e
feels
w he n h e does i t.
What
I h ave said does not imply
that
the anthropologist.
h s to h av e a r el igi on
of
his own, and I t hi nk we shou ld be
clear
on
this p oin t
at
the outset. He is
not
concerned,
qu
anthropologist, with the t ruth or falsity of religious thought. ,
As I u nd er st an d t he m at te r, t he re is no possibility of his
knowin whether the spiritual beings
of
primitive religions or ;
of any others have any existence or not,
and
since
that
is the
case he cannot take the question into consideration.
The
be
liefs are for
him
sociologicalfacts, not theological facts,
and
his
sole concern
is
with th eir relatio n to each o ther and to o ther
social facts. His problems are scientific, not metaphysical or
ontological. The method he employs is that now often called
the phenomenological one a comparative study
of
beliefs
and
rites, such
as
god, sacrament,
and
sacrifice, to determine
their mean in g and social significance. The validity of the
belief.lies in the d omain
of
what
may
broadly
be
designated
the philosophy of religion.
It
was precisely because so many
anthropological writers did take up a theological position,
a lb ei t a n eg at iv e and implicit one, that they felt that
an
explanation of p ri mi ti ve rel igi ous p he no me na i n c au sa l
terms was required, going,
it
seems to me, b ey on d th e leg iti
mate bounds
of
the subject.
Later I shall em ba rk on a g en er al r evi ew
of
anthropo
logical theories
of relig io n. Permit me to say
that
I ha ve read
t he books I sh al l c ri ti ciz e, for o ne finds on ly too of te n that
students accept what o the rs h av e w ri tt en about wha t
an
au th o r wro te instead of read in g the author himself Levy
Bruhl s books, for example, have time and again been grossly
misrepresented by persons who, I
am
sure, have read them
either not at all or not with diligence). In making this review
823123 C
INTRODU TION
was th e intention of writers on primitive religion to explain
it by its origins, so the explanations would obviously account
for the essential features
of
all and every religion, including
th e h ig her on es. Eith er exp licitly or implicitly, explanation
of the religion of primitives was made out to hold for the
origins
of
all that was called early religion and hence
of
the
faith
of
Israel and,
by
implication,
that
of
Christianity which
arose from it. Thus,
as
Andrew Lang put i t, th e theoristwh o
believes in ancestor-worship
as
the key of all the creed s will
see in Jehovah a d ev elop ed ancestral g host, or a kind
of
fetish-god , attached to a
stone perhaps
an ancient sepul
chral stele of some desert sheikh. The exclusive admirer of
the hypothesis
of
Totemism will fin d evidence for his b elief
in
worship of t he g ol de n c al f
and
the bulls.
The
partisan of
n ature-wo rship will insist on Jeho v ah s con nectio n with
storm, thunder, and the fire of Sinai. 1
W e m ay, i nd ee d, w ond er w hy t he y did n ot tak e as their
first field
of
study the higher religions about whose history,
theology,
and
rites far more was k no wn than of the religions
of the p rimitives, thu s p ro ceed in g fro m the b etter k no wn to
the less known. They may to some e xt en t h av e i gn or ed t he
higher religions to avoid controversy
and
embarrassment in
the somewhat delicate circumstances then obtaining, but it
was chiefly because they wanted to discover the origin
of
re
ligion, the essence
of
it, and they thought that this would be
found
in
very primitive societies. However some of them may
have protested that b y o rigin they d id not mean earliest in
time
but
simplest in structure, the implicit assumption in
their arguments was
that
what was simplest in structure must
h ave b een
that
from which more developed forms evolved.
T hi s a mb ig ui ty i n t he c on ce pt
of
o ri gi n ha s c au se d m uc h
confusion in a nt hr opol ogy. I say no m or e
about
it at this
stage but I will r ev er t to it, and to o ther g en eral matters so
far briefly touched on, in my final lecture, by w hic h tim e I
shall h av e
had an
o pp ortun ity to p lace so me examp les of
anthropological theories
of
religion before you. We m ay,
however, note here
tha t had
the authors whose writings we
a re go in g to e xa mi ne read at a ll d ee pl y i nt o, s ha ll we say,
Andrew Lang,
aking
Religion 1898, p. 294.
INTRODU TION
7
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times not b ee n k ep t distinct even i n t he m inds
of
good
scholars.
So
much
by way of some introductoryremarks whichwere
necessary before embarking
on
our voyage into
an
ocean of
past thought. As is th e case with any
an d
every science we
shall find o n man y a n isle the graves of shipwrecked sailors;
but
when welook back onthe whole history
ofhuman
thought
w e n ee d not despair because as y et we k no w
so
little of the
nature
of
primitive religion or indeed of religion
in
general
and
because we have to dismiss as merely conjectural merely
plausible theories purporting to explain it.
Rather
we mu st
take courage and pursue our studies in the spirit
of
the dead
sailor
of
the Greek Anthology epigram:
A shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast
Bids
you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark when
we
were lost
Weathered the gale.
18 INTRODU TION
we shall find
that
it will often be unnecessary for me to point
out the inadequacies of one or otherpoint
of
view because the
required criticism is contained in the writings of otherauthors
men tion ed later. This b eing
so
may
be
w ell t o a dd and
I
am
sure y ou will agree
tha t i t
must n ot b e supposed
that
t he re c an b e on ly o ne s or t of general statement which can be
made about
social phenomena
and t hat
others m ust be
wrong if that one is right. There is no pr r reason why these
theories p urp ortin g to exp lain p rimitive relig io n in terms
respectively of
ratiocination emotion
and
social function
should
not
all b e correct each sup plemen ting the o th ers
t ho ug h I do n ot be lie ve
that
they are. Interpretation can be
on different levels. Likewise there is n o reaso n why sev eral
different explanations of the same type o r o n the same level
should not a ll b e r ig ht
so
long as they do not contradict each
other for each may explain different features of t he s am e
phenomenon. In point
of f
act however I find all the theories
we shall examine tog ether n o more than plausible
and
even
as they have been propounded unacceptable in t hat they
contain contradictions
and
other logical inadequacies or in
that they cannot as stated be proved either true or false or
finally and most to the p oint in tha t ethnographic evidence
invalidates them.
A f ina l w or d: som e p eo pl e t od ay fi nd it embarrassing to
hear peoples described as primitives or natives and even
more
so
to hear
them
spoken of as savages. But I am some
times obliged to use the designations
ofmy
authors who wrote
in the robust language
of
a time wh en o ffen ce to the p eo ples
they wrote about could scarcely be given the good time
of
Victorian prosperity
and
progress and one
may
add smug
ness o ur po mp o fy esterd ay . But th e words are u sed by me
~ w h a t
e b e r ~ a value-free sense anathey are etym o=-
logically u n o b j e c t i o n a b l ~ e th e use of t he w or d
primitive to describe peoples living in small-scale societies
w it h a s im pl e m at er ia l c ul tu re and lacking literature is too
f ir ml y e st ab li she d to b e elimi;nated. T hi s
is
unfortunate
because
no
word has caused greater confusion
in
anthropo
logical writings as you will see for it c an have a logical
and a chronological sense and t he tw o senses ha ve some-
INTRODU TION
19
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PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES
/
HE theory of President de Brosses, a contemporary
and correspondent of Voltaire, that religion originated
in fetishism, was accepted unt il the middle of last
century. The thesis, taken
up
by Comte,z was that fetishism,
. the worship, according to Portuguese sailors, of inanimate
things and
of
animals
by
the coastal Negroes of West Mrica,
developed into polytheism and polytheism into monotheism.
It
was replaced
by
theories, couched
in
intellectualist terms
and
under
the influence of the associationalist psychology of
the t ime, which may
be
designated as the ghost theory and
the soul theory, both taking
it
for granted
that
primitive
man
is
essentially rational, though his attempts to explain puzzling
phenomena are crude and fallacious.
But before these theories became generally accepted they
had to contest the field with others of the nature-myth school,
a contest all the more bitterly fought in that both were of the
same intellectualist genre. I discuss very briefly nature
myth account
of
the origin of religion first, partly because
it was first in time, and also because
what
happened later
was a reaction to animistic theories,nature mythology having
ceased, at any rate in this country, to have any following
and significance.
The
nat ll re-myth school was predominant ly a German
school, and
t
w mostly concerned with Indo-European
religions, its thesis being that the gods of antiquity, and by
implication gods anywhere and
at
all times, were no more
than personified
natural
phenomena : sun , moon, stars,
dawn, the spring renewal, mighty rivers, &c. The most
powerful representative of this school was Max Muller (son
Ch.
R.
de Brosses, u
Culle
des
dieux fttiches
au
parallete l anciennereligion
l Egypte
avec
la
religion
actuelle
la
Nigritie
17
6
0.
2 Comte, Cours philosophic positive 1908 edit., 52 -54:e les:on.
J
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 21
of the romantic poet Wilhelm Muller), a
German
scholar
of
/
the solar-myth b r a n c l ~ ~ c h o o l ( the various branches did .
a good dealof wrangling among themselves), who spent most
of
his life
at
Oxford, where he was Professor and a Fellow
of
All Souls. He was a linguist of quite exceptional ability, one
of
the leading Sanskritists
of
his time,
and in
general a
man
of
great erudition; and he has been most unjustly decried. He
was
not
prepared to go
as
far
as
some of his more extreme
German colleagues,
not
just because
at
Oxford in those days
it was dangerous to be an agnostic, but from conviction, for
he was a pious and sentimental
Lutheran; but
he got fairly
near their position, and, by tacking and veering in his many
books to avoid it, he rendered his thought sometimes ambi-
guous and opaque.
In
his view, as I understand it, men have
always had
an
intuition of the divine, the idea of the Infi
nite his
word for
God deriving
from sensory experiences;
so we do not have to seek itssource in primitive revelation or
in
a religious instinct
or
faculty, as some people then did..
All human knowledge comes through
th e
senses,
that of
touch giving the sharpes t impression
of
reality,
and
all
reasoning is based
on
them, and this is true of religion also: )
nihil in fide quod non
ante
fuerit in sensu Now, things which are
intangible, like the sun and the sky, gave
men
the idea of the .
infinite and also furnished the materia l for deities. Max
Muller di d not wish to be understood as suggesting that /
rel igion began by men deifying
grand natural
objects,
but
rather
that these gave him a feeling of the infinite and also
served as symbols for it.
Mullerwas chiefly interested in the gods ofIndia and ofthe
classical world, though he tried his
hand
at
the interpreta-
[../
tion of some primitive material and certainly believed that
his explanations had general validity. His thesis was that the
infinite, once the idea had arisen, could only be thoughtofin /
metaphor and symbol, which could only
be
taken from what
seemed majestic in the known world, such as the heavenly
bodies, or rather their attributes. But these attributes then
lost their original metaphorical sense and achieved autonomy
by becoming personified as deities in their own right . The
nomina became numina So religions, of this sort
at
any rate,
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22
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES
might be described as a disease
of
language , a pithy but
unfortunate expression which later Muller tried to explain
away but never quite lived down.
It
follows, he held,
that
the only way we can discover the meaning
of
the religion
of
early
man
is by philological
and
etymological research,
which restores to the names of gods and the stories told about
them the ir or iginal sense. Thus , Apollo loved
Daphne;
Daphne fled before him and was changed into a laurel tree.
This legendmakes no sense till weknow
that
originallyApollo
was a solar deity, and Daphne, the Greek name for the
laurel, or rather the bay t ree, was the name for the dawn.
This tells us the originalmeaningof the myth: the sun chasing
away the dawn.
Muller deals with belief in the human soul and its ghostly
form in a similar manner.
When men
wished
to
express a
distinction between the body and something theyfelt in them
other
than
the body, the name
that
suggested itself was
breath, something immaterial
and
obviously connected with
life. Then this word psyche came to express the principle
of life, and then the soul, the mind, the sel After death the
psyche went into Hades, the place
of
the invisible. Once the
opposition of body to soul had thus been established in lan
guage and thought, philosophy began its work on i t, arid
spiritualistic and materialistic systems of philosophy arose;
and all this to put together again what language had severed.
So language exercises a tyranny over thought, and
thought
is always struggling against it,
bu t
in vain. Similarly, the
word for ghost originally meant breath, and the word for
shades (of the departed) meant shadows. They were at first
figurative expressions which eventually achieved concrete
ness.
There can be no doubt that Muller
and
his fellow nature
mythologists carried their theories to the point of absurdity;
he claimed that the siege of Troy was no more than a solar
myth: and to reduce. this sort
of
interpretation to farce,
someone, I believe, wrote a pamphlet inquiring whether Max
Muller himself was not a solar myth Leaving
out
of con
sideration the mistakes in classical scholarship we now known
to have been such,
it
is evident that, however ingenious
PSYCHOLOGICAL
THEORIES 23
explanations of the kindmight be, they were not , and could /
notbe, S ~ E . Q e d . . . b . a . d ~ ~ ~ ~ r i c a l evidence tocarry con-
viction, and could only be, at best,erudite-guesswork. I need
not recal l the charges brought against the nature mytholo
gists by their contemporaries, because although Max Muller,
their chief representative, for a time had some influence on
anthropological thought,
it
did
not
last,
and
Muller outlived
such influence as he
had
once had. Spencer and Tylor, the
latter strongly supported
in
this matter by his pupil Andrew
Lang, were hostile to nature-myth theories,
and
their advo
cacy
of
a different approach proved successful.
Herbert Spencer, from whom anthropology has t aken .
some of its most important methodological
< o n c e p ~ s
and
whom it has forgotten, devotes ala.fge paI'tof- his
h
Principles
Sociology
to a discussion of primitive beliefs, and
though his interpretation
of
them
is
similar to that
of
Sir
Edward Tylor and was published after Tylor s Primitive
Culture
his views were formulated long before his book
appeared, and were independently reachel. Primitive man,
h e says, is. r a i ( ) I l ~ ' and, given his small knowledge, his
inferences are reasonable,
if
weak. He sees that such pheno
mena as sun
and
moon, clouds
and
stars, come
and
go, and
this gives
him
the
of
duality,
of
visible and invisible
conditions, and this notion is strengthened by other observa-
tions,
fo r
example, of fossils, chick and egg, chrysalis
and
butterfly, for Spencer
had
got
it
into his head that
rude
peoples have no idea of natural explanation, as though they
could have conducted their various practical pursuits with-
out it And
if
other things could be dualities, why not man
himself? His shadow
and
his reflection
in
water also come
go. But it is ~ r e a m s which are real expe:iences to
prin:l.i= r
uve peoples, which chIefly gave man the Idea
of
his own
duality, and he identified the dream-self which wanders at \
n ight with the shadow-self wh ich appears
by
day.
This
idea of duality is fortified by experiences of various forms of
temporary insensibility, sleeping, swooning, catalepsy, and
the like, so
that
death itself comes to be thought of as only
a prolonged form
of
insensibility. Andif man has a double,
Spencer, op. cit., vol.
i.
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24
P S YC HOL OGI C AL THEORI ES
PSYCHOLOGICAL
THEORI ES
25
a sou l, by the same reasoning so mu st animals h av e o ne an d
also plants an d material objects.
/
Th e
origin of religion, however,
is
to be looked for
in
the
\. / belief.J:1 ~ o s t s ~ a t h e r t h a ~ i n
soul .
That the soul has a
temporary after-life
is
suggested by the ap pearance
of
the
dead
in
dreams,
so
long as t he d ea d a re r em em be re d;
an d
--the
first traceable conception
of
a supernatural being
is
that
_
of
a ghost. T hi s c on ce pt io n m us t be earlier
than that of
fetish, which implies the existence o f a n indwelling ghost or
spirit. Also, the id ea
of
ghosts
is
found everywhere, unlike
t hat of fetishes, which is indeed no t characteristic of very
primitive peoples. Th e idea of ghosts inevitably-Spencer s
favourite word-develops into t hat of gods, the g hosts of
remote ancestors
or of
superiQr persQns-becoming divinities
the doctrineof Euhemerism), and the food an d drink placed
on t he ir g ra ve s t o ple ase t he dead becoming sacrifices
an d
l ib atio ns to the gods to p rop itiate them. So h ~ c o n c l u d e s
that
a n ~ t r
..
worshipjs the-root
of
every religion _ -
ll
this
is
served up
in
inappropriat e terrrisDorrowed from
the physical sciences
an d in
a d ecid ed ly d id actic mann er.
Th e
argument
is
priori speculation, sprinkled with some
illustrations, an d is specious. It is a fine example of the intro
s ~ c t i o ~ i ~ p 8 C h o l o ~
or
i f I w er e a h or se , f al la Cy ;- to -
wlu Cl1I shall h av e to mak e frequ en t referen ce. If Spencer
were living in primitive conditions, those would, he assumed,
h av e b ee n t he steps by w hi ch he w ould ha ve r ea ch ed t he
beliefs which primitives hold. It does not seem to h av e oc
c ur re d to h im to ask hi ms el f how,
if
the ideas
of
soul
an d
ghost arose from such fallacioliSreasoning about clouds
an d
butterflies
an d
dreams
and
trances, the beliefs cou ld h av e
persisted throughout millennia
an d
coul d still be hel d by
millions
of
civilized people in his day
an d
ours.
T yl or s t he or y for w hi ch he owed a
debt
to Comte) of
, animism he-eoined the word-is v ery similar to-th.at of
/ -Spencer,-tho ug h, as t he w or d
anima
implies, he stresses the
~ idea of soul rather than ofgQ..9st. Some-ambigUity attaches-to
t h e ~ m a n i m i s m in anthropological writings, it being
sometimes employed in the sense of th e belief, ascribed to
Op cit. i. 440. -
primitive peoples, that no t only creatures bu t also inanimate /
objects have life an d personality, an d sometimes with the
further sense t ha t i n addition they have souls. Tylor s t ~ Q r y . _
covers both senses, bu t we are particularly intereste
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26 P S Y CH O L O G I CA L
T H E O R I E S
d ea d o r to dreams among primitive peoples, an d
that
the
differences need to be accounted for if 'obvious inference' is to
be accepted
as
a valid causal conclusion.1
That the of soul led to that of spirit is a very dubious
supposition. Both ideas are present among what were called
the lowest savages, who in evolutionary perspective were held
to
be
the nearest one could get to prehistoric
m an ; a nd
the
two conceptions are
no t
only different
bu t
o p p o s ~ _ d , spirit
being regarded
as
incorporeal, extraneous
i O I D . ~ ,
an d in
vasive. Indeed, Tylor, through failure to recognize a funda
mental
distinCtion between th e two.conceptions, made a
serious blunder iIi his represenfation
of
earlyHebraic thought,
as Dr. Snaith has pointed out.2 Also, it remains to be proved
that
the most primitive peoples think
that
creatures an d
material objects have souls like their own.
If
any peoples
ca n
be
said to
be
dominantly animistic,
in
Tylor's sense
of
the
word, they belong to
much
more advanced cultures, a fact
which, though it would have no historical significance for me,
would be highly damaging to the evolutionary argument;
as is also the fact
that
the conception oragod
ISI0111 l..Q-among
all the so-called lowest hunters
an d
collectors. Finally, we
ma y ask again how
it
is that,
if
religion is the product
of
so
elementary an illusion,
it
has displayed so great a continuity
an d persistence.
Tylor wished to show
that
primitive
rel. gio.g
was rational,
t h a L i L a r o s e - f r o m o b s e r v a J : i ( ) ~ ~ , howevcr lnadequate,
an d
from logical deductions from them, howeyer faulty; t ha t i t
constituted a-crude natural philosophy.,In his treatment of
rn,ag which he distinguished from religion rather for con-
'venlence
of
exposition
than on
grounds
of
aetiology
or
validity,
he
likewise stressed the rational element
i n w ha t
he
called 'this farrago
of
nonsense'.
It
also
is
based on genuine
observation, an d
rests further
on
classification
of
similarities,
the first essential process i n h um an knowledge. Where the
magician goes wrong is injnferring that because things are
alike they have a mystical link between them, thus mistaking
I
J. R. Swanton,
Three
Factors
in
Primitive Religion',
merican nthropolo-
gist
N.S.
xxvi (1924), 35
8
-65.
2
N. H. Snaith, h
Distinctive Ideas the Old Testament
1944-, p. 14
8
.
P S Y CH O L O G I CA L
T H E O R I E S
27
an
ideal connexion for a rea l one, a subjective one for a n ~
objective one. And
i
we ask how peoples who exploit nature
an d organize their social life so well make such mistakes, the
answer is
that
they have very good reasons for not perceiving
the futility
of
their magic. Nature,
or
trickeryon the part
of
the
magician, often brings about
what
the magic is supposed to
achieve;
an d
ifit
fails to achieve its purpose,
that
is
rationally
explained
by
neglect
of
some prescription, or
by
the fact
that
some prohibition has been ignored
or
some hostile force
has impeded it. Also, there is plasticity about judgements of
success an d failure, an d people everywhere find i t h ar d to
appreciate evidence, especially when the weight of authority
induces acceptance of what confirms, an d rejection
of
what
contradicts, a belie Here Tylor's observations are borne ou t
by ethnological evidence.
I have touched briefly on Tylor's discussions
of
magic
partly
as a ~ Q _ e _ r
illustration
of
intellectualist i n t e r p r e t ~ t ( m
an d partly
b e c ~ i n e a : a s
me--straigE:t to aiCestlmation
of
~ r < l : ~ e r contribution to our subJect. F l : ~ ~ E j , I
suppose, th';oest-known name in anthropology, an d we owe
much to h im an d to Spencer an d Tylor. Th e whole
of
The
Golden Bough a workof immense industry an d erudition, is de-
voted to prirp.itive superstitions. But it cannot be said that he
added much ofvalue- toTylor s theory of religion; rather that . /
he introduced some ~ 0 n f u s i o n into it i n t he form
of
two n e ~ f
suppositions, th e one pseudo-historical
an d
the otherpsycho
logicaL According to him, mankind everywhere, an d sooner
or
later, passes through
t 1 : l r . ~ e
t . . g ~ . L ) . f . i t e l l ~ _ c l l l . 1 develop-
ment, from magic
to
religion,
an d
from religion to science,
v
a scheme he
ma y
have taken over from Comte's--phases, the
theological, the metaphysical,
a n d t he p os it iv e t ho ug h t he
correspondence is far from an exact one. Other writers of
the period, for example, King ]evons and Lubbock, and, as
we shall see, in a certain way
of
viewing the matter, Marett,
Preuss,
an d
the writers
of
the nnieSociologique school as well,
also believed
that
magic preceded religion. Eventually, says
Frazer, the shrewder intelligences probably discovered
that
Ina-gic did not really achieve its ends, but, still being unable
to overcome their difficulties
by
empirical means
an d
to face
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II
II
i
I
I
;
i
I
I
I
fl
II
1
l
i
II
28
P S Y C H O L O G I C A L
T H E O R I E S
their crises through a refinedphilosophy, theyfellinto another
, i llusion, that there were spiritual beings who could aid them.
In
course of time the shrewder intelligences saw that spirits
were equally bogus,
an
enlightenment which heralded the
dawn
of
e x p ~ i m e n t l science. Th e arguments in support
of
this thesis were, to say the least, trivial, a nd i t was ethnologi
cally most vulnerable.
In
particular, the conclusions based
on
Australian data were wide of the mark, and , since the
Australians were introduced into the argument to show
that
the s impler the cul ture, the more the magic an d the less the
religion, it is pertinent to note that hunting an d collecting
peoples, including many Australian tribes, aI.limistic
an d theistic beliefs an d cults. It
is
also evident that the
variety, an d
therefore volume,
of
magic in their cultures is
, likely t o be less,
as
indeed it is, thanin cultures technologically
more advanced: there cannot, for instance, be agricultural
magic or magic
of
iron-working in the absence
of
cultivated
plants a nd o fmetals. No one accepts Frazer's theory of stages
today.
Th e
psychological part of his thesis was to oppose magic
an d
science to rel igion, the first two postu lating a world
subject to invariable natural laws,
an
idea he shared with
Jevons,r an d the las t a world in which events depend on the
caprice of spirits. Consequently, while the magician an d
th e scientist, strangeJ.i edfeliows, perform their operations
with quiet confidence:\the priest performs his in fear
an d
trembling. So psychologically science an d magic are a l ike _
-
though one IiappelIS
to
be
f ~ l s e
an d the other_ l ' l l ~ ~ J ' l l i s
~ a n a l o g y - b e t w . . e ~ , L . s , ~ ~ e I l c ~ - a n d m a g i c - ~ 6 t d S - 6 I l T y in
so far
as-
both
are techniques,
an d
few anthropologists have regarded
it
/-as other
than
superficial. Frazer here
made
the same mistake
in method as Levy-Bruhl was to make, in comparing modern
science with primitive magic instead of comparing empirical
an d magical techniques in the same cultural conditions.
However, no t all that Frazer wrote about magic an d reli
e / / gion was chaff. There was some grain.
Fo r
example, he was
able in his painstaking way to demonstrate what Condorcet
an d others ha d merely asserted, how frequently among the
I F.
B. Jevons, Report on Greek Mythology', Folk Lore ii 2
r89r),
220 fr.
P S Y C H O L O G I C A L T H E O R I E S
29
simpler peoples
of
the wm-Id rulers are m a g i c i l . n . L ~ n d Rriests. c/
Then, although he added f lttle to Tylor 's explanationof
magic as misapplication
of
association
of
ideas, he provided
some useful classificatory terms.. showing
that
these associa
tions are
of
two types, those of similarity an d those
of
contact, ~
homoeopathic or imitative magic an d contagious magic.
He
did not , however, go further
than
to show
that
in
magical
beliefs
an d
rites we can discern certain elementary sensations.
Neither Tylor nor Fraierexplained why eople in their magicJ
iiusta e, as t ey supp'ose ,
l ea l
conneXlOns or rea ones
when they do ot
do
so in tlieirother a c t l ~ t i e s . Moreover, it is
- no t
toned
that they do so. Th e error here was i n n ot recog
~ t the associations are SOCIal a nd n ot psychologltal
s t e r e o t y ~ [ C f t J i ~ I E i ~ y O C c } 1 , ~ ~ t : l 1 e ~ ~ 1 9 r : ~ Q . . I , 1 L ~ h e n
e ~ d
r n ~ s R e ~ l ~ c ritual s i t u C 1 ? ( ) ~ s ~ : ~ h i c h a r e a l ~ o ? f g ~ t ~ d l i ~ ~ < ? . 1 - , /
as
I have-argued elsewliere.
r
,
About ~ l l , . : t h ~ s e broadly speaking intellectualist,theoriss we
must say
that,
they cannot be refuted, they also canriot be
sustained, and for the simple reason
that
there is no evidence
about how religious beliefs originated. The:,_eyo utionary
s t a g e s ~ j : h ~ i r sponsors attempted to c,onstruct, as a means
, of supplyln.g the-miss ing 'eVidence, ma y have ha d logical
consistency, bu t they ha d no historicalvalue. However,
we mus t discard the e ~ i (or rather'
p ~ g ' ~ , s i Q n i s t )
assumptions an d judgements, or give them the s tatus of
rather vague hypotheses, we
ma y
still retain much
o f w h at
claimed about the essential rationality
of
primitive
peoples.-They
ma y
not have reached their beliefs
in
the
manner these Writers supposed,
bu t
even they did not, the
- element
of
rationality
is
still always there,
in
spite ofobserva-
--tions being inadequate, inferences faulty, an d conclusions
wrong.
T l : l ~ J ~ _ e l i e f s _ a r . e ~ l w a ~ . o h e r e n t ,
and up to a point
they can be critical
an d
s e p t l ~ d even experimental,
within the system
of
their beliefs and i n its idiom; an d their
thought is therefore intelligible to anyone who cares to learn
their language
an d
study their way
of
life.
Th e
animistic theory
in
various fonns remained for many
I
Th e Intellectualist (English) Interpretation
of
Magic', Bulletin
the
Faculty
rts
Egyptian University (Cairo), i, pt. 2 (r933), 282-3
II
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30 PSYCHQLOGICAL THEORIES
years unchallenged, and i t left its mark on all the anthropo
logical literature of the day, as, to give a single example,
in Dorman's comprehensive account of the religion of the
American Indians, where every belief totemism sorcery,
fetishism is explained in animistic terms. But voices began
to be raised in protest, both wi th regard to the or igin
of
religion
and
to the order
of
its development.
Before we consider what they had to say, it should
be
remarked that the critics had two advantages their prede
cessors lacked. Associationist psychology, which was more or
less
a mechanistic theory of sensation, was giving to ex
perimental psychology, under the influenceof which anthro
pologists were able, though in a rather common-sense way
and in their everyday meanings , to make use of its terms,
and
we then hear
less
of the cognitive and JIlore
of
the affec
tive and conative functions, the orectiveelements, of the
mind;
of
instincts, emotions, sentiments, and later,
under
the
influence of psycho-analysis, of complexes, inhibitions, pro
jection, c.; and Gestalt psychology and the psychology of
crowds were also to leave the ir mark. But what was more
important
was
the
great advance in ethnography in the last
decades of the nineteenth century:' ana- early in the present
century. This provided the later writers with
an
abundance
of information and ofbetter quality: such researches
as
those
of Fison, Howitt, and Spencer and Gillen for the Australian
aboriginals; Tregear for theMaoris; Codrington,
Haddon
and
Seligman for the Melanesians; Nieuwenhuis, Kruijt, Wilken,
Snuck Hurgronje, and
Skeat
and
Blagden for the peoples
01
Indonesia; Man for the Andaman Islanders; 1m Thurn and
von den Steinen for the Amerindians; Boasfor
the
Eskimoes;
and in
Africa Macdonald, Kidd,
Mary
Kingsley,
Junod
Ellis, Dennet,
and
others.
It will have been noted
that in
one respect Frazer differed
radically from Tylor, in claim
that
religion-was preceded
by a magical phase. Other writers took the same view. An
American, John H. King, published in 89 two volumes
entitled The Supernatural: its Origin Nature and Evolution
They made
little impression
in
the climate of animism then
prevailing, and
had
fallen into oblivion till resuscitated by
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 3
Wilhelm Schmidt.
As
intellectualist
and
evolutionist as
others
of
the time, h e was of the opinion that the ideas
of