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MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS Pagan & Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning | ||
6. VI
MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
IT is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter, to say a, few more words about the nature and origin of the belief in Magic. Magic represented on one side, and clearly enough, the beginnings of Religion—i.e. the instinctive sense of Man's inner continuity with the world around him, taking shape: a fanciful shape it is true, but with very real reaction on his practical life and feelings.[1] On the other side it represented the beginnings of Science. It was his first attempt not merely to feel but to understand the mystery of things.
Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very puerile, very superficial. As E. B. Tylor says[2] of primitive folk in general, "they mistook an imaginary for a real connection.'' And he instances the case of the inhabitants of the City of Ephesus, who laid down a rope, seven furlongs in length, from the City to the temple of Artemis, in order to place the former under the protection of the latter! We should lay down a telephone wire, and consider that we established a much more efficient connection; but in the beginning, and quite naturally, men, like children, rely on surface associations. Among the Dyaks of Borneo[3] when the men are away fighting,
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 superstition 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
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 Kingship. 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
Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and alway
Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in abundance.''[5]
As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare; and Schoolcraft, in a passage quoted by Andrew Lang,[6] 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 god— 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 gods, 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 associate 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
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 Sotêr] 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.''[8] 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 assured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial magic.[9]
In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned— of the magical worship 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
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 gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed[10]—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 gods)—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.
How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and separable gods and goddesses—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 supra-natural
And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear, and who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there would grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of emotions— emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and so forth—an image of a divine Bear in whom they lived and moved and had their being. For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or a Lamb or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same way spring tip the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred kangaroo. Another group again might come to worship a Serpent as its presiding genius, or a particular kind of Tree, simply because these objects were and had
According to this theory the god—the full-grown god in human shape, dwelling apart and beyond the earth—did not come first, but was a late and more finished product of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out of the preceding animal-worships and totem-systems. And this theory is much supported and corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The Egyptian religion was full of such divinities—the jackal-headed Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that, following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask—this partly in order to appear to the people as the true representative of the totem, and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic virtues and mana of the beast, which he could then duly impart to the crowd? Zeus, it must be remembered, wears the ægis, or goat-skin—said to be the hide of the goat Amaltheia who suckled him in his infancy; there are a number of legends which connected the Arcadian Artemis with the worship of the bear, Apollo with the wolf, and so forth. And, most curious as showing similarity of rites between the Old and New Worlds, there are found plenty of examples of the wearing of beast-masks in religious processions among the native tribes of both North and South America. In the Atlas of Spix and
By some such process as this, it may fairly be supposed, the forms of the Gods were slowly exhaled from the actual figures of men and women, of youths and girls, who year after year took part in the ancient rituals. Just as the Queen of the May or Father Christmas with us are idealized forms derived from the many happy maidens or white-bearded old men who took leading parts in the May or December mummings and thus gained their apotheosis in our literature and tradition—so doubtless Zeus with his thunderbolts and arrows of lightning is the idealization into Heaven of the Priestly rain-maker and storm-controller; Ares the god of War, the similar idealization of the leading warrior in the ritual war-dance preceding an attack on a neighboring tribe; and Mercury of the foot-running Messenger whose swiftness in those days (devoid of steam or electricity) was so precious a tribal possession.
And here it must be remembered that this explanation of the genesis of the gods only applies to the shapesand figures of the various deities. It does not apply to the genesis of the widespread belief in spirits or a Great Spirit generally; that, as I think will become clear, has quite another source. Some people have jeered at the `animistic' or `anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a kind of superior pity they speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored mind sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind.'' But I must confess that to me the "poor Indian'' seems on the whole
And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed to some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more intelligent and emotional—more specially human in fact—than that of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior
W. H. Hudson—whose mind is certainly not of a quality to be jeered at—speaks of Animism as "the projection of ourselves into nature: the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own, but more powerful, in all visible things''; and continues, "old as I am this same primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it.''[13] Nor will it be quite forgotten that Shelley once said:—
Is active living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part,
And the minutest atom comprehends
A world of loves and hatreds.
The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism
Finally, and to avoid misunderstanding, let me say that Anthropomorphism, in man's conception of the gods, is itself of course only a stage and destined to pass away. In so far, that is, as the term indicates a belief in divine beings corresponding to our present conception of ourselves —that is as separate personalities having each a separate and limited character and function, and animated by the separatist motives of ambition, possession, power, vainglory, superiority, patronage, self-greed, self-satisfaction, etc.—in so far as anthropomorphism is the expression of that kind of belief it is of course destined, with the illusion from which it springs, to pass away. When man arrives at the final consciousness in which the idea of such a self, superior or inferior or in any way antagonistic to others, ceases to operate, then he will return to his first and primal condition, and will cease to need any special religion or gods, knowing himself and all his fellows to be divine and the origin and perfect fruition of all.
For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.
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.
For a discussion of the evolution of religionout of magic, see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.
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MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS Pagan & Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning | ||