Pagan and Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning

V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC

I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist,

some way from the astronomical thread of Chapters II and

III, and now it would appear that in order to understand

religious origins we must wander still farther. The chapters

mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and

astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an

earlier period when there were no definite forms of gods,

and when none but the vaguest astronomical knowledge

existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is best and

safest to move thus backwards in Time, from the things

recent and fairly well known to things more ancient and less

known. In this way we approach more securely to some

understanding of the dim and remote past.

It is clear that before any definite speculations on

heaven-dwelling gods or divine beings had arisen in the human

mind--or any clear theories of how the sun and moon

and stars might be connected with the changes of the

seasons on the earth--there were still certain obvious

things which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned

alike. One of these was the return of Vegetation, bringing

with it the fruits or the promise of the fruits of the earth,

for human food, and also bringing with it increase of animal

life, for food in another form; and the other was the return

of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food

delivering from the fear of starvation; Light and Warmth

delivering from the fear of danger and of cold. These were

three glorious things which returned together and brought

salvation and renewed life to man. The period of their

return was 'Spring,' and though Spring and its benefits

might fade away in time, still there was always the HOPE

of its return--though even so it may have been a long time

in human evolution before man discovered that it really did

always return, and (with certain allowances) at equal intervals

of time.

Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in,

the return of the Vegetation must have enthralled man's

attention, and filled him with hope and joy. Yet since

its return was somewhat variable and uncertain the question,

What could man do to assist that return? naturally

became a pressing one. It is now generally held that the

use of Magic--sympathetic magic--arose in this way.

Sympathetic magic seems to have been generated by a

belief that your own actions cause a similar response in

things and persons around you. Yet this belief did not

rest on any philosophy or argument, but was purely

instinctive and sometimes of the nature of a mere corporeal

reaction. Every schoolboy knows how in watching a

comrade's high jump at the Sports he often finds himself

lifting a knee at the moment 'to help him over'; at football

matches quarrels sometimes arise among the spectators

by reason of an ill-placed kick coming from a too enthusiastic

on-looker, behind one; undergraduates running on the

tow-path beside their College boat in the races will hurry

even faster than the boat in order to increase its speed;

there is in each case an automatic bodily response

increased by one's own desire. A person ACTS the part

which he desires to be successful. He thinks to transfer

his energy in that way. Again, if by chance one witnesses

a painful accident, a crushed foot or what-not, it

commonly happens that one feels a pain in the same

part oneself--a sympathetic pain. What more natural than

to suppose that the pain really is transferred from the one

person to the other? and how easy the inference that by

tormenting a wretched scape-goat or crucifying a human victim

in some cases the sufferings of people may be relieved or

their sins atoned for?

Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of

Theocritus, curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she

melts his waxen image she prays that HE TOO MAY MELT.

All this is of the nature of Magic, and is independent of and

generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy. Yet

it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in

early man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct

of his unity and continuity with the rest of creation, and

of a common life so close that his lightest actions may cause

a far-reaching reaction in the world outside.

Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist

the arrival of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you

want the Vegetation to appear you must have rain; and the

rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has been a MOST

important personage. Generally he based his rites on

quite fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among

the Mandans wore a raven's skin on his head (bird of

the storm) or painted his shield with red zigzags of

lightning[1]; but partly, no doubt, he had observed actual

facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to

him--as, for instance that when rain is impending loud noises

will bring about its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns

have had occasion to notice on battlefields. He

had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud

clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased

downpour of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which

I have often verified in the vicinity of Sheffield) that the

copious smoke of fires will generate rain-clouds--and so

quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking

SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was

on the track of elementary Science. And so he made "bull-

roarers" to imitate the sound of wind and the blessed

rain-bringing thunder, or clashed great bronze cymbals

together with the same object. Bull-voices and thunder-

drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this

connection by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus[2];

but the bull-roarer, in the form of a rhombus of wood

whirled at the end of a string, seems to be known, or

to have been known, all over the world. It is described

with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and

Myth (pp. 29-44), where he says "it is found always as a

sacred instrument employed in religious mysteries, in New

Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient Greece, and

Africa."

[1] See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.

[2] Themis, p. 61.

Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but

of the inner causes of rain he knew next to nothing;

he was more ignorant even than we are! His main

idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that the

sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder

and cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder

(in Hebrew Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was

everywhere regarded as the manifestation of a spirit.[1]

To make sounds like thunder would therefore naturally

call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the rain-maker,

might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles

(known in ever so many parts of the world) in which he

rattled dried seeds or small pebbles with a most beguiling

and rain-like insistence; or sometimes, like the priests of

Baal in the Bible,[2] he would cut himself with knives

till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops suggestive

of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the raingod

was propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children

wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried

them rejoiced, being convinced that rain would also be

abundant."[3] Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would WHISTLE

for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets

for the same purpose.

[1] See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said

to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass

grow up green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel

of the Tribe (Australian).

[2] I Kings xviii.

[3] Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and

Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.

In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which

has been adopted by so many peoples under so many

forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her daughter

Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation),

carried down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness

and Winter. And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial

and ritual of magic for the purpose of restoring

the lost one and bringing her back to the world again.

Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and

unnamable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility;

there was a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep

cleft of the earth, and their remains afterwards collected

and scattered as a charm over the fields."[1] Fir-cones

and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male fertility;

snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their

own skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive

of resurrection and re-vivification; pigs and sows by

their exceeding fruitfulness would in their hour of sacrifice

remind old mother Earth of what was expected from

her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that

the scattering of dead flesh over the ground or mixed

with the seed, did bless the ground to a greater fertility;

and so by a strange mixture of primitive observation with

a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols and

suggestions Nature could be appealed to and induced to

answer to the desires and needs for her children this sort

of ceremonial Magic arose. It was not exactly Science, and

it was not exactly Religion; but it was a naive, and perhaps

not altogether mistaken, sense of the bond between Nature

and Man.

[1] See Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.

For we can perceive that earliest man was not yet consciously

differentiated from Nature. Not only do we see

that the tribal life was so strong that the individual seldom

regarded himself as different or separate or opposed to the

rest of the tribe; but that something of the same kind

was true with regard to his relation to the Animals and

to Nature at large. This outer world was part of himself,

was also himself. His sub-conscious sense of unity

was so great that it largely dominated his life. That

brain-cleverness and brain-activity which causes modern

man to perceive such a gulf between him and the animals,

or between himself and Nature, did not exist in the early

man. Hence it was no difficulty to him to believe that

he was a Bear or an Emu. Sub-consciously he was wiser

than we are. He knew that he was a bear or an emu, or

any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his

mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common

consent existed between primitive man and many

of his companion animals such as has been lost or much

attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very

interesting paper La Grande Famille[1] gives support to the

idea that the so-called domestication of animals did not

originally arise from any forcible subjugation of them by

man, but from a natural amity with them which grew up

in the beginning from common interests, pursuits and affections.

Thus the chetah of India (and probably the puma

of Brazil) from far-back times took to hunting in the

company of his two-legged and bow-and-arrow-armed

friend, with whom he divided the spoil. W. H. Hudson[2]

declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and

capable of killing the largest game, will never even to-day

attack man, but when maltreated by the latter submits to

the outrage, unresisting, with mournful cries and every

sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated in a sense,

has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit, but

may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian

peasant and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud

companionship. The mutual relations of Women and the

Cow, or of Man and the Horse[3] (also the Elephant) reach

so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced. The

Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves

and still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good

fortune. Elisee Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on

the Nile calls to certain snakes by name and shares with them

the milk of his cows.

[1] Published originally in Le Magazine International, January

1896.

[2] See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.

[3] "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves

of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries,

before it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B.

Jevons, Introd. to Hist. Religion, p. 119).

And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious

perception, which made primitive men feel their

unity with other members of their tribe, and their obvious

kinship with the animals around them, brought them also so

close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees, the

vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their

bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had

not yet set in. To cause rain or thunder you had to

make rain- or thunder-like noises; to encourage Vegetation

and the crops to leap out of the ground, you had

to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian

Saxons it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer)

for a man who has some hemp to leap high in the

field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow tall."[1]

Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have

hardly yet died out--even in this most civilized England.

The bower of green boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping

and the twirling, were all an encouragement to the arrival

of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic Magic. When

you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself you

naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically

do this for the energizing of the crops? In every

country of the world the vernal season and the resurrection

of the Sun has been greeted with dances and

the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting

or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances

suggesting the successful hunt or battle. It was no more

than our children do to-day, and it all was, and is, part of a

natural-magic tendency in human thought.

[1] See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.

Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us

with our academical and somewhat school-boardy minds

to enter into all this, and to understand the sense of

(unconscious or sub-conscious) identification with the world

around which characterized the primitive man--or to look upon

Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of

Corn. WE know so well from our botany and natural history

books what these things are. Why should our minds

dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as to our perfect

comprehension of them?

And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any

one of us really ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think

that I have--except most superficially. That very penetrating

observer and naturalist, Henry D. Thoreau, tells

us that he would often make an appointment to visit

a certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when

he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also

a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree near which he sometimes

sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and graceful,

yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and

throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature

could walk, if it only would"; and mentions that

in a dream-trance he actually once saw his "favorite trees

step out and promenade up, down and around VERY CURIOUSLY."[1]

Once the present writer seemed to have a partial

vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat

isolated, and still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly

I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and up-turned

finger-tips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming

through them far into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots

plunged in the earth and drawing the same energies

from below. The day was quite still and there was no

movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree

was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast

being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the

life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing activity.

[1] Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.

The reader of this will probably have had some similar

experiences. Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy

poplar swaying in half a gale in June--the wind

and the sun streaming over every little twig and leaf,

the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy

and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses

of its two visitants; or he will have heard the deep

glad murmur of some huge sycamore with ripening seed clusters

when after weeks of drought the steady warm rain

brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known that

these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately

and deeply-related to him in their love and hunger

longing, and, like himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.

It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious

speculations like these, belonging more properly to the

twentieth century; yet it is incontrovertible, I think, that

in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with their swift

subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere

book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns

are blind. Like the animals they arrived at their perceptions

without (individual) brain effort; they knew things

without thinking. When they did THINK of course they

went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray.

Religion with them had as yet taken no definite shape;

science was equally protoplasmic; and all they had was

a queer jumble of the two in the form of Magic. When

at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook

and its observations, and Religion, from being a vague

subconscious feeling, took clear shape in the form of gods

and creeds, then mankind gradually emerged into the stage

of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific laws

and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and

so also are the gods and the creeds of our own and

other religions; but these things, with their set and

angular outlines, have served in the past and will serve

in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of

knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead

us on to a renewed power of perception which again

will not be the laborious product of thought but a

direct and instantaneous intuition like that of the animals

--and the angels.

To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not

speculate in modern style on these things, I yet have no

reasonable doubt that he felt (and FEELS, in those cases

where we can still trace the workings of his mind) his

essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more

intimately, if less analytically, than we do to-day. If

the animals with all their wonderful gifts are (as we

readily admit) a veritable part of Nature--so that they

live and move and have their being more or less submerged

in the spirit of the great world around them--then

Man, when he first began to differentiate himself from them,

must for a long time have remained in this SUBconscious

unity, becoming only distinctly CONSCIOUS of it when he was

already beginning to lose it. That early dawn of distinct

consciousness corresponded to the period of belief

in Magic. In that first mystic illumination almost every

object was invested with a halo of mystery or terror or

adoration. Things were either tabu, in which case they

were dangerous, and often not to be touched or even looked

upon--or they were overflowing with magic grace and

influence, in which case they were holy, and any rite

which released their influence was also holy. William Blake,

that modern prophetic child, beheld a Tree full of angels;

the Central Australian native believes bushes to be the

abode of spirits which leap into the bodies of passing

women and are the cause of the conception of children; Moses

saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the mimosa) like a flame

of fire, with Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it, and he put

off his shoes for he felt that the place was holy; Osiris

was at times regarded as a Tree-spirit[1]; and in inscriptions

is referred to as "the solitary one in the acacia"--

which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The

same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse

mythology Ygdrasil was the great branching World-Ash,

abode of the soul of the universe; the Peepul or Bo-tree in

India is very sacred and must on no account be cut

down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches.

It is of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical

use,[2] but so holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb

it. The Burmese believe the things of nature, but especially

the trees, to be the abode of spirits. "To the Burman of

to-day, not less than to the Greek of long ago, all nature

is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains are

full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all

kinds of Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and

female, now living round about us. Some of them live

in the trees, especially in the huge figtree that shades half-

an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like fronds of

the tamarind."[3]

[1] The Golden Bough, iv, 339.

[2] Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.

[3] The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.

There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of

MARRIAGE of women (and men) to Trees; which suggest

that trees were regarded as very near akin to human

beings! The Golden Bough[1] mentions many of these, including

the idea that some trees are male and others female.

The well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone

being presented by a priest to a Palm-tree is supposed

by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the Pine cone

being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony

of the god Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still

celebrated in India down to the present day; and certain trees

are clasped and hugged by pregnant women--the idea no

doubt being that they bestow fertility on those who embrace

them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which

are benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked

into the Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual

intercourse to fertilize them.[2]

[1] Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.

[2] Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.

One might go on multiplying examples in this direction

quite indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all

indicate--what was instinctively felt by early man, and is

perfectly obvious to all to-day who are not blinded by

"civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the world outside

us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is

not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct

with feeling and intelligence resembling our own. It is

this perception, this conviction of our essential unity with

the whole of creation, which lay from the first at the base

of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was hardly a

conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became

more conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms

of the gods and the creeds--but of that process I will speak