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.

[1] For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion

see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.

Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very

puerile, very superficial. As E. B. Tylor says[1] 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[2] when the men are away fighting,

the WOMEN must use a sort of telepathic magic in order to

safeguard them--that is, they must themselves rise early

and keep awake all day (lest darkness and sleep should

give advantage to the enemy); they must not OIL their

hair (lest their husbands should make any SLIPS); they must

eat sparingly and put aside rice at every meal (so that

the men may not want for food). And so on. Similar

superstitions are common. But they gradually lead to

a little thought, and then to a little more, and so to

the discovery of actual and provable influences. Perhaps

one day the cord connecting the temple with Ephesus

was drawn TIGHT and it was found that messages could

be, by tapping, transmitted along it. That way lay the

discovery of a fact. In an age which worshiped fertility,

whether in mankind or animals, TWINS were ever

counted especially blest, and were credited with a magic

power. (The Constellation of the Twins was thought

peculiarly lucky.) Perhaps after a time it was discovered

that twins sometimes run in families, and in such cases really

do bring fertility with them. In cattle it is known nowadays

that there are more twins of the female sex than of the

male sex.[3]

[1] Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 106.

[2] See The Golden Bough, i, 127.

[3] See Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson (1901), p. 41,

note.

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

and medicine-men were peculiarly wicked or bent on mere

self-aggrandizement--any more than we have to think

the same of the average country vicar or country doctor of

to-day. They were merely men a trifle wiser or more

instructed than their flocks. But though probably in most

cases their original intentions were decent enough, they

were not proof against the temptations which the possession

of power always brings, and as time went on they

became liable to trade more and more upon this power

for their own advancement. In the matter of Religion

the history of the Christian priesthood through the centuries

shows sufficiently to what misuse such power can

be put; and in the matter of Science it is a warning

to us of the dangers attending the formation of a scientific

priesthood, such as we see growing up around us to-day.

In both cases--whether Science or Religion--vanity, personal

ambition, lust of domination and a hundred other

vices, unless corrected by a real devotion to the public good,

may easily bring as many evils in their train as those they

profess to cure.

The Medicine-man, or Wizard, or Magician, or Priest, slowly

but necessarily gathered power into his hands, and there

is much evidence to show that in the case of many tribes

at any rate, it was HE who became ultimate chief and

leader and laid the foundations of 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

                    "the dark earth beareth in season

Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and

alway

 Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in

abundance."[1]

[1] Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill.

As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare;

and Schoolcraft, in a passage quoted by Andrew Lang,[1] says

of the Dacotah Indians "the war-chief who leads the party

to war is always one of these medicine-men." This connection,

however, by which the magician is transformed into the

king has been abundantly studied, and need not be further

dwelt upon here.

And what of the transformation of the king into a 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

women of the totem, but no others, congregate, and are born

again in human form when a favorable opportunity presents

itself."[2]

[1] Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113.

[2] The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96.

And what the early people believed of the human spirit,

they believed of the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation

spirits also. At the great Spring-ritual among the primitive

Greeks "the tribe and the growing earth were renovated

together: the earth arises afresh from her dead seeds,

the tribe from its dead ancestors." And the whole

process projects itself in the idea of a spirit of the year, who

"in the first stage is living, then dies with each year, and

thirdly rises again from the dead, raising the whole dead

world with him. The Greeks called him in this stage 'The

Third One' [Tritos Soter] or 'the Saviour'; and the renovation

ceremonies were accompanied by a casting-off of the

old year, the old garments, and everything that is polluted

by the infection of death."[1] Thus the multiplication

of the crops and the renovation of the tribe, and

at the same time the evasion and placation of death,

were all assured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial

magic.[2]

[1] Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46.

[2] It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of

the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or

male members of those who died were deposited in the

above-mentioned nanja spots--the idea evidently being that like

the seeds of the corn the seeds of the human crop must be

carefully and ceremonially preserved for their re-incarnation.

In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned--

of the magical 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

intimate relationship and unity with all this outer world,

the instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed

by the spirit of Man, if the man can only find the right ritual,

the right word, the right spell, wherewith to move it. An

aura of emotion surrounded everything--of terror, of tabu,

of fascination, of desire. The world, to these people,

was transparent with presences related to themselves;

and though hunger and sex may have been the dominant

and overwhelmingly practical needs of their life, yet their

outlook on the world was essentially poetic and imaginative.

Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and

the belief in spirits, though there was an intense sense of

every thing being alive, the gods, in the more modern

sense of the world, hardly existed[1]--that is, there was no

very clear vision, to these people, of supra-mundane beings,

sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of earth, as

it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was

slowly evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time

being--though there might be orders and degrees of spirits

(and of 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.

[1] For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC,

see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.

How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in

separate and separable 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 supranatural gods arose

from a process in the human mind similar

to that which the photographer adopts when by

photographing a number of faces on the same plate, and

so superposing their images on one another, he produces a

so-called "composite" photograph or image. Thus, in the

photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members of

the same family superposed upon one another may produce

a composite image or ideal of that family type,

or the portraits of a number of Aztecs or of a number of

Apache Indians the ideals respectively of the Aztec or of

the Apache types. And so in the mental sphere of each

member of a tribe the many images of the well-known Warriors

or Priests or wise and gracious Women of that

tribe did inevitably combine at last to composite figures

of gods and goddesses--on whom the enthusiasm and

adoration of the tribe was concentrated.[1] Miss Harrison

has ingeniously suggested how the leading figures in the magic

rituals of the past--being the figures on which all eyes

would be concentrated; and whose importance would be

imprinted on every mind--lent themselves to this process.

The suffering Victim, bound and scourged and crucified, recurring

year after year as the centre-figure of a thousand

ritual processions, would at last be dramatized and

idealized in the great race-consciousness into the form

of a Suffering God--a Jesus Christ or a Dionysus or

Osiris--dismembered or crucified for the salvation of

mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man--or rather the

succession of Priests or Medicine-Men--whose figures

would recur again and again as leaders and ordainers of the

ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the composite-

image of a God in whom were concentrated all magic

powers. "Recent researches," says Gilbert Murray, "have

shown us in abundance the early Greek medicine-chiefs

making thunder and lightning and rain." Here is the

germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man

may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual

representative of the glorified and composite being

who exists in the mind of the tribe (just as a present-day

King may be unworthy, but is surrounded all the same by

the agelong glamour of Royalty). "The real <gr qeos>,

tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in

clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain.

If the mountain is once climbed the god will

move to the upper sky. The medicine-chief meanwhile

stays on earth, still influential. He has some connection

with the great god more intimate than that of other

men . . . he knows the rules for approaching him and making

prayers to him."[2] Thus did the Medicine-man, or Priest,

or Magician (for these are but three names for

one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the

god.

[1] See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions

of the Race-Life."

[2] The Four Stages, p. 140.

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

been for centuries prominent factors in its yearly and seasonal

Magic. As Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo

(bred by Fear) which by first forbidding contact with the

totem-animal or priest or magician-chief gradually invested

him with Awe and Divinity.

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 aegis, 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

Martius (who travelled together in the Amazonian forests

about 1820) there is an understanding and characteristic

picture of the men (and some women) of the tribe of the

Tecunas moving in procession through the woods mostly

naked, except for wearing animal heads and masks--

the masks representing Cranes of various kinds, Ducks, the

Opossum, the Jaguar, the Parrot, etc., probably symbolic of

their respective clans.

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 SHAPES and 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

to show more good sense than his critics, and to have aimed

his rude arrows at the philosophic mark more successfully

than a vast number of his learned and scientific

successors. A consideration of what we have said above

would show that early people felt their unity with Nature

so deeply and intimately that--like the animals themselves--

they did not think consciously or theorize about it.

It was just their life to be--like the beasts of

the field and the trees of the forest--a part of the whole

flux of things, non-differentiated so to speak. What more

natural or indeed more logically correct than for them to

assume (when they first began to think or differentiate

themselves) that these other creatures, these birds, beasts

and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same

blood as themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and

having the same interior nature? What more reasonable

(if indeed they credited THEMSELVES with having some kind

of soul or spirit) than to credit these other creatures with

a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the Guiana

Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with

beings." Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored

mind--unless indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense

of the Schools--but rather a very directly perceptive

mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing that these

people themselves were in the animal stage of evolution)

than that they should pay great reverence to some ideal

animal--first cousin or ancestor--who played an important

part in their tribal existence, and make of this

animal a totem emblem and a symbol of their common life?

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

and more human spirit. Rising to a more enlightened consciousness

of its own intimate quality, and still deeply

penetrated with the sense of its kinship to external nature,

it would inevitably and perfectly logically credit the

latter with an inner life and intelligence, more distinctly

human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE

'anthropomorphic' instead of less so; and one sees that this

is a process that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding

a certain parenthesis in the process, due to obvious

elements in our 'Civilization' and to the temporary

and fallacious domination of a leaden-eyed so-called

'Science.' According to this view the true evolution of

Religion and Man's outlook on the world has proceeded

not by the denial by man of his unity with the world,

but by his seeing and understanding that unity more deeply.

And the more deeply he understands himself the more certainly

he will recognize in the external world a Being or

beings resembling himself.

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."[1] Nor will it be quite forgotten that Shelley

once said:--

 The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight

 Is active living spirit. Every grain

 Is sentient both in unity and part,

 And the minutest atom comprehends

 A world of loves and hatreds.

[1] Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.

The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism

is I say inevitable, and perfectly logical. But the great

value of the work done by some of those investigators whom

I have quoted has been to show that among quite primitive

people (whose interior life and 'soul-sense' was only

very feeble) their projections of intelligence into Nature

were correspondingly feeble. The reflections of themselves

projected into the world beyond could not reach the stature of

eternal 'gods,' but were rather of the quality of ephemeral

phantoms and ghosts; and the ceremonials and creeds

of that period are consequently more properly described

as, Magic than as Religion. There have indeed

been great controversies as to whether there has or has

not been, in the course of religious evolution, a PRE-

animistic stage. Probably of course human evolution in

this matter must have been perfectly continuous from

stages presenting the very feeblest or an absolutely deficient

animistic sense to the very highest manifestations

of anthropomorphism; but as there is a good deal of

evidence to show that ANIMALS (notably dogs and horses)

see ghosts, the inquiry ought certainly to be enlarged so

far as to include the pre-human species. Anyhow it must

be remembered that the question is one of CONSCIOUSNESS--

that is, of how far and to what degree consciousness of self

has been developed in the animal or the primitive man

or the civilized man, and therefore how far and to what

degree the animal or human creature has credited the outside

world with a similar consciousness. It is not a question

of whether there IS an inner life and SUB-consciousness common

to all these creatures of the earth and sky, because

that, I take it, is a fact beyond question; they all emerge

or have emerged from the same matrix, and are rooted in

identity; but it is a question of how far they are AWARE of

this, and how far by separation (which is the genius of

evolution) each individual creature has become conscious

of the interior nature both of itself and of the other

creatures AND of the great whole which includes them all.

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.