Custom and Myth

The first step in Mr. Max Müller’s polemic was the assertion that Fetichism is nowhere unmixed. We have seen that the fact is capable of an interpretation that will suit either side. Stages of culture overlap each other. The second step in his polemic was the effort to damage the evidence. We have seen that we have as good evidence as can be desired. In the third place he asks, What are the antecedents of fetich-worship? He appears to conceive himself to be arguing with persons (p. 127) who ‘have taken for granted that every human being was miraculously endowed with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich, call it power, spirit, or god.’ If there are reasoners so feeble, they must be left to the punishment inflicted by Mr. Müller. On the other hand, students who regard the growth of the idea of power, which is the predicate of every fetich, as a slow process, as the result of various impressions and trains of early half-conscious reasoning, cannot be disposed of by the charge that they think that ‘every human being was miraculously endowed’ with any concept whatever. They, at least, will agree with Mr. Max Müller that there are fetiches and fetiches, that to one reverence is assigned for one reason, to another for another. Unfortunately, it is less easy to admit that Mr. Max Müller has been happy in his choice of ancient instances. He writes (p. 99): ‘Sometimes a stock or a stone was worshipped because it was a forsaken altar or an ancient place of judgment, sometimes because it marked the place of a great battle or a murder, or the burial of a king.’ Here he refers to Pausanias, book i. 28, 5, and viii. 13, 2.199 In both of these passages, Pausanias, it is true, mentions stones – in the first passage stones on which men stood ὅσοι δίκας ὑπέχουσι καὶ οἱ διώκοντες, in the second, barrows heaped up in honour of men who fell in battle. In neither case, however, do I find anything to show that the stones were worshipped. These stones, then, have no more to do with the argument than the milestones which certainly exist on the Dover road, but which are not the objects of superstitious reverence. No! the fetich-stones of Greece were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted. They were the stones and blocks which bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo, names perhaps given, as De Brosses says, to the old fetichistic objects of worship, after the anthropomorphic gods entered Hellas. This, at least, is the natural conclusion from the fact that the Apollo and Hera of untouched wood or stone were confessedly the oldest. Religion, possessing an old fetich, did not incur the risk of breaking the run of luck by discarding it, but wisely retained and renamed it. Mr. Max Müller says that the unhewn lump may indicate a higher power of abstraction than the worship paid to the work of Phidias; but in that case all the savage adorers of rough stones may be in a stage of more abstract thought than these contemporaries of Phidias who had such very hard work to make Greek thought abstract.

Mr. Müller founds a very curious argument on what he calls ‘the ubiquity of fetichism.’ Like De Brosses, he compiles (from Pausanias) a list of the rude stones worshipped by the early Greeks. He mentions various examples of fetichistic superstitions in Rome. He detects the fetichism of popular Catholicism, and of Russian orthodoxy among the peasants. Here, he cries, in religions the history of which is known to us, fetichism is secondary, ‘and why should fetiches in Africa, where we do not know the earlier development of religion, be considered as primary?’ What a singular argument! According to Pausanias, this fetichism (if fetichism it is) was primary, in Greece. The oldest temples, in their holiest place, held the oldest fetich. In Rome, it is at least probable that fetichism, as in Greece, was partly a survival, partly a new growth from the primal root of human superstitions. As to Catholicism, the records of Councils, the invectives of the Church, show us that, from the beginning, the secondary religion in point of time, the religion of the Church, laboured vainly to suppress, and had in part to tolerate, the primary religion of childish superstitions. The documents are before the world. As to the Russians, the history of their conversion is pretty well known. Jaroslaf, or Vladimir, or some other evangelist, had whole villages baptised in groups, and the pagan peasants naturally kept up their primary semi-savage ways of thought and worship, under the secondary varnish of orthodoxy. In all Mr. Max Müller’s examples, then, fetichism turns out to be primary in point of time; secondary only, as subordinate to some later development of faith, or to some lately superimposed religion. Accepting his statement that fetichism is ubiquitous, we have the most powerful à priori argument that fetichism is primitive. As religions become developed they are differentiated; it is only fetichism that you find the same everywhere. Thus the bow and arrow have a wide range of distribution: the musket, one not so wide; the Martini-Henry rifle, a still narrower range: it is the primitive stone weapons that are ubiquitous, that are found in the soil of England, Egypt, America, France, Greece, as in the hands of Dieyries and Admiralty Islanders. And just as rough stone knives are earlier than iron ones (though the same race often uses both), so fetichism is more primitive than higher and purer faiths, though the same race often combines fetichism and theism. No one will doubt the truth of this where weapons are concerned; but Mr. Max Müller will not look at religion in this way.

Mr. Max Müller’s remarks on ‘Zoolatry,’ as De Brosses calls it, or animal-worship, require only the briefest comment. De Brosses, very unluckily, confused zoolatry with other superstitions under the head of Fetichism. This was unscientific; but is it scientific of Mr. Max Müller to discuss animal-worship without any reference to totemism? The worship of sacred animals is found, in every part of the globe, to be part of the sanction of the most stringent and important of all laws, the laws of marriage. It is an historical truth that the society of Ashantees, Choctaws, Australians, is actually constructed by the operation of laws which are under the sanction of various sacred plants and animals.200 There is scarcely a race so barbarous that these laws are not traceable at work in its society, nor a people (especially an ancient people) so cultivated that its laws and religion are not full of strange facts most easily explained as relics of totemism. Now note that actual living totemism is always combined with the rudest ideas of marriage, with almost repulsive ideas about the family. Presumably, this rudeness is earlier than culture, and therefore this form of animal-worship is one of the earliest religions that we know. The almost limitless distribution of the phenomena, their regular development, their gradual disappearance, all point to the fact that they are all very early and everywhere produced by similar causes.

Of all these facts, Mr. Max Müller only mentions one – that many races have called themselves Snakes, and he thinks they might naturally adopt the snake for ancestor, and finally for god. He quotes the remark of Diodorus that ‘the snake may either have been made a god because he was figured on the banners, or may have been figured on the banners because he was a god’; to which De Brosses, with his usual sense, rejoins: ‘We represent saints on our banners because we revere them; we do not revere them because we represent them on our banners.’

In a discussion about origins, and about the corruption of religion, it would have been well to account for institutions and beliefs almost universally distributed. We know, what De Brosses did not, that zoolatry is inextricably blent with laws and customs which surely must be early, if not primitive, because they make the working faith of societies in which male descent and the modern family are not yet established. Any one who wishes to show that this sort of society is a late corruption, not an early stage in evolution towards better things, has a difficult task before him, which, however, he must undertake, before he can prove zoolatry to be a corruption of religion.

As to the worship of ancestral and embodied human spirits, which (it has been so plausibly argued) is the first moment in religion, Mr. Max Müller dismisses it, here, in eleven lines and a half. An isolated but important allusion at the close of his lectures will be noticed in its place.

The end of the polemic against the primitiveness of fetichism deals with the question, ‘Whence comes the supernatural predicate of the fetich?’ If a negro tells us his fetich is a god, whence got he the idea of ‘god’? Many obvious answers occur. Mr. Müller says, speaking of the Indians (p. 205): ‘The concept of gods was no doubt growing up while men were assuming a more and more definite attitude towards these semi-tangible and intangible objects’ – trees, rivers, hills, the sky, the sun, and so on, which he thinks suggested and developed, by aid of a kind of awe, the religious feeling of the infinite. We too would say that, among people who adore fetiches and ghosts, the concept of gods no doubt silently grew up, as men assumed a more and more definite attitude towards the tangible and intangible objects they held sacred. Again, negroes have had the idea of god imported among them by Christians and Islamites, so that, even if they did not climb (as De Brosses grants that many of them do) to purer religious ideas unaided, these ideas are now familiar to them, and may well be used by them, when they have to explain a fetich to a European. Mr. Max Müller explains the origin of religion by a term (‘the Infinite’) which, he admits, the early people would not have comprehended. The negro, if he tells a white man that a fetich is a god, transposes terms in the same unscientific way. Mr. Müller asks: ‘How do these people, when they have picked up their stone or their shell, pick up, at the same time, the concepts of a supernatural power, of spirit, of god, and of worship paid to some unseen being?’ But who says that men picked up these ideas at the same time? These ideas were evolved by a long, slow, complicated process. It is not at all impossible that the idea of a kind of ‘luck’ attached to this or that object, was evolved by dint of meditating on a mere series of lucky accidents. Such or such a man, having found such an object, succeeded in hunting, fishing, or war. By degrees, similar objects might be believed to command success. Thus burglars carry bits of coal in their pockets, ‘for luck.’ This random way of connecting causes and effects which have really no inter-relation, is a common error of early reasoning. Mr. Max Müller says that ‘this process of reasoning is far more in accordance with modern thought’; if so, modern thought has little to be proud of. Herodotus, however, describes the process of thought as consecrated by custom among the Egyptians. But there are many other practical ways in which the idea of supernatural power is attached to fetiches. Some fetich-stones have a superficial resemblance to other objects, and thus (on the magical system of reasoning) are thought to influence these objects. Others, again, are pointed out as worthy of regard in dreams or by the ghosts of the dead.201 To hold these views of the origin of the supernatural predicate of fetiches is not ‘to take for granted that every human being was miraculously endowed with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich.’

Thus we need not be convinced by Mr. Max Müller that fetichism (though it necessarily has its antecedents in the human mind) is ‘a corruption of religion.’ It still appears to be one of the most primitive steps towards the idea of the supernatural.

What, then, is the subjective element of religion in man? How has he become capable of conceiving of the supernatural? What outward objects first awoke that dormant faculty in his breast? Mr. Max Müller answers, that man has ‘the faculty of apprehending the infinite’ – that by dint of this faculty he is capable of religion, and that sensible objects, ‘tangible, semi-tangible, intangible,’ first roused the faculty to religious activity, at least among the natives of India. He means, however, by the ‘infinite’ which savages apprehend, not our metaphysical conception of the infinite, but the mere impression that there is ‘something beyond.’ ‘Everything of which his senses cannot perceive a limit, is to a primitive savage or to any man in an early stage of intellectual activity unlimited or infinite.’ Thus, in all experience, the idea of ‘a beyond’ is forced on men. If Mr. Max Müller would adhere to this theory, then we should suppose him to mean (what we hold to be more or less true) that savage religion, like savage science, is merely a fanciful explanation of what lies beyond the horizon of experience. For example, if the Australians mentioned by Mr. Max Müller believe in a being who created the world, a being whom they do not worship, and to whom they pay no regard (for, indeed, he has become ‘decrepit’), their theory is scientific, not religious. They have looked for the causes of things, and are no more religious (in so doing) than Newton was when he worked out his theory of gravitation. The term ‘infinite’ is wrongly applied, because it is a term of advanced thought used in explanation of the ideas of men who, Mr. Max Müller says, were incapable of conceiving the meaning of such a concept. Again, it is wrongly applied, because it has some modern religious associations, which are covertly and fallaciously introduced to explain the supposed emotions of early men. Thus, Mr. Müller says (p. 177) – he is giving his account of the material things that awoke the religious faculty – ‘the mere sight of the torrent or the stream would have been enough to call forth in the hearts of the early dwellers on the earth … a feeling that they were surrounded on all sides by powers invisible, infinite, or divine.’ Here, if I understand Mr. Müller, ‘infinite’ is used in our modern sense. The question is, How did men ever come to believe in powers infinite, invisible, divine? If Mr. Müller’s words mean anything, they mean that a dormant feeling that there were such existences lay in the breast of man, and was wakened into active and conscious life, by the sight of a torrent or a stream. How, to use Mr. Müller’s own manner, did these people, when they saw a stream, have mentally, at the same time, ‘a feeling of infinite powers’? If this is not the expression of a theory of ‘innate religion’ (a theory which Mr. Müller disclaims), it is capable of being mistaken for that doctrine by even a careful reader. The feeling of ‘powers infinite, invisible, divine,’ must be in the heart, or the mere sight of a river could not call it forth. How did the feeling get into the heart? That is the question.

The ordinary anthropologist distinguishes a multitude of causes, a variety of processes, which shade into each other and gradually produce the belief in powers invisible, infinite, and divine. What tribe is unacquainted with dreams, visions, magic, the apparitions of the dead? Add to these the slow action of thought, the conjectural inferences, the guesses of crude metaphysics, the theories of isolated men of religious and speculative genius. By all these and other forces manifold, that emotion of awe in presence of the hills, the stars, the sea, is developed. Mr. Max Müller cuts the matter shorter. The early inhabitants of the earth saw a river, and the ‘mere sight’ of the torrent called forth the feelings which (to us) seem to demand ages of the operation of causes disregarded by Mr. Müller in his account of the origin of Indian religion.

The mainspring of Mr. Müller’s doctrine is his theory about ‘apprehending the infinite.’ Early religion, or at least that of India, was, in his view, the extension of an idea of Vastness, a disinterested emotion of awe.202 Elsewhere, we think, early religion has been a development of ideas of Force, an interested search, not for something wide and far and hard to conceive, but for something practically strong for good and evil. Mr. Müller (taking no count in this place of fetiches, ghosts, dreams and magic) explains that the sense of ‘wonderment’ was wakened by objects only semi-tangible, trees, which are taller than we are, ‘whose roots are beyond our reach, and which have a kind of life in them.’ ‘We are dealing with a quartenary, it may be a tertiary troglodyte,’ says Mr. Müller. If a tertiary troglodyte was like a modern Andaman Islander, a Kaneka, a Dieyrie, would he stand and meditate in awe on the fact that a tree was taller than he, or had ‘a kind of life,’ ‘an unknown and unknowable, yet undeniable something’?203 Why, this is the sentiment of modern Germany, and perhaps of the Indian sages of a cultivated period! A troglodyte would look for a ’possum in the tree, he would tap the trunk for honey, he would poke about in the bark after grubs, or he would worship anything odd in the branches. Is Mr. Müller not unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into the midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship a tree if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical meaning, or if boilyas lived in its boughs, but whose practical way of dealing with the problem of its life was to burn it round the stem, chop the charred wood with stone axes, and use the bark, branches, and leaves as they happened to come handy?

Mr. Müller has a long list of semi-tangible objects ‘overwhelming and overawing,’ like the tree. There are mountains, where ‘even a stout heart shivers before the real presence of the infinite’; there are rivers, those instruments of so sudden a religious awakening; there is earth. These supply the material for semi-deities. Then come sky, stars, dawn, sun and moon: ‘in these we have the germs of what, hereafter, we shall have to call by the name of deities.’

Before we can transmute, with Mr. Müller, these objects of a somewhat vague religious regard into a kind of gods, we have to adopt Noiré’s philological theories, and study the effects of auxiliary verbs on the development of personification and of religion. Noiré’s philological theories are still, I presume, under discussion. They are necessary, however, to Mr. Müller’s doctrine of the development of the vague ‘sense of the infinite’ (wakened by fine old trees, and high mountains) into devas, and of devas (which means ‘shining ones’) into the Vedic gods. Our troglodyte ancestors, and their sweet feeling for the spiritual aspect of landscape, are thus brought into relation with the Rishis of the Vedas, the sages and poets of a pleasing civilisation. The reverence felt for such comparatively refined or remote things as fire, the sun, wind, thunder, the dawn, furnished a series of stepping-stones to the Vedic theology, if theology it can be called. It is impossible to give each step in detail; the process must be studied in Mr. Müller’s lectures. Nor can we discuss the later changes of faith. As to the processes which produced the fetichistic ‘corruption’ (that universal and everywhere identical form of decay), Mr. Müller does not afford even a hint. He only says that, when the Indians found that their old gods were mere names, ‘they built out of the scattered bricks a new altar to the Unknown God’ – a statement which throws no light on the parasitical development of fetichism. But his whole theory is deficient if, having called fetichism a corruption, he does not show how corruption arose, how it operated, and how the disease attacked all religions everywhere.

We have contested, step by step, many of Mr. Müller’s propositions. If space permitted, it would be interesting to examine the actual attitude of certain contemporary savages, Bushmen and others, towards the sun. Contemporary savages may be degraded, they certainly are not primitive, but their legends, at least, are the oldest things they possess. The supernatural elements in their ideas about the sun are curiously unlike those which, according to Mr. Müller, entered into the development of Aryan religion.

The last remark which has to be made about Mr. Müller’s scheme of the development of Aryan religion is that the religion, as explained by him, does not apparently aid the growth of society, nor work with it in any way. Let us look at a sub-barbaric society – say that of Zululand, of New Zealand, of the Iroquois League, or at a savage society like that of the Kanekas, or of those Australian tribes about whom we have very many interesting and copious accounts. If we begin with the Australians, we observe that society is based on certain laws of marriage enforced by capital punishment. These laws of marriage forbid the intermixing of persons belonging to the stock which worships this or that animal, or plant. Now this rule, as already observed, made the ‘gentile’ system (as Mr. Morgan erroneously calls it) the system which gradually reduces tribal hostility, by making tribes homogeneous. The same system (with the religious sanction of a kind of zoolatry) is in force and has worked to the same result, in Africa, Asia, America, and Australia, while a host of minute facts make it a reasonable conclusion that it prevailed in Europe. Among these facts certain peculiarities of Greek and Roman and Hindoo marriage law, Greek, Latin, and English tribal names, and a crowd of legends are the most prominent.204 Mr. Max Müller’s doctrine of the development of Indian religion (while admitting the existence of Snake or Naga tribes) takes no account of the action of this universal zoolatry on religion and society.

After marriage and after tribal institutions, look at rank. Is it not obvious that the religious elements (magic and necromancy) left out of his reckoning by Mr. Müller are most powerful in developing rank? Even among those democratic paupers, the Fuegians, ‘the doctor-wizard of each party has much influence over his companions.’ Among those other democrats, the Eskimo, a class of wizards, called Angakuts, become ‘a kind of civil magistrates,’ because they can cause fine weather, and can magically detect people who commit offences. Thus the germs of rank, in these cases, are sown by the magic which is fetichism in action. Try the Zulus: ‘the heaven is the chief’s,’ he can call up clouds and storms, hence the sanction of his authority. In New Zealand, every Rangatira has a supernatural power. If he touches an article, no one else dares to appropriate it, for fear of terrible supernatural consequences. A head chief is ‘tapued an inch thick, and perfectly unapproachable.’ Magical power abides in and emanates from him. By this superstition, an aristocracy is formed, and property (the property, at least, of the aristocracy) is secured. Among the Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, ‘priests and jugglers are the persons that make war and have a voice in the sale of the land.’ Mr. E. W. Robertson says much the same thing about early Scotland. If Odin was not a god with the gifts of a medicine-man, and did not owe his chiefship to his talent for dealing with magic, he is greatly maligned. The Irish Brehons also sanctioned legal decisions by magical devices, afterwards condemned by the Church. Among the Zulus, ‘the Itongo (spirit) dwells with the great man; he who dreams is the chief of the village.’ The chief alone can ‘read in the vessel of divination.’ The Kaneka chiefs are medicine-men.

Here then, in widely distant regions, in early European, American, Melanesian, African societies, we find those factors in religion which the primitive Aryans are said to have dispensed with, helping to construct society, rank, property. Is it necessary to add that the ancestral spirits still ‘rule the present from the past,’ and demand sacrifice, and speak to ‘him who dreams,’ who, therefore, is a strong force in society, if not a chief? Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Tylor, M. Fustel de Coulanges, a dozen others, have made all this matter of common notoriety. As Hearne the traveller says about the Copper River Indians, ‘it is almost necessary that they who rule them should profess something a little supernatural to enable them to deal with the people.’ The few examples we have given show how widely, and among what untutored races, the need is felt. The rudimentary government of early peoples requires, and, by aid of dreams, necromancy, ‘medicine’ (i. e., fetiches), tapu, and so forth, obtains, a supernatural sanction.