Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/645

Rh ETHNOGRAPHY 823 tion covering the ground occupied by all religions, be they true or false. Their definition of the word, although a philosophic one, falls in with that which many theologians have formulated. &quot; Religion is the feeling which falls upon man in the presence of the unknown.&quot; Man fears and must fear the unknown, because the unknown may be dangerous and terrible, because the infinite is hidden in the unknown. Man personifies the Unknown; when his mind is strongly excited, he cannot do otherwise. And that personification he seeks to propitiate. As regards superstitions, while moralists and social re formers consider them to be baneful weeds which it is their duty to dig out and destroy, ethnologists consider them as wrecks of former beliefs, over which the waves of many centuries have washed. The symbol has remained, but its significance is gone ; the comprehension, never more than superficial, became lost, but the reverence was great, and survived. Thus, paganism underlies Christianity still, especially among ignorant rustics, a fact which the word pagan itself illustrates (pagani, country folk). Classic paganism, the product of a late idealism, was in its theory too philosophic to be understood except hy the few; it propounded the worship of the sun and ajther as male principles and sources of light, heat, and life. It had suc ceeded to the so-called chthonic religions, of which Professor Bachofen (Mutterrecht) and M. Jules Baissac (Les Oriyims de la Religion) have been the exponents. The Earth Mother was then the centre of stellar, solar, and lunar deities, lunar deities especially, the moon being often considered as of the male sex. From internal evidence, it may be supposed that these religions were devised under the influence of agricul tural practices, when the idea of paternal filiation began to be slowly evolved from the maternal. And the chthonic religions were themselves in their origin an innovation upon animal worship, which corresponded to the rise of Totemism (M Lennau, Spencer) upon Shamanism, and the still ruder Fetichism. The lowest religions are characterized by their containing the greatest proportion of magic and the least of science and morality. In that stage, the invisible powers of witchcraft and sorcery are made to explain what ever is not understood, even the fact of natural death, the explanation of which one would have thought to be the first to loom on these dark intelligences. But seeing around them so many violent deaths, among men as well as atnong brutes, they believed that all death, and even all diseases, were owing to magic. Magic has been analysed. Its essence is the belief in the a-ction of spirits or souls of dead men. That belief is called ANIMISM (q. v.) by Tylor, whose researches on the subject constitute one of the most important results of English ethnology. He says &quot; Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high culture. Animism is the groundwork of the philosophy of religion, from that of the savages up to that of civilized men; but although it may (it first seem to afford but a meagre and bare de finition of a minimum of religion, it will be found practically sufficient ; for where the roots are, the branches will generally be produced. The theory of animism divides into two great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first, concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after death; second, concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities. Spiritual beings are held to affect or control the events of the material world, and man s life here and hereafter; and it being considered that they hold intercourse with men and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief in their existence leads naturally sooner or later, to active reverence and propitiation.&quot; Indications are not wanting that prehistoric men were addicted to magic. In the Swiss lake-dwellings, crescent- shaped implements in baked earth have been found, which are supposed by some to be amulets, and related to moon worship; and the absence of all bones of hares in the kitchen middens is generally explained by a superstitious avoidance of that animal s flesh. Superstition or prehistoric religion still survives even in the heart of civilized Europe, where many of its bizarre and grotesque practices are to be found similar to those prevailing in China, and in the dark corners of Africa and Australia. How is this universal prevalence to be ex plained 1 Does it prove that the communications between distant members of the human family were more active than it is commonly supposed that they were ] Does it prove that we did all come from the same stock ] Or is the true explanation this, that the similarity of effects results from the similarity of causes, and that men evolved analogous beliefs because they have analogous minds ] Mr Herbert Spencer (Animal Worship] is of opinion that, considering the sum of knowledge which primitive men possessed, and the imperfection of their signs of language and thought, the conclusions which they arrived at were after all the most reasonable. Till recently sensible men did but shrug their shoulders when they heard of super stitions. They had little thought of collecting them with care, and still less of studying them in earnest as subjects of scientific inquiry, and precious as embodying the oldest accessible thoughts of mankind. Some beginning has been made. Brandes, Henderson, and Wright in England, Wuttke in Germany, Kreutzwald in Esthonia, Grohmann in Bohemia, Dennys and Doolittle in China, and many others have collected precious documents. A mass of material lies scattered about, especially in books of travels. Explorers in this field of inquiry ought not to be repelled by the amount of nonsense they encounter ; the more absurd the text, the more ancient and genuine it probably is. Most things would be inexplicable if they stood alone, but one explains another. Here, as in natural history, the value and signification of the individual object is best perceived when it is examined in the series to which it belongs. Fairy tales and popular legends find little favour with many enlightened people. Of course if these tales were to be taken literally, they would be pronounced pure nonsense, but their meaning, like that of poetry, is an ideal one ; they are intended to please and invigorate the imagination of children. In ancient times, when their primitive form and meaning were less altered, they had a higher purpose. Those mixed up with animal stories of a certain character appear to have been Buddhist parables intended to teach fairness and goodness towards &quot;the weaker brethren. But although twenty centuries old and more, they belong to the later creations in the development of human thought. The oldest stories are scraps of prehistoric myths, cosmologies, and epics. Although they have been patched up a thousand times, they have still kept enough of their original traits to be still recognizable. And it is not only popular tales and proverbs which are to be regarded as records of ancient lore, but also children s plays, nursery rhymes, and infantine dance*, as has been pointed out by Tylor and by Rochholz (Kinderlied und Kinderspiel}. Among Kirghiz, Chinese, Redskins, and Bantu negroes, counterparts have been found to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the grand myths of Hercules and Pro metheus, to the traditions of the Argonauts, of Danae, Andro- mede, Proserpine, not to forget the most charming romance of Psyche. During the Middle Ages many of those tales were bedaubed with theological additions, and transformed into hagiologies and &quot;Golden Legends.&quot; As such they had a separate existence, but fortunately they did not obliterate the recollection of the originals from which they sprang. Struck with a happy idea, and wishing to prove that the moderns were as good as the ancients, Charles Perrault put his Conies into writing, which he little suspected to be