Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/176

166 Greenland angekok puts it, "pale and soft so that if a man try to grasp it he feels nothing"—par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno. Perhaps it is only due to Mr. Lang's latest researches to say with regard to this theory that its centre of gravity, so to speak, has of late shown signs of shifting from dream to trance, so that "the hallucination-theory" might possibly now prove the more appropriate descriptive title. I shall not, however, pause to inquire whether the "thrill" of ghost-seeing is likely to have given form and character to the religious emotions of the savage, more directly or forcibly than the less unfamiliar, yet more kindly and sympathetic, appearance of "dream-faces"; nor, again, whether the practical proofs, as they may be called, of Spiritualism (which after all is but another name for Animism), I mean clairvoyance and the like, were brought into earlier or greater prominence by normal dreamers or by abnormal "seers." It is enough for my present purpose to assume that Animism, the belief in the existence of visionary shapes, whether of the dead or sui juris, became with the savage at a certain stage of his development, the typical, nay almost the universal, means of clothing the facts of his religious experience in ideas and words, and the typical and all but universal theory on which he based his religious practice. And this being assumed, we reach our special problem: Before, or at any rate apart from. Animism, was early man subject to any experience, whether in the form of feeling or of thought, or of both combined, that might be termed specifically "religious"?

Let us begin by asking ourselves what was the precise ground originally covered by animistic belief. The answer, if purely tentative, is soon made. The savage as we know him to-day believes in an infinitely miscellaneous collection of spiritual entities. "To whom are you praying?" asked