Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/180

 170 Natural or Normal; that in short which, as Mr. Jevons phrases it, "defeats reasonable expectation." Or perhaps another and a better way of putting it, seeing that it calls attention to the feeling behind the logic, is to say that it is the Awful, and that everything wherein or whereby it manifests itself is, so to speak, a Power of Awfulness, or, more shortly, a Power (though this, like any other of our verbal equivalents, cannot but fail to preserve the vagueness of the original notion ). Of all English words Awe is, I think, the one that expresses the fundamental Religious Feeling most nearly. Awe is not the same thing as "pure funk." "Primus in orbe deos fecit timor" is only true if we admit Wonder, Admiration, Interest, Respect, even Love perhaps, to be, no less than Fear, essential constituents of this elemental mood.

Now ghosts and spirits are undoubtedly Powers, but it does not follow that all Powers are ghosts and spirits, even if they tend to become so. In what follows I propose that we examine a few typical cases of Powers, which, beneath the animistic colour that in the course of time has more or less completely overlaid them, show traces of having once of their own right possessed pre-animistic validity as objects and occasions of man's religious feeling.

Let us start with some cases that, pertaining as they do to the "Unknown Without" as it appears in most direct contradistinction to the "Unknown Within," are thus farthest removed from the proper domain and parent-soil of Animism, and may therefore be supposed to have suffered its influences least. What we call "Physical Nature" may very well be "nature" also to the savage in most of its normal aspects; yet its more startling manifestations, thunderstorms, eclipses, eruptions, and the like, are eminently calculated to awake '