Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/357

 The Religious Basis of Social Union. 347

of the family by the doctrine that its offspring are the children of the State. Sparta is the best instance of the savage tribe within the borders of History, and really forms, I believe, the only connecting link between modern tribalism and the Classical State. But in spite of this dualism the wondering awe felt for the weaker and mys- terious sex showed itself in usage, tabu, and religious practice. It is likely that the savage is a 'realist' in the platonic sense, that (in some matters at least) he very early arrived at group-names and collective terms. Of this perhaps the derisive epithets of Totemism and their solemn use for the mnemonics of the marriage-law is the earliest sign. But I believe the one life-current of the tribe was a very primitive notion — reacting as it did upon the one life of the Nature in the world around. How closely implicated these were is well known, for the very text of magic is the dependence of cosmic order upon social routine. Therefore it is not hard to see how veneration for the source and vehicle of tribal life would take form (in later times) as the cult of a Mother-Goddess when sub- jective feelings, impressions and hopes were objectified.

4. Side by side with this co-operation in Nature's normal tasks there arose another very strange belief which led perhaps, to all later development in hierarchy and politics — I had almost said in Church and State — the cult of the abfiornial personality. It would be easy to show that the Savage, whose metaphysics are often far more refined than his manners, lives in two worlds — the normal and the supernatural, the Profane and the Sacred. Long before he deified personal spirits, in or behind phenomena or directing them from above, he had vaguely divinized the irregular, the unusual, the odd, the grotesque — in nature, in animals, and lastly in man himself — anything indeed that struck his fancy or roused his alarm. How very late appears that cult which seems to us the most natural and inevitable in the world — the worship of the heavenly