The Making of Religion - Andrew Lang

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the parallel supernormal phenomena believed in by savages, and said to recur in civilisation, are facts of actual experience, or not.

      Now, this question is not otiose. Mr. Tylor, like other anthropologists, Mr. Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and their followers and popularisers, constructs on anthropological grounds, a theory of the Origin of Religion.

      That origin anthropology explains as the result of early and fallacious reasonings on a number of biological and psychological phenomena, both normal and (as is alleged by savages) supernormal. These reasonings led to the belief in souls and spirits. Now, first, anthropology has taken for granted that the Supreme Deities of savages are envisaged by them as 'spirits.' This, paradoxical as the statement may appear, is just what does not seem to be proved, as we shall show. Next, if the supernormal phenomena (clairvoyance, thought-transference, phantasms of the dead, phantasms of the dying, and others) be real matters of experience, the inferences drawn from them by early savage philosophy may be, in some degree, erroneous. But the inferences drawn by materialists who reject the supernormal phenomena will also, perhaps, be, let us say, incomplete. Religion will have been, in part, developed out of facts, perhaps inconsistent with materialism in its present dogmatic form. To put it less trenchantly, and perhaps more accurately, the alleged facts 'are not merely dramatically strange, they are not merely extraordinary and striking, but they are "odd" in the sense that they will not easily fit in with the views which physicists and men of science generally give us of the universe in which we live' (Mr. A.J. Balfour, President's Address, 'Proceedings,' S.P.R. vol. x. p. 8, 1894).

      As this is the case, it might seem to be the business of Anthropology, the Science of Man, to examine, among other things, the evidence for the actual existence of those alleged unusual and supernormal phenomena, belief in which is given as one of the origins of religion.

      To make this examination, in the ethnographic field, is almost a new labour. As we shall see, anthropologists have not hitherto investigated such things as the 'Fire-walk' of savages, uninjured in the flames, like the Three Holy Children. The world-wide savage practice of divining by hallucinations induced through gazing into a smooth deep (crystal-gazing) has been studied, I think, by no anthropologist. The veracity of 'messages' uttered by savage seers when (as they suppose) 'possessed' or 'inspired' has not been criticised, and probably cannot be, for lack of detailed information. The 'physical phenomena' which answer among savages to the use of the 'divining rod,' and to 'spiritist' marvels in modern times, have only been glanced at. In short, all the savage parallels to the so-called 'psychical phenomena' now under discussion in England, America, Germany, Italy, and France, have escaped critical analysis and comparison with their civilised counterparts.

      An exception among anthropologists is Mr. Tylor. He has not suppressed the existence of these barbaric parallels to our modern problems of this kind. But his interest in them practically ends when he has shown that the phenomena helped to originate the savage belief in 'spirits,' and when he has displayed the 'survival' of that belief in later culture. He does not ask 'Are the phenomena real?' he is concerned only with the savage philosophy of the phenomena and with its relics in modern spiritism and religion. My purpose is to do, by way only of ébauche, what neither anthropology nor psychical research nor psychology has done: to put the savage and modern phenomena side by side. Such evidence as we can give for the actuality of the modern experiences will, so far as it goes, raise a presumption that the savage beliefs, however erroneous, however darkened by fraud and fancy, repose on a basis of real observation of actual phenomena.

      Anthropology is concerned with man and what is in man—humani nihil a se alienum putat. These researches, therefore, are within the anthropological province, especially as they bear on the prevalent anthropological theory of the Origin of Religion. By 'religion' we mean, for the purpose of this argument, the belief in the existence of an Intelligence, or Intelligences not human, and not dependent on a material mechanism of brain and nerves, which may, or may not, powerfully control men's fortunes and the nature of things. We also mean the additional belief that there is, in man, an element so far kindred to these Intelligences that it can transcend the knowledge obtained through the known bodily senses, and may possibly survive the death of the body. These two beliefs at present (though not necessarily in their origin) appear chiefly as the faith in God and in the Immortality of the Soul.

      It is important, then, to trace, if possible, the origin of these two beliefs. If they arose in actual communion with Deity (as the first at least did, in the theory of the Hebrew Scriptures), or if they could be proved to arise in an unanalysable sensus numinis, or even in 'a perception of the Infinite' (Max Müller), religion would have a divine, or at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained, therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is true. The atheist, or non-theist, of course draws no such inferences.

      But if religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but unessential refinements on that blunder, the inference that religion is untrue—that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis—is very easily drawn. The inference is not, perhaps, logical, for all our science itself is the result of progressive refinements upon hypotheses originally erroneous, fashioned to explain facts misconceived. Yet our science is true, within its limits, though very far from being exhaustive of the truth. In the same way, it might be argued, our religion, even granting that it arose out of primitive fallacies and false hypotheses, may yet have been refined, as science has been, through a multitude of causes, into an approximate truth.

      Frequently as I am compelled to differ from Mr. Spencer both as to facts and their interpretation, I am happy to find that he has anticipated me here. Opponents will urge, he says, that 'if the primitive belief' (in ghosts) 'was absolutely false, all derived beliefs from it must be absolutely false?' Mr. Spencer replies: 'A germ of truth was contained in the primitive conception—the truth, namely, that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness.' In fact, we find Mr. Spencer, like Faust as described by Marguerite, saying much the same thing as the priests, but not quite in the same way. Of course, I allow for a much larger 'germ of truth' in the origin of the ghost theory than Mr. Spencer does. But we can both say 'the ultimate form of the religious consciousness is' (will be?) 'the final development of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous errors.'[8]

      'One God, one law, one element,

       And one far-off divine event,

       To which the whole creation moves.'

      Coming at last to Mr. Tylor, we find that he begins by dismissing the idea that any known race of men is devoid of religious conceptions. He disproves, out of their own mouths, the allegations of several writers who have made this exploded assertion about 'godless tribes.' He says: 'The thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the very origin of human civilisation, perhaps even of human existence.'[9] So far we abound in Mr. Tylor's sense. 'As a minimum definition of religion' he gives 'the belief in spiritual beings,' which appears 'among all low races with whom we have attained to thoroughly intimate relations.' The existence of this belief at present does not prove that no races were ever, at any time, destitute of all belief. But it prevents us from positing the existence of such creedless races, in any age, as a demonstrated fact. We have thus, in short, no opportunity of observing, historically, man's development from blank unbelief into even the minimum or most rudimentary form of belief. We can only theorise and make more or less plausible conjectures as to the first rudiments of human faith in God and in spiritual beings. We find no race whose mind, as to faith, is a tabula rasa.

      To the earliest faith Mr. Tylor gives the name of Animism, a term not wholly free from objection, though 'Spiritualism' is still less desirable, having been usurped by a form of modern superstitiousness. This Animism, 'in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits.' In Mr. Tylor's opinion, as in Mr. Huxley's, Animism, in its lower (and earlier) forms, has scarcely any connection with ethics. Its 'spirits'

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